The Terran Privateer Read online

  “Inform Major Wellesley he has work to do,” Annette said as she let herself relax slightly. “Everyone else, keep a sharp eye out for that destroyer. After all this, I don’t want to be chased off at the last minute.”

  Chapter 21

  James’s company was notably bigger now, with an entire troop’s worth of power-armored Rekiki providing a new heavy support section. They were only pure alien troop, though, as he’d expanded his four existing troops to six, slotting three power armored aliens and three human-carried plasma weapons into each sixteen-sapient troop.

  His headquarters section was now seven people. He’d taken one of the plasma rifles for himself and incorporated the last two aliens—a squat, trilaterally symmetrical mobile fungus named Pophe, whose real name was apparently unpronounceable and whose species were called the Frole, and a tall blue-skinned biped named Ral.

  With the deaths of many of the Rekiki aboard Fang, Ral’s species—the Yin—were the single largest group of aliens aboard Tornado. Despite being, on average, thirty centimeters taller than humans and having faces closer to a bird’s than a human’s, the blue-skinned aliens seemed to get along well with their new crew.

  Ral himself had demonstrated an ability to go poop joke for poop joke with James’s headquarters section, which the Special Space Service Major took as a positive sign.

  His headquarters section and the Rekiki troop—his new Golf Troop—were the second wave. The first was, once again, his Alpha Troop. By the time McPhail docked the shuttle with the transport and he made his way aboard, they’d already taken control of the landing bay.

  The human SSS troopers were mostly dwarfed by their alien comrades in their power armor, but they were also clearly in charge. The pirates weren’t bad as inexperienced troops went, but the Special Space Service was Earth’s best.

  Three A!Tol stood in the middle of the bay under the watchful eye of James’s people. He approached them directly, allowing the Rekiki to spread out behind him.

  “I am Major James Wellesley,” he said flatly. “Your ship is now a prize of the UESF. You will bring your crew to this landing bay and await further instruction. Resistance will be met with lethal force. Do you understand me?”

  The translator mounted in his armor repeated his words in a series of sibilants and clicks. All three A!Tol’s skin was a burnt orange hue he hadn’t seen on Ki!Tana yet—he was guessing anger or possibly embarrassment.

  “You’re nothing but pirates,” the Captain replied, his beak snapping sharply as his beady eyes bore down on James, who ground his own anger under its heel.

  “And my opinion of your species is worse,” he snapped back. “Do you understand my orders?”

  The burnt orange color went even darker.

  “Yes. We will comply.”

  “Good.”

  James turned his back on the aliens, trusting his troopers to keep them under control.

  “Sweep the ship,” he ordered his Troop Captains as the remaining shuttles continued to disgorge his troopers. “Alpha Troop, Golf Troop, maintain security here and act as a reserve. Bravo Troop, get me an ID on the cargo. Everyone else, round up the crew and bring them here.

  “We’re on the clock. Go!”

  #

  “Ma’am.” The voice of Bravo Troop’s commander dropped onto Annette’s private link. “You need to see this.

  Tornado’s Captain quickly checked the connection—the young woman commanding Wellesley’s Bravo Troop had linked the Major in as well as the XO, but it was only the four of them. Whatever she’d seen, she thought it needed to be kept very quiet.

  “Show me,” she ordered, linking one of her command chair screens to the channel.

  A moment later, the screen flickered into the view from Mumina Bousaid’s helmet. The Libyan soldier was looking over a vast open void, presumably one of the cargo holds aboard the freighter they’d captured. A power-armored Yin, even taller than Bousaid’s impressive height, was running a bright arc light along the hold, showing dozens of identical honeycomb shapes.

  Each cell of the honeycomb held a cylindrical object, about a meter and a half across and ten meters long.

  “My God,” Annette whispered. “Are those missiles?”

  “Translator says the labels call them Mark One Hundred Five Momentum Drive Missiles for the Imperial Navy,” Bousaid said quietly. “This hold contains about two thousand of them—and this ship has eight holds.”

