Pirate Stars

by Andrew van Aardvark

  "Sir!" the sensor watch reported with sudden excitement. "The merchant is outgassing."

  "Debris? Quantity? Is it a hull breach?" the Commodore demanded.

  "No serious debris. Quantity's consistent with several large compartments," the sensor watch answered. "Looks like they deliberately vented several large compartments, sir."

  "I see," the Commodore said.

  So did Torsen it suggested a failed but serious escape attempt, one that had been answered with cold blooded ruthlessness. With the venting of the compartments the rebellious captives had taken to be precise. Torson wondered just how many of the merchant's crew they'd eventually be able to rescue. Any? Maybe not.

  The bridge was quiet. Torson and the Commodore weren't the only ones who could do the grim calculation. Maybe at least it would distract the pirates. On the other hand if it delayed them significantly the event horizon from the Casablanca and Daisy's entry to the system might reach them well short of their base. That would not be a good thing.

  Only time would tell. Not a long time in the greater scheme of things, less than an hour, but every minute dragged as they waited and watched.

  The two ships they'd followed so far were displayed on the main screen. Overlaid numbers and graphics indicated their course and most of what else their passive sensors could glean. They all saw what the sensor officer announced.

  "Sir, the merchant prize is closing on the pirate," the sensor officer said. "Too close to be safe. She's changing orientation on maneuver jets. She's coming stern to the pirate."

  They could all see it. Collisions in space not in the immediate vicinity of some docking location were unheard of, but Torson imagined he wasn't the only one half expecting to see one.

  "She's firing her main reaction engines," the sensor officer said. He choked down a strangled exclamation and continued in a determined tone, "The pirate is in the engine plume." Just seconds later he reported what they could all see. "The pirate has broken in two."

  Mutters and low excited expressions of happy excited glee broke out. They'd all had plenty of opportunity to see what pirates could do. They all hated them.

  "Enough," the Commodore snapped. "Let's act like professionals. Eyes on your boards."

  Seconds later, not more than a couple of minutes, the sensor officer reported again. "Sir, we have three, no, four, ships exiting the atmosphere of the large moon," he said.

  Torson did the calculations. It was borderline but if the apparently no longer pirate controlled merchant had roughly the same acceleration as the pirates she was far enough away from them that she could likely make it to jump.

  No guarantees, but she was outside the range of powered missiles let alone beams or guns. If whoever was on the bridge of the merchantman knew what they were doing they ought to be able to escape. They'd have a better chance if the Commodore ordered the Casablanca's attack wing to assist them. Would he?

  "Sir, should we go to their assistance?" Torson asked the Commodore.

  "Not yet," the Commodore replied. "Our ship's systems have been compromised remember? If they don't accelerate our way we can't help them, and if they can they shouldn't need any help to escape. On the other hand four pirate ship's might be a handful for just the Casablanca and the Daisy if they manage to close. Besides you think they had all their ships ready to go on a moment's notice?"

  Torson thought about it for a few seconds. The Commodore was good. It was obvious now that he'd pointed it out, and Torson had no doubt he'd have seen it on his own in time if he'd been working it out as a tactical exercise on paper. In a real situation in just seconds, maybe not, the Commodore was good.

  "No, sir," Torson responded. "If they're keeping some ships on constant readiness they must have two to three times as many available so the crews can rest and for the ships to be maintained."

  "Exactly," the Commodore said. "Four ships using the attack wing so we could stand off would be touch and go, but weighed in our favor. Eight ships or a dozen and we could have a real problem."

  "I see, sir," Torson said.

  "You were right," the Commodore said. "We should have kept the task force together, but don't tell me you're not surprised by how many ships this set of marauders has."

  The Commodore had a good point. Torson had known he shouldn't make any assumptions about this sixth band of pirates, but the next largest one previously had had only a half dozen ships. The remaining pirate bands had consisted of just two or three ships. "I would have guessed at a half dozen ships at most and expected fewer," Torson confessed.

