Sidewinder Precision Pro

[Malacandra]

At this point most hired escorts would traditionally have gone and got riotously drunk.

But it was different this time. At the close of the two minutes, there was a snarl of drums and half a dozen pipers struck up The Black Bear – I'd had the luck to draw myself a tune that, so the oldest sources claimed, used to be played to announce that duty was over for the day and all hands were to march off in whatever semblance of order they saw fit to go and entertain themselves until bedtime. We used it slightly differently, although it turns out to be a difficult tune to march to in step, following the pipes and drums back to barracks.

“Barracks” is not quite the word either for the Claymores' lodgings in the Highlands. I'd been exceptionally privileged on the grounds that I was sleeping with The Macrae, but there were guest quarters and to spare for the other flyers and the catering was hardly military mess standard either. It was likely to make us spoiled for spacer accommodation in future, as while it was short on high-tech amusements it was extremely long on old-fashioned comfort. Bear in mind that while I was young we were living on a world too primitive for soft sheets and electric heat; well, we were also far too poor for furs, and mostly had to economise on firewood as well.

The Macrae dined with us that night – and I say “us” advisedly as I definitely felt my place was with the other Claymores at that time no matter the pleasures of Macrae's own table. Once the initial shock of losing Lovat's Lament was over, everyone seemed to find themselves able to accept it easily enough. The Bull was quiet and thoughtful, but Macrae had a long chat with him, and as he said later on when we walked back down to the still-burning beacon, so far as he could tell the operation could not have been better run and led.

“I had high hopes of yon laddie from the first,” he said, “for when it comes to battle competence, ye mostly needn't look further than the nearest Gelegeusian; they're bred to it early, though there's no' enough trouble for it to count on a planetary scale. No, the Bull's no' at fault for the one loss ye had – and, much though I grieve for young Emeraud d'Ivernage, I had resigned mysel' to losin' more.”

“I wish we'd been able to pick him up though, the way I got picked up,” I said.

Macrae chuckled softly. “Who wouldnae? But it cannot be done with what we have, Marilee. Even with the technology Neville and the Sassenachs have, ye'd need their level of practice and expertise. They are, make no bones about it, verra good at what they do, and we cannot match that unless we have the leisure time they have to learn it. Wi' anythin' less, I wouldn't fancy our chances o' pickin' up a half-dead cat. No. Be glad your own life got saved the once, lassie; we cannot count on that again, for you, me or anyone else.”

He poured a fresh tot of whisky and held it up to the flame. “Forasmuch as it has pleased the Good Lord to take unto himself the spirit of our friend Emeraud d'Ivernage, we commit his component atoms to the quiet deeps of space, until the Big Crunch or whatever else His wisdom shall ordain.” And he poured a good ounce of priceless spirit on the ground and bowed his head.

“There's one thing, though,” Macrae said as we started back to the house. “Your fellows are learnin' to mourn their dead with dignity. Till now, ye carried on like pigs, mostly. Whether the day went good or ill, ye had the one medicine; drink all your skin would hold an' shag all night wi' whoever ye can catch.”

I chuckled at his coarseness, although the gentle pressure of his hand took the sting out of the crack about “pigs”, and he went on, “Not that I'm about to cry out on all those who enjoy their dram, for as you know, I'm no' the soul o' temperance myself.”

“And, for that matter, when it comes to the other thing...”

“Aye,” he laughed, “which, to be honest, I thought myself done with for good and all. Well. Fighting men of any stamp generally dinnae live like monks. But there's measure in all things. We've seen off the friend we lost wi' some style, and no' the kind of desperation that's rooted in the fear we'll no' see another sunset ourselves. Tomorrow's another day, and we've fresh hands coming and new ships being delivered – and Clan Macrae will adopt them right warmly.”

I had no doubt whatever about that. The new arrivals were ten in number and already dressed Macrae style, mostly human except a blue fat-cat from Xeesle who gave his name as “Tom” and, as far as I could tell, was born ready to discourage anyone who wanted to make something of it. But while Tom's girth was impressive for a feline, and he might have looked lazy to the casual eye, there was nothing wrong with his reflexes or his aim. He enjoyed skeet-shooting, except that unlike the rest of us he didn't use a shotgun but a pistol, and that with iron sights.

