The Terran Privateer (30 page)

“She was built as a test bed for rapid modification and iteration,”
Tornado
’s Captain agreed.

“There is much I can do to your ship,” Orentel finally noted, walking around the model and studying it. “Inefficient to upgrade the launchers, have to cut new holes in armor,
never
easy with compressed matter. Take hundreds, possibly thousands, of hours.”

The wands whirred and huge chunks of the ship lit up.

“Beams. Engines. Shields. All require power,” she concluded. “It all depends, Captain Bond, on what you can afford.”

Annette had been waiting for that and quickly checked her communicator screen. It had the latest estimate from Ondu of what he’d be able to sell their remaining prizes and cargo for and how much would go to her and the ship’s accounts.

“And that, Dockmaster, depends on how good of a price you’re going to give us,” she said, leaning forward to start the inevitable dickering.

They had been hectic, terrifying, dangerous days, but
Tornado
had been docked at Tortuga for only five days when Annette called of her senior officers into a meeting on her return from the Crew’s portion of Tortuga.

Ki!Tana had apparently only just left her room, but there was more vibrancy to her skin now, a few more spots of color in the hazy gray of her normal calm. The gray-black pained tones of the previous day were muted, only an occasional flicker of darker gray to suggest she wasn’t fully back to normal.

Annette studied her officers, concealing a smile at changes in the seating arrangements that no one had discussed and carried notable implications. Captain Elizabeth Sade—a civilian, technically, and also completely out of anyone’s chain of command—had shifted to sit next to Commander Rolfson. Lieutenant Commanders Chan and Metharom—communications and engineering respectively, so out of each other’s chain of command—had been shifted together by the change and seemed completely unconcerned.

Wellesley and Kurzman had been sitting together before, so no change there. The changes had shifted Amandine and Lougheed together and that pair seemed bemused more than anything else.

As she and Kurzman had discussed, everyone appeared to be pairing off. While none of the relationships violated protocol, several Annette was aware of came close. Were they in Sol and she was seeing this many couples forming up, she’d endeavor to transfer some of them to other ships just to minimize the number of distracted crew.

In their current state, however, anything that tied their crew together more tightly was to her benefit. They would fight harder for each other, and the pressures of their exiled existence would probably prevent too many ugly breakups.

“All right, people,” she announced once everyone had settled in. “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we have a deal with the Crew and will be shifting over to a slip in their yards in”—she checked her watch—“twenty-seven hours.

“They will be installing two brand-new antimatter power cores in our currently empty spaces, upgrading four of our existing fusion cores to approximately five times their original power density, and ripping out the last three cores to free up volume,” she noted.

“They’re going to use that free volume to enable them to completely rearrange the existing internal crew and power modules to allow for a significant increase in beam-weapon volume. We’re losing the last of our lasers in favor of more proton beams, and they’ll upgrade our existing two beams to the same standard—again, one superior to that of current generation A!Tol cruisers.”

She smiled grimly.

“Lastly, while the Laians are impressed that we
had
a missile defense suite, they think ours is
adorable
. They’re going to rip it out completely and replace it with something that translates, roughly, as ‘deadly rainshower defenders’. I have no idea what that means, but it’s supposed to be more effective.”

“They are rapid-fire, close-range plasma cannons,” Ki!Tana explained. “If they are providing the full suite, it should come with a number of similarly equipped autonomous drones.”

“It’s the full suite,” Annette confirmed, “though I’m warned replacement drones will cost us an arm and a leg, which brings me to our bad news.”

She surveyed her officers, watching them lean forward, wondering what other shoe was going to drop—except for Kurzman, who knew, and Ki!Tana, who clearly guessed.

“We are officially broke,” she said flatly. “If Ondu sells significantly below his estimates, we will actually be in
debt
to the Crew when the work is done, which I doubt is a good idea. My own personal accounts are also gone, as are the XO’s, and we sold
Faces of God
right back to them without even
looking
at the ship they handed us.

