The Terran Privateer Read online

  “If you wait a few minutes, you’ll see everything.”

  Chapter 2

  Annette Bond watched the countdown on the big screen at the front of her bridge. Tornado’s bridge was a two-tiered affair, with a horseshoe-shaped balcony above the main command deck providing space for another dozen consoles and attendant techs.

  Right now, the bridge crew was a fifty-fifty split between ex-UESF personnel and Nova Industries technicians reviewing the function of the various consoles. Unlike the other XC series ships, XC-04 was complete in every way that mattered—she had the interface drive, the interface missiles, the hyperdrive, and the special armor her part of Elon Casimir’s demonstration was meant to prove out.

  Unlike XC-02, she’d even been equipped with a beam armament, a new generation of heavy lasers notably more efficient than—though otherwise identical to—the current armament of the UESF’s battleships.

  Tornado was also the only one of the four cruisers equipped with a hyperdrive, which was how the big ship was currently in orbit around Jupiter. She could, quite handily, have made the trip on her interface drive—but Nova Industries had believed that she’d have been picked up by the sensor arrays the United Earth Space Force had assembled in Earth orbit.

  “I can’t believe we’re going to shoot up our own ship,” her executive officer, Pat Kurzman, said calmly. Technically, his station was in a secondary control center—but Tornado’s combat information center was theoretical only, an empty void on deck fifteen.

  “That’s why we named her Scapegoat,” Annette told him calmly, her eyes on the countdown as it hit sixty seconds. Tornado’s Captain looked like a rogue high school cheerleader, a curvedly athletic blue-eyed blonde woman one hundred and seventy centimeters tall. She had been a cheerleader in an Idaho high school—twenty-five years before. The long, braided pigtails had been cut off when she joined the United Earth Space Force at twenty and replaced later on with a single, shorter, golden braid nestled against her neck.

  “I ran the numbers,” Kurzman admitted. “She should be able to take a full salvo, but we’ve only ever used single missiles in the tests so far.”

  “If we blow her up,” Annette shrugged with a cold smile, “it will still be an effective demonstration, if not necessarily the one the boss wants. We’re out of time,” she finished, cutting off her XO. “Hyper portal in ten seconds.”

  “Emitters are charged. Programmed for the ten-second hop,” the oddly tall and gaunt form of her navigator, Cole Amandine, reported. Amandine was one of the still very few humans born and raised in space, with much of his life before artificial gravity had been invented. Only intense physiotherapy allowed him to walk in full gravity, and he still wore a concealed powered exoskeleton for long periods of walking or standing.

  Annette Bond took a deep breath and focused her eyes on the unimaginably impressive size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot beneath them. There were other humans this far out—a few research stations, the beginnings of a colony scooping hydrogen from the gas giant—but none had arrived as quickly as they had, and none would return as quickly as they would.

  The timer hit zero.

  A dozen emitters that Annette didn’t even pretend to understand the science behind flared with energy, invisible beams of force that lashed out into empty space and tore a hole in reality.

  The hole burst into existence with a brilliant flash of blue light, and Tornado slipped into it with surprisingly practiced ease—more practiced that Annette would have expected from the exactly nine times the crew had done it before.

  A new timer flashed up on the screen, counting down the ten seconds they were scheduled to be in hyperspace. The screens didn’t show anything else—hyperspace was a literal void to the human eye, so Nova Industries had set the screens to automatically turn off after entering the portal.

  Hopefully, the BugWorks people had lined up their part of this demonstration. The time lag prevented them from communicating reliably with the rest of the demo, so all Annette could do was hope no adjustment to the original schedule had been sent in the last few minutes.

  “Opening the exit portal,” Amandine told her.

  “Stand by maneuvering and weapons,” Annette ordered “You know the plan.”

  A new portal opened in the void of hyperspace and Tornado flashed through at one hundred and twenty thousand kilometers a second. They were exactly on target, three light-seconds away from the Belt Research Station and their target: poor XC-03.

