First Command (21 page)

      
Thorson told her that as long as he was alive, nothing bad would happen to her or her daughters.
 
If she was wrong and her husband decided the symbol they represented was not worth the ransom, he would sell everything he owned to purchase the three of them, to keep them out of coarser hands.
 
Mrs. Debran took his drink, placed it on the table, sat in his lap and kissed him.

* * * * *

      
Irina Bugarov gave her deskside annual report briefing to Friedrich Debran.
 
He was somewhat distracted, but was impressed with her spending credits to make credits.
 
Her production improvements were impressive and innovative.
 
He was also impressed with her security officer incentive that resulted in additional work for one of her firms.
 
Debran congratulated himself at choosing such a good chief for his defense subsidiary.
 
He distributed a significant portion of his bonus funds to her account.
 
This was credit she could use for any purpose, including increasing her own salary, if she chose.

* * * * *

      
Russell Obwobwo cautiously crawled through the port dorsal cable and piping access tunnel.
 
He had heard muted explosions and plasma rifle blasts several days earlier.
 
The chief engineer had sent him a coded message to hide and stay hidden, but it had been several days, he’d eaten the last snack bar he’d kept in his tool kit, and hunger was overcoming his caution.

      
He crept through the access tunnel as quietly as he could.
 
He figured that whoever had taken over his ship would be smart enough to read the crew manifest and realize one member was missing.
 
He listened to hear if anyone was moving around the ship near his position and had heard nothing for over a day.
 
He needed to get somewhere he could access a data terminal and find out what was going on.
 
It also wouldn’t hurt if he could find a food replicator.

* * * * *

      
Alistair Bennett read the reply to his request.
 
He was getting the captain he wanted, but not for four weeks.
 
At least Kelly was a known quantity.
 
He wondered how many ships would disappear in that time.

      
It would be nice to see Connie again.
 
The two of them had hit it off on their last combined mission.
 
Connie made it abundantly clear that she was interested in him.
 
They both realized that their careers would not let them carry it farther than just enjoying each other’s company when they could be together.
 
That was good enough for now.

      
He looked over at Rojo, happily chomping away on some flaked Rigelian moonfish, and prepared his ship for lift off.
 
He plotted a course to where he lost the ion trail and looked for hiding places.
 
There was a large dust and rubble cloud near the path the ion trail had gone.
 
He could sit there until the scout ship arrived.
 
Maybe he’d get lucky.

      
“Finish up your fish, Rojo.
 
We’re about to go back to work.”

      
In a few hours he received clearance, powered up his ship, and left the Rigel System.
 
Rojo curled up on the command console beside him and went to sleep.

* * * * *

      
The steam from power cleaning the ventilators blew through the kitchen like a white fog.
 
Sally Halstead looked up from her cleaning as her boss, One-Eyed Pete, came into the kitchen of the Ruin View Restaurant, carefully stepping around the roller racks of plates.
 
Pete, true to his name and true to his pirate persona, had an eye patch over his left eye socket.
 
The eye had been burnt out in a welding accident years before, when a piece of molten metal slipped behind his welding goggles.
 
Modern prosthetics existed that could replace his lost eye, but he preferred the patch.
 
He thought it gave him gravitas.

      
“Sally, get your rump over to the spaceport.
 
I’ve just bid on the food stores on that new container ship they just brought in.
 
Get me a good inventory of any of the packaged foods and bulk ingredients and bring them back.
 
If they have any of those new replicators and base food packs, get inventories of those, too.”

      
Sally looked at Pete with disgust. “What do we need those for?
 
I made you rich by cooking up gourmet delicacies.
 
I don’t need replicators.”

      
Sally stood a head shorter than Pete, but she could be a forceful woman.
 
Pete backed up and put up his hands as if in self-defense.
 
“Relax, Sally.
 
You don’t need replicators.
 
They can’t cook anywhere near as good as you, but I can sell them to the Marauders’ ships when they come through for refit and upgrades.”

      
Sally threw her cleaning towel at Pete and stalked away to get ready to inventory the ship.
 
Maybe she could find some good ingredients.
 
She could always use new spices.
 
She was continually running out.

      
Sally was a smallish woman, a little broad in the hips.
 
She was pleasant enough looking, but no great beauty.
 
Her dazzling smile had long ago faded away.
 
She had been born and grown up in the Algol system.
 
Her parents had passed away and, with no other family in the system, she’d gone to Rigel to become a chef and passed with honors.
 
She was returning to her home when her ship was captured by a Marauder Fleet ship and brought here to Barataria to be sold.
 
She wasn’t rich enough to be ransomed, but she could cook.

      
One-Eyed Pete needed a chef.
 
He bid top credit for her when he found out she could cook.
 
She made him a very rich pirate.
 
The Ruin View went from an out of the way low-end diner to an out of the way trendy top-rated gourmet restaurant.
 
All the senior pirates of the Baratarian Brotherhood were regular diners.
 
Even Steven Maynard, the head of the Brotherhood, dined here regularly at his usual table.

