The Terran Privateer (8 page)

As it was, an interface drive could be identified only by speed and the way it maneuvered, and detailed identification was going to have to wait for the radar pulses to return from their ten-second-each-way journey.

“Target is moving at point two cee,” Rolfson announced. “Definitely an interface drive. No confirmation on size yet…radar pulses returning…now.”

“Ma’am, we’re receiving an IFF code!” Chan reported loudly a moment later. “It’s
Of Course We’re Coming Back
!”

“Rolfson?” Annette asked. “IFF doesn’t guarantee truth,” she pointed out when her com officer looked at her questioningly. It was
unlikely
the A!Tol had already stolen and duplicated Terran Identify Friend or Foe transponders, but they
had
opened their communications through an encrypted, UESF-only channel.

The tactical officer was running through something on his screen, but finally looked back up at her and nodded.

“Active scanners confirm,” he said aloud. “I can’t read the name on her hull from here, but she’s definitely a Nova Industries survey ship.”

With
Of Course We’re Coming Back
in orbit to help guide the shuttle to
exactly
the right spot, James watched McPhail tuck the shuttle deeper into the empty mouth of the volcano. They’d managed to pick out a clear shot of artificial metal before being recalled, and
Of Course
’s crew had confirmed they were in the right spot.

Following the instructions, they pulsed the shuttle’s UESF IFF code and waited. Nothing happened for a few moments, and then what had
looked
like an entire chunk of rock wall smoothly pushed outward and slid down, revealing an entrance just large enough for the shuttle to land in.

“I didn’t think the survey crew had interface drive shuttles,” McPhail said aloud. “But there is
no
way anyone landed one of the spaceplanes in
that
.”

“Looks like you were wrong about being the most experienced pilot on these toys,” James replied with a smile as he studied the cave. It had clearly been a natural formation originally, probably an old lava tube. A prefabricated door had been brought down and installed over the entrance and then covered in local rock.

The inside still had no atmosphere but looked to have been smoothed with mining lasers. Standard-sized UESF shipping containers had been neatly lined up along one side, taking up less than a quarter of the available space—but still representing two entire loads for the small survey ships.

“Set us down,” he ordered. “We’re going to go take a look.”

“Can do, sir,” she replied. “Be careful,” she continued after a momentary pause as the shuttle vibrated to touch down. “I get the feeling you and I will see a lot of each other, and I’d hate to be proven wrong.”

With a small shake of his head, James Wellesley gave her an affirmative salute to the top of his helmet visor and stepped out of the cockpit to collect his men and their senior officer cargo.

#

“We need to check each container individually for its manifest,” Kurzman told the SSS troopers as they stepped out of the shuttle, carefully adjusting to AB2’s lower gravity. The spacer missed that step, but James grabbed him before he face-planted on the smooth volcanic rock.

The Nova team had done a good job of making the cache safe, but smashing into the floor could still crack the Commander’s faceplate, and there was no more air here than anywhere else on the desolate worldlet.

“Didn’t we get a manifest from
Of Course
?” the Major asked as he carefully settled his nominal superior on the ground.

“Casimir didn’t give them one,” Kurzman replied. “He was playing this whole thing way too close to his chest—
two
survey ships he didn’t tell anyone about?” The short officer shook his head. “I’m downloading an access code to your tacnet.
Of Course We’re Coming Back
’s crew didn’t have it, so even the manifests we’re pulling weren’t available.”

“Wonderful,” James said calmly. “All right, people—take it in patrols; that’s ten for each of you.”

The four four-person patrols from Alpha Troop, plus the one from the Major’s company headquarters section, moved out. He designated sections of ten containers for each patrol, making sure all fifty were going to be checked out.

“This doesn’t seem like a lot,” he said on a private channel to Kurzman.

“About a hundred thousand cubic meters of supplies,” the executive officer pointed out. “But…yeah. If it’s half-and-half food and missiles, it’s about six months’ worth of food and a single reload for
Tornado
’s magazines.”

“We had supplies aboard already, right?”

“We had full magazines and we only shot off ten percent of them,” Kurzman confirmed. “We were…lighter on food and water. We can
carry
a six-month supply, but we weren’t expecting to need it.
Tornado
’s only loaded for two months.”

James grunted. Eight months’ food and water and a single set of missile reloads didn’t sound like much to take on an interstellar empire.

“Sir, I think we need the XO,” one of his troopers reported.

