"Everything ready down there?" I call down to Unity. The android flashes me a thumbs-up sign from the piloting seat. Sometimes, the design of this Hazari bridge drives me crazy. I mean I can't get down into the pilot's compartment without banging my head, most of the time, and I'm way smaller than your average Hazari. Then again, it could have sound pragmatic reasons - like, maybe, better not disturb the guy who's driving unless it's really worth banging your head over it, kind of thing.
Anyway. I guess that's not really all that important.
"Contact in five minutes," Ajbit mutters at me. I sit back on the command chair and try to look cool and composed and in charge.
"OK, then," I say. "Everyone all set?"
"You had better be right about this, Pex," Ajbit hisses at me. "What we're doing now is technically illegal - no, never mind that, actually illegal."
"So, OK, well, that's why we're a deniable asset, yeah? Push comes to shove, the only person who gets to go to jail is me." Ajbit shakes her head. She knows darn well I'm wrong about that.
"Convoy ID confirmed," Hal Welti calls out, and adds, "Alea iacta est."
We are seriously gonna do this. OK. I try to fight back the nerves. Wouldn't do to panic before the shooting starts.
"Unity, steer three five seven mark three eight two, maximum combat speed. Hal, Voesyy, get ready to jam subspace transmissions on my mark. Veb, you know what to aim for, right?"
"I make lots of holes, but not where people live," says Vebanillo. She flexes her fingers over the weapons console. If I was one of our targets, I really wouldn't like the way she did that.
"Moving to intercept." Unity's voice, at least, is nerveless.
Seconds race by. Dechenchholing's engines thrum with power. The civilian ships on the screen look like toys... toys I'm just about to break.
"Weapons range in ten," Ajbit reports.
"OK. Comms, put me on their screens." I take a deep breath and try to look all butch and piratical and stuff.
"Hailing frequencies open," says Hal. "Response packets coming back.... You're on."
"Great. Hi, there," I say. "Merchant convoy, comprising vessels - oh, I ain't got time to read all the names, yanno? This is what they call a hold-up. Hand over your valuables."
A face appears on the viewscreen. Green with black hair, good-looking... Orion. "This is Captain Dyessana aboard the SS Makrug," she says. "Raider vessel, be advised we hold a protection contract with K-T MMA. You don't want the sort of trouble hitting us will cause you."
"I don't? I got a battery of plasma cannons here says different, sister." Dyessana's eyes go round at that. Thrang's had time to spread rumours, rumours about just how effective a K-T MMA contract is. Right now, my job is to kick the bricks out from under those rumours. "Any chance I can see some surrendering going on, like, in the next five seconds or so? 'Cause otherwise, it's gonna get kinda noisy around here."
"You wouldn't dare!" She's starting to look panicky. "There are agreements - you're in breach of free trade treaties between the Federation, the Empire, the Ferengi -"
"Hey. Talaxian, sister. Look at the spots. I ain't bothered much about this side of the galaxy. But, if you're not surrendering -" I make a throat-cutting gesture at Hal. The screen goes blank.
"Jamming subspace. And we're in weapons range," says Hal.
"Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum," I say. "Veb. Hole-making time."
Vebanillo hits the tactical console like she's launching into Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. White gold sparks flash from the Dechenchholing's cannons. The lead freighter's shields flare, then waver, then drop. I lean forward. Now's the time I find out if my Pakled tac officer is as good as she's enthusiastic.
The next cannon barrage lets go at point blank range, and stitches blazing ruin across the freighter's hull. Veb is good, she's hitting exactly where I want her to. The cannon bolts aren't burning into the forward command section, or the drives, or the crew quarters. They are, instead, tearing huge holes in the freighter's cargo pods, spilling their contents out and across the sky. Bulk deuterium from one module, refined ores in another.... the corrosive-plasma cannons are meant to punch right through reinforced military-grade hull armour; what they do to a commercial freight pod, I wouldn't do to a dog.
The freighter's crew is safe enough. But the cargo, the stuff they want to make a profit on - that's being sprayed out into space by the kiloton. The idea is not to kill them. The idea is to hurt.
"Remaining convoy ships are scattering," Hal calls out.
