The Terran Privateer (21 page)

Jean Villeneuve—no longer Admiral Jean Villeneuve, now simply another citizen of Earth—sighed and put aside the communicator as his doorbell rang. The news was…good in some ways and terrifying in others. A new industrial plant was being set up near Cherbourg, over a site that had been building surface-to-space shuttles before the occupation.

The site had been
purchased
, for a reasonable price even, from its original owners. Workers were being
hired
. He knew, through his old contacts, that there was even an active push to recruit the millions of now-ex-military personnel all around the globe into the new industrial projects.

The UESF personnel, with some notable exceptions like himself, had disappeared. But Earth’s new overlords had dismantled the national militaries along with the national governments.
Millions
had been rendered unemployed overnight…and found out, a week or so later, that the promised pensions were actually real.

The Weber Network resistance formed by the Weber Protocols was starting to act, sabotage here, a small-scale attack there—but even as they started, the A!Tol were quietly undermining resistance across the planet.

Jean felt very old as he crossed the main floor of his coastal villa. It had been in his family for years, but his wife had left the villa—and him—the day their son had graduated high school and entered the UESF Academy. It was far too big for just him, but he couldn’t bear to part with it.

The security robot at the door was a “gift” from Earth’s new masters, a featureless doglike thing with a stun gun he didn’t pretend to understand. So far as Jean could tell, it really was programmed to be loyal to him above all else, but it was a sign that much of Earth did not forgive the man who’d surrendered.

Opening the door almost stopped the old man’s heart. Standing on the doorstep of his house was the squid-like form of one of the A!Tol. Hovering behind the squid, a dozen or so steps back, were a pair of power-armored centaur-like soldiers, bodyguards giving the leader space.

It
still
took Jean a minute to realize who was on his doorstep.

“Admiral Jean Villeneuve,” Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh’s translator box said calmly. “We need to talk.”

“I am no longer an Admiral,” Jean told the alien bluntly. “You saw to that.”

“Perhaps. We need to talk regardless. May I come in?”

There was something strangely prosaic about the squid-like creature standing on its four tentacles on the front porch of Jean Villeneuve’s villa, the summer sun reflecting off the English Channel behind it.

That same sun reflected off the armored interface-drive aircraft and the armored soldiers behind the Fleet Lord. The A!Tol was asking—and Jean Villeneuve would not pretend the being
had
to ask.

“Very well.
Bienvenue chez moi
,” he told the alien, stepping back and gesturing the creature in.

Here, in his home, he realized that the tentacled alien was actually shorter than him. All told, Tan!Shallegh stood perhaps one hundred and sixty centimeters tall on his locomotive tentacles. The bullet-shaped torso where the tentacles met was covered in a sleeveless vest with a single platinum insignia of a pair of crossed…swords?

The design was odd to human eyes, but the fundamental sword-ness of the weapons that had become the insignia of the A!Tol military still made it through. A small commonality, though hardly enough to give Jean any connection to the being who had conquered his world.

“I have nowhere for you to sit,” he told the alien. “Or your…” He realized the guards hadn’t followed the Fleet Lord in. If he’d had a weapon, Jean Villeneuve could have avenged his world’s conquest right there.

“A stool would work,” Tan!Shallegh replied calmly. “But I do not need a seat. Feel free if you desire; this is your home.”

“It’s your damn planet now,” Jean told him—but he took a seat in his favorite chair. “I’m too old for games, Fleet Lord. What do you want?”

“Even with the medical science you had prior to our arrival, you could expect another hundred-fifty long-cycles of relatively healthy life…I am sorry, eighty years,” the Fleet Lord pointed out. “While the medical teams were highly impressed with your doctors and hospitals, they have told me they expect to be able to increase your species’ average lifespan by another third beyond what you had achieved.”

The A!Tol doctors thought they could get humanity to
two centuries
of average life expectancy? He was surprised that hadn’t been blazoned all over the news. Earth still had a surprisingly free press, but surely their conquerors wouldn’t give up that kind of propaganda coup.

“If they’re right, your people will soon have a longer life expectancy than the males of my own,” the alien noted. “You are by no rational standard old, Admiral.”

“I told you,” Jean said crossly, “I am no longer an Admiral. It is simply Mister Villeneuve now. And as I
also
told you, I have no time for games. What do you want?”

