Starship Blackbeard Read online

  It had all happened so fast. The marines arresting him in his quarters, the false accusations, the rapid trial and sentencing, while his crew scrambled to find evidence to exonerate him. His room was neat and tidy, every one of his possessions where he’d left it. He’d stripped out of the brown overalls with the red prisoner circle, shoved them down the incinerator chute, and put on his standard service uniform with captain’s bars.

  “Where’s Barker?” Tolvern asked.

  Even as she spoke, the door opened with a hiss and Craig Barker came into the war room. His eyes were red and watery, and he squinted at the lights.

  Drake looked at the three of them, then cast his eyes at the empty chairs around the conference table. No pilot, no second mate, no staff officers.

  “Did anyone have a plan?” he asked.

  “We had one,” Tolvern said. “And it worked, didn’t it? Here we are. Nobody was killed. We figured you could take it from here.”

  “That was your plan? To limp into shark-infested waters bleeding from every orifice and hope none of the sharks were paying attention? Wouldn’t surprise me if half the scavengers and salvage operations in the system were winging their way here this moment.”

  “I don’t think they are,” Smythe offered meekly. “The computer says . . . ”

  “Screw what the computer says. Pirates don’t survive out here by telegraphing every move.”

  There were only four possible jumps from Albion, which was one of the reasons why the home planet was so defensible. The Hroom frontier systems had been accessible from at least a dozen different systems each. During the war, Albion and her allies had sent in fleets from three locations. Twice—the battles of Ypis III and Kif Lagoon—Drake himself had led Albion forces in glorious victories.

  As for Albion’s jump points, one took you so close to a neutron star that you and all your equipment would be fried before you got away from it. Two of the remaining jumps came into well-fortified systems that were Albion protectorates.

  The fourth was the Gryphon Shoals, a barren system with no habitable planet. There was a small watch station on the third planet to send a warning back to the home system, but the rest of it was the domain of pirates and smugglers. They hid among the vast number of asteroids and rocky moons, taking advantage of both the system’s proximity to the wealthy Albion home system and its launching point to all manner of Ladino, New Dutch, and Hroom planets.

  “By now they’ve found Rutherford and hauled him in,” Drake said. “Malthorne will have Vigilant and a dozen other ships jumping into the system to hunt us down.”

  Tolvern shrugged, as if affecting nonchalance, though she wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Like finding a needle in a—”

  “They’re going to burn down your bloody haystack until they find us,” Drake interrupted. “We’re wounded, and we’ve got seventeen people in our crew. The Punisher-class calls for a minimum crew of fifty-two. A full deck of cards. And there’s not a single royal marine on board.”

  “We have twenty-four crew members, actually.”

  “You told me seventeen.”

  “We did. Now we have twenty-four. Seventeen in the . . . jailbreak.” She only just stopped herself from saying mutiny. Drake could tell from the hesitation. “Plus six prisoners we liberated from the away pod. And you, of course.”

  Drake took a deep breath. He could feel his blood pressure rising until his pulse pounded at his temples. “You impressed the criminals? What are we, a pirate ship? May as well run up the Jolly Roger and be done with it.”

  Barker started to say something, but Drake waved him off. “Here’s what I’m going to do. We’re going to put the criminals in the brig, then I’m going to hail the scavenger settlements in the asteroid belt. Soon as someone answers I’m stuffing the lot of you into the remaining pods and launching you out. Make your way as fugitives if you can. I’ll send a subspace to the fleet and wait for them to take me in.”

  “You can’t do that,” Tolvern said. “Captain, listen to me. What they did to you was an injustice. A travesty. People die in the mines. Or they do something wrong, and next thing you know they’re off to the sugar worlds, and that’s the end. You know it’s true!”

  “None of that matters. I didn’t turn against the fleet before, and I won’t do it now. Besides,” he added, “I had a plan. Rutherford knew I was innocent. He was going to get me out.”

  “Rutherford is an opportunist,” Barker said from the end of the table. “Now that you’re gone, the door is open. He’ll be the second officer of the fleet before long, mark my words.”

