The Terran Privateer (2 page)

“Watch,” Casimir instructed, zooming the screen in further.

As
Hammer
passed the big rock, moving at a speed Villeneuve recognized as a crawl for the strange ships, there were six bright flashes of light. That was it, all that could be seen with the naked eye, even at this zoom.

Villeneuve blinked and looked to the asteroid, only to swallow hard. The asteroid was
gone
.

“Can you rewind that?” he asked.

“Of course.”

The image went backward in slow motion, the vaporized metal of the asteroid recombining into the chunk of iron and rock. The impact points appeared, then turned into streaks of white light that connected with
Hammer
.

“What were those?” Villeneuve finally asked.

“A logical development of what you saw with
Raptor
,” Casimir told him brightly. “Point four cee was the best we could achieve for anything we wanted
humans
to survive on, but by pushing a smaller craft and being willing to accept levels of radiation instantly lethal to humans, we could build a smaller device capable of sustaining sixty percent of the speed of light for roughly sixty seconds.”

“A missile,” Villeneuve breathed.

“Exactly. We didn’t bother with a warhead,” the CEO continued. “It hits at point six cee, Admiral. Despite the drive shunting anything much
smaller
than its effect field aside, impact with something
larger
results in a catastrophic collapse—one that releases the full kinetic energy of the drive’s contents and velocity. Any warhead we’ve developed would be redundant. It’s a smart inertialess weapon. If you don’t shoot an interface missile down, it
will
hit.”

And hit with
gigatons
of force, Villeneuve noted. He could do that math, at least to an order of magnitude. If even
one
of these XC ships fell into the wrong hands, the Space Force was
dead
.

“What have you
created
, Elon?” he breathed. “This is a
monster
.”

“It is necessary to sometimes look beyond the immediate,” Casimir said very quietly. “You know as well as I do that Dark Eye is starting to intercept some
really
odd modulated-energy patterns as we scan the nearby stars. I agree with the conspiracy nuts on this one, Admiral—they’re alien comms. Someone has moved into the neighborhood and we don’t know what they’re here for. If they’re moving around faster than light, they have hyperdrives—which means they have the interface drive, Jean. It’s a logical progression.”

“You built these to keep humanity safe from bug-eyed monsters?” Villeneuve asked. He wanted to disbelieve, but the man was very earnest…and the Admiral had no hesitation admitting that Elon Casimir was
smarter
than him.

“Hence BugWorks,” the CEO continued. “Any alien with a hyperdrive will have these weapons, Admiral. Some kind of defense was needed.”

“You mean you have a plan to give me something
other
than nightmares?” the older man asked dryly.

“All of these systems are for sale, Admiral,” Casimir returned. “But yes. If you look over
here
”—he highlighted and zoomed in on a different spot in the screen to reveal a third of the XC ships—“you will see XC-Zero Three:
Scapegoat
.

“For reasons that will shortly become obvious,
Scapegoat
is a drone,” he noted. “We have four systems to demonstrate, Admiral. You’re aware of the hyperdrive, and you’ve now seen the interface drive and the interface missiles in action.

“If you wait a few minutes, you’ll see
everything
.”

Annette Bond watched the countdown on the big screen at the front of her bridge.
Tornado
’s bridge was a two-tiered affair, with a horseshoe-shaped balcony above the main command deck providing space for another dozen consoles and attendant techs.

Right now, the bridge crew was a fifty-fifty split between ex-UESF personnel and Nova Industries technicians reviewing the function of the various consoles. Unlike the other XC series ships, XC-04 was complete in every way that mattered—she had the interface drive, the interface missiles, the hyperdrive, and the special armor her part of Elon Casimir’s demonstration was meant to prove out.

Unlike XC-02, she’d even been equipped with a beam armament, a new generation of heavy lasers notably more efficient than—though otherwise identical to—the current armament of the UESF’s battleships.

Tornado
was also the only one of the four cruisers equipped with a hyperdrive, which was how the big ship was currently in orbit around Jupiter. She could, quite handily, have made the trip on her interface drive—but Nova Industries had believed that she’d have been picked up by the sensor arrays the United Earth Space Force had assembled in Earth orbit.

