Redoubtable

32

Four days later, the Wasp docilely followed the Bucket of Blood as it made its final approach to High Dry Tortugas. The Dauntless followed along in her wake. Officially, the Bucket was leading in the captured merchant ships Mary Ellen Carter and Pink Lucky Seven. Those were the names of the ships Kris’s corvettes were squawking, and those were the captures that the skipper of the Bucket was bragging about.

With as many guns aimed at his head as could be arranged.

Kris was not surprised that the pirate captain was reading his lines with gusto. Colonel Cortez and Jack Campbell were both on the Bucket, along with Penny.

Kris had Captain Jack the Marine and Abby with her on the Wasp. All three ships now held a company of Royal Marines and near to a battalion of Imperial ones. Campbell commanded the Bucket, leaving Amber command of the Dauntless.

Admiral Krätz had agreed to let the ship’s captain be in tactical command, under Kris. This despite the fact the Imperial Marine battalions were commanded by lieutenant colonels who outranked the Royal Navy skipper. In Kris’s own case, she had Commander Fervenspiel back aboard the Wasp.

To say the chain of command looped off in all directions was to put it far too simply.

Still, one admiral and one princess easily agreed on what they wanted. A certain grand duchess didn’t get what she wanted. Presently, she waited for things to start happening while fuming beside her admiral on the Fury on the other side of the jump.

From the Bucket’s records, they’d found out the time of day on High Dry Tortugas and had delayed their entry into the system so that they docked just about 2200 hours local time. As expected, there were no port officials interested in doing the usual tax, customs, and disease control at that late hour.

Kris had hoped the pirates were as lackadaisical about those things as they were about most other work.

From the evidence, they certainly were.

There still were a pair of pirate schooners and the freighter of many names tied up at the station’s piers. People from their crews carried on a running conversation with the Bucket’s skipper during the approach. Apparently, no ship had yet taken two ships in one cruise. None of the three ships dockside had ever succeeded in capturing a single merchant ship. Curious, they wanted to know how he’d done it.

The captured pirate skipper was only too happy to boast of his prowess at scaring the crew of the Pink Lucky Seven into terrified and abject surrender.

He just never got to the part where sleepy darts started sprouting in pirate rumps.

Then he told basically the same story again for the Mary Ellen Carter. The pirates couldn’t get enough of the part where the woman crew members started screaming and running up and down in panic.

To Kris’s relief, Lieutenant Amber Kitano kept her opinion to herself as she went about her duties commanding the Dauntless. It must not have been easy.

It sure wasn’t easy for Kris to listen to, and she hadn’t had anything to do with the actual takedown.

Once docked, the Wasp and Dauntless were ordered to stay locked down, preserving everything for tomorrow’s visit by the customs people. Even pirates wanted to assure that The Man got his proper cut. Still, that didn’t keep the “captured ships” from connecting to the piers for air, water, sewage, and comm lines.

Comm lines was where the trouble started.

“Commander, I got something interesting,” Chief Beni said.

“How interesting?” Kris said.

“A lot more than I want. The landline traffic is spiking. Spiking way high. I can’t read it, but traffic between the three pirate ships is going fast and heavy.”

“Anything to the Bucket?”

“Some, but not much. What there is of it is all in the clear and has to do with docking. Who’s paying. When. The usual stuff.”

“But the other pirates seem to have developed a bad case of the yaks. Any idea what they’re saying?” Kris asked

“I don’t know what to make of it, ma’am. It’s all in cipher. But whatever it is, they don’t want anyone who didn’t get the daily cipher drop to know what they’re talking about.”

“Why do I not like that?” Kris said. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Nelly, send a commlink of our own to the other two ships. Let’s see what they think about this sudden talkativeness among the pirates.”

“I already had two spiders spinning cable between our ships, Kris.”

On the outer hull of the Wasp, a tiny portion of Smart Metal™ organized itself into a commlink and boosted away from the Wasp. There were two of them, each leaving a tiny filament of wire behind them. A few minutes later they attached themselves to the commlink at the outer air locks of the other two ships. A fraction of a second later, the bridge crew on the Bucket and the Dauntless listened as Kris reviewed what she knew . . . and all that she didn’t.

“Commander Campbell, did High Dry Tortuga update you on the cipher for today?”

“Golly, Princess, I guess it must have slipped their minds, it being all late and that,” he answered lightly. Then he got deadly serious. “This is not the way you greet your fellow prodigal sons. I don’t like this.”

“Me neither,” his XO observed from the Dauntless.

“Me three-ther,” Kris added.

Around about midnight, it all became perfectly clear.