Mortal Protection Services X.ASWO : A Spaceship With Oars
"Roger, Leia. Report to the bridge..." I glanced at the naked man on my bridge, "... in five minutes."
I pinched my brow. The last thirty minute of my life had been... a lot.
Jim's boss/dad was in a human suit, shaking hands with my crew, balls out. And he was somehow still charming them... It was like some sorta surreal nightmare. My niece was in the galley with some of the gruffest, toughest, fartinest spacefarers this side of Sagittarius A*. And finally, my precious baby robocat was back alive... well alive as he'd ever been. I may have just ugly cried over his return in front of my bridge crew. Whatever. It couldn't possibly hurt my 'captain's image' any more than being related to Dilt and Jimmi's already had.
James was done introducing himself, so I took off my captain's jacket and handed it to him.
"Cover your bits, man."
"Ah, thanks. Tad brisk in here innit?" My entire bridge crew giggled. He wrapped it around his waist in such a way that it wore like a sideways skirt, he turned to Lt. Commander Berlin, "Is it Fashion, dear?"
He modeled his 'skirt' by swishing it back and forth a little. She smiled, ever so slightly. That was as good as a belly laugh from Berlin.
"So Fashion! Now all we need is a too-small jacket on top. Here," She took off her own uniform jacket and handed it to him, "stretch this out a little for me."
"I don't know about that," James said with a hint of laughter. Then he managed something I'd seen a dozen men try at and fail; he complimented her physical appearance, without getting punched in the mouth. "Look at the size of your arms! And your shoulders. Goodness me, such a physique. I bet you could rip my arms off and beat me to death with'em if you wanted to. I'm not sure I'll be able stretch anything out on this except the gut, but thanks, I'll try!"
He put it on, and was mostly right that he wasn't stretching out much but the gut as he tried to pull it closed.
"No no. Leave it open," Lt. London piped up. "Fashion!"
"If you guys are done fucking around, can someone take him to get a hardsuit-on and throw him out the airlock," I said. "And bring our jackets back."
"Aye, sir." Lt. Commander Berlin's smile at him didn't falter. She placed a hand on his shoulder, "Come along, James. You're gonna do a little space walk."
"Ingamar, this is no way to treat family." James complained as he was escorted off the bridge.
I jabbed a few buttons on my captains chair and reopened my audio into the captain's comms. Jimmi and Dilt were still talking, working out logistics details, but they stopped talking and looked at me when I butted into the channel.
"Jimmi, there's more capacity to take on strays on your ship. I'm sending you one, maybe two people in hardsuits, we'll see what Leia says when she gets to the bridge."
"My officers in the brig are standing by for more miscreants." She smiled, "Luke has minor bruises from his ejection from Hyperspace, but he's fine. Ops, prep a shuttle for a man overboard pickup."
"You tell their asses to get back here this instant! And you let those little shit's know that..." Dilt started ranting, so I looked at Ensign Yoto and gave a handsignal to mute my brother.
"Jimmi, how long are repairs gonna take to get your spinal laser back online?"
"The Vaggigablaster?"
"Ugh, yes."
"The dwarves and snails in engineering say we really oughta go hit a drydock and get ourselves sorted out, but since that ain't happening, two days at best, probably three. Five days at worst, if things are much more fucked than we realize. We didn't exactly design her with our particular style of friendly fire in mind."
"Didn't know the Scourge could lay traps like that when we designed her either. We shall persevere. The Amish Papacies repair and resupply should only take about an hour, tops. Is your repair gonna let you walk and chew gum, or is this one of those park it kind of things?"
"We can move, for now. We'll have to shut off warp power for a bit at some point in a day or so, for a few hours at least."
I signaled Yoto to unmute Dilt. "And if they think coming up with some sort of new technology is enough to get them outta trouble...ooooohhhh buddy do they have another thing coming!"
"Shut up Dilt. We get it, you're big mad." I... actually shut him up. "Look, Jimmi and I are gonna get on the move, my navigator will send you coordinates for a drop. We expect our supplies to be there waiting when we arrive."
The back door of the bridge opened, and Leia was standing there, looking like she'd jogged up here.
"I'm sending a fast courier ship to recover my kids, you can't seriously expect to take them further into scourge territory? Leia you better-" Yoto predicted me wanting to mute him. Good officer.
"I thought I said five minutes."
"i ThOuGhT i SaId FiVe MiNuTeS." She sassed back to me, "Smells like ass in the galley, I didn't wanna wait."
My bridge crew laughed. Commander Wolf growled, audibly and they stopped laughing.
"Leia, this is a military ship," I said. "So unless you want to join James going out the airlock to get scooped up by Aunt Jimmi's shuttle pilot, how about at least a modicum of military bearing."
"Sir, yes sir!" She snapped off an overly crisp salute, with a wry little smile.
"Something like that, but... no sir sandwiches, please." I swapped the captain hat for the uncle hat and scooped her up in a big ol' uncle-style bear hug. "I'm glad you ain't dead!" While I had her close, I whispered in her ear, "Your dad is pissed, but you can stay here to help out, if you wanna stay and help out. I'll cover for you. Or we can get you and Luke sent back, your call, kiddo."
"Kiddo?! I'm fourteen. I'm practically an adult!" She pushed off me to end our hug and said, "I'll stay. Lets purge the fuckin' Scourge. Besides, I had a killer idea for your ship when I was in hyperspace. I had a little time to think, and watch prehistoric ancient sci fi. You ever heard of the Picard Maneuver? Impossible with a standard warp drive, right... but what if you had a bunch of fucking Warp Oars."
