Cursed Command (Angel in the Whirlwind Book 3)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “We can kill the bitches,” the voice snarled. “Do you want to watch as we tear them apart?”

  “If you surrender peacefully and hand over the hostages,” Kat added, “we’ll ship you to a penal colony instead of tossing you out an airlock. You’ll remain alive . . .”

  “And doomed,” the voice snapped.

  Kat shrugged, even though she knew the pirate couldn’t see her. “You’re also doomed if you stay there,” she pointed out, dryly. “I can’t leave you in possession of the cloudscoop.”

  “So we’re dead anyway,” the voice said. His tone carried a hint of hysteria. “Come and take us, if you dare!”

  “Let me propose a compromise,” Kat said, after a moment. The pirates would be desperate, she was sure, but she didn’t dare let them think too much. They had to take the bait she offered without thinking. “You hand the hostages over, and we’ll allow you to leave freely.”

  “And then you gun us down when we leave,” the voice said. Kat heard, just for a second, angry muttering behind the speaker. His comrades might be determined to take the offer, no matter what their leader said. The pirate would be lucky if he wasn’t knifed in the back. “I don’t think so!”

  He paused. “We take some of the bitches with us!”

  “Unacceptable,” Kat said coolly. “We want them alive.”

  There was more angry muttering. “We can put them in an escape pod once we reach a safe distance,” the pirate voice said. Kat could hear a stronger undercurrent of fear as he spoke. “You can pick them up once we’re gone.”

  “Also unacceptable,” Kat said. The plan would have been workable if she’d trusted the pirates to keep their word. “There would be nothing stopping you from just keeping them.”

  She grimaced at the thought. She’d spent too long cleaning up after pirate raids during her term on HMS Thomas. She knew what fate awaited prisoners, male and female, young and old, when they outlived their usefulness. There were ways she could offer ransoms, she supposed, but making the trade would be difficult. There would be no way to guarantee that the pirates would keep their side of the bargain.

  “You don’t have any other choice,” the pirate said. His voice rose. “You either take our bargain or watch as the bitches die.”

  “Let me propose a compromise,” Kat said. “How many hostages do you have? Men and women who are not members of your crew?”

  A pause. “Fifty-seven,” the pirate said. “Men, women, and children.”

  Kat frowned. That couldn’t be just the station’s crew, then. The pirates had to have taken other prisoners, starship crews, or hostages from the rest of the system . . . Fifty-seven hostages were a manageable number. Her team could handle it.

  “I will fly a shuttle over to the station,” Kat said. She ignored the rustle that ran around the bridge at her words. “A large one, easily capable of carrying fifty-seven people. She can take the hostages back to Lightning while I remain with you. You can drop me off in a lifeboat before you leave the system.”

  She kept her expression under tight control as she waited for the response. The offer had to be tempting. If they had the slightest idea who she was—and she was famous—they had to know she’d be worth a king’s ransom. The idea of keeping her prisoner had to be astonishingly tempting. Her father would pay billions of crowns for her safe return.

  Take the bait, she thought, grimly. Please.

  “You fly the shuttle alone,” the pirate said after a long delay. “One of our . . . guests . . . can fly her back to the ship.”

  “She can fly on automatic,” Kat assured him blithely. They’d swallowed the bait! Even if the pirate leader suspected a trap, his crew wouldn’t let him say no. “I just need to set the autopilot before leaving the craft.”

  “And then your ship moves away,” the pirate said. His voice hardened. “I want her out of weapons range.”

  “And I want to be sure that I’m your only hostage,” Kat countered. “Lightning will monitor the exchange, then withdraw once the shuttle has returned to the ship. They will not fire on your ship as long as I am with you.”

  There was yet more angry muttering from the speaker, too quiet for her to make out the words, but she could guess. The pirates knew they were screwed, and Kat had offered them a way out. She wondered, absently, if their leader was about to be brutally killed by his own people.

