Poor Man's Fight (55 page)

“So you’ve shot a bunch of my guys in the back and run the rest out of engineering for the moment. Good for you. What’s your next move?”

Stiffening at the taunts, Tanner looked over his surroundings again. “I don’t think I really have to go any further,” he answered loudly, unsure whether he’d be heard or not. “This ship isn’t going anywhere while I’m in here.”

“Well, you’ve got a good point there, but we’ve still got plenty
of guys to dig you out. Only we don’t have to do that. We could just, I don’t know, start executing hostages. You remember them, right?”

Tanner reloaded his weapon. He didn’t answer.

“You wanna maybe make sure nobody else gets hurt, then?” Casey pressed. “Any opinions on that?”

“
You mean all these people you plan to murder anyway?” Tanner scowled. “Yeah, I know how you played Prince Khalil. No dice.”

Someone
yelped. Tanner heard sounds of a struggle. Then he heard the gunshot, and the terrified scream of a man in pain. More panicked screams erupted. Tanner tried to blot it out.

“So if you’ve got the balls to check the monitor, you can see Senior Astrogator Boren on the deck here bleeding out from a stomach wound,” the gravelly voice said. “He won’t die right away, but he’ll sure as shit die if nobody helps him. Now, you want me to pop a few more of these guys? Maybe do one in the head right now, just to make sure we’re clear?”

Tanner’s eyes shut tightly. He took in a long breath of air full of the smell of gunsmoke and dead men. The killing would continue regardless of his surrender. He knew that. The pirates would keep killing. Turning himself over would do no good.

“How many more dead people you want on your conscience, kid?” demanded Casey.

“Don’t try that bullshit with me! You’re the one pulling that trigger,” Tanner replied. His voice shook. “That’s all on you. And I know I can’t save everyone… but if you get away, you keep doing this shit. As long as you’re stranded here, the number of people you can kill has a finite limit.”

“What?”

Tanner opened his eyes. Straight across from him stood vital relays that managed power for the FTL drives. He raised his rifle and unloaded the magazine into the system, reducing it to a pile of broken circuitry and scrap.

“Mother
fucker
!” Casey fairly shrieked.

“I said, ‘finite.’ I’m sure there’s a dictionary program on the bridge computer. See if you can find it before I come shoot your ass.”

Tanner started for the hatch. He heard the pirate captain’s gun click again, somehow loud enough to overcome the thumping of Tanner’s heart. He opened his mouth to yell something, anything to delay the next shot for just another second.

“
Casey, contact!” yelled out another voice in range of the captain’s mic. “Union battleship, less than one light minute—!” The PA cut out.

It stopped Tanner in his tracks. His emotions surged up in a jumble again. Help was here. That had to be
Allison’s ship. There was no way the
Pride
would go anywhere now. Casey, if that was his name, could buy time with hostage negotiations… but in the end, they’d never let him actually take this ship anywhere, would they?

He tried to think it through. Putting himself in that battleship captain’s shoes seemed easy enough. Contain the situation. Don’t let the bad guy
escape. Negotiate to save as many lives as possible. He knew next to nothing about hostage negotiation. Was that something you tried to do quickly? Was it in the negotiator’s interests to stretch things out? What would the pirates think of all that?

Casey
had hostages and a stranded ship. He had to know that he wouldn’t get away with much loot by this point. He couldn’t possibly want anything more than his freedom. How could he maintain it? Tanner rushed over to a console to look over the map of the ship again.

They weren’t entirely stranded. There were shuttles. Shuttles, hostages, and pirates who wanted their freedom more than anything else.

Tanner rushed to the hatch.

***

“
Pride of Polaris
, this is
CFS Fletcher
. Report your status immediately.”

“Oh Jesus fucking Christ that’s a goddamn battleship,
Casey!” Carl’s voice shook. He was on his feet at his station, pulling on his hair. As if the sight of the thing on their sensor bubble and viewscreens wasn’t intimidating enough, the battleship closed to visual range.

