Rebellion of Stars (Starship Blackbeard Book 4) Read online

  The sound grew louder. A shadow passed over, the monstrous roar of a propeller churning the air directly above, and Pez Rykan’s body went limp, some ancient Hroom instinct for playing dead. And then it was past, and he drew in a deep breath. But before he could relax, the sound changed. The helicopter was banking around.

  “We’ve been spotted!” Epa Pim cried.

  Hroom staggered to their feet and scattered. Pez Rykan roared for them to stop, and most did. A few, civilians from the village, ignored his command and waded through the grass, trying to flee.

  The rest he organized as best he could. Hroom males and females put assault rifles to their shoulders as the human craft reappeared. Pez Rykan ordered them to shoot. Gunfire lashed at the sky and forced the helicopter to swerve. A snout-like cannon on its nose fired as it did so. Bullets chewed up the ground. Hroom cried out and fell.

  The helicopter circled around for another attack. Pez Rykan led about a dozen Hroom to a flanking point, where they crouched in the grass, while Epa Pim kept the main body massed, their guns facing forward to take the enemy head-on. It roared toward them.

  Gunfire blasted at it from the front and side. Pez Rykan expected the cannon. Instead, light flared on the helicopter’s underbelly. A missile raced toward the main group of Hroom. There was a flash of light, and then a hammer blow struck Pez Rykan in the chest and threw him to the ground. He got up, ears ringing.

  The helicopter was hovering almost directly ahead of him. Now its cannon had started up again and was pouring fire on the site of the missile blast. The grass caught fire.

  Pez Rykan lifted his rifle and fired at the helicopter. Other Hroom were rising around him, and they too, began to shoot. Bullets pinged off the side of the helicopter. Too late, it seemed to notice this small but determined knot of resisters and began to swing around. But it was listing now. The engine was smoking. Pez Rykan and his companions continued to fire.

  The helicopter spun in a crazy circle, bleeding smoke. For a moment, it looked as though it would right itself, but then it lurched, staggering like an eater on a sugar swoon, and fell. It hit the ground with a crunching blow. The propeller threw up clods of dirt and grass. Pez Rykan braced himself for an explosion, but none came.

  He ran through the smoldering grass, looking for survivors of the missile strike, and above all, his mate. There were dead and dying Hroom all around. At last, he found Epa Pim. When he saw her, he drew short, his legs turning to mud beneath him.

  Amidst the carnage, her face was untouched somehow. Epa Pim’s beautiful round eyes stared straight ahead. The smooth skin on her face and her long, graceful neck were untouched. Below that, all was a ruin. Burned and bloody, the clothing scorched completely off, her torso and legs nearly melted together into a mass of char. The smell of her roasted flesh hung in the air.

  Pain clawed up in Pez Rykan’s chest. A hundred memories seemed to flash through his mind at once. He turned away, unable to bear it, knowing he would call out in anguish. And yet, how could he do such a thing when every one of the surviving Hroom had suffered equal or greater losses?

  “The flying machine,” someone said. “There may be survivors. If they call for help, more humans will come.”

  #

  There were two survivors on board the crashed helicopter. One was a human, the pilot. She was badly injured. She was pinned in the cockpit, her leg shattered. Her face was pale, but she didn’t cry out, and her eyes weren’t leaking in that strange way that sometimes happened to humans when they were in great pain. As Pez Rykan drew his sidearm, she eyed him calmly.

  “Mercy, please.” Her voice was quiet, with a slight tremble.

  “After what you did at the village, you deserve no mercy,” he said. “But I will give you some, anyway.”

  There was no saving this human female. She could not be extracted from the cockpit. There was nobody in his group of survivors who understood human anatomy. It was indeed a mercy what he would do now. He pressed the barrel of his pistol to her head. She closed her eyes.

  I hold you no hatred. But you are my enemy, and either you will die or I will. If I could pull the trigger on your entire race, I would do so.

  He said none of this. It was such a black thought that he wouldn’t have dared voice it.

  Instead, he told the woman, “If you have gods, let them do with your soul what they will.”

  He pulled the trigger.

