I tried to look that one up, but the certification rules just said that commendation stars can be awarded for achievements ‘beyond the normal scope of an exam’. The awards ran from bronze through silver, gold and platinum, with iridium at the top. So it had to be something good, right?
“A perfect iridium?” I gasped. “What does that even mean?”
“It means you’re one of those supersoldiers who blow the curve for normal people. You know, all you have to do to pass that test is hold out for four hours without losing more than half your platoon. The test AI called it because you ran out the clock, but it’s smart enough to figure out your force was getting stronger instead of weaker. So, perfect score for ending the scenario with a full platoon, and an iridium star to show you’re good enough that normal test scenarios can’t find your limits.”
I was speechless.
He mussed my hair. “Go hug Emla, and give the techs a call. I’m sure they’ll want to throw a party or something. Stop by my office the day after tomorrow, and we’ll get you set up with a squad of your own.”
He was right. I had to tell Emla, and the foxgirls. Somehow, I kept my squeal of delight bottled up until after I’d logged out of the sim.
Chapter 19
The mood on the ship was tense as we approached Taragi, the hidden colony where the leader of the Masu-kai yakuza organization lived. It wasn’t the sort of place where even the Square Deal would normally go. The blackest of black ports, hidden deep in the officially uninhabited reaches of the Bali Gap, more than thirty light years from the nearest publicly known colony.
With a small yellow star and a motley collection of small rocky and icy planets, the system didn’t look like much at first glance. There wasn’t even a gas giant, or an asteroid belt to support mining operations. It was a bad place to build any kind of industry, which would normally make it a poor place to colonize.
But the yakuza weren’t running a normal colony. Their money came from their customers, who congregated here seeking goods that even the corrupt governments of the Federation or the Corporate States would never tolerate. There were slavers here who dealt in authentic humans, and brainwashing experts willing to train them to order. There were black market vendors who sold everything from pocket antimatter bombs to mass mind control systems. There were a thousand purveyors of exotic vices offering experiences the human mind was never designed to handle, each more addictive than the last.
A normal black port might have pirates and smugglers rubbing shoulders with assassins and back alley body modders. Taragi was where the pirates and assassins went to learn their trade. If you wanted to build a horrible custom bioweapon to unleash on your enemies, or come up with an inventive new vice that would lure millions of customers into hopeless addiction, Taragi was where you went shopping.
It was also a water planet. A warm ocean nearly two hundred kilometers deep covered the whole planet, and below that was another fifteen hundred kilometers of water compacted into exotic forms of ice by the pressure. In the early days the yakuza colony had been a giant submarine that could dive beneath the waves if a naval vessel from some civilized world came poking around. Hiding activity in space is hard, but a bottomless ocean provided pretty good cover.
They’d long since left that covert existence behind, of course. These days Taragi’s location was an open secret among the criminal elements of the Kerak sector. But it was remote enough that no major power had ever felt motivated to clean the place up, and the defenses were more than a match for anything a minor colony might send there.
The system didn’t have a battle station in the Gamma Layer, but there was a network of sensor platforms keeping an eye on traffic. The Beta and Alpha layers had similar setups, and once we dropped into normal space the defenses became evident. In addition to swarms of heavily armed customers there was a whole squadron of frigates patrolling the system, and three small but dangerous-looking battle stations orbiting the planet.
“There’s probably a lot more we can’t see,” Mina pointed out as we made our approach. I’d joined her and Lina in the observation room down in engineering again, so I could get a look at the place.
“Yeah, an atmosphere and a few hundred meters of water make for pretty good protection, at least against lasers and mass drivers,” Lina agreed. “They’ve got drone bases and missile platforms hidden in the ocean, where they can surface to launch attacks and then submerge again to hide from return fire. You’d need some kind of special weapons to attack the place.”
“Nuclear depth charges, maybe?” Mina suggested. “I read about a war like that once. Anyway, the worst part is no one knows how much stuff they’ve got down there. Armored military bases could easily descend to fifteen or twenty kilometers, which means there’s no easy way to spot them from orbit.”
“So basically, if they decide to attack us we’re in trouble,” I said. “Our only chance is to run the moment we see the defense bases start to surface, and get far enough away to jump out before their missiles can catch up with us.”
“Which is why they have those battle stations in high orbit,” Mina pointed out. “They might look puny compared to the ones in a major system, but they still outmass us by a factor of twenty. We have to park inside their orbit before the Masu-kai will let us send a shuttle down, and at that range the heavy mass drivers they carry will wreck us in just a couple of salvoes. We’ll be too close to the planet to make a hyperspace transition, and we’d never survive long enough to get out of its gravity well.”
Yeah, we weren’t going to be fighting our way out of this place. Better not get anyone mad at us, then.
“I don’t even want to think about how dangerous it must be to wander around this place,” I said. “We’re staying on the ship while the captain meets with this yakuza boss, right?”
“We certainly are,” Mina assured me. “Pirate ports aren’t too bad if you can handle yourself, but the Masu-kai are different. They’ve got this whole thing about acting cultured and stuff in public, but if one of them decides to kidnap you off the street for some recreational torture there’s nothing you can do about it. Trying to defend yourself just makes them mad.”
“Unless you’re from the Azure Star,” Lina added.
“Who?”
Mina grinned, and pointed out one of the ships parked in orbit. Unlike all the other visitors this one was orbiting outside the ring of fortifications. I pulled up a closer view of it, and gasped.