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  “What the hell,” came from the other ship on an open mike, then it went dead.

  A red wash in the engineering spaces showed both reactors on the other ship coming to full life, overpowering whatever cover they had been hiding behind. The pirate ship shot away from the jump point, following a twisting course that danced its engines in and out of a direct shot from the Wasp.

  A half dozen laser capacitors went from not there to yellow to red as they sucked up a charge.

  Then the sensor board got hazy.

  “They’re trying to jam,” Beni observed, did something to his board, and some of the jamming went away.

  “Shields,” was Kris’s next order.

  And she hated herself for it.

  A slight bulge on the nose of the Wasp hid one of her two innovations. On order, Smart Metal™ deployed like a huge umbrella, rotating as it went. It both hid the ship behind it and provided a defense against lasers.

  During drills, Kris had first ordered, “Raise. Metal,” or “Raise. Defenses.” Someone on the back of the bridge had whispered, “Shields. Up,” quoting from a long-running space opera. The bridge crew had a good laugh, but from then on, no matter what order Kris gave, the answer from Defensive Systems was always, “Shields. Up.”

  “Shields. Up,” now answered Kris. No one laughed.

  “Keep backing ship,” Captain Drago ordered. “Guns, let me know when you’re fully charged.”

  That was the Wasp’s other secret. For three hundred years fusion reactors had produced the plasma that rocket motors streamed out to move the ship. That plasma, on its way to the engines, passed through magnetohydrodynamic coils that generated electricity for the ship and its weapons.

  The Compton Maru had gotten under way, exposing its vulnerable engines because otherwise it couldn’t charge its lasers.

  The Wasp backed up, using only its maneuvering engines. By all rights, it couldn’t charge its pulse lasers off that dribble of plasma. But on Kris’s board, the four laser capacitors were rapidly moving from green to yellow, headed for full red. Thanks to new science and a recent refit, the Wasp stripped electricity directly from the plasma flux in the reactor.

  The times they were a changing. And this pirate was about to find out.

  Then Kris got her own surprise. The Compton Maru sprouted a shielding umbrella from its own bow. This one had a leaping tiger on it. Its jaws agape, its claws dripping blood.

  “Aggressive type, aren’t they,” Sulwan observed.

  “Let’s see if they can walk the walk,” Kris said, mashing her commlink. “Ahoy, Compton Maru. This is the USS Wasp, and I am Lieutenant Longknife, Wardhaven Navy. You just fired upon me. Dump your core and prepare to be boarded.”

  “You can go to hell,” shot back in reply, but in the background there was a startled cry of “Not a Longknife.” Followed by “Shut up.”

  The two ships circled each other. Captain Drago kept the Wasp pivoting on its long axis, nose always to the Compton. The pirate, for her part, did her best to open the range while keeping her engines covered.

  The range was point-blank. Hand grenades in a broom closet.

  But the Wasp stood between the jump point and the pirate, giving the latter only lousy choices. She could turn and run for the jump point across the system, giving Kris an easy up-the-kilt shot at her reactors. Or charge the Wasp, hoping to slip past her into the jump point. Or fight it out.

  “The hostile’s lasers are fully charged,” Chief Beni said.

  “Any idea how strong they are?” Captain Drago asked.

  “I’d guess five-inchers. And weak for that,” the chief said.

  “Your Highness, what are your orders?”

  Kris thought about that for all of a second. “He’s not getting away from us, Captain. If he wants to dance, we dance, but he can’t run.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Weapons are online. They are yours, ma’am.”

  The exact nature of the Wasp’s registry might be subject to debate. What Captain Drago and Kris had quickly agreed upon was her weapons policy. Laying aim and closing the firing circuits would be done by a serving Wardhaven officer. One must respect international law . . . even if it was with a wink and a smile.

  Lieutenant Kris Longknife, Wardhaven Navy, aimed Battery 1 for the tiger’s mouth. It was about the right distance out from the bow’s center to have the bridge behind it. Of course, if they were rotating their ship behind the shield, like Captain Drago was rotating the Wasp, burn through on the shield might hit anything—or nothing.