  "But you didn't did you?" the Commodore replied. "No you deduced the existence of this lot and the fact they were different from the other bands in ways we didn't have a good fix on. That was very good work Sven."

  "Thank you, sir."

  "Don't imagine you'd like to speculate on just how many ships they have, how good they are, or what their base is like would you?"

  "No, sir. Like you said likely they can give us a hard fight and maybe worse. More than that is impossible to say. I'd guess their base is large and well hidden. No idea how tough its defenses might be."

  "Thank you," the Commodore said to Torson. "Captain, put the Casablanca in deep stealth mode. Lieutenant Torson, send orders to the Daisy to do the same."

  "Yes, sir. Daisy to assume deep stealth mode."

  Torson busied himself keying in the message and seeing it got to the Daisy and only the Daisy. A few minutes later the acknowledgment came. "Sir, Daisy has acknowledged its orders to assume deep stealth mode," he said.

  "Thank you," the Commodore replied in a distracted manner. "Sensor watch has the merchantman maneuvered at all since the burn that destroyed the pirate?"

  "No, sir, it has not" the sensor officer replied.

  The Commodore looked at Torson.

  "If the merchantman was fully controlled by competent friendlies they'd have started to burn this way by now," Torson answered the implied question. Doubtless the Commodore had reached the same conclusion but wanted verification.

  A nod from the Commodore seemed to confirm that. A few more minutes passed.

  "Sir, the merchantman has begun to maneuver," the sensor officer reported. They all saw it, but the words of the sensor officer confirmed it. "She's turning towards the large moon." A short pause. "The merchantman has resumed course towards the presumed pirate base on the largest moon." A sigh went around the bridge.

  Another gloomy half hour passed during which they watched the merchantman and her new escorts disappear into the large moon's sensor defeating atmosphere. One pirate ship searched the area of the original pirate's destruction. Apparently looking for survivors.

  "Well at least they don't seem to have noticed us," the Commodore said trying to put a positive spin on a depressing situation. "We shall return later with the full task force. Captain, lay in a course to jump back the way we came. Lieutenant Torson send orders to the Daisy to accompany us."

  "Yes, sir," Torson replied quietly. The Commodore's orders to retreat made sense, but Torson was glad he hadn't had to give them. He just hoped the pirates didn't manage to escape in the breathing room they'd gained.

  7: Situation Developing

  The things of this world

  Exist, they are:

  You can't refuse them

  Jeannie had a ghastly headache. Everything else ached too, but her head most of all.

  What had happened? She'd almost made it. Almost counted in horseshoes and hand grenades. Almost didn't count. She'd failed.

  She felt the depressed listlessness she'd only been faking before. She just wanted to curl up and go back to sleep. Forever would be fine.

  Some spark of self reflection in a deep twisted corner of her mind was amused at this. Faintly, mostly to the extent she could feel anything beyond bone aching despair it was anger. Deep disgusted anger. Anger at herself.

  She had come close. She was almost as good as she'd thought she was, and she'd been lucky, and the pirates unlucky and not
at the top of their game. McKittrick had sacrificed his life for her.

  Just the same she'd managed to fail because of a sloppiness born of arrogance.

  Some sort of back up plan in case the bridge fell was an obvious precaution for the Pirate Chief to have made. Using gas had been an obvious means.

  She'd failed to check for the trap. She'd unnecessarily removed the gas mask she was wearing for the sake of mere convenience, and then she'd had the stupid sloppiness to place it out of easy reach. It'd been dumb, careless, and arrogant and it'd cost her everything.

  She realized someone was stroking her fevered brow with a cool cloth.

  She opened her eyes out of some vague curiosity to see Sheena Matheson leaning over her. Her mouth twitched in the best possible attempt at a smile she could currently manage.

  "Sheena?" she said.

  "Yes, it's me," her friend replied.