  The other survivor presented a problem. A Hroom. A free Hroom. His skin was deep purple, not the faded pink of an eater. No slave, this one. He worked willingly with the humans. Pez Rykan had known of such Hroom. They served as marines, as pilots in the Royal Navy. They lived and walked among humans.

  Pez Rykan’s fighters had dragged the free Hroom to their chief and now held him up when his body went limp. A fire burned behind them, consuming the corpses of the dead.

  “What shall we do with him?” someone asked.

  “Prepare a platform,” Pez Rykan said. “A field temple.”

  “To which god?”

  Pez Rykan stared at the prisoner, whose skin flushed so deeply purple now that it appeared black. Firelight flickered off his eyes, which had rolled over, as if he were asleep.

  “To Lyam Kar,” Pez Rykan said. “The god of death will have his sacrifice.”

  Chapter Three

  Starship Blackbeard – Four months after the atomic destruction of York Town by the Hroom death fleet

  The Barsa system was swarming with loyalist forces, but Captain Drake didn’t disguise his presence as he brought Blackbeard and her task force through the jump point. He wanted a fight and swore he would get one. Two hours after the jump, he seized one of Lord Malthorne’s sugar galleons, dumped the cargo into the void, and sent the prize back through the jump point.

  A day later, with loyalist forces scurrying to intercept him, he sent Jess Tolvern out with HMS Philistine. Accompanied by a pair of torpedo boats, Tolvern’s destroyer bombarded a small navy outpost on the farthest, coldest world in the system. The loyalists fought back tenaciously, repelling multiple attacks. Within forty-eight hours, two of Malthorne’s cruisers, supported by torpedo boats and missile frigates, arrived to relieve the outpost. Tolvern fled for her life.

  She cloaked Philistine as soon as she’d escaped, making as if wounded and running for the jump point on the farthest reaches of the Barsa system. That was another feint. Drake gave her new orders, and sent her barreling toward the inner worlds.

  To hide her true movements, Drake further split his forces, sending off his mercenary frigates and sloops to harass the shipping lanes. They were pirates, and it was a task they knew too well. Soon, all merchant traffic in the system was flying under heavy escort. Two more loyalist cruisers jumped into the system to put an end to the threat.

  Drake took Blackbeard and attacked another galleon. He knocked out its engines, then fought a brief, but furious battle against her escorting torpedo boat. The loyalist ship was led by an able commander and struck a blow against Blackbeard’s armor at the helm, but the torpedo boat was no match for the heavy cruiser’s main guns. A broadside from Blackbeard tore the torpedo boat in two and vented her gasses into the void. The galleon it was escorting surrendered. He looted its cargo and let it go.

  And then Drake went quiet. He cloaked, accelerated to top speed, and reversed course for the far side of the Barsa system. Ten days later, fifteen days after arriving in the Barsa system, he arrived at the rendezvous point. Blackbeard was alone while Drake’s forces spread havoc elsewhere to disguise his true mission.

  He’d come to rendezvous with Nigel Rutherford and his cruiser, HMS Vigilant. Where was he?

  Drake stood at the viewscreen, looking anxiously at the gray-green planet beneath them. It was the outermost of the rocky inner worlds and girdled with the remains of a small moon. The belt of debris kept them disguised from prying eyes.

  But after three trips around the planet, it was clear that Vigilant and Rutherford were not waiting in orbit. Drake
turned to Smythe, his tech officer. “Can you run a sweep?”

  They’d taken instrument damage during the fight with the torpedo boat, and some of the systems had been offline while tech and engineering performed repairs.

  “I can run anything you want,” Smythe said. “But the long-range stuff isn’t shielded yet. We’ll give up our position if we go long.”

  “In that case, keep the search close. Five million miles. No, keep it under three.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Twelve hours later, Drake was on the verge of sending Tolvern a subspace to warn her away from Hot Barsa until he sent further orders. There would be no attack on the sugar world without Rutherford.

  But then came a coded subspace from Rutherford. It was short; it took a good deal of energy to open a temporary wormhole wide enough to send through a packet of data.

  On our way. 22:30. Ready weapons. We may have company.

  Drake glanced at the time on the console—19:18. Two hours and change. He re-read the message, then told Manx to get the defense grid computer up and called Barker in engineering to warn him.

