Lords of Space (Starship Blackbeard Book 2) Read online

“Alone, sir?” Capp asked.

  “Yes, alone. And be quick about it. I don’t have time to waste.” To Tolvern, he said, “Keep us on course until we’re back. We won’t be long.”

  “Better not be,” Tolvern muttered.

  Once the doors had closed on the war room, Drake told Capp to take a seat before sitting down himself. He fought to hide his frustration as he looked at the young woman anxiously rubbing the lion tattoos on her arm.

  For the hundredth time in the past several weeks, he bemoaned the loss of his navy crew. Except for Tolvern, Drake, Barker, and a few others, he was left with these former prisoners and newly recruited pirates and smugglers. How in the blazes was he going to run the orbital forts around Hot Barsa, let alone lead an assault team on Admiral Malthorne’s estate, with a crew such as this?

  “You did fine in actual battle, Ensign. This is nothing. Just a minefield.”

  “But what’s a Youd mine? What does that mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a name. A navy classification. When a Youd mine detects you, it sends a signal to all the others in the cluster, and the whole minefield gives chase. That’s what Jane meant about nineteen detonations against the hull.”

  “Wouldn’t nineteen class-two detonations tear us to pieces?”

  “Sure, if we were foolhardy enough to stumble through and let them pummel us. We aren’t. We picked up the field with long-range sensors and know exactly where they are. We’re still several million miles away. If I didn’t think you could bring us through safely, I’d have turned us around already and looked for some safer approach to the inner worlds of the system. So you see, I’m not worried.”

  At this, Capp calmed down a little. “Yeah, I guess that’s right. Sorry, I ain’t so sure of myself at the moment.” There was still something in her tone that made him hesitate.

  “Are we good?”

  “Will Nyb Pim be okay?”

  “I’m sure he will. He suffered a relapse, is all. I don’t mean he got his hands on sugar, so you don’t need to worry about that, but he started shaking in his chair a couple of hours ago. I sent him to the sick bay as a precaution.”

  This was all true. The Hroom had turned violent during the worst of his withdrawal, and Drake hadn’t wanted to chance another incident. Apart from that, he needed Nyb Pim at his sharpest, most able, as they approached the planet.

  “Good, because I don’t think I can hack it on my own.”

  “You managed quite well before we recovered him from the slaver,” Drake pointed out. “Piloting solo, you seemed quite confident. Tolvern would even say you were cocky. Where has that woman gone? I need her back.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong.” Capp rubbed a hand over her scalp. “Maybe it’s ’cause nobody expected much, and now they do.” She tapped her chest, where the ensign insignia was sewn onto her jumpsuit. “Or maybe it’s this gold bar you gave me. I’m an officer now, that’s kinda crazy. Know what I mean?”

  “A junior officer,” he said with a smile. “You have plenty of time to grow into the position, Capp.”

  “Okay. I’m feeling better now.”

  “There’s one other thing. As soon as we run the forts, we’re bringing Ajax—excuse me, Blackbeard—to the surface.” Drake stopped, uncertain as to how much he should reveal.

  “Aye, Cap’n?”

  He thought about what Tolvern would say if she knew what he planned to do with Capp when they reached Hot Barsa. Tolvern would be alarmed. Beyond alarmed. And maybe she’d be right; if Drake trusted any of the newer crew members, that trust was thinner than the hair on Lord Malthorne’s bald spot.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Let’s get through that minefield, first.”

  Commander Tolvern gave him a questioning look as Drake and Capp emerged from the war room onto the bridge. He returned a shake of the head to say that now was not the time. Instead, he settled in the captain’s chair and watched as Capp sat and interfaced with the nav computer. She looked more confident now.

  “Ten minutes to minefield,” Jane helpfully notified him. “At present course—”

  He tapped his console to cut her off. “Since we’re changing course, that isn’t helpful.”

  Nobody else spoke as Capp worked. Drake quietly ran his own calculations and picked out an alternative that would scoot them along the edge of the minefield. With any luck, they’d survive the encounter, but he wasn’t confident with what he saw. Capp had better find a safe course, and hurry up about it, too.