“Oh?” the Major replied. He was already gesturing for Kurzman to start moving toward Delta Patrol. His people had all been five-year-veteran noncommissioned officers of their national militaries before even being
considered
for the Special Space Service. He trusted their judgment.

“We’ve been briefed on every piece of tech we crammed into
Tornado
,” the soldier replied in a Texan drawl, “but ain’t
nobody
mentioned something called an ‘intra-hyperspatial anomaly scanner’ to me.”

The XO suddenly accelerated, almost leaving James behind as the stocky officer charged toward the container.

“Commander?”

“I thought that was just a theory,” Kurzman replied.

“Theory’s fine, Commander, but what
is
it?” James asked.

“It’s eyes that can see in hyperspace.”

#

“You found
what
?” Annette asked her XO and ground forces commander.

“The manifest for one of the containers says its holding an ‘intra-hyperspatial anomaly scanner,’” Kurzman told her. “I’ve never heard of it, but given what the hyperspatial anomaly scanner the survey ships have can do…”

Annette nodded slowly. A large portion of the data Casimir had given her was hyperspatial anomaly scans of the stars surrounding Sol. With those scanners, you could detect a ship in hyperspace from regular space—but the signature propagated at lightspeed. Its only use was to map where people had been, which was helping Rolfson’s team map out potential targets.

Tornado
remained blind in hyperspace, though. The blank void they saw defeated any sensor they had beyond about a light-second—but if Casimir’s people had found a way to detect other ships in hyperspace…

“That could be handy. Well done, Commander. Anything else unexpected in Casimir’s presents?”

“Nothing yet,” Kurzman told her. “About what we expected—food, water, missiles.”

“Have McPhail bring a container of missiles back up when you return,” she ordered. “We need to fully restock our magazines as we plan our next move.”

“Any ideas on that?”

“A few,” Annette admitted. “I gave Rolfson until morning to pull together a briefing, though. If you can find a manual for that intra-hyperspatial scanner, that could help our plans too.”

“We’ll crack her open and see what she looks like,” her XO promised. “We’ll be back aboard before the briefing. Don’t wait up for us.”

Morning. Five days now since the fall of Earth.

Captain Andrew Lougheed of
Of Course We’re Coming Back
had come aboard
Tornado
, joining Annette’s senior officers in the still-rough conference room. A series of petty officers had swarmed over the room over the last few days, setting up a proper briefing display so that Rolfson could give the summary he’d now had days to prepare.

Annette noted that the bearded tactical officer did
not
look happy. She wasn’t surprised—she hadn’t expected him to come up with anything particularly
positive
out of the data from Casimir and Dark Eye.

“Any concerns with
Of Course We’re Coming Back
, Captain Lougheed?” she asked the survey ship’s commander. Lougheed was the man that the UESF had insisted hold that command instead of her, a bulky Chinese Canadian.

“We’re not used to having the interface drive yet,” he admitted. “We’ve had a shuttle with it for a while, but the one on the ship itself is new. I wouldn’t object to borrowing some of your engineering team’s time—we have a grand total of twenty-four people aboard, and we’re seeing some odd glitches.”

“Kulap?” Annette glanced over at her engineer.

Kulap Metharom was a tiny Thai woman who’d been the lead engineer on Nova Industries’ gravitational-hyperspatial interface momentum engine project. She’d been the one to coin the “interface drive” shorthand, and had decided to baby the first fully equipped experimental cruiser—a process that had led her into a uniform and command of
Tornado
’s two hundred–strong engineering department.

“We can spare,” she said quickly. “Will sort after.”

Lougheed nodded slowly, clearly taking a moment to process Metharom’s not-entirely-standard English.

Taking that matter as settled, Annette stood and faced her staff from the front of the room. Along with Lougheed and Metharom, she had Rolfson, Amandine, Kurzman and Wellesley gathered. Between the seven of them, they now represented every O-4 and above left of the United Earth Space Force.

Though, for that matter, if the full Weber Protocols had been activated, the United Earth Space Force didn’t
exist
anymore, though that was a rabbit hole Captain Annette Bond had no interest in diving down.

“All right, people,” she said. “We’ve got a lot to cover today. Lieutenant Commander Rolfson has been digging through everything we were given by the folks back home of what we know of the galaxy. Captain Lougheed was the source of some of that data, so I’d ask you to chime in if we’re off base.

“Kurzman and Metharom have been going over the handful of extra toys Nova Industries snuck in with the supply cache, and Captain Lougheed…well, you saw the end at Sol. We’re probably best off starting with you.”

