The Terran Privateer (13 page)

Annette glanced around the room again, meeting the gaze of each of her officers in turn. Each of them nodded in turn, some more slowly than others. Finally, she met Major Wellesley’s gaze. The Special Space Service Officer sighed and nodded.

“A lot of people in our uniform died because her species came to Earth,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t her, and I’ll deal. But…”

“I know, James,” Annette replied. “For that matter, I think Ki!Tana knows.”

With her officers in agreement, she sent a ping from her com unit to Ki!Tana’s. The big alien found the scroll-like human devices
adorable
, but she was perfectly able to use one. The A!Tol equivalent, apparently, was very similar to the translator—basically a subvocal microphone and earbuds linked wirelessly to a computer box concealed somewhere on the being, though she also used a flimsy-like screen for visual display.

The A!Tol had been close by and arrived less than a minute later—trailed by one of Wellesley’s men. The trooper saluted the officers and stepped back out of the room.

“I didn’t think you were under guard,” Annette asked.

“I requested that Major Wellesley provide a guard once I learned that you had news from your homeworld,” Ki!Tana told her. “My appearing as a prisoner may help settle tempers that will be heated.”

That was clever. She glanced at Wellesley, who made a small gesture toward the alien, clearly implying that it had definitely been Ki!Tana’s idea. For being completely alien to Annette’s crew, the big creature seemed to understand them disturbingly well.

“You and Metharom told me you had an update on the upgrade plans?” Annette asked, waving for the engineer and the alien to take over the front of the room.

Ki!Tana filled the space next to the wallscreen and
still
sent atavistic shivers down Annette’s spine. Out of her armor, the A!Tol’s tentacles were a dull gray color and her main torso was multicolored, almost chameleon-like in its shifting hues, and bullet-shaped. She utterly dwarfed the tiny Thai engineer, easily twice the height of
Tornado
’s
Chief Engineer.

“In terms of full components we pulled from
Rekiki’s Fang
,” Metharom noted first, “we have two proton beams, a shield generator, and one hundred twenty interface drive missiles rated for point seven cee.”

“Kikitheth bought the best missiles she could afford,” Ki!Tana’s artificially flat voice explained, her skin fading to a dull purple color. “This meant we had very few missiles for our launchers.”

“These missiles are actually
smaller
than our own,” the human engineer continued. “With some rearranging, we can store them in the magazine space required for ninety-eight of our old missiles. This gives us five salvos of faster missiles, and then the remainder of our magazines of the point six cee birds.”

“That’s a nice opening punch,” Rolfson said. The tactical officer sounded pleased—as he should be. Another ten percent of lightspeed on their first few salvos would be
very
valuable.

“You are unlikely to acquire comparable missiles in future,” Ki!Tana warned. “Navy missiles are superior but also have superior encryption and protection I would not have codes for. Dan! force missiles will be similar to the Navy.”

“What are…Dan-tuck forces?” Kurzman asked.

“The Dan! are…semi-autonomous sub-regions of the Imperium,” the big alien said. “They owe allegiance to the Empress and provide ships and men for the Imperium but have broad control of their own affairs.”

“Like a feudal duchy,” Annette noted. The big alien’s skin flashed bright blue, a pattern she’d already recognized was equivalent to a human nod.

“Yes. The translator has updated to use that word,” Ki!Tana replied. “Most of the species homeworlds are now duchies. Their fleets are built to the same standards as imperial ships. You are unlikely to capture imperial or ducal missiles in a state where we can override their controls.

“Pirates are less careful, but most will have inferior weaponry to those we took from Kikitheth. To acquire comparable missiles, you will need to purchase them—and currently, to be blunt, you have no trade goods of value.”

“There were goods we
could
have taken from
Fang
,” Annette told her staff. “But we were focused on acquiring useful tech. Speaking of which—the shield generator?”

“We have already begun installation,” Metharom said quickly. “With aid of our new alien crew, it progresses faster than hoped. Installing the relay transmitters will take time. A week, maybe two, still.”

“
Fang
’s shields didn’t stand up to a single volley from our launchers,” Rolfson noted. “Can we upgrade the shield at all?”

