The Terran Privateer (22 page)

“We will be docking in about five minutes,” Amandine reported.

“All right, people,” Annette said. “Cole, are you needed for the docking?”

“Computer systems can take it from here,” her navigator admitted with a mildly disappointed look.

“Senior officers and Ki!Tana report to my office now,” she ordered. “Seal the ship until we’re done.”

Gesturing for the officers already on the bridge to follow her, Annette strode into the Spartan office attached to the bridge. It was, as she quickly glanced around,
just
big enough for a quick planning meeting to sort out the last few details.

“We’ll need Major Wellesley here,” she told her officers as Chan filed in last. “He’ll have to make sure we have the ship sealed first.”

Working or not, it took the Special Space Service Major less than two minutes from her call to arrive and join the Space Force officers.

“What’s the plan, Captain?” he asked as soon as the door slid closed behind him, forcing Annette to hide a smile at his enthusiasm.

“Ki!Tana and I have discussed what our best approach is,” she told her officers, gesturing for the alien to speak.

“Your human crew has no currency that will be accepted aboard the station,” the A!Tol told them. “Until we have liquidated at least one prize or its cargo, you have no funds and are operating on credit based on your relationship with me.

“Captain Bond and I will proceed to an agent of my acquaintance and negotiate the fate of our cargo,” he continued. “We may need to sell the raw protein immediately to have some spending cash, but we will want to hold on to the missiles and molecular cores to get a better price. I’m sure we can negotiate a deal that puts at least some money in the ship’s accounts to be distributed to the crew.”

“Alien crew who are leaving us here can leave as soon as we lift the current lockdown,” Annette told them. “We’ll want a way to reach them to make sure we can pay them fairly. I get the feeling that building a reputation for paying fairly will help us here.”

“It will with most,” Ki!Tana agreed. “Some will see it as weakness.”

“Then let them make that mistake,” she said sweetly.

“No offense to Ki!Tana, but the two of you aren’t going on the station
alone
, are you?” Wellesley asked.

“Hardly,” Annette replied. “I’m bringing
you
and any two of your troopers you choose. Given the warnings we were given, I suspect powered armor and plasma weapons would be considered rude, but body armor and slugthrowers are basically casual wear aboard the station.”

“Indeed,” Ki!Tana replied. “Bodyguards are also expected.”

“Once we’ve put money in our crew’s hands that can actually be spent on Tortuga, I intend to allow shore leave parties to leave the ship,” Annette noted. “Under
no
circumstances does anyone go anywhere alone. My preference would be for parties of six, including at least one of our nonhuman crewmembers to help our people find the lay of the land.”

“Won’t that stand out?” Rolfson asked. “I mean, if we moved in squads…”

“It is quite common,” the big A!Tol told them. “The Laians do not spend a significant amount of time in the public area of the station. They live in the original core hull and do not mingle with their customers. They most certainly do not provide anything resembling law enforcement.

“Another thing to realize,” Ki!Tana continued, “is that while the Laians do not approve of slavery, they do not intervene in slave transactions aboard the station. There is no official slave market, but you may still encounter groups of slaves. Their guards will be well armed and trigger-happy; attempting to intervene is unwise.”

“Slavery? But we’re talking societies with industrial robotics,” Chan objected. “That makes no sense.”

“Not all things are logical, Lieutenant Commander,” the alien told her. “There are tasks for which a sapient creature is simply better than a machine. There is status. There is the use of enslaved skilled labor—in many cases to
run
those industrial robots.

“And there is the Kanzi religion,” she continued grimly. “All other bipeds exist to serve them. Slavery is how their culture is
built
—the Kanzi race are rulers, slavers and warriors raised up on the back of an empire of slaves.

“The slavers will see your people as exotics, prizes the Kanzi will pay great sums for,” Ki!Tana concluded. “Moving in groups is wise. Avoiding the slavers as much as possible is
also
wise.”

“Will there be Kanzi aboard?” Rolfson asked, the big man looking hugely uncomfortable to Annette.

“Tortuga takes all comers who don’t create trouble, and one of the ships docked today started life as a Kanzi armed auxiliary freighter, so yes.”

“We don’t start trouble,” Annette ordered her people flatly. “We protect our own, but we don’t start trouble. James—have your escort ready to go in ten minutes.

“We have business to complete.”

#

Annette and her escorts stopped at the airlock
Tornado
’s crew had hooked up to the massive space station they’d docked with. Both the station and the starship had more airlocks and flexible umbilicals to link them together, but the Terran crew was being cautious. One link for now was plenty.

“What’s the atmosphere looking like on the other side?” she asked the SSS troopers guarding the airlock.

“Slightly higher pressure and a tad over twenty-five percent oxygen,” the woman leading the team told her. “No toxins of concern; I’m only reading oxygen, nitrogen and CO-two.”

Which made sense—that was the exact mix, though in different proportions, you’d find on
Tornado
. If your air was artificial, there was no purposes to putting in anything other than the requirement for life—oxygen, some specific trace gases—and a neutral buffer that all races could breathe—nitrogen.

The carbon dioxide was the result of the fact that, according to the files Annette’s people now had, over ninety-nine percent of known life used
very
similar chemical reactions to life on Earth to provide energy.
Some
CO
2
was almost certainly added intentionally, Annette doubted humans were the only ones who needed a small percentage to properly function, but most appeared to be a natural by-product.

“Gravity is pegged at just under point seven gees,” the Corporal continued. “High oxygen, low gravity. Sounds like it could be fun.”

