The Terran Privateer (20 page)

“She’s firing! Proton beams on the shield!”

“Evade!” Annette snapped. “Disable those guns!”

Two massively powerful proton beams were mounted on either side of the beak-like prow of the armed freighter. Both beams smashed through space, hammering into
Tornado
’s shield, driving the metrics Annette was watching mad.

The enemy gunner was
good
, she noted absently. Amandine tore
Tornado
through an apparently impossible sequence of maneuvers, but the transport had them pinned.

“Dialed in! Returning fire!”

Tornado
’s proton beams and lasers returned fire in sequence as the ship spun through Amandine’s maneuvers, each beam slamming into the alien until its shields finally collapsed. The stolen and upgraded proton beams holed the enemy ship’s prow, shattering both enemy heavy beam weapons in a single shot.

And then
their
shields went down, overwhelmed by the sheer power of the enemy beam weapons, and missiles
flashed
across the intervening space.

The missile suite nailed two but the remainders slammed into
Tornado
’s compressed-matter armor at almost three quarters of the speed of light. The armored cruiser
rang
like a bell, safety belts and the interface drives’ inherent inertial absorption preventing any injury to the crew.

Silence.

“Hit the launchers with the lasers,” Rolfson said after a moment. “She has no weapons left. Your orders?”

Annette took a deep breath and slowly released it, studying the image of the elegant, damaged but functional ship a hundred thousand kilometers from her ship.

“Keep pace with her,” she ordered. “Wellesley, are your teams ready to go?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the Major replied over the intercom. “All shuttles locked and loaded. Do we launch?”

“Yes, but hold off a minute,” she instructed. “Chan, hail them and order them to surrender.”

More silence. The alien transport continued to try to evade, but
Tornado
had enough of a speed edge that that was impossible. There was no way they were getting away, but they were trying. Annette could respect that—but she wanted that ship.

“All right,” she said softly. “Major Wellesley, launch your shuttles. Lieutenant Commander Rolfson, keep your lasers ready to burn out any major pockets of resistance. Chan, record me for transmission.”

She leaned forward into the camera on her chair.

“A!Tol Imperial freighter, this is Captain Annette Bond of the Terran privateer
Tornado
. You have fought valiantly, but you are outgunned and outclassed. You could self-destruct and deny me your cargo at the cost of your lives, but any resistance short of that will only add to the dead.

“I don’t want to kill you. You don’t want to die. Surrender.”

She gestured to Chan, ordering her to cut the recording and send. The
second
part of her message appeared on her scanners as she did, with Wellesley’s shuttles launching from her shuttle bays.

“Give them thirty seconds, Major,” she ordered. “Then…”

“Transmission incoming!” Chan interrupted.

“Put him on.”

The alien that appeared on her screen was
not
an A!Tol. The speaker was a tall hairless biped with dark red skin and a seemingly immobile face, lacking both a nose and ears to human eyes.

“I am Captain Invidus of the A!Tol Imperial Priority Freighter
Songs of the Riders
,” it greeted her. “Are you prepared to guarantee the safety of my crew?”

“Your crew is in no danger from me unless you resist me,” Annette replied. “I will guarantee their safety and your safe return to the Tiamo system.
If
you surrender.”

Invidus lowered its head, a very humanlike gesture.

“I am prepared to fight for my cargo,” it said simply. “I am not prepared to order my crew to die for it. Your terms, Captain Bond?”

“You will evacuate your ship via personnel shuttles that we will take under tow,” Annette told him. “You may wipe confidential and classified data from your systems, but if you wipe the operating system of the ship, the deal is off. If any of your shuttles make aggressive movements, they will be destroyed.

“Otherwise, you and your people will be delivered safely to Tiamo. Your ship and its cargo are mine.”

Invidus bowed his head again.

“Your terms are acceptable.”

Another day, another creepily abandoned transport. James Wellesley was starting to think he wasn’t cut out for the life of a pirate, which would have been a shock to several ancestors his family didn’t talk about very much.

Invidus had been as good as its word. The local consoles were accessible when the Special Space Service people checked into them, readily disgorging an internal map of the ship that his troopers’ scans confirmed to be correct.

