The Terran Privateer

by Glynn Stewart

  #

  Ten seconds after entering the rings, Annette knew that no reaction-drive ship could ever have followed the course they had been given. Inside that ten seconds, Amandine had made six separate vector changes, each of hundreds of kilometers a second.

  It would probably have been an exaggeration to say that you could have walked through the rings, but Annette had spent a lot of time in Sol’s asteroid belt. The comparison was terrifying, but Amandine took Tornado through the rocks with a careful hand.

  “Coming up on the inner edge,” he reported quietly.

  “Bringing up a visual,” Rolfson announced. “Sensors suggest this is going to be…my gods.”

  The screen switched from the tactical plot to a pure visual, first showing the hundreds of rocks inside a visual range and then showing the gap Tornado would dive through—and through it, the crew’s first sight of Tortuga.

  Ki!Tana’s description of it as a mobile shipyard—a large vessel but still inherently a ship—had clearly thrown off Annette’s expectations. She’d expected something big, bigger than even the two-kilometer-long behemoths the A!Tol had attacked Sol with.

  The mobile shipyard had clearly designed to build and maintain ships half again that size—and six of them at once. Tortuga was over twenty kilometers across, a technically mobile six-armed star. Two of the arms had been closed in at some point in the past; a metal shell wrapped the yard slips that filled the other four arms to provide living space.

  The yard slip between the two enclosed arms had been subdivided into a dozen smaller slips. Two were big enough to fit Tornado, but the others were designed to handle smaller vessels.

  The other three slips still looked like they could swallow an A!Tol battleship but held instead a small fleet of identical cruisers. Each was a smoothly lined vessel painted dark red, ten percent again Tornado’s size.

  Twenty ships of various sizes, up to three much the same scale as Tornado, were docked against the enclosed arms. Four of the red cruisers orbited around the station, lazy guard dogs keeping an eye on the flock.

  “We have incoming,” Rolfson reported. “One of the red ships—I’m guessing those are Tortuga’s owners?”

  “Yes,” Ki!Tana confirmed. “Remember, Captain—Tortuga’s Crew are not pirates. They were born aboard that station; they will die for that station. They deal happily with pirates, but they look down on them.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Annette told her.

  “Ma’am, point of concern,” her tactical officer interrupted again. “They’ve got powerful shields, but I still got a pretty good glimpse at their hulls as they closed. These guys have compressed-matter armor—no one else seemed to know it existed!”

  “Interesting,” Tornado’s Captain said slowly. “Are they hailing us?”

  “Just now, ma’am,” Chan confirmed, tossing the channel onto the main screen without needing instruction.

  The being who appeared on the screen reminded her of nothing so much as an upright scarab beetle. Red cloth bandoliers had been strung across a torso covered in heavy carapace plating, each bandolier marked with insignia and medals Annette didn’t even attempt to understand. A squat, beetle-like head sat atop the armored torso, massive black eyes and wavering antennae focused on the screen.

  The Laian chittered for a moment, and then the translator kicked in.

  “This is Captain Tidikat of the Crew,” the translator told them. “You have used an old and…special access code. Identify yourself.”

  Ki!Tana moved into the field of vision.

  “They used my code, Captain Tidikat,” she replied calmly. “My contract has transferred to the Captain of this vessel and I have guided them here to do business.”

  The antennae whirred as Tidikat considered.

  “This is acceptable to the Crew,” it concluded. “Flotilla Commander, identify yourself.”

  Ki!Tana gestured for Annette to take over, stepping back behind the Terran Captain.

  “I am Captain Annette Bond, a privateer of the United Earth Space Force,” she told the alien proudly. “These ships are either under my command or legitimate prizes taken in the course of war. I am prepared to sell the prizes and their contents to fund maintenance and upgrades of my vessels.”

  Mandibles clicked rapidly, in something that the translator clearly didn’t think was speech.

  “A privateer of a fallen state,” Tidikat finally said. “We are…familiar with the path you travel, Captain Bond. What cargos do you have to sell?”

