“Danny, you would go if it were you. You told me about those times you wouldn’t quit, even though you were hurt.”
That stopped me cold. What could I have said? Then I realized what she was talking about. Football! It was my football stories, which Jaenna always enjoyed. I had told her about the time I played with a separated shoulder and the time I stayed in with a fractured cheekbone. Little had I known that Jaenna would put my stories on the same plane as the war stories old Haranyi used to tell her. There was a vast difference between playing hurt in a game and leading a boarding party with a shot-up hip. To Jaenna, that wasn’t apparent. If it was only a game, she must have reasoned, why would you play when you were hurt? (Good question.) I could only assume that something had been lost in the translation.
I tried one more time to talk her out of it. “Jaenna, you can’t lead your force if you can’t walk. You’ve trained them well. They’ll do fine.” Angel nodded vigorously to lend support to my argument.
Jaenna wouldn’t buy it. “They are good,” she agreed. “But they have to be led. And that means me. I will be all right. Ramorir has the bleeding stopped and you heard him say the bone’s not damaged. He can give me enough fluorocarbon to make up for the blood loss and then he can rig my suit to drip in endorphin so I can ignore the hip.”
I looked questioningly at Ramorir. He shrugged.
“Technically, of course, I can do it,” he said. “Medically, I don’t think it is advisable.”
“You’re the physician,” Jaenna snapped. “You’re supposed to do what is technically possible and let me worry about what is advisable.” I had to agree with Angel. She was a stubborn chick.
Further argument was cut off by the ship-in-action. The Carrillacki weren’t going to wait while we thrashed it out. There was nothing to do but race for the bridge. Unless she collapsed in the corridor, Jaenna was going to be on one of those attack boats.
The view from the bridge was just what I expected. The two Carrillacki were on the same course as Franny, although far astern and still out of effective range. Franny was running at well below full thrust, which was allowing them to close the gap. From the data on the screen, it was going to be hours before we were close.
I let it run that way a little longer, then Andrave mustered the strike force and we dropped the boats. This time, there was no lurch, no perceptible sign that they had launched. Only Andrave’s announcement told me. After that, there was nothing to do but wait. Wait, and hope that the boats were not noticed, until the computer had the right solution to the courses of three ships and three small boats. The moment came as a surprise, even though we had been expecting it. The perimeter of the screen flashed green. Numbers appeared by the ship positions there, and more importantly, on the Navigation and Helm screens as well. Farad flipped Franny around her short long axis and gave her full acceleration directly at the Carrillacki. In what seemed like no time, Ruoni reported effective weapons range and beams and shots reached out across the intervening space.
Usually, I approach battle with a distinct sensation in my gut. I wouldn’t call it butterflies. It’s more like impending diarrhea. In spite of how things have turned out, God didn’t make this boy to be a soldier. When we vectored in on the Carrillacki though, my stomach wasn’t bothering me. I wanted to hit Aalaza where it hurt. I wanted to nail those ships.
We opened the fight at a disadvantage, opposed by two ships. They separated as they approached. Four missiles shot toward us, two from each enemy ship. Franny’s computer found solutions and the screen markers representing them began to flash. Volley after volley of counter-missiles shot off. The screen filled with the positions of fast-moving, dangerous objects. That was when the bombardment from the Carrillacki railguns began in earnest. The beamers on our small defensive weapons went after those. Showers of purple and red splashed off the shields. Space around the three ships was filled with firefly sparkles as the beamers picked off the shot. They vanished from sight, temporarily swamped by the light from four successive sunbursts as the Carrillacki missiles were intercepted. Round one to Franny’s space defense.
Just as this engagement was taking place, just as the computer had worked it out, the Carrillacki unknowingly passed our attack boats. All at once, their engines came to life. The Carrillacki destroyer was nearby. Now three attack boats converged on it from all sides. The Carrillacki captain had no chance to maneuver, and little chance to shoot. Our boats docked with the destroyer. Very shortly, that destroyer would cease to be a factor in the battle.
