Pirates (BOOK ONE OF THE RIM CONFEDERACY 1)

by Jim Rudnick

  As they poured over the past battle and tendered reports about losses and gains, it appeared that they were at a stalemate that seemed to have no avenue to success. The aliens had better technology that both canceled out their Navy Ansibles and killed their operators—and not being able to be in touch with each other meant there would be no unified actions under the admiral’s orders.

  On top of that, as the mother ship did not lower her shields, she was never in danger of taking any hits as well. What they had been able to record, using high-speed pulse technology, was that the shields had dipped ever so slightly at each pulse. The effect of the plasma on those brown shields had looked like it was futile, but there had been a slight drain. Enough though, said the admiral, that they’d immediately sent out for two battleships, and they would be here in only three more hours. Figuring that they would co-ordinate an attack using the battleships as the wedge to drive into the alien mother ship, they listened to each of the actions as planned by the admiral and left with their own agenda and orders.

  Back on board the Gillmarten, Tanner had outlined those orders to the Bridge crew and made sure each man knew his part and the roles the others would play too, as a contingency backup. He felt their role just might be pivotal in the attack on the mother ship, and if the Admiral had figured out what was needed, that they’d all know and be able to help.

  He drank his favorite double sweet coffees and called for stewards to bring more and then more again. He fidgeted with his chair adjusting the rake and the height a few times and even barked at the crew when they didn’t respond quickly enough, though he was quick to praise them when needed as well.

  And then the Ansible squawked, and the battleships Griffon and Hillman arrived, and the admiral quickly got on to all of them with final battle orders. They went to meet the alien mother ship off Koo again.

  While still in high-orbit, the alien mother ship had her shields on that glowed brownly in the evening sun as she lay near the terminator. Below, the alien freighters were coming and going to the planet. Empty when they went down, and filled when they came back up, Tanner thought. Wonder what they’re doing on the planet, but that will have to wait.

  He watched the display as the two Orion class battleships winked into existence about 100 miles away, and as they appeared, he saw that yes, they were firing their pulse plasma cannons in tandem. Bigger than the admiral’s destroyer by a factor of five, and using the power of three Perseus engines, their plasma balls hit those brown shields, and even Tanner could see them dim considerably for an instant.

  “Readings?” he shouted.

  “Fell by twelve percent, on impact, but went back up ... only four percent. They will fail in ... eleven more dual impact hits, Sir,” Lieutenant Neilson said as he leaned over his Science display. “We move in twenty-one seconds, Sir” he added as the twin plasma balls continued to arc down on the mother ship.

  Tanner nodded as he watched the fighters come up from the mother ship in swarms. The battleships would be able to withstand the hits from same, he knew, due to their vast size and the relatively lower firepower that the alien fighters carried. He counted down the last few seconds and yelled “Engage” to the Helm when it was time.

  Moving quickly under Inertial Drive, the Gillmarten drove down toward the mile-long mother ship and leveled off just as the brown shields disappeared. As they lined up for their pass at their target, automatic laser cannons on the mother ship began to fire at them, as Tanner gave the order to kill their shields. Like all the attacking forces, without their shields up, they were vulnerable, but as the admiral had surmised, once they were shield-less, the enemy couldn’t find them. And he was right; as soon as the shields were down, the laser cannon turrets stopped their firing and spun hopelessly looking for a target.

  Tanner grinned and congratulated the admiral under his breath. The mother ship was reacting though to her sudden loss of shields as she clumsily began to leave high-orbit and move away from the gravity well of the planet. To engage their star drive, Tanner thought.

  “Stay with them, Helm,” he ordered and was glad to see they lost no more than a few thousand yards of position as they clung to their target ahead.

