The Terran Privateer

by Glynn Stewart

  With two crocodile-centaurs in full powered armor, if only armed with battle rifles instead of the standard plasma weapons, their path through the station was unsurprisingly smooth. Crowds parted, the roving parties of ships’ crews dodged aside, and Annette was certain she saw at least one slaver outright panic when the sapient saw humans coming, turning his people and his shackled “cargo” around in the opposite direction as quickly as they could.

  No one was trying to sell them anything, either. It was a far quieter trip through Tortuga than she’d had before, and it wasn’t just due to the power armor.

  “Did I miss something?” she muttered into the channel. “Did I accidentally install spikes and skulls on my uniform last night and not notice?”

  “Respect on Tortuga only truly comes in one flavor, Captain,” one of the Rekiki replied after a moment. “You destroyed Captain Ikwal and his crew—by the fire of your soldiers and your own words in the High Captain’s court. That you killed him with your own hand only adds to the legend already spreading about the new Terran privateer.”

  “So, they’re afraid,” she said grimly. “The slavers seem to think I’m about to go shoot them in the head and steal their slaves.”

  The soldier paused. “Would you like me to?”

  “Like? Yes,” she admitted. “But the Crew wants to continue in their apathy and I continue to need the Crew. So, not today.”

  The armored centaur glanced at where the slaver was chivvying his pathetic victims back out of sight.

  “Pity.”

  #

  When they reached the connection from the closed-in shipyards that served as Tortuga’s public markets to the main hub of the original repair ship, Annette had to leave the bodyguards behind. The only people with power armor and guns allowed in the Crew spaces were the Crew themselves.

  She was met, however, by a trio of armed Laians, who escorted her and her executive officer through the confusing, hive-like structure of the hub to the Dockmaster’s office on the opposite side of the station. They stopped upon reaching the door, gave her a silent, strange, four-arms-crossed-across-the-carapace salute, then allowed them into the office.

  Stepping into the room, Annette stopped in surprise, causing Kurzman to have to dodge briskly sideways to avoid running into her. The Dockmaster’s office was a large room with the door in the middle of its inner wall—and the outer wall entirely consumed with a massive window over the three yard slips of the station that the Crew’s Dockmaster controlled.

  Like the yard slip available to rent to most customers, two of these had been subdivided from yards designed to handle capital ships to yards designed to handle multiple cruiser-sized vessels. Many of those slips were full, though there didn’t seem to be any active work going on. There were more of the red-painted cruisers sitting in dock than it had looked like from the outside—another fifteen at least.

  Anyone who tangled with Tortuga was going to find that fleet an unpleasant surprise—assuming the Crew could man them. She didn’t know how many Laians were aboard Tortuga, but forty cruiser-sized vessels would require a lot of personnel.

  “Welcome to my office, Captain Bond,” said a small Laian, the tiniest of their adults she’d seen yet at barely a hundred and sixty centimeters tall, with a carapace that shimmered a pearlescent blue hue she hadn’t seen before. The combination suggested to Annette that the Dockmaster was actually the first female Laian she’d seen yet—outside of power armor, anyway.

  “I am Dockmaster Orentel of the Crew of Builder of Sorrows,” she greeted Annette. “Please, come in, come in. I have seats for you and Commander Kurzman, but if you wish to enjoy the view, you are welcome to stand by the window. Most of my guests do.”

  Annette inclined her head to the tiny alien with her glittering carapace, and walked over to the window. The initial shock past, she now looked past the yards, “up” to the massive gas giant Tortuga orbited.

  “Builder of Sorrows?” she asked.

  “Surely you do not think we were always called Tortuga?” Orentel asked. “It is an A!Tol word for ‘insect hive.’ While we have adopted it as our own, it was hardly complimentary when given.”

  Of course, the A!Tol word for insect hive was actually the mouthful of beak snaps the humans had decided not to use.

  “Builder of Sorrows is a nicer name,” Annette agreed, “if a sad one.”

