Cursed Command (Angel in the Whirlwind Book 3)

by Christopher Nuttall

  He gave her a sharp glance, cutting off any other questions. “How many pirates died?”

  “Seventy-three bodies were recovered from the surviving ships, according to the report,” Janet said, consulting her datapad. “Nineteen were killed by their own crew; the remainder seem to have died in the general life support failure.”

  Her voice turned indignant. “They weren’t even wearing shipsuits!”

  “A useful lesson, I am sure,” William said. Basic training, naval and civilian, insisted that crewmen should wear shipsuits at all times, particularly outside their quarters. “Make sure some of the videos get put on the ship’s datanet. It might prevent any backsliding into bad habits.”

  He smiled at the thought, although he felt no real humor. The mystery of Uncanny’s life support problems had never been solved, not really. He would have liked to think that his crew had been maintaining their own ship, but it was hard to be sure. Why the hell would they put up with the stink? And the cruiser was so heavily overengineered that they might not have reached rock bottom by the time he’d taken command.

  His wristcom bleeped. “Captain,” Goodrich said. “I’ve completed the survey of the two pirate ships. The damaged vessel is beyond repair. It would be cheaper to construct a whole new ship rather than try to repair her. I recommend scuttling her without further delay, once the militia have finished searching her for evidence.”

  “Good thinking,” William said. A pirate ship wasn’t likely to be worth much, even if they towed her all the way to the scrapyard. Maybe she could be broken down for raw materials, but it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort. “Did you recover anything from her datacore?”

  “The system is badly fragmented,” Goodrich said. “I don’t think it was a deliberate self-destruct, Captain; the damage is just too erratic. My best guess is that power feedback caused most of the damage. I’d like to bring the datacore back to the ship and try to extract data, but I can’t promise anything.”

  William nodded. “Try,” he said. Smart pirates wouldn’t write anything down, particularly anything that could be used against them, but it was just possible that Goodrich would recover something useful from the ruined datacore. “Did the militia find anything useful?”

  “Nothing of great value, I believe,” Goodrich said. He sounded oddly amused. “The pirates do not seem to have been well-off.”

  “They had four ships,” William said. “That’s not a small investment.”

  He dismissed the thought. “What about the other ship?”

  “She’s intact, but primitive,” Goodrich said. “Her point defense system is an original, sir; her crew made no attempt to modify her to keep pace with the rest of the sector. I wouldn’t have bet on her even if our missiles hadn’t been an order of magnitude more advanced than hers. And to add insult to injury, the level of basic maintenance is appalling.”

  “Really,” William said dryly.

  “Yes, sir,” Goodrich said. “Realistically, I’d recommend that she be scrapped too. Even the Theocracy would turn their noses up at her. But we might get something for her if we took her to Vangelis. A prize crew should have no difficulty navigating her that far.”

  “It might be worth trying,” William agreed. “Did you pull anything useful out of her datacore?”

  “Very little,” Goodrich admitted. “There’s no actual damage, sir, but it’s clear that this ship wasn’t allowed to store navigational data. I plan to have a crew of hackers working their way through the ship over the next few days, trying to draw the data from her systems. We might just be able to locate her base.”

  “If there is a base,” William said. There were quite a few illicit pirate dens along the edge of settled space, but a skillful crew could get by with nothing more than a handful of visits to independent star systems and colonies too poor or desperate to care about where their supplies came from. It was hard to blame them too. “See what you can put together.”

  “Yes, sir,” Goodrich said.

  “And tell the crew that there will be a reward for anyone who backtracks her course,” William added. “I’ll see to it personally.”

  He allowed himself a tight smile. There was nothing like a victory to boost morale—and morale had skyrocketed in the last hour. A little friendly competition wouldn’t hurt either. He’d have to plan the reward carefully, but that wouldn’t be difficult. A day or two of extra leave on Vangelis?

