The Terran Privateer (24 page)

“We’ve set up accounts for all of the human crew,” she told Kurzman and passed him the data crystal. “We’ll be getting a shipment of glorified charge cards shortly; I’ll leave distributing them in your capable hands.”

“We got the agent Ki!Tana wanted?”

“Yeah.”

“Can we trust him?” her XO asked.

“I think so,” Annette sighed. “It’s in his interests to do well for us. His commission is going to be painful, but we’ll get the money we need for the upgrades.”

“Do we need them this badly, ma’am?” Kurzman said quietly. “You’re talking about putting our ship—our
only
warship—into the hands of pirates. We’ve stood up to everything we’ve faced so far.”

“We can’t fight the A!Tol Navy on even ground yet, Pat,” she pointed out. “It’s a risk, I don’t deny that. We’re leveraging Ki!Tana’s contacts to try and upgrade
Tornado
into something that can go toe-to-toe with bigger ships.” She shook her head. “Ki!Tana seems to trust them. We have no choice—we’re not going to free Earth by robbing freighters.”

“Fair.” He paused. The corridors around them were empty for the moment, but it wouldn’t be long before the inevitable grind pulled them back to work. “Are we trusting her too much?” Kurzman asked finally. “We know
nothing
about her. Nothing.”

“Yes, we’re trusting her too much,” Annette said flatly. “I just don’t see an alternative. Do you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Once the charge cards are distributed, we can start doing shore leave,” she told him. “You know the rules I want. Everyone watches their back. This place feels like Mos Eisley.”

“That bad?” Kurzman asked.

She thought about it for a moment.

“Actually, no. It’s worse.”

“So, can we drink it?” one of the Service Troop Captains asked.

James ran the small scanner he’d been issued over the mugs of what
looked
like beer. It blinked for a few seconds and settled on green.

“It’s alcoholic and it won’t poison you,” he told his junior officer as he gestured his people to the table they’d picked out in the “open-air” bar. “I don’t know if I would say that means you can drink it; no one knows what it will
taste
like to humans.”

“Someone has to go first,” Pat Kurzman noted, grabbing one of the mugs and taking a swallow. The XO coughed, blinking rapidly as he tried processed just what he’d put in his mouth, and then shook himself.

“Whoa,” he whispered. “
What
percentage did you say this was, James?”

The Special Space Service Major slipped in next to his boyfriend and slid the mugs around the table to his five Troop Captains. They were all aware of the relationship, which made them the right company to go outside the ship with.

The seventh member of the party didn’t know enough about human relationships to be bothered either way. Ral, as a member of a species that was well represented on Tortuga, was also the only person in the group who
knew
he could stomach the food at the bar.

“According to the scanner, it’s about twenty-two percent,” James told Kurzman with a grin. “It may
look
like beer, but it’s loaded like fortified wine.”

“Well, the bad news is that it doesn’t taste like
either
,” the XO replied. “The good news is that it’s surprisingly drinkable for that.” Suiting actions to words, he took another mouthful of it.

With a shrug, James followed suit. The alcohol content was a shock to his system—despite his intellectual awareness, the appearance had left him expecting beer—and the flavor was another shock. It was definitely palatable, but it took a moment to wrap his brain around.

“Is it just me,” he said aloud, “or does this taste like unsweetened cream soda?”

“That is
exactly
what it tastes like,” Annabel Sherman noted. His Charlie Troop Captain was a blond northeastern United States citizen, a stocky woman who could have passed for the Captain’s little sister—or a rogue cheerleader, when out of uniform. “God, that is
weird
.”

“You are lucky,” Ral told them. “My first experiment at food off my homeworld did not go so well. The result was safe but not tasty.”

“We haven’t got to food yet,” Mumina Bousaid pointed out. Outside of her armor and in the semi-casual blue Space Force uniform, her night-black skin stood out amongst the Americans, Europeans, and Chinese that made up James’s Troop Captains. Against Ral’s blue skin, the four-armed Tosumi bartender, and the other aliens around them, she could have been James’s sister. “The food could still be awful.”

