Queen of the Pirates (11 page)

The
Fribourg Empire
didn’t have women like her.

Denis let himself smile.

Wachturm was going to realize soon that he had a tiger by the tail, not the other way around.

Chapter XIII

Date of the Republic October 4, 393 Sarmarsh System

Jessica had decided to have this meeting in her office, rather than one of the big or little conference rooms. The First Lord had taught her the importance of that level of personal touch, especially with a situation as delicate as this.

It was one thing to capture an Imperial courier–cum–spy doing naughty things and chastise him. That was practically part of her job description.

It was something entirely else to take the Emperor’s cousin and best fleet commander hostage. She would, very soon, be explaining this one to the First Lord, and possibly the entire Senate. Best to do it right.

Her office was plain, almost to the point of severe. Her desk. A backboard with two non–standard filing cabinets, because few commanders liked paper. A sideboard where Marcelle’s coffee service normally sat. Two chairs for guests.

Her only decoration was a small quilt her mother had made for her when she’d been first commissioned, with the Republic seal in white on a dark green background, framed and hung on the sidewall above the sideboard. Other knick–knacks would have to be bolted down for emergency maneuvering, and would have taken up space, so she just had the desk, the sideboard, and two chairs.

Clean, simple, focused.

Marcelle knocked on the door and then opened it.

Jessica rose as Marcelle escorted Admiral Wachturm into her sanctum.

“Admiral,” she said simply, shaking his hand.

He smiled a gruff smile. “Commander.”

She waited for him to sit and then joined him.

Rather than make small talk, they both watched Marcelle make coffee by hand, grinding the beans she had roasted two days before, pouring them into a press, adding just enough hot water to soften the stark bitterness. Honey, syrup, and freshly thawed cream were placed on the table between the two before Marcelle took her leave.

The two warriors studied each other silently for several minutes over the rims of truly excellent coffee. The air had taken on a warm feel.

“Not many people,” the admiral finally began, “have the patience to out–wait me. Especially not in a situation like this.”

Jessica nodded with a wry smile. “I fear you are correct, sir.”

He reached inside a breast pocket and pulled a small leather wallet, a courier satchel, with his right hand as he continued to sip the coffee. He placed the satchel on the desk, next to the water pot, and opened it one–handed. The admiral pulled a heavy piece of paper from the dark leather and laid it flat, spinning it around so she could read.

“Just to get the diplomatic niceties out of the way, Commander Keller,” he said quietly. Expectantly.

Jessica took the paper from him and studied it. Imperial Ambassador at large. Diplomatic immunity. Etc. Mind your p’s and q’s.

Jessica considered her response. Like every campaign, she had planned a number of maneuvers and solutions ahead of time, to make it easier to react in the heat of battle.

“Should I address you as Admiral or Ambassador?” she said, opening the bidding rather high.

His eyes got a canny look, squinting slightly as he took her measure across the desk.

“That would depend,” he drawled, “on your official capacity here.”

Jessica nodded. Call.

“Officially,” she countered, “my squadron has been seconded to assist the
Lincolnshire
government with a piracy problem on their outer borders. In that capacity, we were on patrol, investigating reports of a pirate base in the neighborhood of
Sarmarsh
.”

She paused to take a long sip of the coffee before it lost that perfect edge. Marcelle made the best coffee, especially when she knew she had an audience that would appreciate it.

“Once we arrived, we came under fire from said pirates,” she continued. “While dealing with that issue, we encountered two vessels attempting to flee the area. Given the circumstances, I chose to pursue and apprehend your vessel, and let the other escape.”

Again, more coffee.

He watched her like a mongoose watched a python. Or perhaps how a python watched a mongoose.

“Upon review,” she said, upping the ante a notch, “the other vessel, the one that did escape, was a class of carrier called a Mothership, of a design commonly used in
Corynthe
. Which would suggest that the base below was part of a quiet invasion of
Lincolnshire
’s space, and not just a bunch of pirates. How did you come to be in the vicinity?”

