The Terran Privateer by Glynn Stewart

would have thought impossible a year before—and that was still slow compared to their enemy’s warships. They were still grinding through their analysis, but Annette was sure she’d seen at least one A!Tol ship reach at least forty-five percent of lightspeed to dodge Terran missiles.
    All evidence suggested that Annette’s single ship was outclassed by her enemies in far too many ways. The first task of their new mission would be to start finding ways to fix that.
     
    #
     
    The problem with coordinates on a planet is that the starting point for longitude, especially, was completely arbitrary. Anyone giving you a position on a planet also had to give you their reference point, turning even the most detailed of coordinates into, effectively, “ten thousand kilometers west of the big mountain range.”
    Fortunately, Tornado ’s computer contained the entirety of both the abbreviated official survey of AB2 and the later, secret survey done to locate a good spot for the cache Nova Industries had located. They had more than enough data to reliably identify the dormant volcano Casimir’s people had picked and settle into orbit above it.
    “Are we picking up anything from the caldera?” Annette asked. Surely, there had to be a beacon or something .
    “I’ve got nothing, ma’am,” Rolfson told her. “The entire mountain is something like fifty percent iron and titanium and notably warmer than the rest of the planet. Outside of some kind of transmission, we’re not picking up anything from here.”
    “Sounds like a fantastic place to hide a weapons cache,” Kurzman noted. In the absence of an immediate threat, he was back on the bridge with Annette. The bridge even had a seat for him; it was a cramped thing, without much in terms of screens or controls, but it provided a place for a senior observer to be present.
    “Agreed,” Annette said. “Kurzman, go get suited up. You’re leading the Service detachment.”
    “Don’t we have a Service officer for that?” her XO said dryly.
    “We do. And right now, until I’m a hell of a lot more comfortable with what’s going on, I want you or me on every off-ship op. Everything we say, everything we do, reflects on Earth now. We can’t afford to screw this up.”
    “You realize that even the most junior Special Space Service grunt can snap me in half with one hand, right?” Kurzman pointed out. “What happens if they don’t want a babysitter?”
    “Oh, make no mistake, Commander,” Annette told him with a tiny crack of a smile. “You’re not their babysitter.”
     
    #
     
    Major James Arthur Valerian Wellesley, second son of the fourteenth Duke of Wellington, commanding officer of the Fifty-Second Company of the Special Space Service, managed to not even sigh when the executive officer arrived with their briefing—such as it was!—and told the Major he’d be accompanying whatever troop was sent down to the surface.
    “You’ll need to suit up up here” was his only reply, a level of control he felt was solely possible due to generations of stiff-upper-lipped ancestors glaring at him from the beyond over even the thought of snarking off to his superior.
    Wordless, James gestured for two of his Service people to help the XO while he and his Alpha Troop Captain stepped into his office.
    While the United Earth Space Force had drawn its structures and traditions from the US, French, and Chinese air forces and navies, with an inevitable leavening of British naval sensibilities, no one had put much thought in the early days to providing boarding contingents.
    Faced with a need to recapture ships seized by pirates, the UESF had ended up turning to the world’s special forces—and discovered that the British Special Air Service were the only people with an actual training scenario on the topic.
    Fifty-two percent of James’s people were Chinese at this point, but the traditions that shaped the elite boarding troops of the UESF were British, a Special Space