The Terran Privateer

by Glynn Stewart

  “I do not have antibiotics or painkillers for your species,” he said quietly. “But I can bandage her wounds if you will let me.”

  Amita trained the stunner on him, but then Mosi shifted, her hands finally releasing the Kanzi’s neck as more blood leaked from her. The young specialist nodded sharply, allowing the big alien to approach Mosi with his bandages.

  “Ma’am,” Wei Lin said quietly from the door. “My god…”

  “Sergeant—help Tellaki,” Annette ordered as soon as she realized her guard was there. “Have his people break ours out. Their uniforms have to be around here somewhere.”

  “I’ll help her,” Lin promised as she crossed the room. “We’ll get it sorted. But you’re needed—the Crew are here.”

  All Annette wanted to do was tear the entire station apart, bolt by bolt and rivet and rivet, and destroy every goddamned alien who’d ever crossed her path. She wanted to pull up her communicator and order Kurzman to fire up the proton beams and rip the station to pieces.

  Instead, she nodded and stepped back, letting the Sergeant get to work while she stepped out into the main warehouse to see how bad the situation had become.

  #

  The Rekiki who had rejoined her crew were forming a rough blockade across the entrance, resolutely barring entry to the warehouse to the squad of power-armored Crew soldiers. All of these soldiers, Annette noted as she approached the standoff, were Laian. None of their recruits from other races; these were born and bred Crew.

  “Are you in charge here?” asked one of them, presumably the leader as his armor was marked with gold symbols that meant nothing to Annette. He was apparently making the same judgment on the fact that she was the only one in a uniform, battered as it was.

  “These are my crew, yes,” she replied as calmly as she could. The translator would lose most of her emotion, but homicidal rage was no answer to battle armor.

  “This facility is not registered to you,” the Laian commander told her. “Weapons have been fired, people are dead, and you do not belong here. Your explanation?”

  “Fifteen members of my crew were kidnapped by the scum that owned this place,” she replied, managing to only spit the one word. “Since you failed to protect them, we acted to retrieve them.”

  “You are not permitted to engage in lethal force except in immediate self-defense,” the Laian officer reminded her. “This should have been reported.”

  “I was told to do nothing,” she said coldly. “These people tried to rape one of my crew, who is now dying. Had I waited longer, more of my crew would have died. If you want to make an issue of my protecting my crew, you’re going to have to fight me for it.”

  She was familiar with the body language of neither species around her and she could still feel the tension ratcheting up. Defiance wouldn’t help—even with Tellaki’s people, she had light body armor and submachine guns versus power armor and plasma weapons.

  “This situation has already passed simple solutions, Captain Bond,” the Laian said after a long moment. “It seems the owners of this facility have remote access to the security systems. Captain Ikwal of the Kanzi vessel Faces of God is apparently dead, but his second-in-command has filed a formal complaint against you for an illegal assault and the murder of his Captain.”

  He paused, seeming to wait for a response from her. She stared at him for a long moment until he made a distinct “come on” gesture and she realized what he needed.

  “Where, sir, would I be able to file an official complaint against them for kidnapping and murder of my crew?” she demanded.

  “As it happens, you would need to file that report with an officer of the Crew such as myself,” he said smoothly. “Contrasting complaints would require arbitration by the High Captain. If you are prepared to surrender yourself as security for the good behavior of your crew, I can place this facility under lockdown but allow your crew to return to your ship unimpeded.”

  “May I bring a companion?” she asked, glancing around for Ki!Tana. The big alien wasn’t part of the blockade at the door—apparently because she’d found cover big enough to protect her. Bond waved the A!Tol over to join them.

  “Ah, Ki!Tana,” the Laian officer greeted the alien. “I was warned you would be involved.” He turned to Annette. “The Ki! will not be permitted into the arbitration process, as it is only for Captains, but she may accompany you until then if you surrender and make that complaint.” He paused, glancing up at the suspended second floor, where the holding cells had been concealed. “I will also have our doctors see if we can assist with your wounded crew.”

