The Terran Privateer (12 page)

“She has been given a mission familiar to us all: to act a pirate acquiring resources and tech to aid her homeworld. Since we now lack an employer, I have suggested that she hire us to assist in upgrading her vessel and completing our mission. Captain?”

Tentacles flicked in Annette’s direction and she stepped up, hoping that the translator would render her speech into something the aliens could understand. She barely trusted the device still, so simple was better.

“You will die if you stay here,” she told them. “In trade for helping us strip this ship of parts of value and tracking new targets, you will receive the same share of the loot as my own crew.”

Which was, admittedly, a ratio they were going to have to quietly work out—probably with Ki!Tana’s help.

“We will also feed you and, if we end up somewhere it is safe for you to do so, drop you off and allow you to make your own way from there. My ship has enough space to provide you decent quarters, and you may bring personal items with you.

“Ki!Tana has convinced me you will be of value. Prove her right.”

She stepped back, gesturing for the big alien to handle the rest.

“Anyone who wants to stick with me, come forward,” the tentacled creature told her crewmates. “You know
my
honor if nothing else.”

That seemed a winning argument. All of the surviving pirates stepped forward, forming a surprisingly orderly line to meet with Ki!Tana and Annette.

“James, touch base with Kurzman and Metharom,” she told the Major quietly over their private link—turning the translator off first. “Let them know we just picked up two hundred more crew who we’re going to need to keep a
very
sharp eye on.”

“I think we’re done here,” Metharom told Annette, the engineer reviewing a set of specifications of the pirate cruiser
Rekiki’s Fang
. The captain and her enforcers’ hexapodal, centaur-like species were apparently Rekiki. “From what Ki-tuck-Tana tells me and the data she’s provided, we’ve removed the shield generator, significant components of their interface drive—components that should enable us to improve the efficiency of our drive—and emptied their magazines.”

“Do we trust that…thing’s information?” Kurzman asked. “These missiles are impressive, but I’m worried to fire them!”

Annette met her XO’s gaze levelly, then glanced around the rest of the officers in the plain conference room. If matters continued to progress to her satisfaction, they’d probably move one of the broad stools the A!Tol had brought with her—and, apparently, Ki!Tana
was
a her—in there so the alien could join the staff briefings.

Things were still too unsure with their new friends and crew to do that just yet, as Kurzman’s comment proved out.

“While I’m not entirely sure that this ‘contract’ Ki!Tana has is nearly as ‘you kill it, you bought it’ as she says it is, she does appear to be honestly giving her loyalty to me,” she pointed out. “Without her help, we probably wouldn’t have been able to identify the
shield generator
, let alone the components we’ve pulled to upgrade the rest of our systems. I’m not going to, say, cancel the program in the AI that’s monitoring every move of our new alien crewmembers,” she noted, “but so far, they’ve played fair with us.”

“I’m left with the conclusion that Kikitheth
really
pissed off her crew at some point, and not just by refusing to surrender,” Wellesley said. “They turned on her and the other members of her species far too quickly and violently for there not to have been underlying issues.”

“Agreed,” Annette replied. “For now, we watch Ki!Tana and the rest of the aliens, but otherwise, we treat them like what they have asked to become: members of a privateer crew.”

“Paid in shares,” Kurzman noted. “Do we even
have
a structure for shares for privateer loot?”

“To my surprise when I looked it up, yes,”
Tornado
’s
Captain told him. “Of course, it’s for
reclaimed
pirate loot and assumes that a significant chunk goes back to the original owners. I’ve run it by Ki!Tana, though, and if we designate that equivalent chunk for ‘ship operations and upgrades,’ it’s an acceptable set of rules.”

It also put ten percent of everything in
her
pocket, which she had every intent of also funneling back into the ship. A tap on her com unit flipped it to her senior officers.

“Unless someone has a major complaint, I plan on using this structure,” she continued. “I’ll be including Ki!Tana in the senior officer share, which will reduce your shares, sorry.”

