The Oncoming Storm

by Christopher Nuttall

  There was a ping from Roach’s console. “They swept us, Captain,” he warned. Red lights flared on the console. “They know what we are.”

  “Fire,” Kat snapped.

  Lightning shivered as she launched her missile, aimed right at the enemy drive section. If Kat and her crew were lucky, the pirates would have no time to either return fire or take evasive action. But they hadn’t been alert at all. They didn’t even have their point defense on automatic, ready to blast unexpected threats out of space. The missile slammed into their rear section and detonated.

  “Open a channel,” Kat ordered. She waited for the nod from Ross before speaking. “Pirate ship, this is Captain Falcone of the Royal Tyre Navy. If you give up now, without further ado, your lives will be spared. You have one minute to surrender before I blow your ship into atoms.”

  There was a long pause, long enough that Kat wondered if the pirate ship had lost all power along with her drive section. A military starship shouldn’t have had that problem—there would be batteries, at the very least—but it was quite possible the pirates hadn’t kept up with their maintenance. Military discipline wasn’t part of their lives. Besides, she knew, the ship was over a hundred years old. They might well have done a poor job of refitting her with the latest sensors and weapons systems.

  She thought rapidly. If the pirates couldn’t communicate, she would have to send the marines into the hulk, knowing the pirates could be waiting for a boarding party before blowing their own ship, taking the marines out as well as their crew. Or, if they’d lost life support completely, it was equally possible that most of the crew were trapped in sealed compartments—or dead.

  But we could pull evidence from their hull, if we looked, she thought.

  “Picking up a weak signal,” Ross reported. “They’re begging to surrender.”

  Kat keyed her console. “This is your one chance,” she said. “Cooperate with the marines and your lives will be spared. Any resistance will result in the destruction of your vessel.”

  She switched channels. “Colonel, you have permission to launch,” she told Davidson. The marines had been waiting in their shuttles, ready to launch as soon as the pirate ship was crippled. “Good luck.”

  The display updated rapidly as shuttles arced away from Lightning, heading towards the crippled ship. Kat tensed as the Marines entered weapons range, knowing that a single energy weapon could pick off a shuttle before any of the troops even knew they were under attack. Davidson was in command, of course. Even if it had been permissible for him to remain behind, he wouldn’t have done so. The thought hurt more than she’d expected. It was one of the things she’d loved about him.

  “Contact the convoy master,” she ordered, trying to distract herself. “The convoy is to hold position until we have searched the pirate ship, then we will resume our journey to Cadiz.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Ross said.

  Kat’s console bleeped. “This is Davidson,” a voice said. His tone was calm and steady, betraying no excitement or concern. “We have boarded the pirate ship. No resistance. I say again, no resistance.”

  “Very good,” Kat said. She looked at the XO. “We need to put an investigative team on the vessel.”

  “I’ll see to it,” the XO said. “With your permission, I’ll take an engineering and tactical crew with me. They’ll be able to pull information from what remains of the enemy’s computers.”

  “And determine if she can be safely towed to Cadiz,” Kat agreed. Taking the ship as a prize wouldn’t win the crew much in the way of money, but it would be something. Besides, a full team of analysts from Cadiz might discover something her crew didn’t have the expertise to find. “If not, place scuttling charges and abandon the hulk. I doubt she can move under her own power now.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the XO said.

  Kat nodded, then smiled round the bridge. “Our first real combat test,” she said, “and you all did very well.”

  She paused. “Stand down from battle stations,” she added. “But continue to monitor local space. Our friend out there may have friends of her own.”

  Chapter Nine

  “You’ll want to keep your face mask on,” the marine rifleman said as William climbed through the airlock and into the pirate ship. The rifleman’s name tag read HOBBES. “The ship stinks like a brick shithouse on a very hot day.”

  “Thank you for that mental image,” William said dryly. Marines tended to be blunt and crude, something he normally appreciated. But not today. “Where are the prisoners?”

  “They’re being held in the mess,” Hobbes said. “If you’ll come with me, sir . . .”

  William followed him through the dark corridor, wondering just how the pirates had managed to keep their ship operational for so long. This particular section was some considerable distance from the drive compartment, yet half of the lighting elements seemed to have been blown out while the onboard datanet had been completely lost. Clearly, the UN’s fetish for multiple redundancy—something shared with engineers the galaxy over—hadn’t endured past the ship falling into pirate hands.

  The corridors looked filthy, coated with dust and grime, as if the pirates had never bothered to clean their living space. He glanced into one cabin—the door had been jarred open—and saw a messy space with datachips and bedding scattered everywhere. One bulkhead had chains hanging down towards the ground, ending in manacles. He shuddered, realizing that someone had been kept prisoner in the room. Whoever it was, he hoped they’d been rescued rather than killed. It hadn’t been that long since his homeworld had been raided almost every year by pirates.

  They walked into the mess. William stopped dead. A handful of armored marines were guarding thirty prisoners, all men. The prisoners were lying on the deck, their hands cuffed behind their backs, their clothes largely torn from them. Some were whimpering to themselves, their world suddenly turned upside down. William looked down at them for a long, chilling moment, then looked at Hobbes. None of the prisoners looked very impressive.

