The Terran Privateer (17 page)

“There could be an accident,” Ki!Tana murmured to Annette. “Even a laser could take out those shuttles. You tried to let them go, but the Imperium forced a battle.”

She turned a flat glare on the alien, whose skin was back to the same dark blue as earlier.

“I don’t know
what
fucking
test
you think you’re giving,” Annette hissed, “but I will
not
fire on unarmed escape craft to make my life easier. Drop. It.”

The dark blue faded to purple and then red as the big A!Tol met her eyes.

“Good,” she said. “Fight your ship, Captain.”

With a final glare at her far-too-pleased-with-herself alien compatriot, Annette returned her attention to the screen in time to watch their second salvo of missiles fail against the destroyer’s screen. The A!Tol built even their light warships with a mind-boggling level of defenses.

“Rolfson, move to streaming the missiles,” she ordered. “If we get that freighter out, we have lots of ammunition to burn. Dump everything we got from
Fang
into her.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The next set of lights leaving
Tornado
formed a deadly stream, sparks of white light suicidally charging to their destruction in an orderly line.

“She’s…spinning?” the tactical officer announced after a moment.

“Are you surprised there’s a standard counter to that tactic?” Ki!Tana asked. “They must have dramatically underestimated your weapons’ ability to seek a single target location before.”

“Clearly. Time to proton beam range?”

“Ninety seconds. Ma’am…they’re going to range on the freighter with their beams first.”

“They will fire to disable,” the big A!Tol warned them, “but they will fire.”

“Keep up the missile fire, see if we can peg her with a long-range laser,” Annette ordered. “Make her look at
us
, not Mosi.”

They still had four of the big lasers left on
Tornado
, and while they might not
hit
at a dozen light-seconds, they would hurt if they did. Streams of invisible light started to accompany the missiles. The lasers even connected, lighting up chunks of the destroyer’s shields—but only for fractions of a second before the A!Tol ship broke away.

With over ten seconds of light delay, hitting them with lasers was almost impossible.

“
Oaths
is trying to open a hyper portal,” Amandine reported. He paused and sighed. “They failed; they’re still too close to the star.”

“Damn.” Annette watched the tactical plot on the screen. Her ship was going as fast as she could. With the missiles aboard the freighter now running, she suspected she could kill the destroyer in time. Without them…the destroyer was still going to die. The only thing in question was whether or not the freighter would make it out of the system.

“Hyper portal!” Rolfson announced. “Holy mother of… It’s
Of Course
!”

Lougheed’s ship erupted from hyperspace less than a hundred thousand kilometers behind the A!Tol destroyer at forty percent of lightspeed. The massive laser they’d strapped to the scout ship opened fire from
inside
hyperspace, linking the tiny scout ship to the destroyer with a line of pure light.

Somehow, Lougheed kept the beam on the destroyer as his ship blasted past the A!Tol vessel, the range dropping as low as ten kilometers in the moments after launch. At that moment of insanely close range, the laser still flaring against the alien ship’s shields, all eight of the rack-mounted missiles fired.

There was no perceivable flight time. The entire sphere of the A!Tol’s shield lit up with white fire…and collapsed.

It was impossible to tell whether it was Lougheed’s laser or Rolfson’s missiles that finished the job but by the time
Of Course We’re Coming Back
had been in system for two seconds, the A!Tol destroyer was nothing but fiery debris.

All four ships emerged from hyperspace at their primary rendezvous point eighteen hours later and Annette breathed a sigh of relief at their apparent safe escape. Nothing had shown up on the anomaly scanners as they’d fled, and the only ship in a position to have tracked them
into
hyperspace was expanding debris and survival pods in the Messeth system.

This time, the rendezvous was farther away from Alpha Centauri, heading in the direction of the pirate station the humans had nicknamed Tortuga. It was also directly on the way to the supply route between the system Ki!Tana’s data had confirmed as a major fleet base and one of the key systems supplying it.

The fleet base was beyond her little fleet’s ability to engage—but the ships supplying it were a different matter entirely. Annette still wasn’t sure about intercepting ships in hyperspace, but Ki!Tana seemed to think it was doable, and to be fair,
Rekiki’s Fang
had intercepted
Tornado
.

“Major, Lieutenant,” she greeted Wellesley and Mosi over a channel. “Any issues with our new prize?”

“The software Ki!Tana provided worked like a charm,” Mosi replied. The strange click in the A!Tol’s name sounded surprisingly normal from her, not the stilted almost-right most of the human crew had mastered. “Took longer than we expected, but it was a military transport. We are now fully in control.”

“And no stowaways, either,” Major Wellesley added. “We’ve swept the ship from top to bottom. The only people aboard are us.”