      
Her cooking ability almost got her elevated to membership in the Brotherhood, but One-Eyed Pete blocked that.
 
He couldn’t take the chance that she’d leave the Ruin View for some other restaurant.
 
He treated her well, almost as an equal, but made sure she never lost her captive status.
 
He worked her hard and infuriated her regularly, but never bothered her for sexual favors.
 
With Pete it was purely business.
 
Sally could do a lot worse, under the circumstances.

      
Sally changed into street clothes, gathered up her pocket tablet, and set out for the spaceport.
 
She looked off at the ancient alien ruins in the distance, from which the restaurant got its name, and mumbled, “Replicators, just a bunch of damned techno-nonsense.”

* * * * *

      
The pirate cutter Bonnie Maria edged slowly through the star field.
 
Captain Craig could almost feel the shifting gravity pulling his ship this way and that.
 
He stared at the screen of his specially configured gravimetric feed and searched for the path that would get him through to K’Rang space.
 
He and his crew had been out for a month, a month of nerve-wracking tension as they pushed down blind gravity tunnels and narrowly avoided gravity eddies that could trap them forever.

      
Captain Craig looked at the fuzzy image, searching for another pathway through the field that would not stop at a dead end.
 
This gravity tunnel, for that is how it looked on his screen, seemed promising.
 
He followed it past a trio of brown dwarves far off to starboard and thought he could see a clear opening ahead.

      
In a few minutes he cautiously poked his nose into the clear space, enough to give his sensors a free view of the space ahead.
 
He put his recorders on high speed and high resolution and collected all that he could until his sensor operator reported a ship approaching from port.

      
Captain Craig withdrew back into the star field and started mapping the complete course back to Barataria.
 
He spent the whole return voyage analyzing what he collected in his short view of the K’Rang space beyond the Pleiades.
 
He was pretty sure he found a new and lucrative hunting ground for the Brotherhood.

* * * * *

      
The Missile Corvette J’New made its weekly pass along the face of the D’Rin star field.
 
Lead Sensor Technician H’Talli recorded the sensor data from the passage to use at some future training event.
 
There never was much that went on in this sector, but there was enough varied commercial traffic through it to make it a challenging sensor classification exercise.
 
He counted over ten ships of various types and sizes.
 
These would make a good training opportunity for his section when back in port.

      
He observed the B’Kili system just off the starboard beam and the F’Tuj system ahead and off the forward starboard quarter.
 
These systems containing two main worlds provided a lot of cargo traffic to analyze to keep his team on their toes.
 
He liked these exercises, using recorded data after the patrol was over.
 
It was always too noisy in the CIC during a patrol to really work the targets.
 
He had spoken to the captain about it, but had not convinced him how much more effective his analysts could be if the CIC was quiet while they did their jobs.

Chapter Eight

      
Kelly read through the intelligence reports from the Rigel-Aldebaran trade route, not that they were much help.
 
Ships left port and simply were never seen again.
 
Kelly was amazed that none of the ships, crews, or cargoes appeared on any of the normal lowlife worlds that pirates and marauders frequented and used to move their ill-gotten gain.

      
What could they be doing with the ships, people, and goods?
 
It didn’t make sense.
 
Pirates always needed credits.
 
Ships needed repair and maintenance, especially ships that couldn’t pull into just any port and shipyard.
 
Pirate ships always had special modifications and configurations that wouldn’t pass normal port scrutiny.
 
How did they replenish their stocks?
 
Crews needed diversions.
 
None of those came cheap.
 
If they weren’t selling their goods, how were they coming up with credits?

      
If the missing ships were destroyed, there would be debris.
 
Kelly had seen the effect of catastrophic kills on space ships.
 
There was always an immense amount of debris.
 
What of this report from Alistair, who said the container ship simply disappeared from his screens.
 
How do you make a 300,000 metric ton ship disappear?

      
Kelly put the Reporting Officer’s sensor plot up on his holographic viewer and rotated it to see it from all angles.
 
He called up the astrospatial data layer of all known pirate-friendly worlds and saw no obvious connections.
 
He noted how close the K’Rang frontier was to the area in question and wondered if they might be up to some mischief.

      
He plotted out the ion trail that the Reporting Officer had followed and saw it peter out at the edge of the Pleiades Star Cluster.
 
He could see why Alastair had turned back.
 
The gravimetric flows in the star field would rip all but a reinforced warship apart.
 
If the gravity pressure didn’t crush a ship, the gravity eddies could trap it and never let it out.

      
Kelly pulled up all Galactic Republic surveys of the star field and found them unusually deficient.
 
There were very few surveys into the star field’s depths.
 
Most surveys covered the outer asteroid fields, and none of the few surveys into the field were earlier than five years old.
 
Even the Fleet Intel long-range observation posts’ sensor scans into the field gave little information.
 
The gases and dusts swirling through that part of space obscured all but close range scans.
 
It made for a good buffer between the Galactic Republic space and K’Rang space, but was not good for much else.