Given that the scheme, as modified, put forty percent into the ship, ten percent to the captain, five to the XO and split
fifteen
amidst the remaining senior officers, even Ki!Tana’s inclusion meant each of them would get three percent of any loot they took.

“This is academic until we actually
take
a prize,” Rolfson pointed out. Her tactical officer had apparently decided to braid his hair and beard while she’d been aboard
Rekiki’s Fang
, and now looked even more like a Viking than he normally did. It seemed appropriate.

“Our first step is to pick up
Of Course We’re Coming Back
and return to Alpha Centauri to meet
Oaths of Secrecy
,” she reminded them. “We’ll finish our upgrades while we do that, and we’ll digest what
Oaths’ d
ata shows us about the occupation of Earth.

“After that, Ki!Tana and
Rekiki’s Fang
’s computers have given us a number of possibilities. I am confident that the share of booty will not stay an academic issue for long,” she promised them.

#

Despite its relatively small size,
Of Course
’s small crew meant the living space provided to her Captain was, in Andrew Lougheed’s opinion, excessive. He had a three-room suite—living room, office, bedroom—almost as large as the rooms would be in an apartment on Earth.

Excessive for a ship or not, he could pace from one end of his office, through his living room, to the other end of his bedroom in forty-six steps. In the two
days
since
Of Course
had arrived at the rendezvous point, he’d paced it often enough that the count was burned into his mind.

Small as his crew was, he still couldn’t allow his crew to see how agitated he was.
Tornado
had gone after what appeared to be a freighter, but it hadn’t looked likely that she’d catch the ship. In that case, he would have expected Captain Bond to return to Rendezvous Point Charlie to make a plan of attack to raid the system itself.

Instead, his ship had sat in deep space, waiting for her return. There hadn’t been an agreed-upon wait time, but at some point he’d have to give up. Without
Tornado
…all the two scout ships could really do was go home and surrender.
Oaths of Secrecy
, built in secret as a spy ship, might be deadlier than his own vessel, but it was unlikely she could be deadly enough to act as a privateer against the magnitude of enemy they faced.

His com buzzed. Andrew stopped pacing, glancing over the mirror to make sure he didn’t look too disheveled, and then stepped up to the intercom in his office.

“Lougheed.”

“Sir,
Tornado
has arrived,” his watch officer told him hurriedly. “Captain Bond wants to speak with you immediately.”

“Relay her to here,” he ordered. “Move us into formation with
Tornado
; we’ll move on Bond’s command.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

A moment later, the image of his bridge faded into the image of a similar office aboard
Tornado
and the blond hair and worn face of Captain Annette Bond.

“Captain Lougheed, it’s good to see you.”

“Good to see you too, Captain Bond,” he replied. “I was starting to worry.”

“I apologize for the delay; we had an unexpected encounter,” she told him. “Someone else was pursuing the same ship and mistook us for them. We were, Captain, in a case of delicious irony, attacked by pirates.”

“Is everyone all right?” he asked. He presumed if there was notable damage, his people would have told him, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been casualties.

“We have a number of wounded SSS troopers but no fatalities,” Bond said. “We suckered them and took their ship partially intact. Pirates having all the loyalty of mercenaries, it seems, we now have almost two hundred new crew and a pile of
very
interesting parts and components in my cargo hold.”

“I didn’t know
Tornado
had a cargo hold.”

“We do,” the cruiser’s captain replied. “Storage for consumables, if nothing else. We also have several very large voids in our hull to allow for upgrades, which were readily converted into storage space.”

“Alien crew? How are we even talking to them?”

“We also acquired translator tech. I’ll have Metharom forward the design and software over—we can build the hardware surprisingly easily, but the software is…not very compatible with ours.” Bond shook her head. “We have yet to manage to interface the translation software with our own main systems, so we’re running on personal translators for now.”

