The Terran Privateer
Read The Terran Privateer Online
Authors: Glynn Stewart
Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Alien Invasion, #First Contact, #Galactic Empire, #Military, #Space Fleet, #Space Marine, #Space Opera
By Glynn Stewart
Copyright 2016 by Glynn Stewart
All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
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Illustration © Tom Edwards
Admiral Jean Villeneuve of the United Earth Space Force charged off of his shuttle like an aggravated bull. He hated the Belt Squadrons inspection tours: days crammed into a tiny ship flying out from Earth, followed by weeks of squeezing through obsolete ships, many lacking even artificial gravity, to make a show of the UESF caring about its back-of-beyond postings—and their role in dealing with the increasing level of outer system piracy.
Now the Space Force’s chief supplier of warships had decided to demand a detour at the end of his trip, bringing him to this strange space station even
he
, the Chief of Operations for Earth’s spaceborne military cum police force, hadn’t been aware existed.
Villeneuve was a tall man, with the distinctive pale skin of someone who’d spent their entire adult life in space. His once-black hair was almost pure white now, still cropped close to his scalp to allow for the spacesuit helmets of his youth.
Today he
stalked
into the Nova Industries Belt Research Station in his full white dress uniform, with its gold braid, its silly little half-cape, and the four gold stars of the only full Admiral Earth’s Space Force
had
.
The station looked older than he’d anticipated when he got the “request” to meet someone from Nova Industries here. Most new stations were built as rough spheres, maximizing interior volume now that Earth had artificial gravity. The research station had clearly started as the massive ring of a centripetal gravity facility—and Villeneuve was
sure
Nova Industries had never reported this station to him!
As he reached the edge of the shuttle bay, a trio of white uniformed aides trailing in his wake, the blast-shielded doors retracted to reveal a single man in a crisp black business suit. The man was young—
far
too young to be Villeneuve’s contact.…
And then Jean Villeneuve’s brain caught up to his eyes and he stopped hard, staring at the frustratingly young features of Elon Casimir, chief executive officer of Nova Industries—and a man who had
no
business being a week’s flight from Earth!
“Welcome to BugWorks, Admiral Villeneuve,” Casimir told him cheerfully. “I think you’ll be very pleased with the little demonstration we’ve pulled together for you today.”
“You little
connard
,” Villeneuve snapped at Earth’s youngest multibillionaire. “If you’ve delayed my trip home for some stupid stunt…”
Casimir held up his hands defensively.
“Please, Admiral, I am many things—but I am never a waste of your time.”
#
“BugWorks? Seriously?” Villeneuve asked the CEO half an hour later. Casimir had taken him to a surprisingly well-appointed private office and served up small glasses of the Admiral’s favorite French brandy. He could tell he was being played, but the man whose company manufactured the hulls, engines, and missiles that made up the UESF’s spaceships was usually worth his time.
“In the grand tradition of SkunkWorks and EagleWorks,” Casimir confirmed. “They wanted to use Bug-Eyed monster, but it took too long to say.”
“‘They,’ Elon?” the Admiral demanded, eyeing the younger man. Casimir did not look the part of a multibillionaire CEO. His suit was the latest style, but his brown hair was long in a way that was currently out of fashion and his face was chubby, his eyes a warm blue. He looked like everyone’s favorite cousin.
“BugWorks has been Nova Industries’ main research facility for about fifty years, Admiral,” Casimir told him. “She was the first of the big ring stations built outside Earth orbit, arguably
before
we really had the capability to do so.”
“Why wasn’t I aware this station existed?” Villeneuve demanded. “
Mon dieu
, Elon—if something had happened out here…”
“We…may have allowed the UESF to think the station was decommissioned,” Casimir admitted. “We’ve never really hidden it—the Facility is on all of the lists—but when we switched her to artificial gravity, we let your people think we’d scaled it back.”
“All right,” the Admiral allowed slowly. “Why? That was a dangerously stupid thing to do—even underestimating the population out here could have caused problems!”
“We had our own resources here if needed,” Casimir said calmly. “And…well, your people have been anything
but
supportive of research the last few years.”
Villeneuve winced. There was a strong feeling amongst the Captains and Admirals of the Space Force that the weapons and systems available to them were good enough. Combined with a worry that major advancements would invalidate their own skills, they’d stubbornly resisted supporting research.
The Chief of Operations disagreed, but he was just one voice. Even with the increasingly disturbing pace of losses to piracy outside the belt, the Chief couldn’t convince the Governing Council to fund research when all of his subordinates didn’t think it was needed.
“Bluntly, the only research that the UESF has funded for the last ten years has been the hyperspatial portal system. We had a
lot
more that was really promising,” Casimir noted. “This facility was where we developed the artificial gravity tech, so we had a giant pile of engineers and scientists out here
anyway
, most of whom had been working on various Space Force or privately-funded research anyway.”
“
Qu’est-ce que tu as fait,
Elon?” Villeneuve asked slowly. Even at seventy years old—a hale late middle age in 2185—he still slipped into his native French when aggravated and speaking to people he
knew
understood him. Elon Casimir spoke twelve languages fluently.
Another
thing to be jealous of the man for.
“Ten years ago, my father sold our board on BugWorks,” Casimir said quietly. “He had the opportunity to fully explain it to
me
before he had his stroke.”
Even twenty-second-century medical technology couldn’t save someone dead on arrival with a thumbnail-sized blood clot in their brain. The elder Casimir had been brilliant, eccentric, and rich beyond belief—none of which had saved him when his body had betrayed him.