  “Which one of these pieces of shit is in command?”

  “The captain is dead,” Davidson said, entering from the other hatch. His face was set in a permanent frown. “So are most of the senior officers.”

  “Dead?” William repeated. “How?”

  “Suicide implants,” Davidson said. He motioned for William to follow him. “That’s odd, for pirates.”

  William mulled it over as they walked up the corridor and onto the bridge. Pirates rarely used personalized suicide implants. They were normally only used by secret agents and military personnel. All they did was kill their user if the command was sent or if the user was on the verge of spilling specific secrets to interrogators. William knew better than to trust the implants completely. They were perfectly capable of mistaking an accident that left someone badly hurt for torture, and killing their bearer.

  The bridge was a shambles. Several consoles had exploded—he’d never seen that happen outside a bad entertainment flick—and a handful of bodies lay on the deck. Two of them had clearly been sitting at the consoles, judging from the wounds, but the remaining five all looked surprisingly peaceful. But it was clear they were dead. The corpsman kneeling beside one of the bodies looked up, then saluted.

  “Commander,” he said gravely. “Their brains were turned to ash, along with their implants.”

  “Understood,” William said. There was no point in looking for alternate causes of death. “I assume the implants are beyond recovery?”

  “Almost certainly,” the corpsman said. “I’ll have the analysts plough through the dust, but I’d be astonished if they found anything beyond traces of their presence. The damage was total.”

  William looked down at the pirate commander. He was a tall man, so extensively muscled that William would have bet good money it was the result of cosmetic treatment, wearing an outfit that showed off his frame to good advantage. His belt, lying beside him, had carried two pistols, a monofilament knife, and
a neural whip, the latter probably used on his crewmen when they misbehaved. Pirate commanders had nothing but force to keep their men in line.

  And most of them are probably challenged by their subordinates, he thought. Assassination was a common way of moving up the ladder on a pirate ship. There was certainly no such thing as promotion for merit. He would have had to keep his men under tight control, but not too tight.

  William looked round the bridge. “Why did their implants trigger? Why not simply blow the ship itself?”

  “Good question,” Davidson agreed. “We did smash their datanet to hell and gone, so they might have tried to trigger the self-destruct and failed. Or there wasn’t a self-destruct in the first place. I can’t imagine pirates being very willing to sail under one.”

  William nodded, turning back to the marine. “How many did we take alive?”

  “Thirty-one confirmed pirates, we believe,” Davidson said as they left the bridge and headed down another corridor. Judging by the stains on the bulkheads, the pirates had been in the habit of urinating on the deck. “Fifteen slaves, all but two female, which we are holding in this compartment. They just can’t be trusted.”

  “I know,” William said, as they stepped into the compartment. “Stockholm syndrome.”

  Inside, a number of women lay on the deck, their hands bound behind their backs. It wasn’t fair or right to treat them as prisoners—they were victims of the pirates, rather than willing assistants—but he knew there was no choice. After so long as nothing more than slaves, the prisoners might have developed a kind of loyalty to their captors, just to keep their minds from cracking completely.

  The two male captives had been pushed against the far wall, away from the women; the marines eyed them warily. It was quite possible, despite their obvious mistreatment, that they were pirates posing as captives in the hopes of escape.

  Or that they were forced to partake in forbidden pleasures, William knew. It was the standard treatment pirates gave to prisoners who were too valuable to the ship to hold for ransom, or simply put out an airlock. Once they got their hands dirty, they knew they could never go home again.

  “Have them all moved to Lightning,” he ordered bluntly. They’d probably have to be put in stasis, after the doctors took a look at them. Once the ship reached Cadiz, they could be transferred to a specialized medical facility. “Do we have anyone who might know anything among the prisoners?”

  “Not as far as we know,” Davidson stated. “They all claim to be ordinary crewmen.”

  “Have them interrogated, then transferred to stasis cells,” William said. “If they happen to know anything useful, we can follow up on it at Cadiz.”

  The next hour went slowly as the investigation team carefully searched the pirate ship, finding very little apart from hundreds of pornographic datachips and plenty of evidence that the ship had been involved in dozens of attacks. Most of the main computer had been destroyed—that part of the self-destruct system had worked perfectly—and what remained was scrambled beyond immediate use. William watched as the damaged cores were removed from their compartment, knowing that the techs on Cadiz would have their work cut out for them. It was highly unlikely they’d be able to produce anything more than gibberish or standard operating files.

  “None of the crew kept a journal,” Hobbes told William as he returned to the airlock. The marine brandished a little black book. “Or, at least, none we could use. This book details sexual conquests, rather than anything else.”

  William wasn’t surprised. The military banned its personnel from keeping personal logs, knowing that enemy intelligence agents would try to access them in hopes of finding actionable intelligence. It was clear the pirates probably felt the same way too. If one of their crew had kept a journal, it might wind up being used against them. A note of a pirate base’s location alone would be disastrous.

