The Terran Privateer (37 page)

The amphibious alien wilted and slowly backed away, leading his troops out of the room.

“Don’t pick fights, Tellaki,” she told him quietly. She wasn’t willing to order her people to stand by and watch murder, but stopping
all
of them would start a fight with the rest of the pirates they didn’t need. “I won’t ask you to stand by, but don’t go looking for fights. We still need to work with these…people.”

“I will see these prisoners safely to the hangar, where Guo can protect them,” he replied. “We will take what prisoners we can, but I accept your command, Honored Captain.”

Annette felt strangely dirty. This very base had enabled the conquest of Earth. There was no question that these people were her enemies. It still felt wrong to let her “allies” carry out mass murder so long as it wasn’t directly in front of her people.

Right now, however, she needed the allies more than she needed to feel clean.

“Fire in the hole!”

The moment after Hughes gave the radioed warning, James felt the ground and walls shudder from the impact of the explosives—and
keep
shuddering for several seconds.

“How big a charge
was
that?” he demanded.

The demo specialist shrugged, the gesture barely visible in power armor.

“It was a
very
secure door,” she replied.

Shaking his head, James gestured Ral forward, the Yin back on point as they moved deeper into the A!Tol base. Despite the impact of the explosives, Hughes’s charges had only managed to detach the door itself. It lay on the ground, a disturbingly intact, if warped, hunk of metal.

Beyond it was some kind of administration and control center, half a dozen seats for various races in front of computer screens, and a few desks with organized stacks of paper-like flimsy computers. There was no one
in
the room, however, and the screens were disabled.

It had been neatly shut down, not a result of the attack—and yet this calmly shut-down control center was behind a highly secured, guarded checkpoint and door.

“What the hell?” he murmured. Three exits. “That way,” he ordered, picking the one directly ahead. “Let’s see just what Forel’s people were looking for.”

Stepping through the door at the end of the short corridor gave James part of the answer—and sent a chill down his spine. The door opened out onto a catwalk that wrapped around a massive storage warehouse, easily a quarter-kilometer on each side.

The floor was full of…cages. Portable cells of some kind, with opaque walls but open tops to allow guards to secure them from above.
Thousands
of them.

“That is wrong,” Ral said slowly. “This is a slave-holding facility. It does not belong in an A!Tol military base!”

“Which is why it’s secured and the control center is unmanned,” James said grimly. “Are they occupied?”

All ten men, women and aliens of his HQ section were now out on the catwalk, their power-armor scanners linking together to sweep the thousands of cells for life.

“No,” he finally concluded. “That makes no sense.”

“If they were prepared for more prisoners from whatever source than they got,” Hughes said slowly, “then there are other warehouses like this.”

“We need to find them,” James ordered. “There’s an exit that way,” he said, gesturing toward a door leading off from the catwalk. “Something is
very
wrong here.”

Ral led the way once more, with the rest of the section following him—closer than doctrine called for, but James’s people were picking up the same vibe he was. Not only was something wrong, but it was
important
.

The corridor linked them to another control station. This one clearly
had
still been operational when the attack began, with two bodies lying on the floor—both A!Tol, both clearly shot at point-blank range.

“Look at where they fell,” James said softly. “They were shot in the back while at their workstations. They weren’t killed by troops from the armada. They were killed by their
coworkers
.”

“As soon as the defenses were gone,” Hughes commented. “Someone was
waiting
for our attack.”

“Check these screens,” James ordered. “One of these spaces has to be occupied.
Find it
.”

His helmet could translate the A!Tol text on the screen into English, but it was a slow process and he wasn’t practiced at it. Pophe and Ral, his two alien teammates, were
far
more practiced at it and got to work immediately.

“There are four cargo warehouses behind the security seal,” Pophe reported after a moment. “The one we passed through is the only one without life signs.” The strange mobile fungus turned its eye stalks toward James. “The other security door is open; it was not breached,” it continued. “There are power-armor units moving toward warehouse C.”

“I suspect our red-furred friend knows
exactly
what’s going on,” James observed. “Let’s go break up his party.”

#

They found the rest of the team that had been running the warehouse sector before they found Forel’s people. Five aliens—two Tosumi, two Yin, and one A!Tol—had clearly met up with Forel’s people—and then been shot down by surprise.

Unlike the execution-like murders in the control center, these were plasma bursts to the front from high-powered weaponry—plasma cannons equivalent to those James and his people were carrying.

“They were not expecting that,” Ral said softly, the Yin kneeling over the bodies of the Imperial technicians. “All were armed but never drew their weapons.”

“So Forel was working with people here and betrayed them,” James agreed. “The order wasn’t ‘no prisoners’ it was ‘no
witnesses
’.”

“That’s not good for us,” Hughes noted.

