“They’re not strong enough,” Barker said over the com.
“You’re sure?”
“I can get us to ninety-six, no more. We’ve got too much mass.”
“How about when you’ve got the number three repaired?”
“I’m accounting for that,” he said. “The number three—assuming it can be done, plus Bilbao’s two Hermes-class engines. We still fail. The warp point engine leaves four percent.”
Meaning that ninety-six percent of the atoms of everything in and on Blackbeard would go through. Four percent would remain behind. Which was the same as destroying the ship and everyone on it. You couldn’t lose four percent. You couldn’t lose four thousandths of a percent.
Tolvern cast a glance at the smuggler captain and decided she was going to put him in stasis anyway so he could be brought up on charges in Albion for smuggling across the inner frontier. So it didn’t matter if he heard what she planned to do with his ship.
“We’ll deal with it later. How long until you can bring them over, dump the number two and three, and harness Bilbao’s engines?”
“No idea. I have to get over there and see what we’re talking about.”
“I want an estimate by the end of shift.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“First thing we’ll do is send a subspace. Then, if we don’t receive aid by the time we get the new engines in place, we’ll ditch the brawler and make a run for it. That should shed more than enough mass to do the trick.”
“Can’t imagine it will come to that,” Barker said. “It’s going to take three weeks, minimum, to swap in the freighter’s engines, and I figure the navy will have someone here by then, and probably bringing a couple of spare engines to pull us back home to the yards. In fact, we don’t even need new engines, just the right parts for the ones we got.”
“Three weeks? I thought you said you had no idea.”
“Aye, you dragged an estimate out of me. But don’t hold me to it.”
She ended the call and looked over Bilbao’s captain, who stood, red-faced and furious, but wisely keeping his mouth shut. Even without knowing the first thing about the battle cruiser, but coming down the lift and seeing the ship’s scars, he’d have noted that Blackbeard had been in a fight, taken casualties, and the captain would be in no mood to be gentle in her demands.
He was an older man, bald on top with a gray fringe. Dark, deep-set eyes, and a natural downward turn of the mouth that made him look grumpy, and that was before he met her gaze and scowled defiantly.
Tolvern wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but this wasn’t it. Maybe someone like Carvalho, young and brash and rough around the edges. New Dutch or Ladino, or one of those Albionish fortune seekers, often from Saxony or Mercia. You had to have guts coming all the way past Persia—itself beyond the inner frontier only a year ago—risking the wrath of the navy and possibly worse.
“Name?”
“You’re out of your mind,” he said. “Two of my crew dead, my hull pierced . . . if you’d given me a few minutes—”
Tolvern hardened her tone. “Name?”
“Acosta,” he said sullenly.
“Illegal salvage mission, is it?”
“No.”
“There’s no point in lying. The marines sent me a report. Your hull is crammed with strange tech.”
“That’s not strange tech. That’s Chinese stuff, hauled all the way from Singapore. You think I’m out here scavenging alien gear, is that it?”
“There’s plenty of it floating around. Wrecked ships and destroyed Apex bases. Disruptor fields bring good money on San Pablo. Tissue canisters, energy cannons . . . you think we’re going to let that stuff find its way to the pirates and smugglers you deal with?”
“You’ve got it all wrong. This is a supply mission. We’re legit, and I never dealt with that crap before anyway.” Acosta frowned. “What was that about a subspace message? What ship is this? Is this Blackbeard? Are you the one who sent the subspace to reinforce Persia?”
Huh? Good lord, who had leaked that?
“You are, aren’t you?” Acosta said. “Then you don’t know. Listen to me. The Persia jump point collapsed. You can’t get into the system.”
“That’s impossible. It’s a blue jump.”
“I’m telling you, it’s gone. Persia is cut off. The Second Fleet was in there when it vanished. Also, they say Dreadnought is in there, too, and the Hroom general with his sloops. About half the ships in the Alliance, they say.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you told them to reinforce Persia. They got ten thousand marines, half the merchant fleet in there, too, and no way to get them out.”
