Command

Unlike most of my other stories, the Pixy tales don't truly stand alone; you can try to enjoy this one without reading the prior chapters, and I'll bet you'd enjoy it... but you should probably read the other ones first. Because they're a lot of fun.

Enjoy!

* * *

Prologue

* * *

The curious ship swung out of lightspace after the feint on Nosferates IV precisely on schedule and almost precisely on position, the planets of the rest of the system scattered across Pixy's Master Plot like sand on black felt. She sat back in her command chair, her bridge watch all around her, the target looming ahead as her long, strange ship decelerated madly.

The enemy would never know what hit them.

She nodded to herself, focusing, the whole ship shaking with its long decel burn. Most Fleet ships had dampers to tame that, but most Fleet ships weren't this one. She turned toward her First Officer. "Are we on target, Mr Malevongsy?"

He peered at his scope, nodding. "I'd recommend one quarter mil up-angle, ma'am, and that should put us almost right there."

"Fine. Helm? Pitch up a quarter mil."

"Up a quarter mil, ma'am, aye." Everyone was clipped, precise, keyed up for this very first mission.

"Good." Pixy squinted at her plot, estimating the size of the objective. "Submajor Nestilio?" She glanced at the Army officer beside her. "I need a final call on how big a perimeter Crazy Jack needs."

He scowled judiciously, then shrugged. "He didn't tell me explicitly. Two kilometers should do it."

"Okay." She had to jog her implant twice to pull up the targeting table, by which time they'd traveled nearly three hundred kilometers, the ship slowing dramatically. She hurried to do the math. "Park us at seventy kilometers' altitude, Mr Malevongsy," she rattled out, her leg shaking hard as she strained to sound calm. "No. Scratch that. Sixty-five."

"Sixty-five it is, ma'am."

She swiveled her chair around, glaring down at where the shuttle OIC waited beside his signal lights, facing backward into the cavernous tunnel that ran through the ship. "Ready, Commander Leodmann... Leod... fuck." It was an impossible name to pronounce, which was why she'd given him a nickname, but it was embarrassing for a new captain to fuck it up right here in public. So she reverted to the nickname. "Commander Asshole? Ready?"

"Ready, ma'am." He and his little crew stared backward at the clustered Army transports, and Pixy nodded to herself.

"Two hundred klicks' altitude, ma'am," Malevongsy sang, the ship rattling now as the planet filled the forward port left by the armor.

"All guns manned and ready, Captain," added Lt Luzhenka.

"Fucking awesome." Pixy felt the excitement now, biding her time, the big moon growing rapidly before her. Her ship trembled as it passed Nosferates II, the gas giant pulling at them; the helmsman compensated smoothly. She still marveled at her crew, so motivated and well-trained now that she wasn't in Service Fleet, or on that frigate in the asscrack of the universe. She felt drunk with power, a great mass of weapons and men waiting to unleash themselves at her command; quite unexpectedly, she felt her pussy start to trickle. "Altitude?"

"One-ten now, ma'am."

Why wait?

Pixy asked herself. She took a deep breath and turned her head to give the order to Commander Asshole, down behind her. "Scouts out!"

"Aye aye, ma'am!"

The scout shuttle blazed underneath, streaking down toward the nearby planet with Laredo's fighter as escort, the ship making odd ticking and popping noises now as she struggled to compensate for the sudden gravity from the planet.

Pixy's leg had gone still. It had started now, and it would end one way or the other.

* * *

One month earlier (Sol standard calendar)

* * *

The first clue Pixy had that today was not going to go as expected was the frown on the face of the implant tech outside the conference room. He consulted his tabslate, a tall petty officer of about 22, and looked doubtfully up at Pixy. "What'd you say your name was, ma'am?"

"Pfeiffer. Pixy. Subcommander." The tech just shook his head, his eyes wandering to where a man's legs and boots stuck out from the bottom of his upgrade booth. They locked you into those while they stuffed new information into your implant. "I'm executive officer aboard the

Desperado

," Pixy added helpfully. "It's a frigate? Out on Parabolic Station 4?"

"You're a what?"

"An executive officer." Well, technically. She'd been the acting captain for almost six months, but the new skipper had shown up a week before she'd gotten the invitation to this conference. "Of a frigate?"

