Starship Blackbeard Read online

  “We’re cut off from the database, as you bloody well know,” Tolvern snapped.

  “Well excuse me if I ain’t privy to that detail.”

  The commander looked ready to snarl something else, but Drake put a hand on Tolvern’s arm to calm her. She needed to learn that sometimes the best way to get information was to let the other person do the talking.

  Capp’s male friend moved to extract himself. His name was Ronaldo Carvalho, and he was from one of the Ladino planets, though Drake didn’t know anything else about him. He mumbled something about reporting for duty. The mess had cleared out except for the cook, who now went around clearing glasses and wiping up spills with a bar towel. Capp scowled after Carvalho as he slipped out the doors, as if annoyed that he’d left her alone.

  When she looked back at the captain and the commander, she didn’t seem quite so cocky. “What’s this all about? Am I in some kinda trouble?”

  “You got the lions on your arm because you were just that patriotic,” Drake said. “It was only then that you joined the smugglers and pirates of the Gryphon Shoals. Then about six months ago, you had another change of heart and joined the royal marines.”

  “I couldn’t get in before, and that’s the honest truth. I wanted to be a pilot in the navy, but I failed the tests. Said I wasn’t smart enough, but you know what I think?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” Drake said.

  “I think it was on account of my birth, you know. I wasn’t officer breeding nor education. Least they admit it in the merchant fleet. Wouldn’t let me pilot there, neither. But out in the shoals, they ain’t so fussy.”

  “You were a pirate?” Tolvern asked in a sharp tone.

  “No! I mean, I fell into . . . well, into some bad company. Smuggling and the like. You got that figured out, right? Then, I don’t know. Bug kept itching at me. Came back to Albion to try again. They still wouldn’t let me pilot, but they let me enlist in the marines. Figured I’d see some action that way.”

  “Is that so?” Drake said.

  Capp looked between them both. “I don’t understand. I’m doing right by you, ain’t I? We’re most the way to Barsa already, and ain’t nobody found us yet.”

  Drake nodded at Tolvern. She reached for her waist, which made Capp flinch, but it wasn’t to get her side arm. Instead, she retrieved a computer from her hip pocket.

  “Jane isn’t too sure about this,” she told Capp, “but she seems to think we’re going to jump about here.”

  Tolvern pulled up a chart and showed it to their would-be pilot. It was the Santa María star system, with two planets under nominal control of Ladino colonists from the final wave of human immigration from Earth a couple of hundred years earlier.

  “That’s right,” Capp said. “But there ain’t no other way to get to Barsa from here. Not directly, anyhow.”

  “Seems like a good place to strip down a captured Albion warship,” Tolvern said. “Outside control of the crown, and maybe someone figures the king won’t start a war over a ship that had been taken in mutiny already. A lot of money in that.”

  “Your friend from the jettison pod,” Drake said. “The one you were fraternizing with earlier. Carvalho, isn’t it? He’s Ladino. Wouldn’t happen to be from the Santa María system, would he?”

  “I don’t know, I never asked him. Listen, I’m telling you. We gotta go through Santa María unless you want to fight the navy direct. Then we rev up the engines and come into Barsa from the outer worlds. We jump closer, and we’ll run into the Third Fleet. Frigates and cruisers and everything.”

  Drake fixed her with a sharp gaze. The woman looked back without flinching, which showed steady nerves.

  “You’ve done well so far,” he said. “Moved us farther and faster than I could have hoped.”

  “I ain’t so good past Barsa. Afraid I’d get us lost. These inner systems I know pretty well. What are we doing there, anyway, Cap’n?”

  “You let me worry about that,” he said. “Just get us safely to the Barsa system. If there are any surprises, any treachery, I have the means to crush it.”

  Ajax was still wounded from her recent scrape with Vigilant, but he had no doubt this was true.

  “Ajax is a Punisher-class warship,” he added. “I don’t expect any aspiring pirates would be so foolish as to attack her. But I always keep my guard up, Corporal. That is what necessitated this visit. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  #

  “I don’t trust her,” Tolvern said as she accompanied the captain back to the bridge.