James’s headquarters section had made contact surprisingly close to the bridge. He’d allowed his two power-armored nonhumans to lead the way, but they were on the armed freighter’s bridge ten minutes after they’d boarded.

The similarities to the bridges of UESF ships he’d served on were enough to bring him to a halt. The two previous prizes had been unarmed transports, civilian designs even when bought and upgraded for Imperial service.
This
ship had been built by the A!Tol Imperial Navy for its own use.

The bridge was circular as opposed to the UESF’s horseshoe, with a three-dimensional hologram tank at the center instead of the big screen the Terran ships had used. A similar raised second level surrounded the bridge, full of abandoned consoles where teams would have supported the officers on the main floor.

The ship was half again
Tornado
’s size, with the armament of a destroyer. Her bridge was only slightly smaller than the privateer cruiser, and James found himself wondering just
how many
aliens they’d chased off the ship.

“Is anyone running into stragglers?” he asked over the company channel.

The responses were all negative. Invidus and his people appeared to have fully evacuated the ship—without even leaving any traps.

“Captain Bond.” He raised the channel to
Tornado
. “It looks like the manifest got wiped with everything else, but the operating system is intact. You can send over your prize crew—I’m going to check out the cargo.”

“I’ll have Lieutenant Chou over immediately,” the Captain replied. “So, you’re saying Invidus figured the cargo manifest was confidential?”

“I think the red bugger erred on the side of wiping everything
except
the OS,” James told her. “I’d also guess some
really
important stuff ended up on the shuttles.”

“Go find out what he left us,” Bond ordered. “Once we know that, I’ll decide whether we’ll board the shuttles to see what they took with them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

#

“I…am not sure what this stuff is,” one of James’s troopers said, staring down into the cargo container.

It had taken them five minutes to break the container open—even
with
the disturbingly effective hacking software Ki!Tana had provided them. The cargo hold nearest the bridge was full of identical containers, each a white ceramic box the size of a large suitcase with a small electronic security panel the only break in their smooth, seamless, exterior.

Now the box had opened, an invisible seam cracking the smooth exterior as one side slid up and over on silent and invisible motors. The inside was the same color, though the material looked more like packing foam than ceramic now.

Stacked in neat slots inside the packing material were translucent silver crystals. Each was the length of James’s arm and a perfect octahedron.

“Ral, come take a look at this,” James ordered, waving over the Yin trooper who’d joined his headquarters section.

Unlike the human SSS troopers, the Yin had powered combat armor and had been watching the door to the hold. He obediently came over, looked down into the carrying container—and promptly dropped his plasma rifle.

“
Sacred suns of holy fire
.”

The translator was still only mediocre at tone, but
that
came through.

“Check that weapon,” James snapped. Whatever this stuff was, the last thing they needed was a dropped plasma weapon failing containment and vaporizing half a dozen of the containers—and half his headquarters section.

“Sorry, Major,” Ral said as he reclaimed and checked over his rifle. “I…have never seen those in person and you may want to check with Ki!Tana, but I believe those are molecular circuitry cores.”

James blinked. Humanity had been building nano-scale circuits for years, and the latest versions, the ones included in
Tornado
’s mind-boggling powerful computer cores, had occasionally been referred to as molecular circuits. It was more marketing than anything else, as true molecular circuitry would be a tenth the scale of even humanity’s more powerful circuits.

Tornado
’s
computer cores were each three meters tall and a meter around. If those crystals were what he thought they were, each of them matched the processing power and storage of one of those supercomputers.

“Captain?” he raised
Tornado
again. “I need a video feed to Ki!Tana. We need a confirmation on what we’re looking at.”

“You got into the cargo?” Bond asked.

“We did,” he confirmed.

“What did you find?” the Ki!Tana’s translated voice came onto the channel. “We have the video feed from your helmet up now.”

James looked back into the case, focusing his helmet light on the crystals.

There was a silent pause.

“I understand why this cargo had a priority freighter,” the alien finally said. “Is the entire cargo these?”

The Major looked up, allowing his light and helmet camera to sweep along the entire hold and its rows upon rows of identical containers.

