Intrepid (3 page)

The sixth one raked
Wasp
aft of amidships but missed engineering. At least the lights did not dim, nor did the reload light on Battery 1 slow its rapid climb from yellow toward red.

“Damage Control,” Captain Drago demanded.

“Containers open to space. We’re working on them.”

Captain Drago turned to Kris. “Can you get this over with? I like my ship the way it is, not holier than thou,” he said dryly.

“Firing Three,” Kris said. She had Nelly widen the focus of the twenty-four-inch laser, raking a major portion of the shield. Damaged, it was now too thin to do much more than hide the bow of the pirate, providing a fan to cover the bare rear of the bridge.

As 3 winked out, all pretense at a shield vanished. The pirate spun on its long axis in full view. But not giving up.

Its capacitors began to recharge. A thin wisp coalesced to cover the bow. The tiger was back, a raised paw, the middle finger elevated in the universally recognized insolent salute.

“Some folks just don’t know when to quit,” Kris said.

“Leave us alone,” boomed from the commlink. “You get out of here, or a lot of people are going to die.”

“You’re going to die,” Kris pointed out.

“We got the crew of two ships on board. You shoot at us again, and we’ll see just how much vacuum they can breathe.”

“Oops,” Kris and Captain Drago said at the same time.

“Kris,” Nelly said, “unless they’ve changed their rotation, I know where the bridge is.”

“Target it.” A red pipper began to circle the flimsy shield. Not, to Kris’s surprise, focusing on the raised digit but somewhere around its toes.

The longer Kris waited, the more the chance that they might change their rotation. Kris mashed Battery 4’s firing circuit.

The laser slashed through the spinning cover. Sections spun off into space. There, revealed for all, was the bridge.

But only for a fraction of a second as the twenty-four-inch laser opened it to space, slagging human flesh, instruments, and gear.

“Surrender now or my next laser will hack your reactors’ containment fields to bits,” Kris ordered to anyone who might still be listening.

“What about their prisoners?” Sulwan asked.

“We have only their word that they have them,” Kris said, keeping hard eyes on their target.

“You’re a hard woman,” Drago said. “I hope you’re right.”

So did Kris.

Then the cores of the two reactors dropped out into vacuum, and the
Compton
began to coast along its last vector.

“We surrender. You can board us. We won’t fight you,” was spoken by a new voice.

“I hope for your sake you don’t,” Kris answered. “We’ve got a Marine company that could use a spot of exercise.”

That got no reply.

“Captain Montoya,” Kris called to Jack.

“Standing by,” he answered.

“Prepare to board the pirate as soon as we come alongside and match their speed and vector.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am.”

“Captain Drago, please place your ship alongside that derelict.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Hot dog. More prize money,” came from the wag in the back of the bridge.

4

It took a half hour for the
Wasp
to catch up and come alongside the pirate. Once there, Jack launched two Marine squads in LACs. One team would capture the stern, the other the bow. Most of the Marines would storm the amidships gangway.

At least that was the plan.

As Drago completed a perfect match between midship hatches, Kris kicked off from her station, snagged the hatch, and launched herself aft to join the Marines of the boarding party.

And ran into Abby, towing a full set of combat gear.

“Thought you might need these. Just the things for the well-dressed princess,” her maid drawled.

“Isn’t there a bed you need to be under?”

“Got bored there by myself.”

“Where’s Cara?”

“At the computer, playing some silly game.”

Kris tried one other tack to duck her mothering maid. “Didn’t you hear? They surrendered.”

“Yeah, right,” Abby said, and blocked Kris’s path aft until she did her own surrender and accepted the first armored piece of what constituted full battle rattle.

“You’re not very trusting,” Kris said, pulling on the bottom.

“Not at all. Unlike some princess I know, I learn from bad experiences.” So Kris pulled on full armor while others stretched a tunnel between the
Wasp
and the now-quiet pirate. That could have provided a route for a full assault, but the pirate’s main lock refused to open. Kris arrived just as Jack to her, Captain Montoya to his company, concluded his assessment of the situation.

“Strange how nothing much seems to work on the
Compton
. If I weren’t such an optimistic guy, I’d think they were setting a trap for us,” Jack said. “Gunny, you got an opinion?”