  “Well done, Troop Captain,” Annette told her. “Well done.”

  She leaned back in her command chair, studying the frozen image of the dozens of honeycombs full of supremely lethal weapons for a long moment. Finally, she gestured Ki!Tana over to her.

  “You implied there was a state we could acquire Imperial missiles in where we’d be able to use them,” she reminded the alien. She pointed to the tiny screen. “Is ‘still in the packaging’ that state?”

  Ki!Tana stared at the image for easily ten seconds, her skin color rippling through large chunks of the rainbow.

  “Yes,” she finally said. “We should be able to load the software we do have onto those weapons. They will be less effective, but not by much. That is a lot of missiles, Captain. The Imperium will not let the theft of this many weapons go unnoticed.”

  The alien shivered all of her tentacles in what Annette was starting to suspect was an A!Tol shrug, and her skin settled into an unfamiliar dark blue tone.

  “May we speak in private, Captain?” Ki!Tana asked.

  Annette glanced around the bridge. Everything was in order for the moment, and she could keep her headset with her and be alerted to anything.

  “My office,” she agreed.

  #

  The day office attached to Tornado’s bridge was sparse, designed as a space for the Captain to work without leaving the bridge unattended, as opposed to the office in her quarters intended to be her main workspace.

  It held a desk, a computer, and just barely enough space for the big tentacled alien to squeeze in across the desk from Annette.

  “The Navy will pursue you,” the alien told her. “You have captured a military freighter and one full of munitions they clearly plan to use. They keep close control of those missiles.”

  “Let them,” Annette replied. “I’ll outrun and outmaneuver anything I can’t fight.”

  “Your ship is not that powerful, Captain,” Ki!Tana told her. “You are now easily a pirate heavy, though there are more powerful pirate ships, but you still are barely a match for an Imperial cruiser—a squadron of which could easily bring you to bay and crush you.”

  “You were already operating as pirates when we met you,” she countered. “The game isn’t that impossible.”

  “No,” the alien agreed. “But there are choices you must now make, Captain. That ship will be crewed by just over one hundred and fifty Navy personnel—most likely primarily A!Tol, if the Captain is. They prefer only semi-mixed crews.

  “You do not have the cargo capacity or the time to transship those missiles,” Ki!Tana continued. “You must take the ship itself if you want its cargo. What happens to the crew?”

  That stopped Annette’s thoughts in their track. She hadn’t even thought of the crew of the ship—her plan had been to take the most valuable parts of the cargo and flee, but Ki!Tana was right. She wanted all of those missiles.

  “The ship has shuttles and lifepods, yes?” she asked, buying herself time to think.

  “She was designed by my people,” the alien replied. “She has far more of them than she needs. You could eject the entire crew and still have life pods for your prize crew. They would then tell your enemies who you were. They would tell the Navy that a rogue human ship is out here causing havoc.”

  “They saw us run,” Annette pointed out. “They know that.”

  “And if the crew of this ship reports, they will know you now have alien crewmembers and translators,” Ki!Tana said. “Your threat level will increase. They will have more information with which to pursu
e you, and you will be in greater danger.”

  “And you would suggest, what, killing them all?” Tornado’s Captain snapped. She should have considered that as being a necessity. Was it a line she would cross?

  “I suggest nothing in this case,” the big alien replied, her voice annoyingly flat through the translator. The devices had improved their ability to relay emotion into English, but they were still imperfect at best.

  “If you kill them all, you will be harder to trace,” she continued. “The Navy will know less about you and will have no basis on which to start hunting for you. But.”

  “But?” Annette demanded.

  “But they will hunt you harder. There are two types of pirates to the A!Tol: thieves and murderers. Thieves are punished when caught—but murderers are sought. Thieves will be hunted in the course of duty. Murderers will have special task forces devoted to them.

  “But without witnesses, you are far harder to track,” Ki!Tana noted. “Many darker pirates have hunted for years and retired successfully. As a rogue warship, you may see a special task force regardless.”