“Are we talking universal translators here, ma’am?” Andrew asked carefully.
That
he knew was impossible, but other things he knew to be impossible hadn’t been…

“No, just
very
smart learning software loaded with a number of languages. If I’m following what I’ve been told correctly, the software we have has the most and second-most common languages for each species in the A!Tol Imperium.”

She nailed the click perfectly, to Andrew’s surprise. Apparently,
Tornado
’s
captain had been practicing.

“We’re going to need some time to sort out building this hardware into
Tornado
,” Bond continued. “We picked up a number of engineers, but the biggest value is an A!Tol named Ki!Tana. She’s…apparently sworn herself directly to my service—it’s complicated,” Bond said in response to Andrew’s surprised eyebrow.

“We’re watching all of the aliens carefully, but we’re going to need their technical skills to get everything working. At a minimum, I want the damn shield generator online before we go hunting again.”

“So, Centauri then, ma’am?” Lougheed asked.

“Indeed. Rest, hardware upgrades, check in with
Oath of Silence
. Then we see how complicated we can make the A!Tol’s life around Sol.”

Tornado
and
Of Course We’re Coming Back
had been in Alpha Centauri for almost half an hour before they saw any sign of
Oaths of Secrecy
. Despite being even more delayed than planned, Annette was starting to worry that the second scout ship had failed to escape Sol—a situation that would require them to abandon the caches
Oaths
had placed.

“Any sign?” she asked softly as the big cruiser slid into orbit of AB2, directly above the volcano holding the cache of missiles and supplies. “I know she’s supposed to be sneaky, but…”

“Nothing,” Rolfson replied. “The entire system is dead, no starship signatures. Feeling real lonely, boss.”

“Keep sweeping,” Annette ordered. “If she isn’t here, we’re going to have to do a fast pickup and find somewhere else to do Ki!Tana’s upgrades.”

The big A!Tol was on the bridge now, listening in through her translator. Annette had noticed the alien’s skin changed colors with her moods, and was starting to even pick up some of the more common ones. Somehow, the fact that her planet’s conquerors
literally
wore their feelings on their skin amused her.

“Wait…ma’am, we’re receiving a transmission from the surface,” Chan reported.

“The surface?”

Rolfson answered his Captain’s question by zooming in on the caldera holding the Nova Industries cache to show the black-painted hull of
Oaths of Secrecy
tucked into the side of the crater above the cache entrance. From the angle, Annette judged that anyone who wasn’t directly above the volcano would have no chance of detecting the ship.

“I have Captain Sade for you on the radio,” Chan said after a moment.

“Put her on,” Annette ordered with a small shake of her head.

Captain Elizabeth Sade, Nova Industries, was the type of woman who made Annette feel like an over-aged battle-ax. Sade was space-born, which gave an ethereal grace to her hundred and eighty–centimeter height and carefully braided crown of golden hair. Annette had seen Sade emerge from hard engineering work still looking completely put together except for a few smudges that managed to make her look
better
.

She’d wondered just what had happened to Sade when the woman hadn’t ended up as an XC test captain. Now she knew—Sade had been pulled into an even blacker corner of Elon Casimir’s operations than Annette had.

“Elizabeth Sade,” she greeted the other woman. “Were you trying to give me a heart attack and force me to abandon my supply caches?”

“It was easier to install an entire new engine without relying on artificial gravity,” Sade replied, her eyes then widening in shock as she spotted Ki!Tana. “Wait, why do you have one of those
tentacled fucks
aboard your ship?”

“Control yourself,” Annette snapped. Sade was…almost a friend, but that was still a line she was unwilling to see crossed. “You’ll be briefed, but for now, Ki!Tana is part of my crew and works directly for me.

“We needed data on the A!Tol. She’s also an engineer, which is going to keep us all busy here for a few days. She’s on our side.”

“‘She’,” the younger Captain repeated slowly, looking like the word tasted disgusting to her. “I don’t know what side ‘she’ is on, but I know what her people have been doing back home.”

“I’ll need a briefing,” Annette told her. “Report aboard
Tornado
at eighteen hundred hours. I’ll have my staff ready.” She grimaced. “I can’t imagine I’m going to like it.”