Capp made a scoffing sound. “You’re a bad liar, mate. How would you know all that?”
“Check my hold. Really check it. We were crossing Nebuchadnezzar with a shipment from Singapore when the Persia jump collapsed. I’m carrying nozzles and firing systems for Singaporean plasma ejectors. The admiralty diverted the shipment after Persia went down—that’s why I’m out here. Not scavenge.”
“Diverted to where?” Tolvern asked.
“They’ve sent expeditionary forces to flanking systems. Trying to make it harder to get through. There’s an old colony—sixty percent standard G, nobody knows if it’s occupied. We’re supposed to drop this stuff there. Don’t know who it is, or what else they got coming.”
Acosta’s story made a certain amount of sense, assuming you could buy the improbability of the Persia system being cut off. It was a cul-de-sac, one way in and out, but that jump had been stable. Still, if it had collapsed, right after Tolvern sent a message from sixteen jumps away convincing the admiralty to send reinforcements . . . yes, she guessed things would have played out as Acosta claimed. Send the fleet and marines to Persia, then establish bastions ahead of the system on the inner frontier. If an enemy came, they could slow the attack long enough to bring up more firepower from the rear.
Except if the Persia system was cut off, then only the bastions remained. It sounded like Mose Dryz was trapped in Persia, and possibly McGowan, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t direct the war efforts through subspaces, at least in a limited way, while they searched beyond the farthest reaches of Persia in the hopes of finding a jump point in the deep void between solar systems.
“What kind of enemy is it?” Acosta asked. “Everyone thinks it’s Apex. Is it Apex?”
“I don’t know. Not Apex.”
“Thank God.”
“Don’t thank Him yet,” Tolvern said. “We don’t know who they are or their intentions, only that they’re strong and that we alerted them to our presence. They saw which way we were going. We don’t know if they followed.”
“How badly are you hurt?” Acosta asked. “Your bridge is down, right? And you’ve got engine trouble? What about your guns?”
“Smythe, call security. Get Acosta into stasis.”
“Wait, I told you everything,” Acosta protested. “Why would you lock me up? And what about my crew?”
“I’ll send over my engineers. If your Singapore story holds up, your logs match, then I’ll have you back up here to talk. No cuffs. Your crew will be sent to the mess and given a few beers while we sort things out.”
“What about my bloody ship?”
“But so help me, if you’ve got one scrap of alien tech in that hold, you’re going straight out the airlock.”
“Don’t you touch my engines,” Acosta said as the door opened and two security officers entered. “I’m warning you. I have rights under the naval code, and if you think—”
The closing door cut off his words. “He’s not lying,” Tolvern decided.
Capp scratched her scalp. “How you figure, Cap’n?”
“He wasn’t worried at all when I said that about the airlock, only concerned about his ship.”
“Could be bluffing still,” Capp said.
“Could be, but I don’t think so.” Tolvern returned to her chair and eyed Pi
ng at the defense grid computer. “Ensign, can you identify parts from a plasma ejector?”
“Yes, Captain,” Ping said crisply. “I was trained in plasma nozzle assembly when I was posted on a sentinel battle station. We had built in redundancy and plenty of time for cross-training.”
“Get yourself over to Bilbao, open that hold, and confirm that Acosta is telling the truth.”
She wasn’t a hundred percent sure yet, but more and more she thought she’d pegged Acosta wrong and that his story would hold up, but where did that leave her? All she’d thought about was getting her ship and crew back to friendly territory in one piece.
About getting her husband out of stasis and into a proper medical facility, and hope to God his burns weren’t fatal. Having him frozen in there, no way to know the extent of it, was a weight around her heart these past eight weeks, a dull, throbbing worry that flared up in the small hours of the night, leaving her heart pounding in fear that she’d lost him and just didn’t know it yet.