She watched him take his own long sip of the coffee. His face gave away very little, not that she had expected it to. Perhaps a twinkle in his eyes, as if this was a game he was playing with her. One he expected to win.

“We were on a trade mission,” he said with great seriousness.

“I see,” she replied. Rolling her eyes at that statement would be rude. Appropriate but rude. She settled for a neutral smile.

“So when I go down there and destroy the place,” she continued, “I won’t find any evidence of an Imperial conspiracy with
Corynthe
or
Salonnia
?”

He gave her a feral, hungry grin. “Anything you found would obviously be a fake, Commander, planted to make the Emperor, and the entire
Fribourg Empire
, look bad.”

“Yes, I expected as much,” she said quietly.

Jessica set down her coffee and picked up the document to more closely study it.

“Which brings us back to this document,” she said.

“Yes?” He was all ear, confident in his position. Obviously, the great admiral had planned his response well.

“If you’re an Ambassador,” she pounced, “then I should be escorting you and your vessel to
Ramsey
to present your credentials to the government there. Anything else might suggest that you really were a spy, and the rules of war are very different for that sort of thing.”

She was greatly rewarded by the sudden flickering of his pupils as they shrank. Nothing else about his face changed, just that.

It still spoke volumes.

She watched him finish the coffee.

“I did not want to mention it earlier, Commander Keller,” he transitioned smoothly. “My vessel was actually responding to a distress call from the base, not long before you arrived. I felt it would be impolite to broadcast to everyone that the colony down there was so poorly run, you understand.”

Jessica smiled. Admiral Wachturm was far more entertaining to fence with than the robot.

“I do,” she replied. “Understand, that is.”

She carefully folded up the parchment and handed it back to the man.

“In that case,” she continued, “you would simply be a neutral vessel on a mercy mission in deep space, and not really an ambassador to a group of pirates causing troubles to a Republic ally. Am I correct?”

For a moment, he gave her the look of a man that had sucked a lemon dry. But only for a moment, before he recovered.

“Indeed,” he recovered swiftly. “So I will be free to go on my way shortly? After, of course, all the diplomatic niceties and receptions, of course?”

She inclined her head slightly, baiting the hook one last time. “While I believe that it would be proper for your vessel to return to Imperial space as soon as possible, Admiral,” she drawled lazily, “the circumstances of why you came to be here, now, instead of heading directly to
Ramsey
to present your credentials, require some investigation. And while I would like to be able to transport you to the capital to explain it, I fear that my vessel will, of necessity, have to continue in pursuit of this apparent pirate invasion, which will likely take us to
Corynthe
. Unfortunately, your staff will have to travel with us until proper arrangements can be made.”

She finished off her coffee as well. Marcelle would be two steps outside the cabin door, waiting patiently, probably with a book, but Jessica suspected that they would not need any more coffee. At least, not right now.

Admiral Wachturm grimaced. Gruff and friendly was gone. This was harsher, far more stoic. A man who might have met a competitor worth engaging, possibly even his match.

“
Hostage
is such a vulgar term,” he said into the gap.

“It is, sir,” she replied, polite if not sickly sweet. “I promise that you will be treated as a most honored guest during your stay. And probably subject to some level of awkward hero worship from my crew. But necessity dictates that things aren’t always the way we prefer.”

He set his coffee mug down carefully and studied her face, looking for something.

After a moment, he found it, whatever it was.

He nodded once, carefully.

Jessica nodded back, just as precisely. This was not a man to trifle with.

And she was not a woman to simply be pushed aside.

Chapter XIV

Date of the Republic October 5, 393 Sarmarsh System

Denis had apparently entered the big engineering conference room last, from the mob of people already present. Jessica had saved him a chair, at her right hand. It was fitting.

He looked around as he sat. Several engineers and senior officers were present. And all the big players: Tamara Strnad, his tactical officer; Navin Crncevic, the ship’s dragoon; Vilis Ozolinsh, the chief engineer; Iskra Vlahovic, the flight deck commander; Anastazja Slusarczyk, commander of the GunShip
Necromancer
; and Hollis Dyson,
Gaucho
, the commander of
Cayenne
.