  Drake hadn’t known exactly where to find the minefield, only that it was somewhere between Hot Barsa and her ice-covered twin, Cold Barsa. Because the Barsa system had so many jump points, it had been impossible for the navy to guard all of the approaches to the inner worlds with ships from the fleet. So a few lanes were marked safe for the merchant fleet, and everything else was declared a minefield, whether there were mines or not. Now that Captain Rutherford’s task force had renewed the fight with the aliens, the minefield would be active again.

  Capp looked up with about five minutes to spare. “Got it!”

  She sent over her proposed course. It showed Blackbeard zig-zagging through, never coming close enough to any of the Youd mines to trigger their swarming behavior.

  “Excellent. Commander, verify and plot that course.”

  Tolvern’s fingers flew over her console. Shortly, the minefield came within range of the ship’s short-range scanners, and Drake brought up the viewscreen to focus on the nearest mine. It was only a few hundred thousand miles distant. It wasn’t until he filtered the bright white light of the system’s young star blazing off port that he could actually see the thing, lurking quiet and deadly.

  The mine had the fractal shape of a giant snowflake, about seventy feet from point to point, and sat motionless in space so as to render its profile nearly invisible. Beneath that motionless exterior lay a deadly array of instruments, plasma engines for giving pursuit, and an explosive stinger powerful enough to rip a small hole through the armor of a Hroom sloop of war—or a modified Royal Navy cruiser like the one Drake was flying.

  “Course plotted,” Tolvern said.

  “Jane?” Drake asked the computer, wanting verification. “Estimated collisions with the upcoming minefield?”

  “Probability of one or more collisions: 5.6 percent. Probability of three or more collisions: 1.3 percent. Probability of five or more collisions . . . calculating . . .” Jane was silent for a long moment. “—less than .2 percent. Unknown factors include—”

  “I’d rather have zero,” Drake said, as he cut Jane off once more. “But given the circumstances, I’ll take those odds.”

  Drake called down to engineering to help Barker understand the instructions he’d be receiving about powering up and down the second plasma engine as they danced their way through.

  Moments later, Blackbeard dropped several hundred miles per second as she cut sharply on the Z-axis. Then they hooked starboard to thread another needle between the sensors of two more mines. Next came a sharp yaw to the left, followed by an aggressive change to their pitch, until they appeared to be diving straight down relative to their previous course, even though this took them further away from Hot Barsa. The floor vibrated during the sharpest course corrections as the anti-grav shifted to compensate. The perspective spiraled through the viewscreen until the stars looked like they were swirling down a vast interstellar toilet bowl.

  When Blackbeard finally straightened out, the system’s white-yellow star blazed off port once more. They’d successfully waltzed their way through, as graceful on their feet as Drake’s sister trying to catch the eye of a rich earl at the king’s ball. The image gave him a warm nostalgic glow. Why had he been thinking about his family? It was almost Michaelmas, he supposed, a time when he’d always tried to get leave so he could return to the family estate. They always ate goose, and he smiled to think of how his younger sister, Helen, used to sneak down to the kitchen to get at the fruitcakes before they wer
e served. He would take both of his sisters duck hunting at the lakes, and whatever they shot they would give to the peasants of the estate. Not this year.

  “We did it,” Drake said. “No pursuit. We got through unscathed.”

  “Not entirely, sir,” Smythe said. The tech officer kept working at his computer. “Our wake seems to have washed over those last couple of mines.”

  “You’re sure?” Drake asked sharply.

  “Pretty sure, yeah. The way we were going, our engines were like two big fire hoses blasting this way and that. Do that as long as we did, and stuff is likely to get wet.”

  “I see.”

  “Assuming they were scanning for such a thing,” Tolvern said. “Were they, Smythe?”

  “Yes, sir,” Smythe said. He tapped his fingers over his console. “That’s how I found the minefield in the first place. They were hammering away with active subspace scanners.”

  “I didn’t think about getting detected,” Capp said. “Maybe I could have tried something else.”