“You have a lot of power available,” Ki!Tana told the tactical officer. “That helps. Your reactors, are however, disturbingly inefficient—
Fang
’s reactors produced twice as much power in two thirds the space. They, of course, were not available for transfer.”

Annette’s staff’s response to that could
politely
have been called a chuckle.

“Can you do anything with our existing plants?” Kurzman asked slowly. “My understanding is that we did rip out a bunch of components at your direction.”

“I will need to examine the fusion cores in detail,” Ki!Tana said. “If they are comparable to A!Tol plants of a similar technology level, I should be able to increase your power output by fifty percent without changing their fuel consumption. We will need much of that to power the upgrade I intend to install on the momentum drive.

“I cannot bring your ship up to even
Rekiki’s Fang
’s speeds without a yard, but I believe I can add roughly two percent of lightspeed to your velocity. Enough to catch even military freighters, given time.”

“You see, people, why I wanted Ki!Tana to be here,” Annette told them. “She has been working on starships longer than any of us have been alive.”

“How can we trust you?” Captain Sade demanded of the big alien. “You’re a member of the race that conquered our world
and
a pirate. You turned on your last captain. You could betray us in a moment!”

“I am bound by contract to Captain Bond,” Ki!Tana answered. Her skin was purple again. “You neither know nor understand my people, but realize this: we do not lie. We cannot conceal our emotions, which makes it a useless endeavor among our people. We may break our promises, even our sacred oaths—we are sapients and sapients change—but we do not make them falsely.”

“We also have no choice,” Annette told Sade calmly. “Without Ki!Tana and the other alien crew, we’d have no chance of being able to stand up to even the heavy pirate ships, let alone the A!Tol themselves.”

“So, we upgrade
Tornado
, strap proton beams to her, and go hunting?” Kurzman asked. “Not much of a plan.”

“
Tornado
has few holes in her armor and we don’t have the means to make more,” Metharom replied. “We’re going to have to take out two of her lasers to mount the proton beams. Not sure what to do with the lasers, but we need them out of
Tornado
.”

“Strap them to the scout ships,” Lougheed suggested with a laugh. “We don’t
have
armor,” he continued, “and if we do a similar upgrade to our fusion plants, we’ll have the power for them. I wouldn’t mind having a weapon after I fire off my one missile salvo.”

“That sounds reasonable to me,” Annette agreed. “Metharom, Ki!Tana?”

“Doable,” Metharom agreed as Ki!Tana’s skin flashed to a soft red color.

“Once we’ve upgraded the ships, we will need to go hunting,” the blonde captain told her people. “We’ll have done everything we can do without a yard, and we’ll still need a lot more to take back to Earth.”

“Your best option is to buy upgrades and better technology at A!Ko!La!Ma!,” Ki!Tana told them. “It is a pirate station, where many things are available for sale. If you have prizes and bring them there, you can acquire even higher-quality upgrades and have access to a yard to upgrade your vessels.

“You could also acquire schematics and tech to help your world,” she continued. “All things are for sale at A!Ko!La!Ma!.”

“I can’t pronounce that,” Kurzman said quietly. “Not without throwing up, anyway.”

“A pirate haven?” Annette replied. “Where everything is for sale? Let’s just call it Tortuga.”

“Very well,” Ki!Tana accepted. “Take prizes, Captain. Bring them to Tortuga. There you can buy all that you seek—and your ship is already powerful. There will be those at Tortuga with intelligence and targets they may be willing to share to bring an extra heavy into the fight.”

In Major James Wellesley’s experience, it was inevitable that once soldiers settled in anywhere for any significant length of time, there would rapidly appear first a still, second a bar, and third a place for officers to hang out and pretend the first two things didn’t exist. Often while indulging in the fruits of the still.

Most of the people on the surface of Alpha Centauri AB2 were his Special Space Service troopers, but there was also a continuous stream of engineers and logistics teams. They’d set up scheduled flights, and that meant the occasional overnighter. A slew of prefabricated structures from
Tornado
’s
stores had been set up on the slopes around the cache to provide
somewhere
on the planet to be without a spacesuit.

At one end, a second lava tube cave had been sealed off with the prefab structures and pumped full of air. Since it wasn’t a prefab structure, James officially “did not know” about it or the bar and still that had sprung up in it.