  “Point six cee missiles of Terran manufacture, raw protein, and molecular circuity cores. Plus the three freighters themselves.”

  Tidikat’s mandibles clicked rapidly again.

  “Ki!Tana’s presence alone would see you safely to Tortuga, Captain,” the Laian told her. “Your goods will be welcome here—some more than others, as I’m sure you realize.

  “The rules of Tortuga are simple,” it continued. “Do not cause trouble. Obey all orders given by members of the Crew. Do not exit the marked public portions of the platform.

  “We are not responsible for the security of your persons or goods. If you cause sufficient trouble, you will be ejected or terminated. If you breach the station or an order of the Command Crew, your ship will be seized as compensation.

  “We do not mandate fairness in trade. Look to your own negotiations.”

  The mandibles snapped once, very definitively.

  “Do you understand our rules, Captain Bond?”

  “Perfectly,” she replied flatly. “We are here to trade, not cause trouble. We will protect ourselves if needed.”

  “This is Tortuga,” Tidikat replied, its mandibles snapping rapidly as it spoke. “This is to be expected.”

  Chapter 30

  “We will be docking in about five minutes,” Amandine reported.

  “All right, people,” Annette said. “Cole, are you needed for the docking?”

  “Computer systems can take it from here,” her navigator admitted with a mildly disappointed look.

  “Senior officers and Ki!Tana report to my office now,” she ordered. “Seal the ship until we’re done.”

  Gesturing for the officers already on the bridge to follow her, Annette strode into the Spartan office attached to the bridge. It was, as she quickly glanced around, just big enough for a quick planning meeting to sort out the last few details.

  “We’ll need Major Wellesley here,” she told her officers as Chan filed in last. “He’ll have to make sure we have the ship sealed first.”

  Working or not, it took the Special Space Service Major less than two minutes from her call to arrive and join the Space Force officers.

  “What’s the plan, Captain?” he asked as soon as the door slid closed behind him, forcing Annette to hide a smile at his enthusiasm.

  “Ki!Tana and I have discussed what our best approach is,” she told her officers, gesturing for the alien to speak.

  “Your human crew has no currency that will be accepted aboard the station,” the A!Tol told them. “Until we have liquidated at least one prize or its cargo, you have no funds and are operating on credit based on your relationship with me.

  “Captain Bond and I will proceed to an agent of my acquaintance and negotiate the fate of our cargo,” he continued. “We may need to sell the raw protein immediately to have some spending cash, but we will want to hold on to the missiles and molecular cores to get a better price. I’m sure we can negotiate a deal that puts at least some money in the ship’s accounts to be distributed to the crew.”

  “Alien crew who are leaving us here can leave as soon as we lift the current lockdown,” Annette told them. “We’ll want a way to reach them to make sure we can pay them fairly. I get the feeling that building a reputation for paying fairly will help us here.”

  “It will with most,” Ki!Tana agreed. “Some will see it as weakness.”

  “Then let them make that mistake,” she said sweetly.

  “No offense to Ki!Tan
a, but the two of you aren’t going on the station alone, are you?” Wellesley asked.

  “Hardly,” Annette replied. “I’m bringing you and any two of your troopers you choose. Given the warnings we were given, I suspect powered armor and plasma weapons would be considered rude, but body armor and slugthrowers are basically casual wear aboard the station.”

  “Indeed,” Ki!Tana replied. “Bodyguards are also expected.”

  “Once we’ve put money in our crew’s hands that can actually be spent on Tortuga, I intend to allow shore leave parties to leave the ship,” Annette noted. “Under no circumstances does anyone go anywhere alone. My preference would be for parties of six, including at least one of our nonhuman crewmembers to help our people find the lay of the land.”

  “Won’t that stand out?” Rolfson asked. “I mean, if we moved in squads…”

  “It is quite common,” the big A!Tol told them. “The Laians do not spend a significant amount of time in the public area of the station. They live in the original core hull and do not mingle with their customers. They most certainly do not provide anything resembling law enforcement.

