James made it onto Tornado’s bridge with about a minute to spare.
Harold Rolfson, a massively bearded redheaded man and Tornado’s XO, waved him to an observer seat as the big cruiser cut through the strange void of hyperspace.
“Forty-five seconds to portal formation,” Cole Amandine announced.
“Catalog details of this system are on the screen, people,” Pat told his crew. “If you’ve any guesses for where they hid Tortuga, now’s the time.”
James studied the screen himself. The last time they’d visited Tortuga, it had been hidden under the rings of a gas giant in an uninhabited system. This time, the system—also uninhabited— the coordinates had brought them to didn’t have a ringed gas giant.
It was a sparsely occupied system in general. One small gas giant and six barren rocks of various sizes.
“If it’s hidden, it’s in the gas giant,” Rolfson said loudly.
“That’s where I’m headed,” Amandine told them. “We’ll see if our red-bearded friend is right.”
There was a warm comradery aboard Tornado’s bridge, one that James was glad to feel again. Annette had left her crew behind to become Duchess, but the team here on the bridge still remained. Many of the other crew had retired or transferred to other ships, but Pat had held on to his bridge crew.
The strange tear in reality of a hyper portal lit up the screen, filling the entire view…and then Tornado flashed through into reality, the stars popping in around them and the mass of the gas giant filling the view.
“I don’t suppose the secret pirate base is entirely obvious, just hanging out in space?” Pat asked.
No one bothered to answer the Captain, focusing on their screens as the cruiser’s scanners swept the system.
“No contacts,” Rolfson finally reported. “System looks dead.”
That was the problem with hidden bases. If they weren’t where you thought they were, how could you tell?
“Take us into a low orbit and look for oddities in the gas giant’s surface,” James’s husband ordered. “Pulse our Tortuga code three times omnidirectionally as well. Let’s make sure people know we’re here.”
“What if someone jumps us?” Amandine asked.
“If it’s anyone except the Crew, we blow them to hell,” Pat replied calmly. “If it’s a Laian cruiser, we run.”
“We are expecting them to be happy to see us, right?” Rolfson asked.
James chuckled and the bridge crew looked back at him.
“No,” he admitted to Tornado’s crew. “Remember that this is now a government ship. Worse, even when we were privateers, we blew something like eighty percent of Tortuga’s customers to dust bunnies.
“We have an access code and we didn’t come in sirens blazing, so to speak, so we expect them to let us board. But no, we don’t expect them to be happy we’re here.”
#
“Oh that is interesting,” Rolfson said loudly as they tucked the cruiser into orbit of the gas giant. “Check out those spectrographic and EM readings.”
James glanced over the Militia officer’s shoulder at a set of wavy lines and numbers that meant absolutely nothing to him.
“Looking at them is not answering any questions for the ground-pounder,” he said cheerfully. “Anyone care to explain to the class?”
“The gas giant is not as large as it looks from far away,” the XO told him. “There’s a higher-than-normal density of ions that throws a massive shroud of charged particles out around the planet. It’s almost got two surfaces—one where the actual atmosphere hangs, and a second a couple of thousand kilometers higher up, where the ionic cloud is suspended in its magnetosphere.”
“Surely, the survey team noticed that?” Pat asked.
“There’s a note about odd electromagnetic activity in the catalog, but they ran through this system at speed,” Rolfson replied. “I’d say they spent less than three days each surveying some of the systems this far Rimward.”
“I wonder if it’ll be in our interests to resurvey them,” James thought aloud. “This system is barely outside Sol’s Kovius Zone, and that kind of hidden pocket could be handy.”
“Well, today I’m guessing the Crew used it for just that,” Pat told him. “Lieutenant Commander Amandine, is there any risk to Tornado taking us through the ion shroud?”
“The shields’ll take a beating,” the spaceborn navigator replied, “but we should come through at seventy, eighty percent of capacity.”
“We’ll be vulnerable if someone jumps us,” Rolfson concluded. “But…a Laian cruiser could take us without that edge, and even an Imperial cruiser couldn’t with it.”
“Very well,” Pat said calmly. “Take us through.”
It was an eerie feeling for James, watching them dive toward what appeared to the naked eye to be a solid planet. The gas giant grew larger and larger in the screen, filling their view of the galaxy.
Then Tornado lurched as if struck, the big cruiser hammering her way through the shroud of charged particles and into the space underneath. Energy flickered across her shields, the “empty” void still far denser than regular space.
“The ionic cloud and the EM field are screwing with most of our systems,” Rolfson reported. “Sensors are hashed, but…”
An icon dropped on the screen.
“That’s Tortuga,” the XO told them. “There’s at least two or three other ships in here with us, but Tortuga is an entirely different scale and a lot easier to find.”
As they closed, the screen zoomed in, picking the familiar-looking six-armed star of the Laian-built mobile shipyard out of the static and lightning. Twenty kilometers across, it had been built to provide front-line service for super-battleships in a war between the Core Powers centuries earlier.
“Incoming!” Rolfson snapped. “Sneaky bastards; we have two Laian cruisers matching velocity at five hundred kilometers!”