The alien’s skin had turned a faint purple color, with thick dark blue streaks. Jean had encountered enough A!Tol now to know the color patterns in their skin reflected their moods—but not nearly enough to be able to
read
those patterns.

“I need information,
Mister
Villeneuve,” Tan!Shallegh told him. “You sent a flotilla of hyper-capable ships outside this system during the battle.” A manipulator tentacle made a brushing aside gesture that required no translation. “Do not deny it. We have detailed footage, and even if we didn’t, Captain Bond has emerged again.

“For
your
information, I can receive data from the Imperium and my local fleet base, but I can only send data back to them by Courier,” the Fleet Lord continued. “That is why I will shortly be returning there—our enemies have been active and I must see to the safety of my sector. Including your world.

“But it appears that a Captain Annette Bond of your United Earth Space Force has been raiding military supply ships.”

“What do you expect me to say?” Jean asked flatly. “Yes, we sent out what ships we could to act as privateers and degrade your supply lines. You already know that.”

“I would have expected nothing else. The only question was whether you had hyper-capable
warships
,” the other sapient told him. “It is…one of the moves in the game, as my people would say. You must understand, we have played this game before.”

“What, everything we do is so predictable to you? Then how did Annette escape at all?”

“Firstly, you had an unexpected group of technological advances shortly before our arrival,” Tan!Shallegh told him. “Secondly, I can predict the moves of the game, but not necessarily the tentacles of the player.”

That metaphor took Jean a moment to process, but he slowly nodded his understanding.

Elon Casimir’s BugWorks and all of its advances had been a surprise to the A!Tol—
Tornado
had been a UESF ship for less than a
day
when they’d shown up.

Unfortunately for Earth and the Resistance the Weber Protocols had set up, Elon Casimir was
dead
, killed in a house fire the night Earth fell—a house fire Jean Villeneuve was reasonably sure had been suicide. No one was sure where his daughter had gone, though Jean had very
carefully
not looked.

He owed Casimir that much.

“I don’t know what you expect from me,” he repeated. “I will not betray the confidences of my service, even if you’ve killed it and scattered the ashes to the wind.”

“I do not misestimate your honor,” the alien told him. “Indeed, it is why I am here. I have studied the idioms of your people…I believe the phrase is ‘to take the measure of the man.’ The measure of you, to judge what kind of woman you have sent to me.

“I think a day will come,” Tan!Shallegh told him with a flash of bright blue on his skin, “that you will wear this insignia”—he tapped the crossed swords—, “and I will be honored to call you
brother
.”

“You’ll be waiting a long time,” Jean snapped, even as a shiver ran down his spine. The thought was surprisingly tempting—Earth would forever condemn him as a traitor either way, but if Earth was doomed to
remain
part of Tan!Shallegh’s Imperium, how better to see to the defense of the world he’d sworn to guard?

“Perhaps,” the Fleet Lord agreed. “But we have time. For today, though, Jean…I must know what kind of woman Annette Bond is.”

“And why would I tell you that?” Jean snapped, suddenly angry at the use of his name, at the invasion of his space, at the demands and arrogance of this strange alien.

“Because you have sent her to my worlds to be a privateer—and we understand that concept, Jean—and there are two kinds of privateers: soldiers and murderers.”

“Annette is a warrior without peer,” Earth’s last Admiral told his conqueror. “Her honor has never bent, never broken—not even when my service betrayed her for it. She will not waver in her mission, she will not weaken, she will dog your heels until either she is dead or Earth is free.”

“I see. A soldier, then. I can fight soldiers,” Tan!Shallegh said calmly. “A soldier will be hunted, will be fought, will be brought down—but if she fights us with honor, she will be met with honor. And when she is brought to bay, she will be given the chance to yield.

“But the path you have set her on is one that drags to the bottom of the deeps,” the squid-like creature continued. “For all you say, Jean Villeneuve, I fear she may yet become a murderer.”

“And what happens then?” Jean demanded, his heart suddenly cold.

“I believe your idiom is ‘we will put her down like a mad dog.’”

The system was uninhabited and uninhabitable. None of its five planets fell into the Goldilocks zone for liquid water to form, and if there were any species in the universe that didn’t require liquid water, the A!Tol weren’t aware of them—and neither were the Terrans who’d stolen their databases.

