The Alliance Trilogy Page 5

  #

  Kelly accosted him outside his quarters. “We need a plan, Svensen.”

  He scowled. “Don’t they have regulations in the Royal Navy? You know, where you can go, who you can run down in the corridor on your off time?”

  “This is officer territory, and I’m an officer.”

  “That’s not the half of it. Anyway, you’re here to babysit that Albion torpedo tech. And babysit me, presumably, the way you sat in on my meeting with Wang, butting in when you weren’t wanted.”

  She folded her arms and pressed closer. His back was to his door, and he wanted to shove her clear and go inside. Let the door slide shut and leave her outside, fuming.

  “I’m not sharing my plan with you, Kelly. Forget it.”

  “You don’t have one, do you?”

  “I have one. I’m going in fast, I’m going in hard. I’m neutralizing opposition. Then if you want to do your diplomacy-slash-bullying on behalf of the admiralty, the king, or whatever, feel free.”

  “That’s not a plan.”

  “I know. Like I said, I’m not sharing.”

  “It’s not a good one, anyway. Let me inside, and I’ll tell you how to do it.”

  A snort came up, halfway between a growl and a belly laugh. “Fine, enter. If you feel safe enough alone in my presence, go right ahead.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded. “Are you going to violate me? Slave me out? Aren’t you supposed to be an honorable warlord or something?”

  “I’m going to honorably wring your scrawny neck, is what.”

  He slapped his hand on the button, and the door opened. Inside, Lieutenant Kelly looked around his quarters with her eyes widening in surprise.

  “Not what you were expecting?” he asked.

  “It’s clean.” She sniffed. “And it doesn’t even smell half bad.” She looked down at the polar bear skin, and her expression soured.

  “I killed it myself,” he said. “With a spear.”

  Her tone was dry. “You must be proud.”

  “Very.”

  “Honoring your Scandian ancestors.” Her eyebrow lifted. “A long, unbroken line since the days of longboats and Viking raiders.”

  “Something like that.” Svensen shifted from one foot to the other. “What is this about? Are you seriously offering an untrained, ill-conceived proposal?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a proposal. More like a command.”

  He pointed to the door, his patience ended. “Out.”

  His quarters were private, but small, and there was only one chair, near a starport that showed a bright, unglittering view of the Milky Way. A small table slid out of the wall when it was time to eat. A bed dropped from the wall next to the door that led into his tiny bathroom. Kelly ignored his command and took the chair. She leaned back and insolently crossed her legs with her hands behind her head.

  “I’ve unlocked orders,” she said. “You’ll see them next time you’re on the bridge. Signed by Admiral Drake.”

  “Drake is out past the frontier. The last subspace—”

  “Signed before Blackbeard shipped out. And countersigned by Lars Olafsen.”

  Svensen stared. “Olafsen signed off on this?”

  “Check the seal, check the stamp, check the signature. You’re mine, Svensen. Your ship is mine, your fleet is mine. You’ll see the conditions, and I’m calling them satisfied. Suspected hostile alien tech, attack on Boghammer or its fleet—both satisfied. From now on this mission is under Royal Navy command, Lieutenant Elizabeth Kelly commanding officer.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  Yet he had no reason to doubt it. Everything in her words, in her posture, in her increasing assertiveness as she’d pressed out of the torpedo room, into the general gunnery, and then begun to insinuate herself onto his deck, in her refusal to take orders or even walk the ship corridors with some respect—some damn small bit of respect—indicated that she was not, and never had been, here to simply to assist with the newly installed torpedo apparatus.

  “What do you want? What orders do you imagine giving me?”

  “You know your problem, Svensen?” Kelly said. “You’re not with the Alliance. You’re still a raider at heart. A lone star wolf in the deep. Well things have changed. We pulled your stones out of the fire. We saved the Hroom, we saved Singapore, we saved Persia—the poor, sorry bastards—and now everything is coming together. Rebuilding. Even the Ladinos and New Dutch see it, the pirates. Now we need Scandians to come through. We need men like you to come in out of the void and join us. To become civilized.”

