“Any sign of trouble?” she asked the pilot.
“Nothing so far; I have the bay doors on scanners and they are opening to receive us.”
“Well. Let’s go greet our ‘friend’ Captain Forel,” Annette said calmly.
#
At least part of the power was being used for the shuttle bay’s lights. The entire space was lit up with massive banks of light, showcasing the well-maintained but dingy nature of the space.
Annette’s people filed out of the shuttles slowly, weapons tracking to cover the entire space, which appeared to be occupied by a significant chunk of Forel’s remaining crew. A large contingent of humans stood off to one side, all of them wearing the same gold-colored collars.
She noticed that about a quarter of the nonhuman crewmembers wore the same collar. Also slaves, most likely, with some kind of punishment mechanism in the collars wrapped around their throats.
Forel stood between the two groups of sapients, his webbed hands spread wide to show that he was unarmed. His fur looked slick in the bright light, and Annette shivered in the warm damp of Subjugator’s atmosphere.
“As you required, Captain Bond, the humans of my crew,” he announced, gesturing to the collared men and women. “There were more, of course, before you so genteelly blasted holes through my ship.”
“Mosi, grab them,” Annette ordered. “Get those collars off them.”
Forel went for his coat, then paused as Ki!Tana leveled the plasma rifle she’d brought on the Indiri.
“No sudden moves,” the A!Tol warned. “I like Bond a lot more than I like you.”
“Just the key,” he promised, removing a golden block a centimeter or so across and ten long. He slid it across the floor to Mosi. “Press it to the back of the collars; it will release them.”
Mosi picked up the key with a disgusted expression on her dark face but followed the Indiri’s instructions on the closest of the humans. The collar popped off instantly, and the pale-skinned man rubbed his neck and looked at the young black woman.
“You may be the fairest angel I ever did see,” he told her with a thick Irish accent. “Thankee kindly.”
“Get on the shuttle,” Annette ordered. She glanced at Forel. “You’ll forgive me, Captain, if I remove them from this situation before we have the conversation you’re so desperate to have.”
“We can speak in my office,” he offered. “I have food and drink you will find pleasant.”
“We can speak here,” she replied. “Under the guns of my people.”
Forel shrugged. Like his smiles, it was a clearly artificial gesture—one his species’ forward-bent shoulders didn’t lend themselves to.
“Wait, Bond?” one of the freed slaves said as he was being shuffled toward the shuttle. “Annette Bond?!”
Annette turned at the sound of her name and recognized the speaker in turn. The almost-scrawny man in a blue jumpsuit with a shaven head was a Nova Industries employee.
“Jacob Harmon,” she greeted him. “What are you doing here?”
“Long story involving that,” he gestured at Forel, “and some tentacled bastards. But it started with Hidden Eyes of Terra.”
“A conversation for later,” Annette told him, wondering what exactly a Nova Industries sensor specialist was doing aboard Subjugator. “Go with Mosi for now.”
“With pleasure,” Harmon told her. “It is damned good to see you, Annette.”
She waved him and the rest of the prisoners onto the shuttle. It was going to be a cramped fit with over forty of them, but she needed to keep a shuttle with her. Forel was being cooperative for now, but she wanted an easy escape route to hand.
Finally, full to the brim, the shuttle slowly eased its way back out of the hangar, then blurred away under interface drive. Forel’s prisoners were gone, though Annette had no illusions: his crew might be unarmed, but this was his ship. Annette and her party of armed crew were effectively his hostages.
“With that out of the way,” the Indiri said calmly, “can we talk? I have an offer for you—one I would have made earlier if your people hadn’t started shooting.”
“Fifteen thousand humans neatly boxed for pickup,” Annette replied coolly. “If I wasn’t curious as to where they came from, you’d be dead already. Talk.”
“As I suspect you have realized by now, I do not work alone,” Forel told her. “I am tied into an organization that sees the truth of Kanzi–A!Tol relations: that both are monsters who need to be stopped.
“I understand your reaction to the slaves,” he continued. “My own life partner was kidnapped by Kanzi—and when I finally had the resources to try and rescue her, I learned she was dead. A cross-border raid, one of half a dozen in any given year, though more successful than most.” He shrugged. “The Imperium tries, but they warn us they cannot stop every raid. That they could not save her.”
“I fail to see how your sob story leads here, to the ship full of slaves,” Annette replied dryly.
“I realized then, as others have realized before me and after me, that this half-war could not continue,” Forel said. “I found those others and they had a plan. Through me, they found the resources to fund their plan.” He shrugged. “I am not blind to the failure inherent in funding my campaign to avenge my partner by kidnapping and selling others—mostly humans, a race no one in the Imperium knew to miss—into slavery.
“But the research we had stolen was enough for our scientists to complete their work,” he told her. “I can give you a weapon that will guarantee Earth’s freedom and independence: a starkiller.”
“A single starkiller would do no such thing,” Ki!Tana objected. “They are massive things, difficult to deploy. Half the reason no one uses them is that they’re easily stopped.”