“It could be worse,” Sade admitted. “But…it’s not pretty.”

#

Annette led Captain Sade into the conference room that had become their de facto staff briefing space, making sure that all of her human officers were present. Ki!Tana might be required later, but Annette hadn’t even had to
ask
the alien not to be present for this part of the meeting—she’d volunteered to miss it. The A!Tol seemed to understand that this had to be a meeting for the humans.

“It’s good to see you, Elizabeth,” Lougheed greeted his fellow scout captain. “Did you get your upgrades complete?”

“We have an interface drive same as everyone else now,” Sade confirmed. “Not quite sure what I’m going to do with it without a missile or laser to my name, but I’ve got it.”

“We’ll get there,” Annette told her. “For now, well, you were in Sol later than any of us. What happened?”

Sade sighed, nodding slowly.

“We left a week after the invasion,” she said quietly. “A positive sign, I guess, is that the news was still broadcasting at that point without much interference.”

“Useful as propaganda, I suppose,” Kurzman said.

“They were being sufficiently uncomplimentary to the conquerors that I’m not sure that’s the case,” Sade admitted. “It appeared, from what we were receiving anyway, that the A-tuck-Tol had every intention of maintaining at least some free press.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t have expected it, but they left the press mostly alone. We had other sources as well, relaying through UESF Intelligence, to confirm the news reports as well. The full files are being transferred to
Tornado
and
Of Course
as we speak, but we are talking a week’s worth of news reports.”

“You were there, Captain. Summarize,” Annette ordered.

Sade swallowed and nodded, almost shivering as she considered how to present her thoughts.

“The world changed in a week,” she finally said. “Hell, the
universe
changed in a week. I don’t know how to summarize that, but I’ll try.

“First, it’s important to know there was no…indiscriminate bombardment. The aliens seem to regard civilian locations as safe zones, even when it puts them in danger.”

“That sounds like there
has
been bombardment?” Rolfson asked.

Sade nodded sharply, taking a deep breath before she continued.

“They demanded the surrenders of the national militaries as soon as they reached orbit,” she continued slowly. “Most complied. The United States and the Russians didn’t. They’d both apparently been stockpiling surface-to-space missiles—hundreds of them.

“It…didn’t end well,” she told them all. “After the first launches, the aliens hit the launch sites with kinetic strikes from orbit. The American sites were far away from civilians—they leveled them all. Some of the Russian sites…weren’t.

“The aliens didn’t bombard those. They landed troops and tanks and took them out on the ground. No civilian casualties that I know of—I don’t even know how they can be that careful.”

“You can’t pull off that kind of response without deaths,” Chan objected. “People died.”

“Yes,” Sade said sharply. “A lot of people. Soldiers, only doing their jobs, only following orders—trying to protect people. But…very few civilians.”

“They don’t want martyrs,” Annette noted grimly.

“After that, they dissolved everything above the city level for government,” Sade continued. “With power-armored troops—not even the tentacled bastards themselves, a couple of other species—to enforce the order. They ordered all the military people to go home. Said there’ll be pensions for all soldiers, but…how much paperwork can you get done in a week?” She shrugged. “They might keep their word on that, they might not.

“There were riots,” she said in a disturbingly level voice. “
Everywhere
. They told local law enforcement to get the situations under control—or they would.”

“What happened?”

“Some places…overreacted. Others…did nothing. Both had the same result—power-armored troops, low-level fly-bys. They have some sort of mass stunning weapon, knocked out entire crowds with a single pulse. Fewer people died where the bastards did intervene than where they didn’t.

“Five days in, they introduced a new planetary governor. Some mess of syllables I can’t pronounce; it’s in the news feeds. One of the big tentacled bastards. She’s apparently appointing continental sub-governors to which the existing municipal governments will report.”

Sade shook her head.