While this was happening, Franny drove straight for the cruiser, all weapons targeted on that ship. A shudder ran though the hull, announcing that one shot hadn’t been picked up by the beamers. We traded blows with the cruiser, all the while trying to angle away from the destroyer, which had not yet stopped firing. The cruiser’s captain fired another pair of missiles. A lucky beam burned through and caught one of them just as it launched. It detonated within field goal range of the cruiser. The wave front of the explosion was enough to bounce even that massive ship. The blast also dissipated the shield and, before it could be reestablished, Franny’s beams cut into the cruiser.
“Missiles?” Ruoni asked.
“At your discretion, Fire Control.”
Two broadswords flew toward the cruiser. Either the missile blast or our beams must have damaged their defensive fire control system, because the cruiser fired only one volley of counter-missiles, and those were late. Both broadswords connected and, for a moment, twin stars burned where the Carrillacki had been. I was so intent on the screen, I almost missed Andrave’s announcement that the destroyer had been taken. The entire action, from the time we started shooting to the finish, had lasted only fifteen minutes.
I was afraid to call Medical to inquire about Strike Force casualties. Andrave called anyway as a matter of routine and, like it or not, I was on the comm with Ramorir. Unsurprisingly, Jaenna had been shipped back among the casualties. Fortunately, there were no new wounds. It was simply that a little extra fluorocarbon and some painkiller don’t compensate for being burned through a hip. She had collapsed early in the fighting, barely off the boat in fact. Rather than demoralizing her troops, however, her collapse had had the opposite effect. According to Angel, when she went down the strike force went berserk. The Carrillacki crew had been cut to pieces, too fast for them to organize their resistance, almost too fast for them to surrender. There were few prisoners. And we had ourselves a mint condition kvenningari destroyer.
Not surprisingly, Aalaza was on the comm shortly after the battle. If you figure the lags for the instruments on Calldlamm to pick up the result of the battle, and the time for his beam to reach Franny, he must have started broadcasting the instant he saw the cruiser go boom. God, he was a smarmy bastard. Everything was sweetness and light again and now he was offering me a squadron commander’s commission. Never mind that he had tried to kill us on Calldlamm, and then tried to blow the whole ship. When I pointed out these aspects of our relationship, Aalaza brushed them off as irrelevant and ancient history.
“This is reasonable, from his perspective,” Ruoni said on an inside channel while the conversation was going on. “By taking out those two ships, you just confirmed that your services are worth buying. At the same time, he no longer has the ships to coerce us if you balk.”
I guess this explanation probably would have made sense to an Imperial sophisticate; it just made me angrier. What I wanted to do was to stuff Aalaza’s boots into his mouth, heels first. That was just what I told him, too, and then I told him to go suck on a missile. I broke the connection before he could say anything else.
I had, in effect, declared war on Aalaza. Calldlamm didn’t make its living from trade, but it did import and export significant quantities of goods. We met the first merchanter to lift off Calldlamm after the action before it had even cleared the outer gas giants of the system. We sank a missile into it without any preliminaries. The point was not lost on Calldlamm command. That w
as the last merchanter to lift off while we remained in system. We just withdrew to a wide orbit and watched the wormholes. When a merchanter popped in, we went for it. We bagged three in a row. The last one we had to chase clear to Calldlamm orbit, since it had entered from a wormhole diametrically opposed to our position in the system. We took it anyway, giving Aalaza a front-row view of what we were doing to his formerly profitable trade.
That put Aalaza back on the comm. He wasn’t quite so smooth as the previous time. Shitting his pants would be closer the mark; he understood how precarious his position was. He had no ships in the system that could challenge Franny. The only way he could send for help would be to send two or three of his light ships running to different wormholes in order to guarantee that one would escape. Doing so would increase Calldlamm’s vulnerability to a raid and wouldn’t make him look very good to Carrillacki leadership. His other option, however, was to do nothing, in which case we could keep a stranglehold on him until we got bored or ran out of weapons. It gave him incentive to return to an old idea. This time, it wasn’t just the squadron commander’s commission. He was also willing to throw in a trading station that Calldlamm owned in the Outer Empire.
