The Terran Privateer

by Glynn Stewart

  That progress looked slow, but that was a matter of scale. The exact translation of their velocity into hyperspace was neither constant nor easily rendered, but they were going to travel over a hundred light-years in eight days.

  It was mind-boggling, and the map distracted her once again as her XO stepped into the room and cleared his throat.

  “Pat,” she greeted him. “Have a seat. What do you need?”

  “I think…I need to bend your ear as the only person I can admit doubt to,” Kurzman said with a sigh as he dropped into the chair.

  “Doubt, Commander?” Annette asked. She didn’t have anyone to lean her doubts on at this point. He was right that she was the only one he should be showing doubts to, though she guessed that James Wellesley saw some of them.

  “We’re a long way from home,” he told her quietly. “Like…mind-bogglingly far away and going farther. I can’t help feeling that we’re out of our depth. For God’s sake, we’re relying on one of the people who conquered Earth for all of our data.”

  “To be fair,” she pointed out, “We have a lot of aliens aboard, not just Ki!Tana, and they’ve all been telling us much the same thing. And we did translate a bunch of the data from Rekiki’s Fang ourselves and that supports her too.”

  “I know. But…Captain…I keep looking at the numbers, the size of the A!Tol and Kanzi Imperiums, and the data on the Kanzi…are we doing the right thing?”

  Annette looked at him sharply.

  “The right thing?” she asked. “We’re fighting for the freedom of our species. Our right to determine our own fate, to stand on our own two feet and say ‘We are mankind and we will not be slaves.’”

  “I’ve been looking at the A!Tol historical records,” Kurzman told her. “The species they conquer…they don’t end up slaves. They end up citizens. It’s not a fast process, but absorption into the Imperium seems to help people.

  “Especially compared to the Kanzi.”

  “The alternative is not a different conqueror,” Annette snapped.

  “Isn’t it?” her XO asked. “Let’s say we upgrade Tornado. Return to Sol with the tech and knowledge for the Weber Network to build more ships and we somehow drive the A!Tol from Sol. What happens then?”

  “We fortify and prepare. We build more ships and we defend our world.”

  “And when the Kanzi come?” he said quietly. “When the slavers come with ships of the line and blast whatever we build to shreds? We can’t stop either of these empires from taking Sol, Annette.”

  “So, what, we should just bend our knee to the squids and hope it turns out for the best? So long as I breathe, Patrick, I will fight for my world.” She shook her head at him. “If you want out, I’m sure we could hire a ship to deliver people to Sol at Tortuga.”

  He exhaled and shook his head, leaning back.

  “No,” he admitted “Sorry, that…came out with more certainty than I meant! I have my doubts, Captain, I won’t deny that—but I swore an oath and put on a uniform.”

  “Good,” she told him. Doubts were permitted—she had her own. But they had to be able to do the job. “Tortuga really does look like our best option,” she continued. “If we can get our hands on some of the Laian tech…I know Casimir had plans for keeping some ship-building apparatus intact under the Weber Protocols. If we can deliver him the specs and background for gear equal to the A!Tol navy’s, we have a chance—especially since we know they don’t have compressed-matter armor.”

  “You think we can really do this?” Kurzman asked quietly.

  “I have to,” Annette told him. “And you have to, in public at least. If we believe we have a chance, the crew will believe. The alternative…” She sighed. “The alternative is that we end up truly being nothing but the pirate scum the A!Tol call us.”

  “I…think I would prefer surrender to that, ma’am.”

  “I suspect the warning sign is when that ceases to be the case, Commander.”

  Chapter 28

  Jean Villeneuve—no longer Admiral Jean Villeneuve, now simply another citizen of Earth—sighed and put aside the communicator as his doorbell rang. The news was…good in some ways and terrifying in others. A new industrial plant was being set up near Cherbourg, over a site that had been building surface-to-space shuttles before the occupation.

  The site had been purchased, for a reasonable price even, from its original owners. Workers were being hired. He knew, through his old contacts, that there was even an active push to recruit the millions of now-ex-military personnel all around the globe into the new industrial projects.