He
was at the other end of the linked-together structures, where a carefully balanced and supported platform hung out over the caldera, with a transparent wall providing one
hell
of a view.

Currently, the little observation room was empty, leaving the Major alone with his thoughts as he looked out over the empty heart of a volcano that had last erupted while the dinosaurs walked Earth. His thoughts were bleak.

His older siblings were in the UK military. His father served in the House of Lords. From the news they’d received, both of those entities had been dissolved. His family was
probably
safe, but he didn’t know. He couldn’t know—and neither could any of his soldiers.

The Special Space Service’s Fifty-Second Company consisted of exactly seventy men and women, including James himself. They’d taken
Rekiki’s Fang
’s crew by surprise and faced only the low velocity slugthrowers the aliens regarded as ‘safe’ aboard ship.

Further digging into the pirate ship’s armory had left him feeling physically ill. The pirates’ weapons were clearly second-grade, obsolete, poorly maintained crap, but if Kikitheth’s people had actually managed to break out the plasma rifles and power armor stored in the armory, the Terran boarding action would have been over.

Some
of the weapons had been designed for bipeds with manipulators similar to human hands. He had twenty plasma rifles they’d refitted for his people, and thirty-two of the aliens who’d joined up had power armor and weapons they could use.

Twelve of those aliens were Rekiki, and the big hexapod reminded James of nothing so much as crocodile centaurs. They were ugly, they made him uncomfortable, and since their gear had been meant for Kikitheth’s personal guard, they were the most heavily equipped troops he had.

That still left forty-five of his Terrans with assault rifles and none of his SSS troops with power armor. Boarding actions were going to be dangerous, and their entire
mission
was going to be a series of boarding actions.

“The volcano is already dead, Major,” a voice observed from behind him. “You can’t kill it by glaring at it.”

James spun in place, his hand going to his pistol, then flushed as he recognized the stocky form of Commander Kurzman.

“I didn’t expect anyone in here,” he confessed. The XO, he noted in a corner of his mind he kept carefully turned off when actually on duty, was surprisingly muscled for a Space Force officer.

“It’s all right, Major,” Kurzman replied, stepping up to join him in looking out over the crater. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.”

“It’s quite a view, sir,” James said slowly, eyeing the other man carefully.

“It is,” Kurzman agreed. “You don’t need to call me sir,” he continued. “You report to Bloody Annie, not me. Call me Pat.”

Wellesley realized he’d outright
flushed
at that. What was he, a giddy schoolboy?

“All right…Pat,” he told the other man. “We are, after all, a long way from anyone to call us out on it. Call me James.”

“Oh, the Captain would call us out on anything that caused trouble,” Kurzman said cheerfully. “She didn’t get a nickname worthy of her new pirate queen status by being
nice
.”

James laughed, glancing at the door to make sure no one
else
wandered in on them. Glancing back, he saw the other officer had produced a bottle of wine and a pair of glasses from inside his jacket.

“It’s quite a view and I’m not flying back up for a few hours,” Kurzman said slowly, almost shyly. “Share a drink?”

#

Hours turned to days turned into a week and then two weeks orbiting AB2, every minute hanging over Annette’s head. There was no point rushing. It would take time and money and effort to retake Earth—but every minute, every hour they spent upgrading the ship was time the A!Tol ruled her world.

“Are we ready for the tests?” she asked the big A!Tol who currently seemed to be her best hope of liberating her world. The irony was not lost on her.

“Chief Metharom?” Ki!Tana asked in turn, her beak and eyes turning to look at the screen linked to engineering. “All of the parameters for both systems appear clean up here, if we have the power to feed them.”

“All reactor cores are one hundred and fifty-two percent of design capacity,”
Tornado
’s engineer replied. “Stress levels low, comparable to running ninety-five percent of design. I’m impressed, Ki!Tana.”

Many of the crew still stumbled over A!Tol, but everybody who worked directly with the one tentacled alien they had aboard had mastered
her
name.

Ki!Tana’s skin flashed a pale red—pleased acceptance, apparently—and she turned back to Annette.

“We should be able to energize both the shields and the proton beams without issue,” she noted. “I believe we are ready for the tests.”

