The Terran Privateer (25 page)

“Your timing is impeccable,” Annette told her alien ex-crewmembers. “Thank you.”

“We heard that the Kanzi had brought a hunting party onto the station, Honored Captain,” the Rekiki leader told her. “Your species were the only new bipeds aboard. Given their…tastes, it was inevitable they would be hunting you.”

The alien bent his upper torso to spit on the blue-furred corpses as one of his companions cut Ki!Tana and the SSS escort free.

“You are an Honored Captain,” Tellaki said calmly. “We cannot serve you, as you are not Rekiki, but you have done fairly by us and we could not allow you or yours to be seized without intervention.” He paused. “I have few friends aboard Tortuga,” he continued after a moment. “I was only able to locate you and Major Wellesley. If you have other groups aboard the station, I may have missed them.”

“Damn,” Annette said mildly, pulling her communicator open. Right now, the device was linked into Tortuga’s network—but she didn’t
need
to link the network. The Terran-built devices were significantly more powerful than most of the communication relays used on the network.

“Shore parties, go Code Red and report,” she snapped into the communicator.

“This is Wellesley with party four,” the Special Space Service reported. “Was about to call you, ma’am. Local tipped us off that we’re being surrounded; about to tip the waitress
very
nicely and put some holes in some slavers.”

Annette waited. They had two more parties—another dozen humans and three aliens—aboard the station. Code Red should have them reporting immediately.

Only silence answered.

“Party two, party three, report,” she snapped. No one responded.

“James, you have local support inbound,” she told her ground force commander. “I suspect our furry friends will disappear once Tellaki’s people show up. I’m linking in to Rolfson; stay on the line.”

She tapped a series of commands on the communicator. The first formed a direct link to Wellesley, ignoring the local net. The second dropped her communicator completely off the local net, and the third raised
Tornado
on a priority channel.

“Commander, this is Bond.”

“What do you need, Captain?” her tactical officer replied instantly. He had the watch and clearly had jumped on her call—shore leave watches were boring at best.

“I need you to ping the communicators for
everyone
we sent aboard station,” she ordered. “Parties two and three are not responding; I need to know where they are.”

“One second,” Rolfson said crisply, his voice deadly serious. “I have your party with you and Major Wellesley’s party together…”

“Where are party two and three?” she demanded.

“Looks like their communicators are together,” he answered after a moment. “And nowhere near where either party reported they were heading.”

“I need a location,” Annette told him. “Have the Troop Captains start prepping a retrieval force—Major Wellesley, I’ll meet you on the way.”

“Transmitting now.”

“Ma’am,” the Servicewoman standing next to Annette murmured. “We have visitors.”

Looking away from her communicator,
Tornado
’s Captain spotted two Yin soldiers in the red bandoliers of the Crew rapidly approaching.

The tall blue-skinned aliens surveyed the corpses of the Kanzi as they passed, standing next to them long enough for Annette to note that the Yin’s skin was a far lighter shade of blue than the Kanzi’s fur. The Yin’s beaks and complete lack of fur made the distinction easy to draw, even if both fell into the broad category of “blue biped”.

“You are responsible for this?” one of them asked Annette flatly. Her translator had enough experience with Yin now to pick up his disdain and carry it into his tone.

“They attacked my crew in an attempt to kidnap us,” she told the Crewman. “They appear to have seized over a dozen of my other crew. Unless
you
intend to retrieve them, I suggest you deal with the corpses while I deal with
my
problem.”

“If they initiated the attack, you will have no problem,” the alien told her. “But if you initiate further violence, the Crew will be forced to become involved.”

He spoke calmly, the translator picking up his complete lack of concern about the fate of the dead sapients scattered around him or the fate of Annette’s crew. He approached her, his weapon moving to subtly track in her direction as he clearly attempted to intimidate her.

Annette slammed the flat of her hand into the barrel of his weapon—a light plasma weapon, exactly the kind of weapon no one
except
Crew was permitted aboard Tortuga—as it turned toward her, stopping its movement in mid-swing.
That
threw the big alien off-balance, allowing her to tear the gun from his blue hands, yanking him toward her by the heavy security strap.

Her elbow collided with the side of his head, snapping his beak shut with a resounding thud as the much larger alien soldier landed flat on his face.

He was, thankfully, still moving as Annette turned to face the other Yin. She couldn’t read the alien’s body language, but his complete lack of movement suggested an unwillingness to engage with her. It was dangerous to anthropomorphize aliens, but something in the cast of the Crewman’s eyes suggested that he had no issue seeing his superior brought low.

“Tell your superiors you had two choices,” she said flatly. “They could allow me to retrieve my crew or they could prevent my crew from being kidnapped by slavers. One of these is no longer an option.”

Pulling her communicator back out, she studied the location where her people appeared to be.

“James, I’m flipping you a waypoint near to where I think these bastards are,” she told Wellesley over the com. “Meet me there.”

She turned to Ki!Tana, ignoring the two Crewmembers—one of whom was attending to the other while also subtly holding him down—as she focused on her people. “Are you up for this?” she asked the A!Tol, whose skin was still gray-black with pain.

“Believe me, Captain, breaking some necks will
help
,” Ki!Tana told her. “Let’s go.”

Annette hadn’t made it more than a half-dozen steps before Tellaki blocked her way. Stopping in surprise, she looked up at the crocodile-like alien as he lowered his long,
toothy
snout to meet her gaze with jet-black eyes.

