The Terran Privateer (36 page)

Forel’s face once again popped back up on her command chair screen.

“Captain Bond,
Subjugator
will not survive
many hits like that,” he said flatly. “I need your assistance.”

“We will see what we can do,” Annette promised, eyeing the tactical screen. “Rolfson!”

“Ma’am!”

“Redirect our offensive fire,” she ordered. “Intercept as many of the Imperial missiles as possible; let’s clear our friends a little breathing room!”

“On it,” he promised.

There was a limit to how effective that strategy could be, she knew. If nothing else, command and control were…problematic with lightspeed links, and missiles traveled at three quarters of the speed of light. But it should buy the furred toad on her screen
enough
of a breather to get him into beam range.

“My thanks,” Forel murmured before his image disappeared again.

“Keep the toad alive,” Annette told her crew with a sigh.
Tornado
had the heavier missile armament of the two pirate ships, but neither of them was planning on battering down the battlecruiser’s shields with missiles.

“Bogey is evading,” Rolfson reported. “She’s adjusting course to try and loop around us and support the destroyers.”

“Smart,” she acknowledged. She’d do the same in the A!Tol captain’s place: the battlecruiser could crush half of the smaller ships in a single pass, freeing up the destroyers to support the bogey against the pirate heavies that
could
threaten her.

“Let’s not let her do that,” she continued. “Amandine, take us in!”

“Do we go faster?” her navigator asked.

They’d been matching the same point five cee speed
Subjugator
was putting out. With their Laian upgrades, they now had a short-duration sprint ability of another five percent of lightspeed—something the A!Tol ship couldn’t match.

“No,” she finally decided. “We’ll cut her off well before she’s clear, anyway. Beam range?”

“Thirty seconds and counting.”

Again, Annette wiped her sweaty palms on her trousers and hoped none of her crew saw her nervousness. Unless the battlecruiser had lighter beams than she expected, the moment they hit range was going to be
painful
for everybody, including
Tornado
and
Subjugator
.

“I’m showing shield flickers on
Subjugator
,” Rolfson reported. “Wait,
shit
: her shields are down, she’s hit!”

There was a flash of energy release, a blast of atmosphere—then the other pirate ship’s engines cut out while she was still five seconds short of the battlecruiser’s beam range.

Annette swore loudly as she realized that Forel had abandoned
Tornado
to enter proton-beam range, the deadliest aspect of space combat, alone.

“Kill her!” she snapped as
Tornado
flashed across an invisible line in space and the deadly streams of energy flashed out from both vessels.

For a moment, both sets of proton beams flailed impotently into empty space, and then
Tornado
found her enemy’s measure. Multiple beams connected the two ships, invisible streams drawn in white on the tactical plot, pulsing vast quantities of energy into the A!Tol ship’s shields.

Barely a second more passed before the
Imperial
ship’s beams latched onto
Tornado
and returned the favor.

“Her beams are weaker than ours,” Rolfson crowed after a second. “We may just make it…”

The battlecruiser had
more
beams, though, and the first of them punched through
Tornado
’s shield as the tactical officer spoke, sending the ship lurching away as energy transferred into her armor with crushing force.

“Firing missiles!” the tactical officer snapped. “Intercepting the beam!”

Icons flickered on the screen as interface drive missiles flashed out of their launchers, interposing themselves in the path of the beams that were cutting through the cruiser’s shields. Without shields or compressed-matter armor of their own, the missiles lasted mere fractions of a second.

They were
enough
fractions.
Tornado
’s own beams broke through, the Imperial ship’s shields flickering and
collapsing
as the two ships closed—and Rolfson sent two missiles that hadn’t been sacrificed to defend the ship screaming across the gap at an unimaginable speed.

Compressed-matter armor had saved
Tornado
but the A!Tol didn’t have that defensive layer. Proton beams tore massive gouges in the battlecruiser’s hull, ripping out the responding weapons—and then those two missiles arrived, hammers traveling at three quarters of the speed of light that released their kinetic energy in blinding flashes.

When the light cleared, all that remained of the battlecruiser was drifting fragments.

“Status report!” Annette barked, rubbing her shoulder carefully where the impact had slammed it into the edge of her chair.

