The Terran Privateer (3 page)

Annette waited for the shuttle to settle down in
Tornado
’s landing bay with far more trepidation than she allowed herself to show. Her back was rigid, her posture perfect, years of training as a United Earth Space Force officer still showing as she waited for her boss and the UESF’s commander to arrive.

Kurzman stood next to her, and if her executive officer wondered what his Captain was thinking, he said nothing. Annette Bond didn’t believe in stupid questions, but she did believe in
inappropriate
ones—and Kurzman knew anything about his Captain’s past or personal life qualified.

The sensors reported that the landing bay was safe and the blast shield retracted. Two men had exited the shuttle and were walking toward her, and she knew both of them.

She’d worked for Elon Casimir for three years now, ever since it had been made
very
clear to Commander Annette Bond that even though she had been entirely
correct
to push for the prosecution of Captain John Bowman for his crimes, doing so had ended her UESF career.

Admiral Jean Villeneuve had already been Chief of Operations there. He’d sat as the judge at the trial that had condemned Captain Bowman to death for no less than
fifteen
counts of aggravated rape of enlisted spacers under his command.

Charges that, if the Captains under Villeneuve had had their way, would never have been laid. Annette Bond had pushed, argued, presented evidence, and sworn affidavits for
six months
to force the trial, and then cajoled, supported, and
mothered
the young women in question to get them to actually testify.

Bowman had been convicted and sent to the needle for destroying
their
lives.

In exchange, Annette had been quietly informed that no Captain in the Force would take her as their executive officer again, and that there were no open staff slots. The Captains wouldn’t work with her, wouldn’t talk to her. She had no future in the Force, so when she was offered early retirement, she took it.

Villeneuve hadn’t been involved in that—but he also hadn’t stepped in to
stop
it. It took every ounce of her self-control not to glare at the old man as he calmly walked across the deck to meet her.

“Boss,” she greeted Casimir, then gave the other man a sharp glance. “Admiral.”

“Captain Bond,” Casimir replied, taking her hand warmly and smiling. She gave him a fractional crack of a smile, and the young executive shook his head at her in a familiar amusement.

Villeneuve offered his hand.

“Captain,” he said softly.

She looked back at him and didn’t take his hand, leaving him hanging in the chilled air of the landing bay until Casimir cleared his throat sharply. With a glare at her boss, Annette finally shook the Admiral’s hand.

“Do you have a meeting room set up?” Casimir asked. “The Admiral and I have come to an agreement in principle, and I’d like to fill you in.”

“Of course,” she confirmed crisply. “Follow me.”

Like the rest of her nonessential features,
Tornado
’s conference facilities were lacking much of anything. They
existed
, which put them ahead of many items that remained empty voids in the hull. The table was the exact same cheap folding plastic as currently filled the cruiser’s single mess, with chairs from the matching set.

It was hardly what Casimir was used to, but she’d made sure he knew what he was getting into when they’d discussed it the previous day. His response had been to note that he’d held board meetings on asteroid mining stations.

“Captain, Admiral, please sit,” he told them as he stepped up to the head of the cheap table. He took a seat himself, laced his hands together and faced the two officers.

“Captain Bond, you should be aware that as of midnight tonight,
Tornado
will become a United Earth Space Force vessel,” Casimir said bluntly. “All of the personnel seconded from the UESF will revert to active duty at that time.”

“I see, sir,” Annette said coldly, suddenly feeling as if the ground had been yanked out from underneath her. She’d had a month aboard
Tornado
, getting her out of construction, all of the gear loaded into her modular construction, and ready for this demonstration. She should have known she’d be working herself out of a job. “I’ll inform the rest of the crew to start packing their things.”

“We want to keep the crew, Captain Bond,” Villeneuve interjected. “I have the authority in my own right to close the purchase agreement and offer provisional contracts to the Nova Industries personnel aboard. My aides have been drafting our offers on the way over.”

