The Oncoming Storm (11 page)

She shuddered at the thought. She’d seen pirate slaves—men and women liberated after HMS Thomas had captured a pirate base. They’d been broken beyond repair. The lucky ones had skills the pirates could use, so they’d been press-ganged into joining pirate crews, but the unlucky ones had been raped, then put to work as manual laborers. Human slavery and trafficking was alive and well on the edge of explored space, despite the best efforts of the more civilized powers. Even the Theocracy cooperated when it came to hunting down pirates.

“Captain,” Lieutenant Ross said, “I’m picking up a tight-beam radio signal.”

“Put it through,” Kat ordered.

“. . . under the guns of a warship,” a harsh male voice said. There was so much static that it was hard, even with computer enhancement, to be entirely sure they were hearing the entire message. “You are ordered to cut your drives and prepare to be boarded. Do not attempt to alert any other ship in your convoy. If you cooperate, your lives will be spared.”

Kat’s lips twitched. Few spacers would believe promises from pirates. If she’d been a merchant skipper, she might just have tried to ram the pirate ship. It wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of working in real space, but it would definitely have had a chance in hyperspace. And even if it failed, the pirates would have been forced to blow their own prize rather than take it intact. It might cost them dearly, in the long run. Pirate economics demanded a constant supply of prizes just to feed their market.

“Tell them that we will cooperate,” she said, “as long as our lives are spared.”

Her smile grew wider. “And try to sound scared when you say it,” she added. “Let them think we’re feeling vulnerable.”

She could imagine the reaction on the pirate ship as someone young, female, and apparently helpless begged for mercy. They’d probably find it funny, she knew, as well as a lure pulling them closer. If their crew hadn’t been psychotic before they’d boarded their ship, they probably would be by now. Some of the men they’d tried to rescue, the ones who had been forced to work onboard the pirate ships, had been just as bad as their enslavers by the time they’d been found. Others had zoned out completely.

“They’re ordering us to fall back from the convoy slowly,” Lieutenant Ross reported. “And not to signal anyone else.”

“Unsurprising,” Kat commented. She looked at the helmsman. “Comply with their directive. And remember we’re posing as a freighter.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Weiberg said. “Reducing speed . . . now.”

“Establish a tight-beam link with the convoy master,” Kat ordered. “Inform him of our situation and order him to keep his ships in formation. I don’t want anyone to come looking for us.”

“Aye, Captain,” Ross said.

“And order him not to reply,” Kat added quickly. “We don’t want the pirates to hear it.”

“They might pick up our signal,” the XO warned softly. No one else could hear him. “This is hyperspace.”

Kat nodded. Hyperspace did weird things to radio signals, no matter how carefully they were transmitted. It was quite possible that a tight beam signal would be scattered, allowing the enemy to pick up on it despite being on the other side of the transmitter. If that happened . . . the pirate ship would probably open fire, intent on punishing the freighter that had dared defy orders. Kat would have no choice but to kill the attackers as quickly as possible.

Seconds ticked away. It rapidly became clear that the pirates hadn’t picked up the signal.

“Picking up another signal,” Ross said. She sounded rather surprised. “They’re ordering us to hold position and be ready to greet them. All weapons are to be stowed in lockers; any onboard security systems are to be disabled.”

The XO snorted. “Who do they think we are?”

Kat had to smile. It was common for passenger liners and select shipping freighters to have onboard security systems, but rare for standard freighters to have anything beyond a safe and security locks on the computers. The pirates might have assumed the worst, though; it was a logical precaution. And the order to stow all weapons suggested they didn’t intend to take additional risks.

Or perhaps it will give them an excuse to break their agreement, she thought, grimly. But they don’t really need the excuse.

“They’re entering approach vector now,” Roach reported. “I don’t think they’re interested in maintaining plausible deniability any longer.”

“Good,” Kat said. Her lips curved into a tight smile. The game was about to come to an end. “Neither am I.”