  “I don’t see as we have any choice in the matter.”

  Drake was happy to get away from the smell and sloth of the mess. He’d seen better discipline among the prisoners in jail while awaiting his trial. And he was tired. He’d been up for twenty hours and needed sleep, but first he wanted to check progress on the hull repairs, as well as make sure that the second plasma engine was functioning as it should. They really needed a fortnight in the docks, but where would he go? To Santa María with a crew of twenty-four and no marines?

  “If Capp got out a subspace message,” Tolvern said, “we might find a whole crew of pirates and the like waiting to strip us for scrap.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe she’s come around. She’d be in the mines now if it weren’t for the mutiny.”

  “That’s not going to change her nature, Captain. The woman is still a smuggler at heart. And she’s apparently taken up with this Ladino. What’s he about?”

  They came onto the bridge. Tech Officer Smythe was the only one in the room. It was disconcerting to stare at the wide, nearly empty space. All the screens, from the nav computer to the defense grid, were scrolling displays for crew who were not present. When Smythe turned his chair to consult another display, even he disappeared from view, and for a moment Drake felt as though he were looking at the bridge of a ghost ship, hurtling through the cold black void at 11,000 miles per second.

  When Drake was a young ensign aboard HMS James Cook, they’d found just such a ghost ship while on a reconnaissance mission. It was the shape of a turtle and the size of a small city, cruising along at the relatively sluggish pace of two percent the speed of light. When it was towed in, it was discovered to be some sort of generation ship, but ancient—thousands or even tens of thousands of years old. Those long, silent years had left its surface pitted and scarred.

  There was no sign of passengers or crew, or even indication of what kind of race had been on board, though people had assumed humanoid. Those were the only sorts of aliens so far discovered. But for all Drake knew, it had been built by a race of super intelligent octopus. Whoever they were, there was no trace of them, no sign of who they were or why they’d left.

  How many such ghost ships wandered the empty voids of space? Some of them, he knew, were human, their engines failing, their final passage uncharted.

  “Do you still intend to surrender?” Tolvern asked when he’d taken the captain’s seat.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’m not keen to fit my head into the hangman’s noose.”

  “This is my fault,” she said.

  He turned with a raised eyebrow. “Why, yes. Yes it is. But now that I know what happened to Nyb Pim, I’m more inclined to forgive you. We could hardly see him shipped off to die in the cane fields of Hot Barsa.”

  “That’s just it,” she pressed. “That’s my loyalty. You are loyal to your crew, and your crew returns those feelings.”

  “That wasn’t your oath,” he reminded her.

  “Damn the oath. I couldn’t let you fall for something you didn’t do. It was a bloody crime, and I had to stop it.”

  “Two years. Then I meant to return and clear my name.”

  “The death rate in the mines is twelve percent per year. Smythe looked it up.”

  “Only the weak ones die. I am not weak.”

  “No, Captain.” A funny look came over her face. “You are not.”

&
nbsp; “To answer the question, I’m going to find out who turned my pilot into an eater before I make any decisions. Not one word of that story makes any sense.”

  “You think some larger plot is afoot?”

  “Don’t you?” he asked.

  Jane’s voice came over the com. “Four hundred million miles to destination. Estimated nineteen hours and twenty minutes before final acceleration required.”

  Drake smiled at his first mate. “Practically there already. Only four hundred million miles to go.”

  #

  True to form, Corporal Capp hadn’t known the jump points closer to the planet, so they entered the Barsa system in the middle of the gas giants, another half billion miles from the rocky inner worlds. Smuggler routes, of course. When they popped out, a couple of tramp frigates were rendezvousing a few hundred miles away, no doubt exchanging illicit cargo. They caught one glimpse of the big navy cruiser and fled for their lives.

  Capp, sitting in Nyb Pim’s pilot’s chair, took some time picking out Hot Barsa from a vast swath of stars, planets, and other objects visible from the sector. Scans found no unusual ship traffic in the region, so when she found the planet, Drake simply pointed Ajax in its direction and fired up the engines. Soon, they were hurtling inward as fast as they could travel and still keep cloaked from subspace radar.