“No.” James gestured for the team to move out. “Let’s catch up to Forel’s people. This whole thing stinks, and the more we know, the better informed the
Captain
is.”

“Can’t be far,” Ral noted. “The bodies are still warm.”

They moved, another door falling behind them as they traced the path the map said would lead to one of the occupied warehouses. An icon on his helmet marked the likely location of the other pirate group as James’s people moved as quickly as they could.

Finally, they reached another catwalk, standing out above another massive array of portable cells. This time, they weren’t alone. A dozen power armored bipeds, potentially any one of a dozen or more two-legged races inside the armor, stood on top of the cells and turned to face them as they stepped out onto the catwalk.

“You are not supposed to be here,” one of them said immediately. “Leave.”

“We came down off-course by accident,” James said calmly. “We are supposed to be working together, we can help you.”

He stepped forward, trying to get a look into the cells, to see just
what
Forel was looking for that had been worth all of this trickery, deception and murder to achieve.

Twelve plasma cannons suddenly leveled themselves on his team.

“Leave,” the leader repeated. “Your help is unneeded and none of your people should be here. We will kill you if you do not go.”

James wasn’t
quite
far enough forward to see through the tops of the cages and hesitated. Instinct told him not to retreat, but if he started a firefight without a
reason
things could go very wrong. If he fired first, he would bring the entire alliance crashing down in flames.

“Wait?” a voice exclaimed from below. “Someone speaks English?! Help us! We’ve been kidnapped!”

“Be silent,” the pirate leader bellowed, his translator directly outputting English as he stomped a power armored foot on the top of the cage and pointed a plasma weapon down at the speaker. “You will learn your place.”

A sudden tiny screen flashed up in the corner of James’s visor—Kara Hughes had tossed a sensor ball, a rolling drone with a tiny camera, over the side of the catwalk. It landed with a clatter, rolling across the top of the cages and attracting
everyone’s
attention as it threw its video feed back to the Terran Special Space Service troopers.

The cages were full of people—
humans
. Ragged and exhausted-looking, manacled with chains that were primitive and out of place amidst the glittering white and complex technology of the A!Tol Imperial base.

“Yeah,” James said quietly, leveling his own plasma cannon at the pirate troops. “Not a chance in hell. Walk away or burn, but these are
our
people and I am
not
leaving them with you.”

“Wait!” the alien shouted. “Our captains are allied. This was always the—”

James’s first shot arrived before the pirate finished speaking. The plasma cannons he’d issued his people were designed for many purposes—and one of their modes was a deadly narrow beam of superheated hydrogen intended to take down power armor.

Fired by surprise, it worked like a charm. The lance of fire took the alien in the throat, burning clean through his armor and killing him before he finished the sentence.

James followed his plasma bolt over the catwalk railing, slamming down on the top of the cells with a resounding crunch. The first counter-fire went over his head as he landed, and his second shot took down another pirate trooper—and then his own people joined in.

A blast of plasma slammed into his shoulder, freezing his arm in place and spinning him backward. More fire came down from the catwalk, his people carefully sweeping the top of the cells with fire angled not to enter the cells.

The SSS officer fell off the top of the cells, slamming into the floor of the warehouse with a crushing thump before struggling back to his feet and putting a bolt of plasma through another pirate.

Then it was over, the last two pirates throwing their weapons down and raising their armored gauntlets in the air.

“Get out of the armor,” James ordered, covering them with his own weapon. “Report!”

“Ral is down, hurt bad,” Hughes report. “We lost Rogers, too.”

James nodded, swallowing his pain as he surveyed the cells around him. There were at least five thousand cells in this warehouse alone, each holding a single human in barely tolerable conditions.

“Ma’am,” he said quietly as he raised Annette. “We have at least
fifteen thousand
human prisoners in this base—and Forel’s people were trying to pull them out as slaves.”

“I was watching,” she said grimly. “
Tornado
landing forces, you have new orders: secure the base—from
everyone
.”

It might not say particularly pleasant things about Annette Bond’s character, she reflected, that she was prepared to let Forel and the other pirates murder an unknown but large number of nonhumans so long as they didn’t do it where she could see it, but as soon as
humans
were involved, she was opposed.

“Hail
Subjugator
,” she ordered. “That red-furred toad better have a
damn
good explanation.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Chan replied crisply. Something about the discovery of human prisoners—and
finally
pushing back against the scum they’d allied with—had brought a renewed energy to
Tornado
’s bridge.

Forel usually replied instantly, but this time a light flashed on Annette’s console, indicating that they were pinging the other ship without response for several long seconds.

Paranoia flashed through her mind a moment too late and she began to order Cole to initiate evasive maneuvers—and then bright warning lights exploded across her screens and the entire multi-million-ton mass of
Tornado
lurched in space and rang like a bell.

“Evasive maneuvers!” she finally ordered. “Cole, get us some distance. Ki!Tana, get me shields. Harold, what the
hell
just happened?”

