Pirate Empress is publishing ...NOW!

Okay, as I said in the previous post, Goodlifeguide got back to me sooner than expected and I got the manuscript in this morning. I just finished uploading it to Amazon and B&N. Hopefully there will be no problems, B&N was hinky.

Oh, also, I lowered the price on 11 other titles. So, if you fell behind, now is your chance to get caught up. I'll be going through and lowering other prices later in March. (I think, I may forget)

  Fleet Admiral John Henry Irons and his Reborn Federation had been fighting the pirate empire for over a decade. The battles have sea-sawed back and forth across the sector but the Federation has finally beaten the enemy back to their home star system.

  Catherine Ramichov has seen the battles and has taken over in a bloody coup, ruthlessly culling her own family to take control of the empire. She has a firm idea of what to do and knows what is at stake is nothing less than the survival of her empire.

   Admiral Irons and the military may think they have them beaten, but she is just getting started as Horath's first... Pirate Empress!

As usual, I'll post the links when they go live.

  Edit: And we are live!

Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085B9YRLC

B&N:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pirate-empress-chris-hechtl/1136577813?ean=2940162744504

Pirate Empress Snippet 5

So, I got the manuscript back from Goodlifeguide.com earlier this morning. I'll toddle on over to begin publishing it in a moment.

Here is the last snippet...

Chapter 4

Catherine called a cabinet meeting nine weeks after the first cyberattack and her coup, one week after the latest attack. New people and old were still settling in; she watched from a window as they arrived. Many were not happy about the additional security and obviously nervous about being in her midst after the coup. Well, that was too bad. The meeting had to be a physical one in the palace; they couldn't trust their own communications, encrypted or not.

Catherine was polite and even smiled as they settled into the wardroom. She listened to the reports from each minister gravely. It amounted to a lot of hand-wringing about a lot of damage. They were nowhere near restoring order. What they had was a thin venire and a few holdouts barely holding on.

There were a few bright spots, like the fact that several stations still survived. And cyber security was finally taking their duties seriously. The Admiralty had initiated a plan to blunt the next attack which was still five weeks out. “Most of the military hardware was only lightly touched. What we have left has been cleaned. Anything critical was already isolated and air gapped against intrusion,” Vice Admiral Rupert Bradley stated.

The vice admiral was a temporary addition to the cabinet since they lacked a minister of industry. She had pressed him into service as a temporary fill-in, forcing him to divide his time between trying to salvage his original command, BuShips, and trying to salvage and restore the entire civilian industry at the same time.

Obviously from the slack look on his face and deep drawn eyes he hadn't gotten much sleep as of late. She was sure despite her makeup she had a similar look. At the moment, she could care less about looks as she did results.

“Air gapped?” Catherine asked, sitting back and crossing her ankles under the desk as she played straight man.

“We were working on a program to air gap our hardware to cut it off from any network. Our most sensitive hardware in secret facilities was already like that; some bases run on their own network without being connected to external communications at all. Some have multiple networks all independent of each other. Data is moved through portals like encrypted flash drives only after being carefully vetted. It is the only way to protect it from our own hackers,” the admiral explained.

Catherine nodded.

“When the Federation began using cyberattacks, field units and vessels most distant went to air gap protocols. Those range from bases to forts and ships. Unfortunately, some were infected with delay action attacks,” the admiral explained, showing them a diagram of the cyberattack as it filtered through the various commands.

Catherine nodded curtly. No one wanted to mention the extensive damage to the shipyards. Logistics was still trying to rebuild their databases, mostly by doing inventory all over again. Some of the stations had been abandoned. Some had lost attitude control and were tumbling, shedding their contents. At least one was in a slow and agonizing path to burning up in the atmosphere. If it was allowed to happen, the mega tons of material would rain down and destroy quite a lot below. That which didn't burn up on reentry of course.

Unfortunately, there were few tugs available to alter the course of the station. It was just one problem among all too many at the moment.

“The problem is the lack of communication seriously hampers our units. Only audio commands can be sent, no data. The threat of spoofing added to the confusion and delay in action. All internal Wi-Fi has been disabled, which hampers internal communications as well. But that is why their second cyberattack was blunted.”