Moments after she spoke, the blue-skinned Yin waitress emerged from the back of the bar. She wore a red collar that James had been warned represented a slave and a halter top that showed off a set of breasts at odds with her avian face—in a way that suggested certain things were common for many mammalian males.

She laid a platter of roasted meat and vegetables on the table in front of them. James had discussed just what protein alignments
should
work with her when she’d made her recommendation, and everything checked out on his scanner.

As he was checking the food, though, he noticed the server leaning down next to Ral and whispering in the Yin’s ear. If the two had been human, he’d have thought the waitress was hitting on him, but he’d freely admit he knew
nothing
about Yin courtship rituals.

The server swung away a moment later, leaving the humans with their food. James met Ral’s gaze, hoping the alien got his questioning look.

“She suggests we stop drinking alcohol,” the alien trooper said quietly. “And that we check our weapon safeties. We are being watched. Look for short aliens, one hundred sixty centimeters or so, with blue-and-white fur, that otherwise resemble you humans very closely. Six of them around the bar, with webbers and guns—though mostly out of sight from our table.”

“Fuck,” James breathed, checking the long-barreled slugthrower strapped to his thigh under the table. “Who are they?”

“They’re Kanzi,” Ral told him. “Which means they’re slavers.”

#

“These specifications are distinctly insufficient,” Annette said calmly as she finished reviewing the data the shipbuilder had provided. “If I’m reading them correctly, even with the maximum power supply, this shield would barely stop two salvos from an A!Tol Navy cruiser.”

“Most people, Captain Bond, don’t plan for fighting Navy cruisers,” the strange-looking Frole told her. The mobile fungus ran the largest and most successful shipyard—and ship parts dealership—in the public portion of Tortuga. “Pirates, even heavies,
run
from Navy cruisers.”

“Piracy is merely a means to end for me, Mister Folphe,” she pointed out. “If my ship can’t stand against at least her own weight in A!Tol cruisers, my long-term goals are much more difficult. The shields you’ve shown me simply do not meet my needs.”

“The only people on this station with better gear than me are the Crew,” Folphe replied. “And they do not talk to people who just drifted in from hyperspace for the first time. If you do not like what I have, Captain Bond, you may be out of luck.”

“Then that will leave me with a large amount of unspent cash,” she noted. They were still far short of having sold all of their cargos, but some of the cores and missiles had sold, along with the damaged hull that had held the raw protein. She had a solid idea of what the final result was going to look like—and it was starting to look like she’d be short of things to spend it on.

The fungus coughed, expelling a slew of spores in a direction away from Annette, thankfully.

“Someone looking to buy what you want comes along once in thirteen years or so,” he told her, the translator slicing his native time units into English. “I do not keep units like that in stock. I do not even have schematics to build them. But.” He held up a tendril in a gesture that was starting to seem universal.

“There is an individual who is often aboard this station, an Indiri named Karaz Forel, who deals in the odd and the unusual,” he noted. “He is captain of a ship—a heavy—but has a sapient here who trades for him. They often deal in exotic slaves, strange sapients no one else has ever seen, but they approached me some cycles ago with
recent
A!Tol military schematics. I did not buy them, as pirates would not pay the premium to build them, but…if you bring me those schematics, I can build the units. Custom-build, even, shaped to your ships’ own peculiarities.”

“How long?” Annette asked. She could probably afford the
costs
, though the thought of dealing with slavers made her skin crawl, but every day she was away was a day Earth was conquered without her trying to free it.

“Fifty to sixty A!Tol cycles,” Folphe told her.

Two months, most likely.

“That may be too long,” she replied.

“It is the best option I can offer. Which means it is the best anyone on this station can do. Think about it, Captain. See if you can track down the schematics. It will be a week before I can open a slip, in any case.”

“I appreciate your time, Mister Folphe,” Annette said. “Is there any chance I could get you to arrange an introduction to the Crew yardmaster?”

“I wish,” the Frole yardmaster replied. “If that worthy would let me introduce people, both I and she would be far richer.”

“Shame. Thank you.”

