The Terran Privateer (44 page)

“Shields are back up,” Ki!Tana said quietly. “Damage control is sweeping the ship. We…have no casualty figures yet.”

“We’ll get them,” Annette said grimly. “Do we have engines?”

“Everything is online,” Amandine answered. “I wouldn’t trust the booster, but we can pull point five with no concerns.”

“Then let’s finish this, ladies and gentlemen,”
Tornado
’s Captain told her crew. “Commander Amandine, set your course for that space station. Commander Chan, prepare a message demanding their surrender.”

Maintaining their distance against the cruisers had pulled them well away from the gas giant, but at half of lightspeed, returning to their destination was a matter of minutes. Damaged as
Tornado
was, she was certainly capable of destroying a space station, though it might take longer than she would like.

Rounding the gas giant at last, they got their first solid glimpse at the research facility that had caused them so much trouble.

It was surprisingly prosaic, a slightly distended sphere with short spindles sticking out of the top and bottom. The design was surprisingly similar to the stations that had been built in Sol over the last two decades since the discovery of artificial gravity.

Several small stations, presumably high-risk lab areas, orbited in a trailing cluster roughly eighty thousand kilometers behind the main station. As they drew closer, Annette realized that even the “small” stations were the size of
Tornado
, and reassessed her estimate of the main station size.

The sphere was a little over two kilometers in diameter, with more than enough space for the thirty thousand human prisoners Annette knew had been headed toward it, plus room for at least that in crew and scientists.

Someone had poured a lot of resources into building the station and funding its research. Given their intentions, however, Annette felt absolutely no guilt at tearing it all apart.

“Send the surrender message,” she ordered.

“Yes, ma’am,” Chan confirmed, hitting the button. Now they would wait and see what the response was…

“What the…ma’am, look!” Rolfson exclaimed, pointing at the screen.

The high-risk lab stations were the closest by a third of a light-second, so Annette saw them explode first, each of the five-hundred-meter spheres disintegrating in a bright white flash of antimatter explosions.

Her gaze was inexorably drawn to the main station, the massive facility she
knew
still housed the rogue scientists and their fifteen thousand slaves. She hoped…but from the moment the high-risk labs went up, she knew what she was going to see.

At most ten seconds after the lab station received their surrender demand, twelve fusion reactors went into forced overload and the entire facility vanished in an eye-searing ball of flame.

Of Course We’re Coming Back
rounded the forsaken ice ball of an outer planet they had emerged behind in time to pick up the two cruisers rounding the gas giant to, presumably, chase
Tornado
. The gas giant, almost a brown dwarf, was large enough that the scout ship’s sensors couldn’t see her heavily armed sister.

“Do we have the base dialed in?” Andrew asked, studying the scanners.

“Backtracking the cruisers’ courses now,” Laurent confirmed, crisp and professional. “I’ve got a group of space stations, one big one and a cluster of smaller platforms. Throwing them on the screen.”

Andrew studied the complex as his ship drifted closer to it, cold gas thrusters allowing as much stealth as any ship could have in space while they snuck up on the people who were planning to start a war. He still wasn’t entirely sure this was their fight—but he
was
sure that Annette Bond had told him to make sure the human prisoners made it out.

That was…enough, somehow.

“Both cruisers are around the planet now,” Laurent reported. “The station probably has relays to watch what’s going on, but we won’t know how things end until someone comes back around the planet.”

“Damn,” Andrew murmured. He wasn’t going to bet
against
Bond and
Tornado
, but those were steep odds for the cruiser.

“Keep taking us in,” he ordered. “Prep the missiles and charge the laser. No matter what, we have to finish this.”

“Yes, boss.”

The survey ship continued to close, and Andrew skimmed the sensor take on the station further, studying it for any clues, any sign of either the slaves or the starkiller weapons. Ki!Tana had provided them with a radiation signature that would mark the presence of a starkiller, assuming the weapons weren’t entirely different from the larger bombs available to the A!Tol navy.

They were too far away to distinguish it from the other radiation sources inevitable from any major technological society. The station was powered by a dozen major fusion reactors, and the signatures from their venting systems overwhelmed almost anything else.

Except…

“Sarah, check this out,” he flipped her a location on the station. It took her a moment to focus
Of Course
’s finely tuned passive sensors on the point he’d marked.

By then, that level of resolution was unnecessary. A ship had detached from the station and brought up an interface drive at full power, blazing out-system at forty percent of lightspeed.

“She’s a freighter,” Laurent reported a moment later. “Similar structure to the food ship we caught before we hit Tortuga. Central control module, eight surrounding cargo pods. Bigger, though.”

“How big?” Andrew asked, a sudden thought hitting him. “Let’s say they were using the same cells Wellesley saw at Orsav. How many people could they fit aboard?”

She was silent for a moment working, then met his gaze levelly.

“A little under fifty thousand,” she told him. “They may have just evacuated the entire station.”

As she spoke, the freighter shut down its drives. The interface drive didn’t exactly play fair with physics as written by Newton but the ship was still drifting along at a notable percentage of lightspeed.

“I have
Tornado
on the scans,” Laurent reported. “
Damn
. I’m seeing atmosphere and radiation leaks even
through
her shields…but her shields are up and her drive is at full power.”

“And those cruisers didn’t come back,” Andrew agreed. Without having
seen
the battle, they couldn’t be entirely sure how it had ended—but then, the people on that freighter likely
had
seen it. And they were running away.

“Can
Tornado
see the freighter?” he asked, then winced as the stations suddenly blew apart, filling the gas giant’s planetary system with a wash of radiation.