  “Pirate ship Compton, this is your one and only warning. Dump your reactor, or I will fire on you,” Kris said, voice cold with death.

  Silence answered her.

  “Prepare to change jinks pattern,” Kris announced. “All hands, prepare for radical evasion.”

  On the bridge, people cinched in already tight seat belts. “For what they are about to receive, may we be truly grateful,” some wag muttered.

  “Pirate ship Compton, I will fire on you at the count of three,” Kris said into her commlink.

  Obscenities were her only reply.

  “One,” Kris said. NELLY GET READY TO IMPLEMENT RADICAL EVASION ON MY MARK.

  READY, KRIS.

  “Two.” MARK!

  The Wasp shifted from a soft right climb to a hard left drop that left Kris’s stomach somewhere a dozen kilometers away in the cold vacuum of space.

  Where it was being fried by three laser beams from the hostile.

  “Fire One,” Kris said as she closed the firing circuit for the first of Wasp’s pulse lasers.

  The mouth of the tiger glowed, then fumed, and finally gaped as the Wasp’s laser burned through the shield. To the void behind it. Yep, the ship was rotating.

  And now it also started to jinks.

  NELLY, EVALUATE THE EVASION PATTERN.

  IT IS A BASIC ONE. I AM ALREADY FORECASTING IT.

  Kris aimed her second laser for opposite the ragged hole in the shield that was already healing itself, blocking out the view of what lay behind it, ship or void.

  At the last second, Kris played a hunch, changing her aim to the right paw of the tiger and firing.

  The paint boiled off in a nanosecond, leaving the shield to burn and buckle. Thinner now from the loss of metal to Kris’s hit and the effort to patch it, burn-through came quicker.

  And raked the ship hull behind it before Laser 2 winked out.

  “Compton, you are hit, and your shields are failing. Dump your reactor, and we will board and offer assistance,” Kris said.

  “Never,” was the one-word reply.

  And six lasers reached out for the Wasp from the wounded pirate. They were not so strong as Kris’s ship’s twenty-four-inch pulse lasers, but at this range, a hit by anything could slice the Wasp in half.

  The ship jinked away from four of them. The fifth one spent itself on the shield, boiling off a few kilos of Smart Metal™.

  The sixth one raked Wasp aft of amidships but missed engineering. At least the lights did not dim, nor did the reload light on Battery 1 slow its rapid climb from yellow toward red.

  “Damage Control,” Captain Drago demanded.

  “Containers open to space. We’re working on them.”

  Captain Drago turned to Kris. “Can you get this over with? I like my ship the way it is, not holier than thou,” he said dryly.

  “Firing Three,” Kris said. She had Nelly widen the focus of the twenty-four-inch laser, raking a major portion of the shield. Damaged, it was now too thin to do much more than hide the bow of the pirate, providing a fan to cover the bare rear of the bridge.

  As 3 winked out, all pretense at a shield vanished. The pirate spun on its long axis in full view. But not giving up.

  Its capacitors began to recharge. A thin wisp coalesced to cover the bow. The tiger was back, a raised paw, the middle finger elevated in the universally recognized insolent salute.

  “Some folks just don’t know when to quit,” Kris said.

&nb
sp; “Leave us alone,” boomed from the commlink. “You get out of here, or a lot of people are going to die.”

  “You’re going to die,” Kris pointed out.

  “We got the crew of two ships on board. You shoot at us again, and we’ll see just how much vacuum they can breathe.”

  “Oops,” Kris and Captain Drago said at the same time.

  “Kris,” Nelly said, “unless they’ve changed their rotation, I know where the bridge is.”

  “Target it.” A red pipper began to circle the flimsy shield. Not, to Kris’s surprise, focusing on the raised digit but somewhere around its toes.

  The longer Kris waited, the more the chance that they might change their rotation. Kris mashed Battery 4’s firing circuit.

  The laser slashed through the spinning cover. Sections spun off into space. There, revealed for all, was the bridge.

