“I know. I’m going to go buy that for you,” Tornado’s Captain replied. “Seconds are about to get expensive, ladies. Spend as few of them as you can.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mosi acknowledged.
“Already underway, ma’am,” Amandine told her as she turned to her navigator. “They’ll range on us first. There’s nothing we can do about that.”
“Keep the laser suite up,” she ordered Rolfson. “Prep our own missiles. I’d rather not have this fight, but it looks like I lost that argument.”
“All tubes are loaded with point sevens,” he replied. “Proton capacitors charging—we’ll have a full charge by the time we’re in beam range. Lasers the same.”
“Estimate we’ll be in range of their point seven fives in one minute,” Amandine reported.
“Ki!Tana. Anything specific we should be expecting?” Annette asked their resident alien.
“Her first goal is going to be to secure the freighter,” the old pirate told her. “She’ll expect you to be similarly armed to most pirate heavies—better than her but not by much, as they need a lot of cargo space. She’ll try and hammer down your shields with missiles while closing to retake the transport.”
“And when that fails?”
“She’ll turn and try to close to proton beam range,” Ki!Tana said. “I am guessing, Captain,” she warned. “But that Captain will have two priorities: recapture the freighter and protect the planet. Capturing or destroying Tornado will not register except to help with one or both of those.”
“She can keep the damn planet, but I’m taking that ship.”
“Incoming!” Rolfson announced. “Fourteen missiles coming our way.”
“Please return the favor, Commander,” Annette told him. “All launchers.”
“Yes, ma’am. Five seconds to range.”
The seconds blinked past and Tornado’s response flared into space. Twenty-four missiles blazed toward the destroyer, passing its own salvo as they went.
“Engaging with antimissile lasers.”
Annette gripped the armrest of her command chair. They’d upgraded Tornado a lot, but last time they’d faced A!Tol Imperial Navy ships, she’d watched the UESF die around her.
Rolfson was getting better with the lasers, the last of the missiles dying well clear of the privateer’s shields. That appeared to get the destroyer’s attention and the smaller ship turned in space, adjusting her course to sweep farther away from Tornado even as the missiles closed in.
“Mosi got the drive,” Chan reported from the communications console. “She says they’ll be underway in ten seconds; Oaths is moving to escort.”
“Finally.” Annette’s attention was immediately pulled away as the impact reports from their missile salvo made it onto her screens. Like the cruisers they’d fought at Sol, the warship had major shields—twenty-four missiles had left the destroyer’s screen flickering with light but unbroken.
“Please tell me our new shields are as strong as hers,” the Terran Captain snarled.
“About twenty percent stronger,” Ki!Tana replied, her voice far calmer. “Plus your antimissile suite is surprisingly effective against interface missiles.”
“We didn’t have shields,” Annette pointed out. “Built the best alternative we had. Amandine—take us right at that bitch. Rolfson—ready the proton guns.”
The destroyer’s course was clearly focused on Oaths of Secrecy and the freighter now, but her speed advantage wouldn’t be enough to avoid action if Tornado cut the angle.
“She’ll catch them before they can open the portal,” Rolfson said quietly.
“I noticed,” Annette replied. “Send them another salvo, Lieutenant Commander. Let’s get them looking at us, not Sade and Mosi.”
Another twenty-four missiles blasted away, and now the distance between the two ships was dropping rapidly.
“Mosi and Wellesley have launched the cargo shuttles with the freighter’s original crew,” Chan reported. “They are heading for the planet as fast as they can go, getting the hell out of this fight.”
“There could be an accident,” Ki!Tana murmured to Annette. “Even a laser could take out those shuttles. You tried to let them go, but the Imperium forced a battle.”
She turned a flat glare on the alien, whose skin was back to the same dark blue as earlier.
“I don’t know what fucking test you think you’re giving,” Annette hissed, “but I will not fire on unarmed escape craft to make my life easier. Drop. It.”
