Starship Blackbeard

by Michael Wallace

  “What do you think, Commander?” Drake asked Tolvern. “Coincidence? I didn’t expect to run into someone way out here beyond Fantalus’s gas giants.”

  “Yes, I think coincidence,” she said. “On their way out of the system after doing . . . well, whatever ugly business they were about. If we were any smaller, they’d turn on us, but they’d be a fool to tangle with a cruiser of our size and strength.”

  “We could ignore her. Hold back, let her make the jump, then come in after her.”

  “By now they’ve identified our ship class at least,” Tolvern said. “And if the pirates don’t know we’re outlaws ourselves, they’ll be pissing themselves trying to get to that jump point in time.”

  “I’ve got it!” Smythe exclaimed, looking up from his computer. “It’s the Captain Kidd. Plasma signature matches exactly.”

  Captain Kidd? That didn’t mean anything to Tolvern except as the name of the Old Earth pirate. But Ajax hadn’t been in the position of hunting down pirate ships. They’d been off warring against real enemies for the past two years.

  “Fairly notorious,” Drake said. He apparently knew more than she did. “Captain Kidd mixed it up with HMS Richmond last year. Richmond got the worst of it.”

  Tolvern didn’t think much of Richmond or her crew, but it showed that this pirate ship wasn’t afraid to tackle solitary ships of the Royal Navy. She’d have relished the thought of bagging the prize under other circumstances. But after the mauling at the hands of Vigilant a couple of days earlier, she was no longer so confident. What if the pirates weren’t pissing themselves, but preparing to circle around and give battle? What would Ajax be worth? She’d make a terrific pirate ship in the wrong hands. Surely the pirate captain wouldn’t be so foolish as to make the attempt.

  “Tolvern?” Drake said.

  “I hate to linger in the system,” she said. “For all we know, Vigilant spotted us jumping out of Barsa and came after us. And if Rutherford has called for reinforcements, we might be facing a full task force in a day or two.”

  “We’re not exactly ready for battle against the pirates, either,” he said. “Are there any other jump points we can find in the system?”

  “We can’t let the pirates get away,” Capp said, her voice high and excited. “What if they’ve heard of us? They’d sell us out to the fleet, you know they would.”

  That was one more good point, Tolvern conceded, even as she was irritated that the subpilot was speaking out of place.

  “That only matters if we stay in the system,” Drake said. “Once we’re gone, it doesn’t matter if we’ve been identified or not.”

  “Captain Kidd is accelerating,” Smythe said.

  “What’s her jump speed at estimated mass?” Tolvern asked.

  “Point-oh-eight-two, plus or minus a thousand.”

  “Slower than us, sir,” she told the captain.

  That was a chancy assumption. The speed needed to jump through space was a function of the mass and shape of the ship and how tight or loose the jump point itself was. It was not altogether linear, and of course, there were other factors involved than jump speed in how one might select engine power. A pirate ship might have larger-than-required engines so that it could outrun other vessels, either to overtake them in attack or flee when overmatched. But Ajax had been built with similar considerations.

  “Bring us up to point-oh-six,” Drake said. “Let’s see what Captain Kidd does.”

  Tolvern thumbed the command on her console. Moments later, Barker called up from the engine rooms, as she’d known he would, demanding to know why she’d called for more power to the engines. They were still a long way out from the jump. She told him the situation. He grumbled at this.

  “Put Barker on the bridge channel,” Drake said.

  She obeyed. The engineer’s gravely voice came through for the others to hear.

  “Captain, you there? I don’t care for the thought of another fight so soon, and I’m not afraid to say it.”

  “Explain yourself, Barker,” Drake said.

  “Don’t need much explaining. Shields won’t stand the abuse, and I could use about ten more crew down here for the weapons systems.”

  “We’re not fighting Vigilant,” Drake said. “It’s a pirate ship.”

  Barker grunted. “I know it. And if this were Vigilant, I’d say it was suicide, but pirates or no, I don’t care for it one bit.”

