The Terran Privateer (16 page)

Missiles.

No
wonder
the freighter Captain looked like a grouchy snake pit. James’s people had just taken an entire
squadron’s
worth of missile reloads.

“Is that the last of the crew?” James asked his Troop Captains.

“Scans aren’t showing anyone else, but there are probably corners we wouldn’t see them in,” his Charlie Troop Captain replied. “Are we taking over?”

“Force prize crew is on their way over now,” he confirmed. “Captain wants this hunk of metal moving
before
the squids’ destroyer comes back to check on her.”

“Watch it, sir—you have incoming,” one of his troopers cut in on another channel.

James looked up to see what the trooper was warning him about. The smallish A!Tol commanding the ship was moving toward him, two battle rifle-armed Terrans escorting the—male, James understood from the size—alien back to him.

At some point between their first conversation and now, the orange had faded from the Captain’s skin, leaving only an inky, purplish black tone to the alien’s torso as he reached the Terran Major.

“Is this all of your crew?” James demanded, gesturing at the collection of A!Tol his people had corralled into the center of the landing bay. He’d been trained at rapidly assessing the numbers of a crowd of humans, but those skills were only so applicable to a distressed mob of tentacled aliens ranging from one and a half meters to well over two meters tall.

“Yes,” the Captain replied. “What will happen to them?”

James hadn’t received orders yet—and until he got orders, he was going to act on his own discretion.

“Those shuttles.” He gestured at a set of cargo spacecraft along one wall of the bay. “How many would be required to hold your crew?”

The A!Tol looked at his ship’s parasite craft, his manipulator tentacles fluttering in the equivalent of a human shrug.

“They are not designed for sapients,” he told James. “All of them.”

As he spoke, however, the dark, fear-laced tone of his skin began to flash with elements of yellow—a color James had never seen on an A!Tol below. Given that the shuttles were
huge
and they only needed to get the aliens to the planet they’d left behind them…

“You lie poorly,” James told the alien bluntly. “And so I am forced to guess. You will get two shuttles. Start loading your people onto them.”

He pinged his Alpha and Golf Troop leaders—the latter was his only alien Troop Captain.

“Move the squids onto two of their cargo shuttles,” he ordered. “Keep an eye on them and don’t let them in the cockpits till I give the word—we’ll dump them on our way out-system.”

“You are letting us go?” the A!Tol asked, his skin now a very dark blue.

James looked the strange creature in the eye.

“I may be the last officer of my service after your race ripped my home apart, but I remain a soldier,” he told the transport captain. “I still have my honor.”

#

Whatever game Ki!Tana was playing—and as they reentered the bridge, Annette was more and more certain that the big A!Tol was playing some kind of game—it had been made irrelevant while they were off the bridge.

She received Wellesley’s report with relief she didn’t allow herself to show. Ki!Tana, however, slowly faded to a calm red color. Despite what she’d been telling Annette, the alien was clearly pleased with the result.

“Where’s our prize crew at?” Annette asked Rolfson.

“Lieutenant Mosi is boarding now,” he confirmed. “She has twenty Space Force personnel and ten of our alien crew, which we think should be enough to run the ship at least temporarily.”

“She has the same code-hacking tools we used aboard
Fang
,” Ki!Tana noted. “They may take longer, as this is a military ship.”

“Any sign of our destroyer friend?” the Captain asked. “She’s what’s going to set Mosi’s time limit.”

“Nothing yet,” her tactical officer replied. “The patrol boats are hiding in orbit. They’re scared shitless—but they’ll probably fight if we move against the planet.”

“I have
no
intention of trying to raid a planet with a hundred ground troops,” Annette told him. “That would be stupid.”

“Not arguing, ma’am,” he agreed. “Looking forward to have those missiles in my magazines, though. I’ll feel a lot happier about going up against a Navy ship if we have the same birds.”

“Agreed. Keep an eye out for her,” she ordered. “The
instant
you have a sniff of a hyperspace portal; I want to know.”

“Mosi will hurry, ma’am,” Rolfson said quietly. “Twenty minutes, maybe thirty. We should be good to go then.”

“Be ready to move as soon as the freighter is ready.” Annette glanced at the screen, checking on
Oaths of Secrecy
. Her second ship was floating on the other side of the freighter, all three ships within a few thousand kilometers of each other.

#

“It looks like they’re giving up, sir,” Laurent announced, highlighting the A!Tol destroyer on
Of Course We’re Coming Back
’s main screen.

“Any sign from the system?” Andrew asked. If
Tornado
and
Oaths of Secrecy
had achieved anything since
Of Course
had lured the destroyer out, they should have
left
.

“Nothing,” she replied. “Both
Tornado
and
Oaths
are still in-system. I make it ten minutes or less before the destroyer drops back out of hyperspace.”

“Damn,” he murmured. “Can we do anything?”

“If we brought up the drive, we’d
lure her away again, but then we won’t be able to hide,” Laurent told him. “Our missiles won’t get through her shields, and she’s got nastier beams than us if we get close enough to use the laser.”

“And if she sees us, she’ll catch us,”
Of Course
’s Captain agreed. His ship’s upgrades were lacking compared to
Tornado
. She was still only capable of point four cee, still limited to a handful of externally mounted missiles and a laser, still fragile as cheap paper.

“Show me her likely portal points,” he ordered.