“Sorry, Major,” she nodded to Wellesley, “but
Tornado
cannot afford to acquire power armor for your people. Or, well, anything. If anyone of you want to offer the flotilla a loan from your own accounts, it would be very much appreciated,” she finished dryly.

“I’ve already pooled resources with my Troop Captains,” the SSS Major replied. “We have an appointment with an armorer tomorrow. I am
not
sending my troops up against power armor without matching gear again.”

“I appreciate it, Major,” Annette told him honestly. “I wasn’t looking forward to asking you to. We
will
repay you—as soon as
Tornado
is upgraded and we can go hunting again.”

“How long will that be?” Lougheed asked.

“Thirty days, give or take a few hours,” she replied. “The translator turned whatever units they used into seven hundred and twenty-six hours. Another downside of this deal is that we won’t have schematics, so there’s no point sneaking back into Sol to send the designs to the Weber cells. I asked,” she noted dryly.

Of Course We’re Coming Back
’s Captain
glanced at Sade, who nodded to him.

“I think Elizabeth and I can fund whatever costs we run until then,” he offered. As junior Captains, they’d received significant shares in the prizes taken. More than enough to cover the maintenance costs and food that would arise for all three ships for thirty days.

“Thank you,” Annette said softly. “At least, not needing to go home means we can start hunting again as soon as we’re good to go. The Network may be able to reverse engineer the Laian work, but they’ll need time—time in which we need this ship if we’re to make a difference.”

She glanced around her officers.

“We’re going to have an odd month ahead of us,” she told them. “I’m not comfortable sending
Of Course
or
Oaths
out without
Tornado
for backup, so we’re all going to be sitting around Tortuga. Let’s try to keep our people out of trouble, shall we?

“If you have more questions or concerns, now is the time.”

Thoughtful gazes suggested she’d have more questions later, but for now, everyone was silent.

“All right. Ki!Tana.” She glanced at the strange alien who’d attached herself to Annette. “Meet me in my office,” she ordered. “Everyone else, dismissed.”

#

Back in Annette’s office, she gestured Ki!Tana to the specially designed couch she now kept there for the big alien. The A!Tol dropped herself over it with a slight flush of pleasure and gestured with a manipulator tentacle for the Captain to speak.

“Are you all right, Ki!Tana?” Annette asked. She looked better than the previous day, but the alien had been pretty far gone by the evening.

“It is…complicated,” her companion said slowly. “In a purely medical sense, I am no better off than I was yesterday. Some days are easier than others, but the underlying conditions remain. Were I to be tested by a physician qualified in A!Tol physiology who did not know what I was, they would recommend you say your final goodbyes.”

That
was not what Annette had expected to hear. So much of what she’d heard of the strange alien companion that she’d acquired suggested that Ki!Tana had been around for a very long time, and she’d subconsciously assumed that the A!Tol would
be
around for a long time.

“Are you dying?” she asked.

“No,” Ki!Tana said crisply. “I am Ki!Tol. I have already died and a new soul risen from who I was.”

“I am lost,” Annette admitted. “Start at the beginning, I guess?”

“The beginning is the physiology of the A!Tol, of which you know almost nothing,” the alien told her. “Our males live and die as you would, growing slower with time. They are…not so bright to begin with. But that is an outdated attitude, I suppose,” she continued with a flush of yellow in her skin.

“We have…more distinct differences between our two genders than you humans do,” she noted, “though our males are more capable than we allowed them to be once. They are still rare among our senior military and top scientists.”

“I thought the A!Tol who conquered Earth was male?” Annette asked, curious.

“Tan!Shallegh is, yes,” Ki!Tana agreed. “The Tan! marks him as a first-degree relation of the Empress, born from the brood of one of the Empress’s brood-sisters. He has advantages to offset our gender prejudice. Were he female, he would be on the list of potential heirs to our current Empress.” Her manipulators fluttered in a shrug. “But he is not, and we are not
that
enlightened with our males.”