She met the dark-skinned Captain and smiled sadly. She’d insisted on seeing the sensor data herself, and they’d pass at least a report on to the crew, but her senior officers needed to hear the truth.

“I think we all need to know where we stand.”

Lougheed nodded and sighed, replacing her at the front of the room and pulling out his com unit. A quick tap of the scroll-like device against the wallscreen linked the two, and he easily threw up a tactical plot showing the battle for Earth as
Tornado
had left it.

“Your trick with streaming missiles at a single point proved effective,” he noted first, the plot behind him moving in recorded real time as he spoke. “Your salvo took out one of their cruisers, and Admiral Harrison repeated the trick before
Challenger
was destroyed.

“There were no survivors from Alpha Squadron, and the rest of the Space Force was scuttled as per the Weber Protocols,” Lougheed said grimly. “I think…we expected less of the Force to
survive
that far.”

“We did,” Annette confirmed. “But…there was no point in having the remainder of the Force fight. Alpha Squadron were the only ones with compressed-matter armor and modern missiles.”

“Speaking of compressed-matter armor, watch this.” Lougheed brought up a video, overlapping the tactical plot with a video. “This was assembled by the Orbit One command center after the first cruiser went down, using footage relayed from Alpha Squadron’s ships and the missiles themselves.”

The room was silent as they watched the stream of missiles slam into the invisible energy shield, and the expanding pattern of light as the shield was slowly overwhelmed—and then the missiles snuck through.

“Two hits?” Annette asked questioningly. “We took out one of the A-tuck-Tol’s cruisers with
two hits
?”

“The one Alpha Squadron took down shortly afterwards came apart after
one
,” Lougheed added. “What little analysis was done before they shut down under the Weber Protocols suggests that their cruisers, at least, not only don’t have compressed-matter armor—they don’t have
any
armor.”

“I guess if you have an energy shield that can
eat
forty or fifty cee-fractional missiles, you don’t need it,” Kurzman noted dryly. “Still…the shield clearly has vulnerabilities we can exploit. Vulnerabilities that backing it with our armor would help reduce.”

“Indeed,” Annette agreed. Acquiring an energy shield for
Tornado
was high on her priority list, even if she wasn’t yet sure
how
they would do so.

“What happened after the UESF surrendered?” she asked Lougheed.

“The A-tuck-Tol boarded Orbit One and the other major orbitals immediately upon arriving in orbit,” he told her. “I didn’t get a lot more detail after that, but I can tell you one thing: the boarding troops? They weren’t A-tuck-Tol.”

“They weren’t?”

Lougheed tapped on his com unit and another video replaced the one of the cruiser’s destruction. The screen showed one of the landing bays on Orbit One, with half a dozen of the space station’s police force standing a stiff-backed but unarmed escort around the station administrator and Admiral Villeneuve.

An airlock door slammed aside, and strange forms in black armor started to emerge. Annette half-expected something out of a nightmare, but the first wave of a dozen troopers were humanoids. Squat, wide, creatures with disproportionately large heads, but bipedal humanoids.

The second set of aliens were…more what she’d expected. The A!Tol were
significantly
larger than she’d gathered from the video of Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh. The armored, tentacled creatures stepping into the bay were over two meters tall, carrying themselves on their center tentacles with the manipulators waving all around as they approached Orbit One’s authorities.

There was no sound, but the initial meeting seemed to pass without violence before the footage cut off.

“That was as much as we got before we left the system,” Lougheed told them. “At that point, the surrender of the orbitals had gone peacefully and the groundside militaries had been summoned by the A-tuck-Tol to honor the UESF’s surrender.”

“Facing an enemy with possession of the orbitals, the official policy of the British military is to surrender immediately,” Major Wellesley told them in his irritatingly precise accent. “I believe that is also the Franco-German plan.”

“The Americans won’t,” Annette said with a sigh. “They’ll fight. They can’t
win
, but they’ll fight. And the Weber Protocols will set up a resistance movement as well. The A-tuck-Tol won’t find Earth easy to hold.

“However, there is no point in us returning without some kind of advantage or plan to turn ‘difficult to hold’ into ‘liberated,’” she noted. “Rolfson, you’ve been going over everything that Dark Eye and Nova sent us. What have you found?”

“Nothing good, though a lot that may prove useful,” her tactical officer replied. “May I, Captain Lougheed?” He gestured to the wallscreen.

“Of course.”

