The Terran Privateer

by Glynn Stewart

  Lougheed had taken the command—he’d have been a damn fool not to—but that didn’t mean he liked how he’d got it. That the woman the UESF had tried to exclude was now humanity’s only hope was an irony he hoped those captains were still alive to appreciate.

  “Status report?” he asked.

  “Tornado’s people got the interface drive purring like a kitten,” Mandy Tall, his engineer, reported. “Missile initiators are giving me green signals; everything is showing at hundred percent and green.”

  “All right, people. Let’s see what we find.”

  “Emergence…now,” his navigator reported. The void of hyperspace on their sensors suddenly lit up with the bright blue flare of the hyperportal and his little ship shot through it.

  The G-KCL-79D system was a complete blank on their charts. They knew it was an G3-class yellow dwarf star forty-three light-years from Sol and had had hyperspace trails leading to it on a regular basis starting over fifty years before. They assumed it had a habitable planet, but as Of Course We’re Coming Back’s sensors drank up the light from the system, Andrew Lougheed became one of the first humans to see the star’s planets.

  “Throw everything up on the main screen,” he ordered.

  Like the later XC ships, Of Course had been based on UESF designs. While the much-smaller survey ship’s bridge didn’t have the upper balcony for support staff, it followed the same horseshoe-with-a-wall-at-the-front basic design.

  As the sensors absorbed light and radiation and assembled a picture of the star system, his survey officer—now also in control of the ship’s handful of missiles—Sarah Laurent threw the information on the big screen.

  A single gas giant marked the outer edge of the system, with an utterly massive asteroid belt that put even Sol’s Kuiper Belt to shame splitting it off from the four rocky inner worlds. More data came trickling in and confirmed that the third planet was roughly equivalent to Earth, a blue-and-green marble almost three-quarters water.

  “Almost makes you homesick,” Laurent observed. “Gravity’s a little lower than Earth, average temperature a little higher, lower axial tilt means calmer seasons. Nice world.”

  “I’m guessing somebody else thought so too?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she replied. “Artificial emissions like whoa. Orbitals aren’t nearly as intense as Earth but…damn, that’s a space elevator.”

  Even in the late twenty-second century, a space elevator was still a concept that was occasionally dusted off, compared to modern technology, and regarded as impractical with an atrocious cost-benefit ratio. But…

  “That would make setting up the colony easier if they dropped one down from orbit, wouldn’t it?” he noted.

  “Assuming they can make the cable cheaper than we could,” Laurent pointed out. “Sir, I’m not picking up anything definitively military.”

  “Not surprised,” he told her. “I’m guessing we’re looking at a handful of sublight patrol ships and defensive platforms in orbit, and they’re not exactly going to stick out to this kind of high-level view. Karl—take us in. I want us to swing past the planet at ten million klicks as fast as the interface can carry us.”

  “Can do,” Karl Strobel replied. “Bringing up the drive; we’ll make the pass at point four cee.”

  “Record everything, Sarah,” Lougheed ordered Laurent. “Set up transmission pulses so that Tornado will get everything we’ve got when they emerge.”

  He leaned back in his chair and eyed the planet, the closest confirmed bastion of the Imperium that had conquered his world.

  “Let’s see what our tentacled friends do.”

  #

  Of Course We’re Coming Back was a small ship even by the standards of the pre-Tornado United Earth Space Force, a twenty-two-meter cylinder a hundred and fifteen meters from bow to stern. With only twenty-four crew aboard and no weapons except those bolted to her outer hull, she had spacious working areas and powerful sensors but not much else.

  As originally designed, she’d sacrificed a fifth of her length and a quarter of her volume to fusion rockets and reaction mass for them. With the rockets themselves ripped out and the reaction mass cut by three-quarters, that had left plenty of space to install the interface drive and a few other toys once Lougheed thought of something to put in there.

  Unfortunately, Nova Industries designers had only really established one possible speed for the interface drive that humans could survive. While Of Course was a fraction of Tornado’s size, her speed was the same.

