The Terran Privateer

by Glynn Stewart

  “Twenty-two seconds from that laser would drill a hole a kilometer or two deep into a planet,” Rolfson said dryly. “I can live with that being the weakness.”

  “It would take less time, of course, versus an Imperial ship of the line’s proton beams,” the big alien replied. “Even feeding the extra power through it, realize this shield is not equivalent to an Imperial cruiser’s defense.”

  “I know,” Annette said quietly. “We hit the same spot with over sixty missiles to break an Imperial ship’s shields. Even double the Fang’s survivability is a pale shadow of that.”

  She smiled coldly. “However, speaking of proton beams, I believe Captain Sade has delivered us an asteroid?”

  Like for the weapons test back at BugWorks, they’d brought up an asteroid roughly the same mass and composition as one of the old UESF battleships. It was smaller and lighter than Tornado itself, but it gave them a solid baseline for what the weapons could achieve.

  “Lining the ship up and charging the beams,” Rolfson reported. “We have the target in our sights.”

  “Fire,” Annette ordered.

  Like the lasers they’d replaced, the proton beams were invisible. The asteroid simply…disintegrated. The beams ripped through the full half-kilometer length of the nickel-iron rock in less than a second, forcing Rolfson to hastily cut the beam off.

  “Damn,” someone murmured and Annette very specifically did not look to see who said it.

  “Rolfson?” she asked.

  “The good news is that’ll punch through shields in seconds,” he replied very slowly. “The bad news is that they’re lightspeed and so useless past four, five hundred thousand kilometers most of the time.

  “The really bad news is that the proton beams would do a number on even our armor,” Rolfson concluded, “and Ki!Tana says these are popguns compared to the Navy’s beams.”

  Chapter 20

  Andrew Lougheed smiled to himself as Of Course We’re Coming Back erupted through the hyperspace portal into a brand-new system. Unlike the last time, he even knew what this one was called—Messeth, according to the charts from Rekiki’s Fang.

  They’d matched up the results from Nova Industries surveys and Dark Eye’s scans against the charts as well. The guesses and analysis that had been pulled together were surprisingly close, though A!Tol charts showed their active colonies all well coreward of Earth. It didn’t look like they were to blame for Hidden Eyes of Terra’s loss, since the survey ship had been nowhere near their space.

  “What are we seeing, people?” he asked aloud. The scout ship’s main screen was showing the system according to the charts: six planets, the fifth a super-Jovian gas giant they’d picked up from Earth years back, the rest rocks of various sizes. The real point of interest was planet two, Ikiseth, the only world in the system with its own name in Fang’s databases.

  Ikiseth was a comfortably habitable world with a climate Andrew would love to visit—low axial inclination, slightly farther out than Earth from a much warmer star. A large portion of the planet had similar average temperatures to Earth’s tropics and little extreme weather.

  It was an A!Tol Imperial colony and the charts listed its population as including nine separate species—but the largest population was the semi-amphibian Indiri. Andrew understood there had been a few of them aboard Rekiki’s Fang, but none had survived the mutiny to join the Terran privateer fleet.

  The planetary population was only a passing concern for him today, except in that the eighty million sapients on the planet made it one of the largest colonies within sixty light-years of Earth. That meant the planet had a major trans-shipment station in orbit—and was a logical stopping-off point for ships heading to Earth.

  “Planets are lining with up with what we expected,” Laurent reported. “I’m picking up a space elevator, half a dozen big stations—wait! I’ve got four patrol boats, look to be the same design as in G-KCL-79D. And…the queen in the deck. Will you take a look at her?!”

  The screen zoomed in Ikiseth, Laurent highlighting several features. The biggest station was linked to the surface by a massive tether, the space elevator that apparently was a default feature of A!Tol colony expeditions. Five smaller stations were scattered in geostationary orbit along with an entire constellation of civilian satellites.

  The four patrol boats were less of a concern this time—Of Course was still an eggshell, but with Tornado’s old laser now mounted to the “top” of the scout ship, she had real teeth.

