Redoubtable

33

Lieutenant Commander Kris Longknife chose 0200 hours as about the right time to take down the pirate space station. It was an ungodly hour, and anyone not under military discipline would in all likelihood be sound asleep.

From the number of people swaying in and out of the local grog shops, more likely they’d just be dead drunk.

But Kris had to work to get even that little bit of information.

She had Chief Beni and Nelly launch several nanoscouts from the Wasp to take a good look around the station.

None survived more than seven minutes.

That told Kris a lot more than she wanted to know. Whoever was running this place was even more paranoid than the average Longknife. They also had more high tech than anyone of their low morals and criminal inclinations should have. Certainly more than Admiral Krätz. Did these folks have the ability to jam the local net?

Interesting question that. Which for now remained unanswered.

“Shall we launch some more nanos?” Nelly asked, even as Chief Beni was opening his mouth to likely say the same thing.

“No,” Kris said with a shake of the head. “We don’t want to start a fight just yet, and I’m not sure that we’d win one with these nanos. Only a fool starts a fight they aren’t sure they can win.”

But that didn’t mean that Kris was content to be blind. She resorted to slower methods, sending spider crawlers out along the station power cables the Wasp was now hooked into. The reports would come back via those power lines, and when the spiders went active, they would be beside light fixtures. Whatever power usage the spider spy made would be impossible, hopefully, for the local folks’ countermeasures to notice.

It seemed to work.

Kris got some very good looks from the light fixtures at the top of the pier. Of course, all it showed was inebriated pirates making their way to and from different pubs or their ships.

Other than that, the stations seemed about as inactive as you could get . . . and still have air, water, and lights.

“Wonder if those autoguns are switched on, or if anyone is looking at their sensor take?” Jack asked as he looked over Kris’s shoulder at the feed Chief Beni was getting.

“I was wondering about that myself,” Kris said.

There were a whole lot more automatic machine guns sited around the station than Kris wanted her Marines facing. Jack passed The Word to the Marines’ heavy weapons teams to be ready to take down a lot of machine guns—fast.

Plans for the seizure of the station moved along quickly and smoothly after that.

Then . . . at exactly midnight . . . all Kris’s planning became irrelevant.

It seemed the pirates had other plans.