“I can’t believe we’re going to shoot up our own ship,” her executive officer, Pat Kurzman, said calmly. Technically, his station was in a secondary control center—but
Tornado
’s combat information center was theoretical only, an empty void on deck fifteen.

“That’s why we named her
Scapegoat
,” Annette told him calmly, her eyes on the countdown as it hit sixty seconds.
Tornado
’s Captain looked like a rogue high school cheerleader, a curvedly athletic blue-eyed blonde woman one hundred and seventy centimeters tall. She
had
been a cheerleader in an Idaho high school—twenty-five years before. The long, braided pigtails had been cut off when she joined the United Earth Space Force at twenty and replaced later on with a single, shorter, golden braid nestled against her neck.

“I ran the numbers,” Kurzman admitted. “She
should
be able to take a full salvo, but we’ve only ever used single missiles in the tests so far.”

“If we blow her up,” Annette shrugged with a cold smile, “it will still be an effective demonstration, if not necessarily the one the boss wants. We’re out of time,” she finished, cutting off her XO. “Hyper portal in ten seconds.”

“Emitters are charged. Programmed for the ten-second hop,” the oddly tall and gaunt form of her navigator, Cole Amandine, reported. Amandine was one of the still very few humans born and raised in space, with much of his life before artificial gravity had been invented. Only intense physiotherapy allowed him to walk in full gravity, and he still wore a concealed powered exoskeleton for long periods of walking or standing.

Annette Bond took a deep breath and focused her eyes on the unimaginably impressive size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot beneath them. There were other humans this far out—a few research stations, the beginnings of a colony scooping hydrogen from the gas giant—but none had arrived as quickly as they had, and none would return as quickly as they would.

The timer hit zero.

A dozen emitters that Annette didn’t even
pretend
to understand the science behind flared with energy, invisible beams of force that lashed out into empty space and
tore
a hole in reality.

The hole burst into existence with a brilliant flash of blue light, and
Tornado
slipped into it with surprisingly practiced ease—more practiced that Annette would have expected from the exactly nine times the crew had done it before.

A new timer flashed up on the screen, counting down the ten seconds they were scheduled to be in hyperspace. The screens didn’t show anything else—hyperspace was a literal void to the human eye, so Nova Industries had set the screens to automatically turn off after entering the portal.

Hopefully, the BugWorks people had lined up their part of this demonstration. The time lag prevented them from communicating reliably with the rest of the demo, so all Annette could do was hope no adjustment to the original schedule had been sent in the last few minutes.

“Opening the exit portal,” Amandine told her.

“Stand by maneuvering and weapons,” Annette ordered “You know the plan.”

A new portal opened in the void of hyperspace and
Tornado
flashed through at one hundred and twenty thousand kilometers a second. They were
exactly
on target, three light-seconds away from the Belt Research Station and their target: poor XC-03.

“Maneuvering, take us past
Scapegoat
at a point one cee firing pass,” she snapped. “Weapons, give me a broadside into her as we pass.”

Broadside
was a relative term as
Tornado
’s missile launchers were arranged in six sets of four all along her hull. Given the maneuverability of her inertialess weapons systems, there was no angle at which she couldn’t fire all twenty-four weapons at a target. By only firing the weapons on one side of the ship, however, they would deliver a blow they were sure that
Scapegoat
could survive.

Twelve streaks of light blasted away from the big cruiser as they swung by, crossing the hundreds of thousands of kilometers still between them in two seconds. Annette nodded in relief as all twelve weapons slammed home into the other XC ship—and
Scapegoat
survived.

“Assess the target,” she snapped.

“Banged her around a bit,” Harold Rolfson, her weapons officer, reported. “Systems are reporting some internal damage and a few of the laced plates have shifted around. Computers estimate a ten percent reduction in combat capability were she fully equipped.”

“All right, let’s give the good Admiral a show,” Annette ordered. “Maneuvering, bring us in to ten thousand kilometers and hold the range. Weapons, hit her with the beams. Cycle them across the hull—we want to light her up, not slice up anything we damaged with the birds.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Liking a stooping falcon,
Tornado
turned on her heel and charged back at her prey, beams of coherent light leading the way.