  “Maneuvering, take us past Scapegoat at a point one cee firing pass,” she snapped. “Weapons, give me a broadside into her as we pass.”

  Broadside was a relative term as Tornado’s missile launchers were arranged in six sets of four all along her hull. Given the maneuverability of her inertialess weapons systems, there was no angle at which she couldn’t fire all twenty-four weapons at a target. By only firing the weapons on one side of the ship, however, they would deliver a blow they were sure that Scapegoat could survive.

  Twelve streaks of light blasted away from the big cruiser as they swung by, crossing the hundreds of thousands of kilometers still between them in two seconds. Annette nodded in relief as all twelve weapons slammed home into the other XC ship—and Scapegoat survived.

  “Assess the target,” she snapped.

  “Banged her around a bit,” Harold Rolfson, her weapons officer, reported. “Systems are reporting some internal damage and a few of the laced plates have shifted around. Computers estimate a ten percent reduction in combat capability were she fully equipped.”

  “All right, let’s give the good Admiral a show,” Annette ordered. “Maneuvering, bring us in to ten thousand kilometers and hold the range. Weapons, hit her with the beams. Cycle them across the hull—we want to light her up, not slice up anything we damaged with the birds.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  Liking a stooping falcon, Tornado turned on her heel and charged back at her prey, beams of coherent light leading the way.

  #

  Villeneuve stepped past Casimir silently and pressed his hands into the haptic feedback field, zooming in on XC-03. Haloed in the light from beams he judged close in power to those mounted on his battleships, the ship seemed unharmed.

  “I saw what those weapons did to a rock,” he finally said. “How did she survive that?”

  “‘That, so we’re on the same page, was twelve interface drive missiles impacting at sixty percent of lightspeed,” Casimir confirmed. “The ID missiles mass roughly one metric ton each, providing a kinetic energy at impact of just over two and a half gigatons. While the lasers are a different type of energy, with the difference in scale…it’s not entirely surprising the lasers don’t do much, is it?” the CEO concluded, gesturing at the screen where Tornado continued to bathe Scapegoat in coherent light for a few more seconds.

  Finally, Tornado ceased her attack run, turning to drop herself into a high escort position over the observation shuttle.

  “While working on manufacturing the exotic matter for the hyperdrive emitters, one of the technicians missed a decimal point and a negative sign,” Casimir explained with a sigh. “I’m pretty sure she was hungover, and her boss wanted to fire her—but, fortunately for everyone, one of the scientists on the site took a look at what had been created.

  “We were aiming for matter with negative mass, which is a stone-cold bitch to manufacture and store,” he continued. “What that slip of the numbers gave us was compressed matter. Density is practically off the scale, and the stuff is functionally immune to kinetic force—it has no give to it whatsoever.”

  “Neutronium,” Villeneuve noted aloud. He wanted to say it was impossible, but Casimir had been proving him wrong on that point a lot today.

  “Not…quite,” Casimir concluded. “I’m led to understand that the process could create something that was functionally neutronium, but that it would require exponentially more power than the compressed matter we currently manufacture.”

  “So, your XCs a
re…armored in compressed matter?”

  “Their armor plates are about sixty percent of the thickness of those used on our current battleships,” the shipbuilder replied. “If that was all compressed matter, I’m not sure even the interface drive could move the ship. We’ve used a sandwiched design with impact-absorbing gels, nickel-iron, and a layer of compressed matter.”

  He gestured to the ship that had survived a salvo fit to wipe entire squadrons of the UESF out of space. “There are weaknesses where we combine the plates,” he admitted. “But as you can see, it’s very effective.”

  “Tornado is complete, then?” Villeneuve asked. “All four of your monster techs?”

  “Indeed,” Casimir confirmed. “Some of her internal systems are incomplete and she’d need a larger crew to actually be combat-effective, but Captain Bond has been very pleased with her ship.”

