Pirate Stars

by Andrew van Aardvark

  "You think they'll surrender Captain?" the First Officer asked.

  "No," the Pirate Chief replied. "Seems the owner's on board. Young, proud and headstrong by all reports. Doubt she'll let the crew strike."

  "Too bad," the First Officer said. The pleasant anticipation of a rich prize was making him less cautious than usual.

  "It's better not to be too greedy," the Pirate Chief said. "It's why we're going to try and take the engine room before even asking."

  "That's a pretty trick disabling the engines without damaging them, sir," the First Officer said.

  "It will be if we manage it, and it's looking good so far," the Pirate Chief said. "Fertile imagination combined with careful planning. Rather pleased with myself must admit."

  "Sir," the Communications Officer spoke. "The assault shuttles are in place. Commencing communications blackout."

  Their prey was approaching the ring's edge now, close in with its sensors still active this was the time it was most likely to detect them. A small outgassing, a stray reflection off of a shiny surface or of a comms laser beam and they'd be betrayed.

  Once again the tension on the bridge increased.

  Some tens of minutes passed.

  "Sir, she seems to be penetrating the ring in the direction of the target zone at minimal velocity," the Sensor Officer reported.

  More minutes. "Have detected target breaking jets. They have come to a halt."

  Finally just a few more minutes. "Target active sensors have gone quiet," the Sensor Officer reported.

  The bridge watch knew better than to break out into cheers. They settled for exchanging wide grins, light back slaps, and shoulder punches.

  The assault shuttles were under communications blackout and they'd wait at least an hour to give the target's crew time to relax, but soon enough they'd start a stealthy stalk of the prey and none of the pirates had much doubt it would succeed.

  Their prey might struggle and kick, but it wouldn't escape.

  It was good to be a pirate chief, the Pirate Chief thought.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Torson sat at a console in the Casablanca's Flag Combat Command Room.

  He tried to look busy while watching what was happening in the room. The place was not the Casablanca's nerve center. The escort carrier had its own bridge and its own CCR too. It was the nerve center for Task Force 39, the flotilla that the Casablanca was the flagship for. It was the place the search for a sixth pirate band was being run out of.

  Three days out of Huygen's Station and everybody had recovered from their hangovers, but there was still a notable lack of enthusiasm and good cheer on the part of the commodore's staff manning the command room. Not that that they weren't going about their tasks with practiced professionalism.

  That staff and Commodore Zanjani himself had not put up any real opposition to accepting Torson's recommendation that they extend their anti-pirate campaign to include a search for a sixth rumored pirate band. They knew he represented Admiral Arain and that any such decision would be career limiting. Didn't mean they were happy about it.

  Didn't mean they actually believed they'd find any more pirates and were ready for them either.

  CVE Casablanca was currently alone with a single corvette, the Daisy, as an escort. They were searching a bleak little system with an M3 primary and no name just a jump out of the Spice system where Pedlar's Haven was located.

  Informants had suggested the Chang clan was making preparations for an expedition across the frontier. If the SDF had heard about it was likely any remaining pirates had too.

  It made the systems near the Chang clan's station in Spice slightly more interesting than other poor infrequently visited systems.

  The commodore might be just going through the motions but he was trying to do it intelligently. At the very least when he wrote up his report on the campaign he wanted it to sound good.

  Torson was convinced there were in fact pirates they'd not yet found out there. His fervent wish was that he would be able to keep Task Force 39 together and looking until some better, more concrete, evidence of that fact surfaced.

  He'd recommended that Commodore Zanjani keep his entire task force concentrated partly because of that. The task force had three destroyers, a dozen patrol craft and a marine assault transport in addition to the Casablanca and Daisy. Standard SDF doctrine was they should remain together as a battle group, the carrier providing most of the in system search and strike capability, the corvette and destroyers to escort and protect her, and the patrol craft to provide an FTL capable reconnaissance force.

  The commodore had decided to show initiative and innovate by splitting the force up into four sub-groups, one formed around the Casablanca and each of the others around one of the destroyers. It would allow them to complete their search for the pirates in one quarter of the time it would take otherwise.

  It also at least theoretically meant that a individual search group might be overwhelmed by any pirates it encountered.

  In the privacy of his own mind Torson had to admit this was unlikely.

  The SDF had never in its two centuries of existence fought another naval power. SDF doctrine was derived solely from the historical experience of surface navies and air forces on Earth prior to the discovery of FTL, plus a large number of computer simulations. These might be the best foundation available for its doctrine but just the same they didn't inspire a lot of confidence.

  Pirate ships were usually converted civilian freighters. Very rarely they might be purpose built in the sense of being cobbled together from civilian grade components. In neither case did any single pirate ship compare to a single purpose built military ship of the SDF.

  They weren't as well armed, didn't have sensors as good, and they weren't as robust. Most of all they didn't have the acceleration of a purely military SDF ship. Even if a single SDF ship met pirates in such numbers that they outgunned the SDF ship, that ship could still choose not to engage at the unfavorable odds.