  “And you,” Drake said, turning on the gunner. “I’m shocked. I can see how Tolvern roped in the rest of these fools, but you? What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking that loyalty is the number one lesson you taught us.”

  “Loyalty to the crown!”

  “I’ve been in the navy since ’98,” Barker said. “Thirty-two years. Three kings and one queen. I’ve had seven different commanding officers. Not one of them gave two spits whether I lived or died. You did. That’s where my loyalty lies.”

  Seeing the look of fierce determination on the gunner’s face gave Drake pause. Barker’s defiance was mirrored by Tolvern’s jutting chin, and even Smythe had put down his computer to give a curt nod of agreement.

  “And so you went along with a mutiny because you didn’t want me to face two years in the mines?” Drake asked, still speaking to Barker. “You’ve got a wife, two sons—and now, a granddaughter. You might never see them again. To save me from hard labor?”

  “Aye.”

  Drake didn’t know whether to be touched by the man’s loyalty or give him a good shake.

  “Not just you,” Barker said. “Also, Nyb Pim.”

  Drake leaned back in his chair. “Yes, what of him?”

  Tolvern had already said that something had happened to the Hroom pilot; Drake assumed it had something to do with how Nyb Pim had tried to hack into the naval computers to prove his captain’s innocence. After that stunt, Drake imagined the pilot had been reassigned to a military transport vessel or some other lowly position. You didn’t throw an experienced, highly skilled pilot from the service for what amounted to an indiscretion. There weren’t three people in the navy, human or Hroom, who could match Nyb Pim’s navigational skills.

  “He’s on a galley filled with Hroom,” Tolvern said. “They’re on their way to Hot Barsa.”

  Hot Barsa. One of the sugar worlds. A former planet of the Hroom Empire, it was now given over to the production and export of cane sugar. The heat and humidity were such that humans could only survive if they moved from one air-conditioned space to another, which meant that the labor force was almost entirely Hroom slaves. Producing the very poison that had brought their ancient civilization to its knees.

  “As a pilot?” Drake asked.

  “As one of the slaves,” Tolvern said.

  Drake was horrified. “But he’s not . . . he’d never touch the stuff.”

  “We don’t know how or why,” she said. “They threw him in the brig for a few days. By the time he came out, he was an eater. He attacked two military police, put one of them in the hospital. Lost his freedom for that.”

  Drake tried to picture his calm, analytical pilot shoving sugar into his mouth and failed. Addiction came on quickly, but it had only been two weeks since he’d last seen Nyb Pim. And already he was an eater?

  “You know,” Smythe said, fingers moving over the screen of his handheld computer. “You can get to the Barsa system from Gryphon Shoals in five or six jumps.”

  “The galley only left two days ago,” Barker said. “We can get ahead of it.”

  “Not without a pilot,” Drake said. “It might take two days to get out of here if we use the computer. Then we’re just as likely to end up back at Albion. So unless you want to go sniffing around the system to see if there are any unemployed, desperate pilots idling about, looking for a suicide mission . . . ”

  �
�We already have a pilot of sorts,” Tolvern said. She seemed to be regaining some of her confidence, and the captain had the impression she was still holding onto information. “There’s another person on board with a nav chip implanted in her head.”

  “Who is this person?” Drake scoffed. “I’ve never met her.”

  “One of your fellow prisoners. Name is Henny Capp.” Tolvern tapped her right forearm. “One with the lion tattoos.”

  “The marine? A nav chip is an illegal augmentation. How did it go undetected?”

  “It’s been disabled since she enlisted,” Tolvern said. “Smythe says he can reactivate it.”

  “Easy enough,” Smythe said with a nod.

  “What’s this Capp woman doing with a nav chip anyway?” Drake waved a hand. “Never mind that. You knew, that’s the point. You planned on using her all along, didn’t you?”

  “Once we learned she could pilot, yes,” Tolvern said. “That was the missing piece of the puzzle.”