“What am I looking at, Ki!Tana?” Bond demanded.

“Molecular circuitry cores,” the alien told her. “Each core is approximately sixty-four percent of the processing power and storage of the cores I reviewed in your systems. They are difficult to manufacture, and most Imperial systems still use nano-level circuits similar to your own.”

“
Difficult to manufacture
usually means
expensive
,” the Captain pointed out.

“Yes, but not unreasonably so,” Ki!Tana replied. “Each of those cores costs…three times what an equivalent nano-scale computer would cost.”

“The case has six,” James noted. “Best guess? This hold has five hundred cases. This ship has four holds. That’s
twelve thousand
cores.”

“That would have built this ship four times over.”

“Given that the primary use of molecular cores is to provide computer power to warships, that is a valid comparison,” the alien said. “This is…the maintenance requirements for the fleet based at Kimar. For a full long-cycle for thirty-two ships of the line.”

“So, this will fund the work we want done at Tortuga,” Bond stated.

“Even at the cut-rate price you’ll find for stolen goods, this would buy you your upgrades and another heavy,” Ki!Tana told them. “Entire pirate crews have retired on lesser spoils.”

“I don’t think most pirates would have survived
taking
the ship,” James pointed out.

“No.
Rekiki’s Fang
wouldn’t have even tried; we’d have broken off as soon as we realized what we’d found,” the old pirate told. “Few are the pirate heavies that would knowingly tangle with a Navy Priority Freighter.”

“Chou will be at the bridge in five,” Bond told James. “I want you to keep at least two troops on that ship. Guard those cores, Major. They may just be the key to earning Earth’s freedom.”

“So, when we get back to Earth, I suggest we pool our funds and buy the Captain a lottery ticket,” Captain Sade said with a shark-like grin as the senior officers of Annette’s little privateer fleet gathered at the rendezvous point.

“Three ships and two doozies?” she continued, gesturing at the display at the end of the conference room showing the three Terran ships and their accompanying prizes. “That’s luck.”

“That’s astrography,” Ki!Tana replied. “And a willingness to take risks a regular pirate would not. The missiles? That was a fast collier called up to replace weapons no one expected to have to expend at Sol. Your possession of interface drive missiles would have been a surprise.

“As for the cores…” The alien fluttered her manipulator tentacles. “A similar armed freighter to
Song of the Riders
would arrive at the Kimar Fleet base at least once a five-cycle. The one last five-cycle might have been exotic-matter coils. The one next five-cycle could have been proton beam focusing arrays.

“Remember that we are far from the centers of Imperial power,” Ki!Tana continued. “Few pirates come out this far, so the priority armed freighters are the only security likely to be assigned—and no pirate here would tangle with a priority freighter. Even among the heavies, only about half
could
, and most wouldn’t take the risk. As armed freighters go”—the tentacles shivered again—“a cargo of cores is of middling value. The odds of a greater prize are there—but a pirate’s livelihood is their ship.”

“So, if we’d hung out there for another week and let somebody
else
shoot at us without replying, we might have stolen something more valuable?” Kurzman asked.

“Yes.”

Annette managed not to chuckle as Ki!Tana completely missed her XO’s point.

“Regardless of whether we were lucky or not,” she told her officers, “we now have three prizes to sell. Sade, Mosi: any issues with offloading cargo at Centauri?”

“None,” the young woman commanding their first prize crew replied. “The cave the cache is in is full to bursting now, though. Even with loading all the old missiles aboard the freighter, we still barely fit the new missiles into the cache.”

“We will want to split those up more, given time,” Sade agreed. “There are four more caches in systems around Sol, though Centauri is the biggest. Spreading the missiles around with the food and medicine stocks will reduce our point-failure sources.”

“Agreed,” Annette told them. “We will look into that in the future. For now, I understand all three prizes are ready to go? Lougheed?”

The half-Chinese commander of
Of Course We’re Coming Back
sighed.

“We’re basically using
Of Course
as a replacement for the previous command module,” he pointed out. “It’s…well, it’s a kludge. We’re holding the two ships together with duct tape and wire. I will be
ecstatic
to dump her off on anyone who wants to buy her. Does a ship that damaged actually have value, Ki!Tana?”

