The Terran Privateer (32 page)

#

From Amy McQueen’s wide eyes as they were loaded on to the shuttle, she’d never ridden in a spacecraft before, let alone an alien one. Even now, most people on Earth had never truly left the surface of their planet, though one of the things the Cherbourg industrial plant had been supposed to manufacture was small-scale interface drive units to help change that.

And now it was gone. Jean still had his UESF communicator, though it was in many ways worse than a civilian handset now that it had to run on the same networks. Its unrolled screen, though, showed him all he needed to know.

Cherbourg was the worst, fires still raging through the industrial site. Reporters were desperately trying to assess casualties even as mixed Imperial and human teams worked to contain and suppress the fires. The only difference from before the invasion was the lack of ambulances with brightly flashing lights—night-black military shuttles waited to whisk the injured away to A!Tol ship hospitals as soon as they were rescued from the rubble.

The shuttles were designed to be intimidating, but today, their speed would save lives.

Across the Channel, in London, fires were rising from City Hall. None of the reporters were sure if the London Assembly had been meeting when the bombs had gone off, but they were reporting on rumors saying an A!Tol had been meeting with the Mayor at the time.

North America. South America. Africa. Asia. Every continent had seen at least one attack, most of them two, in the two hours since Cherbourg had been blown to hell. The Weber Protocol–spawned Resistance Network had turned to their job with a vengeance—and a level of violence that sickened Jean.

“The Governor is going to speak,” Kital told Jean moments before the news feeds he was watching lit up with the same announcement. A few seconds later, the cameras cut to the many-tentacled alien, standing behind a podium with no labels or symbols.

Medit! was larger than many A!Tol Jean had met, though most of Earth didn’t have the experience to judge. When he’d met her, her skin had been a neutral gray through their entire conversation, but that self-control had apparently fled her tonight. While her tentacles remained neutral gray, the bullet shape of her torso glittered in orange, purple, and black.

It wasn’t a pleasant set of colors to human eyes, and he doubted the emotions it represented were any better.

“People of Terra,” she began, her words being replaced by the translator box she wore on her chest. “Today, we have seen a grievous assault on A!Tol personnel across your planet and the destruction of several facilities meant to bring your medicine and industry closer to Imperial standards.

“I must note that in many cases, warnings were delivered to the targets sufficiently in advance to prevent massive collateral damage. Many people are alive who would not be if these attackers had not taken these steps.

“We are uncertain of the total death toll. More information will be provided to the local media as we learn it.

“Given the scale of these attacks, I must assure you that all of our resources will be dedicated to bringing the perpetrators to justice,” Medit! told the cameras. “We will find the guilty and punish them. We can do no less. We will do no more.

“The innocent have nothing to fear. The guilty should start watching the shadows.”

The video feed cut off, Jean’s news feed disintegrating into rapidly assembling articles and live analyst feeds.

“You may want to close that and look out the window,” Kital told him. “I know you fought them, but I don’t think you’ve seen one of our battleships up close.”

The news media remained surprisingly open and free under Earth’s new management, and had happily informed everyone that two A!Tol battleships remained in orbit. It appeared that the Governor had retreated aboard one at the beginning of the attacks, and that was where Jean and McQueen were being taken.

He heard McQueen inhale sharply next to him. Her father had served on Earth’s first battleship, but that would have been smaller than an A!Tol
cruiser
, let alone this leviathan of the stars. The ship was two kilometers long, a multi-megaton monster with an odd organic feel to it. In many ways, it almost resembled an A!Tol, with a central hull and a number of nacelles reaching forward with her energy weapons.

It was painted bright white, glittering in the Sun as the shuttle whipped around it at a mind-boggling speed now they were clear of atmosphere.

“
Shield of Innocents
,” Kital said quietly. “She is an older ship, but her crew will die before she leaves this system to the Kanzi. Someday, you may give us credit for that, Admiral Villeneuve.”

#

Jean and McQueen were hustled off the shuttle by their escorts, the power-armored soldiers all unhelmeted now. Without the helmets, the distinctions between the various bipeds became a lot clearer. Height was one divider, but the category of “bipedal soldier” that made up a surprisingly large chunk of the alien ground troops on Earth appeared to include everything from aliens with three eyes, no visible ears, and skin that looked like soft metal, to squat creatures with red fur and wide, toad-like faces.

The rest of the company were saurian centaurs like Kital, all members of the same species with different colors and complexions of scales.

The escort dissipated quickly as they moved into the ship, most of the troops heading in different directions while Kital and a single other saurian trooper led the two humans deeper into the ship.

The interior of the vessel was much smoother than an equivalent UESF ship would have been. Jean’s practiced eye easily picked out where access panels had been tucked away in the smooth lines, but the calm white walls and concealed panels were a far cry from the plain steel and open hatches of Earth’s crude ships.

Shield of Innocents
’ shuttle bay was a busy swarm of small spacecraft arriving and leaving, many of the arrivals disgorging injured human civilians into the hands, tentacles, claws, and other manipulators of the waiting medical teams.

“Each of the battleships can handle three thousand wounded,” Jean’s escort told them quietly. “The cruisers another three thousand between them. The less critically injured will probably get shifted to planetside facilities relatively quickly, but since the worst cases will need to be treated up here, we’re planning to bring all of the wounded up for triage.”