We had five new ships, and Macrae was going to spend some time to think about assignments for four of them, but Tom was an automatic choice for the fifth. Macrae told the other new arrivals not to be too disappointed, though: “After the work we've just done in this system, we have more funds being released to us, and the new ships are already on order.”

While they were starting training, we were preparing to go out of the system: Maises, just under ten light-years away.

[Malacandra]

We had Macrae himself for company on this trip.

Since the Claymore is not Witch-capable, we needed a ship that was to get us from A to B. This wasn't out of the ordinary for most of us, who'd been flying one of the many escort fighters that are designed to just tag along with a freighter from system to system. Macrae was quite clear that this didn't make him the mission commander, though. Our brief was to help him safely to the station and then go off and look for trouble under The Bull's direction, then rendezvous for the return journey.

Maises is a multi-Jump trip from Ususor, of course, and Macrae took us to Veale first for a rest break. It caused quite a stir when twenty ships all docked together and twenty pilots all dressed in kilts disembarked. We mixed with the general traffic commanders rather than the escorts and kept ourselves to ourselves, but you can be sure that we were attracting attention.

“We're not going to remain a secret for ever,” Macrae said at dinner. “People will see the new ships, and the strange dress, and when something odd starts in the systems we visit it will be but a matter of time before the chatter starts on GNN and the like. There's no help for it. If we could run to a Navy mother-ship wi' supplies for independent missions then maybe we could be more mysterious; but even the consortium I've been working on can't run to that, and even if it could, ships like that need resupply as well, and they don't get it at any common station either.”

Veale station is staffed largely by the local Frogs, who didn't see us as any more exotic than the rest of the human traffic they get, and they were the soul of hospitability not least because Macrae was happily paying for the best service. We turned in at a respectable hour with the prospect of a short Jump the next day and a gentlemanly breakfast before we shipped out.

It's just about half a parsec from Veale to Maises, which is a hairsbreadth over two and a half hours in Witchspace. We already knew what to expect when we arrived; if there were any locals who might have been disposed to pick on an unwary trader, their enthusiasm was going to evaporate straight away when they saw a score of ships coming through together – which, by the way, calls for some precision flying to get everyone into the wormhole while it's open. Even Assassins have more sense of self-preservation than that; it's hard work to get victims rubbed out while making sure the law doesn't see you, and all that investment isn't to be undone by trying to complete a hit with the odds well against you.

“Intel had already placed the local facilities down on the planet,” Macrae told us, “and I've had a drone go through the system to confirm. You'll find a globe of Maises on your in-atmosphere HUD, and the place you're looking for is on a large island straddling the hundred and seventieth meridian south of the equator.” Of course, meridians and equators are applicable concepts to all planets – once you know what the local prime meridian is, which is usually right under the Coriolis station unless the planet was colonised way back before the Coriolises became standard. North is defined by the sense of rotation of the planet around its sun; and either way, we didn't need to know what the definitions were given that the computer knew all that.

“Local industry's well up to providing some testing defences, so be on your guard. Here's the file.” What you can get on the station is generally several rungs up from what you can buy locally – obviously, since even in the lowest-tech systems the station can refuel ships, and you can buy missiles in orbit even when the locals are running around in chainmail. Maises was plenty advanced enough for some sophisticated aircraft and simple missiles, but any hardheads would have had to be brought in from out of the system, as even Maises station couldn't manufacture them.

We could still have got zerg-rushed (whatever that means) if we'd been taking on the whole planet or even a nation state, but we weren't. What we had was a pirate base on whatever chunk of real estate the locals had never got around to developing for themselves – or which the pirates had stolen, with the locals too disorganised or outgunned to take it back – and that meant it only had whatever money the syndicate had managed to put into it.

We left Macrae behind at Maises station and headed for the far side. Whatever was happening would be well out of GalCop jurisdiction and, while it might have raised a stink on a planet with a one-world government, Maises didn't have enough organisation to even give backing to a strongly-worded letter.

“Stay alert,” rumbled The Bull as we slipped into atmosphere. “There is no such thing as a milk run. Remember Lovat's Lament.”

We fanned out, a dozen or so kilometres apart. It takes time to search a large island, even with a genuine Pirate Detector, but we were at high altitude and would be troublesome to spot from the ground, or to intercept.

Of course, the trouble with obsolete technology is that you forget how to deal with it.

