Captain Navarre, page 20
Showing off her wealth, more likely.
Suvi could fuss and curse in the privacy of her drone, since nobody could hear her but her ship-side self that she sent updates to regularly. Ship-Suvi was also unimpressed.
Then gun butts and fists began smashing into cases. Or trying, only to discover that the glass wasn’t anything they could break with their bare hands.
So some idiot fired his gun at a lock.
Fortunately, the ricochet went more or less straight up, embedding in the ceiling tiles rather than hitting anyone. Wouldn’t hurt her drone, other than to ping off her skin and into something else.
This was not the room to be playing pinball with humans.
“Cut that shit out!” Vinogradov yelled. “Get the mechanics in here. They have tools for a reason!”
Suvi floated up and stayed out of line of sight as several ijits raced off. More came back. These looked halfway competent.
Okay, maybe three-quarters. One of the men had an impact hammer with some high quality drill bits in place. He leaned into the lock and punched the face off. His partner stepped in when he stepped back, jamming a different bit in from his own hammer, twisting the lock.
Alarms finally started going off. Or maybe just the audible ones.
Suvi assumed hard-wired alarms going downtown to the building these delinquent yahoos had blown up before landing. The cops had other problems than a museum robbery.
She dialed her audio sensors down a few notches, then added a quick routine to wash the alarm out so she could hear everything else ambient.
One by one, the two smarter crooks opened cases and moved on. The punks scooped everything up and started dumping it into briefcases, regardless of how fragile it might be.
But then, they weren’t art collectors in anything but the most literal sense today.
Whatever damage occurred wasn’t going to really impact the value of the pieces, because they’d either be melted down or sold as stolen anyway.
Still, she wished these fools had more pride in their work.
If you were going to steal something, try not to look like a punk, huh?
She idly considered offering lessons in piracy and theft, but sow’s ears and silk purses came to mind.
“Suvi, this is Javier,” he suddenly pinged her. “Can you round up Stacia? I need her outside by the ship.”
Ah HA!!!
SHOWTIME!
She’d wondered if they were planning to abandon the drone body down here. Wasn’t like she wasn’t transmitting everything to herself on the ship in real time, once they realized that the pirates weren’t listening. Only loss would have been the frame itself, and the time spent tuning it.
Stacia was the problem, because she needed to get out safely.
And that time was now.
Suvi considered her personal fashion, here inside her drone. Her look. Up until now, she’d been in her usual flight cockpit that looked almost exactly like it had on Mielikki, back in the before time.
But that was too…staid.
She transformed herself into the four-armed piano-playing version, swapped her green uniform for the hot pink polar bear furs, and dialed up her Red Baron music.
Time to get silly.
Part 4
Stacia had kept a more-than-respectable distance from Kovalev as the woman worked.
Collateral damage kept coming to mind, and she didn’t want it to fall on her. Not as grumpy as the pirate queen had gotten over the last fifteen minutes.
Finally processed how bad she had looked, compared to Navarre’s strike team?
Something.
Her camera beeped in ways that it hadn’t before. She looked down and saw that her diagnostics screen had a message from Suvi.
Navarre requests you join him outside soonest.
Nothing more. Still, it spoke volumes, if everything was coming to a head.
Stacia turned to the nearest pirate. A male, but most of them were.
“Where’s the restroom?” she asked.
“Huh?”
“Restroom,” she repeated, like he was stupid or something.
He pointed.
Stacia nodded and headed that direction. Kovalev was moving around, but not at a fast pace. Enough that if she took her time in the bathroom, the woman might move deeper into the facility.
Helped that gendered bathrooms seemed deeply ingrained in the pirates. No men in here. Few women with the force in the first place, not counting the Dragoon and her pathfinders.
Stacia took her time. Typed a reply to Suvi.
Potty break then away.
She got a string of smiley faces back that were more like the woman flying the ship than the mechanical device that was pretending to be in the drone.
Stacia emerged from the bathroom and looked around. Nobody in sight, so she turned right and headed towards the front, passing a few pirates headed inwards and falling into a stream headed out with loot.
Paintings literally ripped off the walls from the broken wires on the back. Anvil cases no doubt filled with objects d’art. Whatever pirates might find valuable enough to steal instead of breaking.
She filmed as she went, trying to look like a professional, rather than a thief. Or an honest woman surrounded by thieves. Something.
They had guns, and she could still hear occasional explosions in the distance as they flew over the city blowing things up because there was nobody to stop them.
Hopefully, their time was about over.
Stacia moved past the nearer ships. The ones with open bays where folks were stacking and packing like movers. That, at least, they seemed capable of doing in a semi-adult manner.
Hard to steal everything if you can’t carry it off.
Finally, she got out past the parking lot. She could see Aritza’s party mostly because the Dragoon was so much taller than everyone else.
They were looking this way, but she was still maybe two hundred meters away.