  “We are exiles, Captain Bond, children of a Navy flotilla scattered to the interstellar winds,” the Dockmaster said quietly. “We have little to our culture, I fear, but sadness. We know the path you walk, Captain, that of a privateer without a world.”

  “I intend to retake my world,” Annette said fiercely.

  “Your intention is not in doubt,” the Laian agreed. “You are here because my High Captain sees the mirror of our sorrows in your future, Captain Bond. And because Ki!Tana brought you, and my High Captain owes her still. And because when the Kanzi attacked your people, they broke a longstanding decree of our High Captains. Showing you favor makes a point.”

  That brought a wince, for multiple reasons. Annette didn’t want her people to end up like the Laian Crew, an exiled remnant whose continued survival was utterly reliant on criminal activity. It also wasn’t pleasant to be reminded that they were largely helping her to make a point to anyone who would be tempted to follow Ikwal’s example in defying their orders.

  “Somehow, I imagine none of that means you are doing work for free,” Annette replied dryly.

  “Of course not,” Orentel confirmed. “That would be entirely inappropriate for a marketplace such as that which Tortuga has become.” She gestured with a pincer, and Annette saw that the Laian now held four small ivory sticks in her pincers—some form of data-manipulation tool, she guessed.

  A hologram appeared in the middle of the large office, showing Tornado in more detail than even Annette had seen her since they’d finished recommissioning her into United Earth Space Force service.

  “Your ship, Captain Bond,” the Laian said as the wands in her pincers flickered. “I ran the data you provided us through our modeling programs and collated our own cruisers’ close scans. Compressed-matter armor—built into the hull, not an upgrade. The tubes, oversized, designed for cruder missiles than you’re using. The proton beams, stolen. Same with the shield generator. The lasers, surprisingly efficient, though with inherent limits as a weapon system. The defense suite, extremely impressive given your apparent tech limits. Intelligent to include; too many lesser powers rely on the shield.”

  Each section flashed red as Orentel spoke.

  “No one in this sector has developed compressed-matter armor,” she noted. “The Core Powers regard it as one of their advantages over the outer empires. Your people discovered it?”

  “An accident while building exotic-matter emitters for hyperdrive arrays,” Annette admitted.

  “That is how everyone discovers it,” the Dockmaster replied. “Your hull is solid. The ship design is useful for the sort of upgrade you want. It appears that we can even physically relocate the crew quarters and command sections if needed?”

  “She was built as a test bed for rapid modification and iteration,” Tornado’s Captain agreed.

  “There is much I can do to your ship,” Orentel finally noted, walking around the model and studying it. “Inefficient to upgrade the launchers, have to cut new holes in armor, never easy with compressed matter. Take hundreds, possibly thousands, of hours.”

  The wands whirred and huge chunks of the ship lit up.

  “Beams. Engines. Shields. All require power,” she concluded. “It all depends, Captain Bond, on what you can afford.”

  Annette had been waiting for that and quickly checked her communicator screen. It had the latest estimate from Ondu of what he’d be able to sell their remaining prizes and cargo for and how much would go to her and the ship’s accounts.

  “And that, Dockmaster, depends on how good of a price you’re going to give us,” she said, leaning forward to
start the inevitable dickering.

  Chapter 38

  They had been hectic, terrifying, dangerous days, but Tornado had been docked at Tortuga for only five days when Annette called of her senior officers into a meeting on her return from the Crew’s portion of Tortuga.

  Ki!Tana had apparently only just left her room, but there was more vibrancy to her skin now, a few more spots of color in the hazy gray of her normal calm. The gray-black pained tones of the previous day were muted, only an occasional flicker of darker gray to suggest she wasn’t fully back to normal.

  Annette studied her officers, concealing a smile at changes in the seating arrangements that no one had discussed and carried notable implications. Captain Elizabeth Sade—a civilian, technically, and also completely out of anyone’s chain of command—had shifted to sit next to Commander Rolfson. Lieutenant Commanders Chan and Metharom—communications and engineering respectively, so out of each other’s chain of command—had been shifted together by the change and seemed completely unconcerned.

