Commander (The David Birkenhead Series)

by Phil Geusz

  My uncle winced, then scowled and stormed out of my cabin. But the next night he invited me to dine with him. We didn’t speak again of the issue until the meal was finished. Then he ordered a bottle of rum uncorked. “To piracy,” he said softly, lifting his glass.

  “Ahrrr!” I agreed, clinking mine against his.

  And that was all that was necessary.

  22

  We were about as ready as we could be by the time we made our next Jump. First Officer Parker had been wearing his Imperial Lines uniform for over a week, so that it wouldn’t have that stiff, brand new look if he had to go on camera. The marines were about as practiced as could be expected in the art of suddenly bursting through a hatchway, and Corporal Silk was well on his way to mastering the arcane art of plundering. Three times we’d dropped our cargo containers, manned the guns, and then recovered and redeployed our camouflage as quickly as possible. All that was left as we approached Point Seven was to reconfigure our beacon. “Alter the squawk,” I ordered as we closed in.

  “Aye-aye, sir!” Parker replied—it was strange how well he still fit in with the rest of us despite the unconventional uniform. He looked far more comfortable in it than regular-issue navy gear. This was only to be expected, I supposed, given his many years of service as an actual merchant captain. “Now we’re the Pennsdale Courier II.”

  I nodded and smiled. The original mining-service ship that Richard had once been was part of a class of twenty-eight. Three had been taken prize in the last war. Unfortunately the only squawk-code we had on file from any of these was that of the Pennsdale Courier. But one was plenty, or at least enough to get started. And in truth there were so many merchantmen roughly of Richard’s size and general appearance that we’d probably turn old and gray before we ran out of potential identities to assume. That was part of the fun of it all.

  “Five,” Wu counted. “Four, three, two, one…”

  …and instantly we were in the Nagus Three system, which was far busier than the one we’d left behind us. It was held by the Imperial House of Nagus, the second-largest of the breakaway Houses. Nagus Three was one of the centerpieces of their economy. The system contained a major industrialized colony world, an inhabited satellite that supported a significant vacuum-product industry, and an asteroid-mining network that extended all the way out into the Oort. One would expect at least a dozen ships to be flitting about local space at any given moment in such a busy place. And sure enough, our final count was fourteen. Sadly, however, that total included three Imperial light cruisers.

  One of which was preparing to exit the system via the Point we’d just cleared, and was about to come uncomfortably close by.

  “Prepare to render passing honors, Mr. Parker,” I ordered the moment the situation became clear.

  “Aye-aye sir,” he replied, not shifting a millimeter.

  I scowled and drummed my fingers on the arm of the command chair. My first officer had warned me to expect deliberately slow reactions and slovenly spacemanship on his part whenever we were passing ourselves off as a merchie—cargo vessels carried crews a fraction the size of ours, and tended not to prioritize little tasks like scanning surrounding space nearly so highly as did a warship. Besides which, he’d specifically mentioned, passing honors were generally a considered a pointless pain in the butt among merchant spacers. Unless they actually needed something, a merchie would usually put them off as long as possible in the hope that maybe the other ship didn’t give a damn either.

  But that wasn’t likely when said other ship was an Imperial cruiser. Her beacon blinked three times in the traditional underway greeting, then the radio crackled to life. “Hello, Pennsdale Courier!” her commander greeted us in a friendly fashion. “This is Captain Barkely, of His Imperial Majesty’s Ship Lively Cannonade. What’s it like on the other side?”

  By that he meant the other side of the Jump point, of course. Parker waited, and waited, and waited, until I wanted to leap across the bridge and throttle him. Then, at long last, he hit the toggle and blinked our own beacon in return. “I’m Captain Kevin Turner,” he replied. “And space on the other side is as clear as can be, captain! Not a ship in sight. Sorry about the delay—you startled me.”

  I blinked—was typical merchie spacemanship so bad that they wouldn’t yet have noticed an Imperial cruiser sitting virtually in their lap? If so, maybe this pirating business was going to be easier than I’d imagined!

  “No worries, Captain,” the Imperial replied. Apparently he was accustomed to this sort of glacial progress. “Where are you bound, and what is your cargo?”

  “Imperius Prime,” Parker replied. “With imports from Vorsage Secundus. Machine parts, mostly.”

  “Ah!” Captain Barkely replied-you could almost hear the smile in his voice. “Goods from the Royal planets will be in short supply soon enough, I reckon. The word is that the Royals plan to attack again within weeks. Your owners are going to make a pretty penny indeed.”

  “Not that I’ll be seeing any of it,” Parker replied with a very authentic sigh. “I’m just glad that I won’t be caught in the middle.”

  “You won’t be,” the Imperial reassured us. “Space is secure all the way back home. That pirate Javelin is in drydock for a new engine installation. So you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.” There was a long pause. “Safe journeys, Captain Turner.”

  “Victory to the Cannonade,” my first officer replied, sounding as sincere as could be. “Long live the Emperor!”

  “And the Empire,” the Imperial officer responded. Then he cut off the channel, and that was that.