“Less than an intact ship,” the big alien told him, flushing slightly red in pleasure at being directly addressed—Annette’s officers were getting
better
, but they still tended to address questions that the A!Tol could answer best more generally and expect her to answer.

“But she is still valuable. More valuable than her cargo, in fact. Retrofitting a command center onto one of the secondary drive control nodes and adding new hyperspace emitters would be straightforward, well within Tortuga’s capabilities.”

“What
is
this place?” Amandine asked. “I mean, I’m envisaging some kind of rogue space station, but if they can do major starship work…”

“Perhaps most importantly,” Annette said, “Tortuga is our next destination. We are, according to the chart Ki!Tana provided, seven days’ hyperspace flight from the system it is hidden in. We will be flying in convoy within visibility of each other, so if anyone has any problems, we can immediately address them.

“But that said, since we are setting course for Tortuga, perhaps a better idea of where we are headed could be useful. Ki!Tana?”

The big alien flashed bright red for a moment and rose to her full, mind-boggling height.

“Tortuga’s existence depends on a delicate political balance,” she explained. “While this far along the galactic arm, we are mostly concerned with the A!Tol and the Kanzi, but realize that each arm of this galaxy has its own empires and local conflicts. The A!Tol and Kanzi are large by the scale of these outer empires, but it is important that there are powers in the core that equal or exceed them in technology, industry, and military might.

“These powers…do not care about the conflicts out here,” Ki!Tana warned, probably catching the wave of hope that swept over Annette’s crew. “The strongest are the oldest. They are insular and arrogant. Their local sports team is vastly more significant to them than the conflict out here.

“But…they are wealthy and so they are the targets of pirates. Every hundred or so long-cycles, they work together to drive the pirates from their space—and then spend the next hundred long-cycles funding privateering expeditions on each other that fuel more piracy.”

“That sounds like an interesting set of international relations,” Chan noted, the communication officer looking thoughtful. “Few actual wars, I’m guessing, but generally high level of tensions?”

“Exactly,” the A!Tol agreed. “The peace at the core is kept by a number of treaties that call on the other powers to step in if two of the great powers go to war. There are
seven
major powers in the core.

“Key to Tortuga, though, is that three hundred long-cycles ago”—a hundred and fifty years on Terra, give or take—“there was a war between the two smallest great powers. When the other powers stepped in and imposed a peace, the terms were unacceptable to one side’s military. Many of their units went rogue and became privateers—including a mobile shipyard that rivaled anything the A!Tol could build today.

“Eventually, the pirates that initially went rogue were wiped out, but the shipyard escaped. To fund the maintenance of such an immense vessel, the crew took on contracts and provided service to anyone who would pay.

“Their race—the Laians—still rule what has become Tortuga. They move the station every few long-cycles to make sure it remains undiscovered, slowly moving farther along the arm of the galaxy. Why they picked this arm, and the border between the A!Tol and the Kanzi, I don’t know. But they have served me well over the years.”

“So, like the place we nicknamed it for, Tortuga is a melting pot of cultures and states, beholden to no one,” Annette summarized to her people. “It’s lawless, so we’ll need to be very careful, but it also sells
everything
—including the upgrades we want for
Tornado
.”

“If you have the goods, you can purchase technology equal to or better than the A!Tol Navy’s best,” Ki!Tana admitted. “Few have the funds to purchase the Laians’ tech, but they do offer it for sale. With what you are bringing in prizes…the funds you have reserved to upgrade your ship should allow you to acquire some select upgrades.”

“So, Tortuga is a giant spaceship?” Rolfson asked. “Trying to wrap my head around that.”

Ki!Tana looked at him, her skin flashing the blueish purple tones of confusion.

“Sorry,” the tactical officer said, realizing she’d missed the metaphor. “It’s difficult to comprehend.”

“It started as a shipyard,” she confirmed. “Several of the slips have now been built over and turned into living and market sections. It cannot move quickly, but it can enter hyperspace.

“Currently, it is hidden inside the rings of a gas giant in an otherwise uninhabited system. I have the pass phrases to allow us to approach unmolested.”