“Pulse our ID code,” Pat snapped.
“Already on it.”
Several seconds stretched into eternity as the two cruisers, smooth-lined ships ten percent bigger than Tornado, carrying matching armor and even more powerful weapons, paced her through the shrouded pocket.
“Incoming transmission.”
The image of a Laian officer appeared on the screen. To human eyes, they resembled massive upright scarab beetles, with patterns of color and hue that identified individuals. This one wore red cloth bandoliers strung across a torso covered in heavy carapace plating, each bandolier marked with insignia and medals marking the officer as a Captain of the Crew.
James had enough time to realize the Laian looked familiar before he spoke.
“This is Captain Tidikat of the Crew,” he told them, the translator picking up his chitters and turning them into English with ease. “Your code is technically valid, Tornado, but a ducal warship is not welcome in Tortuga.”
“James?” Pat muttered and the Ducal Guard Colonel nodded, stepping forward to face the cameras.
“Captain, I am James Wellesley of the Ducal Guard of the Duchy of Terra,” he told the Laian. He’d seen Tidikat before, when Tornado had first visited the station, but he didn’t think the Laian would remember him.
“I am here as a representative of my Duchess. I swear to you, on her contracts with the Crew, that we are not here to do harm or attempt to enforce the Imperium’s laws.
“We are here to do business with Ondu Arra Tallas and to complete a withdrawal of Duchess Bond’s funds from her accounts with the Crew, to conclude our business with Tortuga in a mutually satisfactory matter that will not require us to seek the station again.”
“You have more enemies than friends here now, human,” Tidikat warned him. “Many lost friends or brothers to your ship.”
“Then they perhaps should have warned their friends and brothers not to betray us,” James replied sharply. “We defended ourselves, nothing more. You know this. There is no way the Crew is not aware of the data and cargo provided to Tallas.”
“No threat to the Crew or the station will be tolerated,” the Laian told him.
“We have no intention of threatening either, nor of initiating violence,” James promised. “We are here to complete our business, Captain Tidikat. I have no interest in bloodshed.”
“You may not find Tortuga’s populace lacking in such interest when it comes to your blood,” Tidikat said. “Your code is valid, Colonel. If you honor your word, you will be permitted to complete your business.
“Your code will not be accepted again. This is the only warning you will receive.”
“It is appreciated, Captain. We mean no harm to the Crew.”
The channel was already gone.
“Well,” Pat said calmly. “That went swimmingly.”
“Better than I expected,” James admitted. “But I would recommend against shore leave this time, Captain.”
#
Chapter 36
James couldn’t help but feel tiny and fragile as he made his way through the loading bay where his Guardsmen were arming up. There were twenty humans and twenty Rekiki in the bay, and all of them had strapped on full powered battle armor, adding even more to their bulk.
The Rekiki did an especially good job of looming when you added several centimeters of armor to their immense centaur-like forms, but the humans did a solid-enough version themselves, given that the suits were a uniform two meters tall.
The low-profile power suit he wore had cost three times as much as a regular suit of armor. It gave him about forty percent of the survivability and seventy percent of the speed and strength of an armor suit while not being an obvious tank.
The Imperium used it for commandos. He’d acquired a handful of the suits on A!To, mostly for VIP protection. He’d fitted Pat for his personally on the way over.
Tornado’s Captain was a decent shot by Navy standards, which meant he was absolutely useless when James’s ex–Special Space Service Guardsmen went to war. Given that they were planning on moving through Tortuga with the funds to purchase an entire squadron of battleships, James wanted his husband as protected as possible.
“Are we really expecting to need this much firepower?” Annabel Sherman asked in her Southerner drawl as he reached his destination and found his two Troop Captains. “Seems like the Laians might object to us dropping an army through their door.”
“They will,” James agreed. “And I’m hoping not to need you, but I want you in reserve regardless. For the actual planned job, I want two troopers from each of you.”
“I should accompany you as well,” Tellaki told him, the Rekiki looking even more enormous than usual in his powered armor. As a member of the “Vassal” caste, Tellaki was smaller than the leaders Rekiki armor was designed for, though he was quite large enough out of the armor for human sensibilities.
“You spent five-cycles here once,” Tellaki continued. “I have spent far longer here and over many more trips. I still know this station better than you, Colonel.”
“Fair,” James acknowledged. “All right. Half a fire team from each of you, under Tellaki’s command. Annabel, I want you to have the rest of the Guardsmen ready to go on the drop of a hat. While I’m not expecting anyone to get kidnapped by Kanzi slavers this time…”
“It’s still A!Ko!La!Ma!,” Sherman agreed, reeling off the proper A!Tol name of the station with an ease that James envied.
“It is,” he agreed, then smiled grimly at her. “But if you’re not going to use the easy name, Troop Captain, at least call it what its owners call it.”
“That name always makes me sad,” she admitted. “Builder of Sorrows. Just reminds me of how…lost the Crew actually are.”
“We weren’t much better once,” James reminded her. “But Bond found us a way home.”
He met both of his officers’ gazes in turn with a firm nod.
“Let’s go make sure home stays safe, shall we?”