  “I’ll spread the word, sir,” Goodrich said. “Do you want me to take command of the prize crew?”

  “No, thank you,” William said. There was no way he could send his chief engineer away for longer than a few hours. If Uncanny ran into unanticipated problems, it would cause no end of trouble. “Return to the ship once you’ve completed removing the damaged datacore and set the scuttling charges.”

  “Aye, sir,” Goodrich said. He didn’t sound disappointed. “I’ll start working on the datacore as soon as I return.”

  William closed the connection. The surviving pirates most likely didn’t know anything useful, although they would be interrogated over the next week. If nothing else, uncovering any fences and purveyors of stolen goods on Vangelis would make it harder for any future pirates to sell their ill-gotten treasures. Vangelis was the closest world that could actually sell the pirates what they needed to keep their ships going. They probably wouldn’t ask too many questions, as long as the money kept flowing.

  Janet cleared her throat. “Captain, who are you going to send to the prize crew?”

  William lifted his eyebrows. “Do you want to go?”

  He ignored her flush. Kat, he suspected, would want to send her XO. And he couldn’t really blame her, if half of what she’d said about him was true. But the pirate ship—he wondered, suddenly, if she had a name—was his prize. Kat couldn’t object if he gave the command to one of his officers.

  But I need them all here, he thought numbly.

  The thought made him scowl. Roach would want the job—command experience was not to be sniffed at, even if it was nothing more than a week of shepherding a captured pirate ship into port—but William knew he needed his XO. And yet, Roach was the logical candidate for the job. He’d resent not being sent. God knew William had taken command of captured vessels during his long career.

  “The XO will take command,” he said finally. “And he can pick his own crew.”

  He took one last look at the pirates, then turned on his heel and marched out of the compartment.

  “Whoever was in charge of this ship was a madman,” Crewman Henderson muttered as they stood in the datacore compartment. “The whole ship’s a fucking death trap.”

  Joel said nothing, but he was inclined to agree. The pirate ship—Talon of Death, according to the captured pirates—was dangerous to her crew, let alone everyone else. And she didn’t even have the excuse of being hammered by a heavy cruiser! The life support system was so badly decayed that it was a miracle it hadn’t failed completely, the sensors were so primitive he didn’t understand how they’d managed to locate the convoy, and the weapons system could barely fart in the general direction of a target.

  “And this is what we want,” Henderson added, lowering his voice. “Isn’t it?”

  “Shut up,” Joel hissed. Henderson hadn’t said anything overtly, but he was clearly starting to doubt the plan. And he hadn’t played any real role in Captain Abraham’s death. He might think he could get out of trouble if he betrayed the other plotters to Sir William. “This isn’t a safe place.”

  The pirate ship would in fact be an excellent place to stage an accident, if Joel hadn’t thought it would draw attention to him. Commander Roach had brought only fifteen crewmen onto Talon of Death, all of whom would be interrogated closely if someone died in transit. And Sir William had the authority, if he chose to use it, to have the suspects interrogated with truth drugs or direct brain induction. Joel knew he was a strong man, but he had no illusions about his ability to conceal anything under that sort of treatment
.

  Henderson is turning into a liability, he thought. But he has to be left alive, for now.

  He looked at Julia, instead. “Did you pull anything from the datacore?”

  “Quite a bit,” Julia said. “Half-assed idiots don’t have the slightest idea how the system works.”

  Henderson frowned. “And you do?”

  “Yes,” Julia said simply.

  She pointed a finger at the giant datacore. “You see, when a file is deleted and wiped, there are still traces of it left in the system,” she added. “Most datacores, particularly civilian datacores, merely move those traces to deep storage until they actually need that part of their memory. And with such capacities, they rarely do need it. These . . . amateurs should have destroyed the datacore before surrendering. Their half-assed approach to wiping the system left plenty of traces for me to pick up.”

  “Good, I suppose,” Joel said. “What have you found?”