“Andrave, tell the good governor that it is reaching the point that I would like to talk it over with him. Tell him that we are going to make orbit and that I want to see those defense stations stand down. They are to allow our computer to link to them. If we pick up any activity, he can kiss his ass good-bye.”
Ruoni gave me a concerned look as Andrave relayed the message. “At this point, I wouldn’t trust him at all,” he said. “You have pushed him too far to play games with first loyalty.”
“I don’t trust him at all, Ruoni. I just think he deserves a proper reply. Acquire solutions for those defense stations in our vicinity as we come in.”
Gingerly, we moved in toward Calldlamm. The position of the missile armed stations appeared on the screen. Three of Calldlamm’s light support ships were with them. The computer confirmed that Aalaza was obeying our instructions. He came back on the comm when Franny reached her planned orbit. He offered to meet me on an orbiting boat to work out an agreement. He sounded sincere. With him still on the screen, I turned to Ruoni and said, “Weapons at your discretion, Fire Control.”
I had the satisfaction of seeing the rage on Aalaza’s face before the connection was broken. Ruoni responded in an instant. Three starbursts shone over Calldlamm as Franny hit the nearby stations. One of them managed a single missile shot; our counter- missiles killed it easily. Two of the light ships moved to attack when we opened fire, showing more bravery than common sense. One caught a broadsword and vanished. The other went to pieces in a hail of shot from the railguns.
“Fire Control,” I asked, “how accurately can you hit the Kordon spaceport with the torpedoes?”
“From this orbit, no problem. We’ll take down part of the adjacent city, though.”
“High yield, but nonnuclear. Fire at discretion.”
Minutes later smoke was billowing from multiple overlapping craters where the port had stood. Aalaza had his reply.
Who the hell says I can’t throw the bomb?
Chapter 19
The next several months were profitable ones for the good ship Francis Drake. The combined haul from the merchanters we’d taken at Calldlamm, plus the cynta deal, plus that perfectly good prize destroyer left our coffers overflowing with cash. It silenced, with finality, all the accumulated grumbling. It also allowed us to indulge in some luxuries, including full armor. There were some retirements, crew who were glad to take their share and go to ground on some convenient world, but with the reputation Franny had built, and the cash to prove it, replacements were easy to come by.
The important point was that none of the key officers left. That was the vote of confidence without which the continued survival of a freebooter was mere luck. Our activity did cause attrition through casualties, a cost of doing business, you might say. I never became completely callous to individual losses, but I did learn to think of the ship and crew as a whole rather than dwelling too much on the individuals. Again, thankfully, none of our casualties came from our officers, and especially not Jaenna, who recovered nicely from the wound she received on Calldlamm.
During this period, there was no further mention of Jaenna returning to Kaaran. More precisely, Jaenna never mentioned the subject and I tried to avoid thinking about it. There was no pressing need because, regardless of her social background, she seemed well suited to the life we were leading. Of course, that way of thinking may have only been my convenient rationalization for prolonging our relationship.
With the ship running smoothly, I finally had a chance to learn my job. Not to say that I learned how a starship really works or even how to fly it. I could have spent most of my lifespan studying and not learned enough for that. But that wasn’t essential for the captain. The captain’s job was to make the critical judgment calls. His officers and crew, if they were good, and mine were, took care of the rest. Looking back at some of my earlier choices in the fight for Franny and on Calldlamm, it was a miracle that any of us were alive. Despite this, there had been little, if any, dissent. It seemed that unless Srihani were ready for an open break, betrayal or rebellion, they were obedient to authority. Sometimes, I could detect approval or disapproval of a decision, but there would never be an open question once I had taken a position. As soon as I realized this, I was happy to get all the decision-making practice I could swatting merchanters.