  Annette nodded swiftly before she could change her mind.

  “Very well.”

  Chapter 35

  Major James Wellesley arrived at the warehouse at a much slower pace and with much less shooting than he’d originally planned. He and his Troop Captains had paused at the original rendezvous point for two of his troops to catch up with them, and they now approached the Crew soldiers guarding the warehouse with the somewhat-illusory advantage of numbers.

  Without power armor for his humans and unwilling to break their restriction on weapons, his thirty-odd troopers were no match for the ten Laians in power armor. That was not really the point: the point was to impress on the Crew how seriously Tornado’s crew took recovering their people.

  The status of the power-armored insectoids, though, was nothing like what he expected. While two were maintaining a very clear, alert guard, most of them had doffed their helmets and appeared to be relatively relaxed.

  They also didn’t react to the humans showing up with thirty more armed troops at all.

  With a sigh, James approached the Laian with the most gold filigree on his armor and threw a crisp salute.

  “Major James Wellesley, Tornado,” he introduced himself. “I’m here to escort our people back to my ship.”

  “Of course, Major,” the Laian replied. “I am Second Lance Pekelon. All of your people are inside, except for your Lieutenant Mosi, who has been transferred to the main medical facility in the Crew section of the ship, and Sergeant Lin who insisted on accompanying her.

  “Well, and Captain Bond and Ki!Tana, of course, who will shortly be facing the High Captain to decide the fate of your ship for this action,” he added, a minor and apparently unimportant addition.

  “Thank you,” James said slowly. “Am I permitted to retrieve them, Second Lance?”

  “You are,” the…junior noncommissioned officer, he thought, told him. “I do need to otherwise maintain lockdown of this facility until the High Captain has completed his judgment. I can only spare two troopers to escort you.”

  “I appreciate the assistance,” he said gravely. Sadly, two power-armored and plasma weapon–armed troopers probably were more of an escort than his thirty-plus humans with assault rifles.

  “I never said anything, Major,” Pekelon said quietly, “but the Kanzi deserved to be driven from our station a long time ago. You will not find many Crew mourning their shed blood.”

  He stepped back, waving for James to lead his people in and rescue their fellows.

  #

  The Laian Commander took Annette’s statement and complaint with quickly efficient questions, clearly processing a translated version of her comments into their system via software in his helmet, as his troops escorted them through the warehouse district, through an unprepossessing hatch, and into a concealed rapid transit system.

  A small pod whisked them away to the original central hull of Tortuga, where they were led to a small waiting room carefully painted with murals of a strange and unfamiliar world.

  “The seat is for a Yin,” the Laian told Annette, gesturing to one of the two chairs. “It should work for your species. There is a cupboard with water over there.” He gestured with an armored claw. “Please make yourself comfortable.”

  The armored insect-like alien bowed, a weird bending movement in his case, and left the room—leaving Annette and Ki!Tana alone for the momen
t. The big A!Tol settled onto the odd curved bench her race used as seats and shivered slightly, her skin still the gray-black of minor distress.

  “Are you all right, Ki!Tana?” Annette asked as she settled into her own chair. “You seem to have been in pain all day.”

  “It is a long explanation,” her companion replied. “One we will not have time for today, but some days are worse for me than others. I have carried my burden for a long time, Captain Bond, and I will carry it for some long cycles yet.”

  “Your burden?”

  “We don’t have time,” Ki!Tana repeated. “Realize before you go into this meeting that the High Captain can seize your ships and all of your accounts. You do not have the force to stop him.”

  A chill ran down Annette’s spine.

  “Would he do that?” she asked, realizing at last how much danger her instinctive reaction to protect her crew had put them all in.

  Ki!Tana made a small grinding noise and Annette realized she was quite literally grinding her beak against itself. Whatever was wrong with the A!Tol, it was getting worse.