“Also potentially distracting,” Major Wellesley pointed out over Annette’s shoulder. “Watch your step; gravity shifts aren’t fun.”

“James, I trained on ships without artificial gravity,” she pointed out. “I’ll be fine.” She nodded to the Corporal. “Open it up.”

The inner airlock door opened and they moved in, letting it close behind them. There was a faint but perceptible change in air pressure as Tortuga’s air was allowed in, overwhelming the lower-oxygen and -pressure air from
Tornado
. Once the shift was complete, the outer airlock door opened, and Annette took a deep breath of “alien” air and stepped into her second-ever alien structure.

The umbilical, sadly, was utterly prosaic. If the Laians who’d built Tortuga had used anything different from the plastic and steel Terrans would have used, it certainly didn’t
look
any different.

“Lead the way, Ki!Tana,” she told the big A!Tol. “You know this place better than we do.”

The squid-like alien moved forward, her locomotive tentacles moving in a way that could still make Annette queasy if it took her by surprise. There was barely enough space for the massive alien to pass Annette in the tube, but they managed it.

“There is no entry scan,” the A!Tol told them quietly. “All of the tubes link to one gallery with several accesses into the main bazaar. Both public arms are set up identically. The bazaar can be intimidating—even I was intimidated when I first came here.”

With everything that she’d seen so far, Annette took the warning seriously. It lost some of its weight, though, as they moved through the docking gallery. There was some traffic wandering through it, aliens of a dozen stripes—she recognized a Yin and a Frole, but the rest were strange to her—but the gallery itself was prosaic and wouldn’t have looked out of place on any station in Earth’s orbit.

Then
they exited the gallery into the bazaar and she stopped in her tracks, trying not to gape as she looked out into what the Laians had built as their main marketplace.

The shipyard slip converted into a marketplace had been six kilometers long and two wide. It had been wrapped in metal and turned into an encased environment—but they hadn’t filled all of that space with corridors and rooms like a regular space station.

The open space that made up one of Tortuga’s bazaars was at least a kilometer wide and four high. It had a clearly oriented “bottom” and “top”, with an almost-uncountable number of galleries surrounding and rising up.

The galleries and the bottom floor were garish conglomerations of hundreds of stalls, vendors hawking an unbelieve variety of wares. In the first five seconds, Annette lost track of the number of
species
she saw, let alone the number of sapients.

“My god,” she whispered.

“I told you.”

“How?”

“About two hundred thousand permanent and semi-permanent residents,
excluding
the Crew, and at least the crew of every ship you saw docked,” the alien replied. “Not to mention a lot of the smaller ships are docked internally.”

“There are
this
many pirates?”

“Pirates, smugglers, exiles, sapients with nowhere else to go,” Ki!Tana said quietly. “The refuse of the galaxy sweeps up in places like this—but realize that even a
million
such wouldn’t even be a rounding error in a census of
your
world, let alone the A!Tol Imperium.”

There was a sadness to the alien’s voice that the translator seemed to be picking up as the big tentacled alien surveyed the bedlam.

“When no one will have you, you go where no one will go,” she explained. “The lucky join the pirates and smugglers. The unlucky starve. The
truly
unlucky fall into the hands of slavers. Do not be fooled, Captain Bond—this is the cesspit of two Empires.”

Annette inhaled, letting the extra oxygen run into her system as she shivered at Ki!Tana’s words, then nodded firmly.

“And it’s where we must do business,” she said. “Let’s find this agent of yours.”

#

As they moved into the bazaar, Annette realized it wasn’t
quite
as crowded as it appeared on first glance. Their party of armed sapients barely stood out at all, though Ki!Tana’s massive size compared to most of the species present definitely helped clear them a path, as most of the population moved in similar parties.

The garish stalls were fronts that led into covers hung over what had probably started life as cargo containers, now upgraded with doors and locks. The front stalls mostly either contained goods Annette judged to be cheap or were
closely
watched by armed guards.

They’d been in the bazaar for several minutes when all of the various aliens began to clear a path for someone else. Ki!Tana gestured with her manipulators for the humans to follow suit, and Annette stepped back with the crowd to see who was coming.

A squad of four aliens, one Laian, one Yin, and two from a species she didn’t recognize, strode along the center of the bazaar. They clearly
expected
everyone to step aside and were clad in as close to a uniform as their three distinct body types would permit—the dark red bandoliers she’d seen on the Laian Captain when they’d arrived—and unlike anyone else she’d seen since boarding the station, all four carried plasma rifles.

“Crew,” Ki!Tana said simply as the patrol past. “They don’t live in the public areas, but they do make sure they get their cut. This way.”

The big A!Tol ducked between two of the cargo container stalls, leading the Terrans away from the main concourse toward the back of the station. They came out into another of Tortuga’s impromptu streets, but across the way from them was a surprisingly familiar-looking “outdoor” tavern.

“We will want to get your crew protein checkers,” the A!Tol half-whispered. “Food here is usually UP, but drinks are at your own risk. Something that would make me mildly intoxicated would kill most humans. For now…just don’t order anything.”

She led the way into the bar, moving like a sapient bulldozer and assuming anyone would get out of her way. To the credit of the patrons’ intelligence, they did—and anyone who might have caused trouble spotted the three Special Space Service troopers bringing up the rear and thought better of it.

Few bits of body language were universal across species, but Annette suspected that having a hand on the grip of your firearm was one of them.