“Good. I’ll want the triple-S company back aboard as soon as possible.” She smiled at Mosi. “Sorry, Mosi, you get to stay Captain a while longer. We’ll need to start offloading missiles ASAP.”

“I’m guessing you want me to take her all the way to Tortuga?” Mosi asked.

“It would be unwise to send the transport on ahead,” Ki!Tana interjected from behind Annette’s shoulder. The Captain glared at the interruption but still gestured for the alien to continue. The old pirate knew the market better than they did.

“You are an unknown entity, Captain Bond,” she said simply. “Arrive with
Tornado
, an unquestionable heavy, and a series of prizes in tow, and you will be greeted with respect.
Tornado
alone will guarantee you a fair deal.

“Send the prize ahead without the heavy to force respect and she will simply be gone when you arrive. No one will have seen her. At best, you will be able to force the return of the ship and hopefully Lieutenant Mosi’s crew, but you would lose her cargo.”

“I have no intention of risking Mosi’s crew,” Annette told her people calmly. “If the best plan is for us to show up as a pirate fleet with a flotilla of prizes, I’m willing to delay things until then.

“We’ll have a full staff meeting this evening, over dinner,” she continued. “Senior officers and Captains—and yes,
Captain
Mosi, that includes you until we sell that ship. Understood?”

#

Like many parts of
Tornado
, the Captain’s dining room was large but Spartan. It doubled as the conference room for the senior officers, so it wasn’t attached to Annette’s quarters, and the only item to make it a “dining room” was the inclusion of a small kitchen where a steward could prepare a meal.

“Don’t expect anything particularly wonderful,” Annette warned the young black woman staring around at the white tablecloth and fine china laid out on the table. “The Captain’s dining ware is prettier, but we’re eating the same UP as everybody else.”

The Universal Protein that apparently every ship in the Imperium carried was bland, tasteless, and—combined with the vitamin powders
Tornado
’s medical staff had whipped up—capable of filling the dietary requirements of humans as well as every other species aboard.

It just made
tofu
look appealing.

Mosi was the youngest and most junior of the officers invited to the dinner, so Annette had purposefully made sure the Lieutenant had made it in first. The black woman was tall and skinny, almost gaunt. She was one of Rolfson’s two junior officers, normally tasked with running a shift in CIC.

Her selection to lead the prize crew was quite literally a matter of her being the Lieutenant on rotation at that moment in time, though so far, Annette was favorably impressed. Not many could keep their cool well enough to work through alien code with a warship bearing down on them.

Others began to drift in behind them as Annette gestured the prize crew’s Captain to her seat at the end of the table.

They’d brought in the odd, stool-like, creation A!Tol used in place of chairs and placed Ki!Tana at one corner. Opposite her were Kurzman and Wellesley, sitting together. That caused Annette to raise an eyebrow—not least because the two men arrived together and promptly sat next to each other.

If they wanted to play footsie under the table, it wasn’t
her
problem—though it was a bit of a surprise. She didn’t know which of the two men would have initiated things, but they appeared to have moved quickly.

Sade and Lougheed were at the other end of the table with Mosi, both of them greeting the junior officer gently and trying to draw her out.

Amandine, Rolfson and Metharom filled the middle of the table. The bearded and stocky Rolfson made an interesting contrast placed next to the almost-elflike Sade, though the side glances the two were giving each other suggested the placement was hardly unwelcome.

Annette concealed a smile behind a napkin as the stewards brought in the food. This far away from home, pairing up was almost inevitable. So long as it didn’t interfere with discipline or involve the chain of command, she was determined to turn a
very
blind eye.

There wasn’t much else to take pleasure in, she realized with a sigh as the food was placed in front of her. It looked like the stewards were trying curry as a solution to the utter blandness of UP—thankfully, they were feeding Ki!Tana something else.

Glancing at the black
goo
the cooks had turned the A!Tol’s protein into, she remembered there were worse things than curry.

#

Despite Annette’s misgivings, the curry went over well with the human occupants of the room. To her even greater surprise, however, Ki!Tana’s skin flashed the dark red of surprised pleasure when the alien bit into her own food. The cooks had managed something edible for a
completely different species
.

If she were still paying the crew, that would have been worth a raise right there.

“All right, people,” she said as the dishes were cleared away. “I called you here so we could go over our plans. These are heavily shaped by Ki!Tana’s intelligence and the fact that
Tornado
is our only real warship.”

As the last of the stewards exited the room, Annette hit a command on her communicator to turn on the wallscreen at one end of the conference/dining room. The screen was loaded with a map of the region around them, filled in with data pulled from
Fang
’s and now Mosi’s freighter’s computers.

