The Terran Privateer

by Glynn Stewart

  “Find out for us.

  “God speed you, Annette Bond. If this task must fall to someone, I’m glad it fell to you.”

  The recording ended, and Annette found herself looking at the now-unencrypted directories. The organization was of an entirely different magnitude than the UESF data. There were directories for analysis, star data, hyperspatial spectrographic spikes, alien races, known worlds.…

  She doubted there was a lot of depth to anything even Nova Industries had. They may have known things the Space Force didn’t, but if they’d known enough to make a difference, Elon Casimir wouldn’t have concealed it.

  “Rolfson,” Annette opened an intercom to her tactical officer. “I hate to hand you a task and tell you to drop it, but I’m forwarding you the data that Nova sent us. I think we’ll want to go through that first.”

  Chapter 10

  For the second time in two days, Tornado erupted out of a hyperspace portal. This time, they weren’t emerging into empty space, and sensors sang into space: radar, lidar, and more exotic techniques sampling the space around Alpha Centauri as the cruiser emerged into potentially hostile space.

  Thanks to Of Course We’re Coming Back’s survey mission, Annette and her people knew the exact layout of the Alpha Centauri system. Both components of the binary system had two close-in planets orbiting their individual stars, while three more planets followed long, oddly shaped orbits around both stars.

  All were rocky worlds, only one even of Earth’s size. Alpha Centauri A2 fell, just barely, into the habitable zone of its parent star. Of Course’s survey mission had named the frigid world “Hope” when they’d first located it.

  Further investigation had shown the naming to be apt: Hope was a life-bearing world, with shaggy animals and wide-leaved plants well adapted to its low temperatures and long winters. It wouldn’t be a comfortable place for humans to live, but humans could live there.

  Which meant, of course, that the supply cache Nova Industries had been assembling was on Alpha Centauri AB2, the outermost rock of the system. AB2 had absolutely nothing going for it—no valuable minerals that weren’t more easily extracted from asteroids, no life, not even enough sunlight to run a solar panel.

  It was perfect for hiding.

  “Are we seeing anything?” Annette asked.

  “Negative,” Rolfson replied. “Alpha Centauri looks as dead as it did when Of Course We’re Coming Back came through. No emissions signatures of any kind.”

  “Is Of Course herself in system?”

  “I don’t see her,” he said. “We don’t know when she left, though.”

  “Amandine, take us to the coordinates of the depot,” Annette ordered. “Rolfson, keep an eye out. We’re supposed to be seeing the survey ships showing up, but that doesn’t mean that the A-tuck-Tol won’t be showing up themselves.”

  Tornado started to move, slipping closer to the rock at a speed her crew would have thought impossible a year before—and that was still slow compared to their enemy’s warships. They were still grinding through their analysis, but Annette was sure she’d seen at least one A!Tol ship reach at least forty-five percent of lightspeed to dodge Terran missiles.

  All evidence suggested that Annette’s single ship was outclassed by her enemies in far too many ways. The first task of their new mission would be to start finding ways to fix that.

  #

  The problem with coordinates on a planet is that the starting point for longitude, especially, was completely arbitrary. Anyone giving you a position on a planet also had to give you their reference point, turning even the most detailed of coordinates into, effectively, “ten thousand kilometers west of the big mountain range.”

  Fortunately, Tornado’s computer contained the entirety of both the abbreviated official survey of AB2 and the later, secret survey done to locate a good spot for the cache Nova Industries had located. They had more than enough data to reliably identify the dormant volcano Casimir’s people had picked and settle into orbit above it.

  “Are we picking up anything from the caldera?” Annette asked. Surely, there had to be a beacon or something.

  “I’ve got nothing, ma’am,” Rolfson told her. “The entire mountain is something like fifty percent iron and titanium and notably warmer than the rest of the planet. Outside of some kind of transmission, we’re not picking up anything from here.”

  “Sounds like a fantastic place to hide a weapons cache,” Kurzman noted. In the absence of an immediate threat, he was back on the bridge with Annette. The bridge even had a seat for him; it was a cramped thing, without much in terms of screens or controls, but it provided a place for a senior observer to be present.

  “Agreed,” Annette said. “Kurzman, go get suited up. You’re leading the Service detachment.”

  “Don’t we have a Service officer for that?” her XO said dryly.

  “We do. And right now, until I’m a hell of a lot more comfortable with what’s going on, I want you or me on every off-ship op. Everything we say, everything we do, reflects on Earth now. We can’t afford to screw this up.”

  “You realize that even the most junior Special Space Service grunt can snap me in half with one hand, right?” Kurzman pointed out. “What happens if they don’t want a babysitter?”

  “Oh, make no mistake, Commander,” Annette told him with a tiny crack of a smile. “You’re not their babysitter.”

  #

  Major James Arthur Valerian Wellesley, second son of the fourteenth Duke of Wellington, commanding officer of the Fifty-Second Company of the Special Space Service, managed to not even sigh when the executive officer arrived with their briefing—such as it was!—and told the Major he’d be accompanying whatever troop was sent down to the surface.

  “You’ll need to suit up up here” was his only reply, a level of control he felt was solely possible due to generations of stiff-upper-lipped ancestors glaring at him from the beyond over even the thought of snarking off to his superior.

  Wordless, James gestured for two of his Service people to help the XO while he and his Alpha Troop Captain stepped into his office.

  While the United Earth Space Force had drawn its structures and traditions from the US, French, and Chinese air forces and navies, with an inevitable leavening of British naval sensibilities, no one had put much thought in the early days to providing boarding contingents.

  Faced with a need to recapture ships seized by pirates, the UESF had ended up turning to the world’s special forces—and discovered that the British Special Air Service were the only people with an actual training scenario on the topic.