#

Villeneuve stepped past Casimir silently and pressed his hands into the haptic feedback field, zooming in on XC-03. Haloed in the light from beams he judged close in power to those mounted on his battleships, the ship seemed unharmed.

“I saw what those weapons did to a rock,” he finally said. “How did she survive
that
?”

“‘That, so we’re on the same page, was twelve interface drive missiles impacting at sixty percent of lightspeed,” Casimir confirmed. “The ID missiles mass roughly one metric ton each, providing a kinetic energy at impact of just over two and a half gigatons. While the lasers are a different type of energy, with the difference in scale…it’s not entirely surprising the lasers don’t do much, is it?” the CEO concluded, gesturing at the screen where
Tornado
continued to bathe
Scapegoat
in coherent light for a few more seconds.

Finally,
Tornado
ceased her attack run, turning to drop herself into a high escort position over the observation shuttle.

“While working on manufacturing the exotic matter for the hyperdrive emitters, one of the technicians missed a decimal point and a negative sign,” Casimir explained with a sigh. “I’m pretty sure she was hungover, and her boss wanted to fire her—but, fortunately for everyone, one of the scientists on the site took a look at what had been created.

“We were aiming for matter with negative mass, which is a stone-cold bitch to manufacture and store,” he continued. “What that slip of the numbers gave us was
compressed
matter. Density is practically off the scale, and the stuff is functionally immune to kinetic force—it has
no
give to it whatsoever.”

“Neutronium,” Villeneuve noted aloud. He wanted to say it was impossible, but Casimir had been proving him wrong on that point a lot today.

“Not…quite,” Casimir concluded. “I’m led to understand that the process
could
create something that was functionally neutronium, but that it would require exponentially more power than the compressed matter we currently manufacture.”

“So, your XCs are…armored in compressed matter?”

“Their armor plates are about sixty percent of the thickness of those used on our current battleships,” the shipbuilder replied. “If that was all compressed matter, I’m not sure even the interface drive could move the ship. We’ve used a sandwiched design with impact-absorbing gels, nickel-iron, and a layer of compressed matter.”

He gestured to the ship that had survived a salvo fit to wipe entire squadrons of the UESF out of space. “There are weaknesses where we combine the plates,” he admitted. “But as you can see, it’s very effective.”

“
Tornado
is complete, then?” Villeneuve asked. “All four of your monster techs?”

“Indeed,” Casimir confirmed. “Some of her internal systems are incomplete and she’d need a larger crew to actually be combat-effective, but Captain Bond has been very pleased with her ship.”

“Bond,” the admiral repeated. “That’s right, Bloody Annie is one of your test captains, isn’t she?”

“She was
supposed
to command
Of Course We’re Coming Back
,” Casimir reminded her. “
Your
people raised a stink about that.”

Of Course We’re Coming Back
had been Earth’s first hyperdrive-capable ship, sent on a scouting mission to Alpha Centauri a year before. Villeneuve’s Captains had
exploded
at the thought of Bloody Annie commanding the mission—and insisted that a
real
UESF officer command the operation.

Bond had only been a year from her not-so-genteel forced resignation from the UESF at the time, an incident that still made Villeneuve furious. He’d known his Captains were an old-boys and -girls club, but he hadn’t expected
that
level of trouble from them.

“When I got up this morning, I thought Earth had over ninety capital ships,” Villeneuve told Casimir. “Now you have shown me that we have one:
Tornado
. That ship needs to be under UESF command, Elon. How much?”

Casimir quoted a number. Villeneuve winced—
Tornado
was going to run the cost of
two
battleships.

“I’ll sort it out,” he promised. “And I want the other three XC hulls brought up to the same spec and ready to deploy.”

“It will happen. You’ll need to deal with
Tornado
’s crew yourself,” Casimir warned him. “About a third of the people aboard are yours, seconded United Earth spacers. The rest are mine. I won’t sell their contracts, and they’ll follow Bond when she tells you to go to hell.”

Admiral Jean Villeneuve winced again. Bloody Annie was going to do just that.

“I will deal with Annette,” he said quietly. “
I
was, after all, the one who got her what she wanted.”

“She’s been the best captain I could hope for,” Casimir told him. “I’ll miss her, but
goddamn
, does that woman need to be a soldier.”