The Terran Privateer (18 page)

The doors slid shut behind everything else and she turned to Pat Kurzman. Her XO was a solid man, short but broad with close-cropped hair, who normally reminded her of an English bulldog. Right
now
, he reminded her of her father’s dog in the gap between him peeing on the floor and them finding the puddle.

“What do you need, ma’am?” Kurzman asked in a solid imitation of his normal unflappability.

“You and James,” Annette said flatly. She wasn’t really asking a question. She’d known
Kurzman’s
interest in men, though Wellesley’s was a surprise—she was surprised by
Kurzman’s
lack of wisdom.

“Um. Yeah,” Kurzman replied, deflating into his chair. “Um. He’s really pretty?”

Annette managed to not laugh, barely, and leveled her best glare on her executive officer, who proceeded to deflate even farther into his chair. She let the silence drag on for several moments, and then shook her head at him, concealing a smile.

“He is,” she admitted. “If rather young for me.” Her own tastes ran more to something like both of her junior captains, a four-poster bed, and a lot of silk rope. “I
do
hope there’s rather more to it than ‘he’s pretty’, though.”

“I think so?” her XO replied slowly. “I mean…part of it is availability. There are very few people in our little flotilla not in my chain of command. Most of the gay men I could think of are junior enough that technical authority is irrelevant.” He sighed. “But we’re both senior officers, we can talk work, and, well…we both like football. Real football, not the American one. I
can
talk to him, which puts him ahead of at least two boyfriends I’ve had in the past.”

“He isn’t in your chain of command,” Annette agreed. “But if it starts to be a problem, I will come down on you like an orbital bombardment. Are we clear, Commander?”

“Yes, ma’am!” he said crisply. He seemed to relax. “There seems to be a lot of pairing-off going on,” he noted. “Sade agreed to let Rolfson buy her a drink before she goes back to her ship, for example.”

“I’m not surprised,” the Captain admitted. “We’re a long way from home—with no
way
home. I’d be more surprised if our people weren’t pairing off. That said”—she raised a hand—“I expect
you
, Mister XO, to make sure we don’t have any problems.

“We can only be so military when the military we serve is gone, but if there’s abuse, it needs to be stopped. If we’re having bad breakups, we need to separate people. We have barely a thousand people and they might be the only free humans left in the galaxy.

“We need them happy, so I don’t intend to step on anything that isn’t a problem—but we need them functional, so step on anything that
is
a problem.”

Looking somewhat less deflated, Kurzman nodded.

“Yes, ma’am.” He paused, considering the situation and eyeing her questioningly. Given the context, Annette wasn’t entirely surprised by what came next. “Do you have anyone back home, Captain?” he asked gently. “I know there can’t be anyone aboard ship for you…”

“No, Commander,” she told him. “To both. Whatever they say about blondes having more fun, however much action you think I’ve had in the last few years, you’re probably guessing too high.”

“Career hazard,” her XO chuckled in agreement. He paused for a moment, and then asked what she knew he’d been angling for. “There were rumors about you and Casimir. Any truth to them?”

She sighed.

“Pat, is it really relevant now?”

He looked sheepish for a moment, then sighed himself.

“I’m your XO, ma’am,” he reminded her. “I wouldn’t expect it to be, but it might.”

He was…probably right.

“Fine. I won’t confirm or deny anything,” she told him, “but I
will
say that Elon Casimir is a man with a lot of money. When his wife passed away, he had a distinct shortage of people he could trust to turn to for comfort. To reveal anything that happened in that time would betray that trust.”

“So, more truth than most assume and less than the tabloids spewed across the world?”

Annette laughed. “Fair. Morgan, while a very sweet child, is
not
my daughter.”

That
had been the accusation that had actually hurt when the tabloids had found out, somehow, about that brief affair in the weeks after Leanne Casimir’s funeral. Piled on top of his parents’ deaths, the loss of Leanne had almost broken Elon. She’d been there and it
had
, briefly, turned into more.

Suggesting that they’d betrayed Leanne, a woman Elon had loved and who Annette had been friends with for
a decade
, before her death had stung. The affair had been long over by the time the tabloids dragged it out, but that pain had been part of why they’d carefully
not
been seen together—she had, after all, been his employee.

“Would you going back to the Force have changed anything?” her XO asked quietly and she smiled sadly as he appeared to have followed her thoughts.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “And now I’ll never know.”

“Well, we are not catching
that
fish,” Rolfson announced as the blip flashed on the anomaly scanner. “I’m reading her as pulling sixty percent of lightspeed!”

“What
is
she?” Kurzman asked. “That’s as fast as our old missiles.”

“Imperial Courier,” the newest member of the bridge crew, a tall Yin named Pondar, replied. The tall blue-skinned alien was impassive as she spoke. “They are the fastest ships ever built by anyone. The Kanzi and the Core Systems have similar craft, but they are a special breed.”

“Sixty percent of light?” Annette repeated. “Military ships?”