  The Third Fleet was lurking around here somewhere, he knew. Maybe no carriers or battleships, but certainly a task force. They were close both to Ladino worlds and systems teeming with Hroom. In other words, it was an ideal intersection between a sugar world, huge sugar markets, and lawless human opportunists. A show of royal power kept the vultures away.

  The next day, still tens of millions of miles out, Drake rolled out of bed to discover two welcome bits of news waiting for him. Smythe had picked up chatter on military channels indicating that the Royal Navy vessels had departed the system shortly before Ajax’s arrival. They’d gone off to investigate unusual empire fleet movements near the frontier.

  Better still, scans had picked up their target. It was Henry Upton, an aging galleon named after one of the founders of the York Company, and a pioneer of the trade that carried sugar, gold, and slaves in a triangle between Albion, the Ladino worlds, and the Hroom homelands.

  Henry Upton had jumped into the system between Hot Barsa and her sister planet, an ocean world with the unimaginative name of Cold Barsa, given because it was locked in an ice age. If the jump point hadn’t currently been located on the opposite side of Hot Barsa’s orbit, she’d have arrived carrying her slave cargo within a few hours.

  Commander Tolvern was fidgeting madly in the war room as she briefed Drake on these developments, her words coming out faster than a cobalt cannon on automatic fire. Smythe and Capp were also in the room, their fingers flying over handheld computers, barely paying attention to the commander.

  “Excellent news,” Drake said when Tolvern paused to take a breath. “Smythe, what is Henry Upton’s top speed?”

  “Hmm? Oh, yes. Here we go. She’s got a single nuclear engine. Max speed five hundred miles per second.”

  He thumbed at his screen, and the captain had the distinct impression he was moving back and forth between technical specifications and something personal.

  “What the devil are you doing there?” Tolvern said. “Writing your memoir?”

  “Multi-tasking,” he said.

  Tolvern snorted. “Probably playing Romans vs. Soviets again.”

  Smythe blushed, and this time Drake thought she was closer to the mark. “Anyway,” Smythe said, “I give the slaver three days until she’s in range of the plasma tugs that will tow her in to Hot Barsa.”

  This was a relief. He’d half expected to arrive and find Henry Upton already in orbit, her slaves being shuttled to the surface. He didn’t have the crew or the armaments to run Hot Barsa’s fortresses and take the fight to the surface.

  “Even better than that,” Smythe added, “the galleon is so slow that she’s coming in for a slingshot around Cold Barsa to shave a few hours off the trip.”

  It was a common tactic for slower merchant ships. The idea was to whip around a planet, using the gravitational pull to boost its speed toward its final destination.

  Drake leaned forward in his chair. “Capp, can we get there first?”

  The corporal flashed a toothy, predator-like smile. “Aye. Six hours until Henry Upton shows up. We can get to Cold Barsa in three.”

  “You see?” Tolvern said, her voice rising in excitement. “Talk about lucky.”

  It did seem unusually fortunate. He could lurk around the backside of Cold Barsa, and the galleon wouldn’t spot them until he’d pounced. They’d have maybe five minutes of warning to send a distress signal. By the time help came, Drake would have his prize and be fleeing toward a safe jump point. And with the Third Fleet shipped off, there would only be a few patrol boats and short-range fighters to give chase, anyway.

  But experience had taught him to be suspicious of luck. As even the ancients had noted, any battle plan fell apart at first contact with the enemy. The key was not to get caught with your trousers down when that happened.

  Smythe looked up from his computer and pushed back his glasses. “Barker wants to know which weapon systems to bring online.”

  “The biggest risk is stumbling into a trap,” he said. “What I want—”

  Capp snorted. “Out here? How do you figure they’d spring a trap? Fill the galleon with explosives or something?”

  “Let the captain speak,” Tolvern said, tone peevish.

  “What I want,” Drake continued, “is shields up at all times. No cannon, no missiles. We’re not here to kill anyone, and we’re not here because of romantic notions about freeing slaves or any such rubbish. One and only one slave—that’s all we care about.”

