Rita Longknife--Enemy in Sight Read online

  “I just don’t know, love, and I don’t like that.”

  “Neither do I,” Ray said.

  “Well, we’re home. Forget the job and let’s see what new things Alex did today.”

  Ray tried to. He really did. But it was hard looking at one tiny fellow’s efforts to stay up for four steps while you wondered how some pirate bastard was staying a whole lot of steps ahead of them.

  10

  Captain Edmon Lehrer led the Queen Anne’s Revenge into the target system. There were two of those strange ball ships in orbit around their target planet. They took off running as soon as they saw the pirate fleet.

  They might have gotten away.

  But just as they were a few hundred thousand clicks from the other jump point out of the system, they ran right into Captain Billy Maynard’s fleet coming in. The round ships had too much momentum; there was no way for them to get enough energy on their boats to turn a deceleration towards the jump into an acceleration away from it.

  Billy’s ships cut them to ribbons. Then, most of them accelerated toward the golden planet, leaving a couple of ships behind to sift through the wreckage.

  It was just as they all expected, the ships they’d cut up with their lasers were loaded with gold, silver, jewelry quality diamonds and other gemstones, all there for the taking.

  It just kept getting better and better.

  Captain Maynard squawked, but Calico Jack commanded the landing force for the very simple reason that two out of every three trigger-pullers were his, or Grace’s and Annie’s and the three of them insisted their troops would only follow Jack.

  That led to some rather delightful if tasteless innuendoes. Calico Jack enjoyed them all, since he was just as happy with a pretty young thing of either persuasion in his bed and made no bones about it.

  They chose a nice, sandy beach about five miles around the bay from what they took for the main, if only town. The first shuttles dropped with half their gunners aboard.

  Once the shuttles were beached and the troops ashore, Calico Jack ordered his trigger-pullers to dig in.

  “We didn’t come down here to dig. That’s what we got those guys for,” came from one of Billy Maynard’s proud boys with a rifle.

  Calico knocked the guy for a loop, snatched up his gun and pointed it at the fool. “Dig you bastards, dig! I don’t care what you came here for, you’ll dig when I say so, and where I say so. Now get some blisters on those lily-white hands.”

  They dug.

  The second drop brought more gunners. Only the later drops brought the spear and knife crew. To some obnoxious trigger-puller’s great disappointment, the digging was all done by the time the farmers arrived with their bladed weapons.

  That was a good thing, because the big dudes with all the arms and legs didn’t wait to be attacked but moved out on their own. And it wasn’t a dumb attack they made.

  Ed’s Revenge was passing overhead when the attack developed.

  “You need any help?” he asked Calico Jack on net.

  “This guy is a lot smarter than I wish he was, and his troops are a lot more disciplined than I really want to face. Maybe more disciplined than the jokers I’ve got behind me. And on top of that, there are a lot more of them than I was expecting. Would you mind lazing the trees off on my right? He’s trying to envelope my right wing and I’d prefer if he didn’t.”

  One of Revenge’s 6-inch lasers cut into tree looking things four kilometers off of the beach.

  “You got the right area, but you’re about half a klick too far from the beach. Bring it in. Shave the hair off my butt.”

  “If you say so.”

  A second 6-inch laser set trees burning closer to the beach.

  “You got it,” Calico shouted. “Now hammer him.”

  Salvo after salvo sliced into the trees, turning them into a burning inferno visible from even two hundred kilometers up.

  “Glad I’m a sailor,” Ed’s second in command muttered as she watched the screen.

  “I’m glad you are too,” he told his lover.

  “Just make sure we get paid. I want to wear nothing but gold coins to bed, like you promised.

  “Just keep your focus here for now,” Ed said. Around him, his crew heard him and applied themselves to the day’s work.

  On the ground, the aliens broke and fell back. Jack’s call for some more shoots were answered by Grace or Annie, or whatever ship happened to be in his sky at the time of the call.

