Pirates of the Suara Sea

from CRAWLSPACE, and other Stories

By Dave Freer and Eric Flint

Copyright 2011 Dave Freer and Eric Flint

All Rights Reserved

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PIRATES OF THE SUARA SEA

The ship was on fire.

I ran down to the aft deck, where, surprise, surprise, a bunch of the Altekar crew were toasting spiky mauve crustaceans on long forks, over a fire made of ripped up deck-planks. On top of other deck-planks.

If you think that sounds unbelievably daft, then you don’t know Altekars. Sometimes I wished that I didn’t.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing!” I shouted, flinging a bucket of water which they had standing next to them at the fire.

“Cooking Perga, skipper,” said Skeer, the Bosun, cheerfully. “The cook doesn’t like the smell in his galley.”

I could tell why.

It stank. Like my being here, in the middle of the Suara Sea on an old scow, a hundred light years—and twenty years too late—from where I wanted to be. “You could have burned the whole ship, you idiots.”

“Aw, Skip,” said Skeer, waving a taloned flipper at me, “There are lots more deck-planks. Maybe even... five.”

Altekars don’t count beyond four. Maybe they could if they wanted to, but they don’t. And, being amphibians they were less worried about burning the ship under them than I was. They’re good in a fight, good for getting drunk with, and good for collecting Marquat pods from the seaweed clumps. Like me, they’re not much good for anything else—which is rather why we were all here. Unlike me they never had had much need for numbers. An Altekar has an inbuilt sense of direction and location. I needed a GPS, and that meant numbers. Other than that, I tried to ignore figures too.

Then we heard a yell from the masthead lookout. “Fast boat, cap’n. Fast boat comin’ fast.”

Ten out of ten for accuracy and minus three hundred for information... but I didn’t need a lot. Out in the endless seaweed drifts of the Suara there were only two kinds of vessels: Sailboats working Marquat and those that preyed on the sailboats. Back on Earth when I was a kid playing on a sixteen foot Hobie off Sydney, and FTL was hot news, there had been the assumption that once the galaxy was our oyster, it would be an oyster like a very large Earth: technologically advanced, and well-ordered.

About the only thing I liked about the galaxy, was that it was neither. It was big—far too big for narrow imagining—it was chaotic, and it was technologically speaking as varied as bouillabaisse. And interstellar transport was not cheap. Hence, when harvesting the Marquat pods from the hundreds of thousands of square miles of Altekar’s shallow seas, for which there was an insatiable demand back on the core-worlds, you could use locally made boats or go broke.

Unless, of course you harvested Marquat pod boats instead of Marquat pods. Then importing a jet-drive, and the fuel for it, could pay for itself. Also the pirates cut out the middleman - the Reyno Corporation buyers in Port Carson. ReynoCo got rich, and the pirates kept the Marquat supply available during our attempts at collective action for a better deal. Piracy had been getting worse over the last few years. Neither Reyno nor the Planetary Authority seemed interested in doing much about it. So it was every ship’s crew for itself, and devil take the hindmost. “Prepare for action!” I yelled. There was no need to do so. The Altekar crew were scattering to their stations and tasks. Bales were being strung and jettisoned, and our feeble armory run out: two locally made bronze cannon. I sprinted up to the wheel-house and threw the wheel hard over, setting the sails belling with the cracking and creaking of booms, as we turned to run directly with the wind.

I looked at the GPS unit. Memorised the figures. Tossed it down to Skeer... Who hooked it up to the last bale of jetsam on the rope, and tossed it overboard.

On the fore-deck, boarding axes and the particularly nasty snake-edged blades the Altekar fancied were readied. Fat lot of good those would be against the pirates beam-cannon, flechette rifles and pistols. Hand-to-hand combat the pirates would avoid. They would lie off, demast the ship, rake the decks, and gas grenade the holds, until the Altekar were dead or jumped overboard.

Sure enough, the two sleek jetboats came yowling up on the starboard side, firing at their maximum range. The water boiled ahead of our bow, and, damn them, they punched a hole through the mainsail.

Our cannon boomed on the down-roll. Darko, Mister mate and chief gunner both, was good. The ball missed the lead vessel by less than ten yards, showering the jetboat and its crew in warm Suara-water and seaweed, wreathing our deck in maroon Lenka smoke. Lenka, the propellant, was a kind of pollen that would even burn underwater – but it just was lousy at tossing cannonballs. It burned too hot to use twice in a row. There was no point in reloading, since the stuff would melt steel, let alone local bronze.

