Privateers and Pirates
2026 / 01 / 16
Greetings, Keleres.
I have one more excerpt from Zi Krik for you to review. I’ll admit, this one has personal interest for me.
– Tribunii Harka Leeds
…
As it turned out, getting into the Coalition Navy wasn’t a matter of stealthily sneaking aboard a ship, or even using my connections to create a false identity.
I just had to enlist.
The Mentak Coalition is probably one of the most cosmopolitan societies in the galaxy. Even though it’s had several thousand years to evolve from its roots as a Lazax penal colony, the melting pot of species and cultures has never gone away. If anything, the Coalition has encouraged its growth. Moll Primus probably has the largest Yssaril diaspora in the galaxy. So after I visited “Little Fianni” and got a bowl of sirrik (almost as good as home!), I walked down to the local spaceport and found a privateer looking for a crew.
Now, dear reader, I hear you saying that the Coalition Navy and the Mentak privateers aren’t the same thing. And technically you’re right, which is a technicality that the Coalition has relied on a great deal in the Galactic Council. But I’ll tell you, during the year I spent aboard the Comet’s Wake, I learned that every officer and half the crew had temporarily resigned from their naval service to become a privateer; and most of them were planning on re-enlisting once the voyage was up. So, serving as a privateer was the best way to join the Navy without ‘officially’ joining.
The ships are pretty much the same, too. One thing I’ve learned in my series on space navies is that every culture has its specialty. For the Mentak Coalition, it’s definitely cruisers, and the Comet’s Wake was no exception.
I never figured out how Captain Braunhelm got ahold of a brand new Corsair-class ship, but the Wake was a pleasure to serve aboard. I heard the older Ranger-class ships were a lot more cramped, but this ship was spacious and comfortable. I even got my own room! And the ship is fast, too. We could be raiding halfway across the galaxy one week, then two weeks later we were back in orbit over Moll Primus.
And that, dear reader, is the Coalition’s true strength. They can’t invade many planets (frankly, their ground forces are laughably small), but if a war begins they can choke the trade and commerce of their foes before the opponents get a chance to fully mobilize their forces. And every ship that’s seized is one more cargo of matériel for the Coalition’s own war machine.
Of course, capturing ships isn’t easy in this day and age. And that’s what led me, one day off the Selinar Nebula, to packing myself into a boarding ram and rocketing across space.
The boarding rams the Coalition uses aren’t much to look at, just a tube with oversized engines on one end and a hefty layer of armored plate on the other. The ram and its passengers flies into the enemy vessel and punches as deeply into the hull as it can. Then if all goes as planned, the front opens up and we go storming in.
And when we got to our target and found out why Captain Braunhelm had managed to obtain such a powerful ship to hunt it.
It was a Rampart Vault Ship. These things are massive, tough, and so well-armed that only a modern cruiser would be fast and powerful enough to catch it. By the time we boarded the Vault Ship, it had already split into its three component parts, but apparently Braunhelm knew which of the three held the cargo he was after. Luckily, the guards surrendered once ten heavily armed pirates were aboard, so I wasn’t forced to compromise my journalistic integrity.
Whatever the captain was after turned out to be a single dispatch case, small enough that even I could carry it easily. Once we had it, the Comet’s Wake left and burned hard for Moll Primus. As soon as we got back, the crew disbanded, each of us receiving double our expected shares.
I never did learn what was in that case.
Obviously, I would like to know what was in the case as well. This incident only happened a year ago, and the Vault Ship was commissioned by Industrial Conglomerated, a corporation based on Vefut II. In addition to having a suspiciously innocuous name, IC never raised any complaints with the Vefut government or the Galactic Council over the piracy. It’s as if they preferred nobody ask any questions.
Vefut II is a hub of antigravity tech development, so this could simply be some new propriety design. But I have my suspicions. IC has recently begun dispatching courier flights again, this time using actual warships bought from the Emirates. However, the Keleres’s own cruiser Artemiris is also a Corsair-class vessel. I may be able to use my own connections with the Coalition to procure a boarding ram, and then perhaps you and your team could reenact Zi Krik’s adventure.
Tribunii Harka Leeds