Word came back about ten minutes later, when Ping called from Bilbao’s hold. Yes, it was Singaporean hardware, not only nozzles and firing systems, but enough material to build two full plasma ejector weapon systems. Ship logs and manifests further confirmed Acosta’s story. Lieutenant Capp still held that both logs and manifests could be faked, and even came up with a couple of semi-plausible explanations for what Bilbao might be doing with military hardware out beyond Persia.
“It’s easy to pull off,” Capp said. “Did it all the time to fool the navy. We was pirates ourselves for a stretch there, yeah?”
She almost had Tolvern convinced until Smythe tracked down Captain Acosta in the navy database. Turned out that Bilbao’s smuggling, slaving past from before the wars had nothing to do with him or his crew. Bilbao had been shot up while running guns for Lord Malthorne’s rebellion, sold for scrap-level prices in the San Pablo yards, and bought by Acosta’s operation, which was semi-legit. His only violations were minor things like not paying duties and failing to report the location of known pirates.
She was debating how to handle Acosta and the other fourteen captured merchant crew when Barker called the bridge. He’d connected the subspace communicator to Bilbao’s engines, and could send communication back to the fleet as soon as she was ready.
Captain Tolvern now had a major decision to make.
Chapter Six
“I have one question for you, Acosta,” Tolvern asked. “Are you a troublemaker?”
Bilbao’s captain remained just inside the doorway, expression drawn into a suspicious frown. He glanced around her quarters, at the small private bathroom and kitchen, at the tiny nook and office next to the viewport. It showed the copper-colored gas giant around which they orbited, its glittering rings in an oblique position relative to Blackbeard and Bilbao, which were still tethered together. The brawler screened them a few dozen miles out.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Please answer the question.”
“How long was I down, and what have you done to my ship?”
“You were in stasis less than a day. Just long enough to tow you here. It’s a better hiding place than dangling out there by the jump point.”
“You stole my engines, didn’t you?” His jaw was clenching and unclenching. “You’re going to shed mass and go through.”
Tolvern sighed. “That’s what I was afraid of. You are a troublemaker.”
“Bilbao is everything to me, everything to my crew. We’re a joint venture, and we’ve put every shilling we own into her, plus some. When you gut our ship and blow her up, we’ll be left with nothing. Why don’t you just send me back down to stasis, freeze me, and never wake me up?”
Tempting. Stasis, that was. She could bring Acosta and his crew back out whenever they figured out what to do about Drake, Nyb Pim, and the other injured crew.
“Here’s my problem, Acosta. I’m down seventy-two crew, dead and injured. I’ve got marines in some of those spots, but you can’t just grab someone, throw him in sensors or fire control or nav, and expect him to know what he’s doing.” She gestured toward the viewport, indicating that he sit across from her.
“No, I won’t.”
“I don’t have a war room—that went down with the bridge—and this is a conversation I want to have in private. Won’t you sit down for a minute and be reasonable?”
“I mean no, I won’t give you my crew. I want my ship back, and I want to be sent on my way. I’ll take back injured crew if you want, and if the navy pays me to return with gear or ammo or whatever you need, I’ll do that, too. Assuming they give me proper escort—things are getting ugly.”
“I need your ship and I need your crew.”
“You can take the ship by force, but you can’t force my crew to work for you.”
“Force? What are you talking about? Who said anything about force? And who said you wouldn’t get your ship back eventually? And with adequate compensation, too.”
He gave her a hard look. She kept her expression firm, but open, trying to appear trustworthy, even knowing there was something disingenuous about her suggestion.
“Did you send a subspace?” he asked. “You must have. And did the admiralty respond?”
“Don’t you want to have a seat and discuss this?”
“Not really. I want answers to my questions.”
She put steel into her voice. “You’re not getting them. This is a military operation, and I have military decisions to make. Those kinds of decisions are the reason you’re standing in front of me right now and not on an Apex harvester, waiting to be slaughtered and fed to an Apex queen commander. Because people like me made the hard decisions.”
This seemed to stop him.