  “Well, they weren’t fool enough to store the coordinates of their lair on the datacore,” Julia told him. She flipped open her personal terminal and tapped a switch, displaying a star chart of the Jorlem Sector. “But I’ve been cross-referencing all the files, and I can backtrack this ship’s movements over the last ten years.”

  Henderson snorted. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes,” Julia said. “It’s actually an exercise they used to set us during training. They wiped all of the navigational data, of course, but you can use the remainder of the files to put together a fairly accurate picture of where the ship has been. See here . . .” She tapped a section of raw data. “The ship took ten days to move from one location to the other. There’s nothing to say where it actually was. But here there’s a reference to a hyperspace storm and another to a trio of cloudscoops. That’s enough to tell me that the ship was in transit from Haverford to Vangelis.”

  Joel smiled. “What’s at Haverford?”

  “Good question,” Julia said. She tapped her console. “It’s a farming colony. Officially one of those petty little religious places where men are men, women know their place, and nothing more advanced than steam power is permitted.”

  “Sounds like paradise,” Henderson said. Joel shot him a sharp warning look, but he ignored it. “The dumb fucks probably wouldn’t even notice if the Theocracy took over.”

  “Quite,” Julia agreed. She was speed-reading as more and more data flowed up in front of her. “Their import/export restrictions are pretty severe. They simply don’t purchase very much from off-world, officially. Ten gets you twenty that our friends were selling the locals something they’re not allowed to have.”

  Henderson laughed. “What else would they sell them?”

  Joel glared at his shipmate, but he had to admit that Henderson had a point. There was no point in smuggling something, certainly not with a huge markup, unless there was no way for the buyer to purchase it legitimately. A world that banned the import of anything more advanced than hand tools would attract hundreds of smugglers, particularly when the locals discovered that life without high technology wasn’t easy. And while Haverford probably couldn’t offer the pirates any high tech of their own, they’d have no trouble supplying food, drink, and women.

  He looked at Julia. “Do you have any idea what they were selling?”

  “No,” Julia said. “But I’m sure they found something.”

  “Unless they were just raiding the place,” Henderson said.

  Joel shrugged. The pirates had had four destroyers—primitive destroyers, to be sure, but it wouldn’t take much to capture a stage-one colony. Using them to raid convoys, particularly convoys from a multi-star power with a long history of hunting down and executing pirates, struck him as showing a lack of imagination. Why do something you knew would eventually lead to certain death when you could use your resources to build something a little more interesting?

  Savages in starships, he thought, darkly. Not a pleasant combination.

  “There’s no suggestion they fired weapons during their stay at Haverford,” Julia said. “I don’t think they needed to be unfriendly.”

  “Which proves nothing,” Joel said. “Haverford could have been captured long ago and turned into a pirate base.”

  He considered the possibilities. He’d hoped to have the first look at any recovered data and, if necessary, make some of it vanish. A list of pirate contacts within the Jorlem Sector would be very helpful, although he would have been astonished if they’d actually discovered one. But now . . . if Haverford had merely been trading with the pirates, he didn’t want to blow the whistle on them.

  But if they’ve been occupied, he added mentally, they need help.

  “Keep digging through the files,” he ordered. “Let me see anything that might be useful first.”

  “Of course, sir,” Julia said.

  And hope that Commander Roach isn’t expecting quick results, Joel added to himself. If we want some of the data to vanish, we’ll need to do it and then hide the evidence.

  Henderson caught his arm as he rose. “Joel . . . if we do find proof that Haverford is occupied, shouldn’t we make sure Sir William knows?”

  “Yeah, we probably should,” Joel said, making a final decision about Henderson. “But let’s see what we’ve caught before we decide what to do with it, shall we?”

  “I don’t think they’ll get much prize money out of . . . of that,” Crenshaw said.

