The Terran Privateer (11 page)

#

Exiting the gallery left them in a corridor leading toward a set of heavy security doors. Someone had set up a crude barricade of metal tables and other objects. More bodies were stacked up in front of the barricade, and the point man dodged back around a wall as gunfire greeted him.

“What have we got?” Major Wellesley asked immediately.

“Looks like six of the centaur types and a lot of dead friends,” the point man replied, running the few seconds of footage backward on the tacnet. “Machine guns—
big
ones—and probably got grenades and such on the webbing. Bit of a headache.”

“Got a suggestion, Corporal?”

Annette was studying the footage herself as the discussion went on. Unless she was severely mistaken, they were looking at the end result of a failed mutiny—one that had almost certainly occurred
after
she’d disabled the ship.

“Use the Kay-Forties to bounce grenades down on them,” the point man said instantly.

Annette had no idea what a “K-40” was—beyond a vague memory of it being an attachment to the SSS’s standard assault rifle—but Wellesley was nodding his agreement.

“Captain, would you think there was anything in that corridor us blasting to hell is going to cause issues?”

Apparently, since he had her, the Major was willing to use her knowledge. She checked over the footage again.

“I doubt it,” she replied. “Doesn’t look like they’re any more inclined to put volatile lines near the bridge than we are. Blow it up all you want, Major.”

“Good. Corporal Danzig has a great idea,” Wellesley told his men. “Load your Kay-Forties, high vee frag grenades.”

Each of the Special Space Service Troopers pulled a round cylinder off of their webbing and slid it home in the smooth-barrelled launcher attached to the bottom of their rifles—the K-40 under-barrel grenade launcher, Annette finally remembered.

“Let the guns call the angle,” the Major ordered. “Fire on the ricochet…NOW!”

Five weapons coughed, firing grenades into the far wall. The explosives bounced around the corner, hopefully ricocheting into the barricade, and then detonated.

“Go!” Wellesley bellowed. He grabbed Annette’s shoulder before she could obey, though, physically yanking her back from the line of fire.

“
Not
you,” he said flatly.

A moment later, the gunfire ended and the two officers went around the corner. The guards were dead, mostly down to the grenades and the survivors finished off by gunfire.

“Nice work,” Wellesley complimented his men. “Danzig—prep a charge.
Carefully
. We’re almost certainly going to want
something
from the bridge.”

The trooper nodded, his grin visible even through his helmet, and started patting his webbing, pulling out a detonator and other bits from the pockets and holders on his armor. For a few seconds, most of the SSS team was looking at him, not at the bridge door.

Annette was more concerned about the bridge—and was the first to spot it opening. Someone had spent a
lot
of money on that door: it was huge, made of heavily reinforced metal, and went from fully closed to wide open in fractions of a second.

There wasn’t even time to shout a warning.
Tornado
’s
Captain simply opened fire as more of the centaurs charged out. Four more of the centaur-like aliens, one of them the biggest she’d seen yet, charged out with machine guns in their hands.

The Special Space Service trained
extremely
competent troops. Distracted by the prospect of explosives or not, one of the team had been standing watch with her eyes on the door. Her assault rifle fire joined the spray from Annette’s gun, putting the lead two hexapodal centaurs down in the first few seconds.

Machine gun fire slammed into the trooper, sending her flying as heavy bullets hit her armor. Annette focused her fire on the big ones, walking explosive rocket rounds up the big creature’s torso and knocking him back into the bridge.

The last hexapod was still moving, though, the big machine gun lining up with Annette. Time seemed to slow as the captain stared down the barrel of the weapon—and then the barrel lurched sideways with its owner.

What looked like nothing so much as a
chair
had slammed into the alien’s rear flank. She wasn’t sure if the cracking sound was the furniture or the centaur-like alien’s legs, but before the creature could do more than turn, a
massive
form slammed into it.

Thick armored tentacles wrapped around the hexapod’s throat and a metallic box on the big A!Tol’s central torso spat a series of sibilant hisses Annette couldn’t understand. The suddenly pinned alien went limp, clearly dropping the gun, and submitted.