“We will at that point probably want to allow shore leave, Captain,” Kurzman suggested. “We’ve been away from Earth a while. It’s rough on the crew.”

“Everyone goes aboard armed and no one goes anywhere alone,” Annette said calmly. “I don’t get the impression, Ki!Tana, that Tortuga is safe.”

“No,” the big alien agreed. “All things can be bought at Tortuga. That includes both safety for yourself—and a lack thereof for someone else.”

#

“Come,” Annette ordered as the admittance buzzer chimed on her office. She’d been doing paperwork and watching the progress of her little convoy on the map of the A!Tol Imperium she had showing on her main wall.

That progress
looked
slow, but that was a matter of scale. The exact translation of their velocity into hyperspace was neither constant nor easily rendered, but they were going to travel over a hundred light-years in eight days.

It was mind-boggling, and the map distracted her once again as her XO stepped into the room and cleared his throat.

“Pat,” she greeted him. “Have a seat. What do you need?”

“I think…I need to bend your ear as the only person I can admit doubt to,” Kurzman said with a sigh as he dropped into the chair.

“Doubt, Commander?” Annette asked. She didn’t have anyone to lean her doubts on at this point. He was right that she was the only one he should be showing doubts to, though she guessed that James Wellesley saw some of them.

“We’re a long way from home,” he told her quietly. “Like…mind-bogglingly far away and going farther. I can’t help feeling that we’re out of our depth. For God’s sake, we’re relying on one of the people who
conquered Earth
for all of our data.”

“To be fair,” she pointed out, “We have a lot of aliens aboard, not just Ki!Tana, and they’ve all been telling us much the same thing. And we did translate a bunch of the data from
Rekiki’s Fang
ourselves and
that
supports her too.”

“I know. But…Captain…I keep looking at the numbers, the size of the A!Tol and Kanzi Imperiums, and the data on the Kanzi…are we doing the right thing?”

Annette looked at him sharply.

“The right thing?” she asked. “We’re fighting for the freedom of
our species
. Our right to determine our own fate, to stand on our own two feet and say ‘We are mankind and we will not be slaves.’”

“I’ve been looking at the A!Tol historical records,” Kurzman told her. “The species they conquer…they don’t end up slaves. They end up
citizens
. It’s not a fast process, but absorption into the Imperium seems to
help
people.

“Especially compared to the Kanzi.”

“The alternative is not a different conqueror,” Annette snapped.

“Isn’t it?” her XO asked. “Let’s say we upgrade
Tornado
. Return to Sol with the tech and knowledge for the Weber Network to build more ships and we somehow drive the A!Tol from Sol. What happens then?”

“We fortify and prepare. We build more ships and we defend our world.”

“And when the Kanzi come?” he said quietly. “When the slavers come with ships of the line and blast whatever we build to shreds? We can’t stop
either
of these empires from taking Sol, Annette.”

“So, what, we should just bend our knee to the squids and hope it turns out for the best? So long as I breathe, Patrick, I will fight for my world.” She shook her head at him. “If you want out, I’m sure we could hire a ship to deliver people to Sol at Tortuga.”

He exhaled and shook his head, leaning back.

“No,” he admitted “Sorry, that…came out with more certainty than I meant! I have my doubts, Captain, I won’t deny that—but I swore an oath and put on a uniform.”

“Good,” she told him.
Doubts
were permitted—she had her own. But they had to be able to do the job. “Tortuga really does look like our best option,” she continued. “If we can get our hands on some of the Laian tech…I
know
Casimir had plans for keeping some ship-building apparatus intact under the Weber Protocols. If we can deliver him the specs and background for gear equal to the A!Tol navy’s, we have a chance—especially since we
know
they don’t have compressed-matter armor.”

“You think we can really do this?” Kurzman asked quietly.

“I have to,” Annette told him. “And
you
have to, in public at least. If we believe we have a chance, the crew will believe. The alternative…” She sighed. “The alternative is that we end up truly being nothing but the pirate scum the A!Tol call us.”

“I…think I would prefer surrender to that, ma’am.”

“I suspect the warning sign is when that ceases to be the case, Commander.”