“They weren’t close enough before and they
definitely
can’t now,” Laurent reported. “I’m not sure we could even raise her with tightbeam comms.”

The freighter’s drive came back up, at a lower power. Twenty percent of lightspeed wasn’t much by the standards of an interface drive ship, but Andrew did the math.

“I have her well clear of
Tornado
’s intercept zone before that cloud dissipates,” he said quietly. “Do you have the same?”

Laurent had already been running the same numbers and she looked up and nodded.

“
Tornado
might be able to shoot her down with missiles, but they won’t be close enough to hit her with anything that can disable as opposed to destroy,” she concluded.

He bit his tongue gently as he ran a different set of numbers. The freighter wasn’t headed
directly
toward
Of Course,
but it was moving in their direction. If the massive vessel was armed at
all
, trying to intercept it would be suicide—the survey ship’s single laser and handful of missiles didn’t make up for the fact that she had
no
shields.

“We can intercept her,” he said aloud.

“Yes,” Laurent confirmed. “She has shields, our missiles probably won’t do much, but we could burn through with the laser.”

“But if she has missiles, we’re dead,” Andrew admitted.

“I can’t tell from here,” she said slowly. “What I can tell you is that she
is
carrying starkillers. We’re picking up the radiation signature Ki!Tana gave us. One on each cargo pod.”

He sighed.

“We let her go, billions die,” he concluded. “Plus, she almost certainly has the slaves aboard, doesn’t she?”

“Can’t say, sir,” Laurent replied.

“Karl,” Andrew addressed his navigator, “how close can you get us on the jets?”

The navigator considered, running numbers on his own console, then shook his head.

“Missile range but not laser range,” he concluded. “We need to bring up the drive inside the next ten minutes if we’re going to cut her off.”

“Well, then,”
Of Course
’s Captain announced calmly. “Let’s not bother playing about. Bring up the interface drive, maximum power. Sarah, prep the laser. Target is that central command capsule—let’s burn them out.”

#

Geometry and velocity vectors meant that
Of Course We’re Coming Back
had closed a significant chunk of the distance with the fleeing freighter before her prey even realized she existed. With a combined velocity of over half of lightspeed, by the time the radiation signature from
Of Course
’s drive had crossed the three-light-minute gap, the scout ship had closed half the distance itself.

Andrew and his crew saw their response barely more than a minute later, with high fractions of lightspeed exerting their usual distorting effect on time. The freighter crew had been edging along quietly, with their attention focused on
Tornado
. It took them well over fifteen seconds to react—fifteen seconds in which the range dropped by over two million kilometers.

Finally, the freighter brought their interface drive up to full strength, pulling away from
Of Course
at forty percent of lightspeed—five percent
slower
than the scout ship was pursuing them at.

“She can’t directly vector away from us,” Strobel noted after a moment. “Not without giving
Tornado
a clear run at her. Net speed…nine percent of light.”

Ten minutes to range. They were
in
missile range, though the freighter’s icon sparkled with the distinctive signature of an energy shield. It was possible their single salvo could disable the shield, but it didn’t seem likely.

“How long until they can open a hyper portal?” Andrew asked.

“A minute after we hit laser range,” Laurent said grimly. “That’s all we get, Andrew.”

He nodded slowly.

“Launch the missiles,” he ordered. They weren’t likely to bring the shield down, but it was worth a shot. “Then try for a couple of long-range burns with the laser—we might get lucky.”

Eight new icons flared on the screen,
Of Course
’s single salvo of externally mounted missiles blasted into space at three quarters of the speed of light. The computer projected white lines onto the screen as Sarah Laurent reached out with their single high-powered laser.

The missiles flashed home in brilliant white sparks, vaporizing themselves against the energy shield with no effect. The long-range laser fire didn’t even connect, coherent light flickering past the freighter in the silence of deep space.

“Cease fire,” Andrew ordered. “Charge the capacitors for a maximum-power shot.”

He double-checked the numbers.
Tornado
was pursuing now, closing through the radiation cloud on the now-obvious signature of the freighter’s drive. She wouldn’t even reach missile range until over a minute after the freighter could open a portal.

“We can’t risk games,” he finally admitted. “Once you have a shot, take it—rip that central capsule to hell.”

“You know they’ve probably got all of their research in there,” Laurent pointed out. “Those warheads may not even fire without some code we won’t have if we kill them all.”

That…probably wouldn’t even be the worst result, Andrew realized. The power of the weapons their prey carried terrified him. If the starkillers became useless, it would probably make everyone’s life even easier.

“We’ll live with that” was what he told Laurent, though. “Fire as soon as you have the shot—Karl, make sure she gets it. One clean hit.”

He held the arms of his chair tightly.
Tornado
could probably pursue the freighter into hyperspace—as soon as
Of Course
had blown their attempt to sneak away, it had been over—but he suspected these bastards wouldn’t surrender. If they realized they were being chased by humans, they’d start threatening their prisoners.

One shot was all they’d get.

One shot was all it took.

Of Course We’re Coming Back
flashed across the four hundred thousand–kilometer line, and Laurent paused. Andrew turned to her, about to yell at her to fire, for God’s sake, but then he saw. At the moment they’d crossed the normal effective range of an energy weapon, the freighter had started jinking to throw off an attack.

His science officer gave them five whole seconds, absorbing their pattern—then fired.

The big laser had been designed to punch through compressed-matter armor. The shield on the freighter was powerful but still a civilian system. The laser burned through it in seconds and continued to hit the rear of the crew capsule of the freighter—and kept going.

It took eight seconds to fully discharge the capacitors and end the beam. When the computer erased its artificial white line, the freighter was no longer evading.

The entire central capsule was simply
gone
.