The Terran Privateer (33 page)

“How?” he asked, not bothering to pretend he didn’t know what she meant.

“There is always a Resistance,” Medit! told him. “We have swum these currents before; we know their rocks and reefs. All sapients are different, and yet so often very similar. We know how to handle armed rebellion.

“But this represents corruption within our own ranks,” she admitted. “These people could only have been kidnapped by the officers and soldiers of our invasion force. Sadly, they have almost certainly been removed from Earth and funneled into the supply chain already.”

“The supply chain?” McQueen demanded. “What has happened to my brother? My husband?!”

“Kanzi slavers operate in our space despite our best efforts,” Medit! said quietly. “They believe that other bipeds were put in this universe to serve them, and would likely happily purchase your people as ‘exotics’.

“I cannot guarantee that we will find your family,” the Governor told McQueen. “I
will
swear to you, upon the honor of my Empress, that we will find those who stole them. We will move the stars and seas to try to find your family and the other victims.

“We swore protection for Terra when we came here,” Medit! reminded them. “If that oath has been forsworn by our own soldiers, I will hunt them. I will break them. If any power in this universe can return your family to you, we will.

“And if we cannot, I swear to you we will avenge them.”

Four weeks was a
long
time to sit still, even on a station with as many and varied entertainments as Tortuga. Those entertainments seemed to be keeping Annette’s crew busy, though her own complete lack of funds had dramatically limited her own ability to enjoy herself.

Despite all of the work,
Tornado
’s crew compartments had been shifted around in one single piece, and her artificial gravity was efficient enough that there hadn’t even been a spilled drink during the process. Annette had remained aboard through almost the entire work, quietly watching video feeds from her office.

Part of her felt guilty. Every day she spent sitting in dry dock, doing nothing, was a day Earth remained under the heel of an alien overlord. Every day she was here was a day she was asking her crew to spend away from their families and their homes for no certain goal.

But they needed the upgrades, and every day they were away from Earth
at all
was the same. In quiet moments like this, as she sat alone in her office, it was easy to admit that she didn’t
have
a plan. Not one she believed in.

The only plan she had was to steal technology and plans for technology from the A!Tol and funnel it back to Earth, where hopefully the Weber Network could do something with it. She didn’t have schematics for the Laian tech, so that didn’t work, but
Tornado
’s upgrades would finally put her in the same weight class as the A!Tol Navy.

Capturing military logistics vessels and civilian ships wouldn’t get her what she needed. She could buy some of the schematics here on Tortuga, but anything she bought would be inferior to the aliens’ top-line military gear—even more so once the Network managed to somehow assemble a hidden yard to
build
anything and finished building ships in secret.

Plus, the more she learned of the Kanzi—and of Tortuga itself, for that matter!—the more she realized driving the A!Tol out would only be the beginning. If they drove the Imperium out, the Kanzi would try and move in. If the Kanzi didn’t…the pirates and raiders who operated through Tortuga would be perfectly willing to raid a weak independent world for slaves and resources.

Even if she somehow managed to free Earth, they wouldn’t magically be stronger than they had been before. And freeing Earth wouldn’t be without a cost. Whatever fleet they built would take losses, have damaged ships.

She could free her world from one conqueror only to make them vulnerable to another.

A pile of money so large she could barely comprehend it had allowed her to upgrade her ship to be able to take on any A!Tol ship in her own weight range and win, but she only had one ship. The Imperium and their enemies had hundreds.

The screen in front of her showed Crew workers and drones closing up the gaps around the last of
Tornado
’s new proton beams. They were slightly ahead of schedule and would finish everything up in the next day or so.

But Captain Annette Bond had to admit, to herself if no one else, that she wasn’t quite sure what to
do
once her ship was ready for war again.

#

Annette’s brainstorming session, an attempt to find a solution to her problems that had once again devolved into brooding, was interrupted by a chime on her communicator.