  Not all ships were created equal. Jack called off a shoot by Ben Hornigold’s ship when the jerk made a mess of it for some of his own landing party.

  “That’s going to cost you,” Ed snapped. “Cost you gold. Billy, did you see that?”

  “I’m on the other side of the damn planet or I’d have been doing the shooting,” the co-commander of the fleet growled. “Ben, keep your guns to yourself and we’ll talk about what cut we take out of your share when this is done.”

  “He didn’t give me a good call,” Ben Hornigold insisted. “They’re running and you’re chasing them real fast down there. You listen in on the net calls. I shot where I was told to.”

  “We settle this later.”

  The next time Ed was above the town, there were humans moving through the streets. There were also the big dudes. The high res cameras showed a lot of them with their hands up, surrendering.

  The ground troops were letting them. Someone had to mine the gold and it sure wasn’t going to be pirates.

  Slavery, here we come, Ed thought.

  They hadn’t treated their own farmers as slaves, and from the looks of those sharp things those plow boys had tied to poles, it was a good thing they hadn’t.

  Ed studied the pictures coming in of the big dudes and wondered how they’d take to being told to do all the scut work. No doubt they didn’t talk good standard. Maybe if they learned it, some of the more gutsy types could be signed on as pirates. Heaven knew, humans worked better if they saw a chance to work the way up the food chain.

  Not all of the big dudes were terribly eager to put their hands up. One building in the middle of town kept shooting. It was big and blocky, made from mud bricks with, apparently, thick walls.

  Calico Jack settled its hash with his mortars. He dropped explosive bombs mixed with smoke grenades, covering for men to slip in and slap explosive charges on the massive wooden doors. One good explosion and the door was down, the portal was open, and gunners were running in.

  Ed Lehrer wasn’t above the town when the fort fell, but what Calico found was beamed around the orbiting ships. “We’ve got the treasure house here. Gold. Silver piled to the ceiling, and jewels fit to swim in, I shit you not.”

  That produced a lot of happy talk aboard the orbiting ships. Not doubt on the ground as well.

  The cleaning up process got started before the afternoon was half gone. Now the shuttles dropped with solar-powered runabouts. They were quickly rigged with machine guns and a couple of companies of eager pirates raced up to the silver mine.

  They didn’t find a lot there.

  Somehow, word had gotten up into the mine of the new gun in town; the workers had taken to the hills. A check of what looked like food stores showed them empty except for some crates full of something that looked like yams. Others held seaweed.

  “They’ll come in when they get hungry enough,” Calico Jack said, then he began issuing orders. “Set up your perimeter, dig in for the night, and see that you post a watch. Two hours on, six off, through the night.”

  While the race for the mine had been going on, mixed troops of guns and pikes headed up the river to collect those panning for gold. Most were eager to put their hands up, what with a gun in their face, and, once collected, they were marched back to town.

  A former top sergeant from Savannah pushed on, way up-river with a force of about a hundred rifles and an equal number of pikes. Nightfall caught him with some five hundred big aliens way too far from town. He used ropes to tie them up to trees an
d let his own troops sleep, without posting a watch or guard.

  How it happened, no one was left to tell the tale, but come morning, that entire detachment, two hundred strong, was found dead in their sleeping rolls with their throats slit.

  “I don’t think this is going to be as easy as some people thought. Not if we’re going to do stupid stuff like that,” Calico Jack was heard to mutter the next day when a scout he sent out to check on the silence from up river answered him with bloody pictures on the net.

  The pirates, both those with guns and those with pole weapons, were a lot more careful the next morning as they herded several hundred of the big fellows out to pan for gold in the river close to the town. They didn’t find a lot.

  “It looks like they panned out the river right close to town,” Calico Jack reported that evening.

  “So, what are we going to do?” Ed Maynard demanded on the ship’s net.

