"Shit," I said as I landed next to him. "Grab the med kit, Baker." I'd knocked him out cold.
"Where? I don't know where it is," she said, panicked.
"Slow down and look at your HUD. The AI is highlighting it," I said in as calm a voice as I could manage. I wasn't overly worried about Mark-Ralph, but I hadn't intended to drop him on the mat, either.
Zebulon had entered the ring and was leaning over with his hands on his knees. "You really clocked him."
Baker slid a med kit onto the mat and looked at me expectantly.
"Open it up and ask your AI what to do next," I instructed.
She opened the kit and my HUD immediately highlighted the diagnostic scanner. I'd used a med kit often enough that I didn't have any questions on what came next, but it was a perfect training opportunity. I watched as her shaky hands pulled the scanner out and laid it on Mark-Ralph's temple.
"It says to apply a P-1 to his right temple," Baker recited what I was also reading on my HUD.
"Best to get after it," I said.
She looked from me to the kit and then pulled a P-1 patch out and applied it more-or-less where the AI instructed.
"What now?" she asked.
"We wait. The patch contains nano-bots - basically tiny robots thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand. They'll go turn the lights back on," I said.
"Did you have to kick him so hard? … Sir," Baker asked, accusatorily.
"I'd have preferred he wore protective head gear." I wasn't about to defend my actions to her. From my perspective, things couldn't have worked out better.
"What the hell does kicking me in the head have to do with Hotspur and a dreadnaught?" Mark-Ralph mumbled, trying to sit up.
"Hold on there, killer, give the bots another minute. You took a pretty good hit there," I said, laying my hand on his shoulder.
"No, seriously. I don't get it," he said.
"Would you say you're physically stronger than I am?" I asked.
"I'd bet on it, Captain."
"Me too," I answered. "How about mass? I bet I give up forty kilos to you."
"Sounds right," he agreed.
"So, by your estimation, you're both bigger and stronger?"
"Yes."
"Sound familiar, Baker?" I asked, looking at the dark-haired woman. She didn't answer other than to nod her head. "So how dumb would it be for me to stand toe-to-toe with you and trade punches, Mark-Ralph?"
"It'd be a fair fight, Sir," Mark-Ralph wasn't quite ready to give it up.
"When Hotspur ran down the Red Houzi dreadnaught Bakunawa, we weren't looking for a fair fight. What we were looking for was a way to kick 'em in the head. If we'd tried to stand toe-to-toe with the big beast, we'd have been shredded within seconds. Somehow, we not only survived, but we captured the ship. Now, I've sent the video logs of that mission to the three of you and I'd like you to review them in your down time."
"You got lucky," Zebulon said. "No way you do that to someone who's expecting it."
"I'll give you points for stubborn, Zebulon. How 'bout you pull on that safety gear and we give it a go?"
Ten minutes later he held his arms up in surrender. I'd taken a few of his better punches - his long arms difficult to avoid - but I'd given way better than I'd received. Having already rendered one of Marny's crew inoperable, I'd pulled my own strikes back to eighty percent. Zebulon had some idea of defense and an even better understanding of his own strengths. In the end, however, he'd died the death of a thousand cuts, or in this case, hundreds of painful, but not debilitating, strikes to any open surface I could find on his body.
"You're impossibly fast," he said, sweat running down his face.
"Is everyone from Ophir as hardheaded as you two?" I asked. "I'd have thought watching me take down Mark-Ralph would have been enough. How about it, Baker?"
"No, sir. I never got into many scraps," she said.
"That's not what I heard," Mark-Ralph said. "I heard…"
"Seamen! Attention!" I hadn't heard Marny's approach and snapped to attention with the rest and then tried to act like I hadn't. I'd heard Marny's angry, ten-hut voice before, but I’d been totally surprised by it this time.
"Seaman Mark-Ralph. Tell me you weren't about to spread gossip about your squad-mate Baker."
"Uh, no ma'am. Well, yes ma'am, I was," he answered. I was both proud of and terrified for him in that moment.
"Ma'am, may I speak?" Baker asked.
