The Terran Privateer (39 page)

“It rings too neatly,” he replied. “I mean…could Forel have been working with traitors in their Navy?”

“Didn’t he say something about special friends?”

James shook his head and turned back to Kashel.

“You will not be harmed,” he promised her. “But believe me, Brigade Commander, we
will
get to the bottom of this.”

Annette hid a smile when she saw Lieutenant Mosi leading the squad of armed volunteers on her shuttle. The young woman appeared to be bouncing back surprisingly well from her ordeal on Tortuga, though her Captain suspected that Mosi was hoping to be able to shoot a slaver in the face today.

They had more volunteers than they had weapons and unpowered armor, leaving Annette with only twenty-four people across two shuttles to take over an entire starship. It helped, of course, that she was leaving Rolfson behind in a position to start making even
bigger
holes in
Subjugator
if Forel started being problematic.

The trip between the two ships was uneventful, though there were a couple of heart-wrenching moments for Annette sitting in the cockpit as chunks of debris came flying at them and the pilot swerved to avoid with far too little notice. Between the wreckage of the defensive constellation, the wreckage of the A!Tol warships, and the wreckage of the pirate armada, the space around Orsav IV was getting dangerous.

The trip only lasted a few minutes, though, and Annette got a good view of
Subjugator
as they closed the last few kilometers. The big ship looked surprisingly undamaged, the pinpricks of the precisely focused proton beams that had disabled her looking almost minor from outside.

“Her shields are down and she isn’t moving,” Ki!Tana noted from behind her. “She’s either charging capacitors for something or powering her weapons.”

“I’m guessing weapons,” Annette replied. “Let’s hope Forel doesn’t decide to be stupid.”

A few more seconds passed, and the shuttles dove toward
Subjugator
’s central hull, where a blinking beacon was guiding them toward her main shuttle bay.

“Any sign of trouble?” she asked the pilot.

“Nothing so far; I have the bay doors on scanners and they are opening to receive us.”

“Well. Let’s go greet our ‘friend’ Captain Forel,” Annette said calmly.

#

At least part of the power was being used for the shuttle bay’s lights. The entire space was lit up with massive banks of light, showcasing the well-maintained but dingy nature of the space.

Annette’s people filed out of the shuttles slowly, weapons tracking to cover the entire space, which appeared to be occupied by a significant chunk of Forel’s remaining crew. A large contingent of humans stood off to one side, all of them wearing the same gold-colored collars.

She noticed that about a quarter of the nonhuman crewmembers wore the same collar. Also slaves, most likely, with some kind of punishment mechanism in the collars wrapped around their throats.

Forel stood between the two groups of sapients, his webbed hands spread wide to show that he was unarmed. His fur looked slick in the bright light, and Annette shivered in the warm damp of
Subjugator
’s atmosphere.

“As you required, Captain Bond, the humans of my crew,” he announced, gesturing to the collared men and women. “There were more, of course, before you so genteelly blasted holes through my ship.”

“Mosi, grab them,” Annette ordered. “Get those collars off them.”

Forel went for his coat, then paused as Ki!Tana leveled the plasma rifle she’d brought on the Indiri.

“No sudden moves,” the A!Tol warned. “I like Bond a lot more than I like you.”

“Just the key,” he promised, removing a golden block a centimeter or so across and ten long. He slid it across the floor to Mosi. “Press it to the back of the collars; it will release them.”

Mosi picked up the key with a disgusted expression on her dark face but followed the Indiri’s instructions on the closest of the humans. The collar popped off instantly, and the pale-skinned man rubbed his neck and looked at the young black woman.

“You may be the fairest angel I ever did see,” he told her with a thick Irish accent. “Thankee kindly.”

“Get on the shuttle,” Annette ordered. She glanced at Forel. “You’ll forgive me, Captain, if I remove them from this situation before we have the conversation you’re so desperate to have.”

“We can speak in my office,” he offered. “I have food and drink you will find pleasant.”

“We can speak here,” she replied. “Under the guns of my people.”

Forel shrugged. Like his smiles, it was a clearly artificial gesture—one his species’ forward-bent shoulders didn’t lend themselves to.

“Wait, Bond?” one of the freed slaves said as he was being shuffled toward the shuttle. “Annette Bond?!”

Annette turned at the sound of her name and recognized the speaker in turn. The almost-scrawny man in a blue jumpsuit with a shaven head was a
Nova Industries
employee.

“Jacob Harmon,” she greeted him. “What are you doing here?”

“Long story involving
that
,” he gestured at Forel, “and some tentacled bastards. But it started with
Hidden Eyes of Terra
.”

“A conversation for later,” Annette told him, wondering what exactly a Nova Industries sensor specialist was doing aboard
Subjugator
. “Go with Mosi for now.”

“With pleasure,” Harmon told her. “It is
damned
good to see you, Annette.”

She waved him and the rest of the prisoners onto the shuttle. It was going to be a cramped fit with over forty of them, but she needed to keep a shuttle with her. Forel was being cooperative for now, but she wanted an easy escape route to hand.

Finally, full to the brim, the shuttle slowly eased its way back out of the hangar, then blurred away under interface drive. Forel’s prisoners were gone, though Annette had no illusions: his crew might be unarmed, but this was
his
ship. Annette and her party of armed crew were effectively his hostages.

“With that out of the way,” the Indiri said calmly, “can we talk? I have an offer for you—one I would have made earlier if your people hadn’t started shooting.”

“Fifteen thousand humans neatly boxed for pickup,” Annette replied coolly. “If I wasn’t curious as to where they came from, you’d be dead already. Talk.”