  “I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “If it remains Ridotak, you benefit from knowing me. He should be, but changes of High Captain are not announced or advertised.

  “Even if not, you merely defied a Crew giving an order on the spot. The Kanzi have broken a longstanding Crew dictate, one the Crew values highly. So long as you do not anger the High Captain, the odds are in your favor. Just…remember that this being could end your campaign with a word.”

  “I will,” Annette promised. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I have overexerted myself, given my state,” the alien admitted. “I will be fine, but if you would be so kind as to fetch me water? Moving would be…difficult.”

  Annette grabbed a bottle of water, clearly designed to be easily drunk from by as many species as possible, for the other sapient and passed it over.

  “If they don’t talk about the High Captain, how do you know who it is?” she asked. “For that matter, they knew you.”

  Ki!Tana swallowed the entire contents of the water bottle in a single extended gulp, and turned her black eyes on Annette, flashes of red and blue barely visible on her skin despite the overwhelming gray of her current state.

  “If Ridotak remains High Captain, he will tell you anyway,” she admitted. “There was a time, Captain Bond, before I served Kikitheth, when I was Crew. And at the end of that time, before I set out into the galaxy to see if there were other paths for me to walk, Ridotak was my Captain.”

  #

  They were most of the way back to Tornado when James’s finely tuned professional paranoia exploded. His lead element, a five-man patrol from his Alpha Troop, had entered the long gallery linking all of the docking tubes on this side of the station. The gallery was empty, with even less traffic than when they’d arrived. The access corridor most of the group were still in was still lightly occupied, with a couple of cargo movers moving toward the gallery access…

  “Everybody to the walls!” he bellowed. “Ambush close!”

  The SSS troopers knew the meaning of that command and bodily grabbed the still-shaky ship crewmen and -women who weren’t trained in the Special Space Service’s lexicon of danger commands.

  Even before the two cargo movers had reached his people, all of the spacers were against the walls and down, with kneeling SSS troopers covering them and aiming at the vehicles.

  The two Laian escorts seemed to freeze in the confusion. One realized what James had seen as a threat and stepped out to challenge the two cargo movers. They were unmanned vehicles, normally, and sensors and safety protocols meant they supposedly couldn’t hit anything, let alone a sapient.

  So, of course the multi-ton transport vehicle drove straight over him, smashing the insectoid alien to the ground and grinding to a halt on his power armor. The vehicle’s engine whirred, unable to push farther as the armor wasn’t going to be damaged or flattened by a civilian cargo hauler.

  The second Laian reacted to that—by putting three plasma bolts into the engine block of the second hauler. It careened to a halt in a crashing ball of flame.

  And then the gunfire started. Kanzi in body armor—only two, thankfully, in power armor—swarmed out of the first hauler and opened fire. Plasma fire slammed into the still-standing Crew trooper in a hail of superheated white flame. Power armor was tough, tough stuff, but not that tough.

  The Laian still managed to spray fire back at his attackers, fire burning through regular body armor like it wasn’t even there, before collapsing backward, cooked in his own suit.

  He had bought James’s people precious seconds. Seconds they put to deadly use.

  James hadn’t expected to fight the Crew when they caught up to them, but they hadn’t known that—or that the Kanzi wouldn’t have power armor—when they left the ship. The two troops who’d caught up with him had under-barrel grenade launchers strapped to their rifles.

  In the seconds the Laian’s sacrifice bought them, they carefully targeted the launchers and opened fire with a salvo of armor-piercing grenades “liberated” from the armories of A!Tol military freighters. A dozen Kanzi from the jammed hauler were still standing, and two power-armored figures were hauling themselves out of the burning wreckage of the other.

  Each took at least one grenade, and then James’s people followed up a fusillade of armor-piercing bullets. The rounds were far from enough to threaten the power-armored soldiers…but they proved entirely redundant.