“Not the ones we built,” Forel said. “A missile-scale weapon, easily able to penetrate the defenses of a star system and detonate the sun. Think, Captain Bond. I can give you all of the schematics I promised you. I can deliver to you a starkiller missile, allow you to claim Earth’s freedom at the point of a fiery sword!”
Annette didn’t need to see Ki!Tana’s skin to know her alien companion was shocked and horrified. But…Earth had kept the peace for almost a century via the concept of mutually assured destruction. The possession of an unstoppable superweapon might just buy her homeworld its independence.
“In exchange for what?” she asked slowly.
The red-furred amphibious alien made a broad gesture toward the planet beneath them.
“We made a deal,” he told her. “A deal to sell thirty thousand exotic slaves, a bipedal species the Kanzi had never seen before, to the High Inquisitor himself. With a passport from him, one we can only get by allowing his representatives to see the slaves, we can fly our ship into the Kanzi Core Worlds—and deploy the weapons.
“In a single strike, seven of their most important star systems wiped out—destroyed by weapons that are unquestionably A!Tol. The war that must be fought will begin, with the Kanzi already weakened.”
In a human, his enthusiasm and fire would have been fanaticism. Annette wasn’t sure the description was any different in an Indiri.
“You want to start a war,” she repeated.
“Yes!” Forel confirmed. “The A!Tol and the Kanzi will tear each other down. Your world can rise from the ashes, independent and strong. All of our peoples will be free from the yoke of those two monsters!”
The image in Annette’s head was…much less positive. She hadn’t lived in the era of mutually assured destruction, but she’d studied it. Once one side used—or appeared to use!—weapons of mass destruction, the other wouldn’t hesitate. The A!Tol and Kanzi would devolve into a war where stars died on a daily basis. Their empires wouldn’t gently fall, liberating their client and slave races. Their empires would be exterminated, client and slave races included.
And Earth, latest client of the A!Tol, on the border of the war…a single weapon wouldn’t be enough. An entire Navy wouldn’t be enough.
“You said thirty thousand humans,” she pointed out, buying herself time to think. “There weren’t that many here.”
“The rest have already been shipped to our base,” Forel replied. “These are the ones who were in transit when Tan!Shallegh locked down all of the fleet transports; someone on Earth noticed what was going on.”
He was closer to her now, the fire now bright in his immense eyes.
“Please, Captain Bond,” he half-begged. “We must see this through. The sacrifices will be worth it once we’re free!”
“You’re mad,” she whispered. “You’d bring down both empires and both of our species in your quest for revenge!”
“It will work!” he promised her. “With a starkiller and the tech I can give you, Earth can stand aside—a beacon of hope as the galaxy goes mad. Your species will emerge one of the leading powers of the new age to come! Is that not worth some sacrifice?”
Annette had to stop, swallowing down a moment of incandescent rage. Sacrifice was pushing for a rapist to meet justice, knowing it would end her career. Sacrifice was walking away from the man she wanted to love, knowing he’d come to her broken and needed to stand on his own. Sacrifice was leaving her home behind and taking up exile in the hope of returning a liberator.
Sacrifice was not sending thirty thousand other people into slavery and potential death. That was murder.
“No,” she told him flatly. “Your plan is madness and I will have no part in it! You will give me the coordinates of that base, Karaz Forel, or I will end you here and now.”
She knew he was mad, but she still expected some kind of sign before he moved. Some kind of hint that she or Ki!Tana could pick up, stop Forel acting.
There was none. One moment he was looking up at her with his strange fake smile, and the next he was still looking up at her with the smile—with some kind of energy blade in his hand.
It spun in his hand in an overhand strike that would have cleaved her head in two if not for years of martial arts and combat practice. She stumbled backward even as she yanked her submachine gun from its holder.
Then fire cut her face, agony flaring in her head as the blade slashed through her skin and bone and she felt her eye come apart and blindness take her.
But muscle memory still worked despite the pain, the gun ripping free from its harness and slamming forward into Forel’s stomach. With blood pouring into her one remaining eye, she couldn’t see him—but she could feel the resistance of his body as the muzzle collided with his flesh.
She pulled the trigger.
She didn’t release it before unconsciousness took her.
Chapter 50
Annette woke to darkness.
It wasn’t a lack of light. It was a lack of…anything. She tried to blink and her eyelids refused to respond. She tried to move—and her arms and legs twitched, and then came up against restraints.
“Captain, you’re awake,” a smoothly educated voice noted aloud. “Please, do not attempt to move. I have blocked your facial nerves and that could easily have other impacts. Can you speak?”
“Yesth,” she managed to squeeze out past numb lips, recognizing the voice of Tornado’s South African chief surgeon, Doctor Jelani.
“Let me try something,” Jelani told her. A moment later, her jaw spasmed, an electric shock running through her system.
“Try now. Is that better?”
Annette moved her jaw and tongue.
“Yes,” she said. “How bad, doctor?”
“You passed out from blood loss,” Jelani told her, his voice professionally soothing and calm. “Ki!Tana was able to put pressure on the wound immediately and Subjugator’s crew provided every assistance they could.”
“How bad?” she demanded.
He sighed.
“You’ve been out for twenty-six hours,” he told her. “We had patients who were going to die without immediate attention, so we slapped a seal on your face and put you in a medical coma. I apologize.”
