“You’ve made enough bloody money from us,” Belisarius grumped. “Those starfighters—”
“Are the only thing permitting our people to sleep at night,” Yilmaz snapped. “Without the Cobras that, as the Admiral says, cost us so dearly, we would be defenseless now. Tell me, Captain, what is your plan?”
“The situation is worse than we expected when I left Castle,” Kyle admitted. “We planned around being able to use Free Trade Zone ships to support our operations, but that clearly will no longer be an option.
“The best option I see is for my ships to take over the convoy system you’ve already set up. We will escort the convoys to Istanbul and Serengeti from here, then set up a schedule with the shippers to make certain that no vessel travels unescorted.”
“Our own ships were doing that, and it solved nothing,” Yilmaz told him. “I’d hoped for better.”
“It’s a starting point,” Kyle replied. “And, no offense to Admiral Belisarius and his people, my ships are more modern, my sensors are more powerful and my fighters are more advanced. There is no crew in my task group that aren’t veterans of the war against the Commonwealth. We’ve fought Terrans, Premier. Pirates are nothing.”
“That still doesn’t solve the problem,” the Premier whined, and Kyle smiled grimly at the man.
“It’s a starting point,” he replied. “We fight them when they come to us. We destroy their ships, capture their survivors, and we find out where they’re coming from.
“Then we find their base and we blow it to hell. Then, Premier Yilmaz, your pirate problem will be very much solved.”
The Premier clasped his hands together with an audible clank of rings hitting each other and smiled, his mood shifting instantly. “Good, good, Captain. Any assistance we can provide, let us know. For now, may I invite you and your Captains to join me for dinner?”
#
Chapter 18
Antioch System
19:00 October 12, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-052 Kodiak
“I can’t say much, love,” Angela Alvarez warned Michelle, the gorgeous blonde nurse leaning against her desk with visible bags under her eyes. “There was a battle. We won, but it’s been a long few days.”
Michelle reached out to run her fingers along her lover’s face on the screen.
“Are you all right?” she asked. Angela was still with Fourth Fleet, though Kodiak was now out of the loop for anything so classified as the movements of one of the Alliance’s main combat formations. Certainly, even a Wing Commander couldn’t say if the battle her girlfriend had just been through had been a defensive or an offensive one.
“Yeah, we stay out of the fight and wait for the casualties,” Angela said quietly. “A lot of fighter pilots, love. And they’re the lucky ones.”
“It’s the job,” Michelle reminded her. “Better a few flight crew than an entire ship’s crew.”
“I know the logic,” the nurse replied. “It’s hard to swallow when every pilot I look at, I think it could be you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be.” Angela made a throwaway gesture. “I’m just maudlin after a twenty-hour shift, but I didn’t want to miss our time slot. Do you know when you’ll be back home and available for leave?”
“No idea,” Michelle admitted. “The people out here…they’re terrified, Angela. They need us. They need to know somebody cares. A lot of wives and husbands aren’t coming home who should have.”
“And there you go right into the heart of it at the Fox’s heels again,” her lover said with a smile. “At least you’re only fighting pirates; the odds seem better there.”
“I’m just glad you have a battleship wrapped around you.”
“Blacksmith is an experiment,” Angela replied. “I don’t have enough data to know what Command thinks of her success, but at least this way, the wounded are out of the line of fire and behind some kind of defense.”
“And my favorite nurse is too,” Michelle told her with a smile. “I miss you.”
“And I miss you. I worry, though.”
“I know,” the pilot acknowledged. “I don’t have a safe job, but…someone’s got to do it.”
“I worry about the future,” Angela admitted. “Not if we’ll still want to be together.” She smiled. “I won’t pretend I don’t occasionally think you only love me because I helped you put yourself back together, but I’m pretty sure we’ll at least give it a shot.
“If we both live that long.”
Michelle touched the screen again, and this time, Angela put her own fingers out to hold them against each other.
“We will,” she promised fiercely. “We’re going to live through this, we’re going to go back home, and our parents are going to harass us about grandchildren. Do you hear me, Commander Alvarez?”
“Aye, aye, ma’am,” Angela said with a laugh. “Be careful. I know pirates aren’t up to the Commonwealth’s standard, but they’re still dangerous.”
“I will be,” Michelle promised.
#
At least on Kodiak, Kyle wasn’t surrounded by people looking to him to solve the most existential problem their society and political power base had ever faced. The crew of his carrier merely relied on him to keep them alive in the face of whatever enemy they fought today, and that was a pressure he was well used to handling now.
Song and Taggart were waiting on the flight deck when he and Nebula disembarked from their shuttle, and he gestured for them to fall in with him and the diplomat.
“My office,” he instructed. “This is a conversation we all need a damned beer for.”
“Do you have anything other than beer?” Song asked delicately.
“Honestly? It’s a full service auto-bar,” Kyle replied. “It can do coffee, tea, or four different liquors. I won’t speak to the quality of what my steward has stuck in it, but there is whisky, vodka, rum and tequila in the bar.”
The delicately featured Vice Commodore made a face. “I’ll stick with the beer.”
