Chương 3: Chapter Two - The Lunatics

Everyone knew that the Lunatics had esprit up to their eyeballs and nuts of pure titanium. They lived one mistake away from certain death, far from anyone and anything important, and were the last bastion of the disenfranchised, the lonely, and the functionally unhinged.

The Lunatics' standard operating procedures were a mystery to every war-capable nation in the solar system, most of all to themselves, and it meant that no one, not the Earth Alliance fleets, not the Empire of Mars, not even the space pirates of Ceres, wanted to fuck with them. There was everything to lose, and only hundred-year-old clown paraphernalia to win. Every culture across the solar system gained a quirk or two over time.

The Lunatics went to the quirk dispensary with a five-gallon drum and loaded up on them until it was full to the brim. They revelled in being a few pennies short of a dollar, and it showed in everything they did. Their ships weren't just ancient scrapheaps abandoned and stolen from other nations. They were ancient scrapheaps painted in garish colours, covered in dazzle camouflage, then modded until the base ship was unrecognisable. No one needed a glowing red nose on the end of a destroyer.

The Lunatic did it anyway. Then they slapped on seven different turret hardpoints in places they didn't belong, one short-circuit away from blowing chunks out of their neighbouring ships, and they called it art. It hadn't always been that way. In fact, the Lunatics could trace their origins back to one of the first off-Earth colonies: a joint France-Canada-Britain lunar colony on the sunny side of Earth's girthiest satellite.

The Lunar High Module Colony was built like a sea of large bubbly capsules on the lunar surface. They looked like a swarm of ticks stuck to the moon's surface, which earned them the name they wore to this day. When shit went haywire and the first Solar System War started, the Lunatics left the moon and fucked off to Haumea. The clown stuff didn't start until a few years later. As it turned out, scrubbing and rescrubbing oxygen was a thankless job.

It was a lot easier to do if everyone would just wear some damned respirators so that their mouth bacteria would stay in one place. Hence, an entire cargo-container full of cheap, Chinese-made, low-danger environmental protection masks. They even worked. Problem was, the masks were a large white oval with two glass circles for the eyes and nothing else. It turned the entire fledgling colony into blank-faced freaks living out in the ass-end of the solar system during a full-scale intra-system war.

Culture has a way to spring up from that kind of thing. Soon, people were painting their masks, and the Lunatics had new faces to show the world. Ivil Antagonist was aware of all of this, most of it through cultural osmosis. She wouldn't admit it to anyone, but she had a secret fascination with Earth-made soap operas, which frequently romanticised the Lunatics as handsome devils with hearts of gold and a few roguishly rough edges that could be won over by a kind-hearted and beautiful B-movie starlet.

She had met a few Lunatics away from their dwarf planet home, and they'd all failed to be handsome roguish people with a few rough edges and were a lot more likely to be insane, angry nutjob anarchists with a chip on their shoulder and too much makeup. The frigate, the Lucky Despot, shook as it was freed from its mooring links. So far, the officers on the ship's bridge were quiet and professional.

Ivil could tell that the captain was sweating under her finely tailored uniform, but at least she was taking things seriously. She checked and double-checked every security measure and had her crew on alertness level Orange as if she was about to navigate through an active minefield next to a raging space battle instead of just a simple A-to-B transition from the Purgatorial Oblivion to the waiting Paradoxical. Ivil felt the weightlessness trying to pull her off the deck.

She frowned and put a stop to that, the heels of her boots clunking down.

"Do we have an ETA, captain?" she asked. The captain glanced up, then shook her head.

"Not yet, Ma'am. Forgive me, but we haven't received confirmation from the Paradoxical."

"In their defence, we didn't tell them that we'd be coming," Ivil said. The captain blinked.

"We didn't, Ma'am?"

