Mistaken identity, p.1
Mistaken Identity, page 1
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
CORSAC FOX
BOOK 2
BLAZE WARD
KNOTTED ROAD PRESS
CONTENTS
Wren
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Z’Gosza Station Four
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Corsac Fox
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Compass Rose
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Khile Heavy
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Read More
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
WREN
ONE
“All hands to action stations,” the call came over the speaker.
Captain Ulysses Fortier—Uly—was already on duty, listening to his own voice echo around his bridge as everyone hyped up to that next level.
Combat imminent.
Corsac Fox, the former Ononguli pirate starship that he and his new crew had stolen out of an Auga police impound orbit when they broke out of jail, had been quietly trailing the other ship under his command, the Cargo Vessel 00429490477, now known as Wren.
Back home, in the Institutional Republic of Batyr, he’d been a mere naval Ensign, an O-2 three years out from his commission, originally serving as a peon officer on the Forward Cruiser Vanguard Lesauvage until that ship had needed to go into extended drydock for repairs after a battle with ships from the Combined Crowns of Danumash, also known as the Seven Kingdoms.
His father had gotten him transferred to the Forward Cruiser Marshall Castillon instead.
That was when things had gone wrong.
Maybe.
Hard to judge, even with hindsight. Captain Dimka Savatier, his new commanding officer on Marshall Castillon, hadn’t liked Uly. That much had been obvious from the start.
Dan Sheridan, his new Second-in-Command these days, had figured that Savatier saw him as a spy for the Industrial Protectors Party.
In any case, Savatier had dumped him, Dan, engineer Kolya Roux, plus security troopers Emil Beranger and Gennady Travers onto a newly surrendered Danumash cargo vessel as a prize crew to sail it home, then left them there.
Maybe that was when things had truly taken a turn for the worse.
But he’d also rescued the Mazhin slaves on the vessel King Hewitt II. Made friends with them, even. Convinced them to join him in repairing the badly damaged freighter so that they could all escape whatever retribution Danumash might have been sending.
It had helped that all of the Danumash officers and about half of the midshipmen on King Hewitt II had been killed instantly with a through-and-through shot from a wavebolt. Uly had inherited a group of teenage boys and a small crew of enlisted men and civilians. Plus the medical staff for his freed slaves.
Uly pulled himself out of the rabbit-hole of memory, and looked at his screen.
He didn’t need to spend time on the trials and tribulations where King Hewitt II had been in turn captured by this very vessel, when it had been known as the Iron Wasp, under the command of a Conductor rather than a Captain. Adrian Sobol.
Subsequent capture by the Auga Empire. Jail, then jailbreak before the Auga could get around to processing that last group of prisoners. The one that included Uly and his by-then greatly expanded crew: Human, Mazhin, Emro, Thogin, and even a group of now-former Ononguli pirates, mostly engineering specialists who had thrown in their lot with Uly rather than spend time in an Auga prison.
“Cartographer,” Uly called, causing Sterling Huff to look up and nod. “Status?”
“Enemy vessels have taken the bait, Captain,” Huff replied crisply.
His voice didn’t even break when he spoke. But then, Huff was fifteen and finally starting to grow into himself, physically as well as emotionally.
There were times when Uly would have liked to find some mystic necromancer, just to bring King Hewitt II’s former commanding officer back from the dead, in order to slap the man for the way that fool had treated his crew.
Probably for the best that he couldn’t. Uly already had a long enough list of enemies that he was planning to get even with, one of these days.
“How many?” Uly queried sharply.
Corsac Fox was heavily over-armed for an Interceptor-class vessel. Almost a dreadnought frigate for firepower. At the same time, he barely had enough crew to sail it and fight at the same time. Were the ship not so automated, he’d have never attempted something this crazy.
“Two signals at present, sir,” Huff replied. “Roscoe was just bringing Wren into the edge of the system when they slipped in and blipped him out of warp. Z’Gosza itself is close enough to see us with a long light-speed lag, but they don’t have anyone in a position to intervene.”
“That’s why we’re here, Huff,” Uly grinned.
He turned to the Mazhin officer next to Huff.
Corsac Fox’s bridge had four main stations in an arc facing inwards towards the Conductor, letting Uly see each of them when they looked up. More stations outside that arc that faced the bulkhead.