"First of all, language. Save your fucking fucks, child, until we're in the shit. You ain't old enough to be that salty. Hmmm, Picard maneuver..." I knew of the theoretical Picard Maneuver, and I don't think she meant straightening out my uniform before sitting down. She meant using an FTL blip of movement to leave an after image of yourself on the enemy's realspace sensors. "Oars, huh? So my space ship will need... rowers?
"Yes, sir! Probably a dozen Oarsmen. Six on either side, or six on top, and six on bottom, maybe both. We'll work out the positioning with a computer's help. I could put in the request for the parts while we're enroute to the drop off."
"How long will your intended retrofit take, in space?" She seemed to have thought this through more thoroughly than most adult engineers would have.
"Thirty six hours, if we stick to a brutal schedule and work the boys hard, two an a half days if we want everyone to work normal shifts and not hate me afterward."
"Lucky you, your Aunt Jimmi needs at least two days to repair the Sapphic Asemia, probably more. Commander Wolf, please help Leia get to work coordinating with the chief engineer. I want a report in an hour on the viability of her plan. If it seems workable, I want work to start ten minutes after you get me the report."
"Aye, sir!" Commander Wolf said. "Come on girl, lets go piss off an engineer."
"Leia, Commander Wolf outranks you, don't forget it."
"Yes sir!" She snapped off a sarcastic salute at me and followed Commander Wolf off the bridge.
I signaled Yoto to unmute Dilt. "Fuck you, Ingamar. Quit muting me!"
"No." I paused to blink at him a few times, to let my sibling love sink in. "So... I'm gonna go ahead and tell you NOT to send that courier ship to get them, Leia's a part of my crew now."
"And Luke is a part of mine." Jimmi joined my side. "He wants to help with the repairs. No fighters. I promise."
"Don't worry, we'll take good care of them." I said, though, I immediately regretted it given our recent history, so I followed with, "A little better than last time. No fighters for them this time. I promise."
"I am going to strangle you both one day," Dilt said. "But... not today. You better not really get them killed. Or I really will kill you both, myself."
"Brother," Jimmi said, "If anything kills them, it'll be over our dead bodies."
"Yeah!" I added.
I read the engnineer's report. The math was sound, the physics seemed to work, and we'd only lose a small amount of armor on the surface where we had the oars stick out. They would be twenty meters long, extended from the hull when in use, and retracted inside when not. Each oar would have an overclocked shuttle craft warp engine as a blade, with some minor modifications to make it work in an interdiction field.
I pulled up my crew manifest and looked to see who I had with rowing experience. This would only work right if the crew doing the rowing were on point too. Sixteen crewmen, better than I expected considered I hadn't considered rowing experience at all when I put together this crew. Twelve gunners, and four engineers. Oh, perfect, Engineer Suwami, was actually a coxswain on the Oxford rowing team for two years.
I informed my crew of the changes, and we planed some drills to practice as soon as the new Warp Oar system was online.
Jimmi set Luke to work helping her repair her ship's damage. The engineering crew over there loved him. Whip smart, my niblings... a little, too smart, really. If they weren't using their brilliance for the good of all Solian kind, then I'd be really worried about them. What with the planet imploding bomb and warp ship with oars madness. Little mad scientists.
Leia was smarter than my engineers, and it was becoming difficult not to notice. In the process of getting the oars installed and working, she also improved reload time for all our guns by 7% and found and fixed a half dozen other small power and process inefficiencies. Basically, she made them look foolish, but worse still, she made ME look foolish because I'd been the one that designed most of the ship.
Her little project went faster than she'd claimed it would, damn kid ascribes to the Montgomery Scott school of engineering estimates. We didn't work our asses off for it, but we were still done in 32 hours. Lucifer, my good sweet boy, helped a great deal with the outside work. He's got a plasma cutter, a welder, and a lot of other stuff packed inside, and he doesn't need to breath. My little sentient toolbox.
The repairs on Jimmi's ship ended up taking four days, they got her a new shuttle bay working, and the vaggigablaster should be able to fire if needed in our next encounter with the Scourge.
I'm actually glad it took four days, because our first few drills practicing the Picard Maneuver were... not great. At first, our rowers couldn't get in sync close enough, which, after a few fuck ups in a row, blew some circuits that took two hours to repair. Leia was embarrassed, and swore to fix it 'right this time'. In the process of fixing it so we wouldn't have damaging shorts anymore, she also managed to get it to still launch us even if the rowers were a little further out of sync. Now, if we fail to sync our row well enough, we just wouldn't go anywhere, rather than hurting ourselves.
After several hours of successful practice, we started mixing in weapons systems drills. pop in, blast some, pop around to the other side of the target with another stroke of the oars and shoot some more.
When we next met the Scourge in battle, we'd have another brand new trick up our sleeves for them.
Repairs completed, we set course for a nearby scourge star system at a moderate warp factor. Go too fast around here and the subspace mines become a problem, or at least an annoyance. The slower you go, the less subspace noise you make, and the Scourge mines track subspace noise.
We were about a half hour out from dropping our warp factor even lower and doing a mine sweep at the heliopause when Ensign Yoto said, "Sir, we're receiving a hail from... the Scourge?"
Posted Nov 18, 2025, 12:53 AM UTC