Pirate crews had never impressed her with their intelligence, but it was unlikely they would get much closer without taking a hard look at her hull. Roach’s passive sensors were already filling in details, suggesting that the pirate ship was an old frigate, probably one dating all the way back to the Breakaway Wars. A number of such ships had gone missing after the wars had come to an end, although no one was quite sure how many. The UN had kept extensive records—every little thing had to be detailed, according to the bureaucrats who actually ran the government—but the records had been destroyed on Earth. Speculation over just how many ships remained in existence had been a common topic of conversation at Piker’s Peak.

“I have hard locks on their drive section,” Roach reported. He sounded pleased with himself. The locks had been established without needing to run an active sensor sweep. “I can pop a hammerhead missile into their ass, no problem.”

“Excellent,” Kat said. In normal space, she would have used energy weapons, but they were dangerously unpredictable in hyperspace. There was a reason most people preferred to avoid fighting battles outside real space. “Prepare to fire on my command.”

She braced herself. One of the other reasons why fighting in hyperspace was so dangerous was that explosions tended to attract energy storms. They could score a damaging hit on their target, allowing them to board the hulk, yet an energy storm could blow up around them and destroy the crippled vessel before it could be claimed. Even a hammerhead missile, a warhead designed to inflict limited damage, ran the risk of drawing a storm to them. But there was no real choice. The only other option was blowing the pirate ship into dust.

There was a ping from Roach’s console. “They swept us, Captain,” he warned. Red lights flared on the console. “They know what we are.”

“Fire,” Kat snapped.

Lightning shivered as she launched her missile, aimed right at the enemy drive section. If Kat and her crew were lucky, the pirates would have no time to either return fire or take evasive action. But they hadn’t been alert at all. They didn’t even have their point defense on automatic, ready to blast unexpected threats out of space. The missile slammed into their rear section and detonated.

“Open a channel,” Kat ordered. She waited for the nod from Ross before speaking. “Pirate ship, this is Captain Falcone of the Royal Tyre Navy. If you give up now, without further ado, your lives will be spared. You have one minute to surrender before I blow your ship into atoms.”

There was a long pause, long enough that Kat wondered if the pirate ship had lost all power along with her drive section. A military starship shouldn’t have had that problem—there would be batteries, at the very least—but it was quite possible the pirates hadn’t kept up with their maintenance. Military discipline wasn’t part of their lives. Besides, she knew, the ship was over a hundred years old. They might well have done a poor job of refitting her with the latest sensors and weapons systems.

She thought rapidly. If the pirates couldn’t communicate, she would have to send the marines into the hulk, knowing the pirates could be waiting for a boarding party before blowing their own ship, taking the marines out as well as their crew. Or, if they’d lost life support completely, it was equally possible that most of the crew were trapped in sealed compartments—or dead.

But we could pull evidence from their hull, if we looked, she thought.

“Picking up a weak signal,” Ross reported. “They’re begging to surrender.”

Kat keyed her console. “This is your one chance,” she said. “Cooperate with the marines and your lives will be spared. Any resistance will result in the destruction of your vessel.”

She switched channels. “Colonel, you have permission to launch,” she told Davidson. The marines had been waiting in their shuttles, ready to launch as soon as the pirate ship was crippled. “Good luck.”

The display updated rapidly as shuttles arced away from Lightning, heading towards the crippled ship. Kat tensed as the Marines entered weapons range, knowing that a single energy weapon could pick off a shuttle before any of the troops even knew they were under attack. Davidson was in command, of course. Even if it had been permissible for him to remain behind, he wouldn’t have done so. The thought hurt more than she’d expected. It was one of the things she’d loved about him.

“Contact the convoy master,” she ordered, trying to distract herself. “The convoy is to hold position until we have searched the pirate ship, then we will resume our journey to Cadiz.”

“Aye, Captain,” Ross said.

Kat’s console bleeped. “This is Davidson,” a voice said. His tone was calm and steady, betraying no excitement or concern. “We have boarded the pirate ship. No resistance. I say again, no resistance.”

“Very good,” Kat said. She looked at the XO. “We need to put an investigative team on the vessel.”