Haydar Ramezani was running sensors today, having been functionally blackmailed into the job, at least until they could hire or recruit enough people to let him go back to being a scientist.
“Have they seen us yet?” Uly asked.
Haydar was Mazhin. Erect biped who could pass for a skinny human in bad lighting. At least until you saw his head.
The Mazhin didn’t have hair. Instead, they had sensory tentacles covering most of the same space. Those were stirring like sleepy snakes, but several pointed at Uly now.
“They have not,” Haydar replied with a grin. “Two Probes or Ultra-Bombers from the size. They appear to be entirely focused on the vessel they are in the process of ambushing. Amateur mistake.”
Uly had never gotten the entire story from Haydar. And the other Mazhin had only been willing to hint at pieces. Uly assumed Haydar was blackmailing them, in turn, for their silence.
He did know that the middle-aged Mazhin gentleman had been far more of a pirate in his youth, some thirty or forty years ago. He had an interesting skill set that most of the rest of the crew lacked.
At least today.
Uly nodded.
“Wavebolt Gunner Kovalchuk,” Uly turned to the Ononguli crew member next. “As they are small, keep the 6dm tubes loaded for shield detonation. Instead launch a pair of the 1dm bolts when we drop. Also set them to detonate on shields, rather than punching through. Understood?”
Kovalchuk gulped and nodded.
“Aye, Conductor.”
The man was qualified to stand bridge watches, but most of the time that had meant either engineering or maybe life support. Today, he was manning the big guns.
Corsac Fox mounted a forward turret with a pair of 6dm tubes. The wavebolt torpedoes were deadly packets of coherent plasma with a control circuit built in. Normally, a ship this size might be expected to have a single 4dm in a turret forward with possibly a second aft, plus the four 1dm defensive weapons mounted on the corners.
Corsac Fox had a lot of firepower for its size. Uly simply didn’t have the crew to man everything with experts. Or even trained crew. He would take what he could get.
Needs must when the devil drives.
“Bring the electroshields full and reinforce on the forward array,” Uly ordered, waiting for Kolya Roux to nod.
One of Uly’s three enlisted senior engineers, and the only one with significant experience in combat operations, Kolya was forward handling shields and monitoring things while the other two were aft, whispering to their systems.
Uly took a deep breath to center himself.
“Huff, take us in.”
TWO
Uly had the Conductor’s screen set to
That trail was how pirates caught civilian ships. And how the police caught the pirates. Uly wasn’t sure which he was today.
Two such generators could not operate in close proximity, so both ships would be tossed out of the bubble, back into regular space. If the attacker left their own generator on standby, you had to get far enough away from them if you wanted to escape.
Huff had let the two pirate ships trap Corsac Fox by sailing right up to them, just as they had done to Wren, then letting their generators kick him out. But he was going to keep his own generators on as well.
Those folks didn’t get to escape him.
Contact.
Wren, sitting dead in space, surrounded by a pair of ships so tiny that they looked like guppies threatening a whale.
Two pirates, sailing close on their Navigation Displacer thrusters. Definitely Seeker-class. Small ones, at that. As Haydar had said, possibly Probes. Maybe Ultra-Bombers. Could even be nothing more than armed freighters.
Wren had no guns to challenge them. And hardly any shields. It was a massive cargo carrier that he’d stolen, fully loaded with emergency supplies sufficient to keep Uly and his crew fed and operational for a long time.
He wasn’t here to steal more food.
“Captain, we’ve caught them entirely by surprise,” Haydar announced laconically.
“Kovalchuk, one torpedo only on each enemy,” Uly ordered. “Maybe we can convince them to surrender instead of being annihilated today.”
Kovalchuk moved smoothly once they were committed. As a rule, the Ononguli man tended to think too much ahead of time but locked in hard on the task when things got serious.
Which was why he was manning the guns today.
Uly heard the two beeps indicating shots sent downrange.
“Haydar, are they not looking up at all?” Uly asked.
“So it would appear, Captain,” Haydar replied with a rude chuckle, looking up with eyes as well as about half of his tentacles. “Oh, my, they’ve even dropped their electroshields in order to send over boarding parties.”
“Warn them,” Uly said sharply. “Challenge them. Something. Those bolts are about to slam into raw metal hard.”