  “By puzzle you mean mutiny and treason.”

  “If there’s treason, it’s not our doing,” Tolvern said. “Captain, think about it. It was a Hroom ship we shot up. Forget what the tribunal claimed, you know. We hauled in wreckage and saw bodies, alien tech. Hroom Empire stuff. We all saw it with our own eyes. It was not an Albion trader, and there sure as hell weren’t royal marines on board.”

  “You’ll notice that Malthorne yanked away the rest of the fleet and let us finish the job,” Barker said. “That way, there were no witnesses.”

  “Rutherford, too,” Tolvern said. “Vanished at the most convenient time.”

  “He’s not in on this,” Drake said, his faith in his old friend unshaken. “I swear it. Anyway, the lord admiral had just cause. You’ve seen how the flagship was mauled in the fight. Malthorne only won the battle because Rutherford’s fleet showed up at the last minute. I don’t know why we were accused of destroying the trader, but I don’t question the admiral’s military decisions.”

  “The battle was won,” Tolvern said, “the enemy forces scattered, and everyone was hailed as a hero but you. You found the enemy fleet, knocked out a carrier, and wiped out the ship carrying the doomsday device. But no, they say that you attacked the wrong ship, killed a bunch of our people instead.”

  “I’ll be exonerated. I’m not worried about this.”

  “Sir,” she continued, “listen to me. We didn’t wake up cranky and decide to mutiny. You don’t know everything that happened after you were sentenced. At first, I thought they’d let us stay together, but Nyb Pim was sent into slavery, and then Assistant Pilot Jones got himself run over by a lorry while he was on shore leave. After that, the fleet said screw it, and scattered the rest of us. Or we would have been scattered, anyway. Practically every member of your crew got sent elsewhere.”

  “Even the company of marines,” Barker added.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Spread all over the colonies. Smythe, show him.”

  The tech officer tapped his screen twice before sliding his computer across the table. It showed a list of marines, sailors, officers, even down to Ajax’s cabin boy, together with their future assignments. No two people would be serving together.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me if they meant to rechristen Ajax,” Tolvern said. “It would have been like we’d never existed as a crew.”

  Drake was still staring at Smythe’s screen and the note across from the assistant pilot’s name: Hit and killed by a lorry while on leave in York Town. Coroner said he’d been drinking.

  He tapped the screen and showed it to Tolvern. “You don’t believe this, do you?”

  She glanced at it and met his gaze. “You tell me. Jones liked his grog, no question. But suspicious that he’d die now. The pilot is in slavery, the assistant pilot dead. Bloody suspicious.”

  Yes, that’s what Drake was thinking. He’d been stripped of his commission and sentenced based on false testimony. It wasn’t the careless attack on the merchant ship that had done it, but that he’d supposedly tried to cover up his crimes by falsifying logs, even hauling in alien wreckage to make it look like he’d done what he’d claimed. He’d even managed to fool his crew, according to the court-martial.

  All of it false. Until now, he’d assumed that someone else had accidentally attacked the friendly vessel, and in the chaos of battle, blame had fallen erroneously on his shoulders. That would have been very different than a conspiracy.

  But now he was not sure. The frame-up looked intentional. To what point, he could scarcely fathom. Merely to hide someone else’s blunder? How would that necessitate getting rid of his pilots and scattering both Ajax’s crew and the marines posted to her?

  “Henny Capp, you say?” he asked. “And she says she can pilot a Punisher-class warship?”

  “Who knows?” Tolvern said. “We didn’t exactly chat about mutiny beforehand.”

  Mutiny. There it was. Good for Commander Tolvern for owning her actions.

  Smythe held out a hand for his computer. He tapped a few times. “Says Capp navigated a merchant frigate. Was fired after a couple of bad jumps. Tried to join the navy as a pilot, was turned down, so she let them disable her nav chip and joined the marines instead.”

  Drake grunted. “And you knew all this before?”

  “More or less,” Tolvern said. “We didn’t have much choice. Anyway, all we need is to get Nyb Pim back, and we won’t need her.”