  Wellesley and Kurzman had been sitting together before, so no change there. The changes had shifted Amandine and Lougheed together and that pair seemed bemused more than anything else.

  As she and Kurzman had discussed, everyone appeared to be pairing off. While none of the relationships violated protocol, several Annette was aware of came close. Were they in Sol and she was seeing this many couples forming up, she’d endeavor to transfer some of them to other ships just to minimize the number of distracted crew.

  In their current state, however, anything that tied their crew together more tightly was to her benefit. They would fight harder for each other, and the pressures of their exiled existence would probably prevent too many ugly breakups.

  “All right, people,” she announced once everyone had settled in. “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we have a deal with the Crew and will be shifting over to a slip in their yards in”—she checked her watch—“twenty-seven hours.

  “They will be installing two brand-new antimatter power cores in our currently empty spaces, upgrading four of our existing fusion cores to approximately five times their original power density, and ripping out the last three cores to free up volume,” she noted.

  “They’re going to use that free volume to enable them to completely rearrange the existing internal crew and power modules to allow for a significant increase in beam-weapon volume. We’re losing the last of our lasers in favor of more proton beams, and they’ll upgrade our existing two beams to the same standard—again, one superior to that of current generation A!Tol cruisers.”

  She smiled grimly.

  “Lastly, while the Laians are impressed that we had a missile defense suite, they think ours is adorable. They’re going to rip it out completely and replace it with something that translates, roughly, as ‘deadly rainshower defenders’. I have no idea what that means, but it’s supposed to be more effective.”

  “They are rapid-fire, close-range plasma cannons,” Ki!Tana explained. “If they are providing the full suite, it should come with a number of similarly equipped autonomous drones.”

  “It’s the full suite,” Annette confirmed, “though I’m warned replacement drones will cost us an arm and a leg, which brings me to our bad news.”

  She surveyed her officers, watching them lean forward, wondering what other shoe was going to drop—except for Kurzman, who knew, and Ki!Tana, who clearly guessed.

  “We are officially broke,” she said flatly. “If Ondu sells significantly below his estimates, we will actually be in debt to the Crew when the work is done, which I doubt is a good idea. My own personal accounts are also gone, as are the XO’s, and we sold Faces of God right back to them without even looking at the ship they handed us.

  “Sorry, Major,” she nodded to Wellesley, “but Tornado cannot afford to acquire power armor for your people. Or, well, anything. If anyone of you want to offer the flotilla a loan from your own accounts, it would be very much appreciated,” she finished dryly.

  “I’ve already pooled resources with my Troop Captains,” the SSS Major replied. “We have an appointment with an armorer tomorrow. I am not sending my troops up against power armor without matching gear again.”

  “I appreciate it, Major,” Annette told him honestly. “I wasn’t looking forward to asking you to. We will repay you—as soon as Tornado is upgraded and we can go hunting again.”

  “How long will that be?” Lougheed asked.

  “Thirty days, give or take a few hours,” she replied. “The translator turned whatever units they used into seven hundred and twenty-six hours. Another downside of this deal is that we won’t have schematics, so there’s no point sneaking back into Sol to send the designs to the Weber cells. I asked,” she noted dryly.

  Of Course We’re Coming Back’s Captain glanced at Sade, who nodded to him.

  “I think Elizabeth and I can fund whatever costs we run until then,” he offered. As junior Captains, they’d received significant shares in the prizes taken. More than enough to cover the maintenance costs and food that would arise for all three ships for thirty days.

  “Thank you,” Annette said softly. “At least, not needing to go home means we can start hunting again as soon as we’re good to go. The Network may be able to reverse engineer the Laian work, but they’ll need time—time in which we need this ship if we’re to make a difference.”

  She glanced around her officers.