  Laurent’s “queen in the deck,” however, was a quarter-kilometer-long, elegant-looking hypership that matched their new databanks listing for an A!Tol destroyer. Smaller than any of the vessels the aliens had brought to Earth, the ships spent most of their time running convoy escort and courier missions through the Imperium.

  The lightest ship the A!Tol Navy deployed, the ship could also eat Of Course for lunch without even noticing.

  “Well, let’s see if we can get her attention,” Andrew said with a grin. “Take us in at point four cee, but keep your options open and assume that destroyer has a tenth of lightspeed on us. We want to see what’s in the system, not get vaporized.”

  “Yes, sir,” Strobel chirped in response. “I like not being vaporized.”

  Moments later, Of Course blazed across the system like a rogue meteor, drawing every eye around.

  Behind her, having exited hyperspace through the same portal, Oaths of Secrecy drifted forward on cold gas thrusters, quietly studying the system for prey.

  #

  The hyperspatial anomaly sensor didn’t provide a great deal of detail. Sitting on Tornado’s bridge, Annette could see where Of Course opened the portal back into hyperspace—that was hard to miss; portals were big anomalies—but the scout ship itself was only visible for a few seconds.

  “That’s odd,” Rolfson said softly. “They must have dropped their interface drive.”

  “And there’s why,” Annette told him as a second portal opened ten seconds later. The pursuing ship would have been well out of range of Of Course in regular space, but the compressed nature of hyperspace meant they’d have been able to bring the scout ship to bay there.

  Except that, according to Ki!Tana, the A!Tol didn’t have any better tools for scanning hyperspace than Tornado did. Their anomaly scanners were significantly longer-ranged than Tornado’s, but the limitations within that range were much the same.

  Having cut their interface drive, Of Course was now effectively invisible to the A!Tol ship.

  Tornado’s interface drive was already off, the privateer cruiser floating in hyperspace outside the Messeth system, waiting for information from its two scouts. The plan had been for Of Course to draw the patrol boats out of position—a plan Lougheed had clearly decided to upgrade.

  “The destroyer is entering a search pattern,” Rolfson noted. “But if I’m reading their vector correctly, those last few seconds under drive before Of Course went silent were enough to completely mess up the A!Tol.”

  “Ki!Tana, how far away can they pick up us opening a portal?” Annette asked the big alien.

  “It depends,” she answered. The A!Tol now had an almost-permanent position at the back of the bridge where she could see the screen and provide feedback on the strange and wonderful galaxy she knew better than anyone else aboard Tornado. “If we open the normal way, full power and straight ahead, she can pick us up from a light-year of real space distance. If do it slowly, low power, and only big enough for Tornado to fit through…fifty-fifty chance she won’t pick us up from here.”

  “Amandine, can we do that?”

  Annette’s navigator shrugged, then checked his screens.

  “I think so,” he finally admitted. “We didn’t design the emitters for that kind of fine tuning, but we can control the power feed. It won’t be perfect and it’ll be slower, but I think we can do it.”

  “It’s always slower,” Ki!Tana told him. “A lot slower—and more vulnerable, too. The people in Messeth will st
ill see you.”

  “So long as we leave that destroyer searching a needle in a hyperspatial haystack, I don’t care,” Annette told them both. “Make it happen, Amandine. Ki!Tana—help him if you can.”

  It was a sign of the big alien’s growing acceptance aboard Tornado that Amandine didn’t even complain at being told to work with a member of the species that conquered Earth. He just gestured the big alien over and got to work.

  Annette leaned back in her command chair, watching the destroyer carefully. With the upgrades they’d ripped from Rekiki’s Fang, she could take the destroyer. With an energy shield extended around Tornado’s compressed-matter armor, they were unlikely to even be damaged.

  She’d rather avoid that. Little as it appealed to her, she had to think like a pirate now—and that meant going after lightly armed ships with valuable cargo. It was highly likely that destroyer had been guarding a freighter of some kind. That was her target.