“I asked you a question,” she continued in the same tone, “and you never gave me an answer. Are you a troublemaker?”
“No, I am not a troublemaker.”
“Are there troublemakers on your ship?”
“No. Well . . . I have a couple of young guys who need supervision. Hotheads.”
“I won’t have them picking fights in the mess.”
“Not the kind to pick fights, but if someone else does the picking, these two are the kind who will jump in swinging.”
“Give me names,” Tolvern said. “I’ll bring them up last.”
“Are all my crew in stasis?”
“I’ll bring them out and give them their freedom if you’ll vouch for their character, promise you’ll keep them in line.”
“I can do that. And what would you have us do?” He still sounded suspicious, but the hostility was gone.
“Shadow my crew to earn your keep, learn their jobs. I’ve got crew who have been pulling sixteen hour shifts daily for eight weeks. Nobody can keep that up forever, not even Hroom. If you’ve got skilled personnel to fill in . . . I’ll put together an offer once I see what your people can do. It will include pay, and you’ll get your ship back at the end.”
He grunted. “Unless you get us killed.”
“That’s always a hazard in deep space, whether you’re facing aliens or not.”
“Did the aliens track you here?” Acosta asked. “Is that what the navy told you? I know you sent a subspace, and I know you got an answer. Why won’t you tell me?”
“I haven’t even shared the contents of the subspace with my first mate yet. Do you think I’d tell you before her?” Tolvern pointed to the door. “That is all. Find Barker in the engine room. He needs your services.”
Acosta grimaced, no doubt thinking of his engines. “I’ll bet he does.”
He stared at her for a long moment, no doubt weighing his chances. A military vessel on the frontier, a hardened captain and crew who would do what it took to win a fight, but had an honorable reputation at the same time. Finally, he gave a curt nod and turned to go. Tolvern breathed a sigh of relief as the marine outside the doors fell in beside him and led him away.
If Smythe’s research into Acosta’s records was right, th
e man would have no slouchers on his crew. They were experienced men and women with their own money down on Bilbao and her ventures. And if there was anything Tolvern knew about people like that, they couldn’t bear sitting still. The rest of Acosta’s crew would follow his lead and cooperate.
Tolvern made a few calls. Capp and Carvalho showed up a few minutes later, followed by Science Officer Brockett, who still wore his lab coat and his goggles propped carelessly on top of his head. Smythe had been off shift, and was the last to arrive, eyes bleary and looking none too pleased.
Her quarters, which had seemed so spacious since Drake went down and she was no longer sharing, suddenly felt crowded. Smythe and Brockett took the seats at the viewport niche, Capp grabbed a chair from the kitchen and turned it around to lean her forearms against the seat back, and Carvalho lounged on the floor.
“There’s another chair in the kitchen,” Tolvern said dryly.
“I can’t sit, Captain,” he said. “Not after fourteen hours folded up in the falcon.”
Tolvern had almost forgotten that she’d kept her striker force in continuous patrol while hauling Bilbao toward the gas giant. She’d had no crew on the captured frigate, and not enough people on duty to effectively operate the brawler, but her striker crew, including Carvalho, had been just coming on shift and had been well rested. Had been. The man deserved to stretch his limbs on the floor.
“Stay as you are,” she told him.
Tolvern remained standing and rubbed her hands together. She paced the small space, stepping over Carvalho’s legs and glancing out the viewport at the gas giant as she passed it. She took a deep breath before speaking.
“I got a subspace from the admiralty. It wasn’t what I was expecting.”
The others were instantly alert, even Smythe, who cut off a yawn and leaned in.
Tolvern’s own subspace that had drawn the response had been terse, but not nearly as short as the one sent from deep across the inner frontier eight weeks earlier. It only had to cross couple of systems, after all. She’d packed it with information:
Disabled, can’t jump. Will strip Bilbao for engines barring relief from fleet. Est. 3 wks to jump. Must abandon brawler. Enemy unknown alien race.
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