“Armor held, barely,” Ki!Tana—acting as bridge engineering officer—reported. “Metharom’s teams are reporting minor vibration damage throughout the ship but nothing critical. Bruises, basically—to both people and machinery.”

“Good to hear,” she replied. “What about our moist friend?”

“
Subjugator
’s shields are back up but her drive is still down,” Rolfson reported after a moment. “Not picking up any more atmosphere venting.”

“Ki!Tana, Rolfson…what are the odds that engine failure was real?” she asked quietly.

“His shields went down and he took a single nonfatal hit?” the A!Tol asked. “If that was real, the Empress is my mother.”

That confused Annette for a moment, then she remembered that, if nothing else, Ki!Tana was at least four or five times the A!Tol Empress’s age.

“Rolfson?”

“I concur,” the tactical officer said after a quick glance over at Amandine, who nodded as well. “The drive is heavily distributed. A single hit could reduce her speed but couldn’t take out her drive, not without her being
very
badly designed. If that hit actually took out her engines,
my
mother is a
virgin
.”

That got chuckles from the human crewmembers, though Pondar, the only alien on the bridge other than Ki!Tana, looked thoroughly confused by
both
metaphors.

“Raise Forel for me,” Annette ordered.

A moment later the Indiri reappeared on the main screen, back in his regular focused view.

“Apologies, Captain Bond,” he began. “We had an unexpected power surge. We should have our engines back online in a minute or two.”

Annette gave the alien who’d tried to abandon her to her death a large fake smile.

“We took some damage ourselves,” she lied. “We’re in pretty rough shape, but we can still support the ground assault. As soon as your engines are online, we should both move to back up the rest of the armada against the destroyers.”

A quick glance at the tactical plot confirmed that at least some of the A!Tol destroyers were still intact, the smaller pirate ships engaging in a long-range, low-risk missile duel that had still managed to cost them eight ships so far.

“Agreed,” Forel said calmly. “Give me one hundred seconds, Captain, then we can be on our way.”

He cut the channel, and Annette turned back to her crew. “Close us up with
Subjugator,
” she ordered Amandine. “Keep our scorched side away from her, make it look like we’re being super-protective of a damaged section.”

“I can do that,” the navigator replied. “Can I just be super-protective of the whole
ship
? It
does
have my own personal skin aboard!”

#

With unsurprising convenience,
Subjugator
’s interface drive came back online just as
Tornado
was passing her, allowing the other pirate heavy to fall in a few tens of thousands of kilometers behind the Terran ship.

As the two heavies returned toward planet four and its orbiting duel, Annette studied the last ten minutes of the fight on fast-forward and realized that the pirates really had
no
clue how to fight a fleet action. They had, intelligently given the superiority of Imperial beam weapons to those most of the pirates had, refused to close, maintained a long range missile engagement.

Given that Imperial
missiles
were superior to those in the pirate magazines, it would have been a more even match than the numbers suggested, no matter what. To make matters worse, however, the pirates had split their fire across all four targets, and done so unevenly. One of the destroyers had taken over a third of the pirate fire, and had
eventually
come apart under the battering—but the four A!Tol ships had focused their fire on one pirate at a time, and six pirate ships had died before the first destroyer had been eliminated.

Now the three remaining destroyers had closed up their formation as tightly as possible and continued to focus their fire on a single pirate ship at a time.

“They started with the weakest-looking ships and are working their way up,” Rolfson noted, following the same data she was. “Scarily competent bastards.”

“So are we,” Annette replied. “Hold back four launchers around where we were hit, but open up with the rest. Pick one target, send it to
Subjugator
, then pound her to pieces.”

A minute later, the ship vibrated as twenty missiles flashed away, diving toward the most damaged of the destroyers. A few seconds later,
Subjugator
entered her own range and followed suit.

The two heavies’ faster missiles dove through the formation of smaller ships, hammering home on the weakest destroyer, plowing through her already-depleted shields and shattering the half-million-ton starship into tiny pieces.

“Destroyers are switching target to us,” Rolfson announced. “And
moving
; they’re trying to close to beam range!”