  The SDF might take losses, its ships damage, in hunting down and destroying pirates, but it was the SDF that hunted pirates not vice versa.

  The SDF had never met a foe that was its equal. It'd never lost a ship larger than a patrol craft in battle.

  Commodore Zanjani and his staff had ample reason to be skeptical of standard SDF doctrine.

  Torson's intuition that the sixth pirate band he felt must exist would prove to be a different kettle of fish than your usual bog standard issue pirate was not much of a match for such solid conventional logic. Torson as Admiral Arain's representative could attempt to override the Commodore's decision but his excuse for doing so was just too flimsy. Such an action would almost certainly end his career. It wasn't worth it.

  And so the task force was divided up piecemeal, connected by regular courier runs on the part of its plentiful patrol craft.

  If nothing else a lot of extra information was being gathered on many poorly surveyed systems on the sector's frontier. In point of fact the task force was gathering data faster than it could easily digest it.

  Which was what Torson was supposed to be doing currently rather than woolgathering about questions of strategy ostensibly above his pay grade.

  The most likely scenario for a successful detection of pirates was that they'd be found in the data gathered during a group's first couple hours after jumping into a system. It took that long for the fact the group had jumped into an average system to propagate throughout that system. The event horizon for any pirate movements or other unshielded activities would cross the event horizon for news of the SDF arrival sometime in that period.

  This didn't mean that the datum indicating pirate activity would necessarily be recognized in that period. No their sensors would be drinking in much more data than could be processed except for the most obvious of signals.

  Torson was supposed to be going over data looking for signals that might have been overlooked, because of faintness, or because of being lost against backgr
ound noise, or because in some other way they were too subtle. "Use your imagination, Lieutenant," the task force's chief of staff had said.

  It turned out that no amount of imagination could make the necessary data crunching anything but mind numbingly boring.

  Torson had it down to a simple system, or set of systems really, and that helped some. Currently he was working through observations of the large number of possible jump points. Most traffic in most systems only used a small fraction of the possible jump points. Trade usually only went via a few close systems and for each such system there was one, or maybe two depending on where you started, jump points that made the most sense economically and safety wise.

  Under normal circumstances most of the large number of possible jump points went unused and were of no interest. Except when ships were deliberately following a route not normally used exactly because they wished to remain undetected. In that case you had to consider the much larger set of all possible jump points. It became mind numbing, particularly because the data for each possible point had to be checked at a regular interval for a couple of hours.

  In bound ships popped right out of the data, you just had to look at it. Theoretically in bound jump emergences didn't have to admit a large amount of energy across a wide spectrum but in practice they did.

  Out bound ships required greater effort. They could sometimes be detected by infared or visible light particularly if they used their reaction engines or maneuvering jets during their jump run, but usually you had to inspect the background stars near the jump point for either occlusion or red-shifting. A time consuming and finicky operation.

  Torson couldn't help but think it was exactly the sort of task suited to automation. He knew better than to even hint at the idea.

  Torson hadn't had the benefit of a good middle class let alone an elite education or the idea would never even have occurred to him. If he'd shown any sign of such thinking during a proper education either his misguided tendencies would have been eradicated, or he'd have ended up in a dead end job and on a watch list for the rest of his life.

  The Federation, and the SDF specifically, had been formed in the shadow of the disasters of the mid 21st century. The AI scares and catastrophic infrastructure failures of that period had led to a strong determination to never repeat the technological mistakes of the late 20th and 21st centuries ever again.

  They'd embedded that determination in strong laws against anything but the simplest, most transparent, and unchangeable automation. Those laws had serious teeth, and they were anything but dead letters even after a couple of centuries.

  A public with an extreme fear of autonomous technology fed and stoked by an unremitting diet of horror shows featuring evil mad scientists helped ensure that. Strong technical guilds determined to preserve their power and their members jobs by prescribing carefully detailed work rules backed up the general distrust with the force of specific private interest.

  Anyone suspected of contemplating or promoting the use of electronic automation would be lucky to get a fair trail and a long sentence. More likely than not the Department of Technological Repression would take them into custody and house them in one of the department's long term care facilities for the mentally deviant for the rest of their existence.

  No Torson wasn't going to complain that his work was boring and easily automated.

  As it happened he got lucky.

  It was only a few hours later that he was examining the spectrum of a background star to a jump point and found it red shifted from the one on record. A ship had jumped out of the system not too long after the Casablanca had arrived.

  "Ma'am, I've found an exit jump to system SC 10184," Torson reported to the Flag Chief of Staff. "Forty minutes after we entered the system. At 1537, over seven hours ago now."

  "Hit the jackpot did you Lieutenant?" Lieutenant-Commander Eva Agner, the Chief of Staff, asked. "Found a pirate ship?"

  "Yes, ma'am, and no, ma'am," Torson said. "All I can tell from the data was that the ship was the size of a medium to large freighter. Could just be one of those trading clan expeditions we heard rumors of."