#
The tube connected to Tornado linked in to a central gallery with a dozen other access points. They hadn’t detected any other ships docked with Tortuga upon approach this time, though the perpetual lightning storm the station was now embedded in made detection of anything difficult.
Even knowing what the interior of the bazaar looked like, James still inhaled sharply as they passed from the corridors around the gallery into the massive open space. It had started life as one of the station’s yard slips, intended to repair and refit super-battleships.
At some point in the distant past, it had been sealed over to hold an atmosphere, but only some of the interior space of that six-kilometer length had been filled with construction. The central bazaar remained an open cylinder a kilometer in diameter and four kilometers high, with hundreds of galleries wrapping their way around the open space as they rose “up” toward the center of the station.
The floor was still the chaotic swarm of stalls and rough-and-ready shack-like structures James remembered, the crowds perhaps a little less dense than before but not by much.
The reaction of the crowd to their small team was entirely different.
Initially, they’d been genteelly ignored by most of Tortuga’s population. Later, after they’d crushed a Kanzi attempt to take part of the crew slaves, the population had given them a respectful space…but still mostly ignored them.
Now the crowd was watching them as they moved through the rough aisles of the bazaar, almost shrinking back out of the way. The five hulking suits of power armor were probably part of it, but while James wasn’t great on alien body language, he could recognize hostile glares from at least some species.
“Oh, yeah,” Tellaki murmured. “We are so popular here.”
“About the only place in the galaxy wiping out a pirate fleet isn’t a glowing recommendation,” James replied. “Let’s get to Tallas. Preferably before someone decides to find armor-piercing knives for our backs.”
#
They had almost reached the bar Ondu Arra Tallas used as the front for his operations before trouble found them, which was farther than James had honestly expected to make it.
While the crowds had been parting to allow James’s party through without issue, many of the sapients filling the halls of Tortuga had then proceeded to follow the humans to see what happened. Everyone knew there was going to be trouble; it was only a question of who found the gear and the guts to stand up to five suits of power armor first.
Somehow, James wasn’t surprised that someone on Tortuga managed to find a matching set of five power-armored thugs. What surprised him was the realization that the occupants of said armor were Frole, a sentient fungal race he’d never seen be anything but calm and curious.
On the other hand, the fact that most of the Frole he’d met were pirates or ex-pirates should have said something about the species.
“I am Phokei,” the central armored figure said. His translated voice was flat—he’d turned off the emotion-translating aspect of the device, and with his natural voice concealed inside the armor, there was no way for James’s to pick it up.
“Nine and twelve buds of my blooming were cut short at Orsav by your Captain,” Phokei told him. “You shall be the first of her blooming to pay recompense with eternity!”
That mouthful of idiom took James a moment to process—but the threat was clear immediately. The Frole grunts had followed the normal Crew expectation—it wasn’t really a rule—not to bring plasma weapons aboard Tortuga, but the heavy high-velocity rifles with their armor-piercing rounds they carried were probably a bigger threat to the station’s integrity.
Less so if they went through James’s people’s power armor, but that wasn’t something he was planning on allowing.
Frole weren’t a particularly slow race, and power armor enhanced their speed. Phokei’s men were probably trained soldiers—but James’s people, human and Rekiki alike at this point, were Special Space Service, run through the most grueling training humanity could envision.
James’s own plasma pistol was in
his hand before Phokei had finished raising his own weapon. A short-range wireless link fed the pistol’s sights to contacts he was wearing, and he opened fire from the hip, three bolts of superheated plasma hitting the Frole’s weapon and the chestplate covering the fungoid’s braincase.
At this range, even the somewhat underpowered hand weapon burnt through the power armor with ease. Phokei was dead before he finished raising his weapon—and his followers suffered the same fate at the hands of James’s troopers.
They hadn’t even fired a shot.
James turned to face the crowd, the mix of a dozen sentient races wavering back in fear now.
“We are not here to cause trouble,” he told them. “We are here to do business. I promised the Crew we wouldn’t start anything, but I swear to you on my family’s honor, I will by God finish anything anyone else cares to start.
“Warn your friends. The Terrans are here and we will not be fucked with.”
#
Either Ondu’s bar was doing horrible business these days, or the scene outside had sent any customers running for an exit. The tables and chairs filling the converted cargo container were empty, the only occupant of the room the twelve-armed, octopus-like alien bartender.
“Ik!It,” James greeted that worthy softly. “We’re here to speak to your boss. Is there going to be any trouble?”
“None you don’t bring with you,” the alien snapped. “You seem to have brought enough.”
“I didn’t start that,” James replied. “I don’t plan on starting anything here. Going to make me change my mind?”
Black eyes met his, empty voids he couldn’t read as Ik!It stared at him in silence for ten seconds. Fifteen.
“Power-armored grunts stay here,” he finally allowed. “You and Captain Kurzman can go through. You’ll have to surrender your guns, especially that plasma pistol of yours.”
“I understand the drill, Ik!It,” the Guardsman told him. “I also understand that surrendering our weapons means you are responsible for our safety.”
Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2) Page 24