Shaking her head to clear some of the dust inevitable from being in close quarters with a Frole, Annette stepped back out into what passed for streets on Tortuga. Ki!Tana and her two Special Space Service escorts were waiting for her outside. The big A!Tol had begged off joining her conversation with Folphe, she really didn’t seem to be doing well today.

Some days, Ki!Tana’s skin barely moved away from the gray-black tone that Annette was learning meant pain and distress. Whatever was bothering the alien, though, she refused to not at least
try
to fulfill whatever she thought her contract required with regards to Annette.

“No luck,” Annette told her. “He had some suggestions, I think I want to pull you and Kulap together to see what our best option is. For now, let’s head back to the ship.”

She’d lined up several potential options for replacing what was left of her ship’s heavy lasers, but those were secondary.
Tornado
needed better engines, shields and power, in that order. Upgrading them was easy—getting them to a comparable level to the A!Tol warships Annette knew she was going to have to fight was
not
.

In an ideal world,
Tornado
would be able to outrun anything she couldn’t outfight. In her current state, she couldn’t outrun
anything
the A!Tol had in their line of battle, nor could she fight in her own weight class. Without
something
more, Annette was facing a pointless career as a powerful pirate, with no chance at liberating her world.

“Captain Bond!” a voice bellowed—in English! —across the square, shredding her distraction. “
Down!
”

The translated voice threw Annette for a moment, but her
escorts
were the best soldiers Earth had to offer, graduates of a grueling program
including
VIP protection. Even as she was starting to duck, one of the troopers slammed into her and knocked her to the ground.

Some unknown weapon coughed loudly as she hit the ground, and thick strands of sticky web slashed through the air where she’d been standing. Ki!Tana was caught, dragged to the ground by some kind of heavy capture weapon.

The SSS trooper who’d knocked Annette down was caught in the web meant for her and slammed to the ground next to the big A!Tol. The other had disappeared, diving behind cover and drawing her weapon.

Annette rolled as she hit the ground, drawing her own weapon as she came up on one knee, scanning for targets. There was nothing visible for a moment, only a scattering crowd—Tortuga’s denizens could recognize a burgeoning firefight from a
long
way away.

Then a short alien, almost human-looking in a tight black uniform but with their visible skin covered in fine blue fur, emerged from the crowd with a large-bored shotgun. It was trained directly on Annette, but she’d been watching for an attack and reacted faster.

The twelve millimeter automatic coughed four times before the alien could fire its own weapon, the heavy slugs working their way diagonally up the creature’s torso. The blue-furred alien went one way in a spray of blood and the weapon went the other way.

Another weapon cracked simultaneously, a double tap from the SSS trooper putting down a second alien Annette had missed.

“Get to cover!” the trooper snapped. “I’ll cover you.”

Annette retreated as more of the blue-furred aliens emerged, tucking herself into the doorway of Folphe’s business. The second wave were not
nearly
as determined to take anyone alive, and bullets began to slam into the doorframe.

She took a deep breath, leaned around the frame and returned fire. Her first shot missed but her second took one of the aliens in the shoulder. She ducked back behind her narrow cover before she saw the result, but heard the double crack of her trooper firing again in the aliens’ distraction.

Then a terrifying
howling
noise echoed through the streets, followed by rapid gunfire from unfamiliar weapons. Without gunfire hitting her own position, she swung out to cover the street—if someone was helping her, she wasn’t going to leave them to it without returning the favor!

A half-dozen Rekiki had joined the fight, taking cover around corners and firing on the blue aliens with deadly accurate submachine-gun fire. The attackers were trying to take cover against the new arrivals—which allowed Annette and the standing SSS trooper to open up on them again.

Several more of the aliens went down, surprisingly human-like blood scattering across the street, then the survivors bolted. Moving with an unexpected speed, half a dozen of them managed to disappear into the gap between two cargo containers before any of Annette’s allies could bring them down.

They left seven dead lying in the streets behind them, and Annette turned her attention to their unexpected rescuers.

She somehow wasn’t surprised to find Tellaki leading the small party of Rekiki toward her across the surprise battlefield.