The armored A!Tol, the biggest of the small number of the immense tentacled creatures Annette had seen to date, released the hexapodal centaur and slowly, keeping all of its tentacles where the Terrans could see them, tapped a command on the box.

“We surrender,” the voice said in flat, mechanical English. “I will order the remaining crew to surrender to your troops. There should be no more death.”

“You’re the Captain?” Annette managed to force out, stunned that this alien could communicate with her.

The A!Tol’s tentacles shivered in a way that sent shivers down the Terran Captain’s back.

“No.” A tentacle pointed at the biggest of the hexapodal centaur corpses. “
She
was the Captain. She refused to surrender when I said I had a translation program for your species. The…crew objected.”

“Will they all obey you?”

“I am Ki!Tana,” the creature said in that flat tone. “I was First Sword. They will obey.”

The translation program was clearly being a bit
too
literal there, but Annette got the gist. This creature was the XO. With the Captain dead—at Annette’s hands, no less!—the crew would obey it.

“Order them to stand down,” she commanded. “Then we’ll talk.”

It became rapidly apparent that most of the crew had been avoiding Major Wellesley’s soldiers. Once Ki!Tana sent out her unintelligible orders, aliens of all shapes and sizes started to materialize out of dark corners and side corridors the Special Space Service troopers had missed. They appeared with their hands or other manipulators raised, clearly a relatively universal gesture for “I am unarmed.”

There were…a lot fewer than Annette would have expected. She doubted her ability to read Ki!Tana’s body language, but the drooping of the alien’s tentacles suggested that it had been expecting more as well.

“No one else seems to be showing up,” Wellesley finally told Annette. “I make it one hundred eighty-six prisoners, including Ki-tuck-Tana here.”

“Are you certain?” the alien asked, the computer-generated voice creepily monotone.

“It’s possible that some of your crew aren’t coming out of hiding,” the SSS Major said calmly, his tone suggesting more sympathy than Annette would have expected the man to feel for a big tentacled alien. “That’s everyone who’s surrendered.”

“This ship had a crew of six hundred and fifty,” Ki!Tana said. The voice was still monotone, but it seemed to be learning. There was a
hint
of emotion to it, which was more than it had started with. “Between the strikes on the power centers, your soldiers, and Kikitheth’s madness, we have lost so many.”

“You attacked
us
,” Annette pointed out.

“We did,” Ki!Tana agreed. “And many may have deserved worse fates. But they were my friends. As are those who live.” The big tentacled creature shook, its manipulator tendrils shivering in a way that was only slightly less creepy on multiple exposures.

“But I must speak to your leader about the future now,” it continued.

“I
am
our leader,” Annette told the alien. “I command the United Earth Space Force’s Operation Privateer, our countermeasure against your species’ conquest of my world.”

No point mentioning that Operation Privateer was three ships, two of which were effectively unarmed. The A!Tol pirate didn’t need to know that.

“Ah. You are here. And you killed Kikitheth yourself. That does make this easier.” Several manipulator tendrils waved toward a door leading off from the bridge. “Shall we use the captain’s office? We have mutual value to discuss.”

Even through the armored vac-suit, Annette could see Wellesley tighten. He might actually let her walk into a closed room with an alien roughly three times her size, but she was going to have to explicitly order it—and even without saying a word, he was
right
.

“Of course,” Annette agreed cheerfully. “Major Wellesley? If you and one of your troopers would accompany us.”

A
horrible
clacking sound emerged from the big A!Tol, and Annette realize the creature was snapping its beak together repeatedly—something the translator wasn’t translating and yet…it was laughing. The alien was
laughing
at her.

“I am no threat now,” Ki!Tana told her. “But bring your soldiers.”

#

The pirate captain’s office was centered around a long couch, clearly designed for the big, hexapodal centaur who’d commanded the ship. The other seats were closer to stools, simple arrangements that worked for most species. Both Annette and Ki!Tana were able to sit with ease.

The rest of the room looked like a junker’s paradise. The walls were filled with displays of choice bits of machinery and other trophies pulled from victims across the years. A banner of some kind covered the back wall, its sigils and heraldry entirely unfamiliar to Annette. Pride of place amongst the trophies was a gold circle containing what Annette realized, after a moment’s inspection, was a tentacle holding a sword.