  Lougheed’s major concern was that A!Tol ships were demonstrably faster than his vessel. Playing bait for them was a risk only ameliorated by his ability to probably jump into hyperspace when threatened.

  “Let me know the instant you see anything move,” he told Laurent as they dove toward the planet.

  “Dialed in a few,” she noted. “So far, pretty sure they’re all civvies—the ones that are moving are running away from us at a quarter-light.”

  “Interesting,” he said aloud. “We didn’t see any benefit to building lower-speed drives, but if they’re running at that speed…”

  “They probably can’t go faster,” Laurent agreed. “They’re all smallish, too. Biggest is four hundred meters long, maybe two million tons. Hard to say for an interface drive ship.”

  “Tag that big ship,” Lougheed ordered. “Our job isn’t to chase civilians, but if nothing else in this system looks of value, Bond will probably go after that one.”

  “Marked in the data upload, but I think she might want to look at that.”

  “That” was a ship that had just started moving from orbit. She was big—six hundred meters long, hundred meters around—and moving fast. She went from at rest in orbit to point four cee in seconds, charging in the opposite direction from Of Course.

  “I’d call her a cruiser, but she’s running and we’re tiny,” his science officer told him. “I’m guessing military transport.”

  “Damn.” Andrew watched the transport run. “She’s going to make it into hyper before anything we send Tornado reaches them, but that’s exactly what Bond wanted. Damned odd reaction, though.”

  “Why? It’s the right one—she’s cutting the chance Tornado will grab her by a lot.”

  “Because those are defense boats,” Lougheed replied, tapping on three more moving icons—ships not much bigger than his own survey ship, though almost certainly more heavily armed. “And we’re not tangling with them—get us away from them, Karl; I don’t want to find out they’re faster than us the hard way.”

  He watched the screen shift at Of Course reversed her vector in a matter of seconds, suddenly careening away from the planet as fast she’d been heading toward it. But the military transport kept running.

  “You’re right in that her stunt will probably save her from Tornado,” he continued. “But it wasn’t necessary to save her from us. We’re bird-dogging for a privateer—but how did our tentacled friend know that?”

  Laurent looked back at the screen, where the freighter continued to flee. It would be a few minutes until the ship knew for sure that Of Course was breaking off, but she looked likely to enter hyperspace before that.

  “Because they’ve seen it done before,” she said quietly. “And it wasn’t us.”

  “No. It appears our A-tuck-Tol ‘friends’ already have a pirate problem.”

  Chapter 14

  Annette was almost starting to get used to the strange appearance of a hyperspace portal appearing out of the disturbing gray void of hyperspace, bright blue light flaring into existence from nothingness, then the starry black of the real universe emerging from the center of the portal.

  Then Tornado flashed into the “real world” and the portal collapsed behind them, light and nothingness alike fading away into prosaic stars and blackness.

  “We’re receiving a data dump from Of Course We’re Coming Back,” Yahui Chan reported. “Transferring last update to tactical—timeline is minus three hundred twelve seconds.”
r />   “What have we got?” she asked Rolfson.

  “Of Course aborted their scouting run at a full light-minute as local patrol craft started to pursue them,” Rolfson noted as he skimmed the highlights Lougheed had sent them. “There is one large sublight civilian craft hiding in the asteroid belt—we have enough data to locate her—and what appeared to be a military transport was running for hyperspace.”

  “Military transport?” Annette asked. “When will they make the portal?”

  “Roughly twenty-five seconds ago,” Rolfson replied. “From our tests on the anomaly sensor, we should be able to ping her. We might not be able to catch up, though.”

  “Well, the colony and their sublight ships aren’t going anywhere,” Tornado’s Captain replied with a cold smile. “Amandine—take us back into hyperspace. Rolfson—have the anomaly scanner ready to go.”

  “What about Lougheed?” Kurzman asked over the link from CIC.

