The Oncoming Storm

by Christopher Nuttall

  He broke off as Hobbes began the interrogation.

  “These devices,” Hobbes said, “allow us to monitor your brainwaves as you respond to our questions. Should you try to lie to us we will know about it. If you try to lie to us repeatedly, we will put you in a lab and access your memories directly. This process tends to result in the victim becoming brain-dead. Do you understand me?”

  The prisoner nodded, rapidly.

  “Good,” Hobbes said. He stepped backwards and smiled. “Where were you born?”

  “Roslyn,” the pirate said.

  William watched with growing impatience as Hobbes slowly built up a baseline on the pirate’s brainwaves. It was the closest humanity had come to a perfect lie detector, he knew, but it wasn’t entirely perfect, even without the problem of separating between subjective truth and objective truth. And it could be fooled by a set of implants, if the pirate had been deemed important enough to have them. Instead, it was starting to look as though he knew nothing beyond his duties. The pirates certainly didn’t bother to tell him where they were going or where they were based.

  The odd piece of data, however, concerned two men who had joined the pirate crew as senior officers, then died with the other officers. Surprisingly, they hadn’t joined the pirates in their games, even when they’d had new victims for their pleasures. Instead, they’d just alternated between the bridge and their cabin while the captain fawned on them. The pirates had suspected the newcomers were actually paying their wages, such as they were. But their commander had always discouraged questioning.

  “They didn’t mind if we destroyed our targets,” the pirate explained, frantically. He seemed almost desperate to help the interrogator now. It was the only way he could hope to keep his life. “We got paid anyway.”

  William and Davidson exchanged glances. Pirate economics were haphazard at the best of times, but there were some understandable principles. A destroyed ship, her cargo smashed to atoms, was worthless. The pirates wouldn’t be able to take her cargo to one of the poorer worlds, a place where no one would ask questions, and sell their takings. They wouldn’t even be able to have fun with the crew. And they would have to replenish the weapons they’d fired. The bastards would lose money on the raid.

  “That’s odd,” Davidson said. He seemed to want to say something, but held his tongue. “We need to bring this to the captain’s attention.”

  “Yes,” William agreed. He’d noticed that Captain Falcone and Davidson spent a great deal of time together. It wasn’t uncommon—the captain could hardly confide in anyone else—but she seemed to take it to excess. “And we will, once we’ve interrogated the remaining prisoners.”

  He sighed as he looked back at the prisoner, who was currently outlining some of the raids he’d seen. It was the same story, he knew; once seduced, the pirate had nowhere else to go. But William was damned if he would feel sorry for the idiot. He could have walked away, even gone back to his homeworld. Instead, he’d made the choice to stay with the pirates and join in their atrocities wholeheartedly.

  “I hope the bastard chokes on Nightmare,” William said bitterly. “Or that he gets killed on the surface.”

  “He might well discover he’s a very small fish among sharks,” Davidson agreed. His tone was expressionless. “The very worst of the Commonwealth can be found there.”

  William nodded. It wasn’t death, he knew. Or at least it wasn’t immediate death, meted out by his own hands. But it was close enough.

  Chapter Ten

  “They were happy to destroy the ships?”

  “Yes, Captain,” Davidson said. “They still got paid.”

  Kat frowned. She’d been sitting in her office, writing the first report on the encounter for the Admiralty, when the XO and Davidson had requested an audience. But their report was unbelievable. What sort of pirate actually took losses on his raids?

  But one of the lessons she’d had to endure from her tutors bubbled up in her mind. “The government can subsidize a service from taxpayers’ money, even though the service is operated at a loss,” he’d said. “Sometimes this serves a practical purpose. The service is necessary . . .”

  She looked at her XO. “Someone is subsidizing the pirate operations,” she said. “The two strangers on the ships might well have been working for the Theocracy.”

  It made sense, she told herself. There was no logic to pirates destroying ships, but if they were actually being paid anyway, no matter the outcome, they’d be happy to smash as many freighters as they could find into atoms. The report would have to be rewritten.

  “If that’s the case,” the XO said slowly, “why didn’t they just launch a missile at us as soon as they had a lock on our location?”

  “Greed,” Davidson speculated. “They’d have had a chance to sell our hull and cargo as well as collect their paycheck from their backers.”

  “Or have their fun with the crew,” Kat added tartly. The medical report had made for horrifying reading. “But this is a worrying development.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Davidson said. “It’s also problematic because we have no proof the Theocracy is behind it. There are other multisystem powers in the galaxy.”

  “None as threatening as the Theocracy,” Kat countered, but she knew he was right. “What did the autopsy show?”

  “Nothing we can use to identify them,” Davidson admitted. “The dead men could have come from anywhere. There are no specific genetic traits linked to the Theocracy. The men did have basic enhancements, but they couldn’t be narrowed down to a single world.”

  “They could have gotten them from anywhere,” Kat said. It would have been more surprising to encounter baseline humans in space. Even newly contacted worlds made the effort to get medical enhancements for its population. “So we have no real proof?”