“Amandine, go evasive,” Annette ordered. “Harold: kill them for me?”

“On it,” he confirmed. “Transmitting next target to the entire flotilla. Let’s see if they get the idea!”

Tornado
vibrated again as more missiles left the hull, and the tactical display flickered for a second before stabilizing, accounting for evasive maneuvers.

“We have three salvos inbound, twenty missiles each,” Amandine announced. “Permission to deploy rainshower defenders?”

“No drones,” Annette told him. “You are cleared to engage with hull-mounted plasma systems.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he confirmed, his attention already lost in the systems. Moments later, the new suite of antimissile defenses, the poetically named “deadly rainshower defenders” activated. In a sense, the weapons were glorified plasma shotguns, firing hundreds of electromagnetically charged, superheated packets of hydrogen into space.

In a few moments, the space in front of the incoming missiles was filled with balls of deadly plasma, each individually magnetically attracted to anything metal in front of them. They couldn’t move far to impact with the missiles, not given the super-high velocities involved—but they could move far
enough
.

Missiles started exploding well short of
Tornado
’s shield, and the destroyers had no such system. While not all of the pirates obeyed Rolfson’s targeting instructions, enough did to send a crashing tsunami of over three hundred missiles crashing down on the targeted destroyer.

By the time the destroyers’ third salvo ran into the plasma shower and disintegrated without even reaching
Tornado
’s shields, both of the ships that had launched it were nothing but debris.

Captain Karaz Forel’s pirate armada now controlled the Orsav system. Eleven of the smaller pirate ships had died dueling the destroyers, but the entire defending task group was gone.

“Major Wellesley,” Annette said calmly, opening a channel to the Special Space Service officer waiting in his landing shuttle. “You are clear to deploy. You know the drill: secure the target, set up for cargo extraction. Watch your back.

“Stay alive.”

James Wellesley smiled as Bond’s command echoed through his helmet.

“Are we ready to go?” he asked his people.

“Yes, sir!” they chorused.

“McPhail,” he addressed the pilot. “Take us down. All of our shuttles should be hitting the northwestern corner; the big hangars there should have the automated freighters.”

“Roger.”

While the Terran-built shuttles
Tornado
carried were slower than many of the other landing craft in the armada, it wasn’t like most of that speed could be
used
on approach to a planet. James’s people would reach the planet last by a few seconds, but since none of the shuttles could approach the planet at forty or forty-five percent of lightspeed, the final few thousand kilometers would be crossed at a minuscule fraction of the spacecraft’s maximum speeds.

In effect, the final arrival time would be decided more by their shuttle pilots’ skill and bravery than by the maximum velocity of their interface drives—and James
knew
his pilots.

He watched the planet approach at a blistering speed, a tiny display inside his power armor’s helmet showing him the position of all of the several hundred shuttles descending from the remaining pirate ships. The division of targets was haphazard at best, with
Tornado
’s troops arriving at the opposite corner from
Subjugator
’s.

Five thousand kilometers from the planet, the shuttles slowed dramatically, dropping from nearly half of lightspeed to a few kilometers a second at best.

James grinned inside his helmet as
his
pilots blasted right past that mark, closing the distance with the earlier wave by the simple method of running the drive at full for a few seconds more. The other Terran pilots followed McPhail’s example in cutting speed
right
behind the rest of the pirates, and he nodded approvingly.

Normally, he would disapprove of using his allies as ablative meat—but given that in this case those allies
wanted
to be first to steal the best of the portable loot, his sympathy was surprisingly limited.

“Altitude three thousand kilometers; we are dropping at fifty kilometers a second,” McPhail reported. “We’ll have to slow for landing; estimated time to target ninety-two seconds.”

“Watch for ground fire,” James ordered. “Evade as you feel necessary.”

“Go teach your grandmother to suck eggs, sir,” she replied. “If you
want
, I’m pretty sure that shiny suit would survive being dropped from this high; want to test?”

“I’ll pass,” he said dryly. “I’m hoping for a nice, easy landing and some mass surrenders.”

His pilot opened her mouth to reply but stopped as warning lights started flashing across her panel.

“
Shit
!
Interface missile launch!”