After an hour or so we got a message relayed from ship to ship. “Mhairi's Wedding: I have a lock”. The Bull called us all into formation by sections, and we prepared to go down.

We didn't see what was coming up until we got a whole bunch of white traces on our scanners. We naturally took them to be a volley of missiles, and some of them were, but some of them weren't. The reason's down to how scanners work.

[Diziet Sma]

Darn cliff-hangers...


Ok.. I confess.. I've been hooked on this story for ages..

[Malacandra]

(Gotta make sure I keep the audience hooked!)

I had to fill in the technical parts later.

Every now and then, when you are fighting someone in space, they will figure they have only seconds to live and they will push the panic button on their escape pod. When that happens, the trace that was bright red (if you were fighting them) or yellow (if you were just a casual observer) fades to white. This happens because the escape pod release also shuts down their ship's drive instantly, leaving the ship drifting while the pod makes its escape – which, by the way, it also does while showing up as a white blip on your scanner.

The thing is, your scanner will colour-code anything with a drive system or a similar energy source. If it's a ship under power then it'll show as yellow, and if it's been flagged as a hostile it comes up red. Police show up as violet, and a few other objects such as fuel stations are coded for separately. But a generic non-planet-sized unpowered object comes up as white; and by “unpowered” that means “without a ship's drive”. A missile motor's different, but the scanner's programmed to detect that too.

What our scanners weren't programmed for was a combustion engine. I barely even knew they existed; they were far too advanced for Qudira, and centuries behind the drives my Sidewinder had used and my Claymore was fitted with. No-one uses a combustion engine where a ship's drive will do... unless they can locally source combustion engines and fuel for them and want to save themselves an awful lot of credits building something that's never going to go into space.

Combustion engines are noisy, but they can still push an atmosphere ship along at quite a rate if you have fuel to spare. So what we had coming up from ground level towards us was a variety of ships and missiles powered that way, and our scanners were flagging all of them as “Alloys” - simple unpowered space junk fit only for scrap.

The part about being unpowered was exactly as untrue as the part about being space junk.

It turns out that a turbojet atmosphere plane can give a Claymore a much better contest in atmosphere than we'd expected. At eight kilometres altitude, and once we'd ECMed the swarm of ground-launched missiles, the jets could match us for speed, acceleration and turn, and their systems targeted us better than we could target them – mainly because every missile they launched showed up as yet another white trace, and we had too little signal to noise to be able to tell which was an enemy and which was a nuisance to be ECMed. Our computers couldn't tell when we were missile-locked, either.

The Bull snapped out a couple of concise orders and we started heading for the mesosphere. As the air thinned almost to nothing, we could start to make more use of our injectors, and the jets began to struggle especially in the turn. We could work with the air around us, but we were designed to manouevre in vacuum; they needed aerodynamic lift and air over their control surfaces. Fortunately, our shields had held off their missiles and the odd cannon-burst they'd managed to bring to bear, but Lochanside and I had both been given a good hiding by the time we managed to win clear.

At forty kilometres, it was another story entirely. We'd pulled the jets up to their ceiling and a number of them realized it and were making back for the thicker air below; four of them left the decision too late and found out that we had a line-of-sight weapon that wasn't being significantly attenuated at this height. (Whether the pilots we were up against were space-savvy enough to know what we were shooting at them with, or whether they were locals hired or coerced by the pirates, we weren't to learn. The Blue Mice that make up the bulk of Maises's indegenes don't go in for fighting like humans do.)

We circled at height, to see if we could lure more of them into coming up to the edge of space, but they were too wary for that. And we had an additional problem into the bargain:

“Lochanside: I'm reading a loss of cabin pressure.”

Lasers and missiles alike don't tend to puncture a ship's hull on a minor scale. Whatever they'd been flinging at us had apparently managed a small penetration through Lochanside's shields. It wasn't killing damage for now, and the Claymore's shields would cover it through another fight – but it meant it wasn't airtight any more, and that's a serious matter for a spacecraft.

“The Rowan Tree: Understood. Any other damage, Claymores?”