“Pirates are not known for their adherence to preventive maintenance schedules,” he growled. “It could be just what you’d expect from scumbags, sir.”

“So true. Okay, crew, let’s get some of the stress and suspense out of our lives. LACs, I want you to seize positions on the forward and aft parts of the ship while we storm the center. We go in sixty seconds.”

“Ah, sir, Staff Sergeant Thu here. Regretfully, LAC One will have to disappoint.”

“What’s your problem?”

“We’ve been checking out both the entrance points forward. One was onto the bridge and has a very big hole punched in it by somebody’s misaimed laser.”

“Careful, Sergeant, said aimer is drifting at my elbow.”

“And it was perfectly aimed at the time it was fired,” Kris shouted toward Jack’s mike.

“Well, sirs, whatever it was then, it’s ruining my day just now. ’Course, to be honest, even if the hatch opened, it would only take me onto the bridge, and I could walk in there, hatch or no hatch. It’s the lower emergency air lock that is the main problem. The inner door is wedged open. We open it, and we could be blowing out all the air forward.”

“So we go to version two of today’s orders,” Jack said, betraying the informality he’d gained as a Secret Service Agent, trying to protect one Princess Kristine Longknife. “Both LACs will enter by the stern, and we’ll take the bow after we secure amidships. LAC Two, what’s your situation?”

“We are ready now, sir.”

“We start in sixty seconds.”

The
Wasp
’s huge amidships cargo bay that Kris and the Marines occupied had already been sealed off. Now a squad of Marines headed into the open tube to take up positions just outside the
Compton
’s hatch. Jack led two more squads down the rabbit hole, but Kris found Gunny and Abby blocking her way.

“I think we ought to wait here, Your Highness. It’s getting mighty stuffy in there,” Gunny said.

The Marines who had gone with Jack were in fully armored space suits, their faceplates down, breathing tanked air. But Kris had learned not to argue with Gunny. At OCS, an old commander had told the class that the proper spelling of Gunnery Sergeant was
GOD
.

Kris had seen ample proof to support that theology in the last three years. Kris waited.

“We’re in,” Jack announced over the net.

A moment later a private had been ordered to test the air. “This place stinks,” was his only comment.

Kris’s previous experience with a pirate ship had stunk of sloppy ship handling, stale cooking, and unwashed crew. But the stink that rapidly worked its way up the passage tube was a whole different blend of filth, sewer, and death.

Kris kicked off from where she hung and headed down the tube, Abby and Gunny right behind.

The stench grew as she approached the
Compton
’s hatch. Once through it, she found herself in a similar cargo bay from the one she left, somewhat the worse for lack of care. Jack and his three squads held there as they searched for booby traps and found nothing. Most had their masks up, saving tanks that might be needed later. A few did not.

“Where’s that smell coming from?” Kris asked.

Jack shook his head. “Life support is on minimum. Air circulation is hardly going, but still, this?”

“How are things aft?” Kris asked.

“We took them down,” came from a sergeant on net. “Only gentle lambs back here. They have no idea what the bridge crew were doing, they just tended the teakettle.”

“We’ll see how that holds up in court,” Kris said dryly.

Jack looked around, frowned at nothing in particular and the stink in general, and said, “Gunny, take two squads and clear the stern spine from here to Engineering.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Gunny said, and organized one of the squads there and the one that had just arrived to deploy aft, covering for each other and moving slowly.

He’d been gone less than a minute when he came up on net.

“Sir, Your Highness, you want to see what we just found.”

Kris headed aft, gun at the ready, Jack in the lead.

The stench got worse as soon as they left the cargo bay. The central spine of a cargo ship always had stairs for use when the ship was under way. It could be broken up into rooms, but since that cost money, it was often just one long, open space.

The
Compton
’s spine was square and broken into compartments.

The first compartment had the usual pipes and conduits along the wall and a spiral stairwell offset from the center enough to allow a solid-looking airtight hatch to close off the bottom of the compartment.

The second compartment was where the stink came from.

Men and women blinked up as Kris started down the ladder. They looked like skeletons wrapped in filthy rags. Most were wired to deadeyes welded onto the outer bulkhead. They drifted listlessly as the ship turned slowly, surrounded by a cloud of their own filth. A few were free. They provided whatever care they could to the others.