“I see it, Carl,” said
Casey, his reassuring tones now giving way to annoyance. “Calm down. Stand over there. I need you out of my way, Carl. Move.” He gestured to a spot at the rear of the bridge, near the exit. It was the only place where Carl wouldn’t be right next to Casey, or a pirate who hadn’t lost his shit yet, or
Polaris’s
huddled bridge officers. If Carl wanted to open up that hatch and run screaming down the passageway, Casey figured, that would be just fine at this point. Carl stepped over the wounded, wheezing astrogator as he obeyed.

With his formerly trusted yet now more or less expendable deputy out of
the way, Casey took a long, steadying breath to assess his situation. His boarding crew had dwindled from hundreds to a few dozen. Engineering was lost. The liner was stranded.

“The fuck do we do,
Casey?” asked Lonnie. Unlike Carl, the muscular pirate held his cool. The handful of others likewise remained calm, keeping their emotions in check. Casey selected for strong nerves among his bridge crews. Apparently Carl had been a mistake, but the rest of his people were solid. They trusted him.

“They’re gonna try to stall for time,” explained
Casey. “They might not have a negotiations specialist, but a ship that size oughta have at least one officer who’s been to a class or two. Or they’ll read what to do from a fucking manual. Regardless, the protocol is for them to drag this out, calm everyone down, get us to see the inevitability of defeat and all that bullshit. It gives them time to consolidate their control of the situation. They’ll also want to have someone separate from the CO doing the negotiating so the CO won’t have to split his attention. So,” he said, calling up the comms system, “we’re not gonna let ‘em do any of that to us.”

“What about that asshole shooting up the ship?”

“Yeah, that’s a problem,” Casey grumbled. He opened up the channel. “
CFS Fletcher
, this is Jolly Roger. That’s the only name you get. As the annoying recorded message from the destroyer has informed you, this liner is under new management. Please open one-way visual communications so I can see who I’m talking to.”

A moment later one of the viewscreens changed, presenting the image of a
Union Fleet commander sitting at a bridge station. “This is Commander Trinh,” he said. “Visuals open. Please reciprocate.”

“Fuck you, no. You don’t rank command of a battleship. Put the captain on.”

“Negative, Jolly Roger. Captain is unavailable. You speak through me.”

“Okay,”
Casey sighed, “I’ll open up visuals long enough for you to see me kill a hostage. I’ve got a lot of these fuckers to burn through.” He waved to Lonnie, who roughly grabbed one of Polaris’s bridge officers by the arm as Casey stood. He dragged the man over to Casey’s console, slamming his head down on the desk and holding it there. Casey keyed the video feed, pulled out his gun and held it to the man’s head.

“Stop!” he heard someone yell. A dark-haired woman immediately replaced Trinh on the viewscreen. She wore captain’s pips on her collar and shoulders. “This is Captain
Leigh.”

“Oh good,” replied
Casey. “Normally I’d shoot this fucker anyway just to make a point, but I should probably establish some good faith.” He pushed the hostage back out of the way, cut the visual feed and sat back down. Casey wondered how many times he’d be interrupted from shooting someone today. He let the thought pass.

“So I’ve got about two thousand rich, influential tourists and another six or seven hundred crew
as hostages. We haven’t spaced anyone yet. All those bodies floating around out here are my own guys. I’m having a very shitty day and I’m in no mood to fuck around.”

“You also aren’t going anywhere in that ship,”
Leigh observed. “Surrender without hurting anyone else and we’ll see to it that you get a fair trial. Cooperating now will mitigate—“

“Hah! Again, fuck you, no thanks. You don’t dictate shit here, lady. Here’s the only deal you get: this ship has two FTL-capable shuttles, and we’re taking them. We will take hostages with us. Obviously we can’t take anything close to the number of hostages we have here, so we’ll leave you with the rest. Naturally, I’m going to pick all the children and anyone else that it’d be especially tragic to see die. You will back off out of weapons range and allow us to leave. Your only other option
involves wasting shitloads of hostages, and we both know you can’t do that.