“Captain, this is Chan,” her communication officer told her brightly. The woman had been
far
more cheerful since she and the chief engineer had settled into a quietly solid relationship. Annette, with her lack of available options, was quietly envious of the two women’s obvious luck and contentment.

And surprised, since she doubted they would even have looked at each other without being stranded light-years and light-years from Sol.

“What is it, Yahui?” she asked.

“We have a caller for you,” Chan reported. “Video link, from the Captain of the new ship that just arrived last night: an Indiri named Karaz Forel.”

Annette sat up straighter.
That
was the man the first yardmaster she’d spoken to had said could get her recent A!Tol military schematics—those and exotic slaves, which weren’t much use to her.

“What was his ship?” she asked. “I didn’t pay that much attention, to be honest.”

“I’ll forward you Rolfson’s assessment,” Chan promised. “She’s a heavy, though: even bigger than
Tornado
and a nasty pile of scrap.”

“I’ll take a look,” Annette said. “You may as well put Captain Forel through. Visual to the wallscreen in my office, please.”

She’d been using the screen as a pseudo-window, looking through the video feeds at the work being done on her ship. Now she quickly made sure her uniform and braided blond hair were straight, and faced the screen as it flickered and then formed into the image of the first Indiri she’d ever taken a solid look at.

The translators the humans used had originally been built for Indiri, and so her eyes were drawn first to Karaz Forel’s ears. They looked surprisingly humanlike, despite having black skin and emerging from a broad, wide-mouthed face covered in slickly moist short red fur.

Despite the fur, the Indiri reminded her of nothing so much as a frog. Big bulging eyes protruded from the wide triangular head, and a long tongue flickered around the alien’s disturbingly open, dark-interiored, mouth.

“Captain Karaz Forel,” she greeted him. By now she had a
lot
of practice at not letting her initial reaction to strange aliens show. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Captain Bond of
Tornado
,” he returned the greeting. “You have made quite an impression on Tortuga. I always fear when I return that I will find the entire star system gone, but the havoc this time is almost as impressive! I wanted to meet the spawn-source of such chaos.”

“I’m certainly not able to destroy stars, Captain Forel,” Annette told the pirate captain. “Otherwise, I am as you see: a privateer in command of a handful of ships. Beyond that”—she smiled—“my secrets are my own.”

Forel’s long tongue flickered in a twisting spiral accompanied by a sharp barking noise. She
thought
he was laughing. It was always hard to tell, and the translator didn’t tend to concern itself with anything but words.

“It is the A!Tol I fear would destroy this star,” he warned her. “It is within their power and they wisely fear the Laian exiles of the Crew. I do not mean to swim into your secrets, Captain Bond. Your ship and her exploits are impressive.”

“We have worked hard and achieved much,” Annette said carefully. The A!Tol could destroy star systems? She was going to have to find out if the alien was being metaphorical. If not…that was something
else
to consider in her strategies.

“Indeed. Wisdom and firepower create many opportunities, do they not?” Forel asked. “My…wise friends in the A!Tol Navy have delivered such an opportunity to me, Captain Bond, but I fear I lack the firepower to fully swim the currents.”

“There are many ships here open for hire, I presume,” she pointed out. “
Tornado
is but one ship. My scout ships aren’t worth much in a fight.”

“And most of the pirates here are not worth much more,” the Indiri agreed. “With
Tornado
matched to my
Subjugator,
they will be
useful
, but without
Tornado,
every ship in Tortuga would not be enough.”

“Unless you could recruit the Crew.”

“Unless I could recruit the Crew,” he allowed. “Which we both know will not happen. Tradition says the heavies split half the spoils, Captain,” he told her. “The other pirates share the rest amidst them, but you and I would walk away with a quarter of the prize each. Hear me out, Captain Bond.”

She wanted to shut the disturbingly moist alien down and send him on his way. Forel was a slaver, the type of sapient who would capture others and force them into servitude for his own profit—the
name of his ship
said as much.

But.