That care couldn’t extend very far. All they had were their own two hands and maybe a gentle voice. There was no visible source for water. One bucket might have served as a latrine. Now its content littered the air of the compartment. A woman glided through space, trying to recapture what had come free.

Kris gagged. “Who did this?” she demanded.

One squad of Marines was on full alert. The other moved around the compartment, cutting prisoners free. A man in what might once have been a merchant service officer’s uniform floated toward Kris. He was bent over, trying gingerly to massage his left foot. That was where he’d been tied down, and it looked black and ugly.

“I’m Dan Orizowski. I was second officer of the
Jumping Jill
, a freighter out of Geneva.”

“You senior here?” Jack asked.

The begrimed man looked around. “I am off the
Jill
.”

“Your senior officers?” Kris asked.

“Killed for resisting.”

“Is this all one crew?”

“No.” A grizzled old fellow now joined them. “I’m Onally MarTom, chief wiper on the
Outside Straight
. Don’t know where we were registered. Our captain surrendered when they asked, but they killed him and all the officers without even blinking.”

“Who?” Kris asked, her voice low. She recognized her tone as deadly. Jack’s lips were a thin line. He’d give her no guff.

“I don’t know their names, ma’am,” the old chief wiper said, “but I’ll never forget their faces.”

“Captain, what say we get this man some faces to look at.”

“My thinking exactly,” Jack said, and turned to Gunny. “I want the whole company over here. Reduce the admin watch to minimum on the
Wasp
. Full battle rattle and demolition loads.”

Kris coordinated with Captain Drago. “I’m stripping my Marines for a rat hunt. Can your sailors keep an eye on the ship to make sure no rats make it off or across to you.”

“I’m getting video of what you’re seeing, and even with life support on full boost, we’re getting some of what you’re smelling. I’ll have armed sailors looking out for anyone that you miss.”

“Could your crew take care of these people?”

“Cookie is preparing oatmeal and got the largest pot of coffee perking. Those that aren’t shooters are ready to help distressed mariners. Even some of the boffins are standing in line to help.”

“You do the humanity thing. We’ll do the other stuff.”

“Kick their butts good.”

Kris brought Jack up to date. He nodded. “Give me five minutes to get everyone in place. Let them have more time to stew in their own juices. I don’t want to face desperate men with anything less than overwhelming odds. I don’t care how many of them die. All of them are not worth one of my Marines.”

Kris gave him a thumbs-up.

Sailors and boffins arrived to carefully tow out the former prisoners. The Marines aft, told there might be solid work for them forward, quickly cuffed and led up the engineering staff, still protesting their innocence to anyone listening.

No one was.

The LACs were launched again. The
Compton
had life pods. Their present position was a good four-year drift in a pod to an only marginally inhabitable planet. Anyone who tried to escape that way faced a long, slow death. As tempting as it might have been to let them try, the LACs had orders to corral in the life pods and head any pirate in them toward a date with a judge and a noose.

At Jack’s orders, the Marines popped the hatch and started their way up the forward spine of the
Compton
.

5

The four-hundred-foot climb up the first forward spine compartment would have been arduous at one gee. In free fall, Kris went hand over hand. Ahead of her, Marines were already fanning out to secure the next compartment, the second of five.

So far no weapons fire. No booby traps. Possibly these pirates had never expected to have to defend their own ship.

The first resistance was in the forward-most compartment. The hatch leading out of it was dogged down and locked from the other side.

“Shall we blow it?” Gunny asked. With a glance, Jack passed the question to Kris.

She mulled it for a moment. Just coming into the space with the Marine rear guard was Chief Beni. Apparently, rage at the pirates’ behavior toward their merchant prisoners had overcome his usual desire to be wherever action was not.

She waved him to her. He looked around to see if there might be anyone else but him that she wanted. She shook her head and waved him forward. He came.

“I want to talk to those thugs on the other side of this bulkhead. Jack me into their net,” Kris said.

His eyes lit up at the prospect of doing good without any unnecessary risks. A minute later he had spotted a cable conduit, had its cover off, and was rummaging around its innards.

“You’re in, Your Highness,” he chimed through a grin a moment later.