Catherine nodded again. The Federation prowlers had recently struck again on the eight-week  anniversary of the first cyberattack, just as promised. Since then a lot of prowlers had been observed jumping away to H001, most likely to report back to their chain of command and resupply. It can be assumed that they'd return.

Of that she was bleakly certain about. She cleared her throat. “Audio commands I know. I remember doing that when Cyrano had us run drills against a possible Xeno opponent. Sharing data was a pain in the ass,” she said, face working in disgust.

Mentioning Cyrano brought no flash of anger anymore. She had no time for such things. She could have used his steady hand and the staff he'd built but they were dead and gone thanks to her father. She fought down a flash of anger at his stupidity and regret over her own inaction. She'd been forced to hold off on her plans, accepting the executions as pawns being sacrificed.

She was pretty sure she'd have to do that again in the future.

“Agreed. But it was the only way to protect our ships from infiltration through their communications. Sometimes data could be sent over encrypted bursts or direct line of sight. But it was hard to trust it.” the admiral shook his head. “Even audio isn't fool proof.”

Catherine looked up with a frown.

Admiral Cartwright and others grimaced and nodded in support of their fellow admiral.

“The enemy can get samples of our voices and use them to sow disorder in our ranks,” Admiral Rico stated. “In fact, they already have.”

“If they have the encryption keys to react in real time. And if our people are foolish enough to accept an omni broadcast,” Catherine said frostily.

“A prowler on the right heading could pull it off in theory. Which is why we're adding code words to our encrypted communications,” Admiral Cartwright stated. “We have to hand deliver code sheets and new encryption keys to each command, which is in itself a slow process. We have been working on our own A.I. and cyber defenses, ironically using what we picked up from the Feds.”

“Ah.”

“But, it turns out that some of that was a trap,” Elvira said as she looked up from her tablet.

“It was?” Catherine blinked and then frowned as she turned to her partner. Elvira had remained silent for the majority of the proceedings up until that point. She hadn't wanted to be there but Catherine had insisted. “I thought it was to teach people modern technology?”

“If you learn the concepts, you are more or less fine, but there are hidden Trojans in the files. In our haste to utilize the tech, our people took shortcuts too. The copy and paste method has its advantages. But it left back doors in the programs, and the enemy exploited it,” Elvira explained, passing a tablet to Admiral Bradley. A section of code was highlighted.

The admiral took it with a frown, read the data, and began to scowl. “Damn. She's right,” he said grudgingly.

The countess took a look over his shoulder and then sighed and gave a rueful shake of her head. “Right under our noses,” she murmured.

“Tricky. Tricky bastards,” Cass Suzzette, the minister of agriculture, ventured boldly as the group muttered.

“Yes, my sentiments exactly. They knew we'd use it. We've dealt with Xeno traps before. And other cyberattacks have been encountered over the centuries. You'd think we'd learn from them, at least learn better methods than air gapping our systems,” Elvira said with a shake of her head. “Usually in the field, the best method is to shut down communications, reboot, and disable or destroy the infected hardware.”

Catherine grimaced at that news. She nodded though. There were plenty of horror stories of greed getting in the way of common sense to the detriment of salvage teams. And there were no doubt dozens, perhaps hundreds of stories out there of it killing the team and never getting back to them.

The problem was the money from salvage was too lucrative to pass it up. No risk, no reward. Besides, when an A.I. normally realized it was being salvaged, security protocols would call for it to wipe itself or self-destruct.

This was different. This was a deliberate crippling take of unprecedented scale. All carefully and maliciously planned.

“I'm not big on software so I can only see the big picture. I admit, I'm probably guilty of the copy and paste error myself,” Elvira said with a shake of her head. “But I agree, cutting down our communication networks will help to some degree. Cleaning all software, possibly down to resetting to factory default from firmware, will do a lot to mitigate any hidden viruses waiting to strike.”