  “And no way to hunt down the pirate base,” the XO said. “It could be anywhere.”

  He sighed. “None of the surviving pirates know anything important,” he added. “Their hands are caked in blood, their souls stained by their crimes, yet they know nothing we can use to track their bases down and destroy them. All we can do is drop them off on Cadiz for transfer to Nightmare.”

  “Put them in stasis,” Kat ordered. It was two weeks to Cadiz and she was damned if she was feeding the prisoners. They could be dropped off at the planet, where they would be held until the next leg of their journey. “Is there any point in continuing to sweep the pirate ship?”

  “I don’t believe so,” the XO said. “The ship’s computers are smashed, her datanet is shattered, and her navigational systems completely wiped. Cadiz might be able to pull something from the wreckage, but we don’t have a specialized forensic team.”

  “Then have her taken in tow by one of the freighters,” Kat said. “Offer to double their pay if they do it without complaining.”

  The XO smiled. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  “We should get a bonus out of this, if nothing else,” Kat added. She didn’t need the prize money, but her crew would be delighted. “Please inform the crew that we will get underway in”—she checked her wristcom—“thirty minutes. Hopefully, nothing will happen until we reach Cadiz.”

  It was a dismissal and William recognized it as such. He stood, saluted, and marched out of the hatch. Kat watched him go and then looked at Davidson. Her former lover was smiling, slightly.

  “I think he’s grown a little more accepting of you,” he said bluntly. “You did well today, you know.”

  “I had a good crew,” Kat said automatically. She smiled at him. “Thank you.”

  Davidson stood. “I’ll get the prisoners into stasis,” he said. He sighed. “One of them did show up on the records.”

  Kat lifted an eyebrow. There was enough storage capacity in a single computer core to list every man, woman, and child in the entire galaxy, but records were far from complete, even in the Commonwealth. She’d expected the pirate crew to come from the edge of settled space, where there were no records and p
lenty of worlds happy to take stolen goods, no questions asked. It was unlikely that any files from those worlds would be added to her ship’s database.

  “Ronan Yedica,” Davidson said. “Child of a nagging mother and largely absentee father. Ran away from home four years ago; never found, until today. God alone knows how he ended up on a pirate ship.”

  “Let him write a letter home, if he wishes,” Kat said. She understood the impulse to run away from home, but hers had been much more constructive. Surely this runaway could have applied to Piker’s Peak . . . or one of the more basic training academies. There were plenty of openings for merchant spacers. “But we can’t make an exception for him.”

  “No,” Davidson agreed. “We can’t.”

  He paused. “Have you told the XO about your father’s concerns?”

  Kat shook her head. It would have only heightened his sense that Kat had pulled strings to be assigned to Lightning as her commanding officer.

  “Probably a good idea,” Davidson said. “But I think he’s a keen observer. You will need him at Cadiz, if what your father suspects is true.”

  “I know,” Kat said, reluctantly.

  Davidson gave her a smile that reminded her of their time together. “You may be the captain,” he said, “but you’re not alone. You certainly don’t have to do everything yourself.”

  “The buck stops with me,” Kat countered. The commandant of Piker’s Peak had that burned into every desk in the building. It had taken years for the cadets to understand its true meaning. “I can’t let him risk his own career for me.”

  “I think he’s loyal,” Davidson said. “And you probably upset his universe by handling the pirates so well.”

  He saluted, then turned and strode out of the cabin. Kat looked back at her terminal, then started to rewrite her report. Once it was completed, she wrote out a second message for her father. It was possible her report would be lost somewhere within the bureaucratic channels, but a more direct message wouldn’t go missing. At least it would serve as evidence that something was badly wrong along the border.

  She sighed, then stood. She wanted to be on the bridge when the convoy resumed course and then start carrying out additional drills. The next pirate ship they encountered might just launch a missile at them rather than try to take her ship intact. Or they might open fire on the prow of the convoy instead . . .

  We need more escorts, she thought sourly. More light units would need to be detached from the battle squadrons for escort duties, weakening the fleets patrolling the border. And that might be precisely what they want us to do.

  “I’m afraid they all had to go into stasis,” Doctor Braham said of the pirate’s former prisoners when William entered Sickbay. “I just don’t have the facilities to even begin healing them all.”

  William nodded, unsurprised. “You did manage to remove the cuffs first? Or take statements?”

  “Yes to the first, no to the second,” the doctor snapped. She eyed him unpleasantly. “I think you don’t understand just how badly they were treated. They really need to spend several weeks in a regeneration chamber, not answer questions from you or any other men.”

  “I understand,” William said quickly. Annoying the ship’s doctor was never a good idea. “Do we know who they are?”

  “I didn’t find a match when I ran their DNA against the records,” Katy said. She pointed to a chair on the far side of the compartment, motioning for him to sit down. “But two of them were probably from pastoral worlds. There aren’t many within six months of here.”

  William sat, reluctantly. “You’re sure?”

