Starship Blackbeard Read online

  Starship Blackbeard

  by Michael Wallace

  Click here to sign up for Michael Wallace’s new release list and receive a free copy of his Righteous novella, Trial by Fury. This list is used only to announce new releases and not for any other purpose.

  The Starship Blackbeard Series

  Book #1 – Starship Blackbeard

  Book #2 – Lords of Space

  Book #3 – Dreadnought (coming in 2015)

  copyright 2014 by Michael Wallace

  Cover Art by Lorenz Hideyoshi Ruwwe

  Chapter One

  The warning light flashed yellow on the airlock door, and James Drake braced himself to be ejected into space. His pod contained several other court-martialed marines and space sailors, also strapped into their seats, also headed for the helium-3 mines of the system’s outer worlds. He didn’t know how long the others were in for, and he didn’t care. Didn’t even know if they were innocent or not. It was only the injustice of his own sentence that burned him, the disgrace to his good name.

  Two years. You can survive that.

  He guessed that his two years of hard labor was one of the lighter sentences. The last perk of being an officer. Only two years—long enough to get him out of the way as the navy mopped up untidy details in the aftermath of the war. But if the Admiralty thought he’d return docile, begging to be readmitted, they were mistaken. The instant he finished his sentence, he would return to Albion to fight the injustice that had sent him away. Fight to regain his commission. Find out whoever had framed him for the destruction of the merchant ship.

  Through the transparent partition, he could see the second pod, also preparing for ejection. Not human in there, but long-limbed, pink-skinned Hroom. Their fate was more grim still. Instead of being fired toward the mining ship, they’d be launched toward the slaver now in orbit around Albion, to be shipped to the sugar worlds and worked to death. Terrible criminals, supposedly. Most likely poor, dumb civilians caught on the wrong side of the war.

  A cool, clinical woman’s voice came into the pod. A computer. The crew of Ajax called her Jane. He supposed it was the last time he’d hear her voice.

  “Twenty seconds to launch. Prepare for rapid acceleration.”

  The yellow light flashed faster now.

  The man next to Drake whispered the Lord’s Prayer in Old Earth English. A chaplain, he’d tried to lead them all in prayer minutes earlier, but one of the marines had cursed him and his god. This time all were bracing themselves for a pop, a hiss, and a giant fist to slam them into their seats as they hurtled outward.

  “Ten seconds,” Jane said.

  Drake looked out at the beautiful blue-and-green sphere of Albion one last time. The island continent of Canada stretched below, verdant and beautiful, with the Zealand Islands curving from the west coast into the ocean like a string of jewels. He looked for his home island of Auckland, but it was covered with clouds. He’d spent his childhood dreaming of the day he’d turn sixteen and join the Royal Navy and get off that boring rock. Now, he wanted nothing more than to sit in the sleepiest pub in the sleepiest farm village with his feet warming in front of a peat fire.

  This latest mission aboard HMS Ajax had lasted seventeen months. Almost a year and a half in deep space, spending blood and treasure for the kingdom, and he’d only made it home for three days. Then arrest, court-martial, and sentencing. One nightmare after another, until here he was, strapped down in this pod. The injustice of it felt like a hand tearing at his heart. Worst of all, he didn’t know where to direct his rage. Who had betrayed him?

  “Five seconds.”

  Drake shut his eyes and counted silently. Five, four, three, two, one . . . zero?

  Jane’s voice came through again. “Recalculating. Eight seconds . . . recalculating. Ten seconds.”

  The ship shuddered. A malfunction, he thought. A defective transport pod.

  He opened his eyes. The slave pod was gone. It had launched, disappeared into the black void. But Drake and the other criminals were still strapped into their chairs.

  “Pod eleven launched,” Jane’s voice whispered in her soothing, computerized voice.

  “Aren’t we pod eleven?” someone asked.

  “Life support readings normal,” Jane continued. “Pod eleven docking with transport ship in thirty-seven seconds.”

  “You dumb tit,” one of the men said, to nervous laughter.