He got a chorus of negatives, which left him to ponder for a few minutes. Lochanside's pilot, duAtha danAnn, was safe enough as long as we stayed in air – and we needed to descend to twenty kilometres to cut the rate of air loss to something safer – but he couldn't go to space unless we could get him something to breathe. We had a few choices: Fly to a safe zone where we could bring Lochanside down – and hope wherever we touched down didn't intern duAtha and confiscate his ship; find somewhere to land and make repairs or jury-rig something that would keep him breathing until we made it back to the station; or touch down briefly somewhere where we could take him off and either leave Lochanside for later recovery or blow it up.

Whichever we decided on, we still had a job to finish first. The Bull formed us up into sections staggered five kilometres apart in height and on the horizontal, and we headed down into the thicker air again. At least we knew what to expect. Sadly, so did the enemy. Any advantage of surprise we'd started with was largely gone by now. Well, we never expected it to be easy.

[ClymAngus]

After the heart in the mouth moment and subsequent gut wrench...

I'm glad Marilee came out the other side of the mangle - and in better shape than did Fleabag (something to do with body mass? - I expect ClymAngus could explain better 'n me). It would be hard to see Marilee walking down the ship corridor with the occasional neck twitch

I'm explaining what now?

Well, Marilee was lucky enough to have some extremely good help much closer on hand than she suspected - and these guys are so insanely gung-ho you suspect they may actually have spaced each other to see what it feels like.
.

Do you want the explanation in normal? Or Toff? Well as Malacandra has done the normal, I'll do the Toff.

[Flashheart vernacular setting engaged]

You see my dear fellow, when the hired help took a velocity spin space side. Not a mean feat when you've had your fire cracker popped by an asp. Any gentleman in the room should zip up their trousers and get whats left of them in a scoop and back in oxy, damn bloody quick! Which is exactly what happened, brass sheen and Military fashion. Life saved. Pip pip! Chin Chin. Brandies back at the lodge to celebrate!

Wouldn't have minded catching that little falling angel in my scoop. Damn lucky blighter. Ding, dong!

[Malacandra]

[Flashheart vernacular setting engaged]

You see my dear fellow, when the hired help took a velocity spin space side. Not a mean feat when you've had your fire cracker popped by an asp. Any gentleman in the room should zip up their trousers and get whats left of them in a scoop and back in oxy, damn bloody quick! Which is exactly what happened, brass sheen and Military fashion. Life saved. Pip pip! Chin Chin. Brandies back at the lodge to celebrate!

Wouldn't have minded catching that little falling angel in my scoop. Damn lucky blighter. Ding, dong!

(Neville and the boys are far too well-bred to point and laugh, but you would be politely but firmly seated well below the salt, and you would never be invited back )

The Bull had had some thinking time, though.

“Red section, attack in line abreast. Choose your own targets but stay at ten kilometres minimum. Make a single pass and pull up to twenty kilometres, then reverse. White section and Blue section, follow in succession.”

Something must have clicked in his brain. Lasers and ship's drives are as near inexhaustible as makes no difference, and even if we were aiming at a small enemy five kilometres distant, it didn't take much of a hit from our lasers to knock down one of these jets. A light beam's a straight-line weapon. They were having to try to hit us with projectiles which might or might not even carry the distance – and if they were coming up to ten thousand metres to try to engage at closer range then they were bringing the fight onto our territory, which favoured us more and more when we pulled up, and whichever section was following the one they were trying to attack had a clear shot at them in their turn.

They tried it a couple of times, and lost a couple of planes in doing it, and then we noticed there were fewer blips on our trace than before. As we later worked out, they'd had to start going down to refuel and rearm. That was our cue to go in after them.

We got a good visual on their base from five kilometres up, while we cheerfully ECMed any ground-to-air missile that was sent up after us. Local or imported, they had the standard vulnerable electronics, and some looked short on payload as well judging by the bang they made.

“Loch Lomond: Yellow trace below. Locked on. Type is Moray Star Boat.”

“The Rowan Tree: Shoot him down! He's headed for the sea.”

Loch Lomond and two other Claymores engaged and in moments the Moray Star Boat, Captain Jack's Parrot, was screaming for quarter. The Bull snapped out an order straight away: “Pirate, set down on dry land and power down. If you move one more metre towards the sea, we'll blow you. Loch Lomond, escort him down.”