“When we reach a safe spot, we will release the remaining hostages. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. That sort of thing. No ransom, no bullshit. I kept my word on
Qal’at Khalil, and I’ll keep it here, too. But if you fuck with us, and you’ll be the captain with all the innocent blood on her hands, you got me?

“Make a choice. Thirty seconds. Think fast.” He cut the channel, and then hit the comms link on his holocom. “Chang, listen up, we gotta move. Pick the most tear-jerky hostages you can and
head for the shuttle bay. Make sure the rest know that we’ll vent the whole promenade if they get squirrely. Got that?”

There was a long pause. “
Casey,” Lonnie murmured, “you can’t actually vent that deck on a ship like this. It’s not built to—”

“I know that, Lonnie,” groaned
Casey. “Chang, you there? Chang?” Silence followed.

“
Casey!” barked an unexpected voice on his holocom. He could hear gunfire in the background. “Casey, it’s Takashi! We’ve got trouble!”

The pirate captain’s mind raced. Takashi was on the lower decks, maintaining small sweeper patrols of the passageways and the shuttle bay. “Keep him pinned down!”
Casey ordered. “Kill the fucker if you can, but at least keep him contained!”

“
Casey, you don’t understand!” Takashi shouted over increasing gunfire. “It’s not the Malone guy! It’s Turtle and Chang!”

Casey
’s face grew dark. He stood from his chair, moving quickly over to the internal security station to check the promenade monitors.

The passengers and crew were
still there. He spotted a few of his pirates, standing in isolated twos and threes, looking confused and nervous. Yet he could not find Chang, or Turtle, or any of the rest of their section. The hostages on their portion of the promenade looked agitated and unsure. Their watchers were plainly long gone.

“Backstabbing sons of bitches,” he breathed.

“Jolly Roger, this is Captain Leigh. Your terms are acceptable under certain conditions.”

Casey
growled in frustration. He tapped a few buttons on his holocom, tying it in to the bridge comms system. Then he drew his gun and waved it at the hostages in the compartment with him. “Up! On your fucking feet! Everybody I haven’t shot yet, get the fuck up! Nobody make a goddamn sound!” He clicked on his holocom once more. “No conditions, lady. We do it my way and we do it right fucking now. I will call you when I’m ready to launch. Jolly Roger out.”

***

Murray whipped around the corner with a cut-down assault rifle in each hand, sprayed wildly and got perhaps a third of the way through either weapon’s magazine before he was blown away. He fell back on the broad, undecorated service passageway in a bloody mess. Crouched behind the corner, Chang bit back a curse. Murray may have been yet another idiot with more liquid courage than brains, but he was also another gun down on Chang’s team.

Chang wanted to talk Takashi into going along. The
Pride
wasn’t going anywhere, not with a firefight in her engineering space. Casey had plainly lost control of the situation. Any idiot could see it was time to abandon ship. Yet leave it to good old Takashi to choose blind loyalty over any sense of self-preservation. Chang had already forgotten who fired the first shot, but it hardly mattered; all it took was a single minute for both packs of pirates to shoot one another to shit.

Turtle held his rifle around the corner opposite Chang’s, firing o
ff several laser blasts without exposing his head to aim. “I always hated this guy anyway!”

“Never gonna get anywhere like this,” observed Chang. He sent a burst of bullets down the passageway, trying to
work out effective tactics. Takashi’s crew had better cover, hiding behind service carts and overturned storage lockers further down the passageway. Chang glanced over his shoulder at the three guys remaining with him. Frank was wounded with a nasty burn through his shoulder that would probably cost him his arm. The other two could still fight.

On the other side of the intersection of passageways, Turtle had five guys left. One of them was committed to keeping watch over the dozen or so hostages they’d taken from the promenade in their retreat. In the middle of the intersection itself and on the floor behind both corners lay dead pirates. Chang spared an irritable thought for how the hostages
were the safest ones in this mess. They were the only people that nobody had any reason to shoot.