Who Put an Aircraft Carrier on My Desert Planet?

The Morrigan drifted through jumpspace, the ship’s engines making the kind of low, ominous grumbling noises that suggested it wasn’t entirely happy about its destination. Caitlin O’Neill sat in the pilot’s chair, arms crossed, scowling at the astrogation display as though sheer force of will might make it change.

Morwen leaned over her shoulder. “Tell me again why we’re going to Dustpan?”

Caitlin gave an exasperated sigh. “Because some absolute gobshite of a freighter captain lost a crate of very expensive things there, and now we’ve got to go retrieve it before some other gobshite gets their hands on it.”

Maltz tilted his head. “Define expensive things.”

Caitlin shrugged. “Electronics, high-end tech, probably a few bits the Imperium doesn’t strictly want people selling on the open market.”

Morwen crossed her arms. “So let me get this straight. We’re going to an awful place, full of awful people, to recover something that is almost certainly no longer there?”

Caitlin shrugged with the calm certainty of someone who’d already committed the crime and was now arguing it was art. “Obviously.”

Scarred-Snout flexed his claws. “Sounds like a perfect way to spend our time.”

Maltz leaned back in his chair, tail flicking. “You do realize there is a one hundred percent chance that we will be shot at.”

Caitlin waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, when are we not?”

“Alright. But when, not if, this goes horribly wrong, I reserve the right to say I told you so.”

Caitlin nodded. “Deal.”

And with that, the Morrigan continued toward Dustpan, a planet where everything was sand, sweat, and bad decisions waiting to happen.

***

Dustpan sprawled beneath them, the result of someone taking a perfectly good desert and deciding to make it worse. From orbit, it looked like a fried egg left out in the sun too long. Up close, it was worse - dry, rocky, and hot, the kind of enthusiastic geological mistake that made visitors rethink their life choices.

Scarred-Snout growled, eyes narrowing at the view below “This entire place is sand.”

Morwen folded her arms. “I don’t trust sand. It gets everywhere.”

Maltz flicked his ears. “I don’t see any oceans.”

“There aren’t any.”

The Vargr squinted. “Then why the hell does it have aircraft carriers?”

And that, indeed, was the question.

Below them, scattered across Dustpan’s endless dunes, crawled the sun-bleached hulks of actual, honest-to-Emperor aircraft carriers: tracked behemoths, still grudgingly functional, sand-scoured and heat-warped beyond reason. They resembled great prehistoric creatures that had gotten very lost, declared the desert home, and refused to die out of sheer spite.

Morwen stared out of the viewport. “I’m sorry. Are those… tanks trying to be airports?”

Quinn adjusted his spectacles, which he did not actually need. “It would appear so.”

“Ah, would you look at that now,” Caitlin said, leaning forward. “Some absolute mad lad took one look at the desert and thought, ‘You know what this place needs? Aircraft carriers.’ And I bet he got a medal for it.”

Quinn, ever helpful, scanned the logs. “They were brought here in the early colony era. Mobile bases. Long-range support. Tactical idiocy dressed up as doctrine.”

Maltz curled his lip in amusement, “Don’t you love Human ingenuity?”

The Morrigan banked low, thrusters kicking up a storm of sand as it descended towards the only neutral place on the planet - the starport.

Despite Dustpan’s efforts to look like the armpit of Charted Space, the port was sleek, gleaming, and bafflingly well-maintained - like a luxury hotel suite built in a landfill, then surprised when guests noticed the smell.

Caitlin checked her notes. “Right. So, according to our oh-so-reliable contact, the cargo we’re after was last seen being ‘appropriated’ by one of the clans. The Ironblood Compact.” She snorted in amusement.

Morwen cracked her knuckles. “So, what’s the plan? Diplomacy? Bribery? Gunfire?”

Caitlin's eyes lit up with mischief, “Yes!”

Maltz groaned. “Fantastic. Can’t wait to get shot at by angry sand-warriors with flying dune buggies.”

Caitlin clapped him on the shoulder. “Look on the bright side, Maltz. At least this time, it’ll be interesting.”

*** 

Getting aboard a tracked aircraft carrier in the middle of a desert? Surprisingly easy - if you lie with confidence and pretend failure isn’t real. At least, not if one is prepared to lie with absolute confidence and refuses to entertain the possibility of failure. Fortunately, the crew of the Morrigan was exceptionally gifted in both areas.

They approached the Leviathan-class land-carrier Carrion King in a rented sand-skimmer that had been making distressing noises ever since Maltz tinkered with the engine to go 50% faster. The carrier loomed ahead - a crawling fortress of scorched plating, exhaust fumes, and terrible life choices baked into every heat-warped panel. Fighters clung to its deck like barnacles, their pilots watching the skimmer with the weary suspicion of men who’d been at war so long, nothing surprised them anymore.

A pair of guards met them at the boarding ramp, bearing the appearance of men who hadn’t slept since their ancestors first declared war on absolutely everyone.

Caitlin marched up with the authority of someone who absolutely wasn’t supposed to be here. “Right! Who’s in charge?”

The taller one frowned. “Who the hell are you?”

Caitlin sighed. “Really? We’ve been chasing you lot all feckin’ day. Regional logistics commission. Priority inspection.” She beamed like she hadn’t just made that up. The guards exchanged a look.

Morwen held up a datapad with bureaucratic menace. “Orders from central command. Don’t tell me you weren’t informed.”

The guards stiffened. There it was - the true enemy of every chaotic military: the possibility they'd missed a memo.