  “Hey, Cap’n,” someone else said. “Ain’t this your ship? What’s wrong with her?”

  “Maybe it’s no mistake,” said a young marine with the Albion lions tattooed on her right forearm. “My commander coulda issued a pardon.”

  Someone snorted at this, a loud, braying laugh like a donkey.

  “Could be,” she insisted. “I punched him in the nose when he cheated at cards. Gave me thirty bloody months for that!”

  “Nobody cares,” someone else growled. “So shut yer gob.”

  Someone else took exception to this, and soon the prisoners were arguing.

  “Keep quiet,” Drake said, annoyed by the chatter. He knew his ship and was listening for familiar sounds, like a man with a cranky furnace who knows what is wrong by its groans and hisses.

  “Nobody asked you,” one of the men said, the one who’d started the arguing in the first place. He was a burly man, older, with a saber scar across one cheek. “Anyhow, you ain’t captain of this ship no more, so stop acting like it.”

  Like the others, Drake was dressed in a pair of brown overalls with a red prisoner’s circle over the chest, but the others had recognized him at once. Apparently they kept up on the news in the planetside jails.

  “Cap’n better watch his back,” another man said, this one dark skinned and with a wolfish smile. He was the one who had been defending the woman with the lion tattoos. “In the mines, we’re all equals, eh? No man got any rank. Plenty of tools lying around. Accidents happen. Know what I’m saying?”

  There was a hint of nervousness in the laughter that followed. Drake wasn’t worried about the implied threat. Some people were bullies and cowards. Others craved leadership.

  He imagined how it would go. They would test him, he would fight back and win. An officer in the Royal Navy—even disgraced—was a man of breeding, culture, and education. Much of that education was in how to dominate those of a lower station. The natural order would not change simply because he had entered a prison camp.

  The ship shuddered. A familiar rumble vibrated through the hull. That was Ajax’s plasma engines firing up. She rolled slowly away from the planet. What the devil? Did they really not know the capsule had failed to launch? And why were they moving, anyway?

  Four other ships came into view. Two were light corvettes, the third a cruiser like Ajax, long and lean and hungry looking. The fourth was the lord admiral’s flagship, HMS Dreadnought, looking like a wounded monster of the deep, her sides scarred with deep gashes from where the enemy had raked her with kinetic fire. Dreadnought dwarfed the orbital fortress at her rear, where she would be in repairs for weeks.

  Some of Drake’s fellow prisoners began to laugh. They seemed to be thinking the same thing, that there had been a malfunction and nobody realized they’d failed to launch. They’d now go off . . . well, wherever Ajax was headed. Problem was, she wasn’t supposed to go anywhere, which Drake knew, but the others didn’t. These weren’t his men and women, but a random collection of discipline problems.

  The lord admiral had put Captain Rutherford in command of Ajax while he chose a new captain, but Drake guessed that his first mate, Commander Jess Tolvern, was the actual officer at the helm. Tolvern was a capable officer, but she didn’t have enough experience to earn her bars yet. In any event, she was tainted now. They wer
e all tainted. Tolvern had tried to testify at the court-martial, had argued angrily that the charges were false. Drake’s pilot was caught falsifying permissions to hack the Royal Navy defensive grid to get records of the battle. He’d probably lost rank as a result of that little stunt.

  Tolvern may not have lost rank, but defying the admiral would no doubt hold back her career for years to come. She’d been her typical self in court, sarcastic and abrasive in the face of injustice. Navy barristers had called her to the stand, hoping that she would pin blame for the disaster on her commanding officer’s shoulders, but had shortly declared her a hostile witness.

  As a result, the admiral didn’t even trust her on an interim basis; he’d put Captain Rutherford in charge of Ajax. Drake’s old ship would continue in orbit until the board approved a new commanding officer. So where was Tolvern going?