"Awright. Had enough of this one, anyway. Get me a line on the next closest, and, oh, yeah, give Heizis a call."
Dechenchholing wheels gracefully away from the lead freighter. A disruptor beam stabs out from its command section, enough to irritate our shields, no more. "Let 'em have their temper tantrum," I tell Veb. "Concentrate on the next one."
"Got it. Targeting locked," says Veb.
We're coming up on the next freighter hard and fast, from the front. My fingers twitch, reflexively, as the targeting reticules light up. Veb is fast, again. The shields go down, and Dechenchholing streaks over the freighter's spine in a textbook-perfect strafing run, leaving every single one of the ship's cargo holds ruptured and venting behind us.
"One more," I say, and we heel over hard as Unity sends us in pursuit of another victim.
"More ships warping out," says Hal. The rest of the freighters are fleeing in all directions as fast as they can.
Not that it works for all of them. One big bulk carrier is aligning itself for the nearest starbase... and space ripples and shimmers beside it, and suddenly the Palatine comes into view, her plasma arrays blazing with green fire. Heizis, too, is using her guns with surgical precision, cutting out the cargo pods without touching the crew or the engines. Very expensive dust sprays out of the carrier's punctured hull.
We have our own next target, now, and our cannons smash straight through its holds and out the other side. Flames blossom and bloom around it. Whatever it was carrying was either naturally volatile, or needed to be kept in an atmosphere. Nervously, I shoot a questioning glance at Voesyy. "No life signs ceasing to register," the Rigelian assures me. "Looks like complex hydrocarbons in the cargo, that's all." I start to relax a bit.
"Four ships with heavy damage," Voesyy continues, "the rest have warped out."
"Awright, looks like we've done all we can right now," I say. "Hal, drop the jamming and get me Captain Dyessana again, willya?"
It takes a couple of minutes. The Orion captain, when she comes up on the screen, does not look like a happy camper.
"Y'know," I say, "I ain't got a particularly big ship, here, right? Filling my cargo hold, that's gotta work out a lot cheaper than letting me empty yours. Might wanna bear that in mind, next time we run into each other - and, sister, depend on it, there's gonna be a next time."
"You," Dyessana spits, "are dead. You are so dead you are going to need three graves, you -"
"Yeah, yeah, K-T MMA. Lemme tell you something, sister, those five letters don't mean squat in today's galaxy. See you around. Me, I got another appointment to keep today." And we close the channel.
---
Space is big. Biggest thing there is. That doesn't stop us hitting another K-T MMA convoy within the next forty-eight hours.
Everybody's got an edge. Thrang's edge is his super-fast hybrid drive. My edge is... a little different. But it's good enough.
Once upon a time, there was a Federation colony world called Bercera IV. It got blasted to ruins by a Klingon renegade, as part of an over-complicated plot by a High Councillor to stop the war. Thing is, the tricobalt weapons used to destroy that world were routed through an illicit Ferengi transwarp gateway network. And that network was owned and run by DaiMon Prago, out of Nali Caerodi, and when he found out what he'd helped to do... well, even Ferengi have consciences.
Prago figures he owes the Federation for what he helped to do. Giving us full access to his transwarp gates, that's his way of paying off some of the debt. And it means Heizis and I can use those gates, can hit Thrang's shipping faster, in more different places, than any conventional force could hope to do.
"I hope you know what you are doing," Heizis says to me over the comms channel, after we leave the next convoy picking up the pieces and yelling for help.
"Sure I do. Dent Thrang's invulnerable image hard enough, he has to come running, yeah?"
"If news gets to him in time, before his plans come to fruition." Heizis's eyes are dark and smouldering. "I do not like these parameters for engagement, either. Safer and simpler just to destroy the convoy vessels -"
"No." There are lines I can't cross, and lines I just won't, and sacrificing innocent civilian lives to lure Thrang out, that one's both. "We need survivors to spread the news, right? As many survivors as we can get. Every drunk in a spaceport bar, telling people he was in one of Thrang's convoys that got hit - that's another blow at Thrang, and we need all of those."