Three of the planets were barren rocks, surfaces burned to ashes long ago by their red giant primary. Two immense gas giants, super-Jovians as Earth categorized them, orbited at radii that the mind could barely comprehend as numbers, let alone distances.

There was nothing in this barren hole of a system to ever draw the eye of a stranger. A survey expedition had swept the system once a hundred years before and it had been marked in everyone’s catalogs with various markers and explanations, all of which boiled down to:
this place is not worth visiting
.

As Annette’s privateer flotilla emerged from hyperspace into the outer edge of the system, the massive gravity of the red giant pushing the safe zone where a portal could be formed far beyond either gas giant, they saw nothing to change that impression, either.

“All scanners are clear,” Rolfson reported. “I have…nothing. Are we sure we’re in the right place?”

“We are in the right place,” Ki!Tana said calmly. “Set your course for the inner gas giant. The rings are dangerous: shifting, large, unpredictable. We will need updated charts to navigate them safely.”

“
Tornado
could pass through with her shields and armor,” Annette said quietly, studying what data the scanners were already providing on the gas giant’s rings. The rings looked to have an equivalent mass to Earth’s entire asteroid belt, compressed into the ring of an over-sized gas giant.

Those rings might actually approach bad-movie levels of density.

“The other vessels could not, and it would be rude,” the alien told her. “Lieutenant Commander Chan, I am transferring an identification protocol to you. Once we have reached one-half of a thousandth-light-cycle from the planet, transmit it. Omnidirectional, high power.”

One half of a thousandth-light-cycle was forty-two light-seconds. The translator was only so good at translating distances and measurements, though Annette had noticed it was getting better.

“I have the data packet, Captain,” Chan confirmed.

“Take us in, Amandine,” Annette ordered. “Let’s see what a pirate base looks like.”

The distance dropped away rapidly, the other five ships dropping into neat formation behind
Tornado
.
Of Course We’re Coming Back
was barely separated from her prize, effectively remote-controlling the far larger vessel.

“Coming up on the designated distance,” Amandine announced after several minutes of smooth flight.

“Transmitting identification protocols,” Chan confirmed a few moments later.

“What do we do now?” Rolfson asked.

“Slow to a halt relative to the planet,” Annette instructed. “Let’s wait and see what we hear.”

“It may be some time,” Ki!Tana warned. “My identification protocols are unique to me. I have not used them in some time, as Kikitheth had her own.”

Moments stretched into minutes, the silence on
Tornado
’s bridge growing tighter and tighter, until Annette wondered if the station had moved. Ki!Tana said they did that sometimes.

“We have a tightbeam pulse emerging from the rings,” Chan announced finally. It felt like the entire bridge let out a held breath in a single exhalation. “Source appears to be a relay beacon—the pulse is machine code. I’m not even sure our computer can read it.”

“Forward it to my communicator,” Ki!Tana replied. “That is odd…”

The alien’s communicator was her original device, only barely linked in to
Tornado
’s
network and functioning mostly through audio feedback, unlike the modern scroll-like communicators Terrans used. The flimsy display she used for visual data pinged as Chan obeyed and then Ki!Tana skimmed over it in silence, her skin a dark purplish-blue.

“It’s a request for confirmation,” the A!Tol finally said. “Lieutenant Commander Chan, if you can relay the packet I’m returning to you to that relay beacon.”

“Of course.”

More time passed. Annette understood that a pirate base on the line between two empires had to be secretive, but this was making her twitchy.

“New package,” Chan announced. “Ki!Tana’s translation software has got it—looks like drift charts for the rings.”

“Finally,” Annette breathed in relief. “Forward them to Amandine. Lieutenant Commander—take us all the way in.”

#

Ten seconds after entering the rings, Annette knew that no reaction-drive ship could ever have followed the course they had been given. Inside that ten seconds, Amandine had made six separate vector changes, each of hundreds of kilometers a second.

It would
probably
have been an exaggeration to say that you could have walked through the rings, but Annette had spent a lot of time in Sol’s asteroid belt. The comparison was terrifying, but Amandine took
Tornado
through the rocks with a careful hand.

“Coming up on the inner edge,” he reported quietly.

“Bringing up a visual,” Rolfson announced. “Sensors suggest this is going to be…my
gods
.”