  “‘May’,” the Captain repeated. “In my world’s past, pirates had a tradition: when they intended to take no prisoners, they flew a black flag. It is, my alien friend, far easier to stop killing than to start, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” the A!Tol agreed. The blue hue of her skin was fading suddenly, easing into a lighter color.

  “I think today we reward surrender with life,” Annette said quietly.

  “You are the Captain,” Ki!Tana replied. “And the holder of my contract. The decision is always yours.”

  Chapter 22

  Missiles.

  No wonder the freighter Captain looked like a grouchy snake pit. James’s people had just taken an entire squadron’s worth of missile reloads.

  “Is that the last of the crew?” James asked his Troop Captains.

  “Scans aren’t showing anyone else, but there are probably corners we wouldn’t see them in,” his Charlie Troop Captain replied. “Are we taking over?”

  “Force prize crew is on their way over now,” he confirmed. “Captain wants this hunk of metal moving before the squids’ destroyer comes back to check on her.”

  “Watch it, sir—you have incoming,” one of his troopers cut in on another channel.

  James looked up to see what the trooper was warning him about. The smallish A!Tol commanding the ship was moving toward him, two battle rifle-armed Terrans escorting the—male, James understood from the size—alien back to him.

  At some point between their first conversation and now, the orange had faded from the Captain’s skin, leaving only an inky, purplish black tone to the alien’s torso as he reached the Terran Major.

  “Is this all of your crew?” James demanded, gesturing at the collection of A!Tol his people had corralled into the center of the landing bay. He’d been trained at rapidly assessing the numbers of a crowd of humans, but those skills were only so applicable to a distressed mob of tentacled aliens ranging from one and a half meters to well over two meters tall.

  “Yes,” the Captain replied. “What will happen to them?”

  James hadn’t received orders yet—and until he got orders, he was going to act on his own discretion.

  “Those shuttles.” He gestured at a set of cargo spacecraft along one wall of the bay. “How many would be required to hold your crew?”

  The A!Tol looked at his ship’s parasite craft, his manipulator tentacles fluttering in the equivalent of a human shrug.

  “They are not designed for sapients,” he told James. “All of them.”

  As he spoke, however, the dark, fear-laced tone of his skin began to flash with elements of yellow—a color James had never seen on an A!Tol below. Given that the shuttles were huge and they only needed to get the aliens to the planet they’d left behind them…

  “You lie poorly,” James told the alien bluntly. “And so I am forced to guess. You will get two shuttles. Start loading your people onto them.”

  He pinged his Alpha and Golf Troop leaders—the latter was his only alien Troop Captain.

  “Move the squids onto two of their cargo shuttles,” he ordered. “Keep an eye on them and don’t let them in the cockpits till I give the word—we’ll dump them on our way out-system.”

  “You are letting us go?” the A!Tol asked, his skin now a very dark blue.

  James looked the strange creature in the eye.

  “I may be the last officer of my service after your race ripped my home apart, but I remain a soldier,” he told the transport captain. “I still have my honor.”

  #

  Whatever game Ki!Tana was playing—and as they reentered the bridge, Annette was more and more certain that the big A!Tol was playing some kind of game—it had been made irrelevant while they were off the bridge.

  She received Wellesley’s report with relief she didn’t allow herself to show. Ki!Tana, however, slowly faded to a calm red color. Despite what she’d been telling Annette, the alien was clearly pleased with the result.

  “Where’s our prize crew at?” Annette asked Rolfson.

  “Lieutenant Mosi is boarding now,” he confirmed. “She has twenty Space Force personnel and ten of our alien crew, which we think should be enough to run the ship at least temporarily.”

  “She has the same code-hacking tools we used aboard Fang,” Ki!Tana noted. “They may take longer, as this is a military ship.”

  “Any sign of our destroyer friend?” the Captain asked. “She’s what’s going to set Mosi’s time limit.”

