The Privateer/The Orenomah

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Maybe I told you already - maybe you figured it out on your own - but I used to work for the Solar Liberty Coalition Navy. I'd attained a decent rank, too. It was my life, pretty much. Since I was born in the colonies, I really grew to appreciate how much life could really suck for those people who didn't have a stable living, so I enlisted so I could make sure I was always there to keep my people safe. In practice...well, it wasn't quite that simple. The Coalition couldn't be everywhere at once, because so many colonists were content to stick up for themselves, for various reasons. A privateer like you - like me, too, actually - knows all too well why the Navy can't protect you all the time.

My time in the Navy was...well, you know those old movies where the reckless pilot gets chewed out by the colonel for pulling crazy, stupid stunts in their plane? That was me, back in the day. My days flying for the Navy were interesting, to say the least. Routine patrols were boring some days, so I'd do stupid shit like carving my initials in asteroids with lasers, or buzzing the carrier tower. Stunt flying probably isn't as hard in space as it is planetside, but you'd get yourself yelled at all the same.

"But you got results, right?" You're probably asking. Truth was, well, I didn't. I had some kills to my record, sure, but most pilots did. We didn't exactly have enough able-bodied fighters for anybody to come home empty. Most of mine were those damned Church of Man zealots, the kind who steal ships and try to ram you with them, all the while calling you a heretic, a sinner, and all that "God is on my side!" crap. I mean, I sort of understand why they'd think God didn't want us to colonize space - we've discovered at least twenty new forms of illnesses brought on from solar radiation and wormcloud travel - but I kind of wish they'd keep to themselves. I //know// how much it sucks out here. I don't need some bearded space-Mennonite in overalls trying to tell me that it sucks because God hates me. Enough people hate me these days that it'd just be icing on the cake anyway.

The big reason for that? Well, I might have been a show-off, I might have pulled off a lot of stunts when the enemy wasn't coming out at all, but when the going got tough...I didn't get going. When the chips were all on the table, I tended to choke. There were a few instances of that, but the worst of them was when my patrol group got pincered by an unexpectedly large fleet of pirates. It was...probably twenty pirates, to my group of five, counting me. Three of the new pilots got missiles up the ass, and my group leader got hit with a Disabler missile. I managed to take cover behind an asteroid, and couldn't do anything but watch as the damn marauders punted his ship around like a pinata. I could have helped him. I could have dragged the pirates off him, got their attention, called for backup. But by the time I thought about any of that, my group leader was dead. His ship burst into a small cloud of scrap tungsten. All I could do was fly back to base and report what happened.

Well, my superior officer didn't like my report. He took it up with //his// superior, and so on through the chain of command. Somehow, I got a promotion out of it, but I suspect they were trying to get rid of me, for reasons I'll get into. I still don't like how that mission turned out, but I can't go back and change it now. It's one of the reasons I left the Navy...Coalition service in general. There are others. A lot of them.

After that disastrous patrol, I got promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, and my new boss was eager to give me a new posting. I'd had some therapy, and figured that I really didn't want to fly a warship anymore, so I requested what amounted to a desk job. The Commander wasn't sure that was the way I should continue my service to the Coalition, but wound up agreeing to post me on a colony ship bound for Europa, whose mission was to establish a Coalition base of operations there. I didn't realize until I got there that my posting was that of the ship's adjutant. The ship was the SLCN Orenomah, a retrofitted colony vessel that had originally aided in establishing settlements on Mars back when we were still declaring our independence from Earth - before there was a Solar Liberty Coalition. I think we were the Solar Colonial Front, back then. I wasn't alive for much of that. I think the war ended by the time I was five.

The Orenomah used to be a good ship. Most of the fancier things were broken, or were removed over the years to go to the Martian colonies. By the time I got to it, it'd been stripped for parts so many times that barely a third of it could even support life. Only one deck's worth of crew and civilian quarters was usable; the rest was in hard vacuum, or had been gutted of furniture and amenities. To make matters worse: once the ship had reached Europa and gained stable orbit, the Orenomah's showrunner - a Navy Colonel I never learned the name of - handed the reins over to me and hightailed it out of there, on a shuttle that wasn't even on the ship's manifest. As acting commander of what remained of the Orenomah, it was up to me to make sure the colonists were on task and had all the resources they needed. Well, neither one of those stayed true for long. The base project was scrapped only a few months in, as we quickly learned that, despite the manifest declaring otherwise, we weren't given any construction supplies or tools. That's about when I realized, the Orenomah wasn't a prestigious project ship. It was a junker that the Coalition wanted to get rid of. Just like me.

I stayed as loyal as I could, trying to keep the colonists and crew happy, trying to keep life going the way people wanted. But supplies were dwindling, we kept losing people to the ship's deterioration. At least I could say pirate and zealot activities were at an all-time minimum...but that's only because Europa held essentially no strategic importance to either the Coalition or the criminal underworld, and the Orenomah didn't have anything worth stealing. We were sitting ducks, and even the pirates realized there was no value in killing 1,000 defenseless, underfunded, unwanted Coalitioners. It made me sad to realize that. Not that I thought I had much value, but I certainly didn't think the men and women under me were the same way. I didn't bother reading their personnel files, though. The Orenomah might as well have been a prison ship to us, and I didn't feel like learning about the criminal histories of the thousand people that the Coalition thought deserved this posting. I could go on for a while about life aboard the Orenomah, but suffice it to say, I got to dislike the Coalition enough that I deserted. I didn't feel like I was going to be missed, and I wasn't. The Coalition, to this day, doesn't realize I left service, and the Orenomah is probably still out there. Maybe they're all pirates now, who the hell knows, but it's not like there's enough colony or market activity out there for it to make much difference. The Orenomah has been forgotten, just like me, and that's probably fine by the Coalition, and that's definitely fine by me.