The Terran Privateer

by Glynn Stewart

“Two: the son of a bitch was working with others. They had a plan to start a war.” She shivered. “Now, I don’t like anyone on their target list, but Earth’s right in the middle. Plus, whether or not their plan will still work, they’ve got fifteen thousand human slaves in their base, wherever it is.

  “I need to know where that base is, people. We may be able to negotiate with this conspiracy. We may end up doing the A!Tol a favor and blowing them all to hell. But we can’t do either without knowing where we’re going.”

  “I would prefer that you not negotiate,” Ki!Tana admitted. “Such a war would see my race annihilated, and I am somewhat attached to my species.”

  “I haven’t made up my mind up yet,” Annette admitted in turn, “but I’m not leaning toward letting them finish their plan.”

  She turned to Metharom, Tornado’s engineer.

  “Now, Kulap, if we do find them, what state are we in to deal with them?” she asked.

  “The armor mostly held,” Metharom replied. “But we did take a point-blank salvo of interface drive missiles. At that range, they were only moving at about forty percent of lightspeed, but that was bad enough.

  “We’ve got twenty missile launchers online. That’s all you’re getting. We have three proton beams online. I think we can cannibalize one of the others to get the last two online in a couple of days.”

  “So, we’re short a sixth of our weaponry, at least,” Annette accepted. “Shields, engines?”

  “Fully functional. We can fly and we can fight, but we’ve lost some teeth.”

  “It will have to do,” she admitted. “Is there anything else I should be aware of, people?”

  #

  Once she’d been released from Doctor Jelani’s tender ministrations, Annette managed to get herself back to her quarters under her own power. Once there, she took the pills he’d given her—painkillers, since the process of having her bones reknit was not pleasant—and settled down looking at her wallscreen.

  With a few commands on a flimsy computer, she mirrored the display and brought up an astrographic map of the region.

  Orsav, known to humanity as Lambda Aurigae, had been one of the systems their initial sweeps had guessed as a new colony, only a few flights into the system during the scope of their lightspeed scans of the worlds around Sol.

  Most of the other systems they’d pegged as colonies had shown up. The concentration of routes they’d thought was a fleet base—that was Kimar, home base to three squadrons of Imperial ships of the line and their escort ships.

  There were misses both ways, of course. Systems that weren’t on A!Tol records they’d shown traffic to, which could be anything, and systems on the A!Tol records that had been settled too recently for the Dark Eye and the scout-ship sweeps to pick up anything.

  The odd thing was the complete absence of settlements inside a roughly forty-light-year radius of Sol in A!Tol records. There were even habitable planets that had been detected, but no one had colonized them. It was too neat and too large a gap to be coincidence, and she made a mental note to ask Ki!Tana about it.

  In all likelihood, Forel’s sponsors had hidden their facility inside a system colonized by the A!Tol. Money could cover a lot of sins, Annette was sure, and having a colony nearby would have allowed them to call on it for labor and help.

  Except.

  Except that they had fifteen thousand human slaves, and many of those couldn’t have been kidnapped since the fall of Earth. Annette suspected she knew—now—why the UESF had been having so many difficulties with pirates in the outer system: even Subjugator would have had the drives and sensors to avoid any encounters with the patrol ships hunting the people stealing entire ships and their crews.

  Had the slaves been a plan all along? Or had Earth simply been available after they’d built their secret lab, and so they’d kidnapped humans as a convenience? And then, once they needed a way through the Kanzi borders…

  She sighed. It was a sickening feeling. Her people hadn’t been victimized because of anything they’d done or any special value. They’d just been convenient. Close to their secret base.

  Close to a secret base run by a faction of the A!Tol military—and hence a base a Terran scout ship could have stumbled upon.

  Annette leapt to her feet to grab her communicator, only to misjudge everything due to the missing eye and end up crashing to the floor. With, thankfully, the communicator in her hand.

  Groaning, she forced herself into a sitting position.