"I imagine they saw us coming. Just fly towards their capital ship, keep your guns pointed away from anything important, and they'll eventually acquiesce." The captain nodded slowly, then returned to her duties. Operating any warship, even an advanced Imperial warship, was a thankless, complicated job. The Lucky Despot fired its manoeuvring thrusters, sliding away from the massive bulk of the Purgatorial Oblivion and deeper into empty space.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. The frigate rotated on its central axis while the crew clung on, then it aimed towards Haumea and the Lunatic fleet. A burst of thrust later and they were gliding at just shy of two G of constant acceleration towards the fleet. Ivil glanced at the ETA on the navigator's screen.

They had an hour until they flipped and started a slow-down burn, then another two hours before they were close enough to start any sort of docking manoeuvres. The captain was playing it safe, moving slower than she needed to, and more cautiously. That was fine. The caution would be noted. The fact that the Imperial Navy hadn't blasted the Lunatic's entire fleet into a cloud of debris was a good enough sign that they weren't here to fight.

Ivil was considering finding a seat for herself when she felt a faint buzz at her waist. Sighing, she tugged her pager from her belt and glanced at its screen. MEETING W/ BOARDING PARTY, scrolled across. Ivil spun on a heel and walked out of the Frigate's command centre. She slipped into an elevator and rode it up a few floors. Then she stepped out onto one of the topmost floors of the ship.

Imperial ships were all long and narrow, but unlike Earth Alliance vessels, they were built vertically, the 'top' of an Imperial ship was the 'fore' of most other navies' vessels. That was just a normal evolutionary change that happened when one's entire navy was built in zero-g by people who'd been born and raised in low gravity. Earth-built ships were still designed by people that were born with dirt underfoot.

This being the topmost floor meant that the foot-thick windows built into the ceiling gave her a fantastic view of Haumea and the Lunatic fleet. Her attention only lingered on the ceiling for a moment before she took in the rest of the room. This was the space that would be hit first in any attack that broke through the ship's shields, so the room was little more than a luxurious lounge, a space for the crew to relax. At the moment there was no one relaxing at all.

The couches and seats, entertainment systems and small cafeteria were all unused. The people in this room, ten in all, were standing at attention to one side, hands closed as fists over their hearts and eyes staring out into the distance. Ivil looked them over. There were seven women, three men, all on the younger side, though they were all adults. They wore tightly fit spacesuits with armoured panels worked over them. They were all Valkyries, which meant, of course, that they weren't entirely human, not anymore.

She saw arms made of interlocking metal, eyes that were pitch black orbs, some had metallic hair, and one of them had a set of skeletal wings folded close against her back. At a glance, Ivil judged most of them to be C-classers. The kind of people that could probably wipe out a platoon of the Empire's best and who would be the front-line in any grand conflict. One of them stood out from the rest. She was a shorter woman, or was trying very hard to remain that way.

Her armour writhed, and on occasion she would appear several centimetres to the side of where she was, then flick back. She was utterly silent. No breathing noises. No heartbeat. No grinding of metal on metal or squelching of organic parts. Her face was a doll's, a perfectly beautiful piece of metal, carved to appear feminine and pretty, with very real and organic eyes filling the sockets.

"Are you in charge?" Ivil asked her. The shorter woman nodded.

"Yes Ma'am, B-class Imperial Valkyrie, Sonic Spectre, Ma'am." Ivil narrowed her eyes.

"Oh... I think I've heard of you," she said.

"You were the lead of a strike force in Ceres a few years ago."

"Yes Ma'am," the valkyrie said.

"That's when I earned my hundredth core, Ma'am." Ivil nodded. The empire might have had some of the best tech in the solar system, but they didn't have quite as many Valkyries as some of the other nations out there. The various nations around Jupiter were rich in Valkyries, and Earth had claimed a fair number of them over the first century of space travel. Mars was behind, but they made up for it with quality. No one had more A-classers than they did, and it showed whenever push came to shove.

"I presume that your team will be my escort?" Ivil asked.

"If you'll have us, Ma'am," Sonic Spectre said. Ivil shrugged languidly.

"I suppose there's no harm. It'll reassure the brass, at least. Do we have any idea how many cores the Lunatics have?"

"Enough to cause trouble, Ma'am," Sonic replied. Ivil grinned.

"Good answer."