  “What if they start shooting?” Tolvern asked. “Henry Upton is unescorted, so I figure she’s carrying light armaments.”

  “Nothing we can’t handle. She’s going slow enough we shouldn’t have trouble harpooning her. If she gets testy, we’ll knock her around a little with the chase gun.”

  “We need a boarding party,” Tolvern said. “Hard to manage without marines on board.”

  Capp flexed her arms. “I’m a marine. Gimme a gun and saber and I’ll go aboard.”

  “Funny,” Tolvern said. “I thought you aspired to be a pilot. Okay, that’s one. I suppose I’d better make two, so I can keep an eye on this one.” She nodded toward Capp.

  “This I’d like to see,” Capp said. “I imagine you waving around a saber all dainty like.”

  Tolvern sprang to her feet, bristling, but Drake grimaced and motioned for his first mate to sit back down. Yes, this insubordination was intolerable, but they wouldn’t be serving with the woman or her fellow criminals much longer. For now, better to keep the peace.

  “You’ll stay here,” Drake said to Tolvern. “I’ll lead the boarding party myself. I need to see what’s going on. If there’s anything else afoot here, I need to know.”

  “But, Captain—”

  “If anything happens to me, you’ll be needed here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s two,” Drake said. “Who else?”

  “I know three blokes who’d be keen to get some action,” Capp said.

  “And what kind of action would that be?” Tolvern asked, innocently.

  “Commander!” Drake said.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “I’d rather not have your blokes, as you put it,” Drake told Capp. “One wild card is more than enough.” He glanced at the tech officer, who was still doing something on the computer. “Smythe?”

  “Me, Captain?” he squeaked, which drew a snort from Capp and a sigh from Tolvern.

  Smythe licked his lips, turning pale. He looked every bit the royal marine, with his natural physique and strong jaw. Everything except the squinting eyes behind glasses and the full, reddish lips.

  “No, not you. Get Barker, ask him
if he’s got anyone in weapons or engineering he can spare. He won’t like it—he’s more undermanned than anyone—but our shields will be up anyway, so there shouldn’t be much trouble while we’re out.”

  As predicted, Barker wasn’t happy with this, but eventually the gunner found two men he said he could spare. One was a former special forces fellow by the name of Oglethorpe who’d transferred into gunnery after getting his shoulder messed up in combat. He’d lost most of the motor control in one arm, but he was still a big, intimidating fellow.

  The other was Manx, the boatswain, currently at work repairing hull damage from their engagement outside Albion. The man’s only experience with weaponry came from basic training, but he was healthy and game. Drake remembered how he’d filled in on the bridge during the mutiny and figured the man was steady enough.

  That made four in the boarding party. The captain needed a fifth, and as Smythe cut the channel with Barker, Drake eyed Capp across the table.

  “I’m telling you,” she said. “You want someone good, you should take my mate, Carvalho. He’s real handy with a gun.”

  “Captain,” Tolvern said in a warning tone.

  Drake ignored her. “Good enough, Corporal. I’ll take a chance.” He rose. “That will be all.”

  #

  Soon they were pulling in behind Cold Barsa, the icy world white and glittering beneath them. The only ice-free water was a thin belt girdling the equator, and from space one couldn’t discern the difference between glacier-covered land and frozen ocean. A small, rust-colored moon came wobbling into view, tracing its rapid path around the planet.

  Drake met the four others from the boarding party in the armory to get them acquainted with the boarding rocket and pressure suits. He repeated his plans for going onto Henry Upton, explained about the harpoon and tether.

  “And no shooting unless shot at,” he said, as he pulled on the pressurized trousers. “Is that clear?”

  They nodded. Oglethorpe and Manx seemed relieved, while Capp and Carvalho looked disappointed. He ordered them to suit up while he hurried back to the bridge to check the situation one last time.

  Tolvern eyed the captain. “We just picked up Henry Upton. She’ll be coming around the planet in eighteen minutes.”