Find out in the laugh out loud novel by L.N. Hunter, available wherever books are sold.
⚒️ The Berganza
by Joel Glover
The explosion tore the shell of the mining installation open the way a small child rips their way through birthday present wrapping paper. It started in a small blue package, proprietary technology and encryption wrapped around alien technology. Matter and energy are illusions, but important ones. As the explosion turned one to the other, the end of that illusion proved fatal for almost three hundred Cavendish Interstellar Refining Employees.
Equally fatal for a further fifty-two was the outrushing of atmosphere from the tubing of the station. It was not metal in a sense that would have been recognised by a blacksmith, but it was metallic in content; texturised compounds spun in organic matrices, combining metals and amino acids to make an endlessly malleable and completely airtight structure. Completely airtight until a bomb is affixed to its interior surface and allowed to detonate.
The Interventionists and Conversationalists disagreed about the best course of action. Eventually, the Conversationalist Chargé D'affaires resolved the dispute through use of a single kinetic warhead, a synthetic diamond rod dropped through the atmosphere to erase all evidence of the incident. It was not even two metres long or one metre wide when it struck, the rifling which had been carved into it burned off in the heat of the atmosphere. Despite that, it knifed its way through the remains of the installation before cranking the planetary crust beneath, thrusting the platform and the survivors of the first explosion into a pool of molten rock.
Ada, their weathervane was the first to speak.
“I think our paymasters have miscalculated.”
The explosion wasn’t large enough to have been detected by accident from the range the Berganza had needed to hide in order to stay hidden from any Cavendish Interstellar Refining response. They had, of course, trained the best sensors they could steal on the bombsite, to ensure they succeeded.
“Why not?” If there was one person on the Berganza more cynical than Ada, it was Jean-Marie. “This way they don’t have to spend money rescuing people, don’t have to explain how their security team screwed up, and can blame whoever they want for an attack which left behind absolutely no physical evidence.”
“Who do you think they will blame?”
“As long as it isn’t us,” Rhodri put in, looking up from the device he was painstakingly assembling, his eyes made massive by the magnifying lenses they had stolen from an abandoned hospital ship, “then I don’t give a shit.”
“Well, they just scrubbed any potential evidence we may have left behind,” Jean-Marie reassured him.
“And also all the evidence that it wasn’t us we manufactured.” Ajax was sulking over his steaming steel cup of miso. He put a lot of effort into collecting the components Rhodri assembled into their bomb; the explosives from Cavendish Rock and Plant, the wiring modules only found in certain geosynchronous satellites deployed by CRP Exploratory. A lot of effort that the kinetic strike and a wave of lava had completely obliterated.
“Every silver lining has a cloud,” Jean-Marie said.
“That’s not the saying!” Neither Ajax nor Jean-Marie spoke English as their mother tongue, and their debates about idiom could—and frequently did—drive Rhodri to loquacious Welsh.
“It was a big cloud though,” the watchmaker said. He claimed his love of explosions was a side benefit of his profession; the rest of the crew suspected it was the only reason he pursued it.
“How long until we can leave?” Ada was jittery, she always was during a job. She was not well suited to waiting. She had asked Rhodri to marry her on their second date, drinking thimble sized cups of hallucinogenic fungal effluent in a dive bar bolted to the side of a lithium refinery.
“After they do.” Jean-Marie gestured at the glitter cloud of shuttles descending through the atmosphere, no doubt packed with Conversationalist employees ready to capture the damage of the ‘terrorist’ atrocity for propaganda purposes. “Plenty of time for Rhodri to make the next device, and Lean-to to catch up on his sleep.”
The pilot was curled up in his couch, being slowly eaten alive by the after effects of a ‘less than lethal’ round taken in service of his previous, Bluer, employment. He had been dismissed with the observation that his symptoms made him ‘as reliable as a lean-to in a hurricane’, an insult he had taken somewhat personally.
“How long has he been out for?”
Ajax limped over and checked the monitor strapped to the pilot’s wrist. “It says... eight hours, seven in deep sleep, RNA stimulus levels at one-ten over seventy eight.”
“Let him sleep,” Jean-Marie decided. “We can give him a booster if we need to, if the corporate hacks act faster than they usually do. Get some rest, mes enfants. Not you Rhodri.”
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