The Terran Privateer (34 page)

She sighed.

“You make an offer I would be a fool to refuse, Captain Forel,” she admitted. “Very well.
Tornado
will need another day to finish her yard work, but we’re in.”

“Warm waters!” he exclaimed. “I will reach out to the other Captains. This will be a pirate armada such as this corner of the galaxy has
never
seen!”

#

James Wellesley had no idea what kind of creature the egg was from. Even cooked, his little portable scanner told him the things would easily kill him. It was a pretty thing in speckled blue, a little under five centimeters long, and it shivered slightly in the fingers of his power armor gauntlet.

“Good job, Major,” Ral told him. The Yin who’d attached himself to the Special Space Service Fifty-Second Company’s headquarters section was something of a lucky find. While he hadn’t been formally trained as an armorer, he’d apparently done enough of the tuning of previous sets that he was able to handle the final calibrations for
Tornado
’s troopers new power armor.

“Now,” the sharp-beaked blue biped continued, “rotate, walk over to the bench and put the egg down.”

James grimaced. The floor of the room was covered in little blue eggshells where troopers had lost control of the gauntlets, or dropped the egg while turning, or failed to hold tightly enough while walking, or… There was a cleaning bot in the closet of
Tornado
’s armory. Ral was leaving the mess on the floor intentionally, to make the apparently simple challenge even harder.

Carefully, ever so carefully, he turned. He
felt
the servos and powered musculature shift with him, moving the hundred-and-fifty-kilogram mass of the suit of armor while putting only the slightest of strain on his own muscle.

He crossed the room, put the egg down amidst the others there—and then twitched, crushing the egg into a thousand pieces as the communicator in the armor helmet buzzed. He sighed.

“I should have left the communicator turned off,” he complained to Yin, then glanced at the icon on his heads-up display. The suit read his eye motion, confirmed his hold to make it an order, and then opened the channel.

“Wellesley,” he said snappily. “What is it?”

“Major,” Captain Bond’s cool tones responded, and James swallowed the rest of his tirade. Things were getting flexible aboard
Tornado
, but not
that
flexible.

“I need to know if your troopers are ready to deploy,” she asked calmly.

James surveyed the room covered in eggshells. They’d expanded the armory by the simple expedient of cutting out the walls for several other surrounding rooms and welding their doors shut. This section, with the power armor, had been nicknamed the morgue—and next to it, just clear of the egg debris, were the racked plasma cannons, automatic grenade launchers, and multi-drum shotguns that were designed to link to the suits.

They were still fine-tuning the suits, but
every
member of his company was now rated on one of those weapons.

“We’re at seventy-five percent on the suits,” he admitted. “Some fine-tuning work to do, but my company can drop and my company can fight. What do you need, Captain?”

“We appear to have signed on for the biggest pirate raid in recent history, Major,” Bond told him. “We’re getting a quarter of the loot and all of the schematics we need for Earth out of it,” she continued, “but I don’t trust our partners.

“I want your company ready to make ground landings and make sure we get our share of the goods,” she continued. “I
also
want you to have at least a troop prepped for a boarding action, just in case we need to make sure our
friends
keep their promises.

“Can you do it?”

Inside the helmet, James grinned as he continued to look at the weapons, each of them flickering up ghostly overlay data in his screens as their encrypted chips responded to his suit.

“We can do that,” he confirmed. “Not a problem.”

“Good. I’ll have more data soon. We’ll be on our way within seventy-two hours.”

“We’ll be ready,” James promised. Letting the channel close, he removed the helmet and met Ral’s gaze.

“What do you need?” the Yin asked.

“Everyone in the company to the highest calibration you can get as quickly as possible,” James ordered. “Speed prioritized over hundred percent, understood?

“
Tornado
is going back to war.”

“Dock reports all umbilicals retracted,” Amandine reported. “I confirm.
Tornado
is floating free, ready to activate the gravitational-hyperspatial interface momentum engine.”

Annette felt a huge sense of relief sweep over her and stretched with a rare brilliant smile at her bridge crew as her ship
finally
edged its way free of the construction slip that had been her home for the last thirty days.

“Take us out, Lieutenant Commander,” she ordered.

“I have a clear entry zone; bringing the drive up at one kilometer per second,” Amandine said calmly. There was no perceptible change on
Tornado
’s bridge—indeed, none of the work done over the last month had noticeably changed the bridge—but the gantries of the yard disappeared almost instantly.

“We are clear of Tortuga and inside the rings,” he stated a moment later. “Self-tests on the drive are showing clear and green, but we don’t have the space in here to test them out.”

Tornado
’s drive was now supposed to be able to reach half of lightspeed, but the space Tortuga was hidden within was only a hundred thousand kilometers or so across.

“That’s all right,” Annette told him. “I don’t like it, but we’re going to have go on self-tests and the Crew’s word. We don’t really
want
to show off in front of our new friends. Rolfson—weapon and defense status?”

“Beams, launchers and shields all show green on self-test,” he confirmed. “Self-tests on the plasma antimissile suite are showing some cyclic issues on the hydrogen feeds. Metharom is looking into it.”

Annette threw a readiness display up on her command chair’s miniscreens, studying her ship’s status. Everything checked out, though her only source on the capabilities of her upgraded command was the Laian Crew themselves.

“So, Ki!Tana,” she said conversationally, turning her head to look at the big A!Tol’s now-permanent bench in the nook beside her, “have the Laians played straight with us?”