  Ajax wasn’t the only ship in motion. Dreadnought remained in place, but the other three ships began to turn in their direction. After a moment of what looked like hesitation, Ajax’s sister ship Vigilant didn’t follow, but presented a broadside. The cruiser’s outer shields retracted, hiding the lions of Albion and showing the black, snub noses of cannon.

  “King’s balls,” the woman with the lion tattoos cursed.

  The other prisoners fell silent, staring out the window. The plasma engines were still warming up and hadn’t reached critical. A double thump vibrated through the hull, this at a lower frequency. That was the warp point engine coming online. It took several hours from ignition switch to jump, but it burned so much energy just to contain the reaction that it was only turned on when it would be used.

  More cursing greeted this.

  “We’re bloody trying to jump?” someone cried.

  “I don’t believe it, we are. We’re going to run.”

  “Captain? What’s going on?”

  Of course, now they all looked to Drake for leadership, now that their stones were on the anvil. He didn’t answer. But he knew. He suspected the other prisoners did too.

  Tolvern, you fool.

  His first officer was leading a mutiny.

  Chapter Two

  Drake wasn’t surprised when the airlock opened and Jess Tolvern appeared. She wore a tight red combat jumpsuit without insignia that showed her lean, muscular body. Her hair was in a bob, the current military fashion for women, and she wore pistols in holsters on each hip. Her green eyes flashed with the confidence that always looked just shy of arrogant.

  Tolvern was only twenty-six, seven years younger than Drake. He’d given her a brevet during the Battle of Kif Lagoon, when his former first mate had been killed in a broadside from a Hroom sloop of war. A shell had punctured the bridge, and the man had been sucked screaming into the vacuum of space.

  Promoting Tolvern had caused some controversy, and Rutherford had privately asked Drake if he wasn’t promoting her in part because of a connection to her family back in Auckland. There was nothing inherently wrong with loyalty to an old family from his father’s estate, Rutherford assured him, so long as she was qualified. Drake assured his friend that Tolvern had proven herself. Sure, she had a good deal to learn and was a commoner, but she possessed a remarkable ability to keep cool under fire. So he had ignored Rutherford and any other doubters. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  “Get the prisoners out of here,” she said over her shoulder to others who were crowding in from the hallway. “We need room for—”

  “No!” Drake cut in. “This stops, now.”

  Tolvern looked back at him. “Sorry, Captain, but no. We’ll argue later, if you like. For now, do what I say.”

  She came over, holding an electronic key, its chain wrapped around her fist. She swiped it over his harness, and it clicked unlocked.

  Drake didn’t get up. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “King’s balls, do you have to be so difficult?”

  He hooked a thumb at the viewscreen showing their surroundings. The three navy ships had their cannon exposed now, and even Dreadnought had turned a pair of deck and belly guns at them, although he knew these would not be loaded with live ordnance. Ajax was pulling slowly away from the opposing ships, but the other vessels, minus Dreadnought, were beginning to give chase.

  “You will get us all killed,” he said. “And my ship blown to pieces.”

  “Hardly. We caught them by surprise. They’ll need time to get those guns up. And they know it, too.” She grinned. “You should hear the threats coming over the com link.”

  Tolvern grabbed for him, as if to help him up, but he pulled back. Some of the other prisoners were hollering for her to unlock them, too. Others begged her to surrender and leave them be. They wanted no part of this.

  “Get up, Captain,” she said. “For God’s sake!”

  Drake was still staring at the viewscreen and saw the flash of light. It didn’t come from any of the ships, but the orbital fortress servicing Dreadnought.

  “There she goes,” he said, not surprised in the slightest. “Brace yourselves.”

  Ajax rocked. An explosion boomed through the ship, coming from what sounded like the aft shields. It knocked him out of his seat before anti-grav could stabilize them. When he got up, Tolvern was shouting, pushing her way back up the hallway.

  Men poured into the pod from the corridor, dragging prisoners, who had their hands cuffed. Dwight Barker, Drake’s chief gunner, was among the mutineers.

  “You!” Drake said. “I thought you would know better than this.”

  “Don’t just sit there, gaping,” Barker said.