“I’ll see to it,” the XO said. “With your permission, I’ll take an engineering and tactical crew with me. They’ll be able to pull information from what remains of the enemy’s computers.”

“And determine if she can be safely towed to Cadiz,” Kat agreed. Taking the ship as a prize wouldn’t win the crew much in the way of money, but it would be something. Besides, a full team of analysts from Cadiz might discover something her crew didn’t have the expertise to find. “If not, place scuttling charges and abandon the hulk. I doubt she can move under her own power now.”

“Aye, Captain,” the XO said.

Kat nodded, then smiled round the bridge. “Our first real combat test,” she said, “and you all did very well.”

She paused. “Stand down from battle stations,” she added. “But continue to monitor local space. Our friend out there may have friends of her own.”

“You’ll want to keep your face mask on,” the marine rifleman said as William climbed through the airlock and into the pirate ship. The rifleman’s name tag read HOBBES. “The ship stinks like a brick shithouse on a very hot day.”

“Thank you for that mental image,” William said dryly. Marines tended to be blunt and crude, something he normally appreciated. But not today. “Where are the prisoners?”

“They’re being held in the mess,” Hobbes said. “If you’ll come with me, sir . . .”

William followed him through the dark corridor, wondering just how the pirates had managed to keep their ship operational for so long. This particular section was some considerable distance from the drive compartment, yet half of the lighting elements seemed to have been blown out while the onboard datanet had been completely lost. Clearly, the UN’s fetish for multiple redundancy—something shared with engineers the galaxy over—hadn’t endured past the ship falling into pirate hands.

The corridors looked filthy, coated with dust and grime, as if the pirates had never bothered to clean their living space. He glanced into one cabin—the door had been jarred open—and saw a messy space with datachips and bedding scattered everywhere. One bulkhead had chains hanging down towards the ground, ending in manacles. He shuddered, realizing that someone had been kept prisoner in the room. Whoever it was, he hoped they’d been rescued rather than killed. It hadn’t been that long since his homeworld had been raided almost every year by pirates.

They walked into the mess. William stopped dead. A handful of armored marines were guarding thirty prisoners, all men. The prisoners were lying on the deck, their hands cuffed behind their backs, their clothes largely torn from them. Some were whimpering to themselves, their world suddenly turned upside down. William looked down at them for a long, chilling moment, then looked at Hobbes. None of the prisoners looked very impressive.

“Which one of these pieces of shit is in command?”

“The captain is dead,” Davidson said, entering from the other hatch. His face was set in a permanent frown. “So are most of the senior officers.”

“Dead?” William repeated. “How?”

“Suicide implants,” Davidson said. He motioned for William to follow him. “That’s odd, for pirates.”

William mulled it over as they walked up the corridor and onto the bridge. Pirates rarely used personalized suicide implants. They were normally only used by secret agents and military personnel. All they did was kill their user if the command was sent or if the user was on the verge of spilling specific secrets to interrogators. William knew better than to trust the implants completely. They were perfectly capable of mistaking an accident that left someone badly hurt for torture, and killing their bearer.

The bridge was a shambles. Several consoles had exploded—he’d never seen that happen outside a bad entertainment flick—and a handful of bodies lay on the deck. Two of them had clearly been sitting at the consoles, judging from the wounds, but the remaining five all looked surprisingly peaceful. But it was clear they were dead. The corpsman kneeling beside one of the bodies looked up, then saluted.

“Commander,” he said gravely. “Their brains were turned to ash, along with their implants.”

“Understood,” William said. There was no point in looking for alternate causes of death. “I assume the implants are beyond recovery?”

“Almost certainly,” the corpsman said. “I’ll have the analysts plough through the dust, but I’d be astonished if they found anything beyond traces of their presence. The damage was total.”

William looked down at the pirate commander. He was a tall man, so extensively muscled that William would have bet good money it was the result of cosmetic treatment, wearing an outfit that showed off his frame to good advantage. His belt, lying beside him, had carried two pistols, a monofilament knife, and a neural whip, the latter probably used on his crewmen when they misbehaved. Pirate commanders had nothing but force to keep their men in line.