  “When did you say?” came Barker’s gruff voice over the com. The chief of engineering sounded grumpy.

  “22:30,” Drake said. “We’ve got time.”

  A grunt. “Check again.”

  Drake looked down at his console and blinked. The time read 22:14. He’d been looking at it moments earlier, and it had read 19:18. He’d have sworn it. “What the devil?”

  “We lost Jane in the fight with that torpedo boat,” Barker said. “She only just came back online and updated the time. You’ve been operating on pre-dilation. Now, it’s correct.”

  Time dilation was minimal at ten percent the speed of light—Blackbeard’s top speed. At ten percent, you lost about fourteen minutes per day. Normally, the AI recalculated and adjusted the shipboard clocks automatically, so they didn’t fall behind real time. But they’d spent ten days galloping across the solar system, and all that time, Jane had been down. Drake had been operating on pre-dilation time and never realized it.

  He uttered an oath and told Barker to get to it, then snapped new orders at Smythe and Manx, who set about their work with fresh urgency. Capp was in the pilot’s chair, but he wanted Nyb Pim on deck in case they entered combat. So he recalled the Hroom pilot from his sleep cycle.

  “I’ve got Vigilant, sir,” Smythe said from the scanners as Nyb Pim came onto the bridge, blinking away the sleep and rubbing his long, thin fingers over his smooth scalp.

  “Is she alone?” Drake asked.

  Smythe frowned and studied his console. Drake’s throat was dry, and there was the buzz in his head that he felt before battle, when all his nerves were tingling, his senses heightened. Untold millennia of evolution, carried by his genes from Old Earth, readied him for this life-and-death struggle.

  “Yes,” Smythe said at last. “She’s alone.”

  Drake felt as though an electric current had been turned off. Nyb Pim had sat down, moving Capp to the subpilot’s chair. Nyb Pim’s fingers flew over his console. Capp rubbed at the lion tattoos on her forearm, staring hard at the viewscreen, which had just captured Vigilant’s shadow and was further resolving the image with every scan.

  Capp let out her breath in a long blow. “Bloody hell, Smythe. Don’t make us wait like that.”

  “The scanners hadn’t . . . ” Smythe started to protest, then stopped. “Wait . . . yes, there she is. Another ship. It’s Melbourne, sir.”

  “King’s balls,” Capp said. “And three bloody Harpoons. Look at ’em.”

  HMS Melbourne was an Aggressor-class cruiser, not quite as powerful as either Blackbeard or Vigilant, but strong enough. And she was traveling with three Harpoon-class destroyers. Who was captaining Melbourne? Was it still McGreggor? He was an able commander. It would be a fight.

  The viewscreen changed over. On came Nigel Rutherford’s grim visage. “Drake,” he said in that cold, almost arrogant tone. “I’ve brought you a small gift.”

  “I see that,” Drake said. “But a cruiser and three destroyers is awfully generous of you.”

  “You are welcome.” A shrug. “I forgot to acknowledge your birthday. Let this be recompense.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “Keep your location hidden—I don’t think you’ve been spotted. I’ll come down as if trying to shield myself behind all those moons, and you can spring an ambush. Here’s what you should do—”

  “Captain Rutherford,” Drake interrupted, his tone firm.

  Rutherford stared back, and the muscles tightened on his jaw. It was a challenge. What better plan was there?

  Drake’s forces were a motley collection of paid mercenaries—pirates, really—and rebellious elements of the Royal Navy like Nigel Rutherford. Drake and Rutherford had spent a year as enemies after Drake’s mutiny, and though they were now on the same side after Malthorne’s treacherous grab for the throne, there was still friction between them. In principle, Drake was the head of the fleet. In practice, Drake and Rutherford were often vying for control.

  Tolvern had urged Drake to declare himself admiral. That would settle command once and for all. Drake resisted. These things must be done properly. He wouldn’t have a civil war within a civil war.

  Drake waited, and at last, Rutherford nodded. “Yes, sir. Your command?”

  That was all Drake had needed, and he was willing to concede everything else. “It is an excellent plan, Captain. We will follow your suggestion.”