“Kikitheth was so proud of that one,” Ki!Tana said, gesturing at the circle. “The commissioning seal of an Imperial Navy destroyer. Poor ship wandered into a pirate muster. They took the destroyer, but Kikitheth commanded the only ship to survive—of
twelve
.”

“This ship is no equal to your military,” Annette noted carefully. “They are faster, with superior weapons.”

“Indeed,” the A!Tol confirmed. “
Your
ship, however, was slow enough that we mistook her for a transport. Your weapons, inferior, your armor…impossible. Interesting combination.”

“I am Captain Annette Bond, privateer for Terra. This is Major James Wellesley, my boarding team commander. You wanted to talk. Talk,” Annette ordered.

“Your ship, Captain Bond, has no shields. Low-efficiency, brute-force engines. Slow missiles. Lasers instead of proton beams. You boarded my ship to steal our tech.”

She winced. The A!Tol was dangerously perceptive.

“Perhaps,” she allowed. Everyone was still in vac-suits, which helped conceal her reaction from the alien who
probably
wouldn’t identify it. “Do you have a point, Ki!Tana?”

She
tried
to imitate the mouth-click the translator was using as a substitute for the A!Tol’s beak snap. She was somewhat pleased with the result, though it was going to take a lot more practice until she was
comfortable
with the sound.

The alien responded with the same beak-clacking as before. Ki!Tana, it appeared, found many things funny.

“While my function was as First Sword, my relationship with Kikitheth was…one of ownership,” the alien told her. “In exchange for settling my debts—which were large—Kikitheth owned my time, skill, and mind for twenty long-cycles. As you have defeated Kikitheth in reasonably fair combat, under the same pirate code that deal was concluded under, that contract now passes to you.”

“Didn’t you instigate a mutiny against your previous contract-holder?” Wellesley interjected. “This sounds like something of a poisoned fruit, ma’am.”

“I am afraid the translator does not handle metaphor well without practice,” Ki!Tana replied. “But I must note that I did not intend to start a mutiny. I advised my captain and owner that I possessed a translation program that would allow us to surrender. Since I assumed she was not
mad
, I did so on an open channel so our crew would not needlessly sacrifice themselves.”

“And instead, this Kikitheth chose to fight,” Annette said. “Exactly what does this ‘contract’ entail, Ki!Tana?”

“You are obliged to provide food and board for myself and to pay a stipend to fund my hobbies—some of which, such as collecting odd translation programs, have proven to be of surprising value! In exchange, as I said, you own my time, skill and mind for the fourteen long-cycles remaining in my contract.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Annette asked. “If you had said nothing, I would have had no reason to believe this existed.”

“It is a duty under the contract and the code,” Ki!Tana replied. “Also, you intrigue me, and there is little left in this galaxy I find truly intriguing.”

“So, if we wanted you to help gut this ship for parts to upgrade ours, you’d do that under your contract?” Annette asked slowly.

“This ship is now useless,” the A!Tol told her, and the translator’s tone seemed even flatter than usual. “With the destruction of the power cores, we lack the ability to generate a hyperspace portal—so we are trapped. We must either be rescued or taken prisoner. Gutting this ship for parts does not hurt
me
, provides value to my new owner, and allows me to argue for the sake of my former crew.”

“And what argument would you make for them?”

“On my own, I have the knowledge to identify parts that should improve your own systems, transport the shield generator, and similarly provide value to you,” Ki!Tana said. “With the surviving crew of
this
ship, I could do so much more efficiently and leverage their knowledge to aid your upgrades.”

“Even assuming I am willing to trust
you
; how could I trust them?”

“You intend to be a privateer,” the A!Tol replied. “Pay them. A crewman’s share of the value of any loot—you may find it wise to provide such to your existing crew as well. Loyalty to the uniform of a conquered world only goes so far.”

Annette sighed. She
wished
she could argue.

“You could upgrade our ship and install the shield generator on your own?” she asked. She wasn’t sure she believed that.