“No,” Pondar replied calmly. She’d taken over Mosi’s slot as junior tactical officer after impressing Rolfson in testing and was on the bridge to get experience with the systems under the tactical officer’s careful eye. “Courier pilots will remind you
very
forcefully that they are not military,” she continued, checking numbers on her screen. “They regard themselves as better.”

“So, she’s carrying news,”
Tornado
’s Captain mused. “Amandine, how’s our intercept looking?”

“She’s a third faster than we are, ma’am,” her navigator replied. “We could probably
shoot
her but we can’t catch her.”

“Pondar—would she surrender if we demonstrate we can destroy her?”

“No,” the Yin replied. “They are
Couriers
. They will die before they fail to deliver their mail, and only death will stop them.”

Annette shook her head, eyeing the featureless dot.

“That’s the fastest communications the A!Tol have got, huh?” she asked.

“The big A!Tol military bases have hyperwave transmitters,” Pondar replied. “They are immobile installations, but combined with the Couriers and the smaller hyperwave receivers scattered through the Imperium, they tie A!Tol territory together.”

Annette nodded, slowly processing the data. They’d pulled vast quantities of data from the systems of the two ships they’d captured, but reviewing and analyzing it all was a slow process. Ki!Tana was usually around when she was on the bridge, but she was starting to realize that making sure they
always
had an alien crewmember on the bridge was important. There was so much her human crew simply didn’t
know—things none of the aliens might think to mention until it came up.

“Let her go,” she ordered as she watched the courier cross toward the alien fleet base. “Keep your eyes open,” she told Rolfson. “We want a freighter—not a warship and apparently not a Courier.”

“Point four cee or less seems to be our line,” he agreed. “All the watches have the notes. We’ll get something, ma’am.”

#

A harsh buzzing noise woke Annette up from some of the better sleep she’d had since Sol had fallen. Blinking wearily, she hit the button to accept the intercom request audio-only.

“Ma’am, this is the bridge. We have a customer—she’s on course for the fleet base at point three five of lightspeed, and we have no other anomalies on the screen. We have twenty-two minutes in which we can launch the intercept.”

She was suddenly fully awake, a predatory grin growing on her face.

“Who has the watch?” she asked.

“Lieutenant Commander Amandine, ma’am,” the rating replied.

“I’ll be on the bridge in five minutes. Have him take the ship to condition two,” she ordered. “Wake up the senior officers—especially Major Wellesley. It looks like we have a customer.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The channel closed with a click and Annette stood in her quarters for a long moment. Point three five meant it probably wasn’t a military ship, but an interstellar freighter full of cargo was a prize worth taking, no matter what.

She was still grinning as she grabbed her combat vac-suit.

#

Annette was a minute inside her own timeline when she strode onto her bridge. Amandine stood from the command chair immediately, throwing her a brisk salute as he moved over to navigation. Rolfson had managed to beat her to the bridge somehow and was working with Pondar to try and extrapolate
some
kind of identification from the tiny amount of information the hyperspatial anomaly scanner gave them.

“Ma’am, we couldn’t find Major Wellesley,” the com tech standing next to her command chair reported nervously. “He’s not in his quarters or answering his communicator.”

Annette sighed.

“I’ll let Commander Kurzman know,” she said. “He’ll be able to track our errant officer faster. Not your fault, Carly. Wellesley should know better than to turn his com off.”

“Sorry, ma’am, thank you, ma’am,” the young woman chirped as she returned to her post at communications, rapidly joined by her boss as Chan entered the bridge.

Annette pinged a private channel to her XO.

“Pat.”

“Ma’am.”

“Wellesley is with you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Tell him to turn his damn communicator on and get to his shuttles,” Annette snapped.

“Already on his way, ma’am,” her XO said quietly. “Communicator was on. We were distracted.”

“I don’t want to know. Be in CIC.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Killing the channel, she turned back to her bridge.

“Rolfson, what have we got?” she asked.

“Speed suggests civilian shipping,” he told her. “Won’t be military supplies, but there is an inhabited world in the system with the fleet base. Regular traders—could be anything, will probably be multiple things.”

“How long is our intercept window?” she asked her navigator.

“If we move in the next ten minutes, we’ll intercept in under twenty,” Amandine replied. “If we wait more than thirty minutes, we’re looking at a stern chase and we’re not
that
much faster than her.”

“I don’t see a point in hanging around,” Annette concluded, settling into her chair. “Take us out, Lieutenant Commander. Rolfson—ready a warning shot for as soon as they see us.”

Moments later—a time frame that still seemed impossibly short to
Tornado
’s Captain—the warship leapt out at the freighter at forty-three percent of the speed of light.

The freighter did nothing.

“They
can
see us, right?” Annette asked as the hyperspace distance between them evaporated. They were cutting the freighter’s course, gaining on it at far more than their own hundred and thirty thousand kilometers a second.

“She may not have an anomaly scanner,” Ki!Tana told her, the alien having just entered the bridge. Something in how she was moving when Annette glanced at her suggested the A!Tol had been having a rough night. Her manipulators sagged and her locomotive tentacles were slow and careful in their movements.