  “We’ll want him to jump and head for Rendezvous Point…Charlie, I think,” Annette concluded. “Chan—let him know.”

  “On it.” Charlie was an arbitrary point one point nine light-years away from this system. It was the farthest rendezvous point they’d set up short of Alpha Centauri. If those patrol craft proved to be hyper-capable, even that could be dangerous.

  “Hyperspace reentry in ten seconds,” Amandine reported.

  “Missiles standing by; Major Wellesley reports his people ready to go,” Rolfson said. “Scanner is coming online now.”

  “Hyperspace reentry…now.”

  A new portal flashed into existence and Tornado disappeared into it. The cruiser had been in the G-KCL-79D system for less than two minutes.

  Nothingness enveloped the screens again, a disturbing gray lack of anything resembling regular light or vision. They had visibility of about a light-second. Beyond that, until very recently, Terran starships had been blind.

  “What do we have, Harold?”

  “I’ve got a ping,” he announced. “Giving you a tac-plot.”

  The diagram that appeared on the main screen resembled nothing so much as an old-fashioned radar screen. Tornado sat at the center, with a large mark near her showing where the computers figured the star system was.

  A third dot, roughly a light-month away in real space, showed the other ship. She was moving away from Tornado—fast.

  “What’s her speed looking like?” Annette asked.

  “I’m making it point four cee on the interface, just over two thousand cee in real space,” Rolfson reported.

  “Amandine—can we catch her?” she demanded.

  “Depends on her course,” the navigator replied. “Taking us after her; let’s see how the angles play out.”

  Tornado leapt through the nothingness toward an anomaly their eyes couldn’t process.

  “Can she see us?” Rolfson asked Kurzman over the link to CIC.

  “Depends if she has something like the anomaly scanner,” he replied. “I wouldn’t bet against it.”

  “If she’s as fast as we are and can see us coming, I’m not sure we’ll catch her,” Annette said aloud. “But we can use the practice. Give it your best shot, Cole. Rolfson—think we can land a hit from here?”

  “Maybe, but we can’t talk to her, so I don’t know what good it would do. Probably bounce right off her shields, too.”

  Annette nodded. She’d reached much the same conclusion herself, but she wanted that ship. It was exactly what she was after…

  “Ma’am, we have another ping!” Rolfson noted. “Behind us, other side of G-KCL. Looks like point four five cee, twenty-two fifty cee in real space.”

  A new dot appeared on the scanner, marked with a flashing red to designate an unknown contact.

  “That’s warship speed, I’m guessing,” the Captain said quietly. “Any idea of her course?”

  “Intercept, ma’am,” Rolfson replied. “She’s coming in hard and fast and she’s aiming to cut us off.”

  “Project her vector for me,” Annette ordered.

  “On the plot,” her tactical officer confirmed. “Remember he can change at any time, though…”

  “I wrote our book on interface-drive tactics, Rolfson,” she reminded him. “And we’re going to need it. Forget the transport—we can’t catch her, and this bastard is going to catch us unless we do something tricky.”

  She studied the plot and what little data they could see of the pursuing ship.

  “Do we know anything about our friend?” she asked.

  “Only that she can pull point four five cee,” Rolfson admitted. “All the anomaly scanner tells us is where she is.”

  “Let’s see what she’s thinking,” Annette said. “Amandine, let’s pull a ninety-degree shift—away from Point Charlie. I don’t want our friend looking for Of Course.”

  “Adjusting,” the navigator responded.

  “Let’s see what our friend does,” the Captain said slowly. If they were after Tornado—and she was reasonably sure they were, they would change course about…now.

  “There he goes,” Rolfson announced. “Wait—I have a new anomaly. Closing at point seven cee!”

  “Just one?” Annette snapped. “Could we be seeing multiples together?”

  Seventy percent of lightspeed had to be a missile, but the A!Tol would know one missile was no danger to Tornado.

  “Just one,” her tactical officer confirmed. “Probability is over ninety percent. That’s…weird.”