"No, you may not, Seaman Baker," Marny snapped. "Squad, that's twenty laps. How you talk to your own in crew country is your business, but you will not denigrate your squad mates to an officer. Now get moving." Marny pointed to the door. One of the great features of Intrepid was the passageway layout. A person could run all the way around the ship. The entire trek, if you were to run down through Deck-3, was two-hundred twenty-five meters.
"I didn't see you come in, Master Chief," I said, picking up the safety gear and returning it to the locker. I was still getting used to Marny's new rank. It seemed to fit her nicely.
Marny chuckled. "Aye, Cap, I believe I recognized that."
"Sorry about your recruits. I really didn't mean to knock Mark-Ralph out," I said.
"Mr. Zebulon will have quite a headache tomorrow. I saw him teetering on his feet a couple of times. Why didn't you put him away?"
"I didn't want him to think I got lucky. I wanted him to realize who was in charge," I said. "Otherwise, I didn't think they'd pay attention when we actually started training."
"From what I saw, you've already started the training." She laid her arm over my shoulders as we walked from the exercise room and I wondered how she might have handled things differently. The sound of the trainees rounding the corner on their first lap caught my attention and I took off after them. Mark-Ralph might have been the one to get us in trouble, but I'd participated. I might as well share in the discipline.
RELOCATION
I awoke to a quiet alarm chiming in my ear. Tabby and I had hit the sack six hours previous and it was going to be a big day.
"Where are you going, lover?" Tabby ran her hand down my chest and onto my stomach. She wanted me to stay in bed to keep her warm and wasn't above getting frisky to achieve it.
"You have to get up too. We're transitioning from fold-space in an hour," I said.
Lights, Tabby requested, jumping out of bed. I watched as she wriggled into a suit liner followed by her grav-suit. I recognized too late that I should have played along a little longer. "Who's got watch?" she asked.
"Ada and Moonie are just coming on," I said, pulling my grav-suit from the suit cleaner.
I looked around the captain's quarters that were starting to feel more like home. It wasn't overly spacious with the bed pulled out into a two-person configuration, but the room also had a small desk built into the port bulkhead. We'd taken to displaying the ship's port feed on the built-in vid screen, although I could easily switch to bridge, engineering or just about any number of different compartments with a single command. The only other furniture, other than storage compartments, was an L-shaped couch. There were a number of possible configurations, but neither Tabby nor I were particular about such things. Perhaps the most luxurious appointment was the private head which I certainly appreciated.
"Did Nick decide whether he or Jonathan is going over to Jeratorn?" Tabby asked.
"It'll be you, me, Nick and Ortel," I said.
"Ortel?"
"Marny wants him to have time in a gunner's chair," I said.
"You think he's ready? Jeratorn is rough," she said.
"Were we?" I asked, pushing my way into the passageway that cut in front of our quarters and over to the officer's wardroom. I tossed a high calorie meal bar to Tabby and poured coffee for us.
"How heavy are we loading?" she asked as I palmed my way through the security panel and onto the bridge. A familiar whistle warned the bridge's occupants that I'd arrived.
"Captain on the bridge," Marny announced.
"Cap, the team is gathered in the conference room," Marny said. She was standing in the workstation that spanned both the bridge and the gunner's nest. While I could see through to the gunner's nest, a sound deadening wave prevented the gunner's mates from overhearing bridge talk and vice-versa. As it was, she had Zebulon, Baker and Mark-Ralph all running drills.
I followed Tabby into the conference room that joined with the bridge, finding Ortel, Nick and Jonathan looking at a holographic image of Jeratorn.
"Is that current?" I recognized the three interconnected towers from our previous visit. The docking bay, which ran horizontally about a third of the way up the forward-most tower looked wider than I recalled.
"Up to date, within a tenday," Nick answered. "We were just going over the publicly listed shipments." It was something we used to do when we were interested in making money. There had always been a premium on shipping in and out of Jeratorn due to the infrequent visits by Mars Protectorate.
"What's the premium running?" I asked.