As the jetboats fired again, I swung the wheel hard the other way, luffing the sail. Beam-cannon ripped into the bottom edge of the mainsail, the uproll effectively protecting the crew. The pirates would not fire through the wooden hull. The last thing they wanted was for the ship to be sunk or the cargo to be damaged.

Darko tossed his linstock over the port side, and he followed it along with the rest of my loyal lads. I huddled down in the titanium-fullerene wheelhouse. That and the GPS were the only two pieces of Earth-made kit we had on board. The wheelhouse came as flat-pak and didn’t cost much.

The ship rolled back to reveal our empty decks to their gunners. The one vessel lay off and seared the ocean a bit, looking for the Altekar who were in the water. They boiled some seaweed and a shoal of opal-fish with the Beam-cannon. They couldn’t do much harm, except to the fish. The crew would be on the bottom fifteen fathoms down by now.

The other jetboat raced in to board us. They were a hard-bitten looking bunch. Mostly New Earthers by the look of them. Tough kids from the slums that technology, progress and welfare had been unable to entirely get rid of. Out here to get rich, or just recruited for the joy of trouble and killing. They packed pistols and a small array of heavier weaponry.

They checked the hold. Cautiously peering over the edge. Altekar sailors had been known to wait in ambush down in the hold. One of the pirates held a gas grenade at the ready...

But the hold was empty, except for one small bale in the far corner. Not big enough to hide three Altekar, let alone a ship’s crew. “It’s empty! Dammit! There is no friggin’ cargo,” yelled one.

I listened happily to the cussing and swearing for a while. When one of them got to the inevitable “Let’s sink the tub.” I called out.

One of the gung-ho live-bait took a shot at the wheelhouse. The others dived for cover.

“Come out!” yelled one of them, trying to get all of himself behind the mainmast. I was almost tempted to take the .03 Lemmer flat out of my boot-heel and trim his belly with a flechette. But instead I yelled. “No way. You’ll kill me.”

“We’re gonna kill you anyway, asshole,” shouted one, running for cover behind the dive-ropes. Like that would have helped.

“Then I won’t be able to tell you where we jettisoned the cargo,” I yelled back, over a fusillade of remarkable inaccuracy. If these little snots had been my boots, back in MACSA... They’d have been dead. That was the trouble with recruiting inner-city drug-gang kids.

The words finally penetrated the head of whatever passed for an officer in the pirate-crew. “Stop shooting,” he yelled.

Eventually they listened to him. Or ran out of ammunition, one of the two. “Come out, “ he yelled again. “We won’t shoot you.”

“If you do shoot me, you’ll all be a lot poorer.” I hoped that would get through to this bunch of crack-heads. One never quite knew if anything in their brains still functioned.

That was obviously worrying to their commander too. “Reiki. Manson. Keep him covered. The rest of you. Holster them.”

With a bit of grumbling, and a fair amount of argument, it happened. “Right.” He stood up from behind the strapped down water-barrels. “Now come out of there. Let’s talk. What’s a Terran doing here?”

“I got dumped by my ship,” I said. “It was this or starve. Look, I don’t want to die. I’ll make you a deal. “I’ll give you the cargo’s GPS location, in exchange for my life and my ship.”

“Sure,” he said, too easily. “Come out of there, with your hands up, mind.”

“You’re not gonna shoot me?” I whined, staying put. “Anyway, you can’t lift the cargo with those little things,” I pointed vaguely at the other vessel hanging off on the starboard bow, with its beam-cannon trained on the ship. “You’ll have to let me take the Queen,” I pointed at my ship, “back there. And without my crew and with the wind in this quarter it’s going to take us a while. You’ll have to man the sails.”

“Queen!” the commander rolled his eyes heavenward. “Terrence,” he said to one of his crew of little scabs. “Call the ship.”

He turned back to me. “We’ve got a winch on that. And dive gear.” He started walking towards the wheelhouse.

“You just stop right there,” I snapped, forgetting myself. Once a Master Sergeant, always a Master Sergeant... He paused, halted by my tone. It gave me enough time to gather myself again. “I need some guarantees.”

“My word on it,” he said, far too easily again.

“You’ll never find it without me. And there are forty-three bales of prime Marquat pod down there,” I said.

He whistled. “Better than the last haul.”

“Better than the last three,” said one of the men who was supposedly covering the wheelhouse.

I stepped out of my titanium-fullerine weave shelter, holding the button in my hand. It was a box, a tiny battery, a green button and a red LED. That was it. Manufacturing didn’t rise to much more out here. But what you don’t tell, they don’t know.