“Don’t. Right call. How bad?” she repeated.
He chuckled.
“Every bone on the right side of your face, from the frontal skull down to your jawbone, has a slice between seven and fifteen millimeters deep,” he told her calmly. “Your right eye was cut clean in two and your optic nerve on that side severed in two separate places. Your jawbone was cut through, but the rest of your skull is mostly intact.
“I focused on the jawbone initially, which is why you can speak,” he continued. “The bone-knitting nanites are busy in the rest of your face, and are filling in the matrix in your jaw. You have a bandage and half a dozen stimulators covering half of your face—and they are staying on for at least two more days.”
“And the eye?” she finally asked.
Jelani sighed.
“We had seventy-three fatalities and a hundred and eighty-two wounded from this whole affair,” he told her gently. “Our regeneration matrix supplies are at critical levels; we can regenerate them still, but we’re nearing the point where we may not have enough base stock for that.”
The “regeneration matrix” required for rebuilding human organs and limbs was basically a slurry of undifferentiated stem cells. Given the right food—and unlike her crew, the stuff loved Universal Protein—it could double its mass in twenty-four hours.
“So, you can give me back my eye if I’m willing to risk not being able to save someone’s life down the line,” she interpreted aloud.
“I would not be so blunt, but yes,” Jelani allowed.
“Then why are we talking about it?” she asked. “Get me a uniform and an eyepatch. Seems to fit the job description, anyway.”
“A uniform? Captain, please! There were worse injuries aboard, but do not make the mistake of thinking you were uninjured. You need to rest and recover.”
Images of a war of mutual annihilation ran through the mental eyes that were all Annette currently commanded.
“You have two choices, Doctor,” she told him gently. “You can get me a uniform and watch me walk out of here, or you can pull all of my senior officers into an infirmary room to brief me.”
“My dear Captain Bond, will you accept how badly you are injured if I agree to the latter?”
#
They compromised by having one of the nurses help Annette into a uniform and roll her sickbed into the conference room normally used for coordinating Tornado’s medical staff. It wasn’t truly big enough for all of Annette’s senior officers, especially not with Ki!Tana’s immense bulk, but they managed to make it work.
“All right,” Annette told her people, looking them over with her remaining eye. None of them tried to avoid her gaze, which was impressive. She would have, having seen what she looked like in a mirror. Half of her face was covered in white gauze, and the half that wasn’t was still partially paralyzed.
But she could see again, and her people looked back at her.
“I need status updates from everyone,” she continued, “but let’s start with Major Wellesley. How are things on the surface?”
The SSS Major looked utterly exhausted. He didn’t appear injured, but he also didn’t appear to have slept. He had always been skinny with his height, but right now his face was gaunt. Nonetheless, he brushed his hair back from his forehead with one hand and smiled in grim accomplishment.
“As of a little over two hours ago, the last remnants of the landed pirates have either surrendered or been wiped out,” he reported. “Brigade Commander Kashel has been about as cooperative as you can expect from a senior prisoner, and her people have been…unresisting.
“We are fully in control of the logistics base,” he concluded. “We’re sorting through volunteers from the prisoners now, but it looks like we’ll have a short battalion: four companies including mine, if we want it.
“Everyone else just wants to go home.”
“I get that. Can we load them onto some of the robot freighters and send them there?” Annette asked. “It seems the easiest wa
y.”
“We should be able to,” Wellesley confirmed. “We’re going to need to recruit them as a labor force to load the other freighters, in any case. We were, after all, expecting to have an entire fleet’s worth of personnel to do that work.”
“See if we can sort out some way to pay them,” Annette instructed. “That should help avoid any feeling that we’re using them as forced labor before we send them home.’
“We will,” Wellesley promised. “If we get the volunteers I expect for that, we should have all of the ships ready to head wherever we want them to go, Earth or Tortuga, inside seventy-two hours.”
“Make it faster if you can,” she told him. “And if you can pull together that battalion, do so. We might need it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Annette turned to Ki!Tana and Lieutenant Mosi. “What about Subjugator?”
“The good news is Forel is dead,” the young black officer replied. “You emptied your gun into him before you collapsed; he was never getting up again. Unfortunately, he’d rigged a deadman switch; the ship’s computers blew apart when he died.
“Subjugator is not repairable, though we have been looting her for missiles and parts,” she concluded. “The slave crewmembers have volunteered to join us to a being, and we’ve shipped the rest to the surface to join the rest of the pirate prisoners.”
“Ki!Tana.” Annette looked at their old pirate friend. “Can we still send our cargos to Tortuga? Will Ondu still sell them for us?”
“For twenty-two percent of the entirety of a logistics base?” Ki!Tana asked. “Ondu will sell them for you and make the sure are accounts are held until you retrieve them. We would not be welcome on Tortuga at this point, but we would not be denied entrance.”
“I want Subjugator stripped from top to bottom,” Annette ordered. “I need two things from her, people: One, I want the schematics Forel promised us. There may well have been a copy on a chip somewhere. If there is, I want it.
The Terran Privateer Page 36
