The Terran Privateer (27 page)

“Are you in charge here?” asked one of them, presumably the leader as his armor was marked with gold symbols that meant nothing to Annette. He was apparently making the same judgment on the fact that she was the
only
one in a uniform, battered as it was.

“These are my crew, yes,” she replied as calmly as she could. The translator would lose most of her emotion, but homicidal rage was no answer to battle armor.

“This facility is not registered to you,” the Laian commander told her. “Weapons have been fired, people are dead, and you do not belong here. Your explanation?”

“Fifteen members of my crew were kidnapped by the
scum
that owned this place,” she replied, managing to only spit the one word. “Since you failed to protect them, we acted to retrieve them.”

“You are not permitted to engage in lethal force except in immediate self-defense,” the Laian officer reminded her. “This should have been reported.”

“I was told to do nothing,” she said coldly. “These people tried to rape one of my crew, who is now dying. Had I waited longer, more of my crew would have died. If you want to make an issue of my protecting my crew, you’re going to have to fight me for it.”

She was familiar with the body language of neither species around her and she could
still
feel the tension ratcheting up. Defiance wouldn’t help—even with Tellaki’s people, she had light body armor and submachine guns versus power armor and plasma weapons.

“This situation has already passed simple solutions, Captain Bond,” the Laian said after a long moment. “It seems the owners of this facility have remote access to the security systems. Captain Ikwal of the Kanzi vessel
Faces of God
is apparently dead, but his second-in-command has filed a formal complaint against you for an illegal assault and the murder of his Captain.”

He paused, seeming to wait for a response from her. She stared at him for a long moment until he made a distinct “come on” gesture and she realized what he needed.

“Where, sir, would I be able to file an official complaint against
them
for kidnapping and murder of my crew?” she demanded.

“As it happens, you would need to file that report with an officer of the Crew such as myself,” he said smoothly. “Contrasting complaints would require arbitration by the High Captain. If you are prepared to surrender yourself as security for the good behavior of your crew, I can place this facility under lockdown but allow your crew to return to your ship unimpeded.”

“May I bring a companion?” she asked, glancing around for Ki!Tana. The big alien wasn’t part of the blockade at the door—apparently because she’d found cover big enough to protect her. Bond waved the A!Tol over to join them.

“Ah, Ki!Tana,” the Laian officer greeted the alien. “I was warned you would be involved.” He turned to Annette. “The Ki! will not be permitted into the arbitration process, as it is only for Captains, but she may accompany you until then if you surrender and make that complaint.” He paused, glancing up at the suspended second floor, where the holding cells had been concealed. “I will also have our doctors see if we can assist with your wounded crew.”

Annette nodded swiftly before she could change her mind.

“Very well.”

Major James Wellesley arrived at the warehouse at a much slower pace and with much less shooting than he’d originally planned. He and his Troop Captains had paused at the original rendezvous point for two of his troops to catch up with them, and they now approached the Crew soldiers guarding the warehouse with the somewhat-illusory advantage of numbers.

Without power armor for his humans and unwilling to break their restriction on weapons, his thirty-odd troopers were no match for the ten Laians in power armor. That was not really the point: the point was to impress on the Crew how seriously
Tornado
’s crew took recovering their people.

The status of the power-armored insectoids, though, was
nothing
like what he expected. While two were maintaining a very clear, alert guard, most of them had doffed their helmets and appeared to be relatively relaxed.

They also didn’t react to the humans showing up with thirty more armed troops at all.

With a sigh, James approached the Laian with the most gold filigree on his armor and threw a crisp salute.

“Major James Wellesley,
Tornado
,” he introduced himself. “I’m here to escort our people back to my ship.”

“Of course, Major,” the Laian replied. “I am Second Lance Pekelon. All of your people are inside, except for your Lieutenant Mosi, who has been transferred to the main medical facility in the Crew section of the ship, and Sergeant Lin who insisted on accompanying her.

“Well, and Captain Bond and Ki!Tana, of course, who will shortly be facing the High Captain to decide the fate of your ship for this action,” he added, a minor and apparently unimportant addition.

“Thank you,” James said slowly. “Am I permitted to retrieve them, Second Lance?”

“You are,” the…junior noncommissioned officer, he thought, told him. “I do need to otherwise maintain lockdown of this facility until the High Captain has completed his judgment. I can only spare two troopers to escort you.”

“I appreciate the assistance,” he said gravely. Sadly, two power-armored and plasma weapon–armed troopers probably
were
more of an escort than his thirty-plus humans with assault rifles.

“I never said anything, Major,” Pekelon said quietly, “but the Kanzi deserved to be driven from our station a long time ago. You will not find many Crew mourning their shed blood.”

He stepped back, waving for James to lead his people in and rescue their fellows.

#

The Laian Commander took Annette’s statement and complaint with quickly efficient questions, clearly processing a translated version of her comments into their system via software in his helmet, as his troops escorted them through the warehouse district, through an unprepossessing hatch, and into a concealed rapid transit system.

A small pod whisked them away to the original central hull of Tortuga, where they were led to a small waiting room carefully painted with murals of a strange and unfamiliar world.

“The seat is for a Yin,” the Laian told Annette, gesturing to one of the two chairs. “It should work for your species. There is a cupboard with water over there.” He gestured with an armored claw. “Please make yourself comfortable.”