“Frigging hell. It’s a woman,” said one of the pirates, licking his lips.

I resisted the temptation to say “now, if only you were a man, sonny.”

His friends came running up, grinning like sharks.

“Get the GPS unit,” said their commander, grabbing me where few live men had before, without invitation. He grinned cruelly. “Stupid bitch. Your back-track is on that.”

“How much do you want to bet?” I said. “And I wouldn’t do that.”

“We can, and we’re going to do anything we damn well like to you. Officers first...” He saw my hand and its contents. He let me go. He gestured at the second boat, slowly and carefully. “We’re under the other skiff’s beam-cannon. Put that down.”

“Lieutenant Koscov. It’s not in here!” shouted the member of his crew who had followed his orders to the wheelhouse.

I looked at the button I was holding down. Looked at Koscov. “I have nothing to lose. You’ve got everything to lose. If I stop pressing this button, you’ll find that out. So: you need to cut me a deal to change that. And I don’t have a lot of reasons to trust you, mister.”

“What is that thing?” he asked, eyeing the object in my hand. His crew were slithering away, like the slimeballs they were.

“Insurance,” I said. “And you just stay put. All of you. When your ship gets here she can tow the Queen along to the site. You boys can just stay on board until the cargo’s up. Then we’ll work out something that lets me get out of here alive.”

“You could join us,” said Koscov looking at the two dollar red LED light. “We’re always recruiting. The money is good.”

“I’ll consider it,” I said evenly. I was quite proud of the way I said that. I mean, I never had any formal training, like standing for office or anything.

It took a good half an hour for their ship to arrive. Space-to-water job, very nice. Innocuous looking, no external armaments—well, it was quite hard to look innocent with those. Civ, thank goodness. Old military crates come onto the market every now and again, but they’re heavy with armour, not thin steel-plate, and cost a lot to fly. And they don’t have much hold space. So the Marquat pirates tend to use Civ boats, which they mostly keep on or under the water, using their radar to pick up targets for the skiffs, coming in to load up when it was all over, and then buying a few moments satellite blindness to launch off-world. This place was officially a Terran dependancy, but there is always someone on the take.

A bit more talky-talk and they hooked us up on the long cable from our chain locker. If the Queen Anne’s Reven ge had been a floating bomb they’d have been quite safe. My hostages were a little less happy about it.

“Look... Captain Van Vyss might just decide to blow you... and us, away when he has the GPS reference,” said Koscov uneasily.

I shrugged. “You better point out that I might have lied to him. He won’t know for sure until his divers have the stuff hooked up.”

“Uh. Did you lie...?”

“That’s for me to know. Tell him that I want to know if his word is any better than yours,” I grinned nastily at him. “Oh and tell him we dropped in two strings. I’ll start with the first one.”

“Uh. Look Van Vyss could just decide we’re expendable once he gets that cargo of yours,” said the lieutenant

I raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were always recruiting? I guess I can see why. I reckon that skiff of yours is my best bet. You might consider coming with me, sweetie. Because the man is not likely to be too pleased with you.”

Lieutenant Koscov was just a little startled by the idea. And seriously weighing it. There is one born every minute. Maybe I am one too. “Look,” he said wheedlingly. “I can cut you a deal. You want off-world...”

“Can’t. That’s why I’m stuck here, sunshine. My heart won’t take the G-stresses. That’s why I got dumped.” It was a good story. Better than “I fought on the losing side, and the systems eventually picked up on my fake ID, and I barely had time to skip out of Port Carson on a Marquat boat which then had the misfortune to get taken by pirates.” Sometimes being a “war criminal” is a matter of perspective. The Corporates won. The Free World Alliance lost.

The ship lowered its stern loading door to allow a diver to drop into the water. “One diver?” I said scathingly. “Even Altekars go down in threes. There are a lot of murkies down here.”

“Murkies? You mean the water?” asked the lieutenant.

I rolled my eyes. “The Suara Sea does look more like thin soup than seawater, Lieutenant Koscov. But that’s seaweed, and plankton. I mean Mercosaurus something-or-other. Just big teeth on a long neck and no brains. Fast and nasty. They’ll even eat Altekars. You boys are new to this, aren’t you?”

“We’ve been here for two months. Never had any incidents,” said Koscov, telling me what I wanted to know. They’d have a nearly full hold, and a lot of Altekar blood on their hands.

“Yeah? And how much time have you spent in the water?” I asked, scathingly. “Better tell that captain of yours.”