“I have been going over the work with Metharom as everything was installed,” her alien companion told her. “They have installed technology on your vessel I have never seen outside of their own ships. They have held some things back, but they have installed everything they promised you. You would likely lose against a modern ship from the Core powers, but against the empires in the spiral arms? They will never see you coming.”

Annette glanced at a collection of icons on her screen.

“So,” she murmured, “do we think they sold our new specs to our Indiri friend?”

Ki!Tana clacked her beak, her skin streaking red in amusement.

“My dear Captain, I know the Crew didn’t sell Karaz Forel the specs for your ship, because
I
sold him the specs for this ship,” she told Annette. “They may have been the specs before the refit, but he did not specify—and he paid richly.”

Tornado
’s Captain stared at the strange, apparently potentially immortal alien on her bridge in surprise as a round of chuckles went around the bridge.

“You had a powerful ship when you reached Tortuga, Captain,” Ki!Tana finished. “He underestimates you now. He also lacks the experience to understand what the armor means: few outside the Core had seen armor such as yours in action.”

“Well, then, let’s not keep our new friends waiting,” Annette said with a smile. “Amandine, take us out to join them. We have an armada to lead!”

#

Annette watched with cautious eyes as Amandine skillfully cut around the massive bulk of Tortuga to join Karaz Forel’s fleet. With shares in as massive a score as the amphibious pirate was promising, he’d managed to talk almost every ship in the pirate station out of their hiding places for this operation.

It was more ships than Annette had expected.
Subjugator
and
Tornado
were the heavy hitters, Forel’s ship half a megaton heavier than
Tornado
’s own two million tons.

The Indiri ship was the first big pirate ship they’d seen since
Rekiki’s Fang,
and it was clear that unlike
Fang
,
Subjugator
had been built for this purpose. While she was heavier and wider than
Tornado
, much of her mass was focused in a heavily armored central sphere, with three interlocked rings holding much of her weaponry, while the central structure protected her cargo and engines. Part of the sphere was a massive hatch, clearly designed to scoop up smaller vessels like a swooping bird of prey.

If Annette had built a ship to
be
a privateer and a raider, it might not have
looked
much like the Indiri ship, but the same points of “protected cargo space”, “capture capability” and “heavy armaments” would have been ticked off.

The rest of the pirate fleet was a far more motley mix. Fifty-six ships, including Annette’s two scout ships, formed a rough sphere around the two heavies. They varied from ships even
smaller
than her scouts, mostly designed to ram and board slower ships with their entire crews, to ships the size of old UESF battleships with significant weapons and armor that were still barely a match for an A!Tol destroyer.

There was no uniformity, discipline or organization to Karaz Forel’s pirate armada, but the fifty-eight ships represented an incredible amount of firepower. Annette was impressed.

Her cruiser finally slotted into its place at the center of the rough formation, alongside
Subjugator,
and Annette reviewed the whole situation grimly. This wasn’t what she’d envisaged when she’d been sent away from Sol. She hadn’t known enough to plan for victory, but she certainly hadn’t expected making allies with a slaver and a fleet of pirates.

The attack would provide resources to help liberate Earth and weaken the A!Tol presence in the area around Sol, both high on her objectives, but she couldn’t help feeling they were missing something when
these
were the allies they found in their quest.

“Ma’am, we have Forel on the channel for you,” Chan reported.

“Put him on the main screen,” she ordered, swallowing her discomfort as she faced the disgusting creature she’d tied her mission to for now.

Karaz Forel appeared on the screen, his face split in his grotesque imitation of a human smile. The camera was surprisingly tightly focused, showing only the Indiri and his command chair. A faint mist sprayed down from above the alien, slicking his fur with moisture and somehow managing to make him look even
less
clean and organized.

“Captain Bond. Your ship is most impressive,” he smarmed at her. “Is your dock work complete?”

“It is,” she told him. “Are any of this collection going to break down before we leave the system?”

He laughed, his tongue twisting in that disturbing spiral again.

“If any of them do, we’ll leave them behind!” he told her. “With your
Tornado
and my
Subjugator
, the rest are just to keep the small fish off of our backs while we finish the job. If you’re ready, I see no reason not to find the current, do you?”

Annette took a moment to mentally translate the metaphor to “get started”, then returned his obviously fake smile. She was reasonably sure that Forel was calculating the best moment to betray her, but for now, he was treating her as the only equal partner in this endeavor.

“I do not,” she agreed. “Let’s be about it.”

She gestured for Chan to cut the channel, then laced her fingers together as she watched the formation begin to move toward the channels out of the gas giant’s rings.

“He is hiding something from you, Captain Bond,” Ki!Tana told her. “I am not certain what.”

“I
think
this deal is honest,” Annette replied, “but I agree. He’s only waiting for the best moment to sell us out. I can’t trust a slaver.”

“Forel is as crazy for his race as I am for mine,” the A!Tol said. “He will not hesitate to betray you, sell you into slavery, or attempt to steal your ship.
Subjugator
was a Kanzi vessel, built for cross-border slave-raiding. They were buying slaves from him when he broke the deal, murdered them all, and stole their ship.”

“I have no intention of trusting him,” Annette repeated. “But damn. He doesn’t like Kanzi?”

“He hates
everyone
,” Ki!Tana told her. “But the A!Tol and the Kanzi are at the top of his list. Watch your blind spots, Captain Bond. These are dangerous waters you swim in.”

“Murky ones too,” she told the alien. “He keeps faking human body language—badly, but how does he even know us well enough to do that? You’re right. He’s hiding something.”