  “They were baseline humans—and I mean baseline,” Katy assured him. She dragged a chair over and sat down facing him. “Someone like you has genetic enhancements and improvements, even if they’re not spliced into your bloodline. They, on the other hand, have no enhancements at all. My best guess is that their homeworld was a dumping ground for a religious sect the UN decided didn’t deserve to stay on Earth.”

  She folded her hands on her lap. Only someone who knew her well would have picked up that sign of tension.

  “The poor girls were on the verge of death,” she added. “I’ve never seen a group quite so riddled with disease. I’m surprised they even managed to survive the shock of being rescued.”

  “Some didn’t,” William said. Other bodies had been found when the marines searched the pirate ship. “What sort of idiot doesn’t go for the boosted immune systems, at the very least?”

  Katy frowned. “Genetic engineering hasn’t always been as precise as starship engineering,” she said, after a long moment. “The early engineers often pushed ahead in hopes of developing a provable science before they were shut down by their governments. Some of their experiments produced . . . horrors. Others actually laid genetic time bombs in their test subjects that wouldn’t explode until their grandchildren were born.”

  She shrugged. “Back then, there were strong reasons to oppose widespread genetic engineering,” she added. “There were quite a few sects dedicated to maintaining the purity of humanity’s bloodline. One of them could have founded the women’s homeworld.”

  William shook his head. Hebrides had never asked to be a low-tech world, but the Breakdown had ensured the settlers were thrown back on their own resources long before they were ready. They’d managed to hold on to some technology, yet it hadn’t been enough to protect them against pirates and raiders. Or, for that matter, to avoid having most of the population working in the fields just to feed the colony. Why would anyone want to trap themselves on such a world?

  But humans were strange creatures. Perhaps some of them were strange enough to want to spend the rest of their lives on a farm.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” he said. The former slaves wouldn’t be needed to testify against their captors, at least. “Please let me know when they are ready for transfer to Cadiz.”

  “I’d be happier if they were sent to another world,” Katy said. “Cadiz is hardly the most peaceable of locations.”

  “That’s where we’re going,” William said.

  Katy nodded. “You’re overdue for your physical, by the way,” she added. “I need you back in here within a week.”

  “I think you just enjoy poking and prodding at me,” William teased. “I’m sure regulations give me at least another two months before it becomes mandatory.”

  “Only if you count from the day we left spacedock for the final time,” Katy informed him, reaching for a glove. She snapped it, meaningfully. “If I have to go hunting for you, Commander, it will be a very uncomfortable medical inspection.”

  William snorted. “I’ll come back in two days,” he said. By then, any problems with the crew after the battle should be apparent. He didn’t expect any, but the thought of prize money had been known to make crewmen do stupid things. “You’ll have the table ready?”

  “Of course,” Katy said. She paused. “Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?”

  “I . . .”

  William hesitated. Just as the captain could talk to the senior marine, the XO could talk to the ship’s doctor. They shared responsibility for the health and well-being of the crew and were expected to meet at least once a week, if only to compare notes. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about his personal doubts with her.

  “No, thank you,” he said, finally. He stood. “I’ll see you in two days.”

  He strode out of Sickbay and started to walk to the bridge, then changed his mind and walked to the observation blister instead. The hatch opened at his approach, revealing the eerie lights of hyperspace. At least it wasn’t occupied, he noted as he stepped inside, the hatch hissing closed behind him. Crewmen and women had been known to use the observation blister for a little bit of privacy from time to time.

  It seemed as if there was nothing between him and the hyperspace storms alarmingly close to the starship’s hull. Colors no human had been able to name flickered and flared in the darkness, clouds of glo
wing mist that looked almost real, if one stared at them for too long. He stepped up to the transparent blister and sighed, remembering just why he preferred living in space to a planetary surface. It was a dangerous life, as the battle they’d fought proved, but it was boundless. One day, perhaps he would buy a ship of his own and head out beyond the rim of explored space. Who knew what might be lurking out there?

  He sat down on the bench, mentally reviewing the battle. The captain had done well . . . hell, she’d done very well. A pirate ship was rarely a formidable opponent for a full-sized warship, but it could easily have turned nasty. He’d known commanders who would have blown their target away at maximum range or risked allowing the pirate ship closer . . . Captain Falcone had done neither. She’d handled the battle just right.

  And what does that say, he asked himself, about her competence?

  The thought was galling, but it had to be faced. He’d assumed the captain had been promoted through her father pulling strings, rather than merit. No, he knew there had been a great deal of string pulling involved. She simply didn’t have the experience to be assigned to command a heavy cruiser, at least not without succeeding her commander after his death. And her conduct since assuming command proved her limited experience. Even being an XO on a battle cruiser wasn’t enough to simply jump straight into a command chair.

  She’d made mistakes. They had all been minor, but she’d made them. And he’d worried about what she’d do when faced with a real challenge.

  But she’d come through it admirably. She’d crippled the pirate ship, captured a number of pirates, and collected physical evidence that suggested someone was bankrolling the operation rather than taking a commission on their loot. There were other, more experienced commanders who might not have handled it so well.

  And that meant that he’d underestimated her.