  #

  Annette Bond had at this point gone into and out of hyperspace over a dozen times. Unless she’d had a reason to think about it, she would have said the transition had no sensation at all. If forced to stop and recall, she might have remembered a momentary sense of discomfort.

  Creeping through a hyperspace portal barely larger than her ship, taking over ten full seconds to make the transition, was a very different story. That slight discomfort she’d barely noticed before was now a seconds-long sensation of dizziness and nausea, building on itself until the cruiser finally exited the portal.

  From the echoing sigh of relief around her bridge and Ki!Tana’s pitch-black skin, she was hardly the only one impacted.

  “Is everyone all right?” she demanded. A chorus of “I think so,” “Yes,” and “Maybe?” answered her, her bridge crew rapidly recovering from the impact.

  “Check throughout the ship,” she ordered. “Let sickbay know to expect casualties.” She glanced at Ki!Tana. “You didn’t mention that part.”

  The alien’s black skin rippled, slowly fading toward the rainbow ripples of calm.

  “I perhaps should have mentioned that I have never done that before,” Ki!Tana replied. “And I would not care to do so again.”

  Annette chuckled. “So, you don’t know everything,” she observed.

  Ki!Tana’s knowledge and skill had been intimidating. Annette wasn’t entirely sure how old the A!Tol was, but she knew her way around the Imperium and its technology better than anyone else aboard—including the other alien recruits.

  “Ma’am, datapulse received from Oaths of Secrecy,” Chan announced. “Captain Sade specifically notes what appears to be a hyper-capable military freighter like the one we missed at G-KCL-79D.”

  “Well, that’s promising,” Annette agreed. “And this time, they’re not outrunning us. Lieutenant Commander Amandine—take us after that ship. Maximum interface drive.”

  She smiled coldly as her ship leapt from a standstill to forty-three percent of lightspeed. Still slower than the destroyer Captain Lougheed had lured out of the system, but hopefully faster than the freighter.

  “How long until they see us?” she asked.

  “We emerged eight light-minutes away,” Rolfson told her briskly. “She’ll see us in a little under seven minutes, by which point we’ll be almost halfway to her.”

  “Prep a missile warning shot for if she tries to run,” Annette ordered. “If she keeps running after that, try and disable her with lasers. Whatever happens, I do not want that ship escaping into hyperspace.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” her tactical officer replied crisply.

  “Amandine—whatever course she tries, see if we can cut her off,” Tornado’s Captain continued. “We don’t have that much of a speed edge; every bit of angle you can give me makes Harold’s job easier.”

  “What about Oaths?” her XO asked. “Or the patrol ships, for that matter?”

  “I’ll talk to Captain Sade,” Annette replied. “You keep an eye on the locals—if they’re threatening us or Oaths, put a missile spread into them.”

  At a hundred meters and maybe a quarter-million tons, the patrol boats had neither the shields nor the active defenses to stand off Tornado’s missiles. She probably couldn’t kill all four with a single salvo, but the boats’ commanders had to know they were out of their weight class.

  “Get me Sade,” she told Chan. A moment later, the image of the wispy blonde captain appeared on her command chair screen. “Captain, what’s your status?”

  “Drifting toward the planet under cold jets and keeping our eyes peeled,” Oaths of Secrecy’s Captain replied. “I’m guessing you want me to start being less quiet?”

  “Not yet,” Annette told her. “I want you to stay nice and quiet while we make a lot of noise chasing that freighter. I’m hoping to take her down with Tornado, but we’re also going to herd her in your direction. If you get a shot, take it. Aim to disable. I want her cargo.”

  “We don’t even know what her cargo is,” Sade pointed out.

  “If we can’t use it, we can sell it through Ki!Tana’s contacts,” Annette replied. “We’ll make it work.”

  “Your call either way,” the junior Captain acknowledged. “Good hunting.”