“Thank you,” Annette told the alien, whose skin flashed an even deeper red. It might
look
like she was blushing, but the tone was, so far as Annette could tell, simple happiness. Ki!Tana was surprisingly appreciative of how well most of the crew treated her—and the fact that her happiness was
so
obvious was helping create that kindness.

There were exceptions, of course, but the big alien was probably still the most accepted of their new nonhuman crew.

“Charge the shields,” Annette ordered Rolfson.

There was no visible change. Nothing on the screens feeding from the exterior of the ship was altered—but the tactical display now showed a two-kilometer-wide sphere around
Tornado
.

“Shield is active and…holding,” Ki!Tana announced after studying her panel. “We are sustaining approximately twice the strength
Fang
was achieving with this generator. This should be sustainable long-term, but I would not suggest running more power through it. This is as much as this generator can safely produce.”

“All right. Run it for a few minutes while Lougheed sets up his run,” Annette ordered, then flipped up a screen connecting her to
Of Course We’re Coming Back
. “Everything looks green on this end, Captain Lougheed,” she told the scout ship’s commander. “Set up for one run with a missile—
please
make sure it will miss us if the shield fails—and then for a laser sweep.”

“Moving in, holding position at one million kilometers,” Lougheed replied several moments later. “We will fire on your command.”

Annette let several minutes pass in relative quiet, then turned to Rolfson and Ki!Tana.

“Any concerns?”

“Nothing on my screens,” the red-bearded tactical officer reply. “Ki!Tana?”

“Everything is clear,” she replied. “I am certain as I can be without testing.”

“All right,” Annette turned back to her junior captain. “Lougheed—fire at will, wait sixty seconds, then try the laser.”

There was no response—and then the bright white streak of a point six cee missile flashed across space and vanished in a flash of white light as it impacted the shield and released its kinetic energy.

“Shields holding,” Rolfson announced. “Minor blip, nothing severe.”

“Results appear as expected,” Ki!Tana agreed.

The blond Captain leaned back in her chair and waited for the laser test. She didn’t even
pretend
to understand how the shield worked—it was a development from the same gravitational-hyperspatial interface that propelled her ship, but that was as far as she got.

“Laser firing,” Rolfson reported. “
Of Course
is holding the beam, shield is holding up but weakening rapidly on that point.” Seconds past. Ten, fifteen, twenty. “Shield has
failed
,” the tactical officer reported. “
Of Course
is ceasing beam.”

“Sustained beam fire is a weakness of the energy shield,” Ki!Tana explained as the data came in from the test. “Normally, evasive maneuvers would prevent such a long stream on a single portion of the shield.”

“Twenty-two seconds from that laser would drill a hole a kilometer or two deep into a planet,” Rolfson said dryly. “I can live with that being the
weakness
.”

“It would take less time, of course, versus an Imperial ship of the line’s proton beams,” the big alien replied. “Even feeding the extra power through it, realize this shield is not equivalent to an Imperial cruiser’s defense.”

“I know,” Annette said quietly. “We hit the same spot with over sixty missiles to break an Imperial ship’s shields. Even double the
Fang
’s survivability is a pale shadow of that.”

She smiled coldly. “However, speaking of proton beams, I believe Captain Sade has delivered us an asteroid?”

Like for the weapons test back at BugWorks, they’d brought up an asteroid roughly the same mass and composition as one of the old UESF battleships. It was smaller and lighter than
Tornado
itself, but it gave them a solid baseline for what the weapons could achieve.

“Lining the ship up and charging the beams,” Rolfson reported. “We have the target in our sights.”

“Fire,” Annette ordered.

Like the lasers they’d replaced, the proton beams were invisible. The asteroid simply…disintegrated. The beams ripped through the full half-kilometer length of the nickel-iron rock in less than a second, forcing Rolfson to hastily cut the beam off.

“Damn,” someone murmured and Annette very specifically did
not
look to see who said it.

“Rolfson?” she asked.

“The good news is that’ll punch through shields in seconds,” he replied very slowly. “The
bad
news is that they’re lightspeed and so useless past four, five hundred thousand kilometers most of the time.

“The
really
bad news is that the proton beams would do a number on even
our
armor,” Rolfson concluded, “and Ki!Tana says these are
popguns
compared to the Navy’s beams.”