“Since we believed the technologies we were working on had major military and civilian applications, and since the United Earth Space Force was refusing to fund the research, Nova Industries—aided by a significant application of the Casimir family’s personal fortune—completed the research ourselves,” Casimir continued, his voice still calm and quiet. “You’re lucky we did, too,” he continued. “You know we’ve been testing hyperships. Without some of the tech that came out of BugWorks, those ships would be impossible.”
“You…completed an entire new generation of military technology with
private
funding?” Villeneuve asked, making sure he was understanding Casimir correctly. Nova Industries was a
huge
corporation, and Casimir was unbelievably wealthy, but he was talking a multi-
trillion
-dollar investment at least.
“Enough civilian and secondary applications have already arisen from BugWorks to cover a third or so of the costs,” Casimir pointed out. “Even if the military applications fall through, we will earn back our costs eventually just from those.
“But the military possibilities are…transformative,” he continued. “Including the hyperdrive, we have developed four systems we believe that the UESF will want on
every
ship. I brought you here today so we could demonstrate them for you.”
“If you want me to sell them to
my
Captains, the people who are the reason you didn’t get funding for this, they’d better be
fantastique
—impressive,” Villeneuve warned.
Elon Casimir grinned, managing to look even younger than his thirty-odd years.
“Oh, believe me, Admiral Villeneuve, you are going to be impressed.”
#
Casimir proceeded to drag Villeneuve out onto an observation shuttle—a luxuriously appointed craft over three times the size of the UESF standardized shuttle the Admiral had arrived on. Every part of the passenger compartment except the floor was covered in high-quality monitors, allowing the two men to watch the big space station drop away beneath their feet.
“Over to your left, you can see the yard where we’ve been building the XC ships,” the CEO told Villeneuve. “They’re our ‘Experimental Cruiser’ hulls, a modular design with a frankly
ridiculous
power-generation capacity that we’ve used as a platform for all of our tests.
“Ahead of us you’ll see XC-Zero One,” he continued. With a brush of fingers through the haptic interface suspended above the screen, Casimir adjusted the view to zoom in on the ship.
Villeneuve studied it with a practiced eye. There was little to compare its size to as they approached, but the ship seemed large for an experiment. It followed similar lines to the UESF’s current battleships, a squished cigar-shape tapering to a flat prow at the front from the engines at the back, except…
Unlike a UESF ship, the cigar tapered
both
ways.
“Where are the engines?” he asked.
“That’s the first tech we’re going to demonstrate,” Casimir told him. “Since I know you’re wondering,” he continued, “XC-Zero One, also known as
Raptor
, is five hundred and eighty-six meters long with an average beam of one hundred meters. She masses just over two million tons—though that’s due to reasons we’ll discuss in a few minutes.”
“That’s a cruiser,” Villeneuve observed dryly. “Right. A cruiser that’s a third longer than my battleships and masses almost three times as much. How much of that is fuel? Which also brings me back to my original point: where are her
engines
?”
Casimir held up one finger in a “hold on a minute” gesture and took a small microphone from a concealed holder on the bar.
“Captain Anderson,” he said into it. “Begin the demonstration.”
There was no audible response, but
Raptor
started moving…accelerating
impossibly
as the big ship turned into a blur that rapidly receded into a barely visible dot. Villeneuve stared in shock as Casimir used the display interface to zoom in on the ship, blurring along at an impossible velocity—only to make a physically impossible turn and blaze back to the observation shuttle at the same impossible speed.
“
Raptor
and the other XC ships are equipped with what the scientists and engineers at BugWorks call a ‘gravitational-hyperspatial interface momentum engine,’ he said calmly. “The crews working with them just call it the interface drive. It’s capable of accelerating from zero to forty percent of lightspeed in just over six seconds with no inertial effects.”
Villeneuve stared at the ship as it came to a halt in front of them again.
“Elon,” he said slowly, “that’s
impossible
. That
violates the laws of physics
.”
“So does the hyperdrive,” Casimir pointed out dryly. “BugWorks has spent the last ten years playing with the consequences of hyperspatial anomalies on our understanding of physics. The interface drive is, so far as our experiments can prove, almost one hundred percent inertialess. The drive pushes anything smaller than about a tenth the size of the effect field to the side and…well, you’ll see what happens when it something larger than that shortly.”
The Admiral stared at the strange ship, considering the potential. His current generation of warships was built around heavy lasers and lots of massive missiles. Those missiles couldn’t even
catch
Casimir’s XC ship.
“You said you had more technologies to show me,” he said levelly, trying to control the urge to hyperventilate.
“Of course,” Casimir confirmed. The shuttle—still, thankfully, using what looked like normal fusion thrusters—continued on its course. They orbited over the big asteroid that the Research Station orbited beside, and a second of the impossible ships appeared on the screens. The CEO gestured and zoomed the display in on it.
“XC-Zero Two,
Hammer
, is also equipped with the interface drive,” he noted. “She won’t be maneuvering much herself, though. She has a different system to demonstrate.”
Once again, Casimir grabbed the microphone and ordered the Captain to begin the demonstration.
Hammer
moved smoothly, with a grace to the cruiser’s motions that just looked wrong to a man who’d grown used to the fusion torch battleships and cruisers of Earth’s Space Force. The experimental cruiser angled away from the asteroid, aiming herself at another, smaller, rock that Casimir promptly highlighted in the display.
“That is asteroid five-two-zero-zero-nine-five,” the CEO told Villeneuve. “Ninety percent nickel-iron by mass, roughly eight hundred thousand tons.”
The mass and nickel-iron percentage lined up very neatly with the UESF’s current battleships. Somehow, the Admiral doubted that was an accident.