"Forty-five percent over standard," Nick answered.
I whistled. It was up fifteen percent from when Red Houzi had been secretly running the station.
"I hope your Beth Anne Hollise isn't off vacationing," Tabby said. She was annoyed that we were dealing with the shapely pirate. I wasn't sure which part bothered her the most, the voluptuous woman's shape or the fact that she was an unrepentant pirate. "Or this will have been a wasted trip."
"Won't be a complete waste. Their prices on precious metals are good," Nick said. "We have six hundred fifty thousand Tipperary credits that we've converted to three hundred thousand Mar's credits. We'll be converting that to platinum."
"We've identified three possible mining groups that we believe will have a sufficient volume of platinum," Jonathan said. "We believe it would be wise for Loose Nuts to convert their outstanding credits to something more portable, given the current, pending litigation."
"The mission is simple," I said. "When we exit fold-space, we contact Hollise to see if she can help us find a source for the livestock."
"I still don't understand why you think she can help," Tabby said. "Don't you have better connections through Anino's mega corporations, Jonathan?"
"We need to do this quietly," Nick said.
Tabby sat back in her chair, arms folded across her chest, as we continued to work through the smaller details.
"All hands. Transition from fold-space in five minutes." Ada's voice came over the public address system.
"That's our cue," I said. "Ortel, on me."
"Give 'em hell, Cap," Marny said as we emerged from the conference room and exited the bridge.
"Keep the lights on," I replied, then led our group through the passageway to the airlock that would take us to Hotspur.
"Normal space in 10… 9… 8…" my AI warned. I closed my eyes and braced myself by placing my hand on the passageway's bulkhead.
As expected, transition sucked, but I wasn't about to show that to Ortel. Once it was over, I opened my eyes and cycled the airlock. "Everyone in," I directed.
Our first stop on Hotspur was the armory. I handed Ortel an armored vac-suit and AGBs.
"Put these on," I said, nodding toward the berth deck's main head. "Then meet us on the bridge."
I stepped back into the armory and Tabby handed me my favorite heavy Ruger blaster pistol which I strapped into a clipless thigh holster. If I expected combat, I'd have chosen a chest holster, but I wanted to appear less provocative when dealing with Hollise. For herself, Tabby chose to strap a short-stock blaster rifle on her back and holstered a flechette to her hip. Nick chose a thin laser pistol that would be illegal on most stations.
Establish ship-to-ship communications bridge with Intrepid, I directed as I slid into the port-side pilot's chair and looked out the armored glass screen onto the familiar star field.
"Greetings, Liam. How's our girl doing?" Ada asked.
I scanned the status displays. We'd left Hotspur in a warm state and she'd awakened quickly. "We're green. I'm releasing docking lines in five… four… three…" Hotspur shuddered and drifted away from Intrepid. I nudged the arc-jets to give us more separation until I was confident we were well clear.
"We'll see you at the rendezvous in forty hours," Ada said as Intrepid's large engines spooled up and she slid forward.
"Roger that, Ada, stay safe. Hotspur out." I closed comms. As I did, I heard the lift arrive and turned to see a much bulkier looking Ortel.
"You're by me," Nick said, indicating the gunner's station that Marny normally occupied. Ortel nodded, his face flush from exertion and possibly the fact that he had all of our attention.
"Nick, have you pinged Hollise to see if she'll be able to meet?" I asked.
"Message is away," he said. "We'll see what she says."
"Ortel, I understand you're doing fairly well in the gunner's chair. We're going to set out a few targets so you get a feel for Hotspur. You good with that?" I asked.
"Yes, sir," he replied. It wasn't as if I intended to give him a choice.
"Nick, you're on bottom turret. Tabby, you have missiles and rear turret. Ortel, you have the two top turrets," I said.
"Two?" he asked.
"We'll link 'em," Nick said, leaning over to Ortel's workstation and indicating how to change the setting.
"Everything on Hotspur uses energy, so go easy on it. Once the batteries are done, we're either losing speed or firepower. Trust me. In battle, we don't want to lose either," I said, ejecting five blinking targeting dummies along an arced path.