The screen switched from the tactical plot to a pure visual, first showing the
hundreds
of rocks inside a visual range and then showing the gap
Tornado
would dive through—and through it, the crew’s first sight of Tortuga.

Ki!Tana’s description of it as a mobile shipyard—a large vessel but still inherently a
ship
—had clearly thrown off Annette’s expectations. She’d expected something big, bigger than even the two-kilometer-long behemoths the A!Tol had attacked Sol with.

The mobile shipyard had clearly designed to build and maintain ships half again that size—and six of them at once. Tortuga was over twenty kilometers across, a technically mobile six-armed star. Two of the arms had been closed in at some point in the past; a metal shell wrapped the yard slips that filled the other four arms to provide living space.

The yard slip between the two enclosed arms had been subdivided into a dozen smaller slips. Two were big enough to fit
Tornado
, but the others were designed to handle smaller vessels.

The other three slips still looked like they could swallow an A!Tol battleship but held instead a small fleet of identical cruisers. Each was a smoothly lined vessel painted dark red, ten percent again
Tornado
’s size.

Twenty ships of various sizes, up to three much the same scale as
Tornado
, were docked against the enclosed arms. Four of the red cruisers orbited around the station, lazy guard dogs keeping an eye on the flock.

“We have incoming,” Rolfson reported. “One of the red ships—I’m guessing those are Tortuga’s owners?”

“Yes,” Ki!Tana confirmed. “Remember, Captain—Tortuga’s Crew are
not
pirates. They were born aboard that station; they will die for that station. They deal happily with pirates, but they look down on them.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Annette told her.

“Ma’am, point of concern,” her tactical officer interrupted again. “They’ve got powerful shields, but I still got a pretty good glimpse at their hulls as they closed. These guys have compressed-matter armor—no one else seemed to know it existed!”

“Interesting,”
Tornado
’s Captain said slowly.
“Are they hailing us?”

“Just now, ma’am,” Chan confirmed, tossing the channel onto the main screen without needing instruction.

The being who appeared on the screen reminded her of nothing so much as an upright scarab beetle. Red cloth bandoliers had been strung across a torso covered in heavy carapace plating, each bandolier marked with insignia and medals Annette didn’t even attempt to understand. A squat, beetle-like head sat atop the armored torso, massive black eyes and wavering antennae focused on the screen.

The Laian chittered for a moment, and then the translator kicked in.

“This is Captain Tidikat of the Crew,” the translator told them. “You have used an old and…special access code. Identify yourself.”

Ki!Tana moved into the field of vision.

“They used my code, Captain Tidikat,” she replied calmly. “My contract has transferred to the Captain of this vessel and I have guided them here to do business.”

The antennae whirred as Tidikat considered.

“This is acceptable to the Crew,” it concluded. “Flotilla Commander, identify yourself.”

Ki!Tana gestured for Annette to take over, stepping back behind the Terran Captain.

“I am Captain Annette Bond, a privateer of the United Earth Space Force,” she told the alien proudly. “These ships are either under my command or legitimate prizes taken in the course of war. I am prepared to sell the prizes and their contents to fund maintenance and upgrades of my vessels.”

Mandibles clicked rapidly, in something that the translator clearly didn’t think was speech.

“A privateer of a fallen state,” Tidikat finally said. “We are…familiar with the path you travel, Captain Bond. What cargos do you have to sell?”

“Point six cee missiles of Terran manufacture, raw protein, and molecular circuity cores. Plus the three freighters themselves.”

Tidikat’s mandibles clicked rapidly again.

“Ki!Tana’s presence alone would see you safely to Tortuga, Captain,” the Laian told her. “Your goods will be welcome here—some more than others, as I’m sure you realize.

“The rules of Tortuga are simple,” it continued. “Do not cause trouble. Obey all orders given by members of the Crew. Do not exit the marked public portions of the platform.

“We are not responsible for the security of your persons or goods. If you cause sufficient trouble, you will be ejected or terminated. If you breach the station or an order of the Command Crew, your ship will be seized as compensation.

“We do not mandate fairness in trade. Look to your own negotiations.”

The mandibles snapped once, very definitively.

“Do you understand our rules, Captain Bond?”

“Perfectly,” she replied flatly. “We are here to trade, not cause trouble. We will protect ourselves if needed.”

“This is Tortuga,” Tidikat replied, its mandibles snapping rapidly as it spoke. “This is to be expected.”