  Thirty grenades went off in an ear-crashing cacophony of bright flashes from the deadly spikes of plasma the weapons flashed into the nearest mass when they triggered.

  When the noise and the light cleared, none of the Kanzi were still standing. Blood and bits of blue fur were splattered across the remaining hauler, the walls, the roof.

  “Get the hauler off our armored friend,” James snapped, swallowing his stomach’s attempt to empty itself at the smell of burnt fur and flesh. The grenades had been designed to kill power armor. Against regular infantry, they’d been pure overkill. “I think the blue-furred bastards just cut their own throats, but let’s earn ourselves some goodwill.”

  Chapter 36

  The room they were in was apparently sufficiently shielded to prevent Annette from linking in to either the station’s network or her direct connection to Tornado. Nonetheless, her communicator at least gave her the time, which let her know that it was a little over forty minutes before the door to their comfortable holding area opened again.

  Two Laians entered, clad in the red bandoliers that seemed to serve as regular working uniforms for the Crew, but with somewhat more gold embroidery. The lead, somewhat larger than the other—so female, as Annette understood Laian physiology—bowed to Annette and Ki!Tana.

  “I am First Spear Podule,” she greeted Annette. “We are your escort to the hearing.”

  “The hearing was put together that quickly?” Annette asked, somewhat surprised. The High Captain ran a space station that rivaled a small city. She would have expected it to take more than an hour to pull him free to organize a hearing.

  Tornado was a lot smaller, and she was pretty sure she’d need more than an hour to sort out a hearing for infractions by her unless…well, unless it was something extremely serious.

  “The situation is unusual and of high priority,” Podule told her as she finished her thought. “It has been some time since a series of incidents of this scale and severity has occurred aboard Tortuga.”

  The insectoid alien gestured for Annette to follow her and left. With no choice but to obey, Annette nodded to Ki!Tana and followed, the second Laian falling in behind her.

  Annette’s sense of direction was good even in three-dimensional space, but as the Laians led her deeper into the central hub of the old shipyard, she quickly lost track of her location. The hub was laid out in in a series of concentric circular corridors that spiraled up and down to reach new levels. Rooms were presumably sandwich
ed between, but Annette only saw connecting corridors and stairwells.

  Finally, well after they’d managed to get Tornado’s Captain completely lost, the latest gently curving corridor terminated at a massive security hatch, a heavy black metal blast door that likely protected either Tortuga’s bridge or a similar nerve center.

  Their exit was about five meters before the hatch, a side door that slid aside to allow them access into a mid-sized conference room that, other than the chairs and the occupants, would have looked perfectly normal anywhere in Sol.

  The tables had been set up in a rough U shape. The top of the table was already occupied by three Laians, one absolutely immense one in a bandolier that eschewed gold embroidery for simply being gold, clearly marking its wearer as the leader of the Laians, the High Captain of Tortuga.

  Either the pickup, the trip up, or both, had clearly been very carefully timed. At the same moment as Podule led Annette into the room and gestured her to a chair that would fit her physiology, a Kanzi with pure dark blue fur was led in the other side of the conference room and placed in the seat exactly opposite Annette.

  This was the first chance she’d had to study a living Kanzi, and she was almost disturbed by how humanlike the alien’s features were. Despite being barely a hundred and fifty centimeters tall and covered in blue fur, the being across from her was one of the most human-looking sapients she’d seen so far.

  “Captain Annette Bond, Oath Keeper Waltan Cawl, you have left me with an aggravating dilemma,” the gold-clad Laian told them. “I am High Captain Ridotak, the leader of the Crew and the ruler of Tortuga. It has been many years since such a series of crimes has been committed on my station. What am I to do with you?”

  “That thing murdered my Captain!” the Kanzi Oath Keeper—presumably a rank of some kind—bellowed, pointing at Annette. “Shot him in the head with her own hands.”