  “I’m not gaping, I’m wondering when this farce will end.”

  “Get him out of there,” Tolvern called from the corridor.

  Barker grabbed him, and this time he didn’t resist. His best bet was to get to the bridge and take command. Once he did, he could order his crew to stand down so he could surrender as bloodlessly as possible. Do that quickly enough, and he might be able to plead mercy for his crew. Even an aborted mutiny would bring down the wrath of the Admiralty. Best case was that Tolvern’s little stunt would earn her her own multi-year stint in the mines. Probably Barker and the others, as well. Better than a hanging, he supposed, but completely avoidable.

  He pushed through the handcuffed prisoners in the hall. One of them was Captain Rutherford, wearing his bathrobe, of all things, his hair wet, as if he’d been dragged from the shower. The man looked livid as Tolvern pushed him along.

  Rutherford and Drake had fought side by side several times in the war. They’d scattered a larger enemy force, won a victory that was sure to earn them both a hero’s parade down the streets of York Town, from Kingdom Tower to the royal palace. That was before the frame-up.

  “Mutiny?” Rutherford said, glaring as they pushed him past Drake in the narrow hall. “Are you an idiot?”

  “I swear I know nothing about this,” Drake said. “But I’ll put an end to it. Mark my words.”

  “You had better. Malthorne will blow us all to kingdom come.”

  “Not you,” Tolvern said. “You’re going home.”

  Rutherford wheeled on her, looked like he would have struck her if his hands hadn’t been cuffed behind his back. “Curse you, Tolvern. If this is your doing, I’ll see you hanged.”

  He started to spit something else, but they shoved him and the other prisoners into the pod. It was going to be crowded in there, unless Tolvern had been stupid enough to order the existing prisoners released.

  Lights were flashing in the hall, together with the siren calling all hands. Didn’t seem to be many hands available. Another shot rocked the ship, closer this time. The smell of burning plastic filled the air, and a red light flashed at an entrance to their right, indicating their airlocks had sealed off part of the ship in that direction.

  Barker caught up with them in the hall, and Drake turned to him. “If you’re here, then who is at the guns?”

  “Nobody. We’re short-handed, as you can figure.”

  “Short-handed and
short of brains.”

  A wry smile from the gunner. “You might say so, yes.”

  Barker was an older man, thick about the middle and with a walrus mustache. Almost sixty years old, and though his skills were not what they had been ten or even five years earlier, he’d once been one of the best gunners in the fleet, and had a long way to slip before he was merely average. And clever, too. Could have been chief engineer, if he’d been more ambitious or of higher birth.

  Barker’s involvement in this scheme was surprising. Not only had age made him sensible, but he seemed to look down on Tolvern as young and callow and female—the older man had joined the navy when women were wives, daughters, maybe even whores in distant ports, but never space sailors, and certainly never officers. So why was he following her into this madness?

  When they reached the end of the hall, they ran into another group of several prisoners being driven by two men with guns and stun batons. Most of the prisoners were unfamiliar, probably part of Rutherford’s crew, but two were engineers Drake had known for years. They should be putting out fires and sealing damaged airlocks, not being jettisoned with the rest of the prisoners. The men driving them, on the other hand, were the head cook and his assistant.

  “We won’t be able to repair hull breaches,” Drake said, “but we can still bake a mean shepherd’s pie. Let’s get this surrender over with.”

  He said this last bit as they came onto the bridge. Tolvern moved to the viewscreen, which was split between zoomed views of the battleship Dreadnought and the cruiser Vigilant and the two corvettes beginning to give chase. The corvettes were quicker out of the blocks than the cruiser, and their engines fired up more quickly. By now, they must be hauling away from Albion at perhaps twenty miles a second and accelerating rapidly.

  “Get to the gunnery decks,” Tolvern told Barker. “Scrape together whoever you can find.”

  “But hold your fire,” Drake called after him. “Await my orders.”

  “Does this mean you’re taking command?” Tolvern asked when the gunner had hurried off. She sounded eager.