“I see you, Honored Captain,” he said, and something in the translated tone suggested that the words were important. “You would go this far”—he gestured toward the Yin soldier struggling to rise—“for your human crew?”

“I would go this far for
any
of my crew,” she snapped. “And if the nonhumans aren’t with the human crew, you’d better believe I will rip this station apart to find them.”

There was some kind of communication between Tellaki and his fellows, and then the Rekiki awkwardly sank to one knee facing her.

“Honored Captain Annette Bond, if you would have this vassal’s fealty, I would return to
Tornado
and take up service with you,” he said calmly. “My fellows would join me in this.”

“You said you could only offer fealty to a Rekiki,” she replied. She didn’t have
time
for this, but Tellaki’s dozen well-armed, experienced troopers could make the difference between life or death for her crew.

“If you will fight for the least as few would fight for the greatest, then you may as well be Rekiki,” the reptilian alien told her.

#

“Wait, the Captain did
what
?” James demanded of the Sergeant leading the Captain’s protective detail.

“Put a Crew twit who told us not to go after our people on the ground with his own gun,” the woman replied with a satisfied tone. “We’re following the bouncing ball, with the Rekiki backing us up. See you at the rendezvous.”

“Will do,” he confirmed breezily before dropping the channel and looking around at his companions, cataloging his assets and liabilities. His Troop Captains were no slouches, easily capable of carrying their weight in a firefight. His
boyfriend
, however, was a naval officer.

“Can you shoot, Pat?” he asked quietly.

“I qualify,” the cruiser’s XO confirmed. “I’m even armed, thank you, but I’m probably not the best fit for an all-out assault on an enemy position.”

“Wasn’t planning on bringing you on that part,” James admitted with a chuckle as he leaned back in his chair. The gesture might
look
casual, but it also allowed him to get a clear line of sight at one of the Kanzi aliens watching the exits. “Skipper said there was backup on its way, but these guys are getting antsy,” he noted. “They may move before our crocodilian friends arrive.”

“What are you thinking?” Sherman asked.

“If Pat is armed…” James glanced around. “We’re all armed. I do
not
care about these bastards. I want to get to our crew—and if we don’t move pretty quickly, we may not catch up to the Captain in time to back her up.”

He bared in his teeth in what someone
very
unfamiliar with humans might have called a smile.

“I have a plan.”

#

The plan started with Sherman and James wobbling their way out of the bar, incoherently singing the same song…about three beats and two octaves out from each other. They gave a
wonderful
impression of being utterly drunk.

Out of the corner of his eye, James could see the Kanzi closing in on them. He’d identified six outside the restaurant, and four were now sweeping toward him and Sherman, clearly planning on taking them with the shotgun-like webbers as soon as they were out of sight of the restaurant.

Once they started to close in, though, James intentionally fell against Sherman, engaging in a level of physical contact that would probably have got him punched out in any other circumstances. They leaned against each other, clearly holding each other up as the aliens closed.

“Now?” she whispered in his ear.

“Now,” he agreed.

Drawing each other’s weapons, they shoved themselves apart, clearing lines of fire and opening up on several
very
surprised-looking little blue aliens. By the time the Kanzi realized
anything
was going on, James had taken one step to the side to be absolutely sure of a clear shot and opened fire.

The first Kanzi went down instantly, a solid double-tap from the standard auto-pistol ripping his torso apart. The second in James’s zone managed to raise and even
fire
his webber—but rushed it, spraying the thick sticky strands across an inoffensive wall.

The alien didn’t get a chance to fire a second shot as
James’s
second double-tap took his head apart.

He didn’t check to see if Sherman had taken down her targets—if two one-hundred-and-fifty-centimeter aliens were a danger to the woman, she wouldn’t have made Troop Captain in the Special Space Service. There were at least two more Kanzi, and he needed to be sure the
rest
of his people were safe.

As James hit the ground, taking cover behind a corner, however, there was a sharp exchange of gunfire that rapidly echoed away to silence. He tapped his communicator, linking to the earbuds for his translator.

“Are we clear?”

“Three hostiles,” Troop Captain Bousaid said calmly. “Neutralized.”

He checked around the corner and surveyed the neat set of corpses where the aliens had rushed to back up their fellows—and run promptly into the prepared ambush of his Troop Captains.

“All right,” he said crisply, gesturing his people to him. “We need to move.”

“Major—looks like those friendlies finally arrived,” Sherman announced from behind him.

James turned again and found a set of six Rekiki churning down the street at a disturbingly rapid pace. They came to a halt in front of him, their gazes flicking across the Kanzi bodies.

“Apologies, Major,” the leader said through his translator. “We had further to go than we had thought—a passage we intended to use was blocked.”

“We’re fine, but it looks like two of our shore parties were captured,” James told them. “Can you help us?”

“We have decided to rejoin Honored Captain Bond’s crew, if she will have us,” the Rekiki replied. “We are with you all the way.”

The Rekiki were in light body armor and packing submachine guns. His people were in utilities and carrying sidearms. He sighed.

“We need to get the XO back to the ship,” he announced. “Guo, Bousaid,” he called his Alpha and Bravo Troop Captains over. “Escort the Commander back to
Tornado
and organize the Company to come after us if needed.”

“Yes, sir,” the two officers chorused.