The dark blue faded to purple and then red as the big A!Tol met her eyes.
“Good,” she said. “Fight your ship, Captain.”
With a final glare at her far-too-pleased-with-herself alien compatriot, Annette returned her attention to the screen in time to watch their second salvo of missiles fail against the destroyer’s screen. The A!Tol built even their light warships with a mind-boggling level of defenses.
“Rolfson, move to streaming the missiles,” she ordered. “If we get that freighter out, we have lots of ammunition to burn. Dump everything we got from Fang into her.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The next set of lights leaving Tornado formed a deadly stream, sparks of white light suicidally charging to their destruction in an orderly line.
“She’s…spinning?” the tactical officer announced after a moment.
“Are you surprised there’s a standard counter to that tactic?” Ki!Tana asked. “They must have dramatically underestimated your weapons’ ability to seek a single target location before.”
“Clearly. Time to proton beam range?”
“Ninety seconds. Ma’am…they’re going to range on the freighter with their beams first.”
“They will fire to disable,” the big A!Tol warned them, “but they will fire.”
“Keep up the missile fire, see if we can peg her with a long-range laser,” Annette ordered. “Make her look at us, not Mosi.”
They still had four of the big lasers left on Tornado, and while they might not hit at a dozen light-seconds, they would hurt if they did. Streams of invisible light started to accompany the missiles. The lasers even connected, lighting up chunks of the destroyer’s shields—but only for fractions of a second before the A!Tol ship broke away.
With over ten seconds of light delay, hitting them with lasers was almost impossible.
“Oaths is trying to open a hyper portal,” Amandine reported. He paused and sighed. “They failed; they’re still too close to the star.”
“Damn.” Annette watched the tactical plot on the screen. Her ship was going as fast as she could. With the missiles aboard the freighter now running, she suspected she could kill the destroyer in time. Without them…the destroyer was still going to die. The only thing in question was whether or not the freighter would make it out of the system.
“Hyper portal!” Rolfson announced. “Holy mother of… It’s Of Course!”
Lougheed’s ship erupted from hyperspace less than a hundred thousand kilometers behind the A!Tol destroyer at forty percent of lightspeed. The massive laser they’d strapped to the scout ship opened fire from inside hyperspace, linking the tiny scout ship to the destroyer with a line of pure light.
Somehow, Lougheed kept the beam on the destroyer as his ship blasted past the A!Tol vessel, the range dropping as low as ten kilometers in the moments after launch. At that moment of insanely close range, the laser still flaring against the alien ship’s shields, all eight of the rack-mounted missiles fired.
There was no perceivable flight time. The entire sphere of the A!Tol’s shield lit up with white fire…and collapsed.
It was impossible to tell whether it was Lougheed’s laser or Rolfson’s missiles that finished the job but by the time Of Course We’re Coming Back had been in system for two seconds, the A!Tol destroyer was nothing but fiery debris.
Chapter 23
All four ships emerged from hyperspace at their primary rendezvous point eighteen hours later and Annette breathed a si
gh of relief at their apparent safe escape. Nothing had shown up on the anomaly scanners as they’d fled, and the only ship in a position to have tracked them into hyperspace was expanding debris and survival pods in the Messeth system.
This time, the rendezvous was farther away from Alpha Centauri, heading in the direction of the pirate station the humans had nicknamed Tortuga. It was also directly on the way to the supply route between the system Ki!Tana’s data had confirmed as a major fleet base and one of the key systems supplying it.
The fleet base was beyond her little fleet’s ability to engage—but the ships supplying it were a different matter entirely. Annette still wasn’t sure about intercepting ships in hyperspace, but Ki!Tana seemed to think it was doable, and to be fair, Rekiki’s Fang had intercepted Tornado.
“Major, Lieutenant,” she greeted Wellesley and Mosi over a channel. “Any issues with our new prize?”