  This was what men like Lars Olafsen didn’t understand. Albion was leading the Alliance with the strength of their economy, their factories, and their growing population, all backed by Admiral James Drake’s fleet. On the surface, it was good. Drake had made peace with his enemies, usually under threat of his cannons. He’d fought a war of extermination against the brutal, predatory Apex race. And won.

  And now he was mounting a concerted push back toward Old Earth. Trying to open broken spacelanes and find out what had happened back there. Nothing good, that was for sure. But Drake was determined to find and fix it.

  And dominate. That was the Albion way.

  Already, the Fourth Wolves were contaminated with ships like War Cry. Scandians, yes, on ships they still called “star wolves,” but with crew trained by the Royal Navy. Even yes-sirring and no-sirring each other.

  “I’ll play along, Kelly. I’ll come in out of the void, as you put it. But I’m still commander and this is still my fleet. You need to give me actual orders, not hint and insinuate. I’m a Scandian. Give it to me straight.”

  “Good.” She looked pleased. Now that the stubborn look was off her face, she wasn’t half bad to look at. Pleasant, and reasonable.

  “The first thing we’re going to do is forget the idea of making contact with the inhabitants of the planet,” she said. “The asteroid belt is rich enough for our needs. We’ll make a quiet scouting mission through the belt, see if we can find something that’s not too smashed up. Drop one of Wang’s war junks to cloak itself and keep watch while we send for a full pre-fab colony, like the kind Catarina Vargus built in the war.”

  “Sounds dull,” Svensen said.

  “It’s vital. This system may be a cul-de-sac, but too many other jump points are down, and it’s the best place we’ve got this deep into the inner frontier.”

  “Sure, fine. But why not go down to the planet for a look around first? There was a human colony there.”

  “Because they’re either dead or enslaved,” Kelly said. “They have no fleet and no space elevator.”

  “Neither did Persia when we freed it from Apex,” he pointed out. “But even after the buzzards had harvested, there were still millions on the surface. And it hasn’t taken long to get them back on their feet and working for the Alliance.”

  “Thirty-eight years,” Kelly said. “That’s a long time for the invaders to do whatever it was they set out to do.”

  “So? What does it matter who is in charge? We were going to bash a few skulls either way. Negotiate at the end of the barrel of a gun—that’s the Albion way, isn’t it? Then whoever is left, we put to work.”

  “We can’t negotiate, because the race that attacked this system is alien. And they’re not Hroom, either. They’re not really the negotiating type, from what I’ve heard.”

  He stared at her, dumbfounded, and could only managed the stupidest of questions. “What?”

  Her response was a simple smug expression, and whatever goodwill he’d felt moments earlier steamed away in hot irritation.

  She’d been holding out on him. And probably on Wang, too. Kelly had known all along that the system had been attacked, and known that an alien race was involved.

  He remembered something. “The mine that hit us coming out of the jump. Your aliens knew we were coming.”

  “That’s right. We already ran a recon mission. Unfortunately, that earlier expedi
tion gave itself away, and it seems that they were waiting for us to come back. That mine was their signal.”

  “So we go check out the asteroid belt and find a good base?”

  Kelly stretched wider in his chair, an assertive, dominant posture. “That’s right, Svensen. We go in quiet, find an old mine or military base, and dig in before they figure out what we’re up to.”

  It sounded impossible. Most likely, they’d get in a nasty fight. With a small fleet, against an unknown alien race.

  Suddenly, Svensen didn’t feel so bored.

  Chapter Five

  Salvation came in the form of an A-class freighter by the name of Bilbao. Ladino ship, home port of Peruano. The database said she’d been an illegal sugar runner before the last Hroom war, but legit since the king’s amnesty. Supposedly, Bilbao was carrying supplies to the rebuilding colony at Persia.

  Tolvern stared at the screen as the unsuspecting freighter moved at a good clip, unescorted, toward a jump point a few million miles out from the center of the system, orbiting the star opposite a hot little rock of a planet with no atmosphere.

  Carrying supplies, are you? Two jumps beyond the inner frontier?