  “And the bird’s too slow,” Kurzman interrupted. “A-tuck-Tol missiles were moving at point seven five back in Sol. Something’s not adding up.”

  “Stand by the lasers; see if you can dial the missile in for a clear shot.”

  “We’ve only got a light-second or so before the laser disappears with the rest of the EM radiation,” Rolfson admitted. “I don’t think we can hit in that time.”

  “Then we’ll take it on the armor,” Annette said grimly. She had a suspicion about that missile—just one, and clearly an inferior weapon to the A!Tol navy’s missiles? If she was wrong, however, Tornado’s armor could demonstrably take the hit.

  The missile blasted into the tiny bubble around Tornado where her regular sensors could see things, screamed in to barely ten kilometers away, and promptly ripped itself apart as its interface drive self-destructed, destroying the missile in a sharp blast of light.

  “What was the purpose of that?” Rolfson asked.

  “Amandine, cut us to zero velocity,” Annette snapped. “Keep us in hyperspace. Rolfson—charge the laser capacitors and make sure all launchers are loaded.”

  “Ma’am?” the tactical officer asked—Amandine was too busy bringing the ship to something approaching a halt relative to the system they’d left behind.

  “That was a warning shot,” she told them. “That’s not an A-tuck-Tol ship, people. That’s a pirate who was after the same prey we were—prey that we closely match the size and speed profile for. So, we’re going to haul over like a terrified transport, let them close until we can see them…

  “Then we’re going to take down their shields with missiles and shoot to disable with lasers. Right now, we need an intact ship to study. If our friend over there wants to play pirate, I’m perfectly willing to call him competition and gut his ship for parts.”

  #

  The bogey’s reaction lined up disturbingly perfectly with Annette’s predictions. As soon as Tornado slowed to a stop, the strange ship made a beeline straight for her. With the variable compression of hyperspace, the apparent pirate crossed something like a light-year of real space to reach the Terran ship, and even the light-second or so that both ships’ sensors could actually see at represented several light-days.

  “Stand by,” Annette said quietly as the dot drifted closer and closer to that line. “Be very careful, Rolfson,” she warned the bearded tactical officer. “I want to live through this—but I also want that ship intact enough to board.”

  Harold Rolfson confirmed her general op
inion of his intelligence by ignoring her unnecessary last-minute reminders and focusing on his sensors, trying to get a clear image of their target a few fractions of a second before their target saw them. To disable the ship, he needed to know where her reactors were—and they had no idea what the other ship even looked like.

  His captain had the same data on the screens of her own chair, and the main viewscreen was showing the zoomed-in section of the void where they expected the ship to appear. Once the two ships were within visual range of each other, the fight would likely be over in moments.

  The entire bridge seemed to be holding their breaths—and then the enemy was there.

  One moment it was simply a darker patch of void, and the next the pirate was emerging from the gray nothingness into the fuzzily delineated zone where electromagnetic radiation could still travel inside hyperspace. It was an odd-looking ship to eyes used to the squashed cigars of United Earth Space Force ships, different again from the smooth lines of the A!Tol warships that had attacked Sol.

  It looked like a horseshoe made of boxes, two long rectangular chunks of hull meeting a third block at the back. Nothing about it was elegant or smooth, a rough assembly of components and dirty hull, protected by an energy screen from any threat.

  “Firing,” Rolfson announced. Bright streaks flashed across the empty space, interface drives missiles crossing the gap faster than the mind could process. Light flashed across the force field, rippling patterns of energy marking the futile attempts of the defense to stay together.

  Twenty-four missiles hammered into the screen—none of them on a course that would hit the actual ship, but all on courses that would miss it by half a kilometer or less. The force field bubble lit up all around the pirate—and then collapsed.

  The lasers that followed were truly invisible to the human eye, high-powered ultraviolet beams as powerful as those mounted on the Terran battleships. Four beams pinned the ship in perfect synchronicity, punching holes through her hull and punching out every fusion reactor Rolfson had detected.