Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (best color ebook reader .txt) 📗

“Harmbo, you’ve got that tracker jammed, right?” Tinbrak asked.

“What am I, Captain? New?” the Rincah replied, mock-offended. Then he chuckled. “Yes, sir. Her signal’s been blocked since the moment we got back on the ship. The only time that signal went out was when we needed it to open the door.”

“Good deal. Now we can just watch the show. Put the display up on the main screen,” the captain said.

Harmbo tapped his control panel, and a view of the empty storage bunker came into view beside the radar display. Bek’ah watched as a smaller red triangle streaked from the Gritloth ship to the asteroid’s surface, then saw the expensively dressed form of Puneet Vashindo, flanked by half a dozen Gritloth bodyguards, step into the bunker. She watched as the thugs fanned out, searching each cryo-pod looking for their occupants. It took only seconds for them to return to the fuming Vashindo, shaking their heads. Bek’ah watched in horror as the furious slaver took a pistol from one of his bodyguards and shot two others in the face in a fit of temper.

Captain Tinbrak leaned forward and pressed a button on the arm of his command chair. “That’s not very nice, Mr. Vashindo,” he said, chuckling as the Gritloth criminal spun around, looking for the source of the voice. “Up here. By the red light. That’s it.”

“If you’re still close enough to transmit planetside, you’re too close to be safe, Tinbrak. I’ll blow you to space dust!”

“But then you won’t get your assets back, will you?”

“I can always get more, and next time I won’t trust my harvesting partner when he tells me he’s got someplace safer than my own files to store the location of the merchandise!”

“I wondered about that,” Tinbrak mused. “Let me guess. Neither one of you trusted the other with the coordinates, so you hid them in Bek’ah, figuring you could just kidnap her when you needed access?”

“Her chip was the only place the coordinates were stored. Neither of us ever made a trip solo, so we could make sure the other one wasn’t trying to screw us. This time, I just followed the tracker, since I knew you’d have to turn off the jammer to get inside, and I knew which system the locker was in. It was a simple thing to follow you to Gleekum and wait for the tracker to come back online. Now do you want to just sit tight and let my ship relieve you of our cargo, or am I going to have to destroy both you and all my resources?”

“How does neither sound?” the captain asked. “I’m thinking neither works for me. How about I blow your ship into a million pieces and leave you on that desolate rock to die a lonely death? Timsif, Tenkor, make it so.” Tinbrak pressed a button on the arm of his chair and the comm link blinked out.

Timsif pressed a few buttons, and the view from the cameras pointing in front of the ship changed. Where the Sniper had been nose-on to the asteroid for the past several hours, now the surface pulled away from the ship as the Pikith backed away, then rotated on its axis and accelerated until the storage bunker came into view below.

“Tenkor,” Captain Tinbrak said.

“On it,” the weapons officer replied, grasping the joysticks and pressing the red buttons. Lasers streaked from under the nose-mounted cameras, blowing holes in the storage bunker and turning the Gritloth shuttle to scrap in a matter of seconds.

“One slaver down, one boatload of slavers to go,” Captain Tinbrak said. “Timsif, turn us around and get us pointed toward the Gritloth ship.”

Bek’ah watched on the radar as fighters streamed from the bigger ship and turned to the captain. “How are you going to deal with them? They won’t fall for your fake cavalry and EMP twice.”

“Don’t need them to,” the captain said absently, his attention focused on the displays.

“Then what are you going to do? You said this thing doesn’t carry missiles.”

“No, I said we had no missiles to speak of. What we have is one missile I don’t speak of until it’s time. Well, now it’s time. Have you ever wondered why a freighter is called the Sniper?”

“No, but it didn’t take me more than a few minutes and a look at all the secret compartments all over this place to know this is a smuggler, not a freighter.”

“To-may-to, to-mah-to,” the captain said, not that she had any idea what he was talking about. Must be something else from his fascination with ancient history. “Sometimes we need to get things to places where some people don’t want those things going. And sometimes when we do, people get upset with us. When they do, we need to deal with that. We deal with that the way our namesakes dealt with it back on Earth.”

Bek’ah shook her head. “I’ve got nothing, Captain. Earth history wasn’t taught on Tideb, and I didn’t study my own history, much less some backwater planet half a dozen Gates away. So what did a sniper on Earth do when people were mad at them?”

“One shot, one kill, Stowaway. One shot…”

The entire bridge crew finished the phrase with him. “One kill!”

“We have a lock, Captain,” Tenkor said.

“A lock with what?” Bek’ah asked.

“I call her Bertha. She’s a blend of high explosives and stealth tech that can dupe any radar into thinking it’s all alone in the universe. Until it’s time to go boom.” He lowered his voice, made it more resonant, and said, “Mr. Tenkor. Engage.”

Tenkor reached forward and pressed a blue button on his control panel, then all eyes turned to the radar. As everyone else watched the display, Timsif rapidly punched in coordinates and got the Sniper moving away from the asteroid and the Gritloth fighters at top speed. The fighters were nimble, quick little gunships, but they couldn’t match the massive engine of the smuggler, and besides, they soon had something else to catch their attention.

That something