  Blackbeard’s instruments were still damaged, and the viewscreen on the makeshift bridge couldn’t bring Bilbao into proper resolution, but Tolvern knew the freighter’s type, knew what type of crew she carried. Smugglers and mercenaries—probably some of Blackbeard’s more unsavory crew members knew them personally.

  “No sign they know we’re following,” Smythe said.

  “Let’s keep it that way.”

  “What do you think?” she asked Capp. “Will they play along if we ask nicely?”

  The assistant pilot slash first mate snorted and ran a hand along her scalp, which was getting shaggy and in need of another buzz.

  “Ain’t likely, is it?”

  “A little bluff then, a missile or two. Maybe knock their hull with the deck gun,” Tolvern added, “just to show we’re serious.”

  “That’s what we’d do if we had good engines,” Capp said with a nod. “Chase her down and disable her and take what we needed, yeah? But the way I figure it, if that freighter makes a run for it we’ll either have to take her out or let her go. Check out these engine specs.”

  Bilbao had good engines, all right. Two Hermes-class plasma engines. Guns, too. A ship built to run the lawless Ladino and New Dutch worlds, carrying sugar to the Hroom and Hroom slaves back to the big plantations on Hot Barsa and elsewhere.

  That trade was gone. The slaves had been freed, and although the sugar trade wasn’t entirely done away with, it was crippled by the sugar antidote and the rebuilding Hroom empire. With the Hroom cooperating—led by General Mose Dryz—Singapore holding down the far frontier, and the Scandians coming around, that put the squeeze on worlds like Peruano, Leopold, and San Pablo, who’d thrived on the semi-lawless outer frontier.

  But there were still a lot of smugglers out there. A ship like Bilbao did its best to avoid navy patrols, and used her guns when subterfuge, bluffing, and her powerful engines couldn’t keep her out of fights.

  Nothing to match HMS Blackbeard, of course. Were she healthy. Which she was not.

  “I’m worried she’ll see our damage and figure out what we want,” Tolvern said. She turned to Ping, who worked the defense grid computer. “Get with the gunnery and tell them to ready the chase gun with disabling shot, assuming we get that close. I want it ready to go.”

  Then she called Barker—presently working in engineering—and told him what she wanted.

  “I won’t bring that number two online,” he said in his characteristic grumble. “I won’t. That last push did her in, and until we see the yards—”

  “I’m not asking you about the number two engine. I just want to know if the number three is going to hold. We need to squeeze more acceleration out of her to overtake the freighter before she hits the jump.”

  She imagined Barker’s walrus mustache twitching and the oaths the old salt was muttering under his breath.

  “We’ll damage the engine doing it,” he said.

  “I understand. I just want to know if it’s possible.”

  “Oh, it’s possible. Just like it was possible to get through that last jump knowing we were going to wreck the number two. We blew her wide, all right. Full plasma dump. Didn’t know we’d cripple the number three at the same time. All that for one more jump.”

  “One jump closer to home.”

  “And you got it. Now you won’t get another.”

  “That’s why I need this freighter.”

  “Five weeks, Captain. That’s what you asked me, to keep her running that long. Well, now we’re at eight weeks since the fight, and Blackbeard can’t take any more. We’ve got so many blown gaskets and valves. Hoses held together with homemade glue. Wires stripped from one system and spliced into another, leaving both of them rubbish.”

  She waited while Barker played out his rant. He was chief of both engineering and the gunnery now—had she forgotten?—and had put his crews through long shifts all these weeks. He’d drawn marines out of stasis and trained them to swing a hammer and turn a wrench.

  After a while she grew impatient. “Are you done?”

  “Not yet. I haven’t run a striker patrol in three weeks. The brawler gave up her engine so I could run fire control. Sent out a man to work a damaged sensor array, and a gravity burp threw him into space. Killed the poor fool.”

  “Barker, we’ve lost forty-two crew,” she said quietly. “Thirty more injured in stasis, and I can’t do a damn thing for them because we lost medical.”

  “I know it.” His tone softened. “And don’t I know we want the admiral and the rest of them somewhere we can get them patched up.”