"I see your logic," Heizis spits. Guess Remans don't go much on the taste of logic. "Well. We have intelligence on the next convoy leaving Alliance space." Good old DaiMon Prago again. "Plotting intercept points now. By the way -" Something seems to be preying on her mind.
"What?" I ask.
"An anomalous result in the analysis of Thrang's tissue," she says with a snarl. "We have made substantial progress with the sequencing of his genome. But the current results -"
"Something you don't recognize?" I knew the guy was some kind of a freak.
"We have gene sequences... we could analyse them ourselves, given time. But these specific sequences are - flagged. They are known, they are recognized... and the reference is to Federation Intelligence. Your people's genetic warfare research division."
"What? OK, transmit that data. We've got a whole raft of Intelligence data libraries over here, we should be able to check that out. At the least, it'll save you some time on completing the analysis."
---
It doesn't take long to flip through the transwarp gates, to find ourselves back on the fringes of Ferengi Alliance space, and hunting down the next set of freighters flying the K-T MMA flag.
I just hope not too many other people are getting in on our act. My guess is that Thrang has been priming local governments and free-range pirates to hit everyone else but his freighters... if enough people get my message, that the K-T MMA affiliation isn't a magic shield against adversity, they will start hitting Thrang's freighters too. Which may put a bit of a monkey wrench in Thrang's plans, true, but it won't bring him to me, which is what I need.
The new convoy is passing only a couple of light years from the transwarp gate. If I was a pirate for real, I'd let this one go - it's too predictable a target, hitting it shows Thrang where I am and how I'm getting about. The danger is, of course, that he knows that. The danger is, he might throw this convoy under the bus, and refuse to come out and play, knowing that I'm deliberately baiting him.
I'm gambling that won't work. I'm gambling that, even if he does know I'm goading him, he still can't afford all the dents I'm putting in his invulnerable image, he will have to stop me. Doesn't matter how many moves ahead he can think, if I know the moves he's got to make. I think chess players call it Zugzwang or something.
God, I wish I was playing chess, it'd be so much simpler.
"Convoy on long-range sensors," says Voesyy. "Something else, too." She leans forward, over her console, peering hard at something on the screen. "Extra blips. Low mass reading, high power signatures. Escorts."
"OK." Muscle, hired muscle of some kind - Orion, Thexemian, whatever. Someone in that convoy is kicking for more protection than the K-T MMA name, possibly. "Get as much data on them as you can when we go in. Hal, contact Heizis, make sure she knows the situation. Gonna have to play hardball, if it's armed ships."
"We still only make holes in cargo, of freighters," says Veb. I don't think she's asking me, I think she's telling me. Good for her.
"Darn right. But anyone tries making holes in us, we hole 'em right back."
"Emissions signatures coming through now. Transmitting to the Palatine." Voesyy's voice is level. "Two Orion warships, Dacoit class."
My nostrils flare, because something about this situation smells. Dacoits... two of 'em... good enough to look like security, yeah, to a freighter captain. But can two Dacoits put up enough of a fight to frighten me off? Against my ship and Heizis's, they don't stand too much of a chance.
Unless they get help. "Oh, boy," I say softly. "I think this is it. Look sharp, everyone."
"We're entering their long-range sensor envelope now," says Vo. At least, the Dechenchholing is. Palatine has already faded into the starscape, and won't be showing up on anyone's sensors until Heizis feels like decloaking.
"OK. Battle stations." Somehow I feel better with the alarms sounding.
"On approach to freighters. Escorts are moving... closing at high impulse, looks like maximum combat speed," Vo reports. "And - sheesh!" She actually jumps out of her seat, staring at the sudden riot of lights on her console. "What the hell's that?"
"Filter out deliberate jamming, flares, all that malarkey," I tell her. "I'm guessing you've just seen one heck of a jolt coming out of subspace."
Voesyy's fingers dance across the scan console. "Confirmed," she says. "Subspace transition... coming out of transwarp and quantum slipstream... equivalent of warp fifty at least." She looks round at me, her eyes hard. "And we have one more ship signature. Low mass, massive emissions profile."
Only one guy that could be. Kalevar Thrang just took the bait.
"Awright," I say. "Game on."
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