Maltz threw up his hands. “I told them to send the message through proper channels! But noooo, let’s just assume frontline personnel have telepathy, shall we?”

Scarred-Snout growled impatiently. “I do not like waiting. It makes me… undiplomatic.”

One of the guards, now visibly sweating, straightened his uniform. “Uh, no need for that, Sir. Of course. If Command sent you, then…” He hesitated. “Er, should we inform the captain?”

Caitlin placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder, smiled warmly, and said, “Absolutely not.”

And just like that, they were aboard.

The Carrion King’s deck was a vast, sprawling mess of outdated fighter craft, sand-dusted equipment, and ground crews who had perfected the art of looking busy enough not to be questioned. The air smelled of oil, sweat, and barely-controlled logistics chaos.

Morwen exhaled. “I can’t believe that actually worked.”

Caitlin dusted off her hands. “Never underestimate the power of vague authority and a clipboard.”

Quinn adjusted his wire-framed glasses. “So. Now that we’re aboard… what’s the actual plan?”

Caitlin waved one hand vaguely. “Oh, we wing it from here.”

Scarred-Snout nodded approvingly. “Ah. The usual plan.”

And with that, they set off into the belly of the land-carrier, full of false confidence, forged credentials, and the quiet, unshakeable certainty that something was going to go wrong.

They were not disappointed.

***

Caitlin, for all her boundless confidence and stubbornness, hadn’t expected the carrier to descend into chaos quite so fast. One moment, she had been very successfully bluffing her way through a cargo manifest, nodding knowingly at things she didn’t understand, and the next…

…alarms.

So many alarms.

A frankly excessive number of alarms rang out across the Carrion King, each one less helpful than the last

It was Maltz’s fault, obviously. It was always Maltz’s fault.

The Vargr sprinted past her at full speed, carrying a large crate, and ears flattened in a way that suggested an alarming number of people were now very angry with him. “Captain! We have to go!”

Caitlin turned around and blinked. “What did you do now?!”

Behind him, sirens blared. Armed guards shouted. A lot of people were running in entirely too many directions for comfort.

Maltz skidded to a halt, panting. “I may have, hypothetically, triggered a security lockdown while accidentally setting off an explosive decompression alarm.”

“Oh for feck’s sake, Maltz!”

More gunfire. Running. Someone screaming something about treason.

Scarred-Snout jogged past, carrying an entire Imperial-grade missile launcher over one shoulder. “This seemed useful,” he said, as if that explained anything.

Quinn followed, looking almost annoyingly calm. “The exit strategy appears to have been significantly accelerated.”

Caitlin dragged a hand down her face. “Right. New plan. We steal a plane.”

Morwen, jogging beside her, did a double take. “We what?”

Caitlin pointed at the nearest dropship - squat, sand-scoured, and clearly built to survive arguments with mountains.

Maltz’s ears flicked. “That seems unwise.”

Caitlin was already running towards it. “It’s unwise or prison, Maltz! Pick one!”

The landing crew, who had very sensibly decided to sprint in the opposite direction of the alarms, had left the dropship’s cockpit wide open.

Scarred-Snout slammed a stolen rifle into an approaching guard’s stomach. “I am deeply uncomfortable with this plan,” he growled, throwing the man into a stack of supply crates.

Caitlin vaulted into the cockpit. “Well, you’re about to be a lot more uncomfortable.”

Maltz, scrambling up after her, staring at the bewildering array of levers and switches. “I don’t know how to fly this, boss!”

Caitlin scanned the controls with the ease of someone who’d stolen something like this before, probably twice. “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. You’re an engineer, you get the engine running, I’ll do the flying!”

“That is the worst sentence you have ever said.”

More shouting. More gunfire. Explosions. The sound of someone very important realizing they were definitely being robbed.

The engines roared to life.

Caitlin buckled in, yanked the throttle, and sent the dropship screaming off the deck at precisely the kind of angle that would have made any trained pilot vomit in terror.

The stolen craft screamed through Dustpan’s scorching skies, its rattling frame making noises that suggested it had not been built for casual theft and reckless piloting.

Behind it, a large number of angry people were giving chase in their own sand-crusted, barely functional aircraft.

Inside the cockpit, Caitlin wrestled with the controls like a woman barely winning an argument with an aggressive shopping cart. “Alright! I may have slightly overestimated my ability to fly this thing!”

Maltz, crammed into the co-pilot’s seat, frantically tapped at the console. “You don’t say! Would you like me to list the current malfunctions, or should we just leave it a surprise?”

Caitlin yanked the stick hard to the left as a burst of tracer fire just barely missed their wing. The dropship dipped low, skimming over the dunes, sending up great swirling clouds of sand as their pursuers roared after them.

Morwen, watching the carnage from the passenger area, shouted. “Cait! Would you like to explain why you’re bringing half the planet’s air force down on us?!”

Caitlin shouted back. “Because they’re very rude and extremely unwilling to let us keep the crate or this nice plane we stole!”

Scarred-Snout growled. “That does tend to happen.”

The dropship jolted violently as a particularly enthusiastic missile decided to make its presence known. Caitlin swore as the console flickered wildly. “Maltz! What vital system just died?!”

Maltz checked the readouts. “Good news! It wasn’t the engines!”

Caitlin gritted her teeth. “And the bad news?”

Maltz pointed at a flashing warning. “Stabilizers are out. We’re officially flying a drunk fridge.”

“Oh brilliant,” Caitlin laughed, just a little too brightly. “This planet just keeps giving.”