  “Mosi,” she pinged the young officer who’d briefed her on the decision by Forel’s slaves to join her crew. “Are all of Forel’s ex-slaves aboard?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Find Jake Harmon,” she ordered. “Find him and send him to me.”

  #

  Mosi arrived less than ten minutes later with the scrawny Nova Industries man in tow. Harmon was looking at the young black woman with star-struck eyes, a feeling Annette suspected was shared among the human slaves Mosi had cut free.

  At the sight of Annette, however, the fair-haired young NI officer managed to pull his gaze away from Mosi as he visibly tried not to gasp in horror.

  “My god, ma’am, you look like hell,” he told her.

  “I appreciate the honesty, Jake, though I thought you had a better idea of how to butter a lady up,” she said with a gentle grin. “Have a seat.” She gestured to a chair across her desk. After her abortive attempt to grab the communicator, she didn’t try to stand.

  He sat, looking at her expectantly, then sighed.

  “I guess you want to know how a middle-manager sensor specialist in Nova Industries ended up a slave on an alien pirate ship?” he asked.

  “Among other things,” she confirmed. “How are you settling in aboard Tornado? I’m hoping someone has filled you in on our story?”

  “Yeah.” Harmon shook his head. “Hard to absorb it all, but your people have been good at filling us in. It’s quite a story, ma’am. Bit of a leap from flying test ships for Casimir, huh?”

  “The way we keep upgrading her, it doesn’t feel all that different some days,” Annette told him. “Though it appears Casimir was even better at keeping secrets than I thought—I didn’t even know the extra scout ships existed.”

  “You knew Casimir,” Harmon said quietly. “He could sell water to a fish. Selling a bunch of us already tied up in the BugWorks projects on signing up for a secret survey mission? That was easy.” He laughed.

  “I don’t even know where they were built,” he admitted. “But after drinking the boss’s Kool-Aid, I ended up as science officer and second-in-command of the survey ship Hidden Eyes of Terra.

  “We were doing sweeps of three systems at a time and then going home. Three of those sweeps went by with no problems at all, so we were doing a shorter, two-system sweep to go out even farther. Heading out along the galactic arm, farther away from where we already knew somebody was.”

  He shivered. “First system, empty. Some new EM pickups, but that was it. The second system, though…it looked empty at first brush, but part of our job was to survey the systems themselves as well.

  “So, we checked them out. Bunch of dead rocks, one planet very early in the stage of developing single-cell life…and then we got too close to the gas giant. I don’t know what we did—they must have thought we’d seen something, but we didn’t see anything until the ships showed up.

  “Two big bastards, size of the XC units, just appeared out of nowhere. Interface drive ships—I’d seen the early work-ups on the engines, so I knew what it was when the things just zipped up to us at half the speed of light and stopped on a dime.”

  He shrugged.

  “We had two rifles aboard,” he pointed out. “That was the extent of our weaponry, so we surrendered. Tentacled bastards boarded the ship and started slapping chains and collars on everyone.” He touched his neck where the collar had been until the day before.

  “They demonstrated what they did and then told us we were all
property. We’d do as we were told or die. Captain Astley died,” he said grimly. “Charged one of them and took a bolt of blue fire to the head. They split us up after that, but four of us ended up on Subjugator.

  “We weren’t even the first humans aboard. The others were crew from out-system mining ships, retrained on alien tech and forced to work or die.” He shivered. “God, Captain, you have no idea how happy I was to see you walk off that shuttle. I’d given up seeing another human face not wearing a collar.”

  Annette tapped the flimsy on her desk, flipping the map she’d been studying earlier onto the screen.

  “You were science officer,” she said quietly. “You were helping navigate. My data from Casimir says you were at these two systems.” They flashed yellow on the screen. “Both have nothing in A!Tol records; both have hyperspace trails, according to the scans from Dark Eye and Oaths.

  “Were you transported from there before you ended up on Subjugator?” she asked him. “It’s important, Jake.”

