My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire by Colin Alexander

Author:Colin Alexander [Alexander, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction, Adventure, Space Opera
ISBN: 2940151510189
Amazon: B00ZNJ07GK
Barnesnoble: B00ZNJ07GK
Publisher: alton kremer
Published: 2015-06-12T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

That was how the Francis Drake was born. (I couldn’t see flying around space in a ship named the Heavenly Blossom.) The name caused some comment, because the empire has no tradition of naming ships after people, but the idea of naming the ship for a famous freebooter eventually caught on.

Franny was one powerful ship. She was about six centuries old, which the Imperials assured me was a good age for a starship. Ships much older than that had usually been bashed around too much, although there were a few ships still in use that had been built as long as two millennia ago. (An Imperial year is about ten percent longer than an Earth year, as best I can figure, but I’ve paid no attention to the difference.) None of the Imperials would have been anxious to fly on a vessel built much more recently, either—deteriorating quality control. Franny Drake carried an amazing amount of weaponry including beams, railguns, multiple missile launchers and space-to-planet torpedoes. The wonder was not that the Flower had been so thoroughly pulverized, but that we had survived as long as we had.

Our most immediate problem was a familiar one. Crew. Most of the Imperials did elect to stay with us. However, they had, as Blahar had predicted, been badly understrength to start and Jaenna’s berserker squad had decimated them. All of the line officers died fighting, with the exception of Ferens, who might as well have. Even in the support services like Engineering and Supply only a few officers survived. We had barely enough crew left from the Flower for a decent-sized wedding party. We got under way thanks to a couple of young Imperial trainees and a lot of help from the automatics. Recruiting wasn’t much of a problem, though. We had no constraints on our cruising, so we hit several different worlds, picking and choosing among the applicants. There was no lack of those, not with a ship like Franny in orbit, not to mention the stories planted by the crew about Captain Danny a Troy and the way he took out an Imperial cruiser.

A secondary problem was the landing boat we’d stuffed into that bay during the battle. There was no way to extract it and repair the damage without the services of a full shipyard. Since that took money, we flew for a while with the doors jammed open.

It didn’t take long, however, before we caught a merchanter off the Harloon system. Franny ran the target down with ease and Jaenna’s force swarmed all over the merchanter crew before they’d realized what had happened. With the loot from that strike, we went back to Yttengary to have the landing boat yanked out like a bad molar. (We went back to Yttengary for the same reason you would return to any service station that had done a good job.)

Since the area under repair was small in relation to the rest of the ship, it was possible to seal off the work area.

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