Then the Dragoon drew a pistol and fired it at her.
Part 5
Zhenya looked around when a clock in her head told her that the annoying little blonde with the camera should have been back by now.
Wasn’t like she could have gotten lost. This building wasn’t that complicated. Just a series of larger and smaller chambers, largely separated by doors or short hallways.
And McNulty should have been back already.
Zhenya sneered at the woman’s weakness.
Had a touch of queasiness to finally see what piracy looked like? Wasn’t nearly as clean and pretty as filmmakers presented it?
On the one hand, a constant struggle against the authorities on various planets who might not want to pay tribute to keep her at bay. At the other end of the spectrum, people coveting her power and position and working to undermine her or simply kill her and take over the gang.
Like she’d done.
Mila was not a threat. Not that many people would follow her if she made her move. And she seemed to understand that she could have what power she had as Zhenya’s Second-in-Command.
Or nothing.
But where was that little bitch?
“Oleg, where’s the woman with the camera?” she asked the closest pirate.
He looked like a man having a nightmare about suddenly being back in school to take a pop quiz he hadn’t studied for.
Of course, if Oleg had ever studied, he wouldn’t have ended up here.
Men. Worthless except for one thing, most of the time.
She growled and headed forward to find Mila. Perhaps the woman had gone that way.
When she found Mila, Zhenya looked around as her Second-in-Command organized pirates emptying out displays.
Something was missing.
“Where’s the probe?” Zhenya asked as she got close.
Mila looked around confused for a second. Looked up.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “It was with us two chambers back.”
Zhenya nodded.
For one or the other to disappear might be coincidental. Both vanishing at once was a problem.
Navarre was up to something.
“Drop everything,” Zhenya said. Then she grabbed the nearest male and shoved him towards the door. “Find the blonde. Find Navarre while you’re at it. Pass the word.”
Her tone and volume were enough to get her men in motion. Many were carrying loot, but that was fine. If this was a trap of some sort, at least they’d escape with a good chunk of the museum’s contents. Or at least the valuable bits.
She could always come back later for the rest.
But a voice in her head had her in motion.
Mila started yelling behind her as she left the room, driving more and more of the pirates into Zhenya’s direction. She gathered up several and carried them in her emotional wake.
Out the front door she paused.
“Where are the prisoners?” she demanded, only to be met by shrugs.
Fools.
She’d let Navarre bamboozle her, and her curs had slacked off as a result, letting him do all the work.
“Move it!” she snapped, turning and walking.
Not at a run. Not even a jog. Nothing to suggest panic to the gunslingers and killers around her.
A hard stride, slamming heels angrily down as she went. They picked up on that and hardened their faces.
Out here, things were in normal motion. Men and a few women coming and going, hauling off loot and packing it for flight. Like they’d all done dozens of times before.
“Where’s the probe?” she asked as she went by. “Where is the blonde with the camera?”
More shrugs.
Nobody was responsible for the woman, so nobody had bothered tracking her. She’d slipped away when nobody looked.
Golden hair reflecting sunlight caught Zhenya’s attention. The blonde.
She began to jog, drawing the pistol she’d largely ignored because there was nobody to shoot at.
Until now.
The distance was extreme, but the small woman was only walking. Zhenya started to run in her wake.
Behind her, the rest of her pirates fell farther and farther behind, unable to keep up.
Or unfaed by the betrayal they didn’t sense.
Zhenya let rage fuel her footsteps.
Even farther away, she saw the tall woman who was Navarre’s bodyguard. Hadiiye.
If Zhenya had had any doubts, seeing that woman with Navarre and her entire team, including that floating probe, dispersed them.
Zhenya raised her pistol. The range was extreme, but she was closing on the blonde with every stride and would get answers out of her.
Then Zhenya saw movement beyond, as Hadiiye raised her own pistol.
Part 6
Djamila considered the range. The temperature and humidity levels would play a measurable part as she triangulated everything in her head. Suvi’s probe was entirely out of effective range.
Stacia McNulty. Approximate range one hundred and eighty meters, closing at a slow walk.
Zhenya Kovalev. Approximate range three hundred meters, closing at an eighteen-second-pace for a one hundred meter dash. Not quite a dead run.
Level terrain. Cover in the form of six starships of various sizes parked between here and there.
Djamila smiled as she lifted her pistol.
Vinogradov’s carbine wouldn’t have been any better for a shot like this, and Djamila rarely needed to consider engaging at this range with pistols. Had she more time, Djamila might have tasked Iqbal with making the shot, but he was out of position and McNulty had less than a second before Kovalev opened fire at her unsuspecting back.
Djamila centered her weapon and let thirty years of time on gun ranges align its existence on the pirate. She wasn’t looking at the woman, so much as taking in the entire horizon, centered on a moving dot of rage palpable even at this distance.
She fired.
