The Terran Privateer Read Online Free PDF Page A

ships have needs as well, Captain. Yours has no special priority. The core has not been delivered, and we are having issues with the supplies. Your requests will take several weeks to complete.”
    Several weeks that Annette would have to delay the formal commissioning of Tornado in Earth service. She smiled coldly and pulled her official communicator out of the jacket of her undress blues. It slid apart with ease, the two scroll-like ends separating and providing the data feed to the e-paper screen between them.
    “I’m sorry, Captain, but making calls in your superior’s office is rude,” Anderson snapped. “You may have been able to get away with that in civilian service, but you are back in the Space Force now!”
    “You have a choice, Commodore,” Annette told him flatly. “In about a minute, I am going to call Elon Casimir, and you can explain to him where the missiles and fusion core his people delivered thirty-six hours ago have gone astray to. I’ll note, for your benefit, that the interface drive missiles used by Tornado are a completely different design from the stopgap design used to provide some usable firepower to the rest of the Space Force. No other ship currently in commission can fire a properly sized IDM.
    “Once we’re done explaining your misplacement—or potentially grand larceny ,” she observed, “to Mister Casimir, I will call Admiral Villeneuve, and you can explain to him why you are intentionally stonewalling the commissioning of the only warship worth the name in the UESF.”
    “I will not be threatened,” Anderson snapped, lunging to his feet.
    Annette remained sitting, looking up at him as she tapped a button on the communicator.
    “Hi, Michelle,” she said brightly to the middle-aged woman who appeared on the screen shortly. “Can you get Elon for me? It’s a bit of an emergency; logistics is telling me that we have a foul-up here.”
    “Of course, Annette,” Elon Casimir’s personal assistant replied. “He’s in a meeting with the Russian President; it will take him a minute or two to get free. What can I tell the President Sokolov is going on?”
    “You wouldn’t dare ,” Anderson hissed.
    “Let me conference in Admiral Villeneuve,” Annette told Michelle. “I’d like him to at least know what I’m doing I if have to inform a member nation’s head of state that the UESF is being obstructive.”
    “Shut that off ,” the Commodore ordered. “Fine. I’ll make it happen.”
    “Do you still need me?” Michelle asked, with an arched brow.
    “Let Elon know I called,” Annette said calmly. “Play him the recording; he needs to know what’s going on.”
    “Of course. Luck.”
    Annette slid the communicator closed and looked back at Anderson.
    “So, I will have my missiles, my power core, and consumables aboard by twenty hundred hours?” she asked calmly.
    “I can’t make that happen in twelve hours!”
    “Those deliveries were scheduled for twelve hundred hours,” Annette pointed out. “I’m giving you eight hours of grace, Commodore. Anything beyond that, and the Governing Council will know you’re impeding Earth having a real defense.”
    She smiled coldly.
    “I’m sure you’ve seen the recent reports from Dark Eye?”
     
    #
     
    A month’s worth of work by Nova Industries main shipyard platform had filled in many of the voids inside Tornado ’s hull, but there would always be certain oddities of her layout that grew from her being an experimental ship.
    The interior of the ship was still very modular, and while the combat information center and many other sections had been filled in, other parts were still empty. Tornado didn’t have the external hull space for, say, more weaponry—but she had internal modules and power generation capacity to spare. The cruiser really didn’t need the seventh fusion core she’d forced Anderson to turn over—she only operated on three. Annette had insisted on it because the design called for it and