  “Very well,” the pirate said. “You fly the shuttle over here now while we power up the ship. Then you’ll be our guest until we reach hyperspace.”

  Probably a great deal longer, Kat thought. She’d tempted them with something they didn’t have a hope of resisting. Or so you think.

  “I’ll be over in fifteen minutes,” she said. “Be seeing you.”

  She tapped her console, closing the connection. “Have a shuttle prepared . . .”

  “Captain,” Crenshaw interrupted. “I really must protest! This is madness!”

  “No, it isn’t,” Kat said. She rose. “You have the bridge. Hold our current position and wait.”

  “Captain,” Crenshaw said. His voice was almost pleading. “You can’t offer yourself as a hostage.”

  “I agree,” Davidson said through the intercom. His voice was flat, so flat she knew he was screaming inside. She wondered if he was seriously considering handcuffing her to the command chair. “They won’t let you go.”

  Kat understood the dangers. Her father’s security team had briefed her when she’d turned twelve, old enough to understand the dark underside of the life she led. A kidnap attempt was a real possibility. Her father would receive a demand, then another demand, then another demand . . . while she’d be kept prisoner, raped and tortured . . . perhaps the security team had exaggerated some of the dangers, but she knew what pirates could and would do. They wouldn’t give up such a valuable prize so easily.

  “I know,” she said. “Which is why we’re not going to let them have me.”

  She took a breath. “This is what we’re going to do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Kat had never felt so alone.

  She knew, deep inside, that she was physically brave. She’d passed through Piker’s Peak, then served on three starships before being promoted to command rank. She’d fought in a dozen combat actions before and during the war. And yet she’d never felt so exposed as she did now, piloting a shuttlecraft toward the cloudscoop. She felt naked and vulnerable and very, very, alone.

  It had seemed a simple plan when she’d devised it on the bridge. But now, sitting alone in the shuttle’s cockpit, she knew she might have made a fatal mistake. If she’d miscalculated, if the pirates managed to take her prisoner, she was in deep shit.

  If I ever get home, she thought morbidly, I’ll probably be put in front of a court-martial for putting my life at risk.

  Davidson had told her that the plan was utter madness. Even after she’d told him what she really had in mind, he’d still been reluctant to go through with it. Kat was his commanding officer as well as his lover. It was his job to keep her alive, even at the cost of his own life. But there was no other bait they could use. The pirates had to be offered a decent chance to not only escape but come out ahead.

  He’s going to be furious afterwards, Kat thought. The Admiralty will be horrified.

  Kat forced herself to remain calm as she guided the shuttle towards its destination. Up close, the modular station looked crude, the modules patched time and time again until there was very little of the original material clearly visible. That was par for the course so far from heavily industrialized planets like Vangelis and Tyre. The current owners would know every last square inch of their facility intimately; they’d know precisely how to refurbish most of the components or produce new ones from scratch. There was very little about the structure that was advanced.

  Certainly nothing irreplaceable, she thought. But replacing a cloudscoop so far from the Commonwealth would be a very low priority.

  The radio buzzed. “Dock at the upper airlock
,” a voice ordered. A radio beacon came on, guiding her to her destination. “And then remain seated.”

  “Of course,” Kat said, feeling her heartbeat starting to race. “I should be docked in two minutes.”

  Sweat trickled down her back as she pulled the shuttle up and made contact with the station, a dull thump running through the craft as the airlocks mated. She glanced at the telltales, then swung the chair around and waited as the pirates fumbled with the hatches. They took longer than she’d expected to open the hatch, even though it was a standardized design. Even the Theocracy used the same basic design. And then there was a hiss as the hatch opened, allowing the pirates to step into the shuttle.

  Kat kept her face expressionless as they turned to face her. They wore basic shipsuits, torn and stained so badly that any protective qualities were long gone. She doubted they would survive a sudden depressurization, even if they did manage to get their masks on before they ran out of air. Their faces were unshaven, their eyes wild and dangerous. She cursed mentally, wondering if she’d made a deadly mistake. Far too many pirate crewmen were drugged out of their minds when they weren’t on duty.