“It already has. The civilians are doing the same. Network transfer is a problem. They've switched to just hard lines but we only have so many to begin with. It is cutting into our efficiency. Wi-Fi is out as is satellite communication. But it is the only way to be sure the data is clean,” Countess Newberry stated. “The flip side is that the networks being down means that hooligans who are behind some of the more dangerous civil unrest are cut off from their supporters. But it means we can't actively track them either.”

A few people nodded.

“The good news is changing our encryption and methods of data transfer have hampered the Fed's intelligence activities. I believe that's a case of seeing a silver lining on a barn burned to nearly ashes, but it means that anything we plan from here on out will hopefully be secret,” the countess ended.

Catherine winced at the qualifier.

“There are no guarantees. We're still running into delayed logic bombs and viruses that try to upload data they gathered. Our cyber people believe we aren't infected by an actual A.I., but they can't guarantee that,” Admiral Bradley stated flatly.

“An A.I.? In our systems?” the countess asked.

“In the hardware. A software download is possible. It would need to be a large system. We're pulling people in that have some experience with such things.”

“Rogue A.I., that's all we need,” Admiral Rico muttered.

“I have my doubts that there is one. That's a lot of data to transfer. Then again, they had plenty of time to send information to our networks before they launched their cyberattack,” Elvira stated flatly. “We are still running across back doors and viruses. Breaking the networks down has severely hampered their ability to attack us in the same fashion in the future.”

“We need to continue on that path then. Once burned thrice shy.”

“That is a defensive measure. We still can't find the prowlers and hit them back,” Admiral Cartwright growled, glancing at Elvira. She had made some suggestions, which had worked to some degree, but it wasn't enough. It had trapped the prowler's recon drones and tracked their buoys, even caught one or two ships, but there were still more.

Or will be when they come back he thought darkly.

“True,” Catherine said with a nod. “Let's take a break for an hour and then we'll reconvene,” she offered.

She could tell that offer was gladly accepted. She also noted that the countess wanted to tell her something. She nodded to a side door. The countess nodded slightly back. Catherine paused to check in with her people to get an updated SITREP and then went to see what the countess had to say privately.

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Pirate Empress Snippet 4

So, I pooped myself out from scrubbing this morning, we've got company coming and staying for the funeral next week. Fun.
Anyway, I was checking my mail this morning and found an email from Rea, PE is in! So, I'm going to settle in, go through her edits, finish adding the TOC and stuff, then send it off to Goodlifeguide.

Oh, she got a kick out of it like everyone else.... grin.

On to the snippet!

Chapter 3

Doctor Nutell looked up to the flickering lights with a frown. Things were bad, he knew it, but he didn't know just how bad it was. He'd insisted all communications be cut when they had heard about the cyber-attack. That had protected them from the worst of the ravages of the attack but the information vacuum had been a problem.

Recently Major Eichmann had come around. The base was a black site, offline to the main network and therefore protected. Despite his entries the staff had managed to get some audio and video screens working. They had contradicted the intelligence officer's assertion that all was well.

Which hadn't helped with morale.

Half of the support staff had upped and quit. Some had deserted in the middle of the night, fearful of retaliation. He'd done his best to quell the panic. It was a daily process to sooth the staff. They knew that any panic would get to their subjects and that was a problem.

He checked on Doctor Milgram. The eugenics and brainwashing psychologist was one of the best in the business. Rumors of the fall of the department of Purity and Enlightenment had him on edge though. Not that the doctor was unprofessional enough to let it shade his work. He was gently guiding Mara as she in turn taught a class of the latest subjects.

Mara was a find but they had realized that Selkies were the real treasure. The blue skinned woman was the closest to human they had but she lacked the full innate gift that the other water dwellers had in piloting and navigation. That was why they had recently shifted focus off of her production and onto the selkie production line.

But, only after they'd made some tweaks to make the selkie less... abnormal and more human.

Most of the merfolk and picean production lines were run out since the recent shift. The last classes were in the simulators now. He'd thought that the piceans would have bred more like fish, with eggs and such but that hadn't been the case.

He frowned as he played with his lower lip.