“We are here.” A gold dot flashed on the map, in deep space. “The station we’re calling Tortuga is here.” A blue dot flashed along the border between the A!Tol and Kanzi territories. “From what Ki!Tana has said, the system has no inhabitable planets, which keeps it from the attention of both the powers around it.

“Tortuga serves as a central hub for piracy and fencing through both of the big empires out here,” she continued. “We can sell anything there, and perhaps more important for our purposes, we can
buy
anything there. Improved shields. Improved power generators. Custom-built power armor for the Major’s troopers. Technical specifications and designs we can provide the Weber Network back home.”

She was presuming, of course, that the Weber Protocols had managed to
establish
the Network as the core of a resistance. If the survivors of the UESF
hadn’t
managed that, Annette’s job was probably impossible.

“With respect, ma’am,” Kurzman asked, leaning forward across the table and eyeing the map. “What are we going to
buy
those things with?”

“Ki!Tana?” Annette gestured to the sole nonhuman in the room.

“Both Imperial and Kanzi currency are accepted aboard the station,” the A!Tol told them. “Barter is also accepted, and you would need to acquire currency of one kind or another to make deals. If you wish to trade at A!Ko!La!Ma!, you will need something to trade. A freighter on its own has significant value. If you are prepared to sell the missiles you captured, you will find many willing to trade.”

“My inclination,”
Tornado
’s Captain told her people, “is to hang on to
all
of those missiles. Our long-term mission, after all, is not piracy. There will be a distinct value to us in having full magazines—and full
reloads
—of missiles that can match the A!Tol’s best.”

“We’ll need a ship to carry them or to store them somewhere,” Mosi pointed out.

“Indeed,” Annette agreed. “We should have our magazines full of the new missiles by the morning. Once that’s done, I want you and Captain Lougheed to return to Alpha Centauri and store all of the point seven five–rated missiles in the cache there.

“You’ll swap them out for all of the point sixes Nova Industries gave us. I can’t imagine they’ll be worth
much
at Tortuga, but they’ll be worth something if many of the Captains are as cheap as Ki!Tana suggests.”

“You are correct,” the tentacled alien confirmed. “They won’t sell for any great amount, but they will sell.”

“Everyone will rendezvous here in one week,” Annette told them, highlighting a new marker on the map—about halfway between their current location and Tortuga. “
Oaths of Secrecy
and
Tornado
are going to spend the week trawling along here.”

She highlighted a section of space. At one end of it was the main fleet base, the system Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh had launched his conquest of Earth from. At the other was one of the major colonies.

“Just by tracking the speed of the hyperdrive signatures at range, we should be able to avoid engaging A!Tol warships and close with freighters,” she concluded. “I’m hoping to grab one, maybe two more ships before we head to Tortuga.

“If we can pull three captures, the ships alone should cover much of the work we need to have done. Anyone have other thoughts or concerns?”

“Do we have a way to avoid engaging A!Tol military transports?” Wellesley asked. “Until we have power armor for my human troopers, I hesitate to tangle with their actual
soldiers
.”

“No guarantees, unfortunately,” Annette warned him. “But I have no intention of boarding ships we haven’t already forced to surrender.”

“A concern for the future,” Metharom suggested diffidently. “We promised the former crew of
Rekiki’s Fang
that they would be able to leave when we made port. How many of our new crewmembers will we lose when we reach Tortuga?”

“You will almost certainly lose all of the Rekiki,” Ki!Tana said quietly. “Those who served did so due to family ties to Kikitheth. Their honor is complicated—serving the ties was more important than not becoming pirates. Keeping their oath to serve in exchange for their lives and transport to safety remained more important. But once their oath is fulfilled, they will not stay.

“Of the others…expect to lose half. You have been fair and honest with them, but they will take their coin and serve on ships with more of their race. Few, even among pirates, like being the only members of their species aboard.”

“Will we be able to hire replacements?” Annette asked. While they didn’t need the alien crewmembers to keep
Tornado
running, they’d been helpful in integrating the alien tech with the Terran warship. She hadn’t considered that they’d likely lose people when they reached Tortuga. “What about
you
?”

“There will always be desperate sapients at the station you call Tortuga,” Ki!Tana replied. “You inherited my contract; I am bound to you for fourteen long-cycles. I will help you find new crew if we need them. I am sure I have a few old friends I can trust.”

“That answers my question,” Rolfson said with a grin. “I was going to ask if we could
trust
anyone on Tortuga to work on our ships.”

#

“Pat, can you wait a moment?” Annette asked as the meeting started to break up. She waved her XO back to his seat at the table as the other officers slowly filtered out. Major Wellesley hung back a moment, looking at the XO with worried eyes, but followed the others out when it became clear she wanted to speak to Kurzman in private.

If she hadn’t already figured it out,
that
would have been a hammer between the eyes.