  “We had no time for that,” Drake said. “Anyway, what’s done is done.” He glanced back at the commander, who was chewing on her lip. “So they’ve sent a warning to the fleet,” he continued. “Maybe they identified us from our wake, maybe not. But either way, the navy knows something is headed toward Hot Barsa. Something that doesn’t want to be seen.”

  “The forts will be on alert,” Tolvern said. “And the destroyer will have its guns ready.”

  “We knew that already, what with Rutherford stirring up the Hroom again. It’s the other royal ships lurking in the system that worry me. Jane,” Drake queried, “how long to Hot Barsa at our current course and speed?”

  “Calculating . . . 12.4 hours.”

  That long? He’d been thinking closer to eleven. Either way, it was too long. In addition to travel time, he needed several hours for the assault itself and more time to make a clean getaway.

  “Tolvern, get Barker on the com. I want us accelerating to maximum speed. Drop cloaking, just hit that throttle with everything we’ve got. At this point, if we’re spotted, it almost doesn’t matter.” He rose to his feet.

  “Where are you going?” Tolvern asked.

  “To engineering. It’s time to see about that new battery. At this point, it’s either working, or it’s not. We have no more time to mess around. We’re going into battle.”

  Chapter Three

  Blackbeard came blistering toward Hot Barsa at nearly ten percent the speed of light. From a distance, the planet was a speck of light, not much bigger than the background stars except that being much closer it moved across the viewscreen as they hooked wide to come down over the north pole and what Drake had determined was the weakest of the planet’s six orbital fortresses.

  But at this speed, they would flash by Hot Barsa like a bullet zipping past a man’s head. Drake had to brake, and brake hard, to get them to slow down enough to descend through the planet’s thick atmosphere. Drop from ten percent the speed of light to one percent, then to a few thousand miles an hour, and they’d expose themselves to punishing attack for an unacceptable length of time.

  So he only ordered them to slow when they were two minutes from the planet. They’d only shed a fraction of their speed as they blew past the world several tens of thousands of miles outside the atmosphere, but Drake was curving sharply to port at the same time, and a few minutes later Blackbeard came screaming around in orbit like a distant satellite.

  Nyb Pim sat in the pilot’s chair, with Capp next to him working the nav computer in support. The Hroom was all concentration now, suffering none of the shakes that had been troubling him. He threaded them expertly through a path that only gave the orbital fortresses a split second to attack before Blackbeard had zipped past again. The enemy didn’t even try to hit them at first.

  But on the third pass, Blackbeard had slowed enough that the first of the orbital fortresses opened fire. During its orbits, the ship came in view of four of the six at one point or another, and all of them started shooting by the fourth time around. The two biggest delivered the biggest punch. These had been built into the side of Hot Barsa’s two small moons—themselves captured asteroids the shape of ten-mile-long baked potatoes—and presented formidable arrays of cannon, torpedo, and missile batteries. Soon, dozens of projectiles were flying out, and missiles and torpedoes came corkscrewing after the renegade ship.

  Drake had been studying the calculations coming through from Capp. “Mark this course,” he told his pilots, and gave coordinates.

  “Confirm heading,” Nyb Pim said. It was rare for the Hroom to question Drake’s orders, but he seemed to have correctly deduced that such a course would take them back toward deep space.

  “You heard me. Twelve seconds on that course, then reverse to bring us around. Keep with present deceleration. Remember Ypis III.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The Hroom would be understanding now why Drake had given the order. The captain had used this same tactic during the war while coming between two poorly coordinated Hroom fleets that had ended up doing each other more damage than they’d done Drake’s task force. Too much ordnance in play at once, directed by too many competing fire-control systems. Nyb Pim had been Drake’s pilot for that battle. He executed the maneuver even better this time.

  They’d evaded most of the enemy fire by the time they came back around. What didn’t blow itself up either lost itself to their rear or was brought down by Barker’s chafe and other countermeasures. Only two small kinetic cannon blasts hit the ship, and the shields shrugged them off with minimal damage.

