Founding Fathers PT 1

Posted on Fri Dec 13th, 2019 @ 2:22am by Commanding Officer Mickey Serendipity & Commanding Officer Soto Nabaal & Executive Officer Kenneth McTigue

Mission: The Forgotten Arm
Location: Callisto Shipyards, Civilian Sector
Timeline: 5 Years Prior To The Eros Incident

It was, in all honesty, terrible tea.

The Jade Garden Tearoom sat in one of the excavated caverns under the rock and ice of Callisto, second largest of the Jovian moons after Ganymede. Like most of the moons subsurface commerce and residential areas, the ceiling of the cavern had been coated in smart paint that would brighten and dull in time with hour of the day. But that had been a century and eight successive administrations ago, and smart paint was suffering from the cold. Splotches of death pixels gathered like fractal storm clouds, promising rain that never came.

Soto put his teacup down, noticing the lack of any sort of sediment on the bottom of the cup. Probably from concentrate then.

"Drink your tea," he said calmly to his companion. "It would be impolite to our hosts. And it will help pass the time until our guest arrives."

Ken glanced at the cup, then up at the captain. "He's late." was the only thing the clean-shaven, military hair-cut Irishman said before taking a sip of the black concoction. He considered the taste before swallowing. "Decent tea."

"That is a topic of debate," Soto said gravely.

A Belter woman came to their table dressed in an ensemble best described as Geisha like. Gold mylar foil, weighted with lead at the hem, made up the fabric of her short-sleeved kimono. Holofoil bamboo space stations and canvas vacuum suited figures flickered across the golden folds. Her face was painted in a silvery-white makeup, with rectangular blocks of black paint dotted seemingly at random to spoof facial recognition. She offered to refill Soto's cup from her tea urn, but he held his hand out flat over the empty cup.

Ken was right, their meeting was running late.

"Please." Ken said with a smile as he nodded to his cup.

"Sorry about being late," came a voice from behind them. He spoke with the accentless English most Near Earth Orbit citizens took, able to drop back into a formal tone of lost Empire, to the salesman pitch twang of the last great frontier power. Tall but not Belter tall. And he didn't have the arrogant twang of a Mariner Valley yokel. He was dressed in a jumpsuit devoid of corporate sponsorship or branding.

"Got held up on the way here," he said, palms held up in a 'what can you do gesture'.

"Understandable," Soto said calmly. "You could have sent a message if you had cared to."

"And have our seller jack the price up by 30%? Come on, you know how these local networks run. Every other byte goes through the hands of the next guy along the chain. Even scrap metal value, a 30% jump in pricing would push us out of the frame," the man made a sign to the Belter Geisha. "Tack on the cost of retrofitting the hull to a human-rated pressure environment, plus the add-on's we discussed, savings add up."

He then turned his attention to Ken.

"You hired security? Pink Water? Star Helix?" he mused aloud. "Huum maybe Alu Sadim, they like hiring ex-UNMC muscle. Save's on the overhead of training."

"None of the above. Call me Ken, I'm the third investor." said the Irishman as he rose from his chair and extened his hand to Mickey.

Mickey took the hand and gave it the firm shake of a man confident in himself. There was no attempt to grind Ken's knuckles into dust or try any of the subtle human tricks to force dominance over a simple gesture.

"Well if Soto brought you along then that's a ringing endorsement all in itself," Mickey said with a smile. He settled into the low padded seat of the tea house table, and made a gesture to the geisha. It was not so much a gesture for attention, having in its bone something of sign language and the idiom of the Belters. The waitress gave an answering hand gesture, and a few moments later the group was walled off with rice paper screens from the rest of the patrons. A steady low buzz filled the air as a white noise generator went to work.

"Terrible tea, but the service here is five stars," Mickey explained. "So I was able to get into the shipyards and get a look at our prospective purchase."

He took out his terminal and laid it on the table. With a tap on its screen, the volumetric display lit up a low-resolution hologram over the table. What it displayed was a low light amplified image of a space ship, under a hundred meters long resting on her engine bell in scaffold support. It had looked like a chubby knife made of grey metal with faded cyan blue high lights. Little notation began to appear attached to various points on the hologram.

"From the looks of her, and I hasten to add I'm just an eye for detail not an expert, she's been out on the surface of Callisto for nearly 30 years. Near as I can tell she's a one of a kind fleet escort made for the UNN back during the Fleet 2300 modernisation fiasco of the last century. From the files on the public feed's a Dillinger class corvette like this would have been superior to anything Mars was putting out at the time. A real quantum leap for the UNN. But like most of the Fleet 2300 programs, the Dillinger was a cash cow. Her hull and engines and reactor are all off the shelf, but her electronics, heat management, and weapons systems were all cutting edge High Frontier bull shit. Hell some of is so redacted I can only tell you it was two paragraphs of black ink"

He tapped the hologram.