  The UESF personnel, with some notable exceptions like himself, had disappeared. But Earth’s new overlords had dismantled the national militaries along with the national governments. Millions had been rendered unemployed overnight…and found out, a week or so later, that the promised pensions were actually real.

  The Weber Network resistance formed by the Weber Protocols was starting to act, sabotage here, a small-scale attack there—but even as they started, the A!Tol were quietly undermining resistance across the planet.

  Jean felt very old as he crossed the main floor of his coastal villa. It had been in his family for years, but his wife had left the villa—and him—the day their son had graduated high school and entered the UESF Academy. It was far too big for just him, but he couldn’t bear to part with it.

  The security robot at the door was a “gift” from Earth’s new masters, a featureless doglike thing with a stun gun he didn’t pretend to understand. So far as Jean could tell, it really was programmed to be loyal to him above all else, but it was a sign that much of Earth did not forgive the man who’d surrendered.

  Opening the door almost stopped the old man’s heart. Standing on the doorstep of his house was the squid-like form of one of the A!Tol. Hovering behind the squid, a dozen or so steps back, were a pair of power-armored centaur-like soldiers, bodyguards giving the leader space.

  It still took Jean a minute to realize who was on his doorstep.

  “Admiral Jean Villeneuve,” Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh’s translator box said calmly. “We need to talk.”

  “I am no longer an Admiral,” Jean told the alien bluntly. “You saw to that.”

  “Perhaps. We need to talk regardless. May I come in?”

  There was something strangely prosaic about the squid-like creature standing on its four tentacles on the front porch of Jean Villeneuve’s villa, the summer sun reflecting off the English Channel behind it.

  That same sun reflected off the armored interface-drive aircraft and the armored soldiers behind the Fleet Lord. The A!Tol was asking—and Jean Villeneuve would not pretend the being had to ask.

  “Very well. Bienvenue chez moi,” he told the alien, stepping back and gesturing the creature in.

  Here, in his home, he realized that the tentacled alien was actually shorter than him. All told, Tan!Shallegh stood perhaps one hundred and sixty centimeters tall on his locomotive tentacles. The bullet-shaped torso where the tentacles met was covered in a sleeveless vest with a single platinum insignia of a pair of crossed…swords?

  The design was odd to human eyes, but the fundamental sword-ness of the weapons that had become the insignia of the A!Tol military still made it through. A small commonality, though hardly enough to give Jean any connection to the being who had conquered his world.

  “I have nowhere for you to sit,” he told the alien. “Or your…” He realized the guards hadn’t followed the Fleet Lord in. If he’d had a weapon, Jean Villeneuve could have avenged his world’s conquest right there.

  “A stool would work,” Tan!Shallegh replied calmly. “But I do not need a seat. Feel free if you desire; this is your home.”

  “It’s your damn planet now,” Jean told him—but he took a seat in his favorite chair. “I’m too old for games, Fleet Lord. What do you want?”

  “Even with the medical science you had prior to our arrival, you could expect another hundred-fifty long-cycles of relatively health
y life…I am sorry, eighty years,” the Fleet Lord pointed out. “While the medical teams were highly impressed with your doctors and hospitals, they have told me they expect to be able to increase your species’ average lifespan by another third beyond what you had achieved.”

  The A!Tol doctors thought they could get humanity to two centuries of average life expectancy? He was surprised that hadn’t been blazoned all over the news. Earth still had a surprisingly free press, but surely their conquerors wouldn’t give up that kind of propaganda coup.

  “If they’re right, your people will soon have a longer life expectancy than the males of my own,” the alien noted. “You are by no rational standard old, Admiral.”

  “I told you,” Jean said crossly, “I am no longer an Admiral. It is simply Mister Villeneuve now. And as I also told you, I have no time for games. What do you want?”