At five hundred kilometers I turned and accelerated hard toward the dummies. I didn't want to spend a lot of time on the exercise, but I wasn't about to have a crew member on board who had never even used the equipment.
"These are all yours, Ortel," I said as I rolled Hotspur lazily away, making the shots more difficult.
"I don't have a shot," he said as he sprayed empty space.
"Don't think so linearly," Tabby said. "You're lined up on the second one perfectly."
Before he could reorient, I flipped the ship and accelerated hard on an oblique angle which only gave him a line on the final target. He caught on and sprayed blaster fire all around the target, catching it after a moment.
"One," he counted under his breath.
I pulled over hard and lined him up for an easy kill and he took it, still over-spraying. But a kill was what we needed. I reversed our direction and pushed back through the target field, giving him different looks at the targets, never making it easy, just possible. By my count, he was about twenty percent accurate. It took several minutes and forty percent of the battery to finish off the rest of the targets.
"Whoo hooo," Ortel exclaimed as he dispatched the final target.
"Not bad for your first live fire," I said. It was hard for me to say, but it was the right thing to do. Tabby gave me raised eyebrows and I didn't need to be a mind reader to wonder what she was thinking.
"I just got a response from Hollise. We're a go," Nick said.
All hands, prepare for hard burn. We'd dropped into Sol space twelve hours from Jeratorn on hard burn. Compared to fold-space, transition to hard burn was a joy. A momentary flip-flop of the stomach as inertial and gravity systems kicked in and then you were done; no color smearing and no jittering star fields.
The trip to Jeratorn was uneventful, as was to be expected in hard-burn.
"Jeratorn, this is Hotspur requesting permission for twenty-four-hour berth," I radioed as soon as we dropped from burn.
"Hotspur, state the nature of your business," a man's voice said.
"Speculative trading interests," I replied.
"Understood. You're clear on Concourse-C, berth fourteen," the man instructed. A twelve-hundred credit charge appeared on my screen requiring approval. It was twice what I'd have expected to pay on Mars.
"Copy that." I accepted the
charge and closed the comm.
As we sailed past the outlying structures on the way to the station, evidence of the conflict we'd engaged in over twelve months before was still evident. Jeratorn had been rebuilding, but was not fully recovered. It was well after 2000, but I was still surprised by just how few ships and sleds were moving about.
"That's huge," Ortel said as we closed on the three towers that made up the station. I'd forgotten he had little experience with space structures.
"Sure is," I said. "Now remember, your job is simple. Don't let anyone aboard. If anyone even gets close raise one of us on the comm. If you have to, pull out from the station. You should only fire on someone if you don't think you'll survive otherwise. Got it?" We'd been over the conversation several times and I was responding mostly to his apparent nervousness.
"Aye, Captain," he replied.
I swung Hotspur around and slid her into our berth backwards.
"Think he's going to be okay?" Tabby asked as we processed through the airlock onto the station's new concourse.
"He's just nervous," I said. "First time he's been left in charge."
"I hope he doesn't do anything stupid," Tabby said. I hoped she hadn’t just jinxed him.
Our destination was the Welded Tongue bar, which wasn't difficult to find. The last time we'd been here, we had a stand-off with a few of the locals, but it had worked to our benefit. I wasn't a bit surprised to hear the noise coming from the open double doors as we approached. The rusty, metal tongue sculpture hanging above the doors was a familiar sight. As we turned the corner to enter, we were stopped by two armed security guards.
"You'll have to check your weapons," the taller of the two said, holding his hand up, almost placing it on Tabby's chest. I winced at the nearly critical mistake.
"We're here to see Beth Anne and we're not checking our weapons," Tabby said.
"Then you're not here to see Beth Anne," the other, beefy looking man, replied.
I stepped forward, getting between Tabby and the guards. "Cool down. We don't need trouble. What my friend here is saying is we'll check our long guns, but we're keeping side-arms. That work for you?"
Give No Quarter (Privateer Tales Book 10) Page 8