“The software Ki!Tana provided worked like a charm,” Mosi replied. The strange click in the A!Tol’s name sounded surprisingly normal from her, not the stilted almost-right most of the human crew had mastered. “Took longer than we expected, but it was a military transport. We are now fully in control.”
“And no stowaways, either,” Major Wellesley added. “We’ve swept the ship from top to bottom. The only people aboard are us.”
“Good. I’ll want the triple-S company back aboard as soon as possible.” She smiled at Mosi. “Sorry, Mosi, you get to stay Captain a while longer. We’ll need to start offloading missiles ASAP.”
“I’m guessing you want me to take her all the way to Tortuga?” Mosi asked.
“It would be unwise to send the transport on ahead,” Ki!Tana interjected from behind Annette’s shoulder. The Captain glared at the interruption but still gestured for the alien to continue. The old pirate knew the market better than they did.
“You are an unknown entity, Captain Bond,” she said simply. “Arrive with Tornado, an unquestionable heavy, and a series of prizes in tow, and you will be greeted with respect. Tornado alone will guarantee you a fair deal.
“Send the prize ahead without the heavy to force respect and she will simply be gone when you arrive. No one will have seen her. At best, you will be able to force the return of the ship and hopefully Lieutenant Mosi’s crew, but you would lose her cargo.”
“I have no intention of risking Mosi’s crew,” Annette told her people calmly. “If the best plan is for us to show up as a pirate fleet with a flotilla of prizes, I’m willing to delay things until then.
“We’ll have a full staff meeting this evening, over dinner,” she continued. “Senior officers and Captains—and yes, Captain Mosi, that includes you until we sell that ship. Understood?”
#
Like many parts of Tornado, the Captain’s dining room was large but Spartan. It doubled as the conference room for the senior officers, so it wasn’t attached to Annette’s quarters, and the only item to make it a “dining room” was the inclusion of a small kitchen where a steward could prepare a meal.
“Don’t expect anything particularly wonderful,” Annette warned the young black woman staring around at the white tablecloth and fine china laid out on the table. “The Captain’s dining ware is prettier, but we’re eating the same UP as everybody else.”
The Universal Protein that apparently every ship in the Imperium carried was bland, tasteless, and—combined with the vitamin powders Tornado’s medical staff had whipped up—capable of filling the dietary requirements of humans as well as every other species aboard.
It just made tofu look appealing.
Mosi was the youngest and most junior of the officers invited to the dinner, so Annette had purposefully made sure the Lieutenant had made it in first. The black woman was tall and skinny, almost gaunt. She was one of Rolfson’s two junior officers, normally tasked with running a shift in CIC.
Her selection to lead the prize crew was quite literally a matter of her being the Lieutenant on rotation at that moment in time, though so far, Annette was favorably impressed. Not many could keep their cool well enough to work through alien code with a warship bearing down on them.
Others began to drift in behind them as Annette gestured the prize crew’s Captain to her seat at the end of the table.
They’d brought in the odd, stool-like, creation A!Tol used in place of chairs and placed Ki!Tana at one corner. Opposite her were Kurzman and Wellesley, sitting together. That caused Annette to raise an eyebrow—not least because the two men arrived together and promptly sat next to each other.
If they wanted to play footsie under the table, it wasn’t her problem—though it was a bit of a surprise. She didn’t know which of the two men would have initiated things, but they appeared to have moved quickly.
Sade and Lougheed were at the other end of the table with Mosi, both of them greeting the junior officer gently and trying to draw her out.
Amandine, Rolfson and Metharom filled the middle of the table. The bearded and stocky Rolfson made an interesting contrast placed next to the almost-elflike Sade, though the side glances the two were giving each other suggested the placement was hardly unwelcome.
Annette concealed a smile behind a napkin as the stewards brought in the food. This far away from home, pairing up was almost inevitable. So long as it didn’t interfere with discipline or involve the chain of command, she was determined to turn a very blind eye.
