Poor Man's Fight (44 page)

“Paid an awful lot for th
is intel.” Lauren’s sober observation had been repeated many times already in recent days. She didn’t seem tired of it yet. Nobody else, did, either.

“The c
rew voted their approval,” grunted Casey. “Good intel isn’t free.” Casey stood on the bridge staring at the holographic projection of
Vengeance’s
sensor bubble. The closest contacts moved in and out of Augustine, all many light minutes away. No patrols appeared anywhere.

“I know,” said
Lauren. “I’m just hopin’ it pays off. We’ve been sitting out here for a good while.”

“You think we’re better off wandering around hoping we catch a random freighter?” snapped the captain. “The crew wanted to come to Archangel and kick someone in the balls. We’re here, aren’t we? They wanted another cruise liner. I’m making it happen, aren’t I?
Fucking rich people get to make their own schedule. If they want the ship to run late, it’ll run fucking late.”

Lauren
held up her hands in a sign of peace. “Hey, I’m not trying to give you a hard time. Just antsy.” She rarely saw Casey get irritable, and wouldn’t have taken that from much of anyone else. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have taken it from Casey, either.

As if to show he knew it, he let out a sigh. “Sorry. Not pissed at you.”

“You are, though,” she shrugged, speaking in a manner-of-fact tone. “You thought coming out here was a bad idea. You spoke against it.”

“I’m making it happen,” he repeated.

“You sound like a parent who’s gotta break the budget on Christmas to keep the kids happy.”

That got a rumble out of
Casey, but not quite a laugh. “I just don’t want anyone thinkin’ we’re gonna get to do this a third time. We pull this off, the only smart thing to do is to get our asses on the other side of the Union and stay there for
years
. Maybe even further out than that. Sooner or later we’re gonna go too far and the fat cats won’t find this shit funny anymore. They’ll run us down, Lauren. We can’t keep coming back to the same hunting grounds. You know that, right?”

“I do,” she said. “One more score out here, then we find new pastures. I’ll back you.” The pair fell silent, watching the sensor bubble and its complete lack of activity. Their prey was almost seven hours late. Other pirates in the crew had to know that. Some doubtlessly had to wonder if their prey would
appear at all.

“Seems like you
need to blow off some steam,” observed Lauren. Again, the captain merely grunted. “Maybe we should swap over once they heave to. You take the boarders over. I’ll run the bridge.”

“That’s a huge change,” noted
Casey. He couldn’t hide his interest.

“So we’ll put it to a vote,” she shrugged. “We’re pirates. Fuck the rules.”

***

“Two minutes to drop to sublight,” announced Sarah Woo at the ops station. “Chief Steward, please notify our passengers.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am,” came the response.

Captain Aaron Kennedy listened to the routine on his bridge from his chair.
Pride of Polaris
was a good ship. Over the last few years, she had come to live up to her name. She was the highest-rated ship in NorthStar’s luxury liner fleet across all indicators. She was no longer the biggest or most opulent, but Kennedy found that having a little competition only sharpened the diligence and discipline of his ship’s officers. He pushed them as a good captain should, but moreover, they pushed themselves.

Smirking at the thought, Kennedy buzzed up his new chief of passenger relations. “Katie,” he
said, “just so you know, you’ll get some angry comm calls in a moment.”

“Is something wrong, sir?”
In the background, Kennedy heard the band playing in the ship’s main ballroom.

“No, everything’s running fine. But someone always loses their lunch at a time like this.”

“Certainly, sir,” he heard her smile. “This isn’t my first rodeo.”

“No, o
f course not,” Kennedy chuckled, “nor mine. Which is why I’m about to route all my passenger communications directly to you. Have a nice night.” With that, he cut the channel and input the commands into his personal comm tracker to do just as he said.

Rich people always wanted to go straight to the top when they were upset. A newer, more nervous captain on a luxury liner typically
accepted that rather than deferring it to a subordinate. Kennedy was over all that.

He’d missed the one-minute warning, but didn’t worry. Kennedy knew his crew could handle this even if he’d magically vanished from the bridge. He looked up, saw the clock and gave the nod to Woo at ops. The
Pride
fell out of FTL with a brief, gentle lurch that surely upset delicate stomachs and more delicate sensibilities across the ship.

Most commercial ship
s had rougher drops. Military ships were typically even more jarring. Kennedy considered the
Pride
to be the smoothest ride he’d ever been on, but naturally some wealthy passengers expected to feel nothing at all.

Kennedy leaned to his right, looking over his shoulder toward Woo as she reviewed the data from the ship’s sensors. “Internal systems all functioning normally. Astrogation looks good. One contact, bearing three-four-three mark three-two-seven, eighty eight thousand clicks. Destroyer class. CDC transponder codes.”

“She’s hailing us,” announced Bert at comms.

“CDC?” asked Kennedy. “I thought Archangel kicked them out of the system
last month after they got caught letting pirate ships slide right through inspections?”

“She’s giving the usual request for inspection, sir,” Bert elaborated.

“Maybe they patched things up?” Sarah suggested.

“Or maybe CDC’s just trying to assert themselves,” Kennedy shrugged. “Can’t have some random state telling a big corporate heavyweight like them who’s boss.
Anyway, signal our compliments and heave to per instructions. I’m sure this won’t take but a couple minutes. Even they won’t want to make our passengers unhappy.”

***

He almost didn’t get to see her at all. Tanner requested leave right when he learned weeks ago of the
CSS Fletcher
’s scheduled port call. He marked out a three-day window to allow for schedule changes. Morales denied it, of course, despite
St. Jude
having a full crew. He even refused to justify himself for it.