Kris considered for half a second what she wanted to say and chose a simple “This is Lieutenant Kris Longknife. We have come for you, ladies and gentlemen. You can survive the next few hours or not. It doesn’t matter to me and my Marines.”

Around Kris, a few Marines pumped air. “Ooo-Rah.”

Beni must have put Kris on a hot mike on the other side, or the damage Kris had done made all mikes hot. Her remarks raised a mumble of comments, most of which were obscene and biologically improbable. One was repeated several times. “Why don’t you just go away and leave us alone?”

“I’ve considered leaving you alone,” Kris said.

That got a lot of happy noise from the other side.

“But I’d hate to leave this big hulk drifting as a hazard to navigation.” There was also the matter of prize money for the
Wasp
’s crew, but that didn’t sound like something that would move a pirate to repentance.

“I could just blast the bow off the ship, leave it here, and tow the rest of this hulk to a port.”

There was a long silence. Around Kris, Marines followed that option to its obvious conclusion. . . and grinned.

It took those on the other side a bit longer to think it through. “Where would that leave us?” finally came from someone.

“You would be left all alone.”

“Until someone picked us up or we died.”

“Considering how far out you are,” Kris said, thoughtfully, “I suspect you’d be long dead before anyone happened by.”

“You’re just going to hang us anyway.”

That was what Kris wanted to do, but that wasn’t the law in human space. “Few planets have capital punishment,” Kris pointed out, generating frowns from her Marines.

“You going to take us to one that don’t?”

“I will take you to the nearest planet with a recognized court system. Cuzco, I expect.”

“Do they have capital punishment?”

“I honestly don’t know.” NELLY, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.

YES, KRIS.

The negotiations went on like that for the next hour. In the end, they all surrendered, and no shots were fired.

“You didn’t want any of your Marines hurt,” Kris pointed out to Jack.

He nodded, then shook his head. “Would have been nice to send a few of them to meet their maker.”

“We killed the worst of them. The bridge crew was fifteen strong when the fight started.” Only parts of three bodies had been recovered from the wreckage.

Every ship’s officer excepting the engineer had taken the brunt of a twenty-four-inch laser. . . and come up the worse for it.

Which left a certain young Navy lieutenant with what the brass euphemistically called a few “leadership challenges.”

She had forty-seven former prisoners that were in pretty bad shape. They needed medical care, and they needed it quickly.

She also had thirty-two new prisoners, all of whom were loudly expounding on their innocence. . . to the no one who was listening. . . from the confines of a hastily expanded brig on the
Wasp
.

And Kris had a very damaged hulk, which turned out to have a very full load of expensive cargo. Leaving her with a lot of questions about how that had come to pass.

Her first two problems said get gone from here. The third left her reluctant to abandon what she’d done. There was also the problem of the
Compton Maru
being the scene of several crimes that were greatly in need of investigation.

Kris was saved from the first problem. The health of the pirates’ prisoners improved as Doc did a couple of miracles. The
Wasp
’s corpsman, widely rumored to have been a board-certified MD before his alcoholism cost him dearly, stayed sober and did good. He racked up bushels of good karma as more and more legs passed from likely candidates for amputation to just in need of careful and tender care. Several of the tough old sailors recovered with amazing speed.

Which led to the next challenge that Kris really should have seen coming.

Onally MarTom slipped a meat cleaver from the mess and tried to use it to part the hair of one of the brig’s new denizens.

Fortunately, a Marine interrupted him.

Kris was there only a second behind Jack while the Marine was still struggling with a surprisingly strong and very distressed mariner.

“He killed my captain,” the man screamed in frustration.

“And he’ll pay for it,” Jack assured him.

Outnumbered and overpowered, the man broke down in tears, but he still cursed them one and all for standing between him and his captain’s murderer.

Gunny arrived to lead him off. “I’ll get him drunk on Doc’s ignored supplies. That’ll at least start the healing. When he sobers up, he’ll be glad he’s not a killer. He isn’t, you know.”

“He showed a pretty solid commitment to making a go of it if you ask me,” Kris observed, still trying to parse some of the old sailor’s curses. And she thought she’d heard them all.

“I’ll double the guard,” Jack said. “Keep the ones keeping the bad guys in where they are. But I’ll add a full team in the next compartment to keep the sightseers and hackers out.”