  The gaunt man stepped over to the wallscreen and tapped one of the two stars. “G-KXT-Three-Five-Seven,” he identified it. “We were picked up here—and no, Captain Bond, we weren’t transported elsewhere and sold. I was working on Subjugator’s bridge. We were above the same damn gas giant—and we went back there, a lot.”

  “That sounds about right, then,” Annette said aloud. “Ready to go back one last time, Mister Harmon? There are still a lot of people locked up in that base.”

  “Give me a wrench, give me a comp, give me a rifle—whatever you need, Captain, I’m in. Those bastards owe me a year of my life, and I intend to take it back with interest.”

  #

  Annette was reviewing loading plans—a surprisingly boring ending to an immense pirate raid, though some of the items they were stealing were definitely eye-openers—at her desk when her communicator chimed.

  “Ma’am, it’s Chan,” her communications officer announced. “The A!Tol base commander has asked to speak to you.”

  “Any idea why?” Annette asked. “I thought James’s people had interrogated her already.”

  “We got everything she was willing to give us, we thought,” Chan confirmed. “But she has asked to speak to you.”

  Annette was intrigued. The more she learned about the A!Tol, the more they intrigued her. If Earth’s first encounter with them hadn’t been an Imperial fleet demanding humanity’s surrender, she suspected they would have worked well with the stiff, prickly and incurably honest creatures.

  Ki!Tana’s ability to get along with Tornado’s entire crew was a case in point, though the big alien female was always quick to point she was very atypical for her race.

  “Have Wellesley’s people get her a communicator,” she ordered. “I may as well see what the Brigade Commander has to say.”

  “The Major thought you’d say that,” Chan replied. “He’s moved Kashel into an office and set up a communicator.”

  Annette shook her head, then gripped her desk fiercely as a moment of pain spasmed from her still-healing facial bones and disorientation from her single eye.

  She exhaled sharply, then returned her attention to the moment.

  “Put her through,” Annette ordered. “Wallscreen in my office.”

  The screen on her wall flickered and the loading plans faded away into an image of a plain office that could probably have existed in any military base in the galaxy. It was a plain gray metal box, but it had a desk, a computer and one of the cupped stools the A!Tol used as seats.

  “Captain Bond, I appreciate you speaking to me,” Kashel greeted her. “I hope your wound does not pain you too much. It certainly looks severe.”

  “It is unpleasant,” Annette admitted carefully. “I will recover. In time, we will even be able to replace my eye. Are your quarters satisfactory?” she asked the A!Tol in turn. “While it is necessary for me to imprison you and your personnel, I have no desire for you to be mistreated.”

  “They are our own barracks for transient personnel,” the alien told her. “They are sufficient. And far better than the fiery annihilation that was your allies’ intention for us.”

  “I did not know that was their intent,” Annette said quietly.

  “And still you saved us in the end,” Kashel replied. “Despite my commander having betrayed your people and us. While she was betrayed in turn, she clearly knew her people were to be killed and agreed to this plan. Karaz Forel’s reach stretched to places he should not have been able to touch.”

  “And now he is dead,” the Terran Captain said. She wasn’t sure where Kashel was going with this; the A!Tol’s skin was a mix of orange, purple and black, but anger, stress and fear were normal reactions to being a prisoner. “What is it you want, Brigade Commander? You asked to speak to me.”

  “It is a matter of honor,” the base commander replied. “You understand, I hope, that the kind of mass kidnapping that was carried out on Earth is not our normal policy.”

  “I accept, at least, that you believe that,” Annette told her.

  “Now that we are aware that these people are on this station, we have a moral obligation to see them home,” Kashel told her. “Our single-use emergency hyperwave beacon was triggered when your armada arrived, though it will still be a five-cycle or more before a relief fleet arrives. That relief fleet, however, will have more than sufficient carrying capacity to take your people home.”