  Beside them and only a few hundred yards away, the admiral’s destroyer Keenan was also shield-less and already pounding plasma at what appeared to be the Bridge of the ship, using her three forward cannons in sync. As she did, the Gillmarten on her port flank flew level, as the Tactical officer began to fire their own forward plasma cannon at their assigned array, the function of which they didn’t understand. It took two full bombing passes, but they eventually took it down, as it exploded and twisted away into space. Tanner smiled, mission accomplished, and as they turned to starboard to look for more targets, it happened.

  Unknown to them, an alien fighter had followed in their wake and had spun when they did and now surged to almost their aft port quarter. While it took a hit and it’s shields dropped drastically from the admiral's destroyer Keenan, which was now just to starboard, the fighter immediately responded by trying to ram the Gillmarten from the side, to vector it into the Keenan herself. In an instant, they had become the missile that would pierce the admiral’s flagship and destroy all on board as well as themselves.

  Tanner swore as he screamed at the Helm, “Take her to port, take those bastards out!”

  The Helm officer responded promptly, and the crash into the alien fighter was brief, but in space, deadly. Tanner knew the fighter was so much smaller than the Gillmarten so the major damage would not be as severe as they hit the smaller fighter and he heard their hull plating split.

  “Kill Inertial,” he barked at the Helm, as they tossed like a leaf in a storm and they glanced off the mother ship. The fighter had splintered into many pieces, with no sign of the alien pilot, and Tanner knew that might be true for them all. As they twisted over onto their back, the Gillmarten seemed to roll to port as well, which put them on a closing vector to the Keenan again, and Tanner gave the order quickly as he saw the flagship grow swiftly in the forward display.

  “Blow her, Tactical. Captain’s priority A-11A.” He watched the officer’s thumb slide down to jam the button on his console, as he already had pushed his own button on the captain’s console beside him. For a moment, time seemed to stand still, and then the Gillmarten split apart, the forward bridge section spinning away as the decks from engineering on down went one way and the middle part of the cruiser vectored the other. As force-fields tried to spring into being, the Bridge power fluctuated and strobed for a few seconds as they twisted up and off the mother ship as it continued to move itself up and out of orbit.

  Only seconds after they’d blown their ship, Tanner glanced at their life support and saw it was not operational though the force-fields would hold them out of the vacuum. As they spun, he suddenly got a view of the Keenan and saw his engineering section had indeed moved away from that collision, but the middle third of the Gillmarten must have crashed directly into the destroyer, and like a brick through a pumpkin, it damaged much as it crashed. As they spun again, Tanner and the rest of the Bridge crew saw the interior of the destroyer as it spewed out bodies and equipment; obviously it’s automatic force-fields could not compensate quickly enough for this large of an impact wound, and as they turned again and the Keenan was more distant, they watched as she spun too, cartwheeling with the vented stream of depressurizing of the decks affected.

  The huge alien mother ship disappeared. There was no notice of where they were going and where they would appear. But they had left Earldom space that much was certain.

  Tanner was sick to his stomach and retched in his mouth, swallowing bile and regret. In trying to evade collision, he had caused just that to occur. He knew they would eventually be picked up after the battle, as they spun away from the now distant mother ship. As he retched onto the floor beside him, the balance of the crew was quiet. They had lived through the battle, and for them that was enough.

  He would always
remember this as the event that changed him; in trying to accomplish one thing, he had caused just that to occur. He suddenly wanted a drink, any drink, just a big one. And then another, and another.

  This could all go away, he thought, as he knew he had to face the admiral later. And then there were all those letters to write, his first ones ever to the families and loved ones of God knows how many crew members had died today. He’d killed them; he knew that in his heart, and for that, he would forever be sorry. Even knowing that his decision was what any other captain would have done, given the same circumstances, didn’t help at all. And in trying to protect the flagship, he’d caused her losses as well, good intentions notwithstanding; the deaths of many were on his hands today.

  Later, when facing the admiral, he had tried to explain his actions but the Admiral knew that he had done what any of them would have done at that time and facing the same decisions. The fact that he’d made the right choice had not soothed him in the least, not even when the Admiral himself had tried to comfort him.