The booth chimed, the tech shifting his glance at it with an irritated scowl. His job was normally so simple: the booth, the software, a few buttons, then done. Now he had a problem, and that problem was the mean looking little short-haired subcommander whose name and information were not matching up on his tabslate. The tech was a man who liked to keep his problems sequential, not simultaneous. "Why are you... I mean, can you explain why you're here?"

"I gave you my attendance orders, sailor." The tech did not know Pixy Pfeiffer. If he had, he might have figured out that

that

tone in her voice meant trouble. "I was invited here for the placer/extraction command conference. The one about the new K-class ships. And here's a letter from a Commander Skeffen bar-Murphy, about me giving an informal briefing about ground-effect use of P/E vessels. All I know is that I need to get into that conference room."

"Okay, ma'am," the tech said patiently, in the voice of a babysitter trying to explain why it's bedtime, "but my orders are not to let anyone into Commander bar-Murphy's conference without updating their implant, and... well, therein lies the problem." The upgrading booth chimed again, and Pixy rolled her eyes. Her cochleas didn't like that sound.

"If the booth is done, sailor, just go ahead and fucking deal with it. I'll still be here." She took a seat on one of the benches by the door. "The chime is bothering me."

"Ma'am." He gave a false smile, then did something complicated with the control bar on the side of the booth. When it spat out a short, fierce-looking officer with a beard, he stood up with a vaguely confused look on his face. People always hated it when their implants got updates. It scrambled your thoughts in ways that felt unnatural. "All set, Commander Daveen. Go ahead on in."

"Thank you." Daveen peered with some interest at Pixy, squinting at her chest, and Pixy (as usual on Fleet installations) wasn't sure whether he was trying to make out the Army medals she had, or simply staring at her tits. He nodded shortly. "Commander."

"Hi. Sir." Pixy stared impassively until he figured got the message, stopped staring, and passed into the conference room, leaving the frowning tech behind. "So. You going to figure out my update, or what?"

"Well." The tech's fingers fluttered over the 'slate, his frown deepening. "As near as I can tell, the problem is that the update is for commanding officers. Since it's a commanders' conference?"

"Yeah?"

"And, well, your implant is designed for XO updates."

Pixy blinked, annoyed as she always was by people who were smarter about technology than she was. Meaning, everyone. "Just put the fucking info into the fucking implant. It'll load, won't it?"

"It'll load." The confession came out slowly, like it left a foul taste in the tech's mouth. "But performance will be severely degraded. I really would recommend you upgrade your implant to handle the data surge."

"Yeah. No. I'm not going under the knife. I'm only here for a quick briefing at a fucking conference." She shrugged. "Look, update me. Then let me in. I do my thing in there. I come out. You download the upgrade again. I leave." She watched the tech closely, seeing in his eyes the moment he accepted the loophole. "I'm serious. Load me up, sailor!" She was hoping this briefing, whatever it was, wouldn't take more than an hour or so. She was looking forward to getting a decent meal here at Winkelmann's before catching the first circuit shuttle back to her ship from the Kaverell Hub.

Pixy was plunking her narrow ass down in the upload booth's molded seat before the tech could raise more objections, and when he shrugged and shut the door she knew she was all set.

It took longer than most updates, which made sense under the circumstances; as she'd been sketchily trained to do, Pixy shut her eyes and thought of a neutral stimulus to preoccupy her while the new data flooded her mind.

What she thought of was moonrise over Aries IX, on her first-ever spaceflight: a joyride in her sister's girlfriend's beater, the little spacecraft she used for flitting around the planet on her drug deals. The three girls had crammed themselves in, giggling with all the Bump they'd taken, faces pressed to the tiny kit-built viewport as little Pixy Pfeiffer got her first glimpse of the stars, unveiled by atmosphere, with nothing between her and them but some mail-order graphene.

First time she'd thrown up in zero-g, too.

But the splendor, as the frosted moon had thrown its cold, stark beams against her dazzled face, had taken her soul and sent it into that cosmos forever. She'd never gotten over it. And now, as the update pumped arcane knowledge into her brain, she buzzed with the data and the memory and the anxiety of whatever briefing she was going to have to give.

She was still stumbling slightly, her overworked implant whirring beside her right eye, as she lurched to the spacious conference table (real wood? No fucking way!) to find, amazingly, her own name at one of the seats. She slouched down, glassy-eyed, her mind suddenly packed with unbidden statistics and schematics: she knew now that the K-class ship bore sixteen short-rocket orbit-to-surface guns, preset to form something called a Cone Of Destruction. She knew K-ships carried 420 sailors and 560 soldiers. She knew they had eight omnidirectional Type VIII torpedo launchers for mid-range defense, and seven manned Tygon Interceptors to deal with any planetary defenses further out.