While Loch Lomond followed the Parrot to an inland site, the rest of us got on with plastering the base with everything we had. On a low pass it was possible to see the destruction in a good deal of detail. Orange flame fringed with heavy black smoke was rising from what we guessed must be a fuel depot for surface ships or the aircraft, and a level strip of concrete a couple of kilometres long was heavily cratered, which put paid to any ideas of launching further aircraft at us.

It may be hard to remember how to deal with obsolete technology, but once you've thought it through, you generally find out why the technology became obsolete.

An hour after we'd begun the assault on the ground base in earnest, there wasn't a vehicle moving or any sign of power generation. The Bull brought all the remaining Claymores over to where Loch Lomond was still circling the downed Moray Star Boat and sent “Pirate, exit your craft and stand one hundred metres clear. Wave some large object over your head.”

Once the pirate had done as he was told, The Bull himself landed. That might not have been the strategic course of action but if Gelegeusians have a weakness it's a reluctance to avoid personal danger, and there was no way he was going to order one of us to secure the pirate and his ship while he himself stayed safely in his Claymore. We saw him approach the pirate, then head for the Moray, which a few moments signalled “Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled. Lochanside, approach and land.”

We took the poetry quotation as a sign that The Bull was in control of the situation, and so it proved. He and duAtha danAnn inspected the damage, but we had no repair facilities on hand. Still, there was very little left moving for hundreds of kilometres on either side, so The Bull decided on a compromise:

“The Black Bear, you now command White Section. Continue to orbit this location, radius two kilometres, as slow as you like. If Lochanside powers up, destroy it. If you are not relieved within twelve hours this time, destroy Lochanside and return to the Coriolis station. If you are attacked, use your own judgment but if you are forced to retreat, destroy Lochanside if you are able to do so without compromising your own safety.”

With danAnn aboard the captured Moray Star Boat, and the pirate comprehensively in irons aboard her, Red and Blue sections headed back to space, which left us with a boring few hours in an extremely repetitive holding pattern with nothing to look at but cloud patterns. Still, that was better than some of the possible alternatives.

Night was falling when we saw a number of drive flames heading our way, and a few moments later all of Red Section and the Moray Star Boat came into scanner range. The Star Boat was now reading as “Clean”, too.

“Captain Jack's Parrot: Marilee, you're relieved. Well done. We've a pressure suit for young danAnn so we'll have that ship of ours back. Rendezvous at the station and don't start any fights.”

That evening it was party time for sure, with the mission completed, everyone back safe and sound, and a captured ship and a prisoner into the bargain. Admittedly it was a civilized party, but Macrae was if anything even more prepared to push the boat out than usual.

“No. Yon miscreant's no' in the hands of the police. They're too accustomed to lettin' criminals pay their fines and go. The rehabilitation I have in mind involves a nice long chat wi' a few friends o' mine. We'll find out what he knows, and then... well, there's room enough on the Macrae estates where he can live a while.”

[ClymAngus]

(Neville and the boys are far too well-bred to point and laugh, but you would be politely but firmly seated well below the salt, and you would never be invited back )

I would expect nothing less from second sons sired from a fish wife that Pappa took a passing fancy to. Not that mamma really cared as she was merrily working her way through the grounds staff and wine cellar at the time.

Lets not do this eh?

Click here for the CENSORED episode, password "sidewinder"

I can't get no, satisfaction.
Cos I'm packin a, linux contraption.
And I tried, and I tried and I tried yes I tried.
I can't get no, No no no! Yeah yeah yeah!
That's what I say!

Cos I'm typing on my deck and a window pops up sayin I must have word.
And it's causing me aggravation cos of the licencing situation.
I can't get no, No no no! Yeah yeah yeah!

[Malacandra]

Click here for the CENSORED episode, password "sidewinder"

I can't get no, satisfaction.
Cos I'm packin a, linux contraption.
And I tried, and I tried and I tried yes I tried.
I can't get no, No no no! Yeah yeah yeah!
That's what I say!

Cos I'm typing on my deck and a window pops up sayin I must have word.
And it's causing me aggravation cos of the licencing situation.
I can't get no, No no no! Yeah yeah yeah!

(I'll be home in September and I'll make arrangements to get you one you can read. I only have Open Office on this laptop and that's no good either for a passworded Word document)

No run of luck lasts for ever.

But sometimes it's not luck that's been managing your affairs, and for ever is too long a timescale to be planning for anyway. For most of us, long enough is good enough – and the “Claymore Scourge” lasted long enough to make a real difference, as Macrae intended.