Stevens kept
St. Jude
on ready-alert status, able to jump into space within an hour’s notice for the slightest job. Even in port, Morales came up with bullshit make-work projects for Tanner and the other non-rates.

Fletcher
had been in orbit for a full twenty-one hours when
St. Jude
returned from an unscheduled patrol. The Union fleet battleship’s officers and crewmen were still largely ashore on liberty, but the clock was running out.
Fletcher
would head out again in hours. Tanner literally ran from the flight line once liberty was announced. He knew the neighborhood she was in. He knew the restaurant. He ran.

Allison
laughed when he hugged her. She wore civilian attire, her hair cut shorter than before but still feminine and flattering. She said something about the charges for assaulting a midshipman, and told him he looked good, and held him tightly. They only had a couple of hours to spend together.

It was his first hug in nine months.

“God, it’s nice to see you,” Tanner said when he finally let her go.

Allison
slapped him on the shoulder, shining her ever-present grin on him. “You look good. Wow. Hey. Take a seat with my friends. This Tammy and Rick, from my class at the academy. And no, you don’t have to call anyone sir or ma’am.”

Tanner shook hands and exchanged greetings with the two young midshipmen, themselves also in civilian attire. They looked bright. Healthy. Happy.

Allison slipped into the seat next to Rick, who slipped his arm around her shoulders. Tanner blinked, but covered his surprise.

***

“Primary engines offline!”

“Dorsal laser mounts out! I don’t think anyone’s alive in there!”

Kennedy blocked out further thoughts of the gunners. He couldn’t spare the time. There were thousands more to think about. “Bert, is our signal getting out?”

“Negative, sir.” The bridge shuddered again as another low-impact missile exploded just beyond it, plainly more for intimidation than to do damage. If the destroyer wanted to break the
Pride
in half, at this point she could do it at her leisure. “No response to our mayday. They must’ve deployed jamming drones. I’m hardly getting any incoming signals at all, and what I’ve got is so faint—“

He paused. Kennedy tore his eyes from the holographic display of the
Pride’s
vain flight from her pursuer to look at the comms officer. “She’s hailing us again. They say if we surrender now, they’ll cease fire.”

Kennedy’s eyes drifted down to the damage control screens. One column listed damaged or destroyed systems. The other displayed
dozens of medical emergencies.

***

Casey looked from the sensor bubble to Lauren with a satisfied grin. “See that?” He jerked his thumb to the holographic icon of the luxury liner slowing down before them. “
That’s
why I let Prince Khalil go home alive.”

“
These guys get the same deal?” she asked.

“What, these assholes?”
Casey shrugged. “Fuck no.”

***

“I think they like you,” Allison observed as her companions moved out.

“I think Rick likes you,” Tanner countered with a smirk. “A lot.”

“Yeah, well.” Her voice trailed off. Allison tugged at a lock of her hair, which used to be much longer. “It’s a lot of work making sure we keep things kosher and within regs, but I think he’s worth it.”

Tanner glanced over his shoulder to verify that her classmates were gone. He couldn’t find any particular faults with them. As much as he envied Rick, he had to admit that the midshipman seemed like a good guy. At the very least, Rick
knew that the nicest thing he could do was to clear out and let Tanner speak with Allison alone for a while.

The revelation didn’t leave Tanner feeling jealous. If anything, he was glad to see
Allison with someone capable of empathy. Just the same, his old fantasies couldn’t die without a little disappointment.

“You’re having a good time out there, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Allison said, her smile growing wider. “Yeah, I am. We’re gonna have our asses kicked by our instructors when we get back to Earth, of course, but that’s academy life for you. This patrol was supposed to end a week ago. Most of our cadre went to specialty schools or shoreside billets for their summer apprenticeship stuff. They’re probably all back at the academy waiting for classes to start by now.”

“
Will being late hurt your standings?”

She shrugged. “Needs of the service, right? It’s not our fault if our ship doesn’t get us back to school on time. They warned us when we signed on that we’d have a lot of catch-up work to do if we got back late
. I don’t regret it. We’ve learned a hell of a lot out here. But you’d know that, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Hey, don’t be like that. Tanner, you’re kicking ass. Literally and figuratively. They don’t give out those medals to just anyone.”

Tanner let out a groan and put his face in his hands. “Can we not talk about the medals? God, they’ve only made shit worse.”

“How so?”

“Every day, someone asks me if I think I’m special now.
They ask if I think I’m supposed to get out of work. Morales comes up with bullshit jobs for me and says I should be able to do them on my own since I’m such a master crewman now. I get treated like I’m a giant burden on everyone for months, and now they act like I’m walking around with my nose in the air when I haven’t said shit about any of it. Hell, I’m still just trying to keep my head
down
.”

“Tanner, I dug up the reports,”
Allison said, reaching out from across the table to touch his wrist. “You saved your boarding team. That ship was caught because of you.”

“I’d say tell that to my crew, but mostly I wish they’d just forget the whole thing,” he grumbled. “It’s like all I did was piss them off more. Made ‘em look bad. I still get reminded over and over how much I suck at my job.”

“I thought you said you were fully qualified now?”

“I am now,” Tanner said, “about four months late, which everyone likes to point out. I barely qualified on a bunch of deck standards. Freeman and Morales both act like they only sign
ed off on my training sheet because they had to, and half of that they only trained me for because they were
embarrassed
into doing it after the
Yaomo
incident. I might be qualified on paper, but that doesn’t mean I’m qualified
enough
. I’m still the guy nobody talks to at chow. Still the guy stuck on watch in port on all the holidays. Still the one who keeps finding shit missing from his locker.”