  And much later, over a Scotch, a good, fine, aged Scotch, he noticed no ease of his guilt, but after quite a few he simply forgot. The cure for guilt he had learned lay in the application of Scotch, many, many of them, but he had the formula for relief, and he practiced it at first seldom, then occasionally, and then almost daily.

  And of course, his crew noticed and eventually so did the admiral. He endured many lectures on duty and putting the past behind him and on assuaging guilt in other ways, but nothing interrupted that slide into the bottle for him.

  Even when the admiral let him know he was leaving to take over the Rim Navy some 1200 light-years distant out on the Rim and wanted him to come along, he barely cared. Somehow the admiral felt responsible for creating what he had become—the admiral’s guilt perhaps over the results of the battle with the mother ship. Or not, he didn’t know nor did he care. Nor did he even somehow notice the various transports out to the Rim; the almost three years on the Galaxy class passenger liner Exerkes, where he did try all kinds of Scotch and realized it didn’t matter as they all worked to salve his guilt.

  And the subsequent smaller liners that slowly worked their way outbound, each of them with another bar to sit at for a while or a room to sleep it off in, no matter. He became thinner and gaunter and never went to any of the various gyms on board all of them. He was haunted in his sleep, spinning and twisting, and as he turned, he saw the Keenan being hit over and over again, venting out crewmen and aliens alike. Dreams haunted him still.

  When they arrived on the Rim, the Sagittarius class O’Hara, the smallest liner they’d been on, deposited them on Juno, and he’d slept it off in the Navy officer's barracks, snoring his welcome away. Days later, the admiral had settled in and he’d found himself ordered onto the frigate Kerry as a brand new lieutenant commander. The loss of two levels of rank, from captain down to lieutenant commander meant nothing to him. He knew that with someone else in charge, he’d have no worries about ever making a decision again. Happiness evaded him as did sobriety, but he could perform here on the Rim without either it seemed.

  And he’d been able to cope. He had now been out here on the Rim for four years almost, and until the Pirate attack, he’d drunk enough Scotch to fill a cruiser's cargo bay. Now, four years later, he’d become the captain of a Navy ship, the Marwick, and with it all the responsibilities of command had come back too, and he shook off the memories of years ago.

  He continued to dress each collar with its new silver eagle and put on his shirt last, noting the starch had been heavy and the pressing well done. Neat, at least, he thought and promised to look up the officer’s times for the gym first thing, as he left his cabin and went up the stairs to the Bridge of his new command, his past Navy life now forgotten ... for now.

  # # # # #

  “I’m telling you,” Lieutenant Billy Doering said, his voice like chipped flint, “we can’t lose. If we use my brother, then it’s all about winning, and that’s all you gotta know.”

  He swirled together the wet rings on the little black laminate table with his beer glass and didn’t look up. Around them at all the other tables, in the ship’s officer's mess, sat only two other off duty officers who quietly chatted after the end of their watches.

  Lieutenant Fleen sipped his drink and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the gold braid on his cuffs shining even in this dim end of watch light level.

  “Win? We have to win, Billy. We were told to win, and that’s how it is, plain and simple.” His collar loosened and his eyes now holding a hint of a glaze after three drinks, Mel Fleen said what Billy already knew. The Baroness brooked no deviations from orders, and those orders had been very very simple ... win the Open Pro Class level at the upcoming VacJump Games. End of story.

  Billy shrugged and pushed his beer glass away as he leaned forward to softly reply, the rocket whine now fading away.

  “Mel, hell, I know that. Why’nt you think I don’t know that? If we lose, then we’re done, careers over for sure. Billy shook his head. Everyone in the Barony knew that, he thought, you either followed orders, no matter what needed to be done to do that, and excuses weren’t even listened to. Everyone knew that. Billy sighed.

