Conflagration

A Tenuous Armistice

The mood aboard the independent corvette Ready Sophia was glum that evening as she returned to orbit around SHP 242's third moon and lick her wounds. Three more of her fighter bays which that morning had held fighters now stood empty. Three more fighters had been lost that day and nothing had been gained. The enemy hadn't lost even a single fighter. Ready Sophia's one and only troop dropship had nearly been lost as well. The troopship and the 52 troopers aboard had barely made it back to the safety of the Ready Sophia from their aborted mission to obliterate the squatter village known as Pilgrim's Rest. Oddly, this whole little war hinged on that single village's legal claim to the planet. Remove them, by whatever means, and the war would be won. That would be enough to satisfy their unofficial employers at Safe Harbor and thereby release the second half of Backwater's fee.

The day had started out as an opportunity to capture a juicy prize, had progressed to an opportunity to win the whole war, and had ultimately devolved into a humiliating rout. Add to that, one of the pilots who'd been lost was one of the most popular members of the Sophie's crew, a young guy who went by the callsign "Mr. Lover."

Capt. Villalobos was in no mood to talk to Col. Raith or anybody else from Third Law. He was in no mood to talk to anyone at all. That's why he ignored Raith's first two requests for parley. When the comms officer buzzed into the captain's quarters for a third time in as many hours, Villalobos finally gave in. "Alright, patch him through. Secure line." If this guy presumes to gloat, I'm hanging up the call and nuking the planet. I don't care if it renders Safe Harbor's precious planet uninhabitable. Capt. Villalobos meant it. He really would like to just nuke this pesky, little planet. Luckily for the few hundred people (mercenaries and settlers alike) down on that annoying, little world, Ready Sophia wasn't carrying any nukes at the moment. If only...

His data terminal connected and there was the heavily tattooed face of Capt. Villalobos's adversary, Col. Landon Raith. The man was in his mid forties and Capt. Villalobos thought his tattoos were about the stupidest thing he'd ever seen⁠—especially now that they were starting to blur with age.

"Good evening, Captain Villalobos," Col. Raith said.

"Calling to gloat, colonel?"

"Negative. I'm calling to see if we can work out a deal."

"Pah! What kind of deal? You don't have anything to trade."

"Well, that's where you're wrong, Captain."

"Bullshit. I know your benefactors have had a falling out with the mother church. You took this job thinking the triple-F-double-C would be paying you out of their coffers, but now all you've got is a little village of dirt-poor farmers paying you in turnips. You don't have any pay coming in and you're bleeding money every day this little skirmish goes on. You're burning fuel, munitions, and food."

"I hate to contradict you, captain, but we do have money coming in and these farmers aren't as dirt-poor as you think. We can pay you a whole lot more to just fly away than Safe Harbor is paying you to play pirate."

"I'm not under contract with Safe Harbor," Capt. Villalobos lied. His employer wanted plausible deniability. Big corporations like Safe Harbor Terraforming don't like it getting out that they use mercenaries to uproot settlers. That could be bad for business. Of course, Raith knew he was lying.

"Okay, fair enough. I can pay you more than you're getting paid not to work for Safe Harbor."

Capt. Villalobos considered that for a moment. "What are you proposing?" If this were the movies, he would claim that he would never back out on a contract and maybe try to be heroic about it, but this was real life. This was the Darklands. Moreover, his was the Backwater Cluster of the Darklands. Contracts were written on toilet paper out here.