  “Bond,” the admiral repeated. “That’s right, Bloody Annie is one of your test captains, isn’t she?”

  “She was supposed to command Of Course We’re Coming Back,” Casimir reminded her. “Your people raised a stink about that.”

  Of Course We’re Coming Back had been Earth’s first hyperdrive-capable ship, sent on a scouting mission to Alpha Centauri a year before. Villeneuve’s Captains had exploded at the thought of Bloody Annie commanding the mission—and insisted that a real UESF officer command the operation.

  Bond had only been a year from her not-so-genteel forced resignation from the UESF at the time, an incident that still made Villeneuve furious. He’d known his Captains were an old-boys and -girls club, but he hadn’t expected that level of trouble from them.

  “When I got up this morning, I thought Earth had over ninety capital ships,” Villeneuve told Casimir. “Now you have shown me that we have one: Tornado. That ship needs to be under UESF command, Elon. How much?”

  Casimir quoted a number. Villeneuve winced—Tornado was going to run the cost of two battleships.

  “I’ll sort it out,” he promised. “And I want the other three XC hulls brought up to the same spec and ready to deploy.”

  “It will happen. You’ll need to deal with Tornado’s crew yourself,” Casimir warned him. “About a third of the people aboard are yours, seconded United Earth spacers. The rest are mine. I won’t sell their contracts, and they’ll follow Bond when she tells you to go to hell.”

  Admiral Jean Villeneuve winced again. Bloody Annie was going to do just that.

  “I will deal with Annette,” he said quietly. “I was, after all, the one who got her what she wanted.”

  “She’s been the best captain I could hope for,” Casimir told him. “I’ll miss her, but goddamn, does that woman need to be a soldier.”

  Chapter 3

  Annette waited for the shuttle to settle down in Tornado’s landing bay with far more trepidation than she allowed herself to show. Her back was rigid, her posture perfect, years of training as a United Earth Space Force officer still showing as she waited for her boss and the UESF’s commander to arrive.

  Kurzman stood next to her, and if her executive officer wondered what his Captain was thinking, he said nothing. Annette Bond didn’t believe in stupid questions, but she did believe in inappropriate ones—and Kurzman knew anything about his Captain’s past or personal life qualified.

  The sensors reported that the landing bay was safe and the blast shield retracted. Two men had exited the shuttle and were walking toward her, and she knew both of them.

  She’d worked for Elon Casimir for three years now, ever since it had been made very clear to Commander Annette Bond that even though she had been entirely correct to push for the prosecution of Captain John Bowman for his crimes, doing so had ended her UESF career.

  Admiral Jean Villeneuve had already been Chief of Operations there. He’d sat as the judge at the trial that had condemned Captain Bowman to death for no less than fifteen counts of aggravated rape of enlisted spacers under his command.

  Charges that, if the Captains under Villeneuve had had their way, would never have been laid. Annette Bond had pushed, argued, presented evidence, and sworn affidavits for six months to force the trial, and then cajoled, supported, and mothered the young women in question to get them to actually testify.

  Bowman had been convicted and sent to the needle for destroying their lives.

  In exchange, Annette had been quietly informed that no Captain in the Force would take her as their executive officer again, and that there were no open staff slots. The Captains wouldn’t work with her, wouldn’t talk to her. She had no future in the Force, so when she was offered early retirement, she took it.

  Villeneuve hadn’t been involved in that—but he also hadn’t stepped in to stop it. It took every ounce of her self-control not to glare at the old man as he calmly walked across the deck to meet her.

  “Boss,” she greeted Casimir, then gave the other man a sharp glance. “Admiral.”

  “Captain Bond,” Casimir replied, taking her hand warmly and smiling. She gave him a fractional crack of a smile, and the young executive shook his head at her in a familiar amusement.

  Villeneuve offered his hand.

  “Captain,” he said softly.