  “Another thing to realize,” Ki!Tana continued, “is that while the Laians do not approve of slavery, they do not intervene in slave transactions aboard the station. There is no official slave market, but you may still encounter groups of slaves. Their guards will be well armed and trigger-happy; attempting to intervene is unwise.”

  “Slavery? But we’re talking societies with industrial robotics,” Chan objected. “That makes no sense.”

  “Not all things are logical, Lieutenant Commander,” the alien told her. “There are tasks for which a sapient creature is simply better than a machine. There is status. There is the use of enslaved skilled labor—in many cases to run those industrial robots.

  “And there is the Kanzi religion,” she continued grimly. “All other bipeds exist to serve them. Slavery is how their culture is built—the Kanzi race are rulers, slavers and warriors raised up on the back of an empire of slaves.

  “The slavers will see your people as exotics, prizes the Kanzi will pay great sums for,” Ki!Tana concluded. “Moving in groups is wise. Avoiding the slavers as much as possible is also wise.”

  “Will there be Kanzi aboard?” Rolfson asked, the big man looking hugely uncomfortable to Annette.

  “Tortuga takes all comers who don’t create trouble, and one of the ships docked today started life as a Kanzi armed auxiliary freighter, so yes.”

  “We don’t start trouble,” Annette ordered her people flatly. “We protect our own, but we don’t start trouble. James—have your escort ready to go in ten minutes.

  “We have business to complete.”

  #

  Annette and her escorts stopped at the airlock Tornado’s crew had hooked up to the massive space station they’d docked with. Both the station and the starship had more airlocks and flexible umbilicals to link them together, but the Terran crew was being cautious. One link for now was plenty.

  “What’s the atmosphere looking like on the other side?” she asked the SSS troopers guarding the airlock.

  “Slightly higher pressure and a tad over twenty-five percent oxygen,” the woman leading the team told her. “No toxins of concern; I’m only reading oxygen, nitrogen and CO-two.”

  Which made sense—that was the exact mix, though in different proportions, you’d find on Tornado. If your air was artificial, there was no purposes to putting in anything other than the requirement for life—oxygen, some specific trace gases—and a neutral buffer that all races could breathe—nitrogen.

  The carbon dioxide was the result of the fact that, according to the files Annette’s people now had, over ninety-nine percent of known life used very similar chemical reactions to life on Earth to provide energy. Some CO2 was almost certainly added intentionally, Annette doubted humans were the only ones who needed a small percentage to properly function, but most appeared to be a natural by-product.

  “Gravity is pegged at just under point seven gees,” the Corporal continued. “High oxygen, low gravity. Sounds like it could be fun.”

  “Also potentially distracting,” Major Wellesley pointed out over Annette’s shoulder. “Watch your step; gravity shifts aren’t fun.”

  “James, I trained on ships without artificial gravity,” she pointed out. “I’ll be fine.” She nodded to the Corporal. “Open it up.”

  The inner airlock door opened and they moved in, letting it close behind them. There was a faint but perceptible change in air pressure as Tortuga’s air was allowed in, overwhelming the lower-oxygen and -pressure air from Tornado. Once the shift was complete, the outer airlock door opened, and Annette took a deep breath of “alien” air and stepped into her second-ever alien structure.

  The umbilical, sadly, was utterly prosaic. If the Laians who’d built Tortuga had used anything different from the plastic and steel Terrans would have used, it certainly didn’t look any different.

  “Lead the way, Ki!Tana,” she told the big A!Tol. “You know this place better than we do.”

  The squid-like alien moved forward, her locomotive tentacles moving in a way that could still make Annette queasy if it took her by surprise. There was barely enough space for the massive alien to pass Annette in the tube, but they managed it.