The admiral pulled a flimsy—a thin, flexible display that could link into a portable computer or hold a small bit of information itself—from his uniform jacket and laid it on the table.

“This is the offer we put together for you,” he said quietly.

Annette didn’t even look at it. She glared at Villeneuve. Part of her
wanted
it—wanted to walk back into the United Earth Space Force and
grind
the Captains’ faces in what their attempt to suppress research had created, along with their rejection of her. The rest of her had
no
interest in going back to the people who’d betrayed her people’s trust and cast her out for seeing justice done.

“My contract with Nova Industries is more than sufficiently remunerative for me,” she replied, her voice very cold and precise. “It also contains penalty clauses for early termination.”

“I will waive those clauses,” Casimir said instantly. “Hell, you’ve got six months left on your contract, Annette—I’ll pay it all out.”

“And if I want to stay with NI?” she asked, suddenly afraid.

“We’re building an entire
flotilla
of survey ships—ones that the UESF will
not
be commanding,” Casimir noted with a glance at the Admiral. “They
could
use a Commodore. But…Annette, please. At least hear the Admiral out.”

Villeneuve glanced at Kurzman and then at Casimir.

“Elon, Mister Kurzman, can I speak to Captain Bond in private, please?” he finally asked.

Annette had a momentary urge to refuse, to kick the man out of the room and off of her ship—for about another eight hours, she
had
that authority.

“Of course,” Casimir replied before she could give in to that impulse. “Pat, with me, please.”

Before the Captain could object, her XO followed their boss out of the room, leaving Annette Bond alone in the room with the man who’d done nothing to save her career—and the piece of electronic paper bringing her back to the Space Force that had betrayed her.

#

Admiral Jean Villeneuve waited calmly for the two Nova Industries people to leave the room, taking advantage of the moment to study the woman across from the table in the dark blue merchant uniform. Her wearing that uniform instead of his own dress whites represented one of his greatest failures as the head of the UESF.

“Are you at least going to look at the offer?” he asked softly. He knew he’d failed Annette Bond once. This was his chance to make it right and do right by the Space Force at the same time. If he played his cards right, the coterie of Captains who’d driven her out, undermined the Force’s research and development, and almost covered up John Bowman’s crimes wouldn’t survive the game.

“Why?” she replied flatly. “I’m
not
coming back, Admiral. You don’t have enough money.”

“Commodore of a survey flotilla?” Jean observed. “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to miss that either. Elon is supposed to be
helping
me, the little brat.”

Bond glared at him in silence. Jean had been glared at by
heads of state
who had less weight behind their anger than she did, and he sighed.

“You
are
, I should point, a Reserve Space Force officer,” he pointed out gently. “You’ve taken the deposit every month for five years; we pay that so we can recall when we need you.”

“That’s meant for war,” she told him. “Peacetime is just a financial penalty.”

“And one Casimir would probably pay for you,” he agreed. “Hear me out at least, Captain Bond? I’m
asking
. You don’t owe me anything.”

“No,” she confirmed. “I don’t. But Casimir clearly wants me to listen, so talk.”

She obviously had no intention of even looking at the flimsy, so Jean drew it back to himself and glanced down the text, making sure he remembered the offer correctly.

“We both know you’d have made Captain at least a couple of years ago if Bowman hadn’t been an epic piece of scum,” he noted. “So, the offer is to bring you at full Captain, with seniority based on your years wearing the title for Nova Industries. Much the same for your people: everyone comes across at an equivalent rank to what they’ve been doing and with appropriate seniority.

“You keep
Tornado
,” he pointed out. “You get the full privileges and authority of her Captain,
including
veto right on the officers and crew we’ll need to fill in around the cadre you already have.”

“And the rest of the Captains will treat me like something they’d scrape off their boot,” Bond replied. “You tried, Admiral, and it’s not a bad offer—but no, thanks.”

“They won’t
be able
to,” Jean told her with an exasperated sigh. “You will command the
single most powerful ship
in the Space Force. A ship that could single-handedly destroy the
entirety
of the Space Force in an afternoon.