A shaded area appeared on the screen. The map was still sparse, the lack of features in hyperspace still something Andrew was getting used to. The destroyer was a single dot, their only real information on her coming from their encounter in the Messeth system. The Messeth system itself was simply a set of circles marking the danger zones around each planet and the star itself.

“Unless she changes course, she’ll be over half a million kilometers away in hyperspace when she passes us,” Laurent reported. “We could close to laser range in moments, but…”

“She has proton beams and an energy shield. We don’t,” Andrew noted. “She’ll portal what, a million klicks from us?”

“Bit over, yeah,” Laurent confirmed. “What are you thinking, boss?”

“
Tornado
can take her,”
Of Course
’s Captain said confidently. “But I don’t think Captain Bond would object to an ace up her sleeve. Tall.” He opened a channel to his engineer. “Start warming up the interface drive.
Don’t
bring it online, but when I give the order, I want full speed on the bounce.”

“I’ll make it happen.”

“All right,” Andrew Lougheed said calmly, studying the dot on his screen and wishing he could see more of what they were doing. “Let’s see what our tentacled friends do next.”

#

“Hyper portal!” Rolfson snapped. “Emergence at ten million kilometers. Looks like our friend the destroyer.”

“Mosi, what’s your status?” Annette demanded of the young officer leading the prize crew.

“We’re into the command interface, but we’re unlocking systems one by one,” the black-skinned Zimbabwean replied breathlessly. “We’ll have interface drive in a minute or two, but we’re at least ten minutes from having the hyperdrive.”

“You’re out of time,” Annette told her flatly. “Sade!” She pulled
Oaths of Secrecy
’s Captain into the channel. “Mosi’s team will have interface drive momentarily. As soon as she does, you
both
take off for Rendezvous Alpha. Mosi—you’ll ride through on
Oath
’s hyper portal. It’ll be tricky flying, but you can do it.”

“We can miss the portal ourselves after generating it; give her a clear path,” Sade suggested. “Shouldn’t even be tricky. We’ll need time and a safe space to do it.”

“I know. I’m going to go buy that for you,”
Tornado
’s Captain replied. “Seconds are about to get expensive, ladies. Spend as few of them as you can.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Mosi acknowledged.

“Already underway, ma’am,” Amandine told her as she turned to her navigator. “They’ll range on us first. There’s nothing we can do about that.”

“Keep the laser suite up,” she ordered Rolfson. “Prep our own missiles. I’d rather not have this fight, but it looks like I lost that argument.”

“All tubes are loaded with point sevens,” he replied. “Proton capacitors charging—we’ll have a full charge by the time we’re in beam range. Lasers the same.”

“Estimate we’ll be in range of their point seven fives in one minute,” Amandine reported.

“Ki!Tana. Anything specific we should be expecting?” Annette asked their resident alien.

“Her first goal is going to be to secure the freighter,” the old pirate told her. “She’ll expect you to be similarly armed to most pirate heavies—better than her but not by much, as they need a lot of cargo space. She’ll try and hammer down your shields with missiles while closing to retake the transport.”

“And when that fails?”

“She’ll turn and try to close to proton beam range,” Ki!Tana said. “I am guessing, Captain,” she warned. “But that Captain will have two priorities: recapture the freighter and protect the planet. Capturing or destroying
Tornado
will not register except to help with one or both of those.”

“She can keep the damn planet, but I’m taking that ship.”

“Incoming!” Rolfson announced. “Fourteen missiles coming our way.”

“Please return the favor, Commander,” Annette told him. “All launchers.”

“Yes, ma’am. Five seconds to range.”

The seconds blinked past and
Tornado
’s response flared into space. Twenty-four missiles blazed toward the destroyer, passing its own salvo as they went.

“Engaging with antimissile lasers.”

Annette gripped the armrest of her command chair. They’d upgraded
Tornado
a lot, but last time they’d faced A!Tol Imperial Navy ships, she’d watched the UESF die around her.

Rolfson was getting better with the lasers, the last of the missiles dying well clear of the privateer’s shields.
That
appeared to get the destroyer’s attention and the smaller ship turned in space, adjusting her course to sweep farther away from
Tornado
even as the missiles closed in.

“Mosi got the drive,” Chan reported from the communications console. “She says they’ll be underway in ten seconds;
Oaths
is moving to escort.”

“
Finally
.” Annette’s attention was immediately pulled away as the impact reports from their missile salvo made it onto her screens. Like the cruisers they’d fought at Sol, the warship had
major
shields—twenty-four missiles had left the destroyer’s screen flickering with light but unbroken.

“Please tell me our new shields are as strong as hers,” the Terran Captain snarled.

“About twenty percent stronger,” Ki!Tana replied, her voice far calmer. “Plus your antimissile suite is surprisingly effective against interface missiles.”

“We didn’t have shields,” Annette pointed out. “Built the best alternative we had. Amandine—take us right at that bitch. Rolfson—ready the proton guns.”

The destroyer’s course was clearly focused on
Oaths of Secrecy
and the freighter now, but her speed advantage wouldn’t be enough to avoid action if
Tornado
cut the angle.

“She’ll catch them before they can open the portal,” Rolfson said quietly.

“I noticed,” Annette replied. “Send them another salvo, Lieutenant Commander. Let’s get them looking at
us,
not Sade and Mosi.”

Another twenty-four missiles blasted away, and now the distance between the two ships was dropping rapidly.

“Mosi and Wellesley have launched the cargo shuttles with the freighter’s original crew,” Chan reported. “They are heading for the planet as fast as they can go, getting the hell
out
of this fight.”