The armored insect-like alien bowed, a weird bending movement in his case, and left the room—leaving Annette and Ki!Tana alone for the moment. The big A!Tol settled onto the odd curved bench her race used as seats and shivered slightly, her skin
still
the gray-black of minor distress.

“Are you all right, Ki!Tana?” Annette asked as she settled into her own chair. “You seem to have been in pain all day.”

“It is a long explanation,” her companion replied. “One we will not have time for today, but some days are worse for me than others. I have carried my burden for a long time, Captain Bond, and I will carry it for some long cycles yet.”

“Your burden?”

“We don’t have time,” Ki!Tana repeated. “Realize before you go into this meeting that the High Captain can seize your ships and all of your accounts. You do not have the force to stop him.”

A chill ran down Annette’s spine.

“Would he do that?” she asked, realizing at last how much danger her instinctive reaction to protect her crew had put them all in.

Ki!Tana made a small grinding noise and Annette realized she was quite literally grinding her beak against itself. Whatever was wrong with the A!Tol, it was getting worse.

“I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “If it remains Ridotak, you benefit from knowing me. He
should
be, but changes of High Captain are not announced or advertised.

“Even if not, you merely defied a Crew giving an order on the spot. The Kanzi have broken a longstanding Crew dictate, one the Crew values highly. So long as you do not anger the High Captain, the odds are in your favor. Just…remember that this being could end your campaign with a word.”

“I will,” Annette promised. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I have overexerted myself, given my state,” the alien admitted. “I will be fine, but if you would be so kind as to fetch me water? Moving would be…difficult.”

Annette grabbed a bottle of water, clearly designed to be easily drunk from by as many species as possible, for the other sapient and passed it over.

“If they don’t talk about the High Captain, how do you know who it is?” she asked. “For that matter,
they
knew you.”

Ki!Tana swallowed the entire contents of the water bottle in a single extended gulp, and turned her black eyes on Annette, flashes of red and blue barely visible on her skin despite the overwhelming gray of her current state.

“If Ridotak remains High Captain, he will tell you anyway,” she admitted. “There was a time, Captain Bond, before I served Kikitheth, when
I
was Crew. And at the end of that time, before I set out into the galaxy to see if there were other paths for me to walk, Ridotak was my Captain.”

#

They were most of the way back to
Tornado
when James’s finely tuned professional paranoia exploded. His lead element, a five-man patrol from his Alpha Troop, had entered the long gallery linking all of the docking tubes on this side of the station. The gallery was empty, with even less traffic than when they’d arrived. The access corridor most of the group were still in was still lightly occupied, with a couple of cargo movers moving toward the gallery access…

“Everybody to the walls!” he bellowed. “Ambush close!”

The SSS troopers knew the meaning of
that
command and bodily grabbed the still-shaky ship crewmen and -women who
weren’t
trained in the Special Space Service’s lexicon of danger commands.

Even before the two cargo movers had reached his people, all of the spacers were against the walls and down, with kneeling SSS troopers covering them and aiming at the vehicles.

The two Laian escorts seemed to freeze in the confusion. One realized what James had seen as a threat and stepped out to challenge the two cargo movers. They were unmanned vehicles, normally, and sensors and safety protocols meant they supposedly
couldn’t
hit anything, let alone a sapient.

So, of course the multi-ton transport vehicle drove straight over him, smashing the insectoid alien to the ground and grinding to a halt on his power armor. The vehicle’s engine whirred, unable to push farther as the armor wasn’t going to be damaged or flattened by a civilian cargo hauler.

The second Laian reacted to
that
—by putting three plasma bolts into the engine block of the second hauler. It careened to a halt in a crashing ball of flame.

And then the gunfire started. Kanzi in body armor—only two, thankfully, in
power
armor—swarmed out of the first hauler and opened fire. Plasma fire slammed into the still-standing Crew trooper in a hail of superheated white flame. Power armor was tough, tough stuff, but not
that
tough.

The Laian still managed to spray fire back at his attackers, fire burning through regular body armor like it wasn’t even there, before collapsing backward, cooked in his own suit.

He had bought James’s people precious seconds. Seconds they put to deadly use.

James hadn’t expected to fight the Crew when they caught up to them, but they hadn’t
known
that—or that the Kanzi wouldn’t have power armor—when they left the ship. The two troops who’d caught up with him had under-barrel grenade launchers strapped to their rifles.

In the seconds the Laian’s sacrifice bought them, they carefully targeted the launchers and opened fire with a salvo of armor-piercing grenades “liberated” from the armories of A!Tol military freighters. A dozen Kanzi from the jammed hauler were still standing, and two power-armored figures were hauling themselves out of the burning wreckage of the other.

Each took at least one grenade, and then James’s people followed up a fusillade of armor-piercing bullets. The rounds were
far
from enough to threaten the power-armored soldiers…but they proved entirely redundant.

Thirty grenades went off in an ear-crashing cacophony of bright flashes from the deadly spikes of plasma the weapons flashed into the nearest mass when they triggered.

When the noise and the light cleared, none of the Kanzi were still standing. Blood and bits of blue fur were splattered across the remaining hauler, the walls, the roof.

“Get the hauler off our armored friend,” James snapped, swallowing his stomach’s attempt to empty itself at the smell of burnt fur and flesh. The grenades had been designed to kill power armor. Against regular infantry, they’d been pure overkill. “I think the blue-furred bastards just cut their own throats, but let’s earn ourselves some goodwill.”