  But only for a fraction of a second as the twenty-four-inch laser opened it to space, slagging human flesh, instruments, and gear.

  “Surrender now or my next laser will hack your reactors’ containment fields to bits,” Kris ordered to anyone who might still be listening.

  “What about their prisoners?” Sulwan asked.

  “We have only their word that they have them,” Kris said, keeping hard eyes on their target.

  “You’re a hard woman,” Drago said. “I hope you’re right.”

  So did Kris.

  Then the cores of the two reactors dropped out into vacuum, and the Compton began to coast along its last vector.

  “We surrender. You can board us. We won’t fight you,” was spoken by a new voice.

  “I hope for your sake you don’t,” Kris answered. “We’ve got a Marine company that could use a spot of exercise.”

  That got no reply.

  “Captain Montoya,” Kris called to Jack.

  “Standing by,” he answered.

  “Prepare to board the pirate as soon as we come alongside and match their speed and vector.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am.”

  “Captain Drago, please place your ship alongside that derelict.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Hot dog. More prize money,” came from the wag in the back of the bridge.

  4

  It took a half hour for the Wasp to catch up and come alongside the pirate. Once there, Jack launched two Marine squads in LACs. One team would capture the stern, the other the bow. Most of the Marines would storm the amidships gangway.

  At least that was the plan.

  As Drago completed a perfect match between midship hatches, Kris kicked off from her station, snagged the hatch, and launched herself aft to join the Marines of the boarding party.

  And ran into Abby, towing a full set of combat gear.

  “Thought you might need these. Just the things for the well-dressed princess,” her maid drawled.

  “Isn’t there a bed you need to be under?”

  “Got bored there by myself.”

  “Where’s Cara?”

  “At the computer, playing some silly game.”

  Kris tried one other tack to duck her mothering maid. “Didn’t you hear? They surrendered.”

  “Yeah, right,” Abby said, and blocked Kris’s path aft until she did her own surrender and accepted the first armored piece of what constituted full battle rattle.

  “You’re not very trusting,” Kris said, pulling on the bottom.

  “Not at all. Unlike some princess I know, I learn from bad experiences.” So Kris pulled on full armor while others stretched a tunnel between the Wasp and the now-quiet pirate. That could have provided a route for a full assault, but the pirate’s main lock refused to open. Kris arrived just as Jack to her, Captain Montoya to his company, concluded his assessment of the situation.

  “Strange how nothing much seems to work on the Compton. If I weren’t such an optimistic guy, I’d think they were setting a trap for us,” Jack said. “Gunny, you got an opinion?”

  “Pirates are not known for their adherence to preventive maintenance schedules,” he growled. “It could be just what you’d expect from scumbags, sir.”

  “So true. Okay, crew, let’s get some of the stress and suspense out of our lives. LACs, I want you to seize positions on the forward and aft parts of the ship while we storm the center. We go in sixty seconds.”

  “Ah, sir, Staff Sergeant Thu here. Regretfully, LAC One will have to disappoint.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “We’ve been checking out both the entrance points forward. One was onto the bridge and has a very big hole punched in it by somebody’s misaimed laser.”

  “Careful, Sergeant, said aimer is drifting at my elbow.”

  “And it was perfectly aimed at the time it was fired,” Kris shouted toward Jack’s mike.

  “Well, sirs, whatever it was then, it’s ruining my day just now. ’Course, to be honest, even if the hatch opened, it would only take me onto the bridge, and I could walk in there, hatch or no hatch. It’s the lower emergency air lock that is the main problem. The inner door is wedged open. We open it, and we could be blowing out all the air forward.”

  “So we go to version two of today’s orders,” Jack said, betraying the informality he’d gained as a Secret Service Agent, trying to protect one Princess Kristine Longknife. “Both LACs will enter by the stern, and we’ll take the bow after we secure amidships. LAC Two, what’s your situation?”

  “We are ready now, sir.”

  “We start in sixty seconds.”