“Captain Bond, I was working on starships when your race was just realizing that they
could
reach orbit,” Ki!Tana said. “Allow me to bring my old crew with me, and I will have this ship’s finest gear installed in your ship in a few cycles. If you leave us, we will die regardless. Let us be your guide to this great galaxy.”

“We need it,” Wellesley murmured over a private radio link. “If it’ll help us…we need its knowledge. Ma’am, its translation program alone could save lives.”

Annette sighed again.

“Very well, Ki!Tana,” she said softly. “I accept your contract and your service. I suspect feeding you and my soon-to-be crewmembers is going to be a headache, but we need you.”

Unspoken, though she suspected the alien understood perfectly, was that she was also unwilling to leave the survivors to die in hyperspace. Her mission might require her to do things over the next few years she would regret—but she saw no reason to start just yet.

#

The pirate ship—Annette hadn’t bothered to learn its name and didn’t see any reason to do so—might have been crippled, but it still managed to maintain gravity and light from her auxiliary power. The Terran captain wondered just what that auxiliary power was—her own ship had massive arrays of batteries that would run emergency systems for about twenty-four hours. If the pirate ship’s reserve power was equally limited, it could eventually be a problem.

For now, there were air, gravity, and light in the eating area that Wellesley’s men had escorted their prisoners to. Everyone was still in their vac-suits, which limited Annette’s ability to distinguish species, but it looked like the survivors were from seven separate species.

Ki!Tana, interestingly, was the only A!Tol among the prisoners. She made a mental note to check in on that later, but she was starting to suspect that Ki!Tana was of very few A!Tol aboard—and a very strange A!Tol at that.

“How do you
feed
this kind of variety?” she asked the tentacled alien,

“UP,” her new companion answered. “Universal Protein. Plus species-specific vitamin powders. We’ll want to bring those stores with us, but it’s all artificial and relatively easily manufactured, given access to carbon.”

Annette’s understanding was that proteins from completely different biospheres would likely be toxic to each other. Apparently, the A!Tol had fixed that problem, along with allowing those species to talk to each other.

“Here,” Ki!Tana said abruptly, opening a cupboard and pulled out several boxes and sets of earbuds. “These are for Indiri, but I think they will fit your ears.” Manipulator tentacles flowed over the translator device for a moment and lights flashed on both Ki!Tana’s own translator and the new one.

“I’ve downloaded your language and set it as the user language,” it continued. “It won’t translate emotion initially. The software is smart, but it can only do so much without live experience.”

“So, the more we humans use it, the better the software will get?” Annette asked.

“Yes,” the alien agreed. “Once we have the crew in service, we can reconfigure these for all of your personnel. Any being you encounter will have one. The A!Tol Imperium has twenty-nine member species. Few can learn that many languages.”

“Major, is the air safe?” Annette asked.

“I’m not sure I trust the emergency air to last for long, but yes.”

“All right. Let’s show our potential new crew who they’re going to be working for.”

Facing the collected prisoners, she removed the helmet from her vac-suit to place the earbuds in her ears. For the first time, she breathed the air that the pirates had used on their ship, and it was surprisingly bearable. She was half-expecting to smell filth and debris and for the ship to be half-maintained.

Instead, the air was crisp, fresh—with a hint of something that smelled vaguely like lemon. It was better than the air on
Tornado
.

Shaking her head slightly, she attached the box of the translator to her chest and joined Ki!Tana facing the alien prisoners. She was vaguely aware of Wellesley doing the same thing but replacing his helmet once he had the translator buds in.

Two of the Major’s troops—over thirty soldiers—guarded the walls and exits from the big room. The others were sweeping the ship for any more survivors and checking on specific concerns that Ki!Tana had told them could risk the ship’s integrity
before
they were done looting her.

“Crew,” Ki!Tana said loudly, the big A!Tol’s voice echoing its sibilants and clicks through the room. The translator picked up the word easily, and Annette figured the rest of the crew was wearing the same devices. “We’ve been defeated. Kikitheth is dead, slain by the leader of these humans. You are all aware of my contract with Kikitheth. It now passes to Captain Annette Bond, who leads these humans.