The Terran Privateer (40 page)

Annette woke to darkness.

It wasn’t a lack of light. It was a lack of…
anything
. She tried to blink and her eyelids refused to respond. She tried to move—and her arms and legs twitched, and then came up against restraints.

“Captain, you’re awake,” a smoothly educated voice noted aloud. “Please, do not attempt to move. I have blocked your facial nerves and that could easily have other impacts. Can you speak?”

“Yesth,” she managed to squeeze out past numb lips, recognizing the voice of
Tornado
’s South African chief surgeon, Doctor Jelani.

“Let me try something,” Jelani told her. A moment later, her jaw spasmed, an electric shock running through her system.

“Try now. Is that better?”

Annette moved her jaw and tongue.

“Yes,” she said. “How bad, doctor?”

“You passed out from blood loss,” Jelani told her, his voice professionally soothing and calm. “Ki!Tana was able to put pressure on the wound immediately and
Subjugator
’s crew provided every assistance they could.”

“How bad?” she demanded.

He sighed.

“You’ve been out for twenty-six hours,” he told her. “We had patients who were going to die without immediate attention, so we slapped a seal on your face and put you in a medical coma. I apologize.”

“Don’t. Right call. How bad?” she repeated.

He chuckled.

“Every bone on the right side of your face, from the frontal skull down to your jawbone, has a slice between seven and fifteen millimeters deep,” he told her calmly. “Your right eye was cut clean in two and your optic nerve on that side severed in two separate places. Your jawbone was cut through, but the rest of your skull is mostly intact.

“I focused on the jawbone initially, which is why you can speak,” he continued. “The bone-knitting nanites are busy in the rest of your face, and are filling in the matrix in your jaw. You have a bandage and half a dozen stimulators covering half of your face—and they are staying on for at
least
two more days.”

“And the eye?” she finally asked.

Jelani sighed.

“We had seventy-three fatalities and a hundred and eighty-two wounded from this whole affair,” he told her gently. “Our regeneration matrix supplies are at critical levels; we can regenerate them still, but we’re nearing the point where we may not have enough base stock for that.”

The “regeneration matrix” required for rebuilding human organs and limbs was basically a slurry of undifferentiated stem cells. Given the right food—and unlike her crew, the stuff
loved
Universal Protein—it could double its mass in twenty-four hours.

“So, you can give me back my eye if I’m willing to risk not being able to save someone’s life down the line,” she interpreted aloud.

“I would not be so blunt, but yes,” Jelani allowed.

“Then why are we talking about it?” she asked. “Get me a uniform and an eyepatch. Seems to fit the job description, anyway.”

“A uniform? Captain, please! There were worse injuries aboard, but do not make the mistake of thinking you were
uninjured
. You need to rest and recover.”

Images of a war of mutual annihilation ran through the mental eyes that were all Annette currently commanded.

“You have two choices, Doctor,” she told him gently. “You can get me a uniform and watch me walk out of here, or you can pull all of my senior officers into an infirmary room to brief me.”

“My dear Captain Bond, will you accept how badly you are injured if I agree to the latter?”

#

They compromised by having one of the nurses help Annette into a uniform and roll her sickbed into the conference room normally used for coordinating
Tornado
’s medical staff. It wasn’t truly big enough for
all
of Annette’s senior officers, especially not with Ki!Tana’s immense bulk, but they managed to make it work.

“All right,” Annette told her people, looking them over with her remaining eye. None of them tried to avoid her gaze, which was impressive.
She
would have, having seen what she looked like in a mirror. Half of her face was covered in white gauze, and the half that wasn’t was still partially paralyzed.

But she could see again, and her people looked back at her.

“I need status updates from everyone,” she continued, “but let’s start with Major Wellesley. How are things on the surface?”

The SSS Major looked utterly exhausted. He didn’t appear injured, but he also didn’t appear to have slept. He had always been skinny with his height, but right now his face was gaunt. Nonetheless, he brushed his hair back from his forehead with one hand and smiled in grim accomplishment.

“As of a little over two hours ago, the last remnants of the landed pirates have either surrendered or been wiped out,” he reported. “Brigade Commander Kashel has been about as cooperative as you can expect from a senior prisoner, and her people have been…unresisting.

“We are fully in control of the logistics base,” he concluded. “We’re sorting through volunteers from the prisoners now, but it looks like we’ll have a short battalion: four companies including mine, if we want it.

“Everyone else just wants to go home.”

“I get that. Can we load them onto some of the robot freighters and send them there?” Annette asked. “It seems the easiest way.”

“We should be able to,” Wellesley confirmed. “We’re going to need to recruit them as a labor force to load the other freighters, in any case. We were, after all, expecting to have an entire
fleet’s
worth of personnel to do that work.”

“See if we can sort out some way to pay them,” Annette instructed. “That should help avoid any feeling that we’re using them as forced labor before we send them home.’

“We will,” Wellesley promised. “If we get the volunteers I expect for that, we should have all of the ships ready to head wherever we want them to go, Earth or Tortuga, inside seventy-two hours.”

“Make it faster if you can,” she told him. “And if you can pull together that battalion, do so. We might need it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Annette turned to Ki!Tana and Lieutenant Mosi. “What about
Subjugator
?”

