"Going into the system, it was me; Sergeant Bothari, my bodyguard; Elena Bothari, his daughter and my friend; Arde, the pilot; Major Daum, the man with the cargo; and Baz Jesek, a Barrayaran deserter I picked up while we were planetside on Beta Colony. I had to take him along, y'see, because once I met him in the first place ImpSec was bound to catch up to him, and desertion in the heat is a capital crime. All I could do was try to ferry him out of their reach."
He tilts his head from side to side in a sort of armless shrug.
"Anyway. The ship that met us on the other side of the jump to Tau Verde was the Ariel, commanded in those days by Captain Auson, who was kind of an ass. He had many redeeming qualities which he presented to me later, but he was definitely still kind of an ass. The warning buoy said that all incoming vessels were to turn over their jump pilots during their stay in Tau Verde space - brilliant idea, really. Except that when Auson was done searching our ship with his squad of lazy goons, he got a look at Elena and decided he'd rather take her hostage. There was... some ambiguity as to what her stay on the Ariel would be like, if we gave her up. So we declined to give her up. There was a fight; my side won. Then we stormed the Ariel, for lack of any better ideas. And then we were presented with a shipful of humiliated mercenaries, over whom we could not possibly hope to keep control by main force, not with five and a half of us to a full crew of them."
Here he pauses, grinning.
"So I convinced them that we had been smuggling, not military equipment, but military personnel, highly intelligent and valuable personnel. They ate it right up. It turned them from a pack of buffoons so sloppy that they could be overwhelmed by six smugglers of whom only half had completed any legitimate military training, into an ordinary bunch that had been nobly defeated by an elite team. And because I sure wasn't getting past that blockade any other way... I recruited them to my imaginary fleet, and kept them so busy proving themselves to me that none of them stopped to wonder why they were bothering. The first time I called myself Mr. Naismith of the Dendarii Mercenaries was to Major Daum before we left Beta Colony, but it was on the Ariel that I started making it true. I can't remember now exactly when they started calling me Admiral, but it would've been around then. I kept that scam going so well for so long that my new Dendarii helped me capture a mining installation from what had previously been their own fleet."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 09:14 pm (UTC)"Going into the system, it was me; Sergeant Bothari, my bodyguard; Elena Bothari, his daughter and my friend; Arde, the pilot; Major Daum, the man with the cargo; and Baz Jesek, a Barrayaran deserter I picked up while we were planetside on Beta Colony. I had to take him along, y'see, because once I met him in the first place ImpSec was bound to catch up to him, and desertion in the heat is a capital crime. All I could do was try to ferry him out of their reach."
He tilts his head from side to side in a sort of armless shrug.
"Anyway. The ship that met us on the other side of the jump to Tau Verde was the Ariel, commanded in those days by Captain Auson, who was kind of an ass. He had many redeeming qualities which he presented to me later, but he was definitely still kind of an ass. The warning buoy said that all incoming vessels were to turn over their jump pilots during their stay in Tau Verde space - brilliant idea, really. Except that when Auson was done searching our ship with his squad of lazy goons, he got a look at Elena and decided he'd rather take her hostage. There was... some ambiguity as to what her stay on the Ariel would be like, if we gave her up. So we declined to give her up. There was a fight; my side won. Then we stormed the Ariel, for lack of any better ideas. And then we were presented with a shipful of humiliated mercenaries, over whom we could not possibly hope to keep control by main force, not with five and a half of us to a full crew of them."
Here he pauses, grinning.
"So I convinced them that we had been smuggling, not military equipment, but military personnel, highly intelligent and valuable personnel. They ate it right up. It turned them from a pack of buffoons so sloppy that they could be overwhelmed by six smugglers of whom only half had completed any legitimate military training, into an ordinary bunch that had been nobly defeated by an elite team. And because I sure wasn't getting past that blockade any other way... I recruited them to my imaginary fleet, and kept them so busy proving themselves to me that none of them stopped to wonder why they were bothering. The first time I called myself Mr. Naismith of the Dendarii Mercenaries was to Major Daum before we left Beta Colony, but it was on the Ariel that I started making it true. I can't remember now exactly when they started calling me Admiral, but it would've been around then. I kept that scam going so well for so long that my new Dendarii helped me capture a mining installation from what had previously been their own fleet."