There was no time to dodge. There was no atmosphere over the logistics base and no need for the missiles to slow down to avoid hitting the planet. The weapons shot up at over seventy percent of the speed of light, crossing the few thousand kilometers between them in fractions of a second.

Shuttles started exploding, the defenders targeting each craft with three missiles to make sure they overwhelmed the tiny spacecraft’s shields.

James’s shuttles didn’t even
have
shields.

“Get us
down
,” he snapped. “I don’t care where; just put us on the ground!”

“Hang the fuck on,” McPhail snapped back and the screen began to spin as she brought the interface drive back up to power.

No matter how desperate, they couldn’t go down at top speed, but they could go down a
lot
faster. Fifty kilometers a second became a
thousand
and suddenly the ground was
there
, McPhail slamming the engine into a complete stop as the shuttle came screaming down at the roof of the complex.

Only computers could try and judge that timing—and even computers couldn’t always get it right. McPhail cut the drive at the last moment, but the landing craft was still traveling at over a kilometer a second when they hit the armored roof of the base and crashed clean through the roof, the next two floors, and came to halt thirty meters
into
the base.

The shuttle was silent for a long moment.

“We’re
in
the ground,” McPhail finally noted. “Close enough?”

#

Fortunately, the exit from the shuttle had managed to align with the corridors of the station, and James’s headquarters section were able to shove their way out of the shuttle into the base. Checking his map, James realized they were on the completely opposite side of the base from where they were supposed to land, smack dab in the area
Subjugator
’s troops were supposed to handle.

“Guo,” he pinged his Alpha Troop Captain. “What’s your status?”

“We are down at the target,” Jie Guo replied. “Coming under fire from A!Tol security forces, but I’ve got three troops here. Where are you?!”

“Opposite end of the complex,” he replied, bringing up a map showing his people’s drop zones. They’d been scattered across the complex—he wasn’t sure
how
Alpha, Delta and Echo had all managed to land at the hangars—but most of them were nearer to Guo than to him.

“All troops, make your way to the hangars and rendezvous with Guo,” he ordered. “We need those robot freighters.”

“What about you, sir?” Tellaki demanded.

“We’re going to secure the local area and see if McPhail can pull the ship out of her new crater,” James told them. “I believe this is a storage section; resistance should be light.”

“Don’t tempt fate, sir,” Guo told him. “We’ll see you when the dust settles—these tentacled bastards are
determined
to fight for these ships.”

“Good luck,” James said.

Cutting the channel, he looked around the empty corridor they found themselves in.

“Well, folks, in the absence of better data, I suggest we go that way,” he ordered, gesturing in the only direction they
could
go. “Let’s see what trouble we can find.”

#

There was more trouble in this segment of the base than he’d expected. The maps that Forel had provided marked the region the alien had targeted his own landing in as a storage area, likely containing high-value but low-use items like computer parts—a logical place for him to claim first dibs on but unlikely to see heavy defenders.

James’s people hit the first defensive position less than fifty meters “north” of their original landing site. It was a security checkpoint, four aliens—all Rekiki, he noted—with light body armor and plasma weapons guarding a set of scanners and a built-in barricade.

A fusillade of plasma fire forced his point man back into the corridor, scorch marks on the front of his power armor. Without the armor, the man would have been
dead
, which made James
very
pleased with the expense.

“Grenades and charge,” he ordered. “We have
no
time.”

A dispenser on his wrist popped a small explosive device into his free hand. He quickly checked to be sure the rest of his team were ready and then threw it on a careful arc that bounced it around the corner.

One. Two.
Three
.

On three, ten hundred-gram hypervelocity fragmentation grenades went off, spraying the security checkpoint with deadly shrapnel.

A moment after the weapons detonated, James started forward with his team, following the explosives around the corner with his weapon extended. The computer in his power armor flashed analysis of the targets: one guard down, the other three wounded but still up.

His people opened fire, a spray of plasma bolts that ripped the barricade to pieces along with the guards behind it.

“Clear!” James snapped. “Confirm!”

Two of his people carefully stepped forward, covered by the rest of the team while they checked to be sure there were no automated defenses and examined the security door.