  “There is no entry scan,” the A!Tol told them quietly. “All of the tubes link to one gallery with several accesses into the main bazaar. Both public arms are set up identically. The bazaar can be intimidating—even I was intimidated when I first came here.”

  With everything that she’d seen so far, Annette took the warning seriously. It lost some of its weight, though, as they moved through the docking gallery. There was some traffic wandering through it, aliens of a dozen stripes—she recognized a Yin and a Frole, but the rest were strange to her—but the gallery itself was prosaic and wouldn’t have looked out of place on any station in Earth’s orbit.

  Then they exited the gallery into the bazaar and she stopped in her tracks, trying not to gape as she looked out into what the Laians had built as their main marketplace.

  The shipyard slip converted into a marketplace had been six kilometers long and two wide. It had been wrapped in metal and turned into an encased environment—but they hadn’t filled all of that space with corridors and rooms like a regular space station.

  The open space that made up one of Tortuga’s bazaars was at least a kilometer wide and four high. It had a clearly oriented “bottom” and “top”, with an almost-uncountable number of galleries surrounding and rising up.

  The galleries and the bottom floor were garish conglomerations of hundreds of stalls, vendors hawking an unbelieve variety of wares. In the first five seconds, Annette lost track of the number of species she saw, let alone the number of sapients.

  “My god,” she whispered.

  “I told you.”

  “How?”

  “About two hundred thousand permanent and semi-permanent residents, excluding the Crew, and at least the crew of every ship you saw docked,” the alien replied. “Not to mention a lot of the smaller ships are docked internally.”

  “There are this many pirates?”

  “Pirates, smugglers, exiles, sapients with nowhere else to go,” Ki!Tana said quietly. “The refuse of the galaxy sweeps up in places like this—but realize that even a million such wouldn’t even be a rounding error in a census of your world, let alone the A!Tol Imperium.”

  There was a sadness to the alien’s voice that the translator seemed to be picking up as the big tentacled alien surveyed the bedlam.

  “When no one will have you, you go where no one will go,” she explained. “The lucky join the pirates and smugglers. The unlucky starve. The truly unlucky fall into the hands of slavers. Do not be fooled, Captain Bond—this is the cesspit of two Empires.”

  Annette inhaled, letting the extra oxygen run into her system as she shivered at Ki!Tana’s words, then nodded firmly.

  “And it�
�s where we must do business,” she said. “Let’s find this agent of yours.”

  #

  As they moved into the bazaar, Annette realized it wasn’t quite as crowded as it appeared on first glance. Their party of armed sapients barely stood out at all, though Ki!Tana’s massive size compared to most of the species present definitely helped clear them a path, as most of the population moved in similar parties.

  The garish stalls were fronts that led into covers hung over what had probably started life as cargo containers, now upgraded with doors and locks. The front stalls mostly either contained goods Annette judged to be cheap or were closely watched by armed guards.

  They’d been in the bazaar for several minutes when all of the various aliens began to clear a path for someone else. Ki!Tana gestured with her manipulators for the humans to follow suit, and Annette stepped back with the crowd to see who was coming.

  A squad of four aliens, one Laian, one Yin, and two from a species she didn’t recognize, strode along the center of the bazaar. They clearly expected everyone to step aside and were clad in as close to a uniform as their three distinct body types would permit—the dark red bandoliers she’d seen on the Laian Captain when they’d arrived—and unlike anyone else she’d seen since boarding the station, all four carried plasma rifles.

  “Crew,” Ki!Tana said simply as the patrol past. “They don’t live in the public areas, but they do make sure they get their cut. This way.”

  The big A!Tol ducked between two of the cargo container stalls, leading the Terrans away from the main concourse toward the back of the station. They came out into another of Tortuga’s impromptu streets, but across the way from them was a surprisingly familiar-looking “outdoor” tavern.

  “We will want to get your crew protein checkers,” the A!Tol half-whispered. “Food here is usually UP, but drinks are at your own risk. Something that would make me mildly intoxicated would kill most humans. For now…just don’t order anything.”