“The good news is Forel is dead,” the young black officer replied. “You emptied your gun into him before you collapsed; he was never getting up again. Unfortunately, he’d rigged a deadman switch; the ship’s computers blew apart when he died.

“
Subjugator
is not repairable, though we have been looting her for missiles and parts,” she concluded. “The slave crewmembers have volunteered to join us to a being, and we’ve shipped the rest to the surface to join the rest of the pirate prisoners.”

“Ki!Tana.” Annette looked at their old pirate friend. “
Can
we still send our cargos to Tortuga? Will Ondu still sell them for us?”

“For twenty-two percent of the entirety of a logistics base?” Ki!Tana asked. “Ondu will sell them for you and make the sure are accounts are held until you retrieve them. We would not be
welcome
on Tortuga at this point, but we would not be denied entrance.”

“I want
Subjugator
stripped from top to bottom,” Annette ordered. “I need two things from her, people: One, I want the schematics Forel promised us. There may well have been a copy on a chip somewhere. If there is, I want it.

“Two: the son of a bitch was working with others. They had a plan to start a war.” She shivered. “Now, I don’t like
anyone
on their target list, but Earth’s right in the middle. Plus, whether or not their plan will still work, they’ve got
fifteen thousand
human slaves in their base, wherever it is.

“I need to know where that base is, people. We may be able to negotiate with this conspiracy. We may end up doing the A!Tol a favor and blowing them all to hell. But we can’t do either without knowing
where
we’re going.”

“I would prefer that you not negotiate,” Ki!Tana admitted. “Such a war would see my race annihilated, and I am somewhat attached to my species.”

“I haven’t made up my mind up yet,” Annette admitted in turn, “but I’m not leaning toward letting them finish their plan.”

She turned to Metharom,
Tornado
’s engineer.

“Now, Kulap, if we do find them, what state are we in to deal with them?” she asked.

“The armor mostly held,” Metharom replied. “But we did take a point-blank salvo of interface drive missiles. At that range, they were only moving at about forty percent of lightspeed, but that was bad enough.

“We’ve got twenty missile launchers online. That’s all you’re getting. We have three proton beams online. I think we can cannibalize one of the others to get the last two online in a couple of days.”

“So, we’re short a sixth of our weaponry, at least,” Annette accepted. “Shields, engines?”

“Fully functional. We can fly and we can fight, but we’ve lost some teeth.”

“It will have to do,” she admitted. “Is there anything else I should be aware of, people?”

#

Once she’d been released from Doctor Jelani’s tender ministrations, Annette managed to get herself back to her quarters under her own power. Once there, she took the pills he’d given her—painkillers, since the process of having her bones reknit was
not
pleasant—and settled down looking at her wallscreen.

With a few commands on a flimsy computer, she mirrored the display and brought up an astrographic map of the region.

Orsav, known to humanity as Lambda Aurigae, had been one of the systems their initial sweeps had guessed as a new colony, only a few flights into the system during the scope of their lightspeed scans of the worlds around Sol.

Most of the other systems they’d pegged as colonies had shown up. The concentration of routes they’d thought was a fleet base—that was Kimar, home base to three squadrons of Imperial ships of the line and their escort ships.

There were misses both ways, of course. Systems that weren’t on A!Tol records they’d shown traffic to, which could be
anything
, and systems on the A!Tol records that had been settled too recently for the Dark Eye and the scout-ship sweeps to pick up anything.

The odd thing was the complete absence of settlements inside a roughly forty-light-year radius of Sol in A!Tol records. There were even habitable planets that had been detected, but no one had colonized them. It was too neat and too large a gap to be coincidence, and she made a mental note to ask Ki!Tana about it.

In all likelihood, Forel’s sponsors had hidden their facility inside a system colonized by the A!Tol. Money could cover a lot of sins, Annette was sure, and having a colony nearby would have allowed them to call on it for labor and help.

Except.

Except that they had fifteen thousand human slaves, and many of those couldn’t have been kidnapped since the fall of Earth. Annette suspected she knew—now—why the UESF had been having so many difficulties with pirates in the outer system: even
Subjugator
would have had the drives and sensors to avoid any encounters with the patrol ships hunting the people stealing entire ships and their crews.

Had the slaves been a plan all along? Or had Earth simply been
available
after they’d built their secret lab, and so they’d kidnapped humans as a convenience? And then, once they needed a way through the Kanzi borders…

She sighed. It was a sickening feeling. Her people hadn’t been victimized because of anything they’d done or any special value. They’d just been convenient. Close to their secret base.

Close to a secret base run by a faction of the A!Tol military—and hence a base a Terran scout ship could have stumbled upon.

Annette leapt to her feet to grab her communicator, only to misjudge everything due to the missing eye and end up
crashing
to the floor. With, thankfully, the communicator in her hand.

Groaning, she forced herself into a sitting position.

“Mosi,” she pinged the young officer who’d briefed her on the decision by Forel’s slaves to join her crew. “Are all of Forel’s ex-slaves aboard?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Find Jake Harmon,” she ordered. “Find him and send him to me.”

#

Mosi arrived less than ten minutes later with the scrawny Nova Industries man in tow. Harmon was looking at the young black woman with star-struck eyes, a feeling Annette suspected was shared among the human slaves Mosi had cut free.

At the sight of Annette, however, the fair-haired young NI officer managed to pull his gaze away from Mosi as he visibly tried not to gasp in horror.