The Terran Privateer (10 page)

Major James Arthur Valerian Wellesley was the direct descendant of the Iron Duke, the man who had crushed Napoleon at Waterloo and half a dozen other battles. The blood of over a dozen generations of soldiers and British nobility ran in his veins, honed by ten years of service in the Royal Marines before he’d been recruited by the Special Space Service.

It took every ounce of his cultural and military training to
not
call his Captain a blithering idiot to her face.

“Ma’am, this is unwise,” he told Captain Bond as the blonde woman finished strapping on her suit with expert skill.

“Yes,” she agreed calmly, pulling a recoilless submachine gun from the rack and loading it with rocket rounds. “But necessary. We have no idea what we’re going to find, Major, and some of the decisions we’ll need to make aboard that ship will be…political. Which makes them mine.”

“Transmissions delays aren’t that high,” he pointed out. “And my people will need to keep you safe.”

“Focus your people on their jobs,” she snapped. “I’m perfectly capable of defending myself.” She tapped the SMG. “Check my qualification scores when I re-upped, Major. But do it in the shuttle. We need to move.”

Three of James’ troops had already crossed to the alien ship and he was receiving reports of heavy fighting. His people
needed
Alpha Troop and the headquarters section, even if bringing his last twenty people into the fight meant he was bringing the
Captain
.

“If we still had higher authority, I would be registering a complaint,” he warned Bond. “But fine, let’s go.”

“At this point, Major, I
am
higher authority,” she replied. “That’s why I need to be there.”

“That’s why you need to not be
shot at
,” James snapped back—but he snapped back while shepherding his men onto the shuttle.

He also looked up Bond’s qualification on the gun she’d grabbed, hoping for some measure of peace of mind. As the data scrolled onto his screen, he chuckled quietly to himself inside his helmet.

She wasn’t lying about taking care of herself. All UESF officers were required to qualify on both rocket and slug rounds for the Force’s standard twelve-millimeter automatic pistol and encouraged to qualify on the twelve-millimeter submachine-gun. Annette Bond had qualified Expert on both when she’d returned to uniform.

With a perfect score.

#

James watched carefully as McPhail slotted her shuttle neatly into the ugly hole through the pirate ship that
had
been one of the reactors. The powerful laser beam had created a perfectly circular hole one meter in diameter.

The explosive vaporization of metal and components in that circular hole, plus the escaping superheated plasma from the holed fusion reactor, had turned the wound into an irregular void over fifty meters wide clear through the ship.

The interface drive shuttle wasn’t a lot
smaller
than the hole, but the pilot made flying a spacecraft into a jagged metal cave only slightly bigger than her ship look like a normal part of the job.

“We’re as far in as we’re getting, and I’ve lined up the exit hatch with what I
think
was a corridor,” she told him. “Good luck, Major.”

With a nod to the pilot, he rejoined his men and the Captain, gesturing for someone to open the shuttle hatch.

“Listen up, people,” he said briskly. “We don’t know the interior layout of this ship, but we’re coming in just above where the reactor was. Everyone
else
is looking for shield generators and tech to haul out, but we’re hunting for the bridge. Best guess is that it’s in the connector of the horseshoe, so that’s where we’re headed.

“You’ve got a waypoint, but it won’t line up with the corridors or decks. Keep moving in that direction, keep your eyes open, and stay in your teams.”

“What about the locals?”

“If anyone looks like they’re trying to surrender, bind them and we’ll pick them up later,” James ordered. Given that his people had no way to
communicate
with the pirate crew at all, that was…unlikely. “Let anyone run that tries to run. If you’re facing weapons—take them down. No chances, people; I can’t get replacements if you get yourselves killed!”

He checked the radar-pulse maps that the other three sixteen-soldier troops had been making as they pushed into the ship. They were nowhere near Alpha Troop and had been focused on sweeping Engineering, but the general layout of the ship was likely to be similar.

“Keep your pulse-mappers running and uploading,” he ordered. “Stay in touch, watch each others’ back, and MOVE OUT!”

His headquarters section moved last, with Captain Bond in the center of the patrol of four troopers accompanying the two officers. She’d taken her placement with reasonable grace, too.

James wasn’t enough of a fool to go first—he was second, about a second and a half behind the SSS trooper who touched down. They already knew from the other troops that the ship still had artificial gravity and light.

It didn’t seem to have much else, though, James noted. They landed in what appeared to have been a control center for the fusion reactor. The consoles were all dark, and half a dozen bodies lay where they’d been blown across the room. The aliens were wearing vac-suits designed to withstand vacuum, not the force of the probably still-fusing plasma that had ripped the wall away.

He focused on the bodies for a few moments, letting his helmet camera record them. Six individuals of what he guessed to be four separate species. Without time to open the armor, he could only classify them as A!Tol, tall bipedal, small bipedal, and what appeared to be a hexapod the size of a horse. Three of the six were the hexapods, but the only one he recognized was the distinct many-tentacled form of Earth’s conquerors.

“No wounded, sir,” one of his troopers noted. “These guys died instantly.”

“They have vac-suits, same as our people,” Bond interjected. “Anyone who survived would have retreated past emergency airlocks. You’ll start hitting resistance when you hit air, Major.”

“Same as training back home,” he replied. “Let’s move, people.”