  The alien’s skin had turned a faint purple color, with thick dark blue streaks. Jean had encountered enough A!Tol now to know the color patterns in their skin reflected their moods—but not nearly enough to be able to read those patterns.

  “I need information, Mister Villeneuve,” Tan!Shallegh told him. “You sent a flotilla of hyper-capable ships outside this system during the battle.” A manipulator tentacle made a brushing aside gesture that required no translation. “Do not deny it. We have detailed footage, and even if we didn’t, Captain Bond has emerged again.

  “For your information, I can receive data from the Imperium and my local fleet base, but I can only send data back to them by Courier,” the Fleet Lord continued. “That is why I will shortly be returning there—our enemies have been active and I must see to the safety of my sector. Including your world.

  “But it appears that a Captain Annette Bond of your United Earth Space Force has been raiding military supply ships.”

  “What do you expect me to say?” Jean asked flatly. “Yes, we sent out what ships we could to act as privateers and degrade your supply lines. You already know that.”

  “I would have expected nothing else. The only question was whether you had hyper-capable warships,” the other sapient told him. “It is…one of the moves in the game, as my people would say. You must understand, we have played this game before.”

  “What, everything we do is so predictable to you? Then how did Annette escape at all?”

  “Firstly, you had an unexpected group of technological advances shortly before our arrival,” Tan!Shallegh told him. “Secondly, I can predict the moves of the game, but not necessarily the tentacles of the player.”

  That metaphor took Jean a moment to process, but he slowly nodded his understanding.

  Elon Casimir’s BugWorks and all of its advances had been a surprise to the A!Tol—Tornado had been a UESF ship for less than a day when they’d shown up.

  Unfortunately for Earth and the Resistance the Weber Protocols had set up, Elon Casimir was dead, killed in a house fire the night Earth fell—a house fire Jean Villeneuve was reasonably sure had been suicide. No one was sure where his daughter had gone, though Jean had very carefully not looked.

  He owed Casimir that much.

  “I don’t know what you expect from me,” he repeated. “I will not betray the confidences of my service, even if you’ve killed it and scattered the ashes to the wind.”

  “I do not misestimate your honor,” the alien told him. “Indeed, it is why I am here. I have studied the idioms of your people…I believe the phrase is ‘to take the measure of the man.’ The measure of you, to judge what kind of woman you have sent to me.

  “I think a day will come,” Tan!Shallegh told him with a flash of bright blue on his skin, “that you will wear this insignia”—he tapped the crossed swords—, “and I will be honored to call you brother.”

  “You’ll be waiting a long time,” Jean snapped, even as a shiver ran down his spine. The thought was surprisingly tempting—Earth would forever condemn him as a traitor either way, but if Earth was doomed to remain part of Tan!Shallegh’s Imperium, how better to see to the defense of the world he’d sworn to guard?

  “Perhaps,” the Fleet Lord agreed. “But we have time. For today, though, Jean…I must know what kind of woman Annette Bond is.”

  “And why would I tell you that?” Jean snapped, suddenly angry at the use of his name, at the invasion of his space, at the demands and arrogance of this strange alien.

  “Because you have sent her to my worlds to be a privateer—and we understand that concept, Jean—and there are two kinds of privateers: soldiers and murderers.”

  “Annette is a warrior without peer,” Earth’s last Admiral told his conqueror. “Her honor has never bent, never broken—not even when my service betrayed her for it. She will not waver in her mission, she will not weaken, she will dog your heels until either she is dead or Earth is free.”

  “I see. A soldier, then. I can fight soldiers,” Tan!Shallegh said calmly. “A soldier will be hunted, will be fought, will be brought down—but if she fights us with honor, she will be met with honor. And when she is brought to bay, she will be given the chance to yield.

  “But the path you have set her on is one that drags to the bottom of the deeps,” the squid-like creature continued. “For all you say, Jean Villeneuve, I fear she may yet become a murderer.”

  “And what happens then?” Jean demanded, his heart suddenly cold.

  “I believe your idiom is ‘we will put her down like a mad dog.’”