She knew it all: engine displacement. Fuel cautions. Chow needs. Armor strengths. It swirled in her brain, the implant struggling to boot and reboot and re-reboot its way through the upload as five other officers took their seats around her. All but one was a full commander, leaving her as the unquestioned junior officer in the room. The bearded guy from outside, his own eyes still a bit shiny from his upload, looked at her chest again. She smiled blandly around her, feeling a sudden urge to pee.

"Okay. Let's get going." Every eye in the room went to a huge man with a clipped grey beard and a long ponytail. He hulked at the top of the table, glaring out like a turret gun. "Welcome, everybody. A few of you were at the first conference last month, and I'm happy we've got closer to a full house now. I'm going to refer you to the meeting notes from last time. Reference 55-1."

Everyone at the table tilted their heads in that way people did when they were using the implants, eyes roving around. Pixy, still abuzz, tried to concentrate enough to do likewise, but her implant felt sluggish, like a wheezy engine.

Performance will be severely degraded,

the tech had said. The big man, bar-Murphy, was already talking again when she finally fumbled her way to his reference, the knowledge from the previous meeting blooming in her mind.

"We were discussing use of the K-ships as ground-effects weapons, in and of themselves. The idea was to land on a planet and then use the ship's weapons in atmosphere. You'll recall that we couldn't agree on whether that was a good idea, and I'm pleased to call your attention to Subcommander Pixy Pfeiffer, over here on the left. Welcome, Pfeiffer."

"Thank you, sir." Pixy trotted out the response dutifully, like the Fleet automaton she was capable of being. "If you'll give me a few minutes? I just got my update. I need to reference some of the tactical specs? For the K-ships?"

"Take your time," he nodded amiably. "For the rest of you, I'm sure some of you remember hearing about Pfeiffer from a few years ago? She was a Service officer who took a GP ship in against an enemy... destroyer, was it?" he asked, turning her way.

"It... it was a bunch of enemy vessels," she stammered, mind racing. They'd nearly killed her, her lower spine ripping apart in a storm of shrapnel. She shunted her mind at once; thinking about that was never fun. "Just a minor scrap, sir."

"What some of you might

not

know," he rumbled on, peering about at the other officers, "was that she was involved in a classified operation shortly after. It has bearing on our discussions about K-ship ground effects. Care to briefly describe your experiences, Pfeiffer?"

'That mission is still classified, sir," she snapped evenly. Her mind was at last starting to settle down, though she knew she'd have a headache later.

"I get it." He glared around again, the other commanders rapt. "She was involved in a space-based final protective fire from a placer/extraction shuttle... while on the ground." Eyebrows rose. "Without getting into details, she did with that shuttle precisely what some of you," he went on pointedly, glancing at the bearded man Pixy had seen outside, "want to do with our brand-new K-ships: she activated weapons systems intended for space within atmosphere."

"Someone wants to do that with these new P/E ships?" Pixy blurted. Her sluggish data search had only now found the ships' formal weapons specs, their fuel load. "Land, then activate the weapons?"

"The destructive potential, I feel, would greatly assist our Army counterparts in their operations." The bearded man, Daveen, smiled at her. "Just theoretically."

"Well, fuck," Pixy drawled, chuckling, her usual ease reasserting itself; nothing she'd seen so far in here had told her she needed to be intimidated, rank aside. Five pairs of eyes looked straight at her. "Theories will get you into trouble in this case, sir. I can say from my limited experience that being in the middle of a P/E ship, with these fuel and weapons ratios I'm seeing, while you launch off its ordnance? I think that would be a seriously bad idea."

"Why?" bar-Murphy barked.

Pixy leaned back in the chair, her back protesting as it always did, remembering. "Well. I was in an uparmored P/E shuttle with a platoon of soldiers on a plain. Standard soils. Atmosphere was mostly nitrogen, I think. There was a city, maybe ten kilometers away, and a Flasbard tank battalion closing." She hesitated. "Might have been a dismounted rocket launcher involved, too..."

"Flasbard

tanks?"

The other subcommander, an older man on her right, arched an eyebrow. "Where was this?"

She glanced at bar-Murphy, who hesitated. "Not important. Just... there were a lot of Flasbards there. Right, Pfeiffer?"