  "Where am I? What time is it?" Jeannie asked.

  "We're on a hidden pirate base. It's huge. A small city in size with hidden docks for a small fleet of ships," Sheena replied. "You've been under for over a day."

  Jeannie struggled up onto her elbows to look around. She was in the middle of a large and undeniably comfortable bed. The bed, her and Sheena were in a rather large and pleasantly appointed room. The walls looked like they were carved out of raw rock, but the gravity was just a little shy of full Earth standard. A small planet or large moon than.

  "What happened?" she asked.

  "You killed a lot of pirates and they almost returned the favor to give the short version," Sheena replied.

  "I was just trying to escape," Jeannie said. "Still surprised they didn't finish me. Pirate Chief must have been livid."

  "Strangely enough," Sheena said, "he's the only thing kept you alive. Not happy about his losses, but seemed philosophical about it. He's a very odd man."

  "Okay. He's the only thing that kept me alive?"

  "For some reason most of the other pirates were very angry," Sheena answered. "They have this idea that you're an exceedingly dangerous menace. Can't imagine why."

  "There was no way I could escape using less than maximum violence," Jeannie said. "No way for me to take prisoners. They're hardly qualified to point fingers." She coughed. Her throat was sore and dry. Her little speech had aggravated it.

  "Here take a sip of this," Sheena said handing her a glass of some sort of pink juice. Lemonade it turned out. "Slowly," she added as Jeannie drank. Jeannie had needed it.

  "Thanks," Jeannie said. "So the other pirates were very angry and I'm guessing wanted to eliminate the menace that's me. Yes?" The thought that she scared the pirates gave her some warm satisfaction. She didn't imagine that said anything good about her character but she'd take her pleasures where she could find them just now.

  "They did," Sheena said. "Only difference of opinion was about how much torture to apply in doing so. The really angry ones wanted to make it as slow and painful as possible. The more pragmatic or scared ones just wanted you dead as soon as could be managed. One took a pot shot at you on the docks."

  "Ouch," Jeannie said. "How is it I'm still here?"

  "It was a big angry crowd and someone must have jostled him," Sheena said. "The Pirate Chief shot him down before he could take a second shot."

  "That calmed them down?" Jeannie asked.

  "Made them pay attention."

  "And?"

  "And the Pirate Chief pointed out fewer surviving pirates meant they were all getting bigger shares of the loot of which you were a valuable part."

  "They bought that?"

  "He also offered to give up his share in all the rest of the loot and just take you. They bought that."

  "Oh," Jeannie said. She wanted to ask Sheena if the pirates knew the Chang's had a policy not to pay ransom, and if so why they thought her father would make an exception for Jeannie. Given the likelihood they were being monitored it was best not to. "Rather flattering."

  "He also gave a long song and dance on the measures he'd be taking to make sure you wouldn't be able to make a similar attempt to escape in the future."

  "You'd think they be done underestimating me."

  "I don't think they're underestimating you," Sheena said. "He was very convincing. He's taken extreme precautions against your getting away. Limited ways in and out of here, all of them and all the ships you could use under heavy guard."

  "That all?" Jeannie said with an attempt at a joking tone.

  "No," Sheena replied. "For one I think you can assume they're going to be watching you very closely." She rolled her eyes in various directions and pointed with her fingers and thumbs which were positioned to be hidden from most places in the room.

  Jeannie assumed the non-verbal gestures indicated listening devices in the room and probably cameras too. Awkward as it was that made sense.

  "Okay," she said. "To sum up, we're on a huge pirate base that we don't know the layout of, our way out of our quarters is heavily guarded, any ships we might use to escape are heavily guarded, and, anyways, the base between us and them is full of angry pirates who'd like nothing better than to kill me."

  "Correct," Sheena said winking.

  So she had Sheena and this Pirate Chief, strangely but conveniently willing to cut her some slack, she still had no idea how she could hope to escape, but she was convinced opportunities would arise if she kept an eye open for them.