  Annette considered. There were two important pieces to Kashel’s offer: one, the warning that there was a relief fleet coming, which wasn’t valueless in itself; and two, the offer to transport the kidnapped humans home. That would free up the ships her loading plan noted for the humans for other tasks.

  “You realize,” she said noncommittally, “that your offer would allow us to load up all of your robot freighters with supplies and steal even more of the supplies you are sworn to protect.”

  “I do,” Kashel answered steadily. “I am concerned, Captain, about the conditions you would have to transport those poor people in if you load them onto those freighters. If they work with us, we can make certain that everyone is cleaned up, checked over by doctors and well fed before we send them home.

  “We owe them far more than that, but we can make sure they get home safely.”

  Kashel clearly regarded allowing Annette to leave with three or four more freighters of expensive military supplies as part of the payment of that debt. The offer had a lot of value…if Annette was willing to trust the A!Tol military.

  “And if you betray me?” she demanded. “My people could be headed right back into slavery.”

  “Captain Bond, I was asked to trust the honor of your Major Wellesley when I surrendered my people,” Kashel replied. “I did, and you have not disappointed me. It would betray my own honor to not repay oaths in kind.

  “But regardless of that, the betrayal of your world’s surrender is a black mark on the honor of my Empress.” Kashel’s skin muted to a dark green tone Annette had never seen on Ki!Tana—still marked with the orange of her anger and the purple of her stress, but now predominantly green. “Bringing your people home will only begin to erase that mark, but every step to erase it must be taken, Captain Bond.

  “On the honor of my Empress, my Imperium, my uniform, and my own blood, I swear this to you: any of your people who remain here will be returned to Earth unharmed.”

  There was, really, no higher oath Annette could demand. She could either trust the squid-like creature in the screen or not. The choice, like so many others since her exile, was hers alone.

  “Very well, Brigade Commander,” she accepted. “I will place their lives in your manipulators. Fail me, and dishonor will not be your worst fear.”

  Chapter 51

  Captain Andrew Lougheed thought of himself as a patient man, but finding himself once again in deep space, waiting on Captain Bond and Tornado without knowing the fate of the only warship the Terran privateers commanded, was straining his calm.

  That was a lar
ge chunk of the reason he was studying the sensor plot of the deep space surrounding them from the desk in his quarters while Sarah Laurent watched him lazily from the bed, both of them naked.

  “Even if everything went perfectly right, they had to load up the cargo and head out,” his second in command told him. “We were always going to have to wait.”

  “It’s been over three days,” Andrew told her, dropping down onto the bed next to her. “Tornado should be here by now.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Assuming everything went perfectly—and while things have been going our way, would you say anything has gone perfectly for us?”

  He snorted.

  “Last time I checked, we’re still exiles without a home,” he pointed out. “So, no.”

  “Bond will come,” she told him, running her hand up his back. “She hasn’t let us down yet.”

  With a sigh and a shake of his head, Andrew nodded. Grinning, he began to reach for Laurent—and then his intercom chimed.

  “Sir,” Strobel announced. “We have hyperspace portals forming—multiple portals. I’m reading at least forty, maybe more.”

  Shaking his head to regain his focus, Andrew rose and hit the button to reply.

  “Any IDs yet?” he asked. He’d been expecting one ship, not a fleet—if the entire pirate armada was here, something had gone very wrong…

  “No, sir. They’re all in the right range that one of them could be Tornado, but…”

  “Understood. I’ll be on the bridge in two minutes.”

  He turned back to Sarah Laurent, to find that she’d risen and grabbed his uniform while he was checking in with the bridge. Their newfound relationship was against regs, but at this point…well, at this point, Andrew Lougheed wrote the regs for his ship.

  They just couldn’t let it get in the way of their jobs, and he nodded his thanks as he started to dress.

  #

  The ships hadn’t stopped emerging from hyperspace by the time Andrew reached his bridge, a little less than two minutes later. Forty-three ships, each a two-million-ton, six-hundred-meter monster, had emerged from hyperspace at the rendezvous point.