Ships of Valor 1: Persona Non Grata Read Free Page A

the staff move any personals they find into the private vault for pick up later. After stowing my duffel, I headed down to the vault to dump a few items and get a couple others out.
    The vault comes with the share. Each share gets a one-meter cube as part of the default, but the Legionnaire can upgrade as needed. Every chance I've gotten, I've bumped mine up, because I'm a bit of pack-rat. My vault was sitting at twenty-seven cube, or a three by three by three meter, which is about the same size as a personal stateroom on ship. Funny considering, I shared my last one with three other guys. It's not the biggest vault size available, but the next one up is hangar size and I wasn’t sure I could quite justify that yet. I tend to keep mine about eighty percent full, but it's mostly mementos. One nice thing is vaults have their own addresses, meaning they can receive mail. Whenever I get back, the items are waiting inside almost like having an extra birthday finding the stuff I mailed previously. The last time I had cracked the door, I had the pleasant surprise of finding a case of cryo-sealed plums from my grandad.
    I could spend all day going through decades’ worth of memories, but my goal was to pull out a couple specific things. I kept a bag prepped at the door, as well as a table so I got to work. LC is a nice place, but most of the rest of Sol proper can be less hospitable. If I ended up on Ganymede, I likely wouldn't need what I was pulling out, but on Titan or Mars, I'd be a fool not to have it.
    An ancient slug-thrower covered in protective oil, waiting for me to pull it out of storage. It was a simple steel model I found years before as part of an auction and worked diligently to get operational Not as nice or as fancy as the energy weapons we used in the Legion, but it was just as effective. The slugs were a centimeter in diameter, and the thing kicked something fierce, but it was effective. The goal being to poke enough holes in a smart suit to just end a fight through pure catastrophic damage.
    The worst battle footage I ever saw, if it could even be called a battle, was a Legion platoon who went up against what we thought was an abandoned outpost using weapons similar to these things. Lost six guys in as many seconds because they were overconfident and didn't anticipate energy displacers not working on kinetic energy transfer. Our suits are great, but massive blood loss inside a suit that’s sealed is as dangerous as getting a hole burned through. What works for modern doesn't work for ancient. Hard lesson.
    Another nice part about these old school weapons is most scanners won't pick them up. That's not to say all, but much of the new stuff ignores them as mechanical devices. I placed the gun and holster beneath my left armpit, thinking my arm should mask it enough to where I wouldn't have any too many issues. I grabbed a couple other minor pieces of equipment, secreted them about my person, and then headed down to the bar proper.
    Schmiddy was staffing the bar. Schmiddy was ancient when I joined, and he was still ancient when I came in. When I said we don't age normally, I meant it. Between the nanites repairing any incidental damage, the genemod therapy the Legion subjects us to when we join, and spending so much time in zero-g our clocks slow down. We have Legionnaires pushing triple centuries, and to the best of my knowledge no one knows how old Schmiddy is, but old timers have heard him mention others who were old timers to them.
    As I said, I'm good at math. Part of the training while in deep-sleep. From what I've been able to gather, Schmiddy was a payroll clerk, a long long time ago, and he got the same kind of treatment. He just knows Legionnaires. Remembers us all. Not just our names, but little things as well.
    He greeted me with a "Hey Rattlesnake," and poured me an Arnold Palmer. Lemons! I hadn't had lemons in years. Trees take up so much physical space we don't generally grow them in the hydro labs