  “We’ll head the big fellows up the river, with plenty of guards, and knock together forts along the river,” Calico Jack said, bluntly. “Today, we walk them up. They can dig a couple of ditches and wall forts. We’ll guard them at night,” he said forcefully, eyes on someone off screen, “and we’ll bring in the gold every couple of days.”

  “That sounds like a plan,” Ed said. Billy nodded.

  “Well, I got my own plan,” Ben Hornigold growled. “Me and mine aren’t interested in wallowing around in the mud. Ben says some ships took off with the gold before he could catch them. I’m gonna go looking for where they took it. There’s more than one way to take candy from a baby.”

  “You sure they’re all babies?” Ed said, cautiously. He eyed Grace and Anne. They shook their heads, but not enough to be noticed by Ben.

  “We took them down here, didn’t we?” Ben Hornigold growled.

  “And we have a lot of dead pirates down here now,” Calico Jack said.

  “As I said, you can play patty-cakes in the mud,” Ben said snidely. “I’ll go get me some ships and gold.”

  Ben Hornigold and Black Bart departed as soon as they could recover their riflemen from the planet. Ed didn’t really feel they were much of a loss.

  Just how big a loss they were would only become clear later.

  11

  Captain Rita Nuu-Longknife, Co-Minister of Exploration for Wardhaven, was getting bored. She was doing a job, pushing paperwork from the in-basket to the out-basket. She was doing good work, getting ships out to make the space ways safe for commerce.

  She knew that.

  Still, nothing was happening.

  Really, nothing was happening.

  The raids on the more distant colonies had stopped. Possibly it was because the distant colonies had armed themselves.

  “It’s amazing what a couple of 81-mm mortars will do to a pirate raid,” her husband, Major General Ray Longknife, muttered on the drive home that evening.

  “I wouldn’t mind if those mortars did something to the pirates. I’d love to see some pictures of what they did to the pirates,” Rita said.

  “No you wouldn’t, love. What mortars leave behind is not pretty.”

  “Excuse me, honey. I’m the transport pilot, remember. I left the rough stuff to you and your guard brigade.”

  “Don’t fool me, love, you stayed behind to pick up the pieces. At least the pieces of me.”

  That got Rita a kiss she knew she had earned the hard way.

  “You know what I really mean. We had a pirate problem. We walked on hot coals to get people to fund some anti-pirate work. Now, we’ve got ships in space and troop assistance teams out there on the ground and, voila, no pirates.”

  “Yeah, that bothers me, too,” Ray said.

  “So, what are we going to do about it?”

  Ray Longknife pondered her question long and hard. He didn’t have an answer that night, or the next morning.

  That morning was Friday. It was the one day she could count on Ray to spend at the office, not out with his 1st Wardhaven Guard Division doing whatever strong men armed did when there wasn’t anything to blow up.

  So, the two of them found themselves staring at the star map that covered one whole long wall in their Exploration office.

  “Has anything changed?” Ray asked, eyeing the map of planets plundered, freighters gone missing on the normal space lanes and exploration ships just gone somewhere out along their scouting sweeps.

  “For a month, it’s been the same,” Rita said, “at least as far as it goes within human space. We’ve got another two overdue explorers.”

  “Cruisers?” Ray asked.

  “Nope. I’ve got our Rambling class cruisers feeling around the rim, but not too far out. It’s the privately funded scout ships. It’s two ten-place schooners that are overdue and maybe missing.”

  “Unarmed?”

  “Not so much as a .45 among the crew, I’m led to believe.”

  “You believe them.”

  “Not on your life, but there’s no way to put even a 3-inch pop gun on something that small.”

  “Assuming it’s actually something that small,” Ray rumbled.

  “You don’t trust the private folks any further than you can throw them?”

  “Less,” Ray said. “There’s too much money to be made in exploration, honey. If they find a new Earth, they can sell it by the pound.”

  Rita highlighted the two new missing ships. All the deep exploration ships that hadn’t come back formed a red cloud. It was a thin cloud, but it clearly covered the quarter of the rim of human space on Wardhaven’s side.