"Yes sir." She took a deep breath and scanned the table. "My objective was to extract the platoon while simultaneously halting the tanks, which were likely to close before I could get the normal lift sequence going. Time was short and I felt I was out of options; I want to stress that this wasn't something I'd have planned to do." She knew they were weighing her. Judging her. "The effects were, um, more severe than expected."

"How severe?" This was from an older woman sitting beside bar-Murphy. Her nameplate said her name was Leeuwen.

Pixy cleared her throat and replied evenly. "Total destruction for fifteen square kilometers. The crater I made was... prohibitively deep. Like, deep enough that it's likely to be a permanent terrain feature. The tanks were... gone. Completely gone. And 20% of the city collapsed." She glanced around. "I set off a seismic event that affected two tectonic plates. Everyone aboard was injured: ear problems for the humans, joint and muscular damage for the linders." She grimaced, remembering her shattered cochleas. "The shuttle itself could barely lift."

"And this, my friends, with nothing but a shuttle. Conventional weaponry," bar-Murphy murmured as the data sank in. "Standard fuel, Pfeiffer?"

"Yes sir. Nothing but betakerosene." Her implant nagged at her blurry mind, telling her the K-ships had some sort of new fuel, much more volatile. She blinked. "Like I said. More severe than expected. It worked because I was just doing a raid, in and out. If we'd had to stay on that planet, control it? Rebuild it?" She shook her head.

"One shuttle, used for ground effects, and she damaged an entire planetary region." Bar-Murphy let that sink in, catching a sober nod from Leeuwen. "You see, Daveen? Borgia?" The other subcommander looked impressed. "We won't even bother writing the doctrine for ground effects on a K-class vessel. Agreed?"

"Sir." Leeuwen seemed to be the leader of whatever faction had pushed for the concept. "Makes sense. Thanks, Commander Pfeiffer."

"No problem." Pixy nodded to herself; it had been a useful trip down memory lane, and apparently bar-Murphy had gotten his way. She turned to him. "Is that all, sir?"

He cocked his head. "All?"

"Yes sir." She shrugged. "It's just that I wanted to get some shopping in before dinner, and I was thinking that if there wasn't anything else you needed me for, I should just head out?"

His bushy eyebrows twitched, meeting in a frown. "You're asking to leave?"

"If I'm done with my briefing, sir." Pixy looked at his eyes and started to get another hint that today wasn't going to go as expected. "I, uh, have a shopping list. The other officers were very excited that I was coming here," she added, glancing around for support: every officer who hit Kavirell III returned with armloads of stuff. She became slowly aware of slight smiles and incredulous stares.

"Pfeiffer, this is a command conference. We're all here to hash out P/E doctrine for our new ships. You're obviously a necessary part of that..." Bar-Murphy faltered, one of those expressive eyebrows rising. "Wait. Have you not been told?"

"Sir?" Pixy felt a rising, inexplicable panic. She hated being the last to know anything. "Told what?" She felt her tabslate buzzing on her table: she was getting a text.

"Told... that is, I assumed you knew just by virtue of being invited here." He consulted his implant. "Yeah. You're slated to take command of K005 next week at the 114 Basin, fit her out, and join the invasion of Calinda 227-B." He frowned. "You didn't get your orders?"

"Sir?" It came out as a faint squeak.

Take command?

Her eyes darted to her tabslate, where the incoming message was from Wrae Juno back on the

Desperado

: NEW ORDERS JUST ARRIVED FOR YOU. YOU'RE GETTING A SHIP!!!! Juno was not generally given to using multiple exclamation points, meaning the news was as extraordinary as it seemed. "I'm... I'm afraid this is taking me by surprise..."

"Well. Congratulations anyway, Captain Pfeiffer," bar-Murphy shrugged, and this time as she glanced around the table she saw warm smiles. Peers. "Let's all give Pfeiffer a round of applause on her first command, eh?" The clapping rippled around the broad table as bar-Murphy winked. "Unless she'd rather go shopping..."

* * *

The low-beam connection back to

Desperado

was a scratchy, uncertain one. This did not decrease the awkwardness of the conversation.

Fleet had sent Commander Reikki out to take formal command of the frigate just a week before Pixy had been summoned to this conference. Like everyone else posted to Outer Parabolic Sector 4, in the back of beyond, Reikki was... compromised. And he understood it, too: his first question to Pixy when he arrived was, "So what'd

you

do to get sent out here?"