  23

  “It’s too bad we’re not the Javelin, sir,” Astrogator Wu opined once the Imperial cruiser had safely translated herself away. “If we were, we could've blown her out of the sky and then raided the entire system at our leisure.”

  I nodded and smiled back. If we’d been Javelin, it would’ve been as if a fox were loose in the henhouse. All the chickens would’ve been fluttering about like mad things, corpses would be strewn everywhere, and the survivors would be screaming for the farmer and his shotgun. As things were, however, everyone was continuing placidly about their routine business. Javelin’s methods were an inefficient way to make war, or so I was beginning to think; while thunderous salvoes and ships blasted from the sky might appeal to a youngster like Wu, well… Once you’d cleaned up a few hundred long-dead corpses, you came to appreciate that a truly intelligent fox would go about things differently.

  I turned to Parker. “Good work, Josiah.” Then I grinned again. “You’re unbelievably convincing.”

  He smiled and nodded back. “I can’t say I wasn’t plenty nervous, sir.”

  “It didn’t show at all,” I reassured him. Then I nodded at the main screen. “You see that big ore-hauler heading this way to make her Jump? She’s an Imperial Lines ship too.”

  Parker nodded, catching my drift. We’d held several long talks in private. Many of them had centered around the most plausible reasons why one merchantman might ask another for a rendezvous in deep space. “New company codebooks, sir?”

  “That’s a nice one to begin with,” I agreed. “Ring her up, and let’s get started.”

  Three days later, we made our first capture. It went off without a hitch, so simply and easily that the tale is hardly worth the telling. New Perth Transporter Four’s captain never even considered that we might be lying to him about how Imperial Lines was revamping the codebooks in preparation for the upcoming conflict—it was after all standard procedure. She actually hove to and waited for over twelve hours, so we wouldn’t have to overstrain our engines in catching up. How polite of her! By the time we came to a relative halt just a few hundred meters away Captain Broke and our own ‘Captain Turner’ were exchanging sea stories by the hour and eagerly looking forward to dinner and a game of chess in Transporter’s wardroom. Space is both wide and deep, so that once an excuse is found for making an unscheduled rendezvous it doesn’t take much for th
e affair to become a major social event as well. Indeed, some ship owner’s believed that their captains made far too many such halts, damaging the bottom line along the way. Or so Lieutenant Parker had assured me. And, he added, they were absolutely correct. “We get lonely,” he explained. “It’s human nature to seek company. In the long run, even the beancounters can’t fight it.”

  Certainly the captain of New Perth Transporter Four didn’t make much of a fuss. “I have two flash-frozen lobsters fresh-caught from the Imperium sea,” he gushed in one typical exchange. “We’ll eat like royalty.”

  “And drink like them as well,” Josiah reassured him. “I have three bottles of white wine that you simply will not believe!”

  “Excellent!” Captain Broke replied. “I can hardly wait!”

  Indeed, Josiah looked rather downhearted as our main ship’s boat zipped across the tiny distance that separated us. I was nervous about using a boat instead of an open cargo sled, as most spacers would’ve found the latter much more convenient for such a short hop. This wasn’t an option for us; our boat was so jammed with marines and such that the interior must’ve resembled that of a clown car. But my first officer had assured us that no one would take notice, and they didn’t. “I know this must be hard on you,” I offered at last.

  He shook his head and sighed before replying. “In another time and place, I’d greatly enjoy sharing a lobster dinner and game of chess with Captain Broke. He and I, well…”

  I nodded back. “Your loyalties are conflicted. It’s understandable enough; in a kingdom where most Rabbits are held as property, I can empathize more than you perhaps imagine.”

  We stood together on the bridge in silence as our boat locked on. There was no external sign of the struggle that must’ve followed; while I hoped the takeover would be sudden and bloodless there could be no such assurances. If good men were killed, the responsibility was all mine. The silence went on and on and on…

  …until finally Transporter’s running lights blinked four times in the irregular pattern that meant “We’ve taken her, and everything is perfectly in hand.” I felt a deep sense of relief, but Josiah sighed and sort of deflated.

  “Tell you what,” I suggested. “You’ve been on duty for a long time without a break, and I’m sure there are stretches lying ahead that are going to be even harder on you. So why don’t you take the rest of the watch below and help see that Captain Broke and his men are settled in properly? Then, afterwards…” I smiled as inspiration struck. “My uncle has quite a personal larder aboard. Though I doubt that his private stores include fresh lobsters from the Imperium, I’m sure he’d be glad to spare you the makings of a truly excellent meal. And he has a chessboard I’m sure he’d let you borrow as well. Captain Broke is a noncombatant, and he sounds like a perfectly pleasant gentleman to me as well. Since he’s going to be our guest for a good long to come with any luck, we should treat him with what dignity the situation allows.” I paused. “And, he is expecting to dine well tonight.”

  Parker’s eyes widened, then he smiled. “I think I could arrange that, sir. Thank you! And who knows? He may let something important spill by accident, once he lets his guard down.”

  My eyebrows rose. I hadn’t suggested the dinner with the gathering of intelligence in mind, but he was absolutely right. It was far too valuable an opportunity to miss—now that I thought about it, we were practically obliged to pump the man for everything he was worth. Decent treatment where cruelty was expected, capped by an unexpected thoughtful gesture, would almost certainly constitute the most promising approach. So I reluctantly ordered that every moment of the meal be recorded with a hidden camera.