  “Add it to the evidence locker,” he said. He had no wish to read a sexual journal belonging to a pirate. “Can this ship be taken under tow?”

  “The chief engineer believes it can be towed by one of the freighters,” Hobbes said. “But its hull is badly damaged. There won’t be much prize money.”

  “There will be a baseline rate, if nothing else,” William pointed out. Taking a pirate ship out of commission alone was worthwhile. If any actionable intelligence was pulled out of the hulk, even on Cadiz, the crew would be in line for another bonus. “Besides, we can always melt the hull down for scrap.”

  He smiled as the marines pulled their prisoners to their feet, none too gently, and pushed them towards the airlock. Some of the pirates looked panicky as they were shoved through the hatch, as if they expected to discover the airlock opened into empty space, while others just looked resigned. They’d had enough time, he decided, to come to terms with the fact that their reign of terror was over.

  “Doctor,” he said, as Doctor Katy Braham entered the compartment. “What do you have to report?”

  Doctor Braham—she had always insisted on being called Katy—looked grim. She’d been in the navy almost as long as William himself and she’d seen more than her fair share of horror, but she had always seemed optimistic. Not this time, William suspected. Pirate ships were always houses of true horror.

  “All but one of the women will require extensive rejuvenation treatments as well as counseling,” she said bluntly. She never bothered to sugarcoat bad news. “The good news is that the sheer scale of their wounds implies they were definitely captives; the bad news is that they will probably have to be permanently supervised by female personnel until we reach Cadiz. Their . . . conduct will leave much to be desired.”

  “They attempted to come on to the marines,” Hobbes put in.

  “Thank you, young man,” Doctor Braham snapped. She glared at Hobbes, then switched her attention back to William. “They’ve had servitude beaten into them, Commander. It’s the only way they know to guarantee their safety. I don’t think they will ever return to what they were before they were captured.”

  William winced. “Do we know who they were?”

  “We’re running their DNA through the records now,” the doctor said. “But I would be surprised if we found a match. Their genetic patterns don’t suggest any high-tech world.”

  They could have come from Hebrides, William thought. The pirates hadn’t wanted much from his homeworld, apart from food, drink, and women. And the planetary government had no choice but to send them whatever they wanted. Some of the girls had volunteered. Others . . . had been drafted. Can we take them home?

  Doctor Braham cleared her throat loudly. “The two male captives have been beaten, quite badly,” she continued. “They were worked over by professionals. The damage was not extensive or permanent, but it would have been very painful. I think we can safely assume they’re not willing pirates.”

  “Keep an eye on them anyway,” William ordered. Stockholm syndrome could strike any kind of captive, no matter how badly they were treated. And if the pirates had forced their captives to get their hands dirty . . . he shook his head. “And see if they memorized anything they can tell us.”

  “I’ll have my staff supervise the transfer to Lightning,” the doctor said, as though she expected objections. “I think we will probably need to put most of the former prisoners in stasis. There’re too many of them for my staff to handle.”

  “See to it,” William said. He sighed. Yet another problem. “But they will need to answer questions eventually.”

  He took one final walk through the vessel, noting the sheer lack of maintenance that had contributed to her quick defeat, then returned to the shuttles as the crew prepared to leave the pirate ship for the last time. The female prisoners, according to Davidson, had experienced real problems with boarding the shuttles until two of the female marines had removed their own armor. Even so, the prisoners had shied away from them. The doctors had eventually resorted to sedating all of the pirates’ former captives, with the intention of leaving them out of it
until the ship reached Cadiz.

  “The interrogations will begin in thirty minutes,” Davidson informed him. Interrogating the former pirates was a marine chore. “Do you wish to witness?”

  The honest answer was no, but William knew he should be there. “I’ll catch a cup of coffee and a shower, then join you,” he said instead. He was ruefully aware he stunk after spending several hours on the pirate ship. “Hold the interrogation until I arrive.”

  He walked back to his cabin, showered, took a long drink of coffee, and then returned to Marine Country. The prisoners had been separated, ensuring they couldn’t come up with a shared story to tell the marines, although William would have been surprised if they’d managed to cooperate in any case. Pirates weren’t used to cooperating with one another, no matter the prize. He forced himself to look impassive as he walked into the interrogation chamber and peered through the one-way glass.

  The pirate definitely didn’t look impressive, he decided, as the marines cuffed him to the chair and then attached a pair of monitors to his forehead. He was a young man, barely out of his teens; William suspected, despite himself, that he knew the boy’s story. Like so many others, he would have viewed a career in space as more glamorous than a life behind the rear end of a mule on the ground. And he would have rapidly found himself so desperate for work that he would have taken the first job that came along. It was sheer bad luck it had been on a pirate ship.

  Young and impressionable, William thought. And desperate.

  It was never a good combination.

  “The corpsman did a quick medical check,” Davidson said as he entered the compartment. “There are no medical issues, nor any interfering implants. It’s unlikely he knows anything of substance.”

  “We’ll see,” William said. It was impossible to say in advance what would serve as a clue to lead the navy to the pirate base. The pirate might have seen something that would fit in with another piece of information from a second pirate. “I . . .”