His biggest problem was supplies. They were not immune to the problems outside. They had enough supplies for several more weeks before things got dire. He hoped the powers that be sorted out their troubles soon enough. He had a lot more work to do and it was very promising indeed.

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Mara kept herself from glancing at Doctor Milgram for support as she gently guided her class in piloting. They were really too young to do the job, but the doctors insisted that they could learn. And they were, but the kids resisted to some degree, they just didn't have the focus of older trainees. And some of the staff had recently come down harshly on them when they failed to be attentive.

She knew something was wrong, but no one was saying anything, least of all to someone like her.

She was no longer being drugged; a lot of the clouds had lifted. She'd remembered bits and pieces of her history, including the fact that Sydney and Anita had come with her from somewhere else.

They were some of the last; all of the menfolk had been reassigned to other duties. She had overheard Doctor Milgram as he had firmly told Sydney to mind her own business when she'd inquired about them. That was unlike the doctor too.

“Okay class, we're going to start the next sim. I want you to focus, swim as if your lives depended on it, because they very well could someday...”

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Doctor Milgram frowned pensively as he watched the class. He had done the tours of the various crèche. He didn't like that some of the staff had left. You didn't do that with patients. Some like Jane had hung in there though. When he'd asked her she'd just shrugged it off.

He didn't have anywhere else to go. He'd heard the rumors of the coup and Purity and Enlightenment getting gutted. He was hoping his time with Doctor Nutell would make him indispensable in his current occupation. Something told him that the doctor wouldn't hesitate to throw him to the wolves to save his own skin though.

Really, there was no place to run. Where would he go? What would he do? Wherever he went eventually II would find him. It didn't matter. For the moment, only the work did.

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Irma Algresi ran a hand through her tousled hair and then waved to frustrated clerk. “If it's gone just set it aside. We need to focus on what we can reconstruct,” she insisted.

The clerk sighed and then nodded, setting the folders aside.

She'd never understood why the Inspector General's office had insisted on paper backups of some documents. They'd been redundant and as a cost saving feature she'd pitched stopping the practice. She was now glad she'd been overruled. At the time she'd thought cynically that it had been because as an Assistant Deputy IG accountant she'd stepped on someone's toes. Probably the printer or someone who was making money warehousing all of the documents.

Now she was glad. To a degree.

By going back through the documents they'd been able to reconstruct some of the deleted files. Clean computers had been provided by the IT department, not as many as she'd requested, but a couple. She had a pair of techs working to rebuild their accounting files. It was a daunting task.

The weird thing was that one or two other government departments were calling on them for the data. Apparently, IG's insistence on a paper trail was the only way they could rebuild the records in some cases. She had every record double checked.

She was one of the few department heads to stay at her post. Really, it wasn't like she had anywhere to go. Her flat? When she went home she only saw bad news on the few channels still working. Rioting was happening everywhere. It was scary. At least her work had armed guards who had no intention of letting the chaos and self-immolation touch their offices. She'd taken to camping out in her office on the battered couch whenever the reports of the rioting said they were near.

She hoped someone did something soon. For the moment all she could do was focus on her little world and try to bring order to chaos.

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Pirate Empress Snippet 3

And in to Chapter 2...

Chapter 2

Catherine looked at the list for her cabinet. It was woefully short, many ministers had fled before the coup, others had during it. She, like her father had yet to fill some of the posts. The deputies in charge were doing the best they could, so she left them to it for the time being. She had the shuttle ride and a bit more to think about it and other things. Not to mention read briefs.

Too many briefs. And to settle with offers of positions to her supporters. Some had already accepted. Some like Marina Stuart and her sister just wanted to leave. She didn't blame them she actually secretly agreed with them. “I'll put you at the top of the evacuation list,” had been her standard response.

She looked out the window as she saw the curve of the planet begin to form. It was so pretty, white, blues, greens. Pity her people had mucked it up.

She thought back to seeing her father's body. She had wanted to kill the bastard for too long. Most of her family too. She had to admit, she'd felt no love lost in killing her siblings. They'd been rivals; she'd held no affection for them not even her youngest sister Khali. Khali had seemed sweet and innocent in their rare interactions on holidays but there had been something there recently, a hidden something that came out in the girl's eyes and occasionally in her smiles.