  #

  The freighter’s crew was slow off the mark. Annette wasn’t sure if they hadn’t been paying attention or hadn’t had the right crew on duty, but they didn’t bring up their drive until over five minutes after they would have picked up the closing privateer.

  But the ship was still capable of forty percent of lightspeed, and Tornado was now overhauling her at a little more than three percent of light. It was a mind-bogglingly fast speed in many circumstances, but in this case, it might not be enough.

  “Fire the warning shot,” Annette ordered.

  A moment later, a single missile blazed across the void. The missiles they’d stolen from Rekiki’s Fang could hit easily the freighter at this point—but destroying the freighter was pointless.

  The missile slammed into the freighter’s shield on a vector that would never have hit the ship, sending light flaring out across the energy screen.

  There was no change to the freighter’s course.

  “Will we intercept her before she can open a hyper portal?” Annette asked.

  There was a limit to how close to a planet or star a portal could be opened, but at almost half the speed of light, those distances could be crossed with ease.

  “Probably, unless we’re delayed,” Amandine told her. “And there’s the delay they’re hoping for.”

  The four patrol boats that the scout ships had picked up earlier were now charging out from the planet. The angle was in their favor: unless Tornado changed course directly away from them, they would catch the cruiser.

  Annette wondered if the quartet of tiny ships would actually be worth anything against a pirate. From what she’d seen of Rekiki’s Fang, the pirate ship could have taken all four boats—though it would have been more of a fight than it was going to be for Tornado.

  “Let’s see if we can head them off,” she said calmly. “Rolfson—target the closest and feed her a dozen missiles.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Twelve bright sparks flashed to light, closing the distance to the patrol boats in a blur. The small defending ships maneuvered and launched their own missiles in response.

  The boats had shields, but they were designed to stand against pirates with half a dozen missile launchers instead of a true warship. The shields flared with light as the missiles struck home, then collapsed in a bright flash as they were overwhelmed—the ship they were supposed to protect vanishing similarly the next moment.

  “We have twenty-four missiles inbound, and the other three boats are running for their lives,” Rolfson reported in satisfaction. It took an interface drive barely ten seconds to completely reverse velocity—and the patrol boats had done just that.

  “Let’s not test the shields with those missiles,” Annette ordered. “We have missile defenses. Us
e them.”

  Given the ubiquity of energy screens and high maneuverability of interface drive ships, the A!Tol apparently didn’t bother with active defenses against missiles. Annette suspected they were right and that the mass and energy required by Tornado’s suite of antimissile lasers had better uses.

  Since she had them, however, she was going to use them.

  A single missile made it past the suite, slamming into Tornado’s new shield and vanishing in a blast of fire.

  “Shield status?”

  “Overflow buffer at point six percent,” Kurzman reported from the CIC. “We can take a lot more hits like that before we need to worry.”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” Annette replied, allowing herself a small smile. “And our freighter friend?”

  “She changed course while we were shooting at her, but we’ve adjusted to follow,” Amandine replied. “No material change to our intercept time, but she’s now entering Captain Sade’s intercept envelope.”

  “Is she?” Tornado’s Captain murmured, studying the screen. “Well then, it seems Oaths of Secrecy will have the honor today.” She leaned back in her chair. “Inform Captain Sade to engage at her discretion—but I want the ship intact.”

  The end of the chase was surprisingly sudden. Tornado was six million kilometers behind the freighter, closing the range at roughly nine thousand kilometers a second. They were nearing the point where Tornado would have to make a dangerous attempt to disable the A!Tol transport with missiles or pursue her into hyperspace.

  Then Oaths of Secrecy brought up her interface drive. She was two million kilometers away from the fleeing transport—but ahead of her. Five seconds after the scout ship started her lunge, the big laser they’d mounted along her keel fired.

  The freighter’s shield held for less than two seconds, and the laser washed over the ship—intentionally cutting power to only fry sensors and controls, not gut the ship.

  “They’ve cut their interface drive and are transmitting their surrender,” Chan told the bridge.