  The Wasp’s huge amidships cargo bay that Kris and the Marines occupied had already been sealed off. Now a squad of Marines headed into the open tube to take up positions just outside the Compton’s hatch. Jack led two more squads down the rabbit hole, but Kris found Gunny and Abby blocking her way.

  “I think we ought to wait here, Your Highness. It’s getting mighty stuffy in there,” Gunny said.

  The Marines who had gone with Jack were in fully armored space suits, their faceplates down, breathing tanked air. But Kris had learned not to argue with Gunny. At OCS, an old commander had told the class that the proper spelling of Gunnery Sergeant was GOD.

  Kris had seen ample proof to support that theology in the last three years. Kris waited.

  “We’re in,” Jack announced over the net.

  A moment later a private had been ordered to test the air. “This place stinks,” was his only comment.

  Kris’s previous experience with a pirate ship had stunk of sloppy ship handling, stale cooking, and unwashed crew. But the stink that rapidly worked its way up the passage tube was a whole different blend of filth, sewer, and death.

  Kris kicked off from where she hung and headed down the tube, Abby and Gunny right behind.

  The stench grew as she approached the Compton’s hatch. Once through it, she found herself in a similar cargo bay from the one she left, somewhat the worse for lack of care. Jack and his three squads held there as they searched for booby traps and found nothing. Most had their masks up, saving tanks that might be needed later. A few did not.

  “Where’s that smell coming from?” Kris asked.

  Jack shook his head. “Life support is on minimum. Air circulation is hardly going, but still, this?”

  “How are things aft?” Kris asked.

  “We took them down,” came from a sergeant on net. “Only gentle lambs back here. They have no idea what the bridge crew were doing, they just tended the teakettle.”

  “We’ll see how that holds up in court,” Kris said dryly.

  Jack looked around, frowned at nothing in particular and the stink in general, and said, “Gunny, take two squads and clear the stern spine from here to Engineering.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Gunny said, and organized one of the squads there and the one that had just arrived to deploy aft, covering for each other and moving slowly.

  He’d been gone less than a minute when he came up on net.

  “Sir, Your Highness, you want to see what we just f
ound.”

  Kris headed aft, gun at the ready, Jack in the lead.

  The stench got worse as soon as they left the cargo bay. The central spine of a cargo ship always had stairs for use when the ship was under way. It could be broken up into rooms, but since that cost money, it was often just one long, open space.

  The Compton’s spine was square and broken into compartments.

  The first compartment had the usual pipes and conduits along the wall and a spiral stairwell offset from the center enough to allow a solid-looking airtight hatch to close off the bottom of the compartment.

  The second compartment was where the stink came from.

  Men and women blinked up as Kris started down the ladder. They looked like skeletons wrapped in filthy rags. Most were wired to deadeyes welded onto the outer bulkhead. They drifted listlessly as the ship turned slowly, surrounded by a cloud of their own filth. A few were free. They provided whatever care they could to the others.

  That care couldn’t extend very far. All they had were their own two hands and maybe a gentle voice. There was no visible source for water. One bucket might have served as a latrine. Now its content littered the air of the compartment. A woman glided through space, trying to recapture what had come free.

  Kris gagged. “Who did this?” she demanded.

  One squad of Marines was on full alert. The other moved around the compartment, cutting prisoners free. A man in what might once have been a merchant service officer’s uniform floated toward Kris. He was bent over, trying gingerly to massage his left foot. That was where he’d been tied down, and it looked black and ugly.

  “I’m Dan Orizowski. I was second officer of the Jumping Jill, a freighter out of Geneva.”

  “You senior here?” Jack asked.

  The begrimed man looked around. “I am off the Jill.”

  “Your senior officers?” Kris asked.

  “Killed for resisting.”

  “Is this all one crew?”

  “No.” A grizzled old fellow now joined them. “I’m Onally MarTom, chief wiper on the Outside Straight. Don’t know where we were registered. Our captain surrendered when they asked, but they killed him and all the officers without even blinking.”

  “Who?” Kris asked, her voice low. She recognized her tone as deadly. Jack’s lips were a thin line. He’d give her no guff.