  Soon enough, Rutherford was slowing Vigilant as he approached the planet. The enemy cruiser and the three escorting destroyers slowed, too, but only to launch an initial barrage of missiles. Too far out; those missiles would do little good.

  Drake hid behind one of the larger moon fragments. HMS Melbourne got greedy and chased after Vigilant without waiting for her destroyers to get into position. At that moment, Drake brought Blackbeard into the open. It took a moment to drop the cloaks and get the batteries hot, but Melbourne didn’t spot them until it was too late.

  The enemy cruiser was blasting at Vigilant, now within range. She swung wide to show her main guns, and that exposed her to Blackbeard.

  Drake fired two torpedoes. They whipped past hastily launched countermeasures and slammed into Melbourne’s rear. The enemy cruiser snapped off missiles in response, which Blackbeard swatted away. Drake ordered the main cannon readied as they came to. By now, Blackbeard was only a few hundred miles distant.

  “Fire!” Drake ordered.

  Blackbeard let loose with a broadside. The shot tore into Melbourne’s shields. Another torpedo disabled the engines.

  Drake expected Vigilant to wheel on Melbourne. With the enemy vessel wounded, the two rebel cruisers would shortly finish her off. But Rutherford continued, accelerating now as he skimmed above the atmosphere of the planet. He came at one of the destroyers, now isolated and vulnerable. The destroyer fled.

  Melbourne fired her own guns, and she and Blackbeard exchanged fire for several minutes, but Blackbeard had gained the upper hand in the initial engagement, and pressed her advantage. Drake’s crew was readying another broadside when Captain McGreggor surrendered.

  Capp pumped her fist. “Got you, ya bastards.”

  Nyb Pim gave a pleased hoot, and Smythe, Manx, and Oglethorpe slapped each other on the backs, grinning. Even wounded, Melbourne was a terrific prize. Repaired and with a new crew, she’d be a powerful addition to the rebel navy.

  By now, the three enemy destroyers had regrouped. But not to fight. Instead, they fled toward Hot Barsa. There, they no doubt figured, they could be protected by the guns of the orbital fortresses while they awaited orders. Drake watched their flight with dismay. That was all wrong. Clearing the region around the planet of Hot Barsa itself was the reason for all of these fights across the system. To pin down Lord Malthorne’s forces tens of millions of miles from where they’d be needed.

  Having scattered the destroyers, Rutherford brought Vigilant int
o position to guard Blackbeard’s rear should the remaining vessels mount one last bid to free Melbourne. When the threat faded, Vigilant swung around to take possession of the prize.

  “Smythe, send Tolvern a subspace,” Drake said, still worried about those destroyers.

  “Yes, sir. Should I tell her the gig’s up?”

  Drake hesitated. He touched the console. “Jane. I need numbers. Estimate Tolvern’s arrival time at Hot Barsa.”

  “Unknown ship,” came the cool voice of the computer. She sounded almost petulant, as if she knew what he was asking, but meant him to spell it out.

  “Don’t be so blasted literal minded,” he said. “HMS Philistine. According to her last known course. Give me an arrival time.”

  It took several long moments before the response came back. Drake knew this was because Jane had only just come back online and was no doubt expending much of her computation power running diagnostics and repair, but it seemed like pure stubbornness.

  She was slow enough that Capp and Nyb Pim had already calculated the similar data for the three destroyers by running it through the nav computer, although admittedly, this was much less precise. Tolvern had a window. A very, very tight window. Drake’s instincts said no, but they might not get another chance. This was their opportunity to fatally weaken Lord Malthorne. They had to take it.

  “Sir, do you still want that subspace?” Smythe asked, his hands poised above his console.

  “Cap’n,” Capp protested. “You can’t let Tolvern stand against them destroyers. They’ll eat her alive. We’ll go after ’em. Us and Vigilant. We’ll settle their hash.”

  No, because there was still a powerful task force nearby, three cruisers and support craft. Blackbeard and Vigilant needed to harass these ships out in the space lanes to keep them from either crushing the mercenaries and their diversion or joining the protective cordon around Hot Barsa.

  “Subspace channel is open, sir,” Smythe said. “It’s eating power. If you want to send a message . . . ”

  Drake decided. “Tell Tolvern what’s coming and when. But she is to proceed as planned.”