There wasn’t much else to take pleasure in, she realized with a sigh as the food was placed in front of her. It looked like the stewards were trying curry as a solution to the utter blandness of UP—thankfully, they were feeding Ki!Tana something else.
Glancing at the black goo the cooks had turned the A!Tol’s protein into, she remembered there were worse things than curry.
#
Despite Annette’s misgivings, the curry went over well with the human occupants of the room. To her even greater surprise, however, Ki!Tana’s skin flashed the dark red of surprised pleasure when the alien bit into her own food. The cooks had managed something edible for a completely different species.
If she were still paying the crew, that would have been worth a raise right there.
“All right, people,” she said as the dishes were cleared away. “I called you here so we could go over our plans. These are heavily shaped by Ki!Tana’s intelligence and the fact that Tornado is our only real warship.”
As the last of the stewards exited the room, Annette hit a command on her communicator to turn on the wallscreen at one end of the conference/dining room. The screen was loaded with a map of the region around them, filled in with data pulled from Fang’s and now Mosi’s freighter’s computers.
“We are here.” A gold dot flashed on the map, in deep space. “The station we’re calling Tortuga is here.” A blue dot flashed along the border between the A!Tol and Kanzi territories. “From what Ki!Tana has said, the system has no inhabitable planets, which keeps it from the attention of both the powers around it.
“Tortuga serves as a central hub for piracy and fencing through both of the big empires out here,” she continued. “We can sell anything there, and perhaps more important for our purposes, we can buy anything there. Improved shields. Improved power generators. Custom-built power armor for the Major’s troopers. Technical specifications and designs we can provide the Weber Network back home.”
She was presuming, of course, that the Weber Protocols had managed to establish the Network as the core of a resistance. If the survivors of the UESF hadn’t managed that, Annette’s job was probably impossible.
“With respect, ma’am,” Kurzman asked, leaning forward across the table and eyeing the map. “What are we going to buy those things with?”
“Ki!Tana?” Annette gestured to the sole nonhuman in the room.
“Both Imperial and Kanzi currency are accepted aboard the station,” the A!Tol told them. “Barter is also accepted, and you would need to acquire currency of one kind or another to make deals. If you wish to tra
de at A!Ko!La!Ma!, you will need something to trade. A freighter on its own has significant value. If you are prepared to sell the missiles you captured, you will find many willing to trade.”
“My inclination,” Tornado’s Captain told her people, “is to hang on to all of those missiles. Our long-term mission, after all, is not piracy. There will be a distinct value to us in having full magazines—and full reloads—of missiles that can match the A!Tol’s best.”
“We’ll need a ship to carry them or to store them somewhere,” Mosi pointed out.
“Indeed,” Annette agreed. “We should have our magazines full of the new missiles by the morning. Once that’s done, I want you and Captain Lougheed to return to Alpha Centauri and store all of the point seven five–rated missiles in the cache there.
“You’ll swap them out for all of the point sixes Nova Industries gave us. I can’t imagine they’ll be worth much at Tortuga, but they’ll be worth something if many of the Captains are as cheap as Ki!Tana suggests.”
“You are correct,” the tentacled alien confirmed. “They won’t sell for any great amount, but they will sell.”
“Everyone will rendezvous here in one week,” Annette told them, highlighting a new marker on the map—about halfway between their current location and Tortuga. “Oaths of Secrecy and Tornado are going to spend the week trawling along here.”
She highlighted a section of space. At one end of it was the main fleet base, the system Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh had launched his conquest of Earth from. At the other was one of the major colonies.
“Just by tracking the speed of the hyperdrive signatures at range, we should be able to avoid engaging A!Tol warships and close with freighters,” she concluded. “I’m hoping to grab one, maybe two more ships before we head to Tortuga.
“If we can pull three captures, the ships alone should cover much of the work we need to have done. Anyone have other thoughts or concerns?”
“Do we have a way to avoid engaging A!Tol military transports?” Wellesley asked. “Until we have power armor for my human troopers, I hesitate to tangle with their actual soldiers.”
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