On the back of those early successes came more backing and more recruitment. There is old money in the landed gentry on scores of worlds, and they don't like having their prerogatives trodden on, whether by random ne'er-do-wells and freebooters or by organised crime syndicates. The Claymores were few in number at the outset but they chose their targets well, where they had a tactical advantage and significant strategic gains to make. They achieved the goals of any elite strike force, which is to inflict serious losses on the enemy while taking few themselves, and while there would be losses to come, they would come after Macrae's initiative had gathered momentum and could absorb the losses.

It wasn't long before we had a second strike team, twenty Claymores strong, and then a third, and then a fourth, and while piracy throughout the sector was still looting trading convoys and lone ships, whole pirate enclaves were being swept out of existence. There wasn't a unified front that they could present – there isn't, so far as anyone has yet found, some mysterious “pirate island” where all the captains unite to debate, vote, and set policy. They're more like the disease that Hugh Fitzroy-Badgerson likened them to – a virulent infectious organism that can be highly successful at propagating itself, and that is perfectly capable of outpacing the immune system's attempts to stop it. But if that's so, we're like an antibiotic or even a nano-cure: directed, highly selective, and very able to outpace even the infection's rate of reproduction. And I was in it from the start.

That's something I pride myself on, but of course it was nothing more than a fortunate coincidence. If I hadn't fallen foul of a particular set of circumstances, I'd never have met Macrae. I had to lose a freighter, console myself with Terek, be run out on by him, meet and mistreat some anonymous bar-girl and end up thoroughly ashamed of myself, and run into a random kindly eccentric in a Coriolis station. When I look back, I honestly can't see a future in which I didn't die soon if I hadn't met Macrae. Instead – and in company with a number of hired escorts who seem to have been following a similar downward spiral – I found something that can only be called redemption. If that's not the right use for the word, then I never saw it.

Within the year, The Bull himself was off to Sector Two with a strike team and a senior member of Clan Macrae. The plan is to send another team through after a six-month wait, but it's difficult to check on progress until someone develops the mythical “Widdershins Drive” that would allow a ship to travel from Sector One to Sector Eight and so on back round the clock. But Hugh Fitzroy-Badgerson and his backroom lobsters were confident in their predictions for The Bull's future.

Longer term, we all have retirement plans. Macrae's adamant that none of us can be expected to fight pirates for ever and expect to live through it, and he's written a set tour of duty that means after a certain number of missions we'll be moved to the reserve list and training replacements. By that time we're looking like becoming a regular military – which, as I understand it, both the Navy and the police are tacitly approving of. Macrae observed to me that they were happier for the Claymores to be “inside the tent pissing out, instead of outside the tent pissing in.”

But only to me. To the rest of the Claymores he's much more formal and never coarse – and to me he's the perfect Highland gentleman on almost all occasions. I can't describe how much it means to me that I'm the one person he can let the mask drop in front of every once in a long while, whether with a slightly rude figure of speech or a good swear at the state of the universe. There isn't, so far as I've ever seen, any force known to man, robot or alien that's capable of wringing a tear from Macrae, but I do believe that, with me, he's learned to relax enough to finally grieve, as have I.

Which implies something about our relationship; but we've no intention of formalising it. Turns out that it's entirely acceptable for a widowed Clan Chief to have a young lady about the place after a decent interval, and Young Macrae hardly needs a stepmother younger than he is. And in the likely event there's a Macrae Bastard on the scene in a few years, there's a place in Highlands society for one of those too – and over on cosmopolitan Gerete it would hardly even be noticed.

Macrae calls me all kinds of a fool to tie myself to an old has-been who'll be ready for a wheelchair while I'm still in the prime of life, for he's adamant about not turning to medicine to extend his life. “Lachlan deserves his turn as The Macrae in the way of nature, and there's more to a good life than the count of years,” he says, and I know he won't be shaken on it. So I'll be his lover for a while, his nurse for a short time, and I'll have many years left to me to find another man who'll be half as good.

So for now I have good work to do, the tools and training to do it with, good companions and an adoptive family who couldn't be bettered anywhere in the Eight. I get paid more than enough for this job.