#

The emergency airlock was about ten meters farther into the wrecked ship, a somewhat featureless slab of metal that would have slammed down as soon as atmosphere started to be lost. A control panel had swung open when the airlock door had closed off the section, but was flashing a white screen with strange characters on it.

“I can’t
read
this, but I’d say they locked it out after they used it,” James’ electronics specialist said after looking at it for less than a second. “Give me thirty seconds—I don’t care what language they speak; the rest of the troops report they use wires same as we do.”

The woman was good to her word, and the lock slid partially open under her ministrations. James led the team into the lock and glanced back at the specialist.

“How long to open the other side?”

“On your order,” she replied.

“Everyone expect trouble,” he ordered, pulling a grenade from his webbing and standing to the side. The gap between the two emergency bulkheads was big enough for all six of them with room to spare—but not enough room to allow for cover. “Open it.”

Two wires James could barely see crossed and the inner door started sliding upwards. As soon as the gap was large enough, he rolled the grenade under it.

The metal floor vibrated under his feet as the weapon went off, a ricocheting shard of metal bouncing under the door and pinging off his leg armor.

“Go!”

Two of his troopers ducked under the rising door, covering the hallway with their weapons—opening fire almost immediately at targets only they could see. One slammed back into the door, grunting over the network as
something
hit him.

“Cover him!” James was through the door a moment later, realizing too late that Captain Bond was right beside him.

The hall was filled with smoke and shadows, several bodies stacked up where his grenade had shocked a hastily prepared defense. A trio of vac-suited aliens were firing at his people, and even as James opened fire, one of them went down.

Seconds later, it was over. Seven aliens lay dead in the hallway of their ship and James turned to check on his trooper.

“I’m fine,” Karimi snapped. “Didn’t penetrate the vac-suit armor.”

“Everybody still up?” James asked. A chorus of affirmatives answered him. “All right, folks—watch for bad guys and follow the bouncing ball.”

#

Annette followed the Service troopers carefully. She needed to be here—seeing the inside of what a reasonably “modern” ship in the A!Tol Imperium looked like had value all of its own—but she also knew they were trained and prepared for this situation and she was not.

As they pushed deeper into the ship, though, she was linked into their tactical net, collating information from the four troops and thirteen four- and five-trooper patrols sweeping through the enemy ship. Their micro-pulse maps were giving her a surprisingly solid idea of what the ship looked like overall, as did their encounters with the enemy.

The ship was
big
. Bigger than
Tornado
by a significant margin—two hundred meters long, three times as wide, a far boxier structure. But despite its size, they’d run into a limited number of crew—alive or dead. The mapping was starting to suggest that a chunk of the ship was blocked off, probably cargo space.

Whatever she was
now
, the big boxy ship had clearly been built as a cargo hauler—on a
massive
scale.
Tornado
wouldn’t fit in the pirate’s cargo compartments—but one of the older UESF battleships that had fought alongside her might have.

Even so, they were running into far fewer people than she would have expected.
Tornado
had a crew of nine hundred. She would have expected about the same aboard the pirate ship, but the SSS teams had run into barely two hundred aliens so far.

“Major, either this ship is
extremely
automated, or they’ve pulled their crew back to protect something,” she warned Wellesley. “
I
would be arming crewmembers to protect the bridge in their place.”

They were drawing close to where she figured the bridge was as well. If there were a few hundred aliens taking up defensive positions somewhere, they were going to run into them here.

“We could hold up, bring in the rest of the company,” he suggested. He didn’t sound enthused.

“No—I’m worried what they might still be able to do,” Annette replied. Even without main power, it was possible the crew might manage to fire off a missile salvo and damage, if not destroy,
Tornado
. “Just be ready for trouble.”

“Sir, ma’am,” the point trooper suddenly said over the tactical net. “I think you need to see this.”

She let Wellesley lead the way, her own weapon covering the Major as they rounded the corner to see what the patrol had found.

Annette stopped dead when she saw it, looking at the scene in surprise. So far, they’d run into a handful of defenders and seen bodies in the areas of the initial hits. Now, the corridor in front of them looked like a slaughterhouse.

The corridor widened out into a gallery linking several levels, with a clear set of paths leading up toward where she guessed the bridge was. The open space served a double purpose of easing access while allowing clear lines of fire to help protect that access if attacked.

The pirates
had
been prepared to do so, in a fashion that
would
have required Wellesley to bring up the rest of his company—except everyone left in the gallery was dead. At least thirty or forty vac-suits were scattered through the space, representing at least eight different species.

The hexapods they’d seen in the first room were the single largest group, though outnumbered by the rest of the dead. Studying the bodies, she realized that about half of the centaur-like creatures seemed to be wearing heavier armor—and the ones wearing heavier armor seemed to have been defending the bridge.

“Wellesley, you see the ones in heavier armor?” she asked

“Yeah. Looks like those were the actual boarding troops,” the Major observed. “And it looks like a good chunk of the
rest
of the crew turned on them.”

“I think we need to get to the bridge, Major,” Annette told him. “Something
really
weird is going on here.”

“They’re aliens, ma’am. How do we judge what’s weird?”

She shook her head at Wellesley and gestured for him to lead the way.

“I speak fluent starship, Major—which also tells me the bridge is that way.”