  Fifty-two percent of James’s people were Chinese at this point, but the traditions that shaped the elite boarding troops of the UESF were British, a Special Space Service that recruited from the world’s best.

  And spent much of its time babysitting.

  “I’m bringing the headquarters section down with Alpha Troop,” the tall, dark-haired aristocrat told his senior troop leader. “I’ll want your team sweeping for the cache, the section and I will stay with the XO.”

  “Any idea how large the zone will be?”

  “No. Nova Industries didn’t give us that much data,” James replied. “But then, we weren’t expecting extra supply, so I think we’ll take whatever we get.”

  “Amen, Major.”

  “Get your boys and girls on the shuttle,” James told him. “I’ll go make sure the Commander hasn’t accidentally hooked up the wrong tubes.”

  #

  The shuttle dropped from orbit like a rock, fast enough to make the Major nervous. He knew, intellectually, that the interface drive meant the landing craft could stop anywhere the pilot chose—but all of his experience in landing drops was on more conventional spaceplane-style shuttles.

  “Miss, you have done this before, right?” he asked the shuttle’s pilot quietly.

  The redheaded young woman made a shushing gesture.

  “It’s Lieutenant,” she pointed out. “Lieutenant
Mary McPhail.”

  “Leftenant McPhail,” James allowed. “You have done this before, right?” he repeated.

  “Yep. Twice.”

  “Twice?”

  “Which is once more than any other pilot aboard Tornado, which is why you got me. Now, unless you want to be a high-velocity smear, shut up and let me do my job.”

  The Special Space Service Major shut up.

  Alpha Centauri AB2 was an airless rock, but the volcano was approached far too quickly for James Wellesley’s peace of mind. He was about to say something when suddenly they were inside the caldera, rock walls screaming past at hundreds of kilometers an hour.

  McPhail finally hit the controls, slamming the forty-meter-long shuttle into an instant hover with no warning—and no inertia. The sight alone sent James’s stomach reeling, and only ironclad self-control kept him from visibly reacting.

  From the way the pilot glanced back at him and grinned, she had been expecting some reaction. He met her gaze levelly for a long stiff-upper-lipped moment, and then winked at her.

  “What are we seeing on the scanners?” he asked.

  The younger woman turned back, running through the results of the shuttle’s sensors.

  “We’re in the middle of the caldera, about two hundred meters beneath the rim,” she told him. “But…I’m not picking up anything. As far as hiding things goes, I don’t know if they could have picked anything better—but I’m wishing someone had given us a key.”

  James considered for a moment, glancing at the sensor data being fed to his spacesuit helmet.

  “How narrow were the coordinates they gave us?” he said. “As I recall, they were long.”

  “Yeah, but that’s almost garbage data when you’re talking about coordinates on an inhabited planet,” she pointed out.

  “Except we have the exact mapping they used,” he said. “Those coordinates should get us within a hundred meters or so, right?”

  “Moving us to the exact coordinates,” McPhail allowed after a moment. “Let’s see what we find.”

  #

  Annette watched the relayed data from the shuttle’s sensors on her command displays. The main video feed was up on the bridge’s main display, but she was digging into the more-detailed sensor reports, looking for the clue they were all missing.

  She doubted Casimir had given them inaccurate coordinates, but it appeared that the Nova Industries crews had hidden the cache extremely well. It would take time to find it, which also raised questions about just how accessible it was going to be.

  “Hyper portal!” Rolfson suddenly snapped. “I have a hyper portal forming at three million kilometers.”

  “Dammit,” Annette swore. “McPhail—get back up here.”

  “Ma’am—I think we found it!” the pilot replied. “Not sure; we’re going to pulse the IFF.”

  “Negative, pull back up to orbit,” Annette ordered. “We may need to run.”

  “It could be Of Course We’re Coming Back,” Rolfson reminded her. “The portal itself is interfering with our scanners; we can’t resolve the newcomer.”

  He was right. The odds were that the arrival was one of their expected visitors—but they couldn’t be sure.

  “We’re Earth’s only hope,” she told him. “No chances. McPhail, you have thirty seconds to make orbit; we’re going to round the planet and pick you up. Rolfson, get the launchers up. Amandine, set a course to pick up the shuttle and have us ready to flee if we’re facing more metal than I want to tangle with.”

  A chorus of confirmations echoed back and Annette leaned back as her cruiser leapt into motion. With the interface drive, the trip back up to the ship was a matter of moments, McPhail rocketing the shuttle out of the airless volcano caldera at twenty percent of the speed of light.

  Amandine dove the cruiser down closer to the planet at an only slightly more sedate pace. The shuttle cut its interface drive a few kilometers short of the bigger ship, and the navigator nailed the pickup perfectly, matching velocities for a fraction of a second and scooping the shuttle into the landing bay.

  The dive took the hyper portal out of view behind AB2, and Annette examined what data they had as closely as she could. All she could tell for the moment was that a ship had exited hyperspace. The A!Tol presumably had some kind of better detector for this, one less blinded by the strange radiation that came out of the portal.

  “All launchers primed, all lasers charged,” Rolfson noted.

  “Coming around the planet, you’ll have a clear line of fire in…three, two, one…now!”

  “Gotcha!” the tactical officer announced. “We have a line of fire, lighting up the target with radar and lidar.”

  “If there’s a threat, return fire immediately,” Annette ordered, mirroring Rolfson’s consoles to her screen. Passive scanners weren’t giving them much—their current array of sensors could only tell her that the ship was probably smaller than Tornado and wasn’t using a reaction engine.

  They didn’t have a way of detecting the presence of a gravitational-hyperspatial interface. Like the ability to see into hyper-portal, she suspected the A!Tol had a solution for that—one of many pieces of technology they were going to need to steal.

  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.”

  Chapter 11

  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 s
alute 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?”