  Though I’d have been far happier had the affair remained nothing more than the genuine gesture of respect I’d originally meant for it to be.

  24

  Captain Broke ended up telling us far more than he ever intended to, and so did all the other captains who followed him. Their advice and wisdom—all offered freely, during informal conversation they thought was about harmless subjects—guided us steadily deeper and deeper into Imperial space. Behind us we left an ever-growing legacy of missing ships and vanished crews.

  Richard took two more cargo ships in the Nagus Three system—we could’ve snatched several more by pushing our luck, but that didn’t seem to me like a good risk so early in the game. The Imperial Lines vessel Vargus Relay also stopped for new code books, while we kindly offered the services of a doctor to the tramp bulk-gas transporter Argon when the captain’s wife experienced difficulty in childbirth. The little one was delivered successfully in our sick bay, offering Argon’s captain at least a little solace. He’d owned his own ship, and while there was insurance it wouldn’t cover all of his loss. Still, he was a good sport about it all once we delivered him a healthy son, and didn’t bear us too much of a grudge. In fact, he named the boy Richard.

  All in all, our crew had a very pleasant cruise during those early months. We made it a point whenever feasible to allow our prisoners to bring all the luggage and private stores they could carry, allowing them to preserve many valuable and sentimental objects that otherwise would’ve been lost. Sometimes we even helped them bring more. We had plenty of room in the holds after all, and neither family jewels nor holograph albums massed enough to amount to anything. Besides, the personal food-stores helped us eke out our own limited supplies as long as possible. Because we did these small things for them, they were amazingly tranquil and easy to work with. Our prisoners were a merry bunch of merchies, all things considered. We left them mostly to their own devices, listening eagerly with hidden microphones as they swapped sea-stories by the endless hour and along the way spilled rivers of vital intelligence about traffic patterns, busy cargo centers, and the operational patterns of Imperial Navy vessels deep in the Empire.

  Their slaves were another problem entirely, one that I lost considerable sleep over. From the very beginning of things it became obvious that there was simply no way to insulate them from our relatively free and fully armed lapine crew members or, eventually, from finding out who was in command. Indeed, more than half the marines who took them prisoner in the first place were bunnies. Within mere hours of being taken aboard, the Rabbits and Dogs almost invariably became delirious with joy and broke out in celebrations that bordered on riots. In the end there was nothing for it but to enlist and train as many as would volunteer. We didn’t really need that many crewmen, but otherwise those not permitted to serve would sulk and complain. Besides, one of the darker aspects of our situation was that the Imperials would never permit them to remain alive after being exposed to such an egalitarian society. Or, more especially, after being exposed to me. So we made it a point when looting our victims to raid the arms chest as well as the ship’s safe, codes, and log book. Soon we had a veritable arsenal of raggedy, mismatched small arms, and I put Silk and Sergeant Petranovich to work making raggedy, mismatched marines out of our volunteers to carry them. The rest I meted out here and there according to their skills and abilities. The largest single batch, including all the does, were put in charge of feeding and caring for their former owners, an assignment they accepted with good humor once Nestor had a little talk with them. While I never out and out promised my volunteers freedom should we make it back to Royal space, it was clear they expected it. My reputation, as always seemed to be the case, preceded me.

  It was obvious from the first that disposing of the looted ships was a much more difficult and even dangerous proposition than effecting their capture. In the old days, raiders and pirates had either carried enough extra officers and men to sail the prizes home, or else in extremis had taken them to isolated places where they might be stripped of everything useful and then burned or sunk at leisure. In space, however, this was impossible because every ship was in sight of all the rest, all the time. Not one but two Imperial cruisers were watching us every second of our rendezvous with New Perth Transporter Four, for example, and one of them was in a favorable position
to intercept. While they wouldn’t be alarmed by a few boats zipping back and forth, a dazzling explosion or imploded drive was sure to attract unwelcome attention. So long before we ever captured a prize Wu always worked out a pre-programmed course for our victim’s navigation system. It took the abandoned ship directly to the Jump node the vessel was already headed for—we never attacked anyone on course for any local destination—and then initiated a Jump. The beauty of this was that without an actual astrogator at the helm the translation was almost certain to misfire, so that the vessel Jumped… nowhere! It was a most convenient method of disposal, which my astrogator later refined by adding in half a pre-programmed radio conversation or two, so that we could “converse” with the empty vessel at pre-set times. Sure, there was risk—anyone else who tried to speak to one of our victims, for example, would get nothing but static back. But so long as we were careful to only attack ships not more than a week or so from a Jump, the risk was minimal. And even when we could’ve been caught out, as when a ship we’d just plundered was offered passing honors by an unexpected arrival in the system, the merchies tended to attribute the silence to rudeness, incompetence, or both. A suddenly-appearing Imperial warship, like the cruiser we’d encountered that first time, would of course be another story. But, hey! You place your bets, and you take your chances. Nothing is certain in life, and doubly so in war!