Free Prison Planet (THE RIM CONFEDERACY Book 3) by Jim Rudnick

younger man, and the Baroness had become the head of the Barony, a realm of nine worlds—soon to be 10 Helena knew as soon as Throth became a voting member of the Barony once the Ikarians were settled in. From renting a room on a pleasure world to owning nine planets, the Baroness had excelled, and Helena knew this was a formidable force here on the RIM.
    “What needs to be done can only be done by you, dear,” the Baroness said and then followed that with a furtive look around her as if to say what came next was more than private.
    Leaning forward, Helena heard her stepmother outline her plan to make a real change in the Barony future and at the same time cause major disruption to the RIM Navy too ... and for the first time in years, she was alarmed at what she heard.
    She listened. She asked questions. She thought and then asked more questions and received more answers. And when she had no more queries, the Baroness looked at her directly.
    “Doing what has never been done before is sometimes daunting—but trust me, stepdaughter, it can be done. You need to use all of your wiles to get this done. I don’t care and neither should you what this costs as long as it gets done. You will succeed is the only outcome. Look at me, the Baroness of Neres, and one day if you want to be able to say that, you will do this successfully,” she said almost to flaunt her position, but as Helena knew, she made sense of this plan, as the screen EYES ONLY went back to black.
    Later in the transport bus back to the Sterling , Helena realized there were no more questions. Just a well-thought-out set of steps to follow like those old dominoes that must fall one into the other then the next and the next. Each one was dependent upon the one in front of it to make the whole thing work.
    My job, she thought, as she rode the escalator up into the Sterling , is just to get those items all in a row ... and to be able to sway the Captain ...
     
    #
    The Marwick shuttle was at what some might call low-level altitude but others might call dangerous. Above the waves, yes, but not by more than fifty feet, and Lieutenant Hendricks, the pilot, was focused on nothing but the sea ahead of him. The rest of the away team watched in silence as the shuttle cruised at more than a mile per second, leaving a furrow behind them as a wake never seen before. With a blue sky, the deep ocean blue and the white wake furrow behind them, it was a trip in duo-tones for sure, Tanner thought. He’d requested this low-level flight as it was something no one as far as he knew had ever done. Even the three Provost Guards who accompanied the away team to look after the convict were staring out the large shuttle view-ports at nothing but ocean, whitecaps and all.
    “On my home world, Captain” Lieutenant Rizzo said, “we have a sport called boarding, where you ride a wave coming into shore or behind a boat, and it’s tons of fun. Well, ‘til you remember that if you’re dumped off the wave near shore, that they make sandpaper outta sand, Sir,” he said and unconsciously rubbed his left thigh and hip.
    “Something I’m sure you did over and over, right, Rizzo,” Lieutenant Elliot chuckled and rose from his seat pretending to balance on just such a board, which got a few cheers from the rest of the team, and even Radisson, the new ensign, was up on top of his seat boarding the shuttle herself.
    “Settle down,” the XO said and that got the group back into their seats, and he eyed Radisson a bit to let him know that kind of shenanigans was frowned upon. Least it should be ...
    As they cruised across the ocean, it became apparent even at this speed that the number of islands was very low on this heading. They never had to avert their course to go around any, and they only saw a line of islands in the distance to port once. At more than 3,600 miles per hour, they were moving quite quickly, and in a little less than two hours, a line of islands appeared ahead.
    “Slow,