  “So we’re incapable of fighting?” Drake asked. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  Now Barker sounded more hesitant. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

  “We need your exact status,” Tolvern said. She understood that the captain appreciated an unvarnished opinion, but the engineer’s equivocating grated on her. “Can you fight or not?”

  Barker grunted. “Well, guns are back on their carriages, and we have sufficient ordnance for a fight so long as it doesn’t carry on too long. Responses will be sluggish, given how we’re undermanned.”

  “We’re a million miles out,” Drake said. “There’s a bit of time yet. But get your men and women out of bed. Anyone you need. I want you on full standby in ten minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There’s another consideration,” Tolvern told the captain when Barker was offline. “We’ve been racing around for a couple weeks now without putting into port. The scoops have been collecting hydrogen while we’re at cruising speed, but it hasn’t replaced more than fifteen percent of what we’re burning. We accelerate to jump speed now, and we might be running on fumes in a few days.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that possibility,” Drake said. “We might come limping into San Pablo.”

  “Captain Kidd is accelerating,” Smythe said. “She’s trying to outrun us.”

  “Just what I thought,” Drake said with a smile.

  There was something cunning in that smile, and Tolvern suddenly knew that she wasn’t privy to all his thoughts. He was scheming. That he had any sort of plan at all gave her renewed hope.

  “Hail the ship,” Drake said. “I have a proposal to put to our pirate friends.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Captain Nigel Rutherford took Vigilant down through Albion’s atmosphere. The ship shuddered and bucked like an unbroken horse with a rider on its back. He stared out the window at the surface as it came rushing up. The continent of Britain peeled away from Australia, and soon he could see mountains, lakes, and rivers resolving themselves. Finally, the wide, fertile York Plain, golden with autumn wheat from horizon to horizon.

  The plain ended at Lake Huron, the nearest of the Great Lakes. It was daytime, and there was cloud cover to the east, so he didn’t immediately pick out York Town. Then he saw the skyscrapers of the Kingdom Towers in the center of the city, the downtown area curving in an arc along the banks of the St. Lawrence, with bridges running back and forth across the river.

  The royal palace and its vast estates lay between the west bank of the river and the forests stretching to a distant mountain range on the north. It was a huge wooded parkland almost the size of the city itself, thousands upon thousands of acres.

  The Punisher-class cruisers were the largest naval ships capable of landing planetside. Unlike a carrier, or the great battleship Dreadnought, which was built to brawl with enemies in space, Vigilant and her sister ships Ajax and Churchill were occasionally called on to engage air forces inside a planet’s atmosphere. They could disgorge marines in the middle of a hostile city, while bombarding the enemy with cannon and missile, a laser tracing a scorching ray back and forth until the city was aflame.

  But it took a hardened carbon fiber and tyrillium surface to withstand the tremendous heat of her plasma engines upon takeoff and landing. Had he attempted to land at York’s commercial port, he’d have melted the tarmac. And so Rutherford ordered them to approach from the south toward the military spaceport some thirty miles distant from the palace and fifty miles outside the city.

  A strange, unpleasant sensation
settled deep in Rutherford’s bones as the ship powered down upon landing, the pull and tug of natural gravity for the first time in months. In space, the anti-grav systems kept the bones from eroding, but real gravity was a different sensation. It felt like his bones were shifting in place.

  You’re going to feel some serious shifting if you’re not careful.

  His bones might shift right out of their sockets when they hoisted him by his wrists for a flogging. His neck bones might shift when he dangled from a rope, a noose about his throat.

  #

  Rutherford stepped onto the tarmac, where the air was so hot that it seemed to suck the breath from his lungs. It radiated through his boots, nearly cooking his feet inside. Only gradually did the crisp autumn breeze drive away the heat left by Vigilant’s engines. It carried the scent of forest, something he hadn’t smelled in a long time but that seemed so green and welcoming he thought a desire for it must be written into his very DNA.