The latter did not bode well. It suggested that something crazier than normal was brewing.

Jessica rapped her fist on the table to bring order to the murmurs.

“Okay, people,” she announced to the room, “they’ve had forty hours to stew down there. We don’t have the resources to storm the place. At least, not without heavy casualties. Marines are crazy, but not bulletproof.”

She nodded to the giant black man who led the fifty–eight member marine contingent, commonly called
Navin the Black
by his own people, as though he were an ancient Viking. He smiled and nodded back.

“How do we neutralize the base?” Jessica concluded.

Tamara leaned forward with a careful look on her face. “If you don’t want them to escape,” she began, “we could sit up here for a week or so with the Type–3’s and just blast the surface until we melt everything and bury them. Husbands the Primaries and missiles when we can’t restock them out here. I presume you are looking for a solution that is either faster or more humane?”

“Thank you, Tamara,” Jessica replied. “Yes to the latter. Faster and more humane.”

Denis considered the situation below. The base had been disarmed by all the strikes, but not particularly damaged. The flight bay had suffered a catastrophic failure, so they had no immediate way off the moon until they fixed something, but they couldn’t do that while
Auberon
and her consorts sat overhead.

“Have we offered them a carrot?” Denis asked quietly.

The room fell into stunned silence.

Pirates?

“A carrot?” Jessica asked him.

“Sure, we’ve got the stick. If they don’t see a carrot, they’re just going to have to assume we’re here to kill them all, and they’re going to make that as expensive as they can.” He shrugged. “I would.”

“We could turn it into a refugee crisis,” Enej said from the opposite corner of the table. Denis had missed the man when he walked in.

“Explain, Enej,” Jessica said clearly intrigued.

“Right now, they’re pirates, and we’re the Republic,” he said with a wry smile. “
Aquitaine
hunts down pirates and hangs them. That’s how it’s always been done.”

Several hands and fists pounded the table. Many of the crew came from poorer worlds where piracy was an everyday fact of life. People like Moirrey Kermode, but there were many others from the Outer Reaches.

“So,” Enej continued over the noise, “what if we treat the place like it had just suffered a major natural disaster, and all these fine folks are colonists that need to be transported back to where they came, with nothing more than what they can carry on their backs?”

He leaned back and smiled at the abrupt, shocked silence that rippled around the room.

Denis was reminded of a still pond on a quiet fall morning, with a little fog on the water. And then some enterprising twelve–year–old hurled a great big rock as far out as he could, shattering the calm with a huge splash of energy. The folks around him were like that.

Denis turned to his boss. “There you go, commander,” he said. “A carrot.”

She rewarded them with a warm grin. “And here I was trying to figure out the orbital mechanics necessary to redirect one of the asteroids and slam it into the moon hard enough to kill that base.”

“Ooh,” Moirrey piped up from the engineering end of the table. “Gots that covered, ma’am. Nina does, that is.”

Denis looked at that corner and saw Auberon’s primary pilot, Nina Zupan, sitting between the flag centurion and Yeoman Moirrey Kermode, blushing uncomfortably as the engineer pointed at her.

“Is that true, Zupan?” Jessica asked.

“Yes, sir,” Nina replied. “But it was Moirrey’s idea. I just did the math.”

“Tell me,” Jessica commanded.

“Is simple, ma’am,” Moirrey chirped as the room listened. Moirrey’s radio drama narrations during the Long Raid had kept the crew alternatively rapt and giggling. She had a background on stage that made her a natural speaker.

“The gas giant’s orbitin’ a wee faster bit than the asteroids in the belt. We could pick out one of the bigger ones, attach a big boom to knock it out of line and some thrusters, and fly it out an’ slam it into the bigger moon pretty easy. Jus’ needs ta know when you wants to blow up the base so’s we know which one to pick.”

“An asteroid?” Jessica said with a blink.