  Drake recalled what the prisoner had told him when they were failing to launch in the pod. “Capp said she’d punched an officer. Is that what she was in for?”

  “The officer was her lover,” she said. “Tried to end things, and she got violent. He lost a rank for his role in the matter. She took a sentence in the mines.”

  “Lovely. Speaking of rank, what is she?”

  “Corporal.”

  So, not an officer, and from her coarse accent, low-class riffraff, as his father, the baron, would have said. She had no business in the pilot’s chair. Drake had seen enough of a man’s—or woman’s—natural abilities to know that class, character, and rank didn’t always match. A commoner could be just as honorable, hard-working, and intelligent as someone of better breeding. But this Capp woman seemed to have none of those qualities. Except what was his choice? Muck around the star system looking for smugglers and pirates to see if he could find someone better?

  For that matter, should he even go after Nyb Pim? What if he were seeing what he wanted to see? If this whole business was a mistake, he should surrender, turn over the ship to the navy, and return to suffer the judgment of king and country.

  “There’s a conspiracy,” Tolvern said. “We need to get to the heart of it.”

  “Aye,” Barker said. “That’s my inclination, too.”

  “Inclination or desire?” Drake said.

  “Trust your instincts,” Tolvern urged. “They never led us astray before, and they won’t now. What do they tell you to do?”

  “Okay,” he said at last. “Bring Corporal Capp to the bridge. First we find out if she’s capable. Then we see if she’s willing.”

  The other three leaned forward in their chairs. “And if she is?” Tolvern asked.

  Drake sighed. “Then we find our pilot and rescue him from slavery.”

  Chapter Four

  Captain Nigel Rutherford came through the airlocks of Dreadnought and walked stiffly down the hallway toward the lift. His neck was so sore that he could barely turn it from side to side. He was already late to see the admiral but couldn’t bring himself to hurry. Probably better if he got hold of his emotions first. He was in a foul mood and not feeling favorably inclined toward Malthorne, or anyone else, for that matter.

  He’d spent seventeen hours in his bathrobe, trapped in a jettisoned away pod with eighteen other sweaty, grumbling victims of the Ajax mutiny. After the first few hours, Rutherford had despaired of ever being rescued. Commander Tolvern had simply flung them into space without a preprogrammed trajectory, and the search area ha
d expanded geometrically as they raced away. Just a blip in the cosmos, impossible to locate; when Rutherford was a fighter pilot, one of his mates had been lost in space after being forced to eject from his ship, his distress beacon broken. A wretched way to go.

  But no, someone had noted their trajectory and, when the fleet could be bothered, finally sent someone to fetch them. About bloody time. Five more minutes and he’d have throttled every last person in the pod with his bare hands.

  He caught the lift, turned his whole body to push the button to take him to the officer deck, then waited for the door to shut. A young ensign came running down the hall just as the doors began to ease shut.

  “Hold the door, sir!” he gasped.

  Rutherford held out a hand to the young man. “No. Take the next one.”

  With his other hand he mashed the Door Closed button. He went up alone. He was in such a foul mood that he felt a twinge of malicious satisfaction to see the young man’s look of dismay. He, too, was late for an important meeting, it would seem. Let the boy get a flogging, for all Rutherford cared.

  “Wonderful. I’ve turned into Captain-bloody-Bligh.”

  He could finally see Bligh’s point of view in the Old Earth story about the mutiny on the Bounty. Sometimes what was needed for discipline was a good old-fashioned whipping.

  People in the kingdom, and especially in the fleet, tended to romanticize the stories of the British Empire, America, and all of that other English history from before the Great Migration, but not that one. If Albion ever needed to invent an indigenous religion, Captain Bligh would make a prime candidate for the role of the devil. Maybe Napoleon or Hitler would also serve, but they seemed a little too much like real historical figures.

  Then who would be the Albion god of his new religion? Admiral Horatio Nelson? Queen Victoria?

  “George Washington,” he said with a chuckle as the doors opened.