So he did. And a few minutes later the remains of a diver drifted up. I looked at it dispassionately. “I guess someone should have listened.”

It took a bit of time for the next lot to go over the side. In a bunch. They were armed with knives and a couple of makeshift harpoons. Heh.

A few minutes later the rope they’d taken down with them was tugged. Someone hooked it up to a winch. A couple of minutes later they hauled the first of the bales from the Queen up.

Koscov chose that moment to get clever. Tried to grab the button. I poked him in the solar plexus and, as he folded, I pushed him into one of his dumb friends and tossed the button at another one, dropping down next to the wheelhouse before the explosions began.

The way to pirate’s heart is through his chest. And judging by this one’s behaviour he didn’t love me much. So I took the .03 out of my boot-heel and let an exploding flechette open the way through his chest for me. He was sweet in dumb-bunny boot sense. I got three of the others too, before Skeer and his crew caught up with the rest. Darko and his lads were butchering the survivors on the sinking ship. The Lenka pollen charges they’d hauled up had filled their cargo-loading bay with hot shrapnel. Made closing it unlikely.

My Altekar lads didn’t have many New Earthers trying to stop them boarding. Okay, the pirates on the ship were less helpless than a bunch of stupid inner city boys diving had been, but their ship was sinking, the hull burned through by a Lenka limpet. The skiffs and their beam cannons were matchwood. We really would get the charges right one of these days. That was a lot of good loot wasted.

“Nice shooting skipper!” yelled Skeer, cheerfully. “Better than the first time, eh.”

“That was because you jumped left when you should have jumped right,” I said. The first time I’d been a desperate passenger, and the pirates had taken the ship unawares. Skeer and Darko were just Marquat divers back then, and it had been an ugly fight with very few survivors. That time I hadn’t been expecting it. Times changed. “Let’s go. Darko breaks too much if we leave him to himself.” One of the lads passed me the rebreather that used be one of the pirate-diver’s possessions before they had to try knife fighting at fifteen fathoms.

Me and the boys dived over the side and headed for their ship. I can’t swim as fast as an Altekar, but they helped me along.

We swam in through the hull-breach that we’d melted through with the limpet mine. It was always a bit tricky, that, because there were sharp bits of metal and the water was sucking, but we got in fine. Well, no major loss of blood. The water was doing a good job of flushing the rats out, but having us come up behind them suddenly added a new dimension to the fight. The city-boys had guns and emergency lighting. We had vision tailored for sight in soupy water, knives, axes, and some .3 flechettes and surprise. Not everything in life is fair. I think they found taking on sail ships with jet-boats and beam-cannon was more fun. They preferred it being unfair that way around, it seemed, listening to their screaming.

The emergency lights dimmed. I gritted my teeth. Engineering and the bridge were always our first target. Okay. External aerials went first, outside, but the inside of a 22nd century ship was an unfamiliar place to the Altekar. Things went wrong. There is always something that you don’t expect in a fight. That’s reality, as the first bunch of overconfident pirates found out, when they’d targeted an Altekar Marquat boat with a stowaway Marine Master Sergeant.

The ship lurched. Yeah. I was right. Someone had tried to initiate launch - despite the ship being half-full of water, with compromised hull-integrity and probably with open cargo-bay doors. Oh, and three hundred tons of Queen Anne’s Revenge hooked up to the spaceship by a good solid braided palkar cable. And a fair amount of the ship’s electrical and electronic systems suffering from Suara seawater. Sure death. Still... she was starting to boost, and that would be sure death for all of us too.

The ship was already making a lot of seriously unhappy mechanical noises. Well, I was no Altekar and I knew where engineering and the bridge were on a space-craft. The former was closer, and, as the pirate swayed and sucked to get free of the water, I led Skeer and the lads there. We blew the door, and I took out the crewman huddled behind the generator.

Generators were valuable loot, but I had no hesitation in dropping a Lenka charge into it, before we ran like hell.

The Lenka blast and death of her lift-generators smacked us down in the corridor, but at least it wasn’t free-fall. As well as killing us all, free-fall would have wrecked my ship, and I would have been a really upset ghost. We couldn’t have been more than twenty feet clear of the water by the impact. Of course the lights were completely down now. There was just the emergency wall-glow trace, reflecting off even more water swirling in.

Still. The dark is better for knife-work than shooting.

We blew a few airtight doors, and the ship continued to settle. The Suara is only about twenty fathoms at its deepest, and around here fifteen fa’am was the norm. So that left a piece of their ship sticking out above water-level. We had to put a Lenka charge to blow a hole in it to haul the last of them out of there. In the meanwhile Skeer had the lads get some ropes down to their cargo hold. There was a good supply of other people’s Marquat pods there.