“
Subjugator
opened fire,” her tactical officer replied. “We took twenty missiles directly to the hull. We’ve lost two of the proton beams and at least four launchers are disabled, but we’re still here.”

“Son of a
bitch
,” Annette snapped. “Return fire! Beams and missiles; get the defender drones out.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Even as Rolfson had been explaining, Cole Amandine had been opening the distance from the other pirate ships at fifty-five percent of lightspeed, putting the full force of their new sprint mode into getting them more range.

“I have multiple launches from across the armada,” Rolfson reported. “One hundred plus missiles inbound. Rainshower defender drones are deployed.”

The drones tripled the amount of plasma cannon the cruiser had to defend herself, and staying inside her shield perimeter meant they were as protected as the rest of the ship.

“Is
anyone
backing us?” Annette demanded.

“No one is responding to hails,” Chan reported. “The entire armada is now painting us with targeting sensors.”

“I suspect Forel discussed this with the other captains as a contingency scenario,” Ki!Tana told them, her flattened translator voice sounding disturbingly calm. “He has likely offered to split our share with them if we are destroyed.”

“
Fuck
this for a game of soldiers,” Annette snarled, tracing the white lines of the proton beams lighting up the screen as her ship fired on
Subjugator
.

“Ma’am?” Rolfson asked in confusion.

A moment later, the salvo from the rest of the armada ran into the first blasts of plasma from the rainshower defense suite and evaporated into debris and vaporized metal.

“Kurzman, take over the rainshowers. Rolfson, pass beam control to me,” she ordered. “You handle missiles—target the rest of the armada while I take
Subjugator
with the beams. When push comes to shove, we’re
soldiers
, people,” she told her bridge crew. “So, let’s kill some damn pirates, shall we?”

#

Even moving at over half of lightspeed, they’d barely opened a full light-second’s worth of distance before
Subjugator
and the rest of the armada had come out after them. Relative velocity and faster weapons meant
their
missiles were hitting home faster than their pursuers’ missiles, and Rolfson took merciless advantage of that.

Annette had four proton beams left and set to using them with a will, burning into
Subjugator
’s shields even as the pirate ship dodged around, preventing her from getting a solid beam lock.

Forel’s ship returned the favor. Even undamaged, he only had four proton beams of his own and it took well over ten seconds for
Subjugator
’s energy weapons to come into play. The Indiri pirate clearly hadn’t expected
Tornado
to survive a point-blank missile salvo.

Now the Terran experimental cruiser, upgraded with stolen A!Tol and purchased Laian technology, found itself facing an entire
fleet
. The rainshower defender drones had shredded the first missile salvo, but the armada had a
lot
of launchers and beam weapons.

Tornado
’s shields flickered, warning icons flashing on Annette’s screens as several sections began to weaken under proton beams and laser strikes. The icons faded as Amandine rotated the ship, spinning the cruiser to spread the damage.

“Prioritize the ships with proton beams,” she ordered Rolfson as the defense drones’ plasma packets turned a second, larger missile salvo to vapor.

“On their way,” her tactical officer responded grimly. “Queueing targets for second salvo.”

Twenty missiles sliced into the pirates, directed at a single target. None of the pirate ships had any kind of active defenses, relying entirely on their shields. The biggest weakness of that defense was that they couldn’t support each other—and the missiles split into four successive waves that slammed into a single target.

The largest of the lighter pirates was half again the size of an A!Tol destroyer at just under five hundred meters long. With more cargo space than a destroyer, she was more lightly armed but still the heaviest-armed vessel of the armada after
Subjugator
herself, with a single proton beam that was actually
more
powerful than
Subjugator
’s beams.

Five missiles, even traveling at seventy-five percent of the speed of light, were no threat to her shields. A
second
five missiles, hitting in roughly the same spot, set her shields to flickering, sending whirls of glittering energy across the sphere defending the ship.

The third wave of five missiles
barely
failed to penetrate but ripped gaping wide holes in the pirate’s shields, spots of blackness in the coruscating glitter of the shield—spots that the
last
wave of five missiles, arriving fractions of a second later, slipped through with deadly precision.

A single massive explosion marked the end of
that
ship, and more missiles followed on, targeting other ships with beam weapons that continued to actually threaten
Tornado
. Harold Rolfson cut his way through the pirate armada with hammerblows of fire that ripped apart ship after ship.

Annette wasn’t having nearly as much luck.
Subjugator
was ignoring the rest of the pirates, dancing around
Tornado
’s proton beams even as she returned fire. Both ships were hit, but their shields shed the focused beams of charged particles, only slowly weakening under the pressure.

Two ships blew up simultaneously, the last of the proton beam–armed pirates, and Annette
felt
the tempo of the battle change. Several of the smaller pirate ships, already hanging back in the armada’s sorry excuse for a formation, stopped pretending and ran for it.