  "So you don't think we've the slightest chance of escaping then," Jeannie said.

  "That's right," Sheena said winking again.

  * * *

  Torson had been cornered by a gang of feral peers in a dark alley once, as just a kid barely into his teens, he'd thought he was a goner. He'd thought he was going to be painfully beaten to death and left to die amongst the garbage, turds and piss there. He'd felt a deep dark despair then.

  Two jumps back from system SC 10206, the pirate base system, he was feeling much the same again. Still here he was decades later, alive and doing alright for himself, so maybe it'd work out okay once more.

  It didn't look good and the Commodore had put the ball squarely in his court. Torson was in his tiny cabin his study nook pulled out, but he could still hear the orders the Commodore had issued him in the privacy of the Captain's day cabin.

  "Captain Doria's traps have failed. We both know the safe thing to do here," the Commodore had said, "would be to pull the entire Task Force back to Huygen's Station and call in outside investigators to find our mole."

  "Yes, sir," Torson had responded certain the Commodore wasn't looking for input yet, and equally certain he wanted to know that Torson was following his logic closely.

  "We both know that would kill both of our careers and likely allow this last pirate band to escape rendering our victories so far moot," the Commodore had gone on. "Even if Arain did convince SDFHQ to keep the Task Force together, maybe even reinforce it, the pirates would be long gone by the time we returned."

  "That'd be my assessment, sir," Torson had agreed.

  "So you, Lieutenant, are going to come up with some better plans," the Commodore had said. "You will figure out how to find or neutralize our mole, and you will make a plan to return in sufficient force to destroy that pirate base before they can bug out on us. Understood?"

  "Yes, sir," Torson had replied. How else does a lieutenant reply to orders from a commodore?

  Just the same as of yet he had no real idea of how he was going to carry out those orders.

  Okay, so the presence of a mole who'd compromised their internal systems was the main limiting factor on all the rest of their plans. They had to find the mole. Torson would recommend a return to attack against the pirate base if he had to with just measures in place to mitigate the presence of a traitor, but it would be a dangerous Hail Mary pass. Best to find the mole first.

  Given the security clearances and permissions necessary to have inserted the traitorous message to the pirates in the Casablanca's communications queue there were only a limited
number of possible candidates.

  The Commodore himself had the highest permissions. He had to rule him out. Torson also had had sufficient permissions, but he could rule himself out, and since he'd spotted the problem the Commodore would accept that.

  That left five other people. The Commodore's Chief of Staff, his intelligence chief, and the three communication watchkeepers.

  Of the three watchkeepers Torson believed they could discount Lieutenant Olsen. He could have kept the information about the antenna orientation off of his boards and Torson would have never seen it. The surprise he'd shown when Torson had noticed struck Torson as being genuine.

  The other four he had various feelings about but no solid logical argument for striking any of them off of his list. He needed a plan for figuring out which of them it was. Some variation on the old trick of giving them each a different piece of important information and then the chance to leak it seemed best.

  They could use the Commodore's higher permissions to hide the fact the mole's back channels were compromised. If none of the watch that had been on the bridge blabbed it ought to work.

  Ideally having caught the mole they could use them to pass on disinformation to the pirates to aid in the second part of the plan. The part where they took out the pirate base before the pirates fled and without getting a bloody nose for their troubles.

  As the Commodore had said ideally they'd assemble the entire Task Force and then jump into the system all together. As he had hinted they'd likely have to settle for moving on the pirate base in separate groups and assembling there. Close enough to the same time that the pirates couldn't defeat them in detail.

  It was the outline of a plan.

  Details and execution needed to be worked out, but it was a plan.

  * * *

  Jeannie was feeling extraordinarily happy. Unnaturally so.

  It had to be drugs although for the life of her she couldn't figure out how the Pirate Chief and his scary pet doctor had managed to administer them.