With everyone seated again, Harold Rolfson stepped up to the wallscreen and tapped it with his com unit, taking over control of the screen and bringing up a pseudo-three-dimensional display of the stars around Sol.

“The farther we go from Sol, the older our data is,” he warned. “Dark Eye has been sweeping systems out to sixty light-years, and Nova Industries scouts ran a loop about ten light-years out covering the same stars. Inside that ten-light-year loop, our data is relatively current. Outside it…” The bearded officer shrugged.

“The good news, such as it is, is that we appear to be on the ass end of nowhere,” he noted. “Further out along our arm of the spiral, we found almost nothing. There’s probably at least a few survey ships or similar out there now, but if there was nothing there fifty years ago, there probably isn’t anything significant now. Except…here.”

A pair of stars, both ten light-years farther along the rim, flashed red.

“This is where
Hidden Eyes of Terra
was supposed to scout on the mission she didn’t come back from,” Rolfson noted. “We presume one or both of these systems contains an A-tuck-Tol base of some kind. Could be as simple as
Hidden Eyes
ran into a patrol ship, or we could easily be looking at a relatively new fleet base.

“Hyperspatial anomaly scans suggest that hyperdrive traffic to this system”—he tapped one of the two—“started picking up about twelve to thirteen years ago. That would be consistent with assembling a fleet or logistics base to support expansion in this area.”

That was promising. While a fleet base was almost certainly beyond their ability to assault, they could probably pick off ships going to and from it.

“When we look toward the galactic core, though, we see a
lot
more traffic,” Rolfson told them, rotating the view to focus on those stars. “Our ten-light-year sweep was empty, but we did pick up activity starting at the thirty-light-year mark, and it was
busy
fifty years ago around the sixty-light-year line.”

A number of systems highlighted in orange, some with thick circles around them and some with thin.

“Based on Dark Eye’s scans of electronic emissions and the scout ships’ scans of hyperspatial anomalies, we believe these systems to be inhabited. Thicker bands represent higher likely populations.”

The orange systems formed the edge of a creeping sphere, the edge of an expanding Imperium.

“What I found interesting was
these
systems,” the tactical officer pointed out. A small number of systems shaded purple. “They’re about equally far away toward the core, though slightly farther from Earth on a direct line, and show similar traffic patterns—except they share
no
traffic we detected with the orange systems.”

“I was warned the A-tuck-Tol had enemies,” Annette told the others. “Kanzi or something like that. Any idea which of these is which?”

“The orange systems are definitely A-tuck-Tol,” Rolfson said firmly. “Backtracking Tan-tuck-Shallegh’s fleet leads us to this system.” One of the more lightly banded orange systems flashed with a red caret. “Our guess is that system
definitely
hosts a significant A-tuck-Tol military base, supported logistically by the larger colonies around it.

“We’re looking at the edge of their Imperium,” he admitted. “Wideband scans from beyond the sixty-light-year mark are picking up signals suggesting dozens, if not
hundreds
, of inhabited systems. But what we’re picking up there is so diffuse, we can’t give any details. Only an impression of sheer size.”

“We’re minnows facing a great blue whale,” Annette agreed, looking around the table. “I suggest we all get that into our heads now. We need to dance and pirouette, play the game better than they can. Right now, we can potentially take on a single A-tuck-Tol cruiser—but if we get caught by a squadron or one of the bigger ships they brought to Sol, we’re dead.

“So, we need to be smarter. We need to learn to do things we didn’t think were possible. And first on that list, gentlemen, ladies, is that we need to learn how to intercept and board ships in hyperspace.”

“But that
isn’t
possible!” Rolfson objected.

“Nova Industries disagreed with assessment,” Metharom told the tactical officer. “Major Wellesley, Commander Kurzman, brought back sensor. Nova design. Scans for anomalies
inside
hyperspace.”

“The manuals say they tested it, but I’m not sure how,” Kurzman noted. “I want to experiment with using it to track
Of Course We’re Coming Back
through hyperspace. It may well allow us to track ships but not give us enough detail to be able to engage with missiles.”

“In theory, once in hyperspace, missiles and shuttles can move around exactly as they do in normal space,” Amandine pointed out. “It’s just that our normal sensors and navigation systems don’t work.”

“We’ll be dumb-firing missiles and navigating shuttles by dead reckoning,” Annette agreed. “Until, at least, Metharom can build a version of the hyperscanner we can mount on shuttles and missiles. Boarding flights are going to be especially risky.”