“Rolfson,” she snapped. “Don’t let them run. If we’re going to gut piracy in this region, let’s do it right.”

Her tactical officer nodded, a disturbingly cold smile on his face as he sequenced his missiles.

“Ki!Tana.” Annette turned to her alien companion. “Do we have detailed-enough scans to pick up
Subjugator
’s reactors? Can we disable like we did
Fang
?”

“She has an antimatter core,” the A!Tol replied slowly. “Hitting that would blow her to hell—but it can only energize her beams, her shields,
or
her drives. Take out her fusion cores and Forel is out of options.”

“Download the details to my console,” Annette ordered. “Kurzman, I need the rainshowers. We’re going to have to take the next salvo on the shields—Metharom, be prepared for damage control!”

A moment later, nine blinking red lights appeared on her schematic of
Subjugator
, and a set of control icons for the rainshower defenders and their plasma cannons appeared on her command chair screens. It took her a moment to familiarize herself with them and find the option she needed—a moment in which
Subjugator
’s beams found and
held
Tornado
.

“Breaking!” Amandine snapped, twisting the ship into a spiral that would have killed them all if
Tornado
’s interface drive weren’t inertialess. The shield failed, a localized collapse that allowed the proton beams through—but the navigator had acted in time and one beam missed completely.

The other scattered along the top of the hull, reflecting from the compressed-matter armor but also destroying the emitters for one of
Tornado
’s proton beams and an entire bank of rainshower defender cannons.

Annette reprogrammed her attack in silence, hoping she still had enough, and then hit
execute
.

Every plasma cannon on her ship and the attending drones swiveled to one target and fired. The defenders weren’t designed as offensive weapons. Even the relatively light armor the pirate ships carried would prevent them damaging the ship—but firing
every
cannon created a wall of superheated plasma that slammed into
Subjugator
’s already-depleted shields.

The pirate heavy’s shields collapsed. They wouldn’t be down for long—but that was
exactly
what Annette had been planning for. Each of her remaining proton beams fired rapidly: narrow beams, short pulses lasting less than a tenth of a second. Each beam mount had three targets.

A moment later,
Subjugator
’s shields came back up…but her drive didn’t and her beams stopped firing.

“Her reactors are down,” Ki!Tana snapped. “What now?”

“Amandine, Rolfson,” Annette ordered. “Take us in on the rest of the Armada—let’s finish these bastards.

“Then I want to have a chat with Karaz Forel.”

#

Warning icons flashed across Annette’s command chair screens and the bridge’s main screen, warning of shield overload as dozens of missiles she’d chosen to ignore slammed home. Reversing course took them deeper into that swarm and the warnings flashed from orange to red, “shield failure imminent” flashing across the bottom of Annette’s screens.

With the rainshower defenders returned to their true purpose, however, the impacts stopped. Instead of taking eighty missiles on the shield and hoping, the rapidly cycling plasma shotguns were blasting seventy-plus of them to vapor, leaving only two or three of each salvo to hit
Tornado
’s weakened but intact shield.

Still in control of the proton beams, Annette linked Rolfson’s targeting data to her screen and went after the ships his latest salvos were ignoring. The smaller pirate ships were
all
running now, sending missiles back at the Terran cruiser in a desperate attempt to buy her time.

If any of them had run at the beginning, she would have been more merciful. But every single one of those ships had joined Forel in turning on her. The Indiri had clearly had his contingency plan in place from the beginning, waiting for Annette to step out of line—and not a single sapient from the crews of over
fifty
ships had so much as tried to sell that information to her.

Her proton beams cut into the heavier ships, focusing fire on the handful of surviving vessels that could, if you squinted, be warships. Their shields couldn’t stand up to Rolfson’s missile salvos, let alone the proton beams she lashed them with. Ship after ship detonated as
Tornado
wreaked her revenge.

“I have hyperspace portals opening,” Rolfson announced. “The lead elements are escaping. What are your orders?”

Annette looked at the tactical plot, with its dozens of icons marking wrecked ships and dead crews, and finally,
finally
swallowed her anger. Fifty-two pirate ships had attacked the logistics base.
Forty
were debris and corpses.

“Maintain fire,” she ordered, “but let any of them that reach the portals go. Our business is here with Forel, not in hyperspace with them.”

Leaving the rest of the space battle to Rolfson, Annette opened a channel back to the logistics base behind her.

“Major Wellesley, what’s your status?” she asked.

“Spread
very
thin,” his perfectly cultured English accent replied a moment later. An echo of plasma fire and screaming followed him down the line. “Fortunately, it turns out the prisoners whose cells we picked a fight on top of were a couple of companies of the US and Chinese Armies. They have no training on plasma weapons, but
damn,
are they enthusiastic students.