  “And I’ve told you twice tonight why we gotta use my brother. I’ve told you that he has this ... this condition ... the reason why he’s such an odd duck, and how we can use that this one time, to win that Open Class jump and to make a betting killing, which’d buy us out of the Barony Navy. The Caliphate casino won’t want to pay off, but they will 'cause they must … bets laid equals bets paid. Then we buy our way out of the Navy with this simple win and my brother. Or else we get used to never-never land out here ... with the rest of these wanna-be Navy types.” He gestured around them at the other men sitting and quietly drinking.

  “They’re nobodies, Sam. Not like us. They will never go anywhere, pulling their duty for the Navy. Not us, Sam. If we can win, then we’ll clean up. Odds against the Caliphate champ are almost 1100 to 1, and we can buy our way in if we bet big enough. And we know where to get 90,000 credits to bet with, now don’t we?”

  Billy straightened then and softly sipped the finish of his beer, putting the glass down exactly over the top of the wet ring on the tabletop in front of him. He looked at Mel and waited, as Mel pondered their options. They both stared out the window as droids swarmed over the merchant freighter beside them here at the Leudi Station, grappling hooks and conveyor belts swiftly moving cargo out of its holds. He wondered what kind of cargo it was and how one might boost it for a minute or two. Then he finally looked back at Mel who also turned back, his pale blue eyes looking for assurance as he licked his lips before he spoke.

  “But only if we win, Billy. What makes you think you can even ask your brother to risk his life for us?” Mel tossed the dregs of his Scotch down and punched another round’s order into the tabletop console. They waited quietly, while the droid brought the fresh beer and another Scotch to the table and then floated away.

  “And more importantly, what makes you think that your retarded little brother can beat this Jocko, the Caliphate champ now for, what’s it been, four months? Lotta vacuum there ... Your brother ever even been in a vacuum before? What’s he know about it anyways?”

  Billy knew Mel; they’d been friends since they’d shared a cell out on Halberd, the RIM’s Max Security Prison planet. There, after three years of sitting and walking the island end to end to end to end just waiting to complete their sentences, they’d both been offered commutation of their sentences if they signed up for the Barony Navy with a mandatory five years of service. Hadn’t taken a brain, Billy thought, to figure out that five years as a Navy man, even a lowly lieutenant, would be better than the rest of his twenty-year sentence for extortion on Neres itself. And Mel had agreed, and they’d signed onto the Barony cruiser Newton and now lay off Leudi, on a three-day turnaround from a long leg out to Far Away, more than twenty light-years out at the edge of
the RIM.

  Billy grinned at Mel.

  “Oh yes, Mel, Junior knows what the game is, and I know how to make him the winner. You ever wonder why Junior is ... well ... like he is? What he’s got that makes him so weird?”

  Mel shrugged and sipped his Scotch.

  “Why’n hell do I care? He’s an idiot that I met once on … Randi, wasn’t it … he's got a big head, right?"

  Billy nodded.

  “Yeah, Mel, he’s an idiot for a reason. I went with him to most of those specialists to help and all those brain doctors and even to that big clinic on Eons with their Adept doctors, Mel. You know what he’s got? It’s called Proencephaly and it’s ‘cause when he was twelve and we had that cruiser punch the hole in our ship out in the asteroids off Ramparts, remember? I told you, anyways, the trauma caused cysts to appear in his brain ... and they had to take them out, which left him with these big sorta bulbs of just air in his head. His head is full of air, Mel ... and that makes him a winner!"

  Billy sipped at his drink.

  "Remember back months ago, Mel, when I went to the monthly games at the Caliphate Station, and he won his heat in the Amateur class? And remember he told me that he could have lasted minutes more or so cause of that ‘pocketed’ air in his head?” Billy sat back and took a swig of his beer, smiling at Sam.

  “And we’re gonna bet our lives on a head full of air,” Mel queried as he nodded his head,” is that what you want me to do?” He shook his head, but Billy knew then it was a done deal. Mel always nodded his head when he’d made a decision