“Pirate vessels, this is your only warning,” Haydar announced in a crisp, news-announcer sort of voice. “Surrender immediately or be destroyed.”
The two 1dm wavebolts weren’t moving at light speed, but an appreciable fraction. Those two ships had about eight seconds before they exploded.
There, both had panicked and raised shields. One of them was even managing to fire back with their Neutron Omnipulsar. Wildly inaccurate at present, but something.
Shieldless, 1dm bolts would have crushed those ships like aluminum drinking cans.
“We surrender!” someone called on an audio channel.
Haydar had routed it to the bridge speakers, so Uly heard it fully, instead of as a tinny echo from that station.
“Kovalchuk, kill both bolts,” Uly ordered. “Then keep the Sixes centered in case someone decides to play possum.”
The Ononguli man pressed a pair of buttons, then looked up in confusion.
“Possum?” he asked.
“Never mind,” Uly shook his head. “Stay prepared.”
Kovalchuk nodded.
On Uly’s screen, both wavebolt icons faded.
“Pirate vessels, this is Corsac Fox,” Uly said. “You will immediately put your entire crews in suits and evacuate your ships to stand outside on the hulls. Unarmed. We will search your vessels. If there is anybody hiding aboard, or any of my boarding crew are injured, all your lives are immediately forfeit. Am I clear?”
Uly muted the line and drew a breath. He hated this part of life. The terrible pirate warlord damning lives on a whim.
He’d been an adult and an officer for three years before he’d taken command of King Hewitt II. And had just turned twenty-five last month. Yet, he was in command here. Responsible for nearly one hundred lives. Everyone looked to him to lead them.
He had to do a good job of it.
Once upon a time, he’d promised that he would get everyone home, wherever that turned out to be. But the Mazhin didn’t belong to planets, the Thogin cousins were itinerant, and three of his Emro crew were traveling scholars. The fourth, the Emro woman Anari Supasei, had been Moss School, because the Auga thought she was too smart to be Sabre School, when Suka Kuri, the Moss School elder who was an Exemplar of the Arts—a literal Living Legend—said that Supasei might rise to that level herself, given time.
And his combined Human crew had all thrown in with him as pirates, mostly because one group didn’t want to go back to Danumash, and whatever punishment they might face.
His Batyr folks had gotten a little pissed to have been abandoned out here by Captain Savatier.
Uly was on his own, far from home, and trying to make the most of it.
At least he’d found some friends to help.
“Uly, they’ve turned off engines, electroshield arrays, and targeting systems,” Haydar spoke after a long moment. “I’ll assume that they are done. At least for now.”
“Do we know who they are?” Uly asked.
“The first person I spoke with sounded Ugotha from the accent,” Haydar nodded. “Sensors suggest a broad mix, all medium-sized, however.”
Uly nodded. Thogin were tiny by comparison to Humans or Mazhin, lean and running around a meter and a half tall on average.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Emro—of all schools or walks of life—ranged upwards from two meters, to as much as two and a half, with Hiko Seiichai, the Seeker of the Moss School, apparently near the high end at two hundred and forty-nine centimeters in his bare feet.
Hiko was not, however, a warrior by any stretch of the imagination. Or even a dancer. One hell of a painter, though.
Uly turned to the wing station where a ship’s Knight would sit on a Danumash ship. Dan Sheridan held that title for now, along with First Officer and Second-in-Command. All of them were wearing too many hats.
Today she wore a suit of boarding armor with the helmet on a cord at her hip and a serious look on her face.
“You are remaining aboard the Fox,” Dan announced as she rose from her station, brooking no argument.
Uly simply nodded.
He had argued with her enough on the topic before today. It was still a pain in his ass when she was right.
He still took her in with a long glance as she turned to exit.
A few centimeters taller than him at one hundred and eighty-eight. Heavier, too, at seventy-five kilograms, but Uly had always been tall and skinny. Sheridan Chastain was made of muscles.
Extremely dark skinned, even compared to Uly’s Turkishness and curly brown hair, her skin was a rich, deep brown. Black hair curls kept buzzed tight on the sides and a little fuzzy on top.
Square face with a flat nose and thin lips. Eyes that came out to sharper edges than his, in a manner he’d once heard called Afro-Siberian.