  "Still illegal," Agner replied. "Good work Lieutenant. I'll pass this on directly to the Commodore. I expect he's going to want to follow up on it."

  "Yes, ma'am. Thank you." Torson said. It was excellent news. He couldn't help thinking that it might be the breadcrumb that would lead to the sixth group of pirates.

  * * *

  The Chang's Venture still had gravity.

  So Jeannie could call the bulkhead she was clinging to the ceiling. Or the "deckhead" if she was acting the spacer rather than the groundhugger today.

  She was trying to act the demon-like ninja, a one woman army, but as far as she knew ninja's didn't have a special vocabulary for the parts of a spaceship.

  The recessed handholds she was using to hold herself flattened "above" the rest of the corridor were not rare, they were standard any any spacecraft not designed and built by groundhuggers for other groundhuggers. What was rare was a woman with the strength to lift her whole weight using them.

  Most women's, hell most men's, problem at this point would have been not just lifting their own weight but holding it up for an indefinite period. Not Jeannie's.

  Jeannie was the rare person who could not only lift her weight by her fingertips but hold on by them carrying that weight indefinitely. Some combination of genetics and training. As a girl, before the whole weight of her responsibilities to the clan had become evident, she'd dreamed of free climbing a dozen different sheer rock faces on as many planets.

  She wasn't living that dream right now. She was waiting in ambush.

  She was discovering she didn't have much patience for quiet waiting.

  Unfortunately she didn't have any weapons. She was going to have to take some from the pirates who'd invaded her ship. That meant waiting.

  Waiting quietly in a direction they might not think to look in when they came around a corner in the corridor.

  She really wished she had Sheena with her, although the big woman would have been hard to hide.

  Sheena had fallen defending her early on during the pirate's assault on the ship.

  They'd slipped the Chang's Venture in among the rocks and ice of a gas giant's ring without incident. Jeannie had been on the bridge the whole while. They'd shut the whole ship down and been sitting quietly in stealth mode. They were expecting any pursuers to be at least a couple of hours behind them. The Captain had sent most of the crew for a break.

  She'd suggested Jeannie and Sheena should take one too. It had seemed like a sensible idea.

  They'd been just outside the door to Jeannie's cabin, returning there after a quick sparring session, when something like the hand of God had slapped the ship hard.

  Sheena, an ex-marine, had said, "Boarding charges. To the aft, engineering I'd guess."

  Jeannie didn't know how that could be, but she didn't doubt Sheena or her expertise. They'd rushed the remaining short distance to Jeannie's cabin where they'd both left their weapons. No need to carry them on the ship light years from anyone other than trusted crew members.

  They'd found the door to the cabin locked. Unresponsive to Jeannie's commands. Proof against Sheena's more robust physical efforts to force their way in.

  That was where the pirates had found them.

  Sheena had stepped in front of Jeannie and pushing her away hard hissed, "Run. Hide. Ambush."

  The pirates laughed as Sheena charged them.

  They mustn't have realized Sheena's apparently normal shipsuit doubled as light armor impervious to the dartlets they were using.

  Jeannie hadn't realized at the time either it was only skulking about later trying to evade the searching pirate parties that she determined they were working in threes, two with probably non-lethal dart guns and a backup man with a plasma gun that would definitely kill anyone it was used on light armor or no.

  In any event the pirate's laughter had died in s
urprised grunts and the sounds of fighting. That was the last the fleeing Jeannie had heard. That was the last Jeannie had seen of Sheena or that particular set of pirates.

  Long haul expedition class freighters were big. Still Jeannie didn't think there was anywhere on the Chang's Venture she could hope to hide indefinitely. However poor the odds she had to counterattack. She needed weapons.

  She'd decided to wait somewhere for the pirates, she hoped just a small team, to come to her.

  The environment controlled cargo holds had been one option. She'd chosen instead the unused passenger section. They'd had no passengers on the trip out, they'd thought they might have some for the the trip back. Unlike the cargo holds the ship's security system didn't have comprehensive means of surveillance in the passenger section. Passengers liked their privacy.

  And so it had come that she was at the corner of a pair of corridors in the passenger section clinging to the ceiling. Waiting for a team of armed pirates to come by so she could attack them and take their weapons from them.

  It wasn't hard to hear them coming when they finally arrived. Not only were the sounds of their movement easy to hear, they were communicating by voice. Not by silent hand signals or even over the tactical radios built into their helmets.

  They weren't making any effort to sneak up on her like a foe, they were trying to herd her like prey. She'd make them regret that insult.

  It was a three man team like the others she'd seen. She swung down from her perch taking one of the lead pair in the face with both her heels.

  As they went down she clawed the face of the other man in the lead pair with one hand while reaching for the plasma gun of the third man with her other hand. They'd been conveniently bunched up.

  The third man held onto his plasma gun though she did manage to pull him off his feet. The second man screaming dropped his dart weapon instead using his hands to cup his destroyed face. She grabbed the loose weapon and fired full automatic into the third man's face.