  She looked back at him and didn’t take his hand, leaving him hanging in the chilled air of the landing bay until Casimir cleared his throat sharply. With a glare at her boss, Annette finally shook the Admiral’s hand.

  “Do you have a meeting room set up?” Casimir asked. “The Admiral and I have come to an agreement in principle, and I’d like to fill you in.”

  “Of course,” she confirmed crisply. “Follow me.”

  Like the rest of her nonessential features, Tornado’s conference facilities were lacking much of anything. They existed, which put them ahead of many items that remained empty voids in the hull. The table was the exact same cheap folding plastic as currently filled the cruiser’s single mess, with chairs from the matching set.

  It was hardly what Casimir was used to, but she’d made sure he knew what he was getting into when they’d discussed it the previous day. His response had been to note that he’d held board meetings on asteroid mining stations.

  “Captain, Admiral, please sit,” he told them as he stepped up to the head of the cheap table. He took a seat himself, laced his hands together and faced the two officers.

  “Captain Bond, you should be aware that as of midnight tonight, Tornado will become a United Earth Space Force vessel,” Casimir said bluntly. “All of the personnel seconded from the UESF will revert to active duty at that time.”

  “I see, sir,” Annette said coldly, suddenly feeling as if the ground had been yanked out from underneath her. She’d had a month aboard Tornado, getting her out of construction, all of the gear loaded into her modular construction, and ready for this demonstration. She should have known she’d be working herself out of a job. “I’ll inform the rest of the crew to start packing their things.”

  “We want to keep the crew, Captain Bond,” Villeneuve interjected. “I have the authority in my own right to close the purchase agreement and offer provisional contracts to the Nova Industries personnel aboard. My aides have been drafting our offers on the way over.”

  The admiral pulled a flimsy—a thin, flexible display that could link into a portable computer or hold a small bit of information itself—from his uniform jacket and laid it on the table.

  “This is the offer we put together for you,” he said quietly.

  Annette didn’t even look at it. She glared at Villeneuve. Part of her wanted it—wanted to walk back into the United Earth Space Force and grind the Captains’ faces in what their attempt to suppress research had created, along with their rejection of her. The rest of her had no interest in going back to the people who’d betrayed her people’s trust and cast her out for seeing justice done.

  “My contract with Nova Industries is more than sufficiently remunerative for me,” she replied, her voice very cold and precise. “It also contains penalty clauses for
early termination.”

  “I will waive those clauses,” Casimir said instantly. “Hell, you’ve got six months left on your contract, Annette—I’ll pay it all out.”

  “And if I want to stay with NI?” she asked, suddenly afraid.

  “We’re building an entire flotilla of survey ships—ones that the UESF will not be commanding,” Casimir noted with a glance at the Admiral. “They could use a Commodore. But…Annette, please. At least hear the Admiral out.”

  Villeneuve glanced at Kurzman and then at Casimir.

  “Elon, Mister Kurzman, can I speak to Captain Bond in private, please?” he finally asked.

  Annette had a momentary urge to refuse, to kick the man out of the room and off of her ship—for about another eight hours, she had that authority.

  “Of course,” Casimir replied before she could give in to that impulse. “Pat, with me, please.”

  Before the Captain could object, her XO followed their boss out of the room, leaving Annette Bond alone in the room with the man who’d done nothing to save her career—and the piece of electronic paper bringing her back to the Space Force that had betrayed her.

  #

  Admiral Jean Villeneuve waited calmly for the two Nova Industries people to leave the room, taking advantage of the moment to study the woman across from the table in the dark blue merchant uniform. Her wearing that uniform instead of his own dress whites represented one of his greatest failures as the head of the UESF.

  “Are you at least going to look at the offer?” he asked softly. He knew he’d failed Annette Bond once. This was his chance to make it right and do right by the Space Force at the same time. If he played his cards right, the coterie of Captains who’d driven her out, undermined the Force’s research and development, and almost covered up John Bowman’s crimes wouldn’t survive the game.