We were also gaining notoriety in the stations of the Outer Empire. It was easy to slip into some establishment that favored the free flow of intoxicants and hear an amusing ballad about what we had done to Aalaza. Probably, it was that incident, more than any other, that earned us a place in the folklore of the Outer Empire. All our other actions were built around it and embroidered into one continuous story. Those whose first loyalty was to kvenningari would flinch at the songs, which just made them more popular among the freebooters. When our crew was on the premises, well, things sometimes got out of hand. The body count became inflated and found its way into a new stanza. It was a good thing I never read my press clippings.
If they were good months for us, they were calamitous for the empire, for reasons totally unrelated to our activity. Either Aalaza had had only part of the facts, or had been telling only part of the truth, when he told us of Jerem’s fate. The emperor had indeed been suckered and betrayed at Albane, and then defeated in a series of battles running across the Outer Empire. He had, ultimately, surrendered to Carrillacki ships.
He had not, however, become a Carrillacki puppet as Aalaza had claimed, but had died by his own hand after the surrender. His death created a peculiar situation for the empire, one that had its roots in the troubles of the Imperial line over the past several centuries. Regular crops of assassinations and battles for control of the emperor, following the destruction of Srihan, had greatly reduced the number of possible pretenders to the throne. Jerem had been a powerful planetary governor prior to becoming emperor, one of the few, according to Jaenna, whose power exceeded that of her father. The only reason that he had been accepted as emperor was that, at the time, he was the only survivor of the Imperial line.
The Great Kvenningari had been unhappy with the choice, but had been unwilling to destroy the fiction of an independent emperor. When Jerem had moved to make it a reality, and to reassert the old Imperial prerogatives, the kvenningari had moved against him, even at the cost of sending their units into action against the Fleet. The fact of that battle sent tremors through the empire that no amount of denial could completely calm.
The Carrillacki and their accomplices had wanted a puppet, not a corpse. Jerem had only one son, and he had disappeared during the fighting leaving no suitable candidate for the throne. The kvenningari set about finding candidates by means of gene maps—a clever high tech successor to the family tree. This created about a dozen candidates with some level of military suppo
rt, but the kvenningari could not come to a consensus, or even develop enough support for one to push the others aside. The Fleet sat on its hands and the empire began to dissolve. In the midst of this, Jonthar a Jerem turned up. He had a reputation as a libertine, but he set about rallying the Fleet as best he could, setting it on a collision course with the kvenningari. The way things were going, I figured that we would be able to raid into the Inner Empire within a year.
It was against this backdrop that Franny docked at Tetragrammaton and I learned that the station manager had an urgent message for me. We traded regularly at Tetragrammaton Station, so that it was a logical place for a message to reach me. Despite past history, the association wasn’t as odd as it seemed. Tetragrammaton was a good station, very busy with connections everywhere. On our side, we were dependable when it came to bringing in loot, so they weren’t much bothered that I had once absconded with the Flower. Carvalho would have been bothered, no question about it, but no one had heard of the Flying Whore for months. Possibly, he had changed bases. Possibly, he had caught a missile. Regardless, I liked Tetragrammaton. Walk down the corridors of Tetragrammaton Station wearing Franny’s insignia and heads turned. It was like being a football star all over again.
The station manager at Tetragrammaton was named Loraan. In appearance, he was the antithesis of Dremmon of Graudoc. Loraan worked from an office not much bigger than a ship’s cabin. The floor was standard deck, the furnishings would have been at home in any modest office. Loraan himself was of compact build, and well along into middle age. The one jarring aspect to his appearance was his bright green goatee. I assume he dyed it to match the dominant color in his tunics. The ascetic appearance could be deceiving. Loraan maintained a full range of sybaritic delights on the station, all of which he was happy to offer to his friends.
Loraan had also been in charge of Tetragrammaton back when I heisted the Flower. Whenever the subject came up, he expressed great amusement over it. I had few illusions about his feelings. Loraan was a true friend, as long as you were winning. On this visit, he was all business right from the start. I had barely seated myself when he delivered his message.
My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire Page 26