"These shuttered blisters around the hull? Housings for a directed energy PDC array. Never runs out of ammo as long as the ship's reactor is flying, sounds great. Problem is in the laser heads, the beam defuses over distance, so you end up needing to track n incoming target for ten seconds before it self immolates. Or the missile switches from infrared to radar or direct comm's back to the mother ship. Either way, great idea, terrible execution. Not to mention the monster processing power needed to keep an evading fast mover tracked over that time. Missile racks are internal, fitted for Hermes ADCAP's but pretty sure they're the universal mountings the UN put into place back in 2280. Should still fit modern birds, so replacements will be just pricey not retrofit jobs," he then tapped the engine bell. "Couldn't get in to see the ship without tipping my hand, but given this thing was built around a Hadrian fusion bottle it's safe to say it's still in there. We'd be missing most of the ship if it had been taken out."

He then gestured to the nose of the ship, where a cluster of sensor vanes reached for the stars alongside a pair of parallel metal rails.

"That also looks like the business end of a 10-inch rail gun. Then again could also be an extra launch tube for the missile system. The files I was able to get out of the UN Admiralties office on the quiet were less than specific about what is still considered classified material for the next fifty years." Mickey admitted.

"Nope, that's a rail gun." Ken nodded. "Not a standard keel mounted one though, this has the looks of a Mark Fourteen rail gun barrel they fit on the refitted Phantoms, though I feel she's shorter." The irishman took control of the hologram and flipped through it for a few moments. "This is a nice ship, but those laser PDC arrays are utter shite. It takes one hell of a pilot, and an even better gunner to make those things outperform a conventional ballistic system."

"A lot of the PDC array's data was redacted, seemed focused on the fire control and ECM system. Something called 'Witchcraft'. That particular data set had UN Info Warefare packet gunner's surrounding it when I pinged the New York relay. I have a person on the line if we need the data, but given the system was removed and the hardware was not should be an easy switch," Mickey explained.

"I hope they didn't strip out the fire control system for the PDC grid. If they did they'll be all but useless." Then Ken looked at him again, "Hang on, you have a line to someone with access to redacted data?"

"I have a line to someone who see's hacking as a competitive sport. Ex-MCRN EW/ECM officer. I helped her out of a problem a few years back, she owes me a number of favours for keeping the Navy's retrieval hounds off her back. Turns out when you leave the Mickey Navy they have a dim view of you keeping the combat AI rig," Mickey made a flowing hand gesture, "She might be able to find the software if we ask, but given the technical limitations of the laser array I imagine stripping it out and replacing it with autocannons with an AC rated fire control system would be better."

"I'd feel more comfortable with a projectile-based system. But then again, it wouldn't be my priority for the ship. How many fights do you expect us to get in." Ken chuckled.

"As many as we can win, fewer than we can loose," Mickey said with a grin. "I'd rather have more in one column than the other."

"It is perhaps a topic for another day," Soto said as he sipped his tea. "Perhaps we should continue our review?"

He then flipped to the rearview. "Some micro pitting on the drive cone. We'd have to verify that it doesn't need reinforcing or we'll be out a proper ton. Does it say anywhere if she's airtight?"

"Like I said, couldn't get close enough without tipping my hand to the scrapper that I was after that hull," Mickey explained as he took a sip of his tea and grimaced.

"If it was built as a prototype for the Fleet 2300 program, it would have had every credit pumped into its production," Soto mused as he gestured to the armoured baffles around its drive and reactor section. "Spaced armour baffle over the radiators. You would need to remove the plates to get at the retractable radiator vanes. We can take it as seen that she's in as good a shape as she looks."

"So we go out there and put a bid on her," Mickey asked. "If they let us inside I can rig one of the spare tanks on one of our EV suits to spring a leak. Should let us see if it's at least able to hold a marginal atmosphere. But you'd need a real yard to find out if she can take a standard rating without blowing every seam on her hull. Could be we get a discount if we let the yards here do the work, saves on the barge we'd need to drag it down the well in a timely fashion."

Ken looked at Soto, then back to Mickey. "I can do most of the structural work she'll need by myself. But I'm not great with the software suites and packages. So we'd need to line up an Operations specialist for that."

"I can handle the Operation's side of things until we've got someone qualified," Mickey said and looked to Soto.

"Then we find ourselves in concordance," Soto said with a warm smile.

Ken nodded, "How do we proceed?"

"We go to the guy holding the pink slip," Mickey said as he made another hand gesture to the waitress. "You'll like him Ken. He's a collector of sorts, right up your alley I think."