[Diziet Sma]

I can't get no, satisfaction.
Cos I'm packin a, linux contraption.
And I tried, and I tried and I tried yes I tried.
I can't get no, No no no! Yeah yeah yeah!
That's what I say!

Cos I'm typing on my deck and a window pops up sayin I must have word.
And it's causing me aggravation cos of the licencing situation.
I can't get no, No no no! Yeah yeah yeah!

I only have Open Office on this laptop and that's no good either for a passworded Word document

The solution is called LibreOffice. Handles passworded Word documents beautifully.

(These days, LibreOffice is to be preferred over Open Office for a number of reasons.. not least to do with some not-nice-ness on the part of Sun/Oracle over use of (and contributions to) the code-base. As the little incident above demonstrates, it's also more up-to-date with Word's features.)

[Lone_Wolf]

Which implies something about our relationship; but we've no intention of formalising it. Turns out that it's entirely acceptable for a widowed Clan Chief to have a young lady about the place after a decent interval, and Young Macrae hardly needs a stepmother younger than he is. And in the likely event there's a Macrae Bastard on the scene in a few years, there's a place in Highlands society for one of those too – and over on cosmopolitan Gerete it would hardly even be noticed.

Macrae calls me all kinds of a fool to tie myself to an old has-been who'll be ready for a wheelchair while I'm still in the prime of life, for he's adamant about not turning to medicine to extend his life. “Lachlan deserves his turn as The Macrae in the way of nature, and there's more to a good life than the count of years,” he says, and I know he won't be shaken on it. So I'll be his lover for a while, his nurse for a short time, and I'll have many years left to me to find another man who'll be half as good.

So for now I have good work to do, the tools and training to do it with, good companions and an adoptive family who couldn't be bettered anywhere in the Eight. I get paid more than enough for this job.

I hope that IS NOT the end of the story, Malacandra ?

[ClymAngus]

(These days, LibreOffice is to be preferred over Open Office for a number of reasons.. not least to do with some not-nice-ness on the part of Sun/Oracle over use of (and contributions to) the code-base. As the little incident above demonstrates, it's also more up-to-date with Word's features.)

Yeah Libre is giving me 101 opening options and all the usual suspects are giving me file read errors. Then that's the problem with work kit, otherwise I'd have just bolted on a plugin or grabbed a stand alone.

The Macs at home aren't going to do it. So yeah, It's not that I really need the text porn but this one has been such a long time coming (no pun intended) that I'm not adverse to a gregarious (yet well deserved) money shot.

[Malacandra]

I hope that IS NOT the end of the story, Malacandra ?

For now I'm out of things to say about Marilee, Macrae and the Claymores, and having written a novel-length story in just about one calendar month I think I need to stop while the audience are asking for more rather than when they're sighing "Enough, already". I've a school term coming up which is going to be inordinately busy and rather than let this degenerate into a cycle of "We went out, found some pirates, and killed them" I shall retire these characters until another story starts to make its presence felt.

I've especially enjoyed Macrae's company since he popped up out of nowhere and gave me the chance to write about Scots In Space! for a while. And meanwhile, I have the first few hundred words of another Hammond adventure waiting to be picked up and run with. So watch this space - there will be more along in due course, but not necessarily this side of Christmas. Thank you for reading along!

[Diziet Sma]

Yeah Libre is giving me 101 opening options and all the usual suspects are giving me file read errors.

Huh? I just click on the file, LO loads and asks me for a password, after which it displays the file.. maybe your download was corrupted? Or your version of LO needs updating?

The Macs at home aren't going to do it.

LO is available for Mac as well..

[Diziet Sma]

So watch this space - there will be more along in due course, but not necessarily this side of Christmas. Thank you for reading along!

Many, many thanks, Malacandra, for the journey you've taken us all on.. I've enjoyed it tremendously, and look forward to whatever you come up with next!

To borrow a phrase,
Write on, Commander!

[SteveKing]

So watch this space - there will be more along in due course, but not necessarily this side of Christmas. Thank you for reading along!

Many, many thanks, Malacandra, for the journey you've taken us all on.. I've enjoyed it tremendously, and look forward to whatever you come up with next!

To borrow a phrase,
Write on, Commander!

Seconded... Rah, Rah and all that, what!

(I was thinking, "enough time to pass for maybe [strikeout]'Pirates Strike Back'[/strikeout] , but I thought better of it)

Can't wait