“The door is locked down,” Ral, his Yin trooper, reported. “Tight security code—I’m not sure even the guards would have access.”

“I’m not slowing down to hack it open,” James replied. “Kara—set charges.”

Kara Hughes was his headquarters section demolition specialist, and she leapt forward with a will to examine the door.

“I can blow it, but it’s going to be one hell of a boom,” she said quickly. “Clear the zone; I’ll need a couple of minutes.”

“Everybody back,” he ordered. “Let us know if you need anything.”

“I’ve got the charges; just need to be sure I won’t blow anybody I don’t mean to, sir.”

That was about as blatant a hint as she could get away with, and he nodded as he stepped back with the rest of the team.

“Space Service troops, report,” he ordered calmly once he was clear of the checkpoint room.

“This is Guo,” Alpha’s Captain replied. “I have Alpha, Bravo, Delta and Echo with me. We have secured four of the ten hangars for these robot freighters. They’re impressive-looking ships, everything we were told they would be.”

“How many are we looking at?”

“I’m seeing five per hangar so far,” Guo confirmed. “Each
Tornado
’s size; these hangars are
huge
.”

“Take ’em and hold ’em, Troop Captains,” James told them. “They’re the key to us getting
paid
for this stunt.”

“Sir, this is Sherman,” his Charlie Troop Captain reported. “We have a problem.”

“What kind of problem, Annabel?”

“We’re moving through the admin section of this base,” she told him. “Civilians, some uniformed, some not. They’re all dead and we didn’t kill them.”

“Someone was there before you?”

“One of the pirate ships closest to Forel,” Sherman confirmed. “I don’t recall a ‘no prisoners’ order, boss.”

“Because there wasn’t one,” James said flatly. “Tellaki, your status?”

“Echo is with me now, Honored Major,” the Rekiki replied. “Apologies for delay; we were discussing that exact lack of order with some of our pirate friends.” He paused. “We may need support from on high. Am I authorized to terminate our ‘allies’?”

James winced.

“That bad?” he asked, then sighed. “That’s the Captain’s call, not mine. I’ll bounce it.”

#

“Explain,” Annette ordered as soon as she’d been updated and linked to Tellaki.

“My honor does not permit me to allow the slaughter of surrendered enemies or the unarmed without direct orders,” the Rekiki vassal who’d ended up sworn to her told her. “The pirates we are sharing this section of the complex with have no such honor. We are…in disagreement.”

Tellaki’s helmet started relaying his footage to her. The space looked like a cafeteria with an attached atrium, though the plants in the atrium were
purple
instead of green. There had already been a firefight of some kind, as scorch marks marred the pale blue walls.

At least fifteen aliens with no armor or weapons had been herded along one wall, guarded by four of Golf Troop’s Rekiki soldiers. The other members of Golf Troop were standing with Tellaki and had their weapons trained on an eclectic group of aliens, including several Yin and a Tosumi led by an Indiri, who had their own weapons trained on Tellaki’s men.

“They have no armor,” the Rekiki said calmly. “I can end this disagreement immediately with your permission.”

All of the prisoners were in Imperium uniforms, which
did
make them enemy combatants. For a moment of dark rage, Annette was tempted to simply tell Tellaki to walk away. If they’d all been A!Tol, she might even have given in—but only two of the prisoners were the tentacled aliens. The rest were a mix of other species, including at least two she hadn’t seen yet.

“No,” she told Tellaki. “
Nobody
dies; do you understand me?”

“I am sworn to you, Honored Captain,” the alien replied. “Your command?”

“Tell them that we are taking these prisoners and they will receive a portion of any sale or ransom,” she ordered.

The saurian alien turned his attention back to the pirates and snapped at them, a hissing and sibilant speech her translator confirmed as roughly what she’d said.

“Our orders from Forel are no prisoners,” the Indiri replied. “No slaves.

“Relay me?” Annette asked Tellaki, and a flashing light informed her that he had linked her to her speakers.

“Forel passed no orders to me and has no authority to command me,” she told the Indiri coldly. “These prisoners belong to
Tornado
, and my troops
will
kill you if you defy me. Do you understand me?”