No, the girl had been trouble and had needed to go.

Did that make her a monster? She wasn't sure. She wasn't sure she cared. She probably knew the answer she just didn't want to be bothered answering it.

Tired, she thought.

The purge was still ongoing. Every pirate lord had to be found and assessed. Some were still missing. Some had already gotten out of the star system but II and ONI were still trying to track the rest down. Trying and failing because of the mess with the Feds.

Some of her supporters were on board to show they were loyal to the new regime. They fell all over themselves falling in line. Those bothered her on many levels. Others wanted to prove themselves. The most zealots were the ones who were angry with the state of the system and how the war had been prosecuted. Or they had an axe to grind. Or, in too many cases, they just loved to wallow in the violence.

She was determined to get it right though. They all were. They were being pressured from outside by the Federation. That meant they had to find a way to cement control fast. Fortunately, the Federation was a foreign attacker everyone could unite against. And her father had become unpopular as of late. She could and would use both to stay in power.

She needed to resist the urge to strike at people who didn't agree with her. A reign of terror was fine for some but she needed to find a middle ground. She needed to be seen as even handed. But she couldn't go too soft either. The gloved fist, she thought with a slight nod to herself. Gram, your lessons are finally proving useful, she thought with an ironic twist of her lips as she sent the fleeting thought to her late and unlamented grandmother.

She'd had to clean her own family from top to bottom. It had been a fire sale; everyone had been forced to go. Her father's closest supporters had gone right along with them. The assassinations had been carefully calculated. She had tried to limit the splash over with the other families. She knew there was going to be some; the families deliberately wed each other to keep infighting to a minimum. Not that that strategy worked.

Dealing with the ruling families had been tricky. She had stepped on any resistance hard, but tempered her bloodlust carefully to show that she could do so when needed. She had tried to carefully calculate a moderate response as required for each given situation, since they were all different. She didn't want to come off as being too ruthless or not enough.

Countess Newberry had let the story of her response to the threat of her own family get out in dribs and drabs as gossip. Word spread about how she ruthlessly picked off her own family. There were not enough people with enough power base to challenge her, and too many were looking to their own survival over banding together and coming after her.

Between that and having the Admiralty, II, ONI, and the other branches of the military solidly behind her it had allowed her to consolidate her grip on power over the past several weeks.

So far the Federation was holding off on further cyber-attacks. Broadcasts of the damage and civilian casualties caused by them might be helping, she wasn't sure. She was pretty sure that had been a good move, allowing the vid crews to show it had hurt her a bit, but it had showed that her people were trying to help.

But it also would hurt the Federation resolve in doing further harm, especially to civilians. She knew the Federation was sensitive to such things. Then again, Admiral Irons did threaten to nova bomb the entire star system, killing everyone in the system. She wasn't certain there was a way to stop a cloaked ship from delivering a nova bomb to the sun. Probably not.

That just meant she needed to find another way to take that threat off the table.

She needed time. Time to cement her control, time to rebuild, and time to execute the next stage of her plan. What was that saying about time in war though?

She frowned thoughtfully, puzzling over the reference before setting it aside. At the moment the origins didn't matter. A fresh thought occurred though, the Feds might be, no, they were most likely watching as they waited for some reaction. And no doubt assessing their strike and planning the next one.

There had to be ways to blunt the next one. She made a note to have her people look into that.

The biggest thing that was going to cement her control was decisive and clear leadership. Moderation, showing that she wasn't panicked but was taking the threats seriously. But showing strength and resolve while facing such adversity. She couldn't cave or give the appearance of caving.

But time! She needed time. Her fingers curled and then straightened over and over, digging into the cloth of her pant legs. Time. It all came down to time, and a way to use it to stop the next cyber-attack while they figured out how to fix what was damaged.

Well, I know someone who could handle the engineering side, she thought, touching a key to call her assistant to see how much longer she had to get to the station and her wayward lover. Their confrontation was long overdue. Hopefully her lover would forgive her.

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