Which left Kris wondering if she ought to do something about the pirates sooner rather than later. King Ray had dragooned a retired Wardhaven judge into joining Kris’s crew. Being a hobbyist astronomer, she was delighted to be aboard.

Kris had assumed the
Wasp
might be called on to pass quick and efficient justice on some minor matters. Capital piracy, murder, and slavery went quite a bit beyond Kris’s plan.

And there was the requirement that any court chartered in Wardhaven follow the Ordinance of Human Rights that had been the cornerstone of the now-defunct Society of Humanity.

Central to that was the ban on capital punishment.

But not every planet had signed the Ordinance. Kris’s father had almost lost his chance to be Wardhaven’s prime minister when he’d used every stalling tactic in the politician’s handbook to keep Wardhaven’s signature off the Ordinance. Not forever, only long enough to hang the kidnappers whose mishandling of Kris’s little brother, Eddy, caused his death.

With luck, the nearest planet would also not have signed the Ordinance. Longknifes did not like kidnappers.

So while Doc healed the freed, and Jack kept alive the not yet dead, Kris led a scratch salvage-and-repair team through the wreck of the
Compton Maru
. Most were borrowed from the
Wasp
’s crew, but the boffins supplied their own techs, and the Marines also provided their electronics and engineering specialists.

And Kris donated most of Nelly’s time after the computer demanded a go at the mess Kris had made.

Kris’s well-aimed twenty-four-inch lasers had made quite a mess of the
Compton
’s bridge. Even when they patched the holes and glued an airtight bubble over the bridge, they also had to set up a string of lights.

Anything that required electrical power was fried, right down to the smallest lightbulb. “Oh, can I have the ship’s computer?” Nelly said, as soon as pieces were identified.

“You think you can get something out of this?” Kris said.

“Everyone else on board has a hobby. Jigsaw puzzles are all the rage among the scientists. Pretty lame from my perspective. But that looks like it might be a challenge.”

“Take all the pieces we find,” Kris ordered, “to the electronics lab. Maybe Nelly or one of mFumbo’s experts can make something out of it.”

“Maybe a watch that runs slow,” Chief Beni muttered, but he gathered the scattered shards and boxed them up for transport.

It was when they got their first look inside the shipping containers that matters got serious again.

They were full.

Since all documentation on them was in the now-defunct computer, that left folks to speculate on why a pirate ship had a full cargo.

“Could they have winched the cargo containers off the ships they boarded?” Sulwan mused.

Jack shook his head. “In zero gee, with only makeshift gear? It would be a whole lot easier to send the cargo off to wherever you were selling the ships.”

Captain Drago nodded. “These pirates started off as mutineers. So where are their officers?”

“They were pretty quick to murder the officers of the ships they took,” Kris pointed out.

“Someone needs to answer us some questions,” Jack said.

But all questions were met with sullen silence. Even the reactor snipes suddenly took to studying their fingernails.

No one objected when Gunny suggested that, what with them in zero gee, and none of the prisoners able to exercise, maybe they’d all be a lot safer if they were cuffed to their bunks. And when ex-pirates suddenly turned space lawyers demanded their rights, Marines overruled then with a few quick butt strokes.

“We need to get this show moving,” Kris concluded.

With the
Compton
’s bridge unable to command anything, the techs went looking for a backup. As expected, the first spine compartment forward of amidships had plug-ins for an emergency bridge, but like most merchants, it had no stations. There should have been a few in the spares locker, but, to no one’s surprise, there were none. Six were salvaged from the 4.7-inch lasers and reprogrammed as needed. Three more were brought over from the
Wasp
’s spares locker.

In a week, with a mixed crew from the
Wasp
and former hostages, both ships were ready to get under way.

And the time hadn’t been a total waste.

Professor mFumbo’s techs hadn’t launched their probe given all the excitement over the
Compton Maru
’s arrival. Once things calmed down, they modified it for high acceleration and sent it off at two gees.

It ducked through to the next system and reported back six hours later that there were two old jump points in that system and three fuzzy ones. And two planets in the inhabitable zone.

Kris had to quell a budding mutiny among the scientists. “We will get back here,” she assured them.