“A ship we will be acquiring more of as fast as possible,” he continued. “Commands for
those
ships will be assigned based on experience with a brand-new class of vessels with completely different performance parameters.

“Damn it, Bond, I’m handing you a chance to make those idiots
obsolete
and
choose
our next generation of Captains. I need to break that club as badly as you
want
to,” he pointed out, “or I’ll just leave this problem to the next Chief of Operations. I can’t micromanage who ends up on
Tornado
—but I trust you to pick men and women I’d be proud to pin oak leaves on.

“What else
can
I offer you?” he asked.

Finally,
finally
, he got a crack of a smile.

“John Bowman’s head,” she noted. “But you gave me that already.” She shook her head. “All right, Admiral. I want your promise that you’ll back me to the hilt—I
don’t
trust your Captains.”

“Some of them are actually decent people,” he pointed out. “But I promise. I’m not going to bring you back in and cut you off. If you take the eagle I’m promising, I’m behind you all the way.”

“This ship will still need work,” she pointed out. “I don’t know how much of our…shortfalls Casimir has told you about.”

“He basically told me you could fly and shoot,” the Admiral replied. “I was honestly surprised you had a conference room.”

“I’m sorry, Captain, but it will simply not be possible to meet your requests.”

Annette leaned back in her chair and eyed the man sitting across from her with a self-satisfied smirk on his face. Commodore Joseph Anderson was a heavyset man with tanned skin, and the current head of logistics for the United Earth Space Force.

They both wore the dark blue service dress uniform of the United Earth Space Force, a general requirement aboard Earth’s military orbitals, but where Annette Bond now wore the silver eagle of a Space Force Captain, Anderson wore a single silver star of his senior rank.

They’d last met when
Captain
Joseph Anderson had stood as Captain Bowman’s defensive character witness during Bowman’s trial. He’d made it very clear that day that he regarded Annette’s pursuit of her Captain as a betrayal of the Force.

“Which part of my requests is a problem, sir?” she asked, keeping her voice level and cold. “Was it the supply of interface drive missiles that were specifically manufactured and delivered for
Tornado
’s use? The seventh fusion power generator core that was
also
specifically built for
Tornado
, and whose absence means I have an open core installation in my engineering section?

“Or was it the food and other logistical supplies standard for the commissioning loadout of any United Earth capital ship? Supplies you have known would be required since
Tornado
was brought into United Earth service a month ago?”

The smirk remained constant.

“All of these pose issues,” Anderson noted. “IDMs are a scarce resource in the Space Force right now. Other ships have needs as well, Captain. Yours has no special priority. The core has not been delivered, and we are having issues with the supplies. Your requests will take several weeks to complete.”

Several weeks that Annette would have to delay the formal commissioning of
Tornado
in Earth service. She smiled coldly and pulled her official communicator out of the jacket of her undress blues. It slid apart with ease, the two scroll-like ends separating and providing the data feed to the e-paper screen between them.

“I’m sorry, Captain, but making calls in your superior’s office is rude,” Anderson snapped. “You may have been able to get away with that in civilian service, but you are back in the Space Force now!”

“You have a choice, Commodore,” Annette told him flatly. “In about a minute, I am going to call Elon Casimir, and you can explain to him where the missiles and fusion core his people delivered thirty-six hours ago have gone astray to. I’ll note, for your benefit, that the interface drive missiles used by
Tornado
are a completely different design from the stopgap design used to provide
some
usable firepower to the rest of the Space Force. No other ship currently in commission can
fire
a properly sized IDM.

“Once we’re done explaining your misplacement—or potentially
grand larceny
,” she observed, “to Mister Casimir, I will call Admiral Villeneuve, and you can explain to
him
why you are intentionally stonewalling the commissioning of the only warship worth the name in the UESF.”

“I will
not
be threatened,” Anderson snapped, lunging to his feet.

Annette remained sitting, looking up at him as she tapped a button on the communicator.