  “Is it my imagination, but isn’t Savannah about in the center of the rim where we’re bleeding scouts?”

  Rita nodded.

  Ray walked slowly up to the map, fingered the space around the rim that bled red.

  “You want to go back to Savannah?” Rita asked.

  Ray nodded. “Somewhere out there are aliens. Worse, somewhere out there are human pirates. I really wish I could ditch the fear in the pit of my stomach that the two of them aren’t separate and distinct problems anymore.”

  “It’s not just your stomach, love.”

  “You too, honey?”

  “Me too.”

  “Any suggestion?”

  “I’m thinking my mother wasn’t nearly as bad a mother as I thought she was a few years ago. I’m thinking that I might want to leave little Alex with her for a bit while you and I run the Exeter over to Savannah to see how things are going there.”

  Ray nodded. “Because if we have to throw together a Rapid Reaction Force, it’s likely going to be heading out from there. If it’s not, it’s just going to be a slow reaction force that gets there too little and too late.”

  They nodded. Rita turned to check on the availability of the Exeter. Ray did his own call to the 1st Guard. With luck, he should be able to pull a company out of the training cycle and load them aboard Rita’s ship.

  Maybe if she could lay her hands on four ships, he could take an entire battalion.

  12

  Captain Edmon Lehrer tried to keep his cruisers as fully crewed as possible. He was none too sure what lay beyond the jumps into this system and he was not at all happy to have Ben Hornigold and Black Bart charging around beyond his ken.

  However, you can only keep a crew in zero gee so long before they start to lose important things. Like bones and muscle mass. Even eyesight gets off. Not good for a gunner.

  Every day, he let a quarter of his crew go below for two days. Six days up. Two days down. If he had to push it, the shuttles could get the ships fully crewed in six, maybe nine hours. It would be pushing it, but it could be done.

  Any ship coming through the three jump points into the system would take a lot more than twelve hours to get here even if they were pushing two gees.

  It seemed like a safe way to run things.

  Of course, once ashore, the crew had to have something to do.

  And that was where the rub came in.

  The most profitable thing to
do was pan for gold. Lots of sailors thought it would be fun to try their hand at it. Any gold they took out themselves was theirs to keep, no requirement to share it with the others, or even the captains.

  So, when it was Ed’s time to go down, he decided to take a try at it. Of course, the river near town was all worked out, so he got Calico Jack to drive him up to the fourth fort up river.

  It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

  The day was clear, as most had been since they landed. The drive was a bit rugged. “They didn’t bother to make any decent roads up here,” Calico said from his place behind the wheel. “They used pack animals to get food up river and gold down.”

  If the drive was rough, the scenery was beautiful. Beside them, a fifty-meter-wide river flowed placidly over rocks and gravel. It was clean, in most places, though where a lot of the big fellows were panning, it got a bit murky.

  On both sides of the river, the jungle came down to the river, except where it had been hacked back. There were flashes of just about every color along with the green.

  “What’s that like?” Ed said, nodding at the color splotched green.

  “You don’t want to go there,” Calico said, giving it a cautious eye. “They got stuff in there with leaves as sharp as steel. I swear to God, I think some of it cuts you and enjoys the taste of your blood.”

  “Really?”

  “I can’t really know anything about this place, but from the eager way it slashes at you if you walk in there, I’d sure say the damn plants are doing it for some reason.”

  Ed was sitting in the passenger seat, close to the jungle. He edged away from the doorless chassis.

  The fort was about what he’d expected from his view in orbit. The jungle had been slashed back from a flat bit of alluvial gravel. The dirt, rocks and gravel from the ditch had been thrown up into a four-sided walled enclosure. Inside were pens for the big fellows and tents for the humans. At least at this fort, guards with guns and pikes walked the walls, eyes both in and out.

  Ed felt safe as he and his number two tucked themselves into their bedrolls, enjoyed each other’s gifts and drifted off to sleep to the sound of night calls from the jungle.