  A military vehicle painted the red and gold of Albion came rolling toward where he stood. As ordered, he was alone, without so much as a staff officer to accompany him. He’d told Pittsfield that the crew had been commanded to go through standard decontamination procedures. Pittsfield’s raised eyebrow showed how much he believed that particular story. They hadn’t been planetside, so there was no point in decontamination.

  The vehicle pulled to a stop, and two naval police officers jumped out. They had side arms and grim expressions. The lead man saluted, which eased Rutherford’s fears that he was under arrest. Nevertheless, he was hardly at ease, given the circumstances.

  “Captain Rutherford?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come along. The admiral is waiting.”

  Once he was inside the lorry, it raced across the tarmac toward the gates of the spaceport. There were guard towers and checkpoints, but they were not challenged and soon reached the open road beyond. The lorry joined civilian traffic for a stretch, then turned onto another military road. A mag-lev rushed by to their left, the entire train appearing and vanishing in an instant. After driving through the countryside for about an hour, they passed through a small town of two-story, red brick houses, each tucked one against the other, before turning onto a country lane. A gate soon blocked their passage. The driver showed his credentials, and an armed guard opened the gate and waved them through.

  They drove another twenty minutes through a large estate with fields, stables, and a pair of tenant villages, tidy but modest, and then drove through another checkpoint before they approached the manor house itself.

  Sitting on a rise at the heart of Lord Malthorne’s estate, the manor was like a small palace itself, with two huge wings spreading out from the looming central part of the house to embrace a courtyard. Walled gardens and carefully cultivated woodland walks stretched toward a small artificial lake. A small island lay in the center, topped by what looked like a Greek temple. Beyond the lake lay a vast woodland, which also belonged to the lord admiral. The property was some hundred thousand acres, but Rutherford knew it was only a fraction the size of the vast sugar plantations Malthorne held on Hot Barsa and Setoom.

  The naval police sent Rutherford out of the lorry and walking toward the front door, while they remained behind. He stood alone at the ten-foot, double oak doors, and when they didn’t open of their own accord, lifted the brass knocker and let it fall with a boom.

  A butler in coat and tails gestured him into a vast open foyer with a curved marble staircase sweeping to the second floor, then another elegantly dressed servant brought him into a two-story library that smelled of pipe smoke and old books. He accepted an offer of tea and sat next to a large globe of Old Earth. He turned it idly while sipping his tea, noting how comically small were the original British Islands that all Albionish claimed as their ancestral home. At least some of the other homelands—America, Canada, and Australia—looked like they had some heft to them.

  “It is beautiful,” Admiral Malthorne said, coming into the room. “The most beautiful planet you will ever see.”

  Rutherford sprang to his feet and saluted. “Old Earth? There was some sort of war, wasn’t there?”

  “King Hubert used to dream of sending a fleet back to the home system. Unite all of humanity.” It wasn’t an answer to Rutherford’s question. “His son is more practical. We have troubles enough in our own neighborhood without setting off on fanciful adventures.”

  “Have you been, my lord?”

  “Yes, I have. Or to the Earth system, anyway. I never landed on Earth itself.”

  Malthorne took the opposite chair. The globe sat atop a small, oak accent table, and the admiral now opened its drawer and pulled out a pipe and a tin of tobacco. He pressed tobacco into the pipe, packed it with a silver tamper, then finished filling it. A moment later, he was puffing.

  Before Vigilant’s final approach, Rutherford had taken care to have his dress uniform ironed. He’d put on his ribbons and tassels and made sure the buttons on his vest were polished. He greased his hair and parted it in the middle. Current fashion was a close-shaved head, but the officers of the Royal Navy were more conservative, and he was glad he’d been too pressed to cut it recently. It fell in slick curls over his ears.

  But now he felt overdressed. The admiral was not in uniform at all, but wore a smoking jacket and riding trousers, with polished, knee-high boots. He had the look of a man who had stopped in for a quick pipe before changing his jacket and taking his horse and dogs out for a hunt.