“Hi, Michelle,” she said brightly to the middle-aged woman who appeared on the screen shortly. “Can you get Elon for me? It’s a bit of an emergency; logistics is telling me that we have a foul-up here.”

“Of course, Annette,” Elon Casimir’s personal assistant replied. “He’s in a meeting with the Russian President; it will take him a minute or two to get free. What can I tell the President Sokolov is going on?”

“You wouldn’t
dare
,” Anderson hissed.

“Let me conference in Admiral Villeneuve,” Annette told Michelle. “I’d like him to at least know what I’m doing I if have to inform a member nation’s head of state that the UESF is being obstructive.”

“Shut that
off
,” the Commodore ordered. “Fine. I’ll make it happen.”

“Do you still need me?” Michelle asked, with an arched brow.

“Let Elon know I called,” Annette said calmly. “Play him the recording; he needs to know what’s going on.”

“Of course. Luck.”

Annette slid the communicator closed and looked back at Anderson.

“So, I will have my missiles, my power core, and consumables aboard by twenty hundred hours?” she asked calmly.

“I can’t make that happen in twelve hours!”

“Those deliveries were scheduled for twelve hundred hours,” Annette pointed out. “I’m giving you eight hours of grace, Commodore. Anything beyond that, and the
Governing Council
will know you’re impeding Earth having a real defense.”

She smiled coldly.

“I’m sure you’ve seen the recent reports from Dark Eye?”

#

A month’s worth of work by Nova Industries main shipyard platform had filled in many of the voids inside
Tornado
’s hull, but there would always be certain oddities of her layout that grew from her being an experimental ship.

The interior of the ship was still very modular, and while the combat information center and many other sections had been filled in, other parts were still empty.
Tornado
didn’t have the external hull space for, say, more weaponry—but she had internal modules and power generation capacity to spare. The cruiser really didn’t
need
the seventh fusion core she’d forced Anderson to turn over—she only operated on three. Annette had insisted on it because the design called for it and Anderson had pissed her off.

The entire crew quarters had been built into one module, inside a second layer of armor and buried at the core of the ship, which led to some oddities in the layout. One of them was that Annette Bond’s executive officer’s quarters were directly opposite hers.

Since Anderson had managed to come through only twenty-two minutes after her deadline, she’d been able to inform Admiral Villeneuve that
Tornado
would commission on schedule, which meant that she and her XO were due on the main deck in full dress whites in just under an hour.

Annette took a moment to be sure her own long tunic, with its high collar and stiff shoulder boards, was straight and properly buttoned, then rapped sharply on Kurzman’s door.

“Commander? Is there a problem?” she asked through the hatch.

“Give me a moment,” the newly commissioned officer replied. A few seconds later, he opened the door and looked up at his taller captain helplessly. Kurzman was a short man, stocky and well-muscled but without the height needed to carry off the tunic.

Worse, he clearly had
no
idea how to wear the tunic, the shoulder boards, or the associated cobalt-blue tie. He’d misbuttoned the tunic, only one of the two shoulder boards was properly fastened, and he’d used a type of tie knot that just did
not
work with the cut of the Space Force tie.

“
How
?” he demanded as he saw her perfectly turned-out uniform.

“Maxwell Base OTS,” Annette told him crisply. “Plus two years of Space Force Academy.”

“They covered the tie?”

“They covered the uniform,” she replied crossly. “Now hold still.”

Obedient to a fault sometimes, Kurzman complied.

It had been
years
since she’d helped fellow cadets put the uniform on at the Academy, but she wasn’t surprised to find she still remembered it. In under a minute, she’d rebuttoned and straightened her executive officer’s tunic, reattached his shoulder boards, and tied his tie.

“There,” she concluded. “You’ll embarrass me less now.”

Kurzman relaxed slightly and nodded his thanks. She’d half-expected the problem—Kurzman was a merchant spacer who had spent his career as an officer aboard the big transfer ships running between Earth and Mars. Merchant spacer uniforms were much less demanding than the Space Force’s.