Partial hit, which was in the third standard deviation for such a shot. Not great, but most people would have missed entirely.
Kovalev went to her knees, then face-planted as her legs didn’t work all that well.
Partially stunned was almost worse, because you were awake to note how your body stopped responding correctly. Djamila would generally prefer to be out cold.
Except that being awake allowed her to plan. To force numb legs and hands to do as she demanded.
Recovery would improve by fractions, but those fractions might mean the difference between life and death.
Kovalev down unfortunately put her safely out of sight as well, which prevented Djamila from taking a follow-up shot to keep her down.
The shot had been rushed. Tagged the woman high on her right shoulder. Sufficient to save Stacia’s life. Not enough to end Kovalev as a threat.
Djamila waved McNulty to start running.
It took the woman another moment and a look back at the mob starting to bay for blood behind her, then McNulty turned into a jackrabbit.
Djamila smiled.
“Defensive fire,” she said to her killers. “I need McNulty safely aboard.”
“Excessive violence is called for,” Javier spoke up. “I’m about to start blowing shit up, so feel free to start early with any explosives you don’t want to haul home.”
Djamila laughed at the look of sheer joy on Galal’s face as he stuffed his pistol into the holster and rotated the grenade launcher off his back, chambered a round, and lofted it into the distance.
Two more joined it before the first landed, detonating on a ship close to the mob of pirates starting to move this way. They panicked and went for cover.
Around her, Djamila’s people cut loose with everything they had.
Part 7
Javier nodded to the outgoing barrage and went up the ramp to Mila’s ship. No cargo in here yet, but that was because the plan had called for ships closer in to be filled first before taking off for others to replace them.
Mila would normally have landed in the front row, since she flew a big panel van of a ship, but the woman had been carrying a full load of passengers on this trip.
Still, the distance today helped.
Outside, he could hear a shitload of weapons opening up. Bullets started to spang angrily off the hull around him, but nothing was getting through and none of those punks had the sorts of anti-tank firepower they would need to threaten him.
Not until somebody got smart and took off. All those fighters had more than enough guns to do the trick.
He threw himself into the pilot’s seat and started a preflight. Most of the checklist he could skip, because she’d done a solid, professional job of shutting it down two hours ago.
The one thing he did that she hadn’t done was bring the guns live.
Ship this size had a turret on the bottom, plus four small pulsars on the wings. Parallel rather than parallaxing, but this wasn’t a fighter by design. Rather, it was a personnel transport with guns added later.
Good enough for the crazy shit he had planned.
Javier had a count going in his head. Almost to the second, the first set of steps pounded up the ramp.
“Strap yourself in tight!” he yelled, assuming it was Stacia, with everyone else covering her escape and about to pile in behind her.
Instead of listening, she kept coming. He assumed it was her.
Just in case, Javier pulled his pistol and pointed it at her as she got to the doorway.
Stacia yelped and ducked.
“Just making sure,” he said. “I said strap in.”
“Up here, damn it,” she snapped angrily, throwing herself into the co-pilot seat.
And turning that damned camera on him. Should have known.
He’d hired her for a job. She didn’t think it was done yet, obviously.
Javier shrugged and slipped back into the Navarre persona for a little while longer.
Aft, more stomping.
“We are clear to lift,” Djamila yelled. “Closing the ramp now!”
“Take over the belly turret, someone!” Javier yelled back, then started bringing power to the repulsor collective.
The ship flew like a wasp, hovering delicately in place as the light from aft went out with the ass end finally sealed.
“Stand by for powered flight!” Javier yelled, mostly for the benefit of folks watching the video Stacia was shooting.
Instead of slamming it to the stops and racing for the heavens, Javier set the craft to rotating in place slowly, nose down, counter-clockwise, while he set the forward guns to auto-fire as quickly as the generators could recharge the capacitors.
Below him, he felt the turret spin in place and someone started taking more precise shots at various ships on the ground. Again, mostly just to damage things so that they had to be repaired prior to flight.
The pirates weren’t big on skinsuits, so if you had a missing windshield, you had a flight ceiling of about six thousand meters. Unless you wanted to surrender to the local authorities who might be a little bit pissed after all this.
Some of them might have to make that choice soon.
Helped that nobody else had caught on to what was about to happen. No other ships started shooting back, though that would change shortly.
If nothing else, some fool would realize that they’d been betrayed.
And come loaded for bear.
Javier completed one rotation and figured he needed to get gone. This ship wasn’t as fast as some of them, and he needed a head start if he wanted to survive this crazy-ass stunt.
He cut the wing guns, adjusted trim and epulsors, then stood this bitch on her ass and finally slammed the thrusters to the stops.
Bye, bye…
Part 8
Stacia watched with her mouth dropped open, but it wouldn’t appear on camera at any point, so she could pretend to be as calm, cool, and deadly as the folks around her.