The sales of their cargo and prizes had ended lower than she’d hoped or Ondu had predicted. They’d covered the payments to the Crew, but only because Annette’s senior officers didn’t have much more use for the money than she did. They’d pooled their funds, made the last payment on the upgrades, and covered the maintenance fees, docking fees, and food resupply.

But now not only was Annette broke and the flotilla account empty, she owed her senior officers over a million marks. She wasn’t, quite, desperate—but a score large enough that Forel would accept a quarter would rebuild their accounts, enable them to buy the tech to deliver to Earth so that
Tornado
wouldn’t stand alone against the A!Tol.

“All right,” she said finally. “You have my attention, Captain Forel.”

The wide mouth opened even farther, thick lips pulling back disgustingly to reveal rows of deadly sharp teeth in a disturbing attempt at a smile—and how did Forel know humans well enough to make even that pathetic attempt at the gesture?

With a gesture of a hand she half-expected to be webbed, Forel brought up a star chart of the region.

“The A!Tol maintain a series of logistics bases along the border with the Kanzi,” he explained swiftly, highlighting a number of stars in green. “This one is their newest in this sector, positioned to support their operation against your system.” The farthest green star along the spiral arm flashed.

“They have completed the full supply loadout for the facility,” he noted. “Food, missiles, repair parts, molecular circuitry cores—everything you captured on your way to Tortuga, in even vaster quantities. Because piracy in this sector has grown worse lately, with some high-profile captures, they have pulled a lot of ships back to the main Navy base in the region, here at Kimar.”

A star flashed red. It was the same one their intel said was the Navy base where Earth’s conqueror, Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh, was based.

“The logistics base has significant
fixed
defenses, but I have acquired the codes for the orbital constellation,” Forel noted. “There are also a cruiser and several destroyers. Even with the control codes, I cannot take even the cruiser on my own.

“But with
two
heavies,” he gestured to Annette, “we can blow the constellation, trap the defending ships, and take control of the system. The loot from a Navy logistics depot will set up every being involved as a king, swimming in females or jewels or whatever they choose!”

He was practically…no, he
was
salivating at the thought. She wasn’t sure if it was Indiri in general or just Forel who was this disgusting. She had her suspicions, though, and they were relatively complimentary to the species.

“That’s a lot of cargo,” she pointed out carefully. “That won’t fit on the pirate ships.”

“The choicest loot will,” Forel replied. “For the rest, the base is supplied with a small fleet of automated ships, designed to deliver cargo to formations in need as quickly as possible. We will load the rest onto those and send them to Tortuga to be sold and divided.

“Even a quarter of this will make you and me rich beyond dreams, Captain Bond,” he told her. “But if you need more incentive…”

She waited in silence. It was a lucrative operation, one that could set her up to pull a lot of resources Earth’s way, but she wasn’t sure that she wanted to work with Karaz Forel.

She wasn’t sure she
could
work with Karaz Forel.

“I’m listening,” she said shortly.

“I know from Yardmaster Folphe that you are looking for schematics of military hardware,” he noted. “Shields, missiles, proton beams—I’m guessing you humans have a hidden shipyard somewhere.”

Annette said nothing. He was far closer to the truth than she liked, though she
did
like where his hint was going.

“I have the latest schematics of A!Tol military hardware, acquired from my…wise friends in the Navy,” Forel told her. “While those schematics are
worth
much, let’s be honest,
copying
them doesn’t
cost
much. If you sign on to this operation, I will back your twenty-five percent share, I will bring the codes for the defense constellation,
and
I will give you the full schematics for the latest generation of A!Tol weapons, engines, power generators…and the cruisers and super-battleships they mount them on.”

His horrible fake smile appeared again as she blinked at that.

“You have not even
met
their super-battleships yet,” he pointed out. “Just their battleships. Just
one
super-battleship would make
everyone
hesitate to tangle with Earth. I do not know if whatever yard you have hidden in murky waters could build it, but the designs may have value regardless.”