“I’ll take that whisky,” Nebula replied. “I’m not sure beer is enough for this.”
Walking through the door, Kyle waved the diplomat to the bar.
“Help yourself, Nebula. You’ve worked out how it works by now. Then, once you’ve got that whisky, brief them.”
The diplomat was, unsurprisingly, more diplomatic in his expression of distaste than Song had been, but he pulled three beers from the mini-fridge, then poured himself a glass of whisky. He didn’t bother with ice.
“The long and short of it is that the Free Trade Zone is completely, utterly and unquestionably fucked,” Nebula concluded after a large swallow of hard liquor. “They’ve lost every interstellar warship any of them had in commission and over half of the Alcubierre-capable shipping in twenty star systems.
“Even with convoying and our protection, the economy here will take years to recover from the impact of the last six months—but the pirates are running out of prey, too. If they have the firepower to take down Crusader or the other ships, they have the weight to take any of the secondary systems easily.”
“And if they’re willing to take a risk, they could be a serious threat to even Antioch or the other core systems of the Zone,” Kyle concluded as he popped his beer. “Escorting the remaining shipping will push off the inevitable, but these systems are going to need a major investment of new ships, civilian and military, from somewhere to claw themselves back up.”
“The Alliance has neither to spare,” Taggart said after exchanging a glance with Song. “None of us do.”
“We can send more civilian shipping this way, but we can’t spare warships to sell them,” Kyle agreed. “Which means that we can’t just protect the existing ships—wiping out the pirates has gone from ‘best-case scenario’ to ‘absolute necessity’.”
“That’s…a tall order, sir,” Song replied. “Three ships? Twenty systems? Stars alone know how many uninhabited systems a pirate could
be based in.”
“Federation Intelligence has been working on one end of the problem,” Nebula told them over his half-empty whisky glass. “At least some of the crews from these ships have been ransomed back to their families, usually through the auspices of Amadeus’s Great Houses. The Houses are scum, but they’re usually honest scum.”
Amadeus was one of the member systems of the Free Trade Zone…in theory. In practice, Amadeus didn’t have a functioning government, with between six and fifteen Great Houses, depending on how you classified them, vying for control at any given point in time.
Since the planet was barely above poverty level, that meant the Houses didn’t exactly bother with things like legalities or moral codes. But, by and large, if you paid a ransom through one of them, the kidnap victim made it home.
“Our Intelligence team, working with the locals, is trying to follow the money trail back,” Nebula told them. “If we’re lucky, we might trace them all the way back to a base. If not…well, we might at least find a rendezvous or somewhere we can ambush.”
“From our side, we run protection as planned,” Kyle continued. “We kill anything that crosses our path…but we keep the Marines ready to go and we at least try to cripple pirates. We need prisoners, and making that possible is going to mostly fall on you, Song.”
“That’s a lot of risk to ask of our pilots,” Taggart objected with a coded glance at the CAG, and Kyle was struck with a moment of suspicious realization. The two were sitting together again. They were always sitting together, and often communicating with a glance and not even neural implants…
“It is,” Kyle agreed, putting that thought aside for the moment. “But unfortunately, it’s a risk I need to ask of them.”
“Against Terrans, it would be unwise,” Song said slowly. “Possibly suicidal against remotely even odds, but against pirates…” She nodded firmly. “We’ll need to be careful, keep Williams’s bombers in reserve for if something goes wrong or we run into actual Terran ships. I won’t guarantee prisoners from every ship, but if we short-circuit two or three raids…we’ll get someone with answers.”
“I don’t even care about answers,” Kyle admitted. “I want coordinates. I don’t care if we’re tearing them from someone’s flash-frozen implant, so long as I can end these bastards.”
Sadly, that particular bit of imagery wasn’t helpful as anything but hyperbole. You could back up an implant’s contents, but the files inside were intimately linked to the brain that had stored them. They could only be restored or read in the mind that had created them.
Starship data cores and living prisoners, that was what they needed.
“We’ll do what we can,” Song told him. “I’ll touch base with the other CAGs, though I assume they’re getting much the same briefing?”
“Probably without the beer or whisky, and lacking in Mr. Nebula’s eminent presence, but yes,” Kyle agreed.
“We also have to remember the joker in the deck, people,” he told his officers. “If Terra is involved out here, all of our careful plans go out the window—and much as I’d like them, we’re not going to try for Commonwealth prisoners.
“If we see TCN ships, Echo Wing drops and we blow them to hell with everything we’ve got,” Kyle said grimly. “Just knowing they’re out here would change the game, people. That confirmation would be almost as valuable as finding the pirate base.”
#
Once everyone else had left, Kyle sat in his office with a beer and the holodisplay of the region for a long time, searching for some easy solution that could end the crisis. He wasn’t particularly surprised not to find one—without data on where the pirates were striking from, he couldn’t launch an offensive. Couldn’t do anything except stick his ships on top of the most likely targets and wait for the bastards to come to him.
And, Gods knew, he wasn’t the best defensive tactician in the galaxy.