  “It was about twenty years ago,” Malthorne continued between puffs. “The king sent me with a task force to see the lay of the land, so to speak. It’s no easy journey—there’s a vast, lawless swath of systems between here and there, plus a star going nova to get around. We fought off pirates and petty warlords. One charted jump had collapsed, and we ran out of fuel getting to the next. Becalmed for three weeks while we scooped hydrogen. Rations ran low, not helped by an infestation of rats. It was only when we had resorted to eating the little blighters that we put down the infestation.”

  Rutherford had never heard of this expedition. “What did you discover, my lord?”

  “At Earth?” Malthorne smiled. “That is classified.”

  “I see.”

  And now the admiral’s face hardened. “You failed, Captain. And failed badly.”

  Rutherford looked down at his tea. The mug was cooling in his hands. “Yes, my lord.”

  “Drake has escaped. Again. You destroyed Henry Upton against direct orders.”

  “No, my lord. I never received them until it was too late. We returned at once. The ship broke apart before we could haul her in.”

  “Which would not have been a problem if you had defeated Ajax to begin with.”

  “My lord—”

  Malthorne waved his hand dismissively. “I’ve read the report, seen the footage. You had Ajax in your grasp. Her shields were down, you could have finished her easily.”

  “But that’s when you ordered me to turn around!”

  “I grow weary of your excuses, Captain. You were given excellent information, you knew how to trap the enemy. Yet you still failed.”

  Rutherford sat silently stewing at this. He hadn’t been given information; those were things he’d figured out for himself. What’s more, Malthorne had sent away the fleet before the engagement. The intention had been to lure Drake into a trap. In reality, it helped the man escape.

  “It was only a slaver,” Rutherford said. “I don’t think it’s any great loss.”

  “Oh, you don’t? Then it’s a good thing your duty is not to think but to obey.”

  What was the admiral going on about? Since when was a captain of the Royal Navy not allowed to think? It’s why he’d thrashed the Hroom sloops of war at Ypis III and again in the Battle of Kif Lagoon. In that second engagement, he and Drake had been outnumbered four to one by the enemy. But the Hroom commanders had been ponderous, inflexible. When conditions changed, the two Albion captains had more deftly al
tered their battle plans and won a smashing victory as a result.

  “Was there something important about that particular slaver?” Rutherford asked. “Besides Drake’s pilot being on board, I mean?”

  “Yes. Obviously.”

  Rutherford waited for the admiral to elaborate, but the man sat brooding without speaking. Pipe smoke wreathed his scowling face.

  Rutherford was growing more confused by the minute. If whatever the slaver carried was so important, why had it been traveling without an escort? Why had Malthorne sent off the naval resources in the Barsa system? They could have come in to rescue Henry Upton while Vigilant chased down and destroyed Ajax. For that matter, why summon Rutherford to the Malthorne estates? Why not speak on the admiral’s flagship in orbit? Or bring down the young captain himself, while leaving Vigilant in space?

  Never mind. That wasn’t his responsibility. Thinking in the moment yes, but questioning naval strategy? No, that was not his duty.

  “I’ve been turning my thoughts to what Drake might do next,” Rutherford said hesitantly.

  “Yes?” The other man’s tone was dull, disinterested.

  “He has his pilot. According to survivors from Henry Upton, this particular Hroom—”

  “There were survivors? Why was this not in the report?”

  “I didn’t think it worth mentioning, my lord. We took fewer than twenty on board, and most were Hroom. I sent them on to Hot Barsa, together with the wreckage.”

  Now Malthorne sat up straight. “How much wreckage?”

  “Two big chunks of the hull. The engines seemed like they could be salvaged, and I thought the York Company would want their logs and the like. It was probably a waste of time, but—”

  Malthorne sprang to his feet and hurried from the room. Rutherford stared at the admiral’s pipe, smoldering on its tray where the man had left it. Now that was curious. Whatever, or whoever, had been on that ship sure had the admiral agitated.