  Kat gave him a sidelong look as they stood together on the bridge. In a way, Crenshaw was right; Talon of Death—and whoever had thought up that name was a melodramatic asshole—wasn’t worth more than a few thousand crowns. Only a navy in desperate need of hulls would even consider purchasing her, although there were quite a few single-system navies within the Jorlem Sector who might put in a bid. But that wasn’t the point.

  “A few hundred crowns to the ship’s crew will be appreciated,” she said quietly. Crenshaw was from old money, like her. She would be surprised if he didn’t have at least a million crowns in his trust fund. But that meant he had no idea of the value of money. “And it will be a promise of things to come.”

  “They’ll spend it all on booze and strippers,” Crenshaw predicted.

  Kat looked at him. “So what?”

  She allowed herself a smile as she looked back at the tactical display. Talon of Death couldn’t hope to keep up with the cruisers, but as long as she could pace the convoy it probably wouldn’t matter. And if she couldn’t . . . having to be towed would be frustrating to her temporary CO, yet it would get them to Vangelis.

  Then we can hand the crew over to the local authorities, she thought. The interrogations hadn’t revealed anything of value. And hope we never see them again.

  “Captain,” Linda Ross said. “Talon of Death reports that she is ready to depart. Uncanny adds that the scuttling charges are primed, ready to fire.”

  “Very good,” Kat said. She walked back to her command chair and sat down. All things considered, Uncanny’s first true engagement had gone very well. “Order the charges detonated, and then take us back onto our planned course.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Linda said.

  The tactical display bleeped. Kat looked at it and smiled. The crippled pirate ship was now nothing more than an expanding cloud of dust. Hyperspace would eventually drag the remains into an energy storm, vaporizing the starship. If any pirates came looking, they’d never find a trace of their former comrades.

  A low hum ran through the ship. “We are underway,” Lieutenant Bobby Wheeler reported briskly. “Our ETA remains unchanged.”

  “Good,” Kat said. She smiled as a thought occurred to her. “Take us back into stealth. Let’s see if any other pirates come sniffing around.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Captain,” Lieutenant Wheeler said. “We are approaching Vangelis.”

  Kat had hoped to pick off a couple more pirate ships during the remainder of the cruise, but no other vessels had taken the bait. Her long-range sensors had reported a
couple of vague contacts, yet nothing had materialized. But they might just have suspected that ten bulk freighters wouldn’t be flying in convoy without an escort, even if they looked to be traveling alone.

  “Take us out of hyperspace as planned,” she ordered. “Communications, transmit our ID codes to System Command as soon as we arrive, then forward the diplomatic package to the planetary government.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Linda said.

  “Hyperspace gateway opening in five minutes,” Wheeler said. “All systems reporting nominal.”

  Kat braced herself as the gateway flared open, allowing Lightning and her consorts to flow back into realspace. Normally starships would emerge from hyperspace much closer to the planet, but she didn’t want to panic the planetary defenses. Vangelis was not technically involved with the war, yet her government had been buying up as many modern warships as they could get their hands on. They might even want Talon of Death!

  She smiled at the thought, then watched grimly as the system display updated rapidly, revealing hundreds of starships and interplanetary vessels making their way around the star system. Vangelis hadn’t had the vast investment that had powered the growth of Tyre—or Ahura Mazda, for that matter—but Kat had to admit that her early governments had done very well for themselves. Three cloudscoops orbited the gas giant, providing fuel for a growing system-wide industrial base. They’d already started producing their own freighter designs, she knew; it wouldn’t be long before they started churning out indigenous warships of their own.

  In many ways, Vangelis is the sort of member world the Commonwealth wants, Kat thought as she studied the planet itself. Tyre had more orbital activity, but Vangelis wasn’t that far behind. Seven settled asteroids orbited the world, along with two dozen industrial nodes and several small shipyards, all protected by a swarm of Orbital Weapons Platforms. A thriving industrial base, a growing and educated population . . . no need for any long-term investments.