  Still, there were several tense minutes during the final approach, when they came down atop the north pole. The polar fortress spotted them and brought out its main guns as they came toward it. Blackbeard was traveling much slower now, and the fort seem to have all the time in the world as the ship continued to decelerate in preparation for entering Hot Barsa’s atmosphere.

  The polar fort was supposed to be the smallest of the six in orbit around the planet, but on the viewscreen it seemed massive and deadly. The fort commander could boast double the guns of the starship, and an endless supply of torpedoes and missiles compared to Drake’s. In addition, its batteries and bombproofs burrowed into the side of a small, captured asteroid, with hundreds of feet of protective rock making it look almost impregnable, like a mile-long tortoise with guns. Against it, Drake had a couple of feet of tyrillium armor. He could not afford to stand off a pace and slug it out with that beast.

  The mood on the bridge was tense, silent, as lights flared along the side of the fort, its weapons discharging.

  Drake called the gunnery. “Hold the broadside. Give her the secondary battery.”

  “Aye, sir,” Barker said. He delivered it in his customary growl, but Drake heard the quaver in his voice.

  “Those guns had better work,” Drake muttered to himself.

  They’d left San Pablo last week after a rushed job in Hubert Rodriguez’s spaceyard. Rodriguez was skilled and reliable and had helped fight off a pirate attack attempting to seize the ship and kill its crew. He’d incorporated the shields and batteries of Captain Kidd—a pirate vessel Drake and his crew had trashed in battle—into HMS Ajax. The ship had left San Pablo rechristened as Blackbeard, more formidable than ever. But they’d left in a rush to get away before Rutherford’s naval forces arrived to crush them. The urgency had come at the expense of proper diagnostics on the new systems.

  Blackbeard shook as the first missile penetrated their countermeasures and detonated against the shields. Moments later, the schematic on Drake’s console lit up with simulated explosions. Most of the hits struck them on the belly, where shields were weakest. Damn.

  Three more flashes. Same exact place, right on the belly. He braced for shuddering explosions, alarms, and Jane’s ominous assessment of damage. Nothing. They didn’t seem to be hit. Then he realized. Those three flashes must have come from the new battery, installed on the ship’s
underside with the guns stripped from Captain Kidd.

  Of course. Engineering may have incorporated the new guns and torpedo tubes, but Smythe hadn’t yet reprogrammed the schematic. The computer was registering the firing of the guns as detonations.

  Explosions ripped into the side of the polar fort.

  “Yes!” Tolvern exclaimed.

  Drake called down to Barker. “Concentrate on the forward enemy batteries. We’ll be swinging right past.”

  He wished he could roll back and give the fort a full broadside, let them see the full might of a Punisher-class warship, but he needed to keep his shields up around the main batteries. Blackbeard was already taking blows right and left, testing her shields, so recently repaired.

  And something else was bugging him. It took a moment to register what. Where was the destroyer? The navy warship was supposed to be either in orbit around Hot Barsa or patrolling the near space lanes. He believed it was HMS Javelin. She wasn’t powerful enough to tackle a cruiser like Blackbeard on her own, but could provide devastating support fire. But there was no sign of her.

  Smythe hunched over his console, hands moving, his face bearing a look of intense concentration. He muttered something about pulse countermeasures, though whether to himself or through the com to engineering, it was hard to say. Nyb Pim was maneuvering them expertly, his eyes staring at his screen, while his long, red fingers danced over the console. Capp sat next to him, also interfaced with the nav computer, running calculations in support. Tolvern kept in contact with engineering and fire control, her words coming as fast and punctuated as a Gatling gun.

  Two more torpedoes slammed into the ship, but they didn’t detonate. Either success for Blackbeard’s countermeasures, or a failure of the enemy armaments. The polar fort loomed. Blackbeard slid past. Missiles and cannon fire chased them down.

  The ship entered the atmosphere, shuddering and bucking. The fort continued to fire at them, but most of its weapon systems pointed outward, into space. It was designed to repel Hroom sloops of war, which couldn’t land planetside, but instead set up in orbit to bombard a planet. Drake’s ship didn’t suffer the same deficiency.