Everybody looked up, and Demijack shouted, “There! There!” He was right: the blot that might only have been a smudge of oil on the screen moved as Vinnie banked, revealing itself to be a freighter, big and ungainly and hopelessly outclassed. Easy prey. Easy pickings.
We could use some of them, thought Black Alice. Contrary to the e-ballads and comm stories, a pirate’s life was not all imported delicacies and fawning slaves. Especially not when three-quarters of any and all profits went directly back to the Lavinia Whateley, to keep her healthy and happy. Nobody ever argued. There were stories about the Marie Curie, too.
The captain’s voice over fiber optic cable—strung beside the Lavinia Whateley’s nerve bundles—was as clear and free of static as if she stood at Black Alice’s elbow. “Battle stations,” Captain Song said, and the crew leapt to obey. It had been two Solar since Captain Song keelhauled James Brady, but nobody who’d been with the ship then was ever likely to forget his ruptured eyes and frozen scream.
Black Alice manned her station, and stared at the screen. She saw the freighter’s name—the Josephine Baker—gold on black across the stern, the Venusian flag for its port of registry wired stiff from a mast on its hull. It was a steelship, not a Boojum, and they had every advantage. For a moment she thought the freighter would run.
And then it turned, and brought its guns to bear.
No sense of movement, of acceleration, of disorientation. No pop, no whump of displaced air. The view on the screens just flickered to a different one, as Vinnie skipped—apported—to a new position just aft and above the Josephine Baker, crushing the flag mast with her hull.
Black Alice felt that, a grinding shiver. And had just time to grab her console before the Lavinia Whateley grappled the freighter, long vanes not curling in affection now.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dogcollar, the closest thing the Lavinia Whateley had to a chaplain, cross himself, and she heard him mutter, like he always did, Ave, Grandaevissimi, morituri vos salutant. It was the best he’d be able to do until it was all over, and even then he wouldn’t have the chance to do much. Captain Song didn’t mind other people worrying about souls, so long as they didn’t do it on her time.
The captain’s voice was calling orders, assigning people to boarding parties port and starboard. Down in Engineering, all they had to do was monitor the Lavinia Whateley’s hull and prepare to repel boarders, assuming the freighter’s crew had the gumption to send any. Vinnie would take care of the rest—until the time came to persuade her not to eat her prey before they’d gotten all the valuables off it. That was a ticklish job, only entrusted to the chief engineers, but Black Alice watched and listened, and although she didn’t expect she’d ever get the chance, she thought she could do it herself.
It was a small ambition, and one she never talked about. But it would be a hell of a thing, wouldn’t it? To be somebody a Boojum would listen to?
She gave her attention to the dull screens in her sectors, and tried not to crane her neck to catch a glimpse of the ones with the actual fighting on them. Dogcollar was making the rounds with sidearms from the weapons locker, just in case. Once the Josephine Baker was subdued, it was the junior engineers and others who would board her to take inventory.
Sometimes there were crew members left in hiding on captured ships. Sometimes, unwary pirates got shot.
There was no way to judge the progress of the battle from Engineering. Wasabi put a stopwatch up on one of the secondary screens, as usual, and everybody glanced at it periodically. Fifteen minutes ongoing meant the boarding parties hadn’t hit any nasty surprises. Black Alice had met a man once who’d been on the Margaret Mead when she grappled a freighter that turned out to be carrying a division’s-worth of Marines out to the Jovian moons. Thirty minutes ongoing was normal. Forty-five minutes. Upward of an hour ongoing, and people started double-checking their weapons. The longest battle Black Alice had ever personally been part of was six hours, forty-three minutes, and fifty-two seconds. That had been the last time the Lavinia Whateley worked with a partner, and the double-cross by the Henry Ford was the only reason any of Vinnie’s crew needed. Captain Song still had Captain Edwards’ head in a jar on the bridge, and Vinnie had an ugly ring of scars where the Henry Ford had bitten her.
This time, the clock stopped at fifty minutes, thirteen seconds. The Josephine Baker surrendered.
* * *
Dogcollar slapped Black Alice’s arm. “With me,” he said, and she didn’t argue. He had only six weeks seniority over her, but he was as tough as he was devout, and not stupid either. She checked the Velcro on her holster and followed him up the ladder, reaching through the rungs once to scratch Vinnie’s bulkhead as she passed. The ship paid her no notice. She wasn’t the captain, and she wasn’t one of the four chief engineers.
Quartermaster mostly respected crew’s own partner choices, and as Black Alice and Dogcollar suited up—it wouldn’t be the first time, if the Josephine Baker’s crew decided to blow her open to space rather than be taken captive—he came by and issued them both tag guns and x-ray pads, taking a retina scan in return. All sorts of valuable things got hidden inside of bulkheads, and once Vinnie was done with the steelship there wouldn’t be much chance of coming back to look for what they’d missed.
Wet pirates used to scuttle their captures. The Boojums were more efficient.
Black Alice clipped everything to her belt and checked Dogcollar’s seals.
And then they were swinging down lines from the Lavinia Whateley’s belly to the chewed-open airlock. A lot of crew didn’t like to look at the ship’s face, but Black Alice loved it. All those teeth, the diamond edges worn to a glitter, and a few of the ship’s dozens of bright sapphire eyes blinking back at her.
She waved, unselfconsciously, and flattered herself that the ripple of closing eyes was Vinnie winking in return.
She followed Dogcollar inside the prize.
They unsealed when they had checked atmosphere—no sense in wasting your own air when you might need it later—and the first thing she noticed was the smell.
The Lavinia Whateley had her own smell, ozone and nutmeg, and other ships never smelled as good, but this was… this was…
“What did they kill and why didn’t they space it?” Dogcollar wheezed, and Black Alice swallowed hard against her gag reflex and said, “One will get you twenty we’re the lucky bastards that find it.”
“No takers,” Dogcollar said.
They worked together to crank open the hatches they came to. Twice they found crew members, messily dead. Once they found crew members alive.
“Gillies,” said Black Alice.
“Still don’t explain the smell,” said Dogcollar and, to the gillies: “Look, you can join our crew, or our ship can eat you. Makes no never mind to us.”
The gillies blinked their big wet eyes and made fingersigns at each other, and then nodded. Hard.
Dogcollar slapped a tag on the bulkhead. “Someone will come get you. You go wandering, we’ll assume you changed your mind.”
The gillies shook their heads, hard, and folded down onto the deck to wait.
Dogcollar tagged searched holds—green for clean, purple for goods, red for anything Vinnie might like to eat that couldn’t be fenced for a profit—and Black Alice mapped. The corridors in the steelship were winding, twisty, hard to track. She was glad she chalked the walls, because she didn’t think her map was quite right, somehow, but she couldn’t figure out where she’d gone wrong. Still, they had a beacon, and Vinnie could always chew them out if she had to.