“As I suspect you have realized by now, I do not work alone,” Forel told her. “I am tied into an organization that sees the truth of Kanzi–A!Tol relations: that both are monsters who need to be stopped.

“I understand your reaction to the slaves,” he continued. “My own life partner was kidnapped by Kanzi—and when I finally had the resources to try and rescue her, I learned she was dead. A cross-border raid, one of half a dozen in any given year, though more successful than most.” He shrugged. “The Imperium tries, but they warn us they cannot stop every raid. That they could not save her.”

“I fail to see how your sob story leads here, to the ship full of slaves,” Annette replied dryly.

“I realized then, as others have realized before me and after me, that this half-war could not continue,” Forel said. “I found those others and they had a plan. Through me, they found the resources to fund their plan.” He shrugged. “I am not blind to the failure inherent in funding my campaign to avenge my partner by kidnapping and selling others—mostly humans, a race no one in the Imperium knew to miss—into slavery.

“But the research we had stolen was enough for our scientists to complete their work,” he told her. “I can give you a weapon that will guarantee Earth’s freedom and independence: a starkiller.”

“A single starkiller would do no such thing,” Ki!Tana objected. “They are massive things, difficult to deploy. Half the reason no one uses them is that they’re easily stopped.”

“Not the ones we built,” Forel said. “A missile-scale weapon, easily able to penetrate the defenses of a star system and detonate the sun.
Think
, Captain Bond. I can give you all of the schematics I promised you. I can deliver to you a starkiller missile, allow you to claim Earth’s freedom at the point of a fiery sword!”

Annette didn’t need to see Ki!Tana’s skin to know her alien companion was shocked and horrified. But…Earth had kept the peace for almost a century via the concept of mutually assured destruction. The possession of an unstoppable superweapon might just buy her homeworld its independence.

“In exchange for what?” she asked slowly.

The red-furred amphibious alien made a broad gesture toward the planet beneath them.

“We made a deal,” he told her. “A deal to sell thirty thousand exotic slaves, a bipedal species the Kanzi had never seen before, to the High Inquisitor himself. With a passport from him, one we can only get by allowing his representatives to
see
the slaves, we can fly our ship into the Kanzi Core Worlds—and deploy the weapons.

“In a single strike, seven of their most important star systems wiped out—destroyed by weapons that are unquestionably A!Tol. The war that
must
be fought will begin, with the Kanzi already weakened.”

In a human, his enthusiasm and fire would have been fanaticism. Annette wasn’t sure the description was any different in an Indiri.

“You want to start a war,” she repeated.

“Yes!” Forel confirmed. “The A!Tol and the Kanzi will tear each other down. Your world can rise from the ashes, independent and strong. All of our peoples will be free from the yoke of those two monsters!”

The image in Annette’s head was…much less positive. She hadn’t lived in the era of mutually assured destruction, but she’d studied it. Once one side used—or appeared to use!—weapons of mass destruction, the other wouldn’t hesitate. The A!Tol and Kanzi would devolve into a war where stars died on a daily basis. Their empires wouldn’t gently fall, liberating their client and slave races. Their empires would be
exterminated
, client and slave races included.

And Earth, latest client of the A!Tol, on the border of the war…a single weapon wouldn’t be enough. An entire
Navy
wouldn’t be enough.

“You said thirty thousand humans,” she pointed out, buying herself time to think. “There weren’t that many here.”

“The rest have already been shipped to our base,” Forel replied. “These are the ones who were in transit when Tan!Shallegh locked down all of the fleet transports; someone on Earth noticed what was going on.”

He was closer to her now, the fire now bright in his immense eyes.

“Please, Captain Bond,” he half-begged. “We
must
see this through. The sacrifices
will
be worth it once we’re free!”

“You’re mad,” she whispered. “You’d bring down both empires and both of our
species
in your quest for revenge!”

“It will work!” he promised her. “With a starkiller and the tech I can give you, Earth can stand aside—a beacon of hope as the galaxy goes mad. Your species will emerge one of the leading powers of the new age to come! Is that not worth some sacrifice?”

Annette had to stop, swallowing down a moment of incandescent rage. Sacrifice was pushing for a rapist to meet justice,
knowing
it would end her career. Sacrifice was walking away from the man she wanted to love,
knowing
he’d come to her broken and needed to stand on his own. Sacrifice was leaving her home behind and taking up exile in the hope of returning a liberator.

Sacrifice was not sending thirty thousand
other
people into slavery and potential death. That was
murder
.

“No,” she told him flatly. “Your plan is madness and I will have no part in it! You will give me the coordinates of that base, Karaz Forel, or I will end you here and now.”

She knew he was mad, but she still expected
some
kind of sign before he moved. Some kind of hint that she or Ki!Tana could pick up, stop Forel acting.

There was none. One moment he was looking up at her with his strange fake smile, and the next he was
still
looking up at her with the smile—with some kind of energy blade in his hand.

It
spun
in his hand in an overhand strike that would have cleaved her head in two if not for
years
of martial arts and combat practice. She stumbled backward even as she yanked her submachine gun from its holder.

Then
fire
cut her face,
agony
flaring in her head as the blade slashed through her skin and bone and she
felt
her eye come apart and blindness take her.

But muscle memory still worked despite the pain, the gun ripping free from its harness and slamming forward into Forel’s stomach. With blood pouring into her one remaining eye, she couldn’t
see
him—but she could
feel
the resistance of his body as the muzzle collided with his flesh.

She pulled the trigger.

She didn’t release it before unconsciousness took her.