  Chapter 29

  The system was uninhabited and uninhabitable. None of its five planets fell into the Goldilocks zone for liquid water to form, and if there were any species in the universe that didn’t require liquid water, the A!Tol weren’t aware of them—and neither were the Terrans who’d stolen their databases.

  Three of the planets were barren rocks, surfaces burned to ashes long ago by their red giant primary. Two immense gas giants, super-Jovians as Earth categorized them, orbited at radii that the mind could barely comprehend as numbers, let alone distances.

  There was nothing in this barren hole of a system to ever draw the eye of a stranger. A survey expedition had swept the system once a hundred years before and it had been marked in everyone’s catalogs with various markers and explanations, all of which boiled down to: this place is not worth visiting.

  As Annette’s privateer flotilla emerged from hyperspace into the outer edge of the system, the massive gravity of the red giant pushing the safe zone where a portal could be formed far beyond either gas giant, they saw nothing to change that impression, either.

  “All scanners are clear,” Rolfson reported. “I have…nothing. Are we sure we’re in the right place?”

  “We are in the right place,” Ki!Tana said calmly. “Set your course for the inner gas giant. The rings are dangerous: shifting, large, unpredictable. We will need updated charts to navigate them safely.”

  “Tornado could pass through with her shields and armor,” Annette said quietly, studying what data the scanners were already providing on the gas giant’s rings. The rings looked to have an equivalent mass to Earth’s entire asteroid belt, compressed into the ring of an over-sized gas giant.

  Those rings might actually approach bad-movie levels of density.

  “The other vessels could not, and it would be rude,” the alien told her. “Lieutenant Commander Chan, I am transferring an identification protocol to you. Once we have reached one-half of a thousandth-light-cycle from the planet, transmit it. Omnidirectional, high power.”

  One half of a thousandth-light-cycle was forty-two light-seconds. The translator was only so good at translating distances and measurements, though Annette had noticed it was getting better.

  “I have the data packet, Captain,” Chan confirmed.

  “Take us in, Amandine,” Annette ordered. “Let’s see what a pirate base looks like.”

  The distance dropped away rapidly, the other five ships dropping into neat formation behind Tornado. Of Course We’re Coming Back was barely separated from her
prize, effectively remote-controlling the far larger vessel.

  “Coming up on the designated distance,” Amandine announced after several minutes of smooth flight.

  “Transmitting identification protocols,” Chan confirmed a few moments later.

  “What do we do now?” Rolfson asked.

  “Slow to a halt relative to the planet,” Annette instructed. “Let’s wait and see what we hear.”

  “It may be some time,” Ki!Tana warned. “My identification protocols are unique to me. I have not used them in some time, as Kikitheth had her own.”

  Moments stretched into minutes, the silence on Tornado’s bridge growing tighter and tighter, until Annette wondered if the station had moved. Ki!Tana said they did that sometimes.

  “We have a tightbeam pulse emerging from the rings,” Chan announced finally. It felt like the entire bridge let out a held breath in a single exhalation. “Source appears to be a relay beacon—the pulse is machine code. I’m not even sure our computer can read it.”

  “Forward it to my communicator,” Ki!Tana replied. “That is odd…”

  The alien’s communicator was her original device, only barely linked in to Tornado’s network and functioning mostly through audio feedback, unlike the modern scroll-like communicators Terrans used. The flimsy display she used for visual data pinged as Chan obeyed and then Ki!Tana skimmed over it in silence, her skin a dark purplish-blue.

  “It’s a request for confirmation,” the A!Tol finally said. “Lieutenant Commander Chan, if you can relay the packet I’m returning to you to that relay beacon.”

  “Of course.”

  More time passed. Annette understood that a pirate base on the line between two empires had to be secretive, but this was making her twitchy.

  “New package,” Chan announced. “Ki!Tana’s translation software has got it—looks like drift charts for the rings.”

  “Finally,” Annette breathed in relief. “Forward them to Amandine. Lieutenant Commander—take us all the way in.”