  If they didn’t start out as monsters, she thought, keeping herself still by force of will, they’re soon made into monsters.

  The lead pirate pointed a gun at her forehead. His hand shook so badly that Kat couldn’t help wondering if he’d pull the trigger by accident. He looked her up and down, his eyes leaving trails of slime over her body; his companion, more interested in the shuttle, seemed to pay little attention to her. But that, Kat reminded herself, meant nothing. The best security officers were often the ones who seemed to be doing nothing.

  “Get up,” the pirate growled. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Kat obeyed, silently considering his accent, which reminded her a little of President Alexis’s voice, although she knew that meant nothing. Plenty of spacers, including pirates, passed through Jorlem, probably spending a great deal of time with prostitutes while selling their wares and waiting for the next job.

  The pirate took a step forward, inching towards her as if he feared she’d turn into a whirling blur of hands and fists at any moment. She would have smiled at the thought, if she hadn’t been so tense. That sort of thing only happened in bad movies. Kat clenched her jaw as he removed a pair of metal handcuffs from his pocket, then motioned for her to turn around. She’d anticipated it, but it was still awkward. She swallowed, hard, as she felt cold metal around her wrists.

  “Spread your legs,” the pirate ordered harshly, an unholy hint of gloating anticipation in his voice. “And then stay still.”

  Kat nodded, not trusting herself to say a word as he ran his hands over her body, groping her breasts, caressing her buttocks and rubbing between her legs with a sickening eagerness that chilled her to the bone. She’d been careful not to carry anything that could be used as a weapon, knowing she’d be searched when she arrived, but still . . . she fought to show no reaction at all as his hands started to pull at her uniform’s fastenings, threatening to strip her bare. There was no way she could convince herself that someone else was touching her.

  “You really don’t have time,” she said as evenly as she could. “Your boss will want to get the hostages onto the shuttle and out of here before it’s too late.”

  The pirate turned Kat around and leered. “There’s always time for fun.”

  Kat made a show of shrugging. “Your boss may not agree,” she said. “There’s time for fun later.”

  She kept her face expressionless, refusing to let him see just how much his touch bothered her. She’d met too many sadists who found excitement in tormenting others. They didn’t want submission to be offered willingly, she knew all too well; they wanted to wrest control. They wanted their victim to hurt.

  She promised herself, silently, that the pirate wouldn’t survive the day, no matter what else happened.

  “You might have something up your ass,” the pirate said. “Perhaps I should check.”

  “And then the captain will ram a bullet up your ass,” the second pirate said. He caught hold of Kat’s arm and pulled her towards the hatch, ignoring his comrade’s squawk of protest. “If we don’t get out of here soon, we’re dead.”

  The pirates frog-marched Kat through the hatch and into the station. The air tasted musty, as if the filters hadn’t been replaced for weeks, although she did have to admit that it smelled better than the average pirate ship. A line of hostages, their hands secured behind their backs with plastic ties, was already forming outside the hatch, guarded by three heavily armed pirates. She felt sick as she looked at the hostages, realizing that too many of them had been molested—or worse—in the last few minutes. Clothes mussed and torn, nasty bruises on their faces . . . They looked as if all hope had long since gone.

  “Get them onto the ship, then secure them to the chairs,” the second pirate ordered. “Make damn sure none of you are onboard when the autopilot comes online.”

  Kat glanced at him. “You have to issue such an order?”

  The first pirate reached around and pinched her nipple, hard. “Shut up,” he said as she winced in pain. “Or I will teach you respect.”

  “Behave yourself,” the second pirate ordered.

  Kat quietly studied the station as they made their way through a twisting maze of compartments. It looked very much like a family-run business. The bulkheads were decorated with children’s paintings and a handful of photographs. A pair of teaching machines were parked in the lounge . . . A family had hoped, once upon a time, to turn the station into a home as well as a business. She hoped, prayed, that the owners had survived long enough to be rescued . . .