  “What I want to know is if the number three will hold until we run these pirates down.”

  He grunted. “I don’t know, Captain. I’m being straight with you, I really have no idea. I can nudge and see what happens, shut her down if the numbers don’t look right.”

  “Let me rephrase that,” Tolvern said. “We’re pushing that engine. If we don’t, we’ll be sitting here, crippled and leaking and crossing our fingers anyway. We can’t jump, we don’t have enough power to send a subspace to beg for help. I need that freighter.”

  Minutes later, they were increasing their acceleration, drawing closer to Bilbao, on a course to overtake her an hour short of the jump, just when the freighter began warming her warp point engine. So far the other ship hadn’t detected Blackbeard, coming in from behind, riding her wake.

  Maybe it would be easier to simply hail Bilbao and explain their need. Carrot and stick: good Albion coin if they complied, Royal Navy firepower if they didn’t.

  Except when Bilbao saw their crippled engines, revved her own, and took off, what could Tolvern do about it? Only the stick was left, and not even that if they didn’t get closer to the action.

  “Call the colonel,” she told Capp. “I want thirty marines thawed and ready to go.”

  #

  Bilbao kept cruising along, happy and oblivious, until Blackbeard was nearly upon her. The battle cruiser was very nearly off the freighter’s port as both ships hurtled toward the jump point at five percent the speed of light.

  Barker and his crew were sending messages from the engine room with increasingly dire warnings. Finally, he called and said he was shutting down the number three in ten minutes and burping plasma. If he didn’t, the whole thing would burst and turn HMS Blackbeard into a small, very bright and very hot point of light that would burn for oh, about a thirtieth of a second, and then go nova.

  “Drop cloaks,” she said. “Fire warning shot.”

  Cloaks dropped, the bombproofs retracted, and the gunnery exposed cannon, torpedo, and missile arrays. A pair of missiles streaked in front of Bilbao and detonated. She began to turn, and her own cloaks dropped, exposing her guns. Tolvern ordered the chase gun crew to ready for action.

  Capp had sent out
a demand to stand down and come to the instant the warning shots went out, with a Royal Navy code to back it up, so Bilbao’s crew already knew that a big Albion warship was challenging them. The inner frontier was technically a war zone, even though Apex had been smashed, and if Tolvern’s subspace to the admiralty had done its job, anyone out here should be well aware that the navy was stirred up again.

  In other words, hardly a surprise that Bilbao would be challenged two systems out from Persia. And yet at the same time, it was reasonable for a ship of any kind to be cautious, to expect a trap, rather than simply throwing up its hands and obeying orders.

  Under normal circumstances, it would be reasonable to trail for a bit, exchange messages, let the other bridge have a conversation, size up Blackbeard’s big guns, and figure out who they were dealing with. And decide, quite reasonably, that full compliance was the wise course of action.

  But Tolvern couldn’t fiddle her thumbs waiting for them to take the wise course of action. The warning shots and demand for compliance had been a feint, designed to buy a few seconds of surprise.

  “Send the boarding party.”

  Blackbeard fired her harpoons, snaring the freighter, and marines shot across on boarding rockets. Tolvern chewed her lower lip while she waited for the first update. Moments passed, and Colonel Tibbs and his men penetrated the ship. There was shooting.

  Two, maybe three minutes passed, and then it was over. Tibbs had Bilbao’s captain, they had the bridge. Others were throwing down their weapons. No casualties on her side, either, thank God. Only a couple of smugglers gunned down when they didn’t surrender fast enough for the colonel’s tastes. Regrettable.

  Bilbao slowed, Blackbeard, too. Tolvern ordered the ships brought together and the entirety of Bilbao’s crew brought over in cuffs. Once they were done stripping the smuggler ship for parts, Tolvern intended to blow the remnant into tiny little pieces.

  #

  Tolvern was already getting bad news from Barker when Tibbs brought the captain of the smuggler onto the makeshift bridge, hands cuffed behind his back, and turned him over to Lieutenant Capp, who took custody with a toothy grin.