  “We’re going to have an odd month ahead of us,” she told them. “I’m not comfortable sending Of Course or Oaths out without Tornado for backup, so we’re all going to be sitting around Tortuga. Let’s try to keep our people out of trouble, shall we?

  “If you have more questions or concerns, now is the time.”

  Thoughtful gazes suggested she’d have more questions later, but for now, everyone was silent.

  “All right. Ki!Tana.” She glanced at the strange alien who’d attached herself to Annette. “Meet me in my office,” she ordered. “Everyone else, dismissed.”

  #

  Back in Annette’s office, she gestured Ki!Tana to the specially designed couch she now kept there for the big alien. The A!Tol dropped herself over it with a slight flush of pleasure and gestured with a manipulator tentacle for the Captain to speak.

  “Are you all right, Ki!Tana?” Annette asked. She looked better than the previous day, but the alien had been pretty far gone by the evening.

  “It is…complicated,” her companion said slowly. “In a purely medical sense, I am no better off than I was yesterday. Some days are easier than others, but the underlying conditions remain. Were I to be tested by a physician qualified in A!Tol physiology who did not know what I was, they would recommend you say your final goodbyes.”

  That was not what Annette had expected to hear. So much of what she’d heard of the strange alien companion that she’d acquired suggested that Ki!Tana had been around for a very long time, and she’d subconsciously assumed that the A!Tol would be around for a long time.

  “Are you dying?” she asked.

  “No,” Ki!Tana said crisply. “I am Ki!Tol. I have already died and a new soul risen from who I was.”

  “I am lost,” Annette admitted. “Start at the beginning, I guess?”

  “The beginning is the physiology of the A!Tol, of which you know almost nothing,” the alien told her. “Our males live and die as you would, growing slower with time. They are…not so bright to begin with. But that is an outdated attitude, I suppose,” she continued with a flush of yellow in her skin.

  “We have…more distinct differences between our two genders than you humans do,” she noted, “though our males are more capable than we allowed them to be once. They are still rare among our senior military and top scientists.”

  “I thought the A!Tol who conquered Earth was male?” Annette asked, curious.

  “Tan!Shallegh is, yes,” Ki!Tana agreed. “The Tan! marks him as a first-degree relation of the Empress,
born from the brood of one of the Empress’s brood-sisters. He has advantages to offset our gender prejudice. Were he female, he would be on the list of potential heirs to our current Empress.” Her manipulators fluttered in a shrug. “But he is not, and we are not that enlightened with our males.”

  “Your females are bigger on average, as I understand,” Annette said slowly. “That can’t help.”

  “It does not. We are larger, stronger, heal much faster, and we regard ourselves as smarter,” the alien said calmly. “Unlike our males, our females grow until we die. We can even replace lost tentacles, where our males cannot.”

  Tornado’s Captain considered what all of that would have meant for, say, medieval or early gunpowder combat troops, and shivered. She could see why males had become the sheltered, “gentler” sex for the A!Tol.

  “What we lack,” Ki!Tana continued, “is an internal gestation chamber. We do not have any mechanism in our bodies to feed our young while they grow—and we do not lay eggs.”

  Annette looked at her alien friend in confusion—then in horror as just what that meant sunk in.

  “Our embryos literally consume us from the inside out,” the A!Tol said flatly, her skin flushing purple with sadness. “We have, in thousands of years of study and science, never found a way to prevent carrying our young to term internally from being fatal.”

  “Surely, by now you can get around that?” Annette asked. Even humans had mastered ex-vivo gestation by the end of the twenty-first century—an invention that had dramatically slowed the decrease in births in the world’s middle class.

  “We had the ability to extract gametes, artificially fertilize them, and bring them to live birth externally before we had computers, Captain Bond,” Ki!Tana told her. “Which led us to the most horrifying scientific side effect our species has ever encountered.”

  Annette waited in silence. This was something she probably could have researched, now that they were at Tortuga and had access to galaxy-wide databases. Hearing it from her friend, which was what Ki!Tana had somehow become, made it so much more immediate.