  The interior doesn’t quite match the plans, she thought as her implants silently ran a comparison. If we’d stormed the station, we’d be operating at a disadvantage.

  She braced herself as she was pushed into the control room. Five men—three calculating, two wild-eyed—looked at her. They seemed surprised to see her, as if they hadn’t really expected the captain to keep her side of the bargain. Kat glanced from face to face, silently picking out the leader. A pirate leader couldn’t call on a chain of command to back him up if he ran into trouble with his crew. He’d be the roughest and toughest of them all.

  “My Lady,” the leader said. The voice was familiar. “Welcome to hell.”

  Kat scrutinized him for a long moment. He was heavily muscled, so heavily muscled that she was sure he’d had some bootleg enhancement as well as adaptations and improvements spliced into his genetic code. His face was hard, his eyes cold, dark . . . This wasn’t a man, she realized, who gave much of a damn for anyone apart from himself. The only thing that had kept him at bay was the threat of being blown away along with the station. He wore an armored shipsuit and carried a belt crammed with weapons, trying to make himself look as intimidating as possible.

  “Thank you,” she said sarcastically. “Move the hostages to the shuttle, and then they can fly back to the ship, and we can head out past the gravity well.”

  The pirate tilted his head. “And what is to stop us from keeping the hostages, and you?”

  “Lightning will blow the station away if the shuttle isn’t sent back,” Kat said. “And if you try to keep the hostages, they’ll blow the station away too.”

  “You’ll die,” the pirate snarled.

  “Of course,” Kat agreed. “And so will you.”

  She saw a flicker of pure rage cross the pirate’s face and inwardly shuddered. The man was psychopathic. Being humiliated so badly, being threatened by his own crew . . . The pirate would take his rage out on Kat if he made it away from the system. She’d be lucky to last long enough for the ransom demand to reach her father . . .

  . . . and she would be astonished if she was ever returned.

  “There’s no point in trying to alter the deal now,” she added, allowing her voice to lighten submissively. Let him think she’d bend the knee. “Let the hostages go, then
we can depart the station and make our way beyond the gravity well.”

  “Of course, Captain,” the pirate sneered.

  She read her fate in his voice and shuddered. The only thing keeping him from rubbing her nose in it was the awareness that she might be able to use her implants to call for help, if, of course, he’d considered her implants. No, he had everything to gain by playing along . . . for the moment. He’d alter the deal when he thought he could get away with it.

  The pirate glanced at one of his officers. “Make sure all the bitches and the rest of the unwilling are on the shuttle,” he ordered. “And then key the autopilot to take them home.”

  “Sir,” the pirate said.

  Kat braced herself as the pirate leader turned his attention back to her. “We have prepared a lifeboat just for you,” he said nastily. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy your time in space.”

  “I can catch up on my sleep,” Kat said, trying to inject humor into her voice. Let him think she believed him, for the moment. “Commanding a starship is very tiring.”

  The pirate laughed. “It is very tiring,” he agreed. He jabbed a finger at her. “Sit against the bulkhead and wait.”

  Kat did as she was told, cursing the handcuffs under her breath. They were too tight, cutting off her circulation. Her hands were going numb. The pirates hurried around the complex, doing their work as the shuttle was slowly loaded with hostages, yet they kept glancing at Kat, cold anticipation in their eyes. They knew what was awaiting her too.

  “The shuttle is packed,” a pirate eventually reported. “They’re ready to go.”

  The leader looked at Kat. “They’ll be on their way in a moment,” he said. “And then we’ll be on our way.”

  He looked back at his subordinate. “Send them on their way.”

  “Yes, My Lord,” the pirate said.

  Kat forced herself to wait, calmly, as the shuttle detached itself from the station and headed back towards Lightning. The hostages would be out of the firing line, if nothing else; the only people on the station, save for herself, were the pirates. And she was ready to die, if necessary, to stop them.