“I checked in with everybody before I started dressing,” he told her after a moment. “We are fully stocked on munitions, fuel, food, and all other consumables. Core Seven is online and has been tested up to one hundred and ten percent capacity.”

“I assume we’re not running at that now?” she asked.

“No,” he confirmed. “We’re running all seven cores at less than fifty percent capacity. All systems are showing green,
Tornado
is ready in all aspects to be commissioned, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Pat,” she told him quietly. “It’s been one hell of a month. Glad to have you with me.”

Kurzman appeared unsure how to respond to that—and settled for a safe silence as Annette led the way toward
Tornado
’s outer hull.

#

To a fanfare of trumpets, Morgan Casimir—a golden-haired cherub of three years old held in her father’s arms—pushed the button that fired a bottle of champagne into
Tornado
’s prow. Cameras zoomed in on it, showing it as it shattered and sprayed broken glass and golden bubbles across the armored prow of Earth’s newest warship.

Everyone applauded the little girl, who turned a beaming bright smile on the crowd, and the commissioning ceremony itself was over. Annette remained standing next to the platform, allowing herself a rare full smile at Morgan—the little girl, for whatever reason, seemed to
adore
her. She
heard
her XO sigh in relief and saw him visibly sag from the unfamiliar parade rest.

“We still have to circulate,” she murmured to him. “Separately, at that.”

“I can glad-hand, boss,” Kurzman whispered back. “I just can’t do this god-awful uniform.”

“Get used to it,” Annette ordered. “If I’m reading the cards right, we’re going to be doing a lot of full-dress affairs.
Tornado
is the Force’s newest and shiniest toy.”

“Wonderful. I’ll go say hello to the natives, then,” the man replied in an exaggeration of his natural British accent.

Kurzman glanced around, set his eyes on a cluster of civilians, and sauntered away from Annette. She, despite what she’d told him, remained standing next to the dais where she’d read her commissioning papers, formally taking command of
Tornado
as a United Earth Space Force officer.

“Auntie Annie!” Morgan squealed, providing Annette about half a second’s warning before the girl torpedoed her way into the Captain’s midsection.

Annette gently and awkwardly patted the child on the head, looking around half-desperately for Elon Casimir. She
liked
Morgan, inasmuch as she liked any child, but this was
not
the place for it.

“Come here, Morgan, or you’ll muss Captain Bond’s uniform.” The older Casimir thankfully arrived to her rescue. The blonde child detached herself from Annette—only to attach herself to her father like a limpet.

Casimir simply smiled and ruffled his only child’s hair as he met Annette’s eyes.

“The uniform looks good on you,” he said quietly. “Better on you than a lot of these twits.” He gestured to the gathering with his head. Roughly a third of the UESF’s ninety-four Captains were in the room, at least
pretending
to like their newest compatriot.

“To be fair, most of
these
ones are decent,” she admitted. “I had a veto on the guest list—not a perfect one”—her gaze touched on Commodore Joseph Anderson and she barely concealed a snarl—“but enough to weed out the true scum.”

“Villeneuve needed you for this more than I did,” Casimir told her. “You were never comfortable commanding anything without guns, either. Made you feel vulnerable.”

He met her responding glare with a disarming smile and shrug.

“You belong here,” he finished. “And you are the woman of the hour. It’s your ship, which makes all of these people your guests.”

“And I should be talking to them and not my old boss?”

“Pretty much,” Casimir agreed with a wink, reminding her of
other
things he’d been at one point. “I’ll always back you, Annette. You may not work for me anymore, but that ship is still my baby and I trusted you with her from the beginning.”

“I appreciate it,” she told him. “But I believe I see an Admiral approaching, and in this new job, stars trump even you.”

Casimir gave her a wave that vaguely approximated a salute and swept Morgan away into the crowd. Annette took a moment to relax from what had been a friendly chat, and then turned to face an older woman she didn’t know with the tripled stars of a Space Force Vice Admiral.