The Governor may have given the Resistance credit for trying to minimize collateral damage, but that likely meant there were only thousands of injured instead of thousands of dead. The Imperial troops and government appeared to be pulling out all of the stops in disaster relief in response.

Jean sighed as they left the shuttle bay, shaking his head. Every target he’d seen made sense, and this was exactly the kind of operation the Resistance had been created for, but instead of making the A!Tol look
bad,
they appeared to have handed them the propaganda coup of the century.

The worst part was that he wasn’t even entirely sure the A!Tol were helping people for any kind of ulterior motive. They really did seem to be just…trying to help.

“The Governor is waiting,” Kital told him, bringing them to a door even Jean had almost missed. “Should your companion wait with me?”

“No,” Jean said shortly. “The Governor needs to see Miss McQueen’s data. I’m just the door opener.”

With a firm nod to the panicked-looking young woman he’d dragged this far, Jean Villeneuve stepped through the door into the office of the A!Tol Governor of Earth.

#

The office didn’t look like a permanent fixture for Medit!. There were no decorations. A utilitarian desk and couch had been added for the Governor to work from, and someone had recently provided two human chairs for her guests. A massive screen was set up next to the desk and couch, and the Governor was scrolling through dozens of images at a time, a haptic field over the screen responding to commands from her fluttering manipulator tentacles.

“Ah, Admiral Villeneuve,” she greeted him. “And Miss Amy McQueen.”

“Not an Admiral anymore,” Jean reminded the Governor. “Not an officer of any kind.”

“We could fix that,” Medit! pointed out. “My staff could have an appropriate uniform and insignia done up by the end of the day. Lesser Fleet Lord would be a small demotion for you, equivalent to your Vice Admiral, I think, but give some time for retraining and we could have you in command of your own cruiser squadron inside a Terran year.”

He shook his head.

“No offense, Governor, but I have no intention of serving the people who conquered my world,” he said dryly. “I have to decline your generous offer.”

Her skin was still torn up in colors of orange, purple, and black—but streaks of blue and red appeared as she offered and he responded. Jean wondered if the Imperial databases that had been made publically available on Earth included a translation guide for their conquerors’ skin tones. He would have looked it up if he hadn’t expected to remain retired.

“Shame,” she told him.

“Every time I talk to one of you tentacled
bouffon
, I feel like I’m being tested,” Jean pointed out grumpily. “I’m just here to deliver Miss McQueen—something is going on on Earth that either says you’re
lying
to us or you have a problem.”

Medit!’s skin flashed bright orange before quickly returning to its mottled tones.

“The Imperium does not, as a rule, lie,” she said, her translator picking up a level of flatness that Jean suspected was not due to a software failure.

“We
are
testing you, Jean Villeneuve,” she continued after a long moment of silence. “In time, we may even tell you why. What did Miss McQueen find that was so important?”

At least they weren’t going to
lie
to him, he guessed. He gestured the young woman forward.

“Tell her what you told me,” he instructed.

Haltingly, McQueen started. Medit! waited calmly for her to finish, and the young lawyer rapidly regained her confidence, likely mentally classifying the Governor in the same category as a human judge.

When she finished the recitation she’d given Jean, the A!Tol gestured with a manipulator tentacle.

“May I see this data?”

McQueen glanced at Jean, who still had the original chip she’d given him, then produced another copy of the chip from her suit jacket.
Smart
girl.

Medit! took the chip and dropped it onto a small plate next to the big screen that Jean had completely missed. The plate lit up in colors beneath the chip, flickering for a couple of moments. The datachip was designed to be accessed by slotting it into a reader, but it appeared that the A!Tol tech it was sitting on could read it regardless as a directory appeared on the big screen.

All of the labels were in English, but the Governor flipped an icon from the screen onto the directory and everything changed over into a completely different iconography and language—the computer was translating the Terran files, file structure and even language in real time.

Jean was impressed. The top-line computer hardware Nova Industries had acquired for the XC units like
Tornado
probably had the processing power to do that, but nobody on Earth had written
software
capable of that. And this was just a secondary demand on the battleship’s computers.

As video streams and text started to flash onto the screen, it rapidly began collating past what Jean could follow. He suspected there had to some kind of AI routine that was organizing the data in a manner Medit! was used to working with, but it was still impressive how quickly the A!Tol cut through all of the data, her skin shifting to darker and darker orange as she worked.

“Miss McQueen,” the Governor said, the translator applying an impressive amount of graveness to her voice. “May I keep this chip?”

“I have copies,” McQueen said calmly.

“I would hope so,” Medit! agreed, a momentary flash of blue cutting through her current burnt umber tone. “This should
not
be happening,” she noted. “We do
not
engage in kidnapping or murders. It undermines the entire uplift effort.”

Uplift
. Jean didn’t think the translator had chosen that word at random. Uplift was…very different than conquest, if they meant it they way he suspected they did. Of course, what the
colonizer
thought was ‘uplifting’ could be very different than what the
colonized
would think.

Medit! stepped away from the haptic interface, her black eyes turning back to the two humans.

“You were correct to bring this to me, Jean Villeneuve,” she told him. “This is a greater threat to the integration of Earth than the Weber Network attacks.”

Jean tried not to wince at her revelation that she knew about the Weber Protocols. He probably failed.
That
was unexpected—all of the records he’d been aware of were destroyed.