  “Nothing yet,” her tactical officer replied. “The patrol boats are hiding in orbit. They’re scared shitless—but they’ll probably fight if we move against the planet.”

  “I have no intention of trying to raid a planet with a hundred ground troops,” Annette told him. “That would be stupid.”

  “Not arguing, ma’am,” he agreed. “Looking forward to have those missiles in my magazines, though. I’ll feel a lot happier about going up against a Navy ship if we have the same birds.”

  “Agreed. Keep an eye out for her,” she ordered. “The instant you have a sniff of a hyperspace portal; I want to know.”

  “Mosi will hurry, ma’am,” Rolfson said quietly. “Twenty minutes, maybe thirty. We should be good to go then.”

  “Be ready to move as soon as the freighter is ready.” Annette glanced at the screen, checking on Oaths of Secrecy. Her second ship was floating on the other side of the freighter, all three ships within a few thousand kilometers of each other.

  #

  “It looks like they’re giving up, sir,” Laurent announced, highlighting the A!Tol destroyer on Of Course We’re Coming Back’s main screen.

  “Any sign from the system?” Andrew asked. If Tornado and Oaths of Secrecy had achieved anything since Of Course had lured the destroyer out, they should have left.

  “Nothing,” she replied. “Both Tornado and Oaths are still in-system. I make it ten minutes or less before the destroyer drops back out of hyperspace.”

  “Damn,” he murmured. “Can we do anything?”

  “If we brought up the drive, we’d lure her away again, but then we won’t be able to hide,” Laurent told him. “Our missiles won’t get through her shields, and she’s got nastier beams than us if we get close enough to use the laser.”

  “And if she sees us, she’ll catch us,” Of Course’s Captain agreed. His ship’s upgrades were lacking compared to Tornado. She was still only capable of point four cee, still limited to a handful of externally mounted missiles and a laser, still fragile as cheap paper.

  “Show me her likely portal points,” he ordered.

  A shaded area appeared on the screen. The map was still sparse, the lack of features in hyperspace still something Andrew was getting used to. The destroyer was a single dot, their only real information on her coming from their encounter in the Messeth system. The Messeth system itself was simply a set of circles marking the danger zo
nes around each planet and the star itself.

  “Unless she changes course, she’ll be over half a million kilometers away in hyperspace when she passes us,” Laurent reported. “We could close to laser range in moments, but…”

  “She has proton beams and an energy shield. We don’t,” Andrew noted. “She’ll portal what, a million klicks from us?”

  “Bit over, yeah,” Laurent confirmed. “What are you thinking, boss?”

  “Tornado can take her,” Of Course’s Captain said confidently. “But I don’t think Captain Bond would object to an ace up her sleeve. Tall.” He opened a channel to his engineer. “Start warming up the interface drive. Don’t bring it online, but when I give the order, I want full speed on the bounce.”

  “I’ll make it happen.”

  “All right,” Andrew Lougheed said calmly, studying the dot on his screen and wishing he could see more of what they were doing. “Let’s see what our tentacled friends do next.”

  #

  “Hyper portal!” Rolfson snapped. “Emergence at ten million kilometers. Looks like our friend the destroyer.”

  “Mosi, what’s your status?” Annette demanded of the young officer leading the prize crew.

  “We’re into the command interface, but we’re unlocking systems one by one,” the black-skinned Zimbabwean replied breathlessly. “We’ll have interface drive in a minute or two, but we’re at least ten minutes from having the hyperdrive.”

  “You’re out of time,” Annette told her flatly. “Sade!” She pulled Oaths of Secrecy’s Captain into the channel. “Mosi’s team will have interface drive momentarily. As soon as she does, you both take off for Rendezvous Alpha. Mosi—you’ll ride through on Oath’s hyper portal. It’ll be tricky flying, but you can do it.”

  “We can miss the portal ourselves after generating it; give her a clear path,” Sade suggested. “Shouldn’t even be tricky. We’ll need time and a safe space to do it.”