“Your females are bigger on average, as I understand,” Annette said slowly. “That can’t help.”

“It does not. We are larger, stronger, heal
much
faster, and we regard ourselves as smarter,” the alien said calmly. “Unlike our males, our females grow until we die. We can even replace lost tentacles, where our males cannot.”

Tornado
’s Captain considered what all of that would have meant for, say, medieval or early gunpowder combat troops, and shivered. She could see why males had become the sheltered, “gentler” sex for the A!Tol.

“What we
lack
,” Ki!Tana continued, “is an internal gestation chamber. We do not have any mechanism in our bodies to feed our young while they grow—and we do not lay eggs.”

Annette looked at her alien friend in confusion—then in horror as just what that meant sunk in.

“Our embryos literally consume us from the inside out,” the A!Tol said flatly, her skin flushing purple with sadness. “We have, in thousands of years of study and science, never found a way to prevent carrying our young to term internally from being fatal.”

“Surely, by now you can get around that?” Annette asked. Even humans had mastered ex-vivo gestation by the end of the twenty-first century—an invention that had dramatically slowed the decrease in births in the world’s middle class.

“We had the ability to extract gametes, artificially fertilize them, and bring them to live birth externally before we had
computers
, Captain Bond,” Ki!Tana told her. “Which led us to the most horrifying scientific side effect our species has ever encountered.”

Annette waited in silence. This was something she probably could have researched, now that they were at Tortuga and had access to galaxy-wide databases. Hearing it from her
friend,
which was what Ki!Tana had somehow become, made it so much more immediate.

“If we remove the ability to conceive by removing the gametes, this does not remove our hormonal
urge
to conceive,” Ki!Tana explained. “Our males have no sex drive unless activated by a female’s pheromones, but we females enter a phase where our bodies demand that we conceive. And since conception is fatal to us, that phase does not end.”

Heat. She was basically talking about a sapient species going into an inescapable, unending heat of the kind that caused dogs to jump walls and cats to squeeze through impossibly small cracks. A heat that could only be stopped by a pregnancy that would be
fatal
.

Annette couldn’t help herself. She stared at Ki!Tana in open horror.

“We have found ways,” her companion continued, clearly aware of Annette’s reaction, “to postpone what we now call ‘the birthing madness’. Drugs. Treatments. Removing the gametes early helps. We avoid all A!Tol young until they are mature, leaving their care to immature females and related males. We have managed to push its onset past three hundred long-cycles, aligning our lives with what our doctors can allow our males.

“But the madness takes us all and it does not leave,” she said flatly. “Some choose not to have their gametes fertilized until it does, and have them reimplanted, dying as their foremothers did. We have ways to make it less painful, but it remains a minority choice. Most see their broods raised while they live, even if they don’t
meet
them until they are adults.

“And then, when the madness begins to take them, they quietly arrange their affairs—and then calmly arrange their deaths.”

The office was silent.

“And you are in this ‘birthing madness’, I take it?” Annette finally asked, once the mind-boggling horror of being an A!Tol female had at least partially processed.

Ki!Tana’s skin flashed a wan red, tired pleasure and acceptance.

“A small fraction of us refuse to die,” she said simply. “We make arrangements. We lock ourselves away in isolated places of meditation. Only the rich can even try, as the madness grows stronger for many long-cycles. Even among those who try, many choose to die in the end.

“Eventually, and how long varies from person to person, the madness stops getting
worse
. The body can regenerate removed glands, but it will eventually reach the highest production of the hormones it possibly can.”

Manipulator tentacles flutter.

“Then you adapt,” she said simply. “You rebuild your mind and soul from the fragments left behind. Understand, Captain, that I do not know who I was before I entered that cell on the side of a mountain. Even her name is lost to me; I have only fragments of her memories.