“If she
has
a scanner, it may be old, broken, or short-ranged,” the old pirate continued. “Or, well, she may see us…and realize there is nothing that they can do.”

“Or it could be a trap,” Rolfson noted.

“Or it could be a trap,” Ki!Tana agreed.

“Spin up the antimissile suite and charge the shield,” Annette ordered. “It doesn’t feel like a trap. But I don’t plan on dying today, either.”

“Intercept time two minutes and closing,” Amandine reported. “They’re…still not doing anything.”

“Major Wellesley.” She opened a channel to the Special Space Service commander. “Are you ready to board?”

“You give the word, ma’am.”

She waited. The distance was dropping rapidly—relatively quickly; they’d hit the one light-second mark where the freighter’s crew would be able to see them with regular sensors. At that point, she could demand their surrender and they’d have no choice but to obey.

“Ma’am! I have an aspect change!” Rolfson reported. “New signature on the scopes.”

“We have a visitor?” she demanded. “Show me!”

“No, looks like it just detached from the freighter?” he said in a confused tone. “I’ve got a second anomaly moving in the exact opposite direction to the original at point four five cee.”

“Escape ship,” Pondar said instantly.

“What?” Rolfson demanded of his new junior.

“Some captains—usually those with good insurance—have the crew section of the ship basically built as a detachable vessel,” the Yin explained. “It’s surprisingly inexpensive to do, as the drive can be built to only last a week or two and usually includes the hyperdrive emitters.”

“Do we need the escape ship to capture the freighter?”

“Normally, but we should be able to use
Oaths of Secrecy
’s emitters as a replacement,” Ki!Tana said. “They have abandoned the freighter and will claim it on their insurance. We could, of course, capture both.”

Captain Lougheed’s ship was close enough to the escape ship’s course to cut them off. Annette had limited ways to
communicate
with him, but given the plans they did have, if she fired a missile in parallel to the escape ship’s course, he’d know to bring it in.

“No,” she finally concluded. “We want the cargo and the hull. We don’t need the crew—we’re not slavers, and repatriating them would be a pain in the ass.”

“Ma’am, we have broken the one-light-second zone,” Amandine reported.

“Major—launch your boarding operation.”

#

The star freighters that tied the A!Tol Imperium together looked odd to James’s eyes. His family had kept their wealth intact the way most of the successful British aristocrats had: by investing in shipping and trade over the years. A good third of the spaceships flitting around the Sol system had a Wellesley among the investors, so the Major was very familiar with what Earth’s interplanetary freighters looked like.

Each of the freighters he’d seen so far had been completely different. Even looking through the files stolen from their captures showed a vast array of different shapes and sizes, and this new ship followed the rule of looking completely different.

It consisted of four cylindrical modules linked together with a mess of gantries and wiring. The shuttle’s sensors noted that the interface drive nodes were equally mounted on all four modules, probably with redundant controls as backup for the now-missing central module.

He could see where that capsule had been, a mess of broken gantries and connectors. With it missing, he wasn’t entirely sure
where
to go. When in doubt, however…”

“Alpha through Delta Troops,” he announced over his communicator. “Start at the top, go clockwise. Each of you takes a module and sweeps it. Echo, Golf Troops, stay out as reserve.”

“What about us?” McPhail asked. With the craft stolen from
Fang
, James’s headquarters section now had their own shuttle, allowing them to act as a mobile reserve.

“Take us to…that one,” he indicated the one assigned to Charlie Troop. “I want to see what we’re looking at with my own eyes.”

“On our way, Major,” the pilot told him.

#

The ship was more than a little eerie. All of the lights in the module James Wellesley and his headquarters section boarded were still on. Indicators were flashing, computer screens running—everything aboard the ship was fully functional.

The air wasn’t breathable, which was a new one on him. Most of the races they’d encountered so far breathed air with an oxygen content within a few points of Earth’s. They had all been able to breathe aboard the last two ships, and their new alien crewmates could breathe aboard
Tornado
. This ship had a similar oxygen content, but its level of about six other chemicals would be almost instantly lethal to James’s human Special Space Service troopers.

“Ikel,” Ral, his new Yin soldier, said sharply.

“What?”

“Ikel,” Ral repeated. “Carapaced hexapods, need
chlorine
in their air to survive. Would have been a pure Ikel crew—no one
else
can breathe their air.”

“Works for preservation, though,” someone pointed out. “Most bacteria not used to this are going to die immediately.”

“Brilliant,” James said with a shake of his head. “Charlie is securing the ship. Let’s check on the cargo.”

Most of the module was cargo space, so finding
something
to check was easy. A hatch nearby opened up to the hacking software Ki!Tana had given them, and revealed rows upon rows of stacked containers, roughly a meter wide and high by two meters long.

“What is this?” the Major asked rhetorically. He stepped over to one of the boxes and poked at it. His helmet said it had a power source but nothing significant.

“Cover me,” he ordered as he identified a lock and a lid. With a sharp strike from the butt of his plasma rifle, he smashed the lock open and pushed the lid up, shining a light in.