“Expanding my horizons, right,” he muttered, checking his system. To his surprise, he had a message from Mira—he hadn’t heard from her in a few days, but that wasn’t unusual, and they usually went for live conversations.
“Hi, Kyle.” The image of the insanely beautiful woman who’d decided to keep him appeared on his screen. “Camerone and Seventh Fleet are going dark, so I’m not sure when you’ll get this.”
He nodded in understanding. Q-coms might be totally secure, but the computers they ran through weren’t necessarily. So, any Alliance formation about to go on the offensive would go dark except for critical communications, sending the last set of messages from its crews at random intervals over several days to confuse anyone who was listening.
“I presume you’ll be briefed once things are moving, but I can’t say anything,” she continued. “I’m glad you’re on the far side of the Alliance, though. Walkingstick is playing the attrition game again, seeing what he can cut off our formations for minimal losses of his own.
“I’m not planning on letting Camerone fall victim to that, but the problem with war is that the enemy gets a say.” Mira sighed, her dark eyes focused somewhere past the camera.
“This isn’t likely to be my last message, but it’s always possible,” she told him. “So, you take care of yourself until you hear from me again, Kyle Roberts. Don’t let that reputation of yours drag you into something you can’t win.”
She smiled.
“But since this definitely is not my final message, I suggest you start planning something fun for when we next both have leave back home. I expect to be impressed, Captain Roberts.” She waved a finger at him. “Rumor has this latest gig of yours as an audition for a flag, after all.”
Her smile tightened.
“But be careful,” she reiterated. “I’d rather have Captain Kyle Roberts home than posthumously promoted Admiral Roberts’s flag and medals in a box.
“I’ll see you on the other side. Fly safe.”
Her image froze and he reached out to touch it gently. War was hell on relationships, though that thought brought back his realization about Taggart and Song.
As Kodiak’s Captain, he was going to have to call them out on it, he realized with a sigh. They weren’t in violation of regs, as the XO wasn’t in the CAG’s chain of command…but there was enough of a potential conflict there that they should have told him.
That, at least, was a problem he could deal with easily.
Well, it was going to be easy for him.
#
Chapter 19
Antioch System
08:00 October 13, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
DSC-052 Kodiak
“Sir, we’re receiving a q-com transmission for you from Antioch,” Jamison’s bubbly subordinate told Kyle over the intercom. “The Premier’s office relayed them to us.”
“Well, if the Premier thinks we should talk to them, we probably should,” Kyle allowed. “Link them through.”
Morning hadn’t brought solutions to any of his problems, though it had at least brought confirmation that all three of his ships were now fully stocked on consumables. With the zero-point cells and modern recycling, a warship could go for years without resupply…but nobody wanted to eat recycled ration bars.
Everyone was all too aware of just what they were recycled from.
The transmission came to his implant first, but he flipped it to his wallscreen immediately. The woman who appeared on the screen was something of a surprise. He was, vaguely, aware of the existence of the traditional Islamic burqa, but he’d never seen someone wearing it.
“Is this Captain Kyle Roberts?” she asked.
“That would be me, yes, miss…”
“I am Trade Coordinator Yassifa Aksoy,” the woman told him calmly, and his brain got past the surprise of her outfit to catch up to the quality of it. It might have been an all-encompassing full-body veil, but it was made of silk with actual gemstones woven into it to form the pattern of a galaxy across her torso.
“I serve as the head of the board of directors
of the Free Trade Zone Shipping Commission,” she continued. “I am also CEO and primary shareholder of Alshrq Aljadid Shipping. Two of the ships currently in Antioch orbit are mine. One of the vessels waiting in Istanbul orbit is mine. Four of the ships lost to pirates in the last few months were mine,” she finished harshly.
“I appreciate you reaching out to me, Coordinator,” Kyle replied. “It seems we’ll be taking over convoy security from the local militaries, which I presume will require close coordination with the Commission. Is there someone I should specifically be speaking to?”
“Me,” Aksoy said simply. “I cannot overstate the importance of our situation to the Commission and the Free Trade Zone. I have lost friends and family to these murderers. What can we do to assist you, Captain Roberts?”
“For the moment, I’m afraid all we can do is assist you,” he admitted. “I understand that the ships in Antioch orbit were originally for at least two convoys. Has that changed, given how long they’ve been sitting here?”
“No,” she told him. “Two, including one of mine, are heading to Istanbul. The other two are heading to Serengeti, via Lodestone and Salvatore. The ships in Istanbul and Serengeti will have to wait for an escort, and there is a vessel in Lodestone belonging to another shipping line.”
“That works with my own plans,” Kyle replied. “My Imperial compatriot needs to travel to Istanbul, and I intend to accompany them there while sending Alexander to escort the other convoy. When will the ships in orbit be ready to leave?”
“Captain, they’ve been ready to leave for weeks,” Aksoy told him with a chuckle. “Every day they sit in orbit, both their owners and their captains are pissing money down the drain. I will forward your communications people the contact information for all four ships. They will be ready to move when you are.”
Rimward Stars (Castle Federation Book 5) Page 13
