I took a quick look around the barracks, dismissing the midshipman with a curt nod that she returned with a frosty glare. That little petty girl… Princeton? Yes, Princeton was right about one thing. This place was one of the most comfortable-looking barracks I’d ever seen.

  It was clean and tight as a whistle, but it also felt lived in. Personal touches were evident on some of the bunks: a holopic of family, a lucky charm, a well-worn book. It even had tac-walls that could be extended to block off the racks for anyone looking for a little privacy, a luxury I’d never seen on a Fleet vessel. The fire watch, a big orc named Jordan that was, surprisingly, already a bronze—his aura a steady, solid hum of power—greeted me when I entered with a crisp salute that I returned.

  “Sir. Welcome to the Crow,” he rumbled, his voice like gravel grinding together. He showed me where my new berthing was located, his movements economical and precise.

  It was a combination office/bedroom, which was standard for a warrant of my grade, but the scale was all wrong. It was sized more like a captain's or admiral’s quarters. A small tactical grid conference table for mission planning dominated the main area, and a soundproofed wall screened off the living area and the head from the rest.

  I stepped through and blinked. It even had an actual water shower, very old-school, and the whole thing had been done up in a rich wood facade like it was a luxury yacht from the 20th century… I ran a hand over the wall. Facade? That was real wood! The grain was rough under my fingertips, the scent of old varnish and polish faint in the air.

  The amount of resources that had to have been poured into this room was staggering. Unless it had come fitted like this when it was a reward for clearing some great rift, back before I was born. The bed was wide, a real bed with a proper mattress rather than an officer’s rack, and the whole thing was clearly done up for a major, the slot I was technically filling.

  A major who preferred a touch of class and had pockets deeper than a singularity’s gravity well, anyway. I was simply surprised that it didn’t have gold spigots in the sanitary fixtures, but then, that would have been kind of gauche.

  It even had a sunken tub as part of the bathing area. An actual sunken tub, like medical centers used for emergency decontamination or hydrotherapy. I tried to remember the last time I’d taken a bath… about 30 years ago, probably. Unless you counted occasionally diving into a scummy water hazard in a rift while a wraith was trying to take your head off, but that was a far cry from a heated bathtub.

  Then again, this ship HAD spent some time as a diplomatic yacht and high-security transport. I might have just been the lucky recipient of a refitting that wasn’t as complete as it could have been. A piece of leftover luxury.

  I did another minor inspection, carefully watched by the orc, Jordan. I noted that the heavy armors were all kept in open maintenance frames, being actively serviced by a couple of dwarves who nodded respectfully before going back to their work. It was a decent precaution to keep everything up to date and in perfect repair that most ships lacked; they usually just locked the armor away and demanded that the troopers drag it into the mechanized bay for checks only when they noticed damage.

  But, as part of the kit, each trooper also kept a well-oiled and honed low-tech weapon locked into a frame over their racks. I let my essence sight flicker open, and my breath caught. Some of those weapons actually glowed with potent enchantments! A fine, silvery sheen on a bastard sword, a deep emerald pulse from a wickedly spiked morningstar.

  This place was a rifter’s paradise. The firewatch, seeing my interest, opened up the armory as well, where rack upon rack of carefully maintained heavy armor and more specialized weaponry for low-tech delves was kept in pristine condition.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “Sorry, Mister Wasserman,” Jordan rumbled, sounding genuinely apologetic. “Regs usually state that the troopers and ship’s guard remain armed at all times, but the yards got really...antsy at so many enchanted weapons hanging around, so they forced us to keep them locked down in the dock. Captain’s orders. We’ll re-establish proper shipboard procedure the moment we get clear of the docks next week.”

  I nodded, the motion sending a fresh spike of pain down my neck. “That’s fine.” I wouldn’t have personally allowed the yards to cripple the ship’s defenses just because it was getting refitted, but the Captain probably had to dance on more political eggshells than I did. Warrants, oddly enough, have more freedom to enforce ship regs under such circumstances, if the regs in fact demanded the ship’s company remain armed at all times. We were expected to be stubborn that way.

  Not a bad precaution if you had decent discipline… Fleet ships usually locked everything up in the armory between assaults, and the best, or most powerful weaponry, got assigned to the highest ranks rather than allowing people to keep personal weapons, especially not enchanted ones.

  I glanced at one of the poleaxes kept carefully locked above a rack. It had the distinctive purplish sheen normally associated with Mithral, which meant it might be worth more than the entire armory of a standard frigate put together.

  But then, fleet ships often had ethnic flare-ups that had to be handled with kid gloves. The soc-jus types had been put down hard generations ago, but they always had the strangest ability to pop back up in the worst places at the worst possible times, and they always brought violence and death with their suicidally stupid ideology. Fleet ships were no exception. You couldn't trust a crew that was at each other's throats with powerful personal weapons.

  But on a private ship like this, where the captain and XO could carefully groom a crew over years, where they never had to deal with conscripts or social climbers except for the occasional house spy like Miss Princeton, discipline and personal freedom could thrive under the Captain’s benevolent tyranny. And based on the quarters for even the lowly deck scrubs on board ship, the least-respected profession outside of actual manual labor, her tyranny was benevolent indeed.

  What struck me most powerfully as I made my way back towards the XO’s office was how HEALTHY everyone looked. I know that the Crow had three high-ranking spiritualists on board, outside of whatever Reynard was becoming, but it seemed like even the working crew—the men and women hauling cargo and running power lines—were all at least copper rank.

  Their auras were bright, their movements filled with the easy grace and vitality that came with that level of advancement. Their skin glowed, their eyes were clear. There was no sallow complexion, no lingering cough, no sense of grinding poverty and desperation that hung over most Fleet crews like a shroud.

  Was THIS why the Captain was so dead set against conscription? Was this what a properly supported, well-equipped rifter was supposed to look like? If so, she had a mountain of evidence against the UPF’s current brutal, wasteful policies. I had always imagined privateer ships as dirty scrotholes full of angry, undisciplined men who were riflers one day, pirates the next, and raiders only when local fleet ships forced them to participate or face getting their contracts and freedom revoked.

  I had no idea they could be like this. Then again, I’d always been fleet, even when I’d been in independent action. It wasn’t like this sort of success story would become public knowledge. The powers-that-be wouldn't want the rank and file to know there was a better way.

  The most interesting part was that the crew seemed to be evenly split between male and female. Obviously, most of the heavy grunt work was being done by the larger males, but there were plenty of females, including a few impressively muscular female orcs, who were heaving oversize munitions loads aboard right alongside the men.

  Yes, there was the expected jawing and teasing, but it didn’t seem particularly malicious; it was the comfortable rhythm of a seasoned unit that had grown trusting each other with their lives. I saw a dwarf woman with intricate braids in her beard casually hand a massive crate to a human man twice her size, and he took it with a grin and a nod.

  And some of the people were frankly gorgeous. There was an Elf in greasy coveralls running one of the cargo loaders who could have stepped off the cover of a romance novel, all sharp angles and flowing hair, and even a short green girl of a breed I was unfamiliar with, staggeringly lovely with short, pixie-cut blue hair and an… ahem… amazing and compact body, was clearly directing the cargo drones with sharp, precise gestures while I watched. The Crow was a very aesthetically pleasing posting, I’d give it that.