“So far, the reports I had suggested they were at least
talking
to the mayors and city governments they’ve left in place, but everyone higher has just been sent home. There was some organized resistance when they landed in the US, but…”

“How bad?” Annette asked. No one
else
in the room was from the United States, but she knew her countrymen. She doubted they’d rolled over for any invader, even an alien one.

“I don’t know how they did it, but they got ten goddamn divisions into the field against the landings in Washington DC. Tanks, helicopters; it looked for a few hours that they’d make a real fight of it. Then Tan-tuck-Shallegh told them to surrender or be forced to.”

The ethereal blonde captain shivered.

“No offense, ma’am, but they were
Americans
. Their response was…pithy. It turned out no armor, tank, or defense system we have can protect against their stunners. They knocked out over
a hundred thousand soldiers
in a single pass. Their biggest difficulty was finding a way to keep the fucking
chopper pilots
alive.

“They took out the American military resistance in under fifteen minutes with no fatalities,” Sade concluded. “Civilian resistance continues, but their patrols are in armor that can stand up to anything we’ve got short of anti-armor rockets, and their vehicles carry energy shields that can stand up to those. Neither the news nor Intelligence has
any
reports of successful attacks on their ground troops.”

“The Weber Protocols call for a wait period before initiating real counterattacks,” Rolfson noted. “The resistance so far is…well, civilians with guns. It’ll be a different story once the Weber teams start moving.”

“Hopefully,” Sade said quietly. “The fuckers don’t seem to be engaging in retaliations… Hell, in a lot of cases, they don’t even bother to
shoot back
. That’s how
fucking helpless
Earth is.”

“Thank you, Elizabeth,” Annette told her. “That’s what we needed to know—Earth is fucked unless we can do something to change the odds.”

She laid a flimsy on the table in front of her. “I suggest you all look at this,” she told her staff. “I’ll distribute copies to everyone, but this is our Letter of Marque.

“It officially states that we are neither Nova Industries nor United Earth Space Force ships anymore,” she continued. “The UESF, especially, is functionally dissolved. We are charged, however, and authorized under this document to act as ‘agents of the Earth government,’ with the right to wear uniforms and be treated as soldiers.

“We are charged to capture any enemy shipping we encounter, to steal or trade for any technology we believe can help Earth, and acquire ships and allies if possible. I am authorized to act as ambassador plenipotentiary with the full authority of the Governing Council of Earth when dealing with such allies.

“As Captain Sade has told us, our home has been conquered. No resources they have can turn that tide. It falls to us”—she tapped the flimsy—“to find those resources. We are officially charged and authorized as Privateers of Terra—and we, my friends, are Earth’s only hope.”

#

It took time for the shock to fade. For all that they had all known Earth had fallen, it was something entirely different to hear the realities of that fall laid out by Captain Sade. To
see
how the woman who’d had to watch it happen felt about it.

There would come a time to review news and intelligence reports, to go through
Oaths of Secrecy
’s own sensor records for corroborating evidence, but for now, Annette kept her senior officers locked in the conference room while they worked through it. It would never do for these men and women to look distressed or upset in front of the crew.

Annette was surprised by how much the news affected her. She really had nothing back on Earth to tie her down—an ex-husband currently leading a research drilling operation in Antarctica and her…complex friendship with Elon Casimir, but that was it. No children, and her parents had passed on years ago. Most of her Nova Industries coworkers were now part of her little fleet.

And yet.

Her world had been conquered. Entirely apart from her oaths as a UESF officer and her promises to Jean Villeneuve, that simple fact raised her hackles and awoke her anger. She didn’t grieve for Earth—Earth wasn’t lost yet—but she was angry. The A!Tol were going to regret coming to her planet. And speaking of the A!Tol…

“This is not news that’s easy for us to handle,” she said aloud. “But we also have work to do. Metharom and Ki!Tana have details to go over for us.” Annette nodded to the engineer, who swallowed and returned the gesture firmly. “Given the news, if anyone
isn’t
willing to be in the same room as an A!Tol, I’ll understand—but we need her.”