We started loading while Darko wrinkled the last of the hide-aways out of their holes. There was still a lot of good looting of 22nd century goods on the ship. Those were worth more than Marquat, here on Altekar. It’d take us a week to strip her.

I was supervising the loading when they brought Captain Van Vyss over to the Queen Anne’s Revenge . They’d found him in a lifepod, which, lucky for us, he’d failed to launch. Sometimes luck breaks your way.

I looked the sorry piece of work over. “I thought there couldn’t be too many Van Vysses out there,” I said, remembering him all too well. Mowing down people who couldn’t get to you to fight back was something he’d done well for the Corporates. He hadn’t changed much in peace-time.

“Look,” he began, “I’m worth more to you alive than I am dead. You can get a good ransom for me.” Then he recognised me. “Bonney!”

He’d kept his cool until then. Now beads of cold sweat stood out on his forehead. “I call myself Teach these days,” I said conversationally. “More appropriate, I think. A nice pun, and better ship-name. Now, who would be prepared to pay a ransom for you, ex-Commodore Van Vyss?”

He was too scared to play his cards properly. It was amazing what a bad reputation could do for you. The Corporates had done well at lying off in space and pounding colonies until they surrendered. Might have gone on working too if the Free Worlders hadn’t found out what happened to the colonists who had surrendered. So: when they pounded Macquarie’s settlement to pieces, Master Sergeant Anne Bonney had been waiting for them when they landed, with a lot of people who hadn’t been in the settlement. I hadn’t changed that much either. Well, Macquarie was lifeless slag, and I was a war criminal as a result. I’d let Van Vyss get away that time. And he’d testified against me.

He still seemed to think that he could be lucky twice. But fear made him stupid this time. He named names. Gave details about certain well-placed administrators and the officials in the Reyno Corporation. Now he offered me very large sums, instead of trading on my honor and the status of prisoners of war. Of course Marquat-pod harvesters don’t make much money, but some people get very rich out of the trade. Isn’t that always the truth?

“Well, Van Vyss,” I said when he’d finally finished, when he thought he was going to jump the trap. “I’ll have to go through your cabin and log details to confirm it, but it could be even more profitable than the last few of our prizes have been.”

“Oh yes. Look, Bonney. We could use you,” he said, desperately eager.

“Yeah. You could. Of course it would cost you.”

He sang a little more about his contacts.

So I turned to Darko. “Got the plank ready? Or did you use it for cooking Perga?”

“Got another one,” said Darko, cheerfully.

I knew the next part. “Got lots, maybe even five,” I said, grinning wryly. You had to learn to fit in with the Altekar.

Van Vyss didn’t speak Altekar, and only understood ‘five’. I guess it meant as much to him as the number did to the Altekar, because he didn’t even try to fight or run.

Altekar can’t count, but you can count on them. Someone had chummed the opalfish in close. We were lying maybe three hundred yards from Van Vyss’s sunken ship. The water shimmered with hungry little fish. “One of the problems with modern pirates,” I said, as he was prodded with sharp snaky-blades onto the plank out over the bright water. “Is that they don’t learn enough history. With a name like mine, I took an interest. If you’d recruited anyone other than dropout illiterates, they’d never have taken on a ship called Queen Anne’s Revenge .”

What was happening finally sank in to Van Vyss. “But all the money, Bonney!” he squalled.

“Wasn’t worth your life,” I said, prodding him forward. I’d been terribly disappointed to find out that walking the plank was one of the pirate myths, and had rarely happened. Well. We had changed that. “I don’t think there is enough money in the universe, Van Vyss. And anyway, you and your friends might have talked to their other friends. And then my friends would have paid for it. I’ve been there before, in case you forget, and I learned my lesson. No, you pirates will just have to keep getting lost with all hands. It’ll get harder to recruit as less of your gutter-sweepings come back from the Suara, and the price of Marquat will rise without the pirate supply undercutting it. But we’ll give your friends a call.”

***

So we pulled up a few spare deck planks and toasted some Perga on long forks on the aft-deck, and drank Nash Rum (you really don’t want to know) while the opal-fish and the meer-crabs pulled Van Vyss’s corpse apart. Tomorrow we’d give a call to his backers to come and fetch the rich cargo he had stolen, before his ship’s hull was damaged.

Okay, so the ship was on fire. But we had at least another five deck-planks.