Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3)

by Michael Wallace

  “I can’t offer an alliance. I’m a renegade, a declared pirate, and Lord Malthorne is determined to start another war.”

  “He has already started it.”

  “I know. And I can’t stop him,” Drake said. “So I can’t offer you an alliance.”

  “That is good, because I cannot offer an alliance, either. Neither can the empress, not at this time. And it is not the war with Albion that prevents it, though that is a part.”

  “Because there’s another war, isn’t there? A Hroom civil war, that’s what I’ve heard. Is it true?”

  “There is always a civil war,” Mose Dryz said. “Since humans arrived and gave us sugar, there is always some part or other of the empire in rebellion. But this time, it is different.”

  “What is happening this time?” Drake asked.

  Mose Dryz stood silently for a long moment, looking contemplative. When he finally spoke, he didn’t answer the question. “There is something else I can give you in trade.”

  “I didn’t ask for trade, you understand that? This is a gift. Perhaps you will remember this down the road, but I give it to you freely.”

  “So you have said.” The Hroom turned his deep, liquid gaze to Brockett. “You are clearly a skilled scientist, and perhaps you can make something more of this than we have. A tissue sample—can you . . . how do you say . . . ?” He said something to Nyb Pim.

  “He wants to know if you can sequence a genetic code.” Nyb Pim said.

  “Of course,” Brockett said. “I’m a geneticist by trade, and Blackbeard has a great lab, all the tools I need.”

  “What kind of tissue sample?” Drake asked.

  “How do you call them? Apex? Yes, two samples from enemies killed in battle. Our people are working on them, too, but so far we have made little progress. So if your scientist thinks he can make something of them, I will share.”

  Brockett’s eyes lit up. “I’ll sure try. Yeah, this is great. Happy to tell you what I find, too, if the captain will let me.”

  “We’ll make of it what we can,” Drake told the general. “If we find anything useful, we’ll let you know.”

  “Very well. I will send you back with the samples. I suppose that is all. You may return to your pod now.”

  Mose Dryz turned as if to go, then hesitated, as if he wanted to say something else.

  “Yes, General?” Drake asked.

  Again, silence. Brockett opened his mouth, as if something had just occurred to him about the tissue samples, but Drake lifted a hand to hush him. Let the general think, let him fill the silence himself.

  “I should not tell you this,” Mose Dryz said at last. “But these people are my enemies, as well as yours.”

  “Apex?” Drake asked.

  “No, not Apex. A Hroom faction. They must not succeed, or their next step will be to destroy me and all Hroom who think as I do.”

  “Succeed in what?”

  “There is a death cult in the empire navy,” Mose Dryz said, “worshipers of the dark wanderer, the god of death.”

  Drake thought back to the temple platform outside Malthorne’s estate on Hot Barsa. “Lyam Kar. Yes, I’ve heard of the god of death. This is his prayer room, right?”

  “Yes? Then you know he is a jealous god. He preserves those who honor him and destroys those who do not. The Hroom people have dishonored their most important god—this is what the death cult says—and they wish to cleanse our worlds. They will put all of the sugar eaters to death, for a start. Do you know how many millions, how many billions would die? More than Albion has ever killed or could dream of killing.”

  “You could kill all the eaters, but sugar would still exist,” Drake said. “Someone would smuggle more in, and it would start all over again.”

  “That is why they will also destroy the sugar worlds. Hot Barsa, San Pablo, Antilles. And of course, the biggest sugar world of them all. It does not grow sugar itself, but it is the heart of the trade and the source of the cult’s anger.”

  Drake stared. “You mean Albion.”

  “Yes.” Mose Dryz held his gaze. “This is what I offer you in trade, Captain James Drake. A warning. The death cult means to destroy Albion. They have assembled a massive fleet of sloops of war and loaded them with fissile material. It is a one-way mission—they do not intend to return. They do not wish to fight your navy or battle your orbital forts, they will aim at your home world and bomb it.”

  “Disseminate the antidote,” Drake said. “That will undercut this cult. They’ll have no reason to kill sugar eaters, and no cause to attack Albion with a suicide fleet.”

  “It is too late for that. They have already left. They cannot be contacted or recalled. Nobody must know their course, because they must arrive via the most circuitous route possible to lessen the chance that they will be detected by your Royal Navy before they enter the Albion system. But when they arrive, they mean to turn Albion into a radioactive wasteland.”

  Chapter Three

  HMS Vigilant was only an hour from her last jump point and still accelerating when she drew the attention of a hungry star leviathan. Captain Nigel Rutherford had just gone down for his sleep cycle when they recalled him urgently to the bridge, and by the time he’d thrown on a uniform and rushed to the helm, the leviathan had homed in on the cruiser’s plasma engines and was giving chase.

  Commander Pittsfield was in the captain’s chair, but he sprang to his feet with a look of relief and moved aside for Rutherford to take the helm. The leviathan stretched across the viewscreen, the body eight hundred yards long with ropy tentacles stretching several miles behind it. Violet plasma vented from its nozzle.

  “How the devil did this happen?” Rutherford demanded, glaring at Tech Officer Norris, one of Malthorne’s loyalists. Sweeping a system for star leviathans was routine upon coming out of a jump.

  “He says that he looked,” Pittsfield said dryly, “but he claims to not have found anything.”

  “It was lurking in that gas giant,” Norris protested. “It must have been dormant. We can’t pick them up when they’re dormant, you know that.”

  “Right, of course, it was dormant,” Rutherford said sarcastically. “So it popped out of its dormant state and fired up its nozzle. Just like that.” He narrowed his eyes and glared until Norris looked away. “This one was awake and lurking. You missed it.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Scan its belly. Let’s see how hungry it is.”

  Norris brought the viewscreen to a higher resolution. A closer inspection confirmed that it was in its feeding state. When dormant, a leviathan tucked in all its parts until it looked like a fat, bloated whale, but when it entered its feeding state, it uncoiled until it resembled a monstrous squid, like a kraken from ancient legends. Once, Rutherford had been on Dreadnought when Malthorne’s battleship fought off one of the monsters. A tentacle had pierced the tyrillium armor, plunged through two decks, and been hacked off by marines as it groped for fissile material. After the fight, Rutherford joined the crew in examining the severed tentacle. Six feet thick of oozing gelatinous flesh enveloped a core of wires and circuitry. Nobody knew what alien race had created the things, or to what purpose. Perhaps they’d evolved from some lower technology.

  This particular leviathan was skinny, almost emaciated. No hope that it had fed recently and would make a half-hearted attempt to haul them in. It must have come in from deep space, traveling for decades or even centuries through the void. Leviathans digested metal and plastic, but fuel, explosives, and especially fissile materials were its primary targets, and the reason leviathans chased ships. Thank God they were so rare.

  “Are there any other warships in the system?” Rutherford asked.

  “Unfortunately—” Norris began.

  Rutherford cut him off. “I was talking to the commander. I want you to communicate with engineering. Shunt power from the shields and ready countermeasures. Caites, get me the gunnery and see what we’ve got that might help.”

  �
�No, sir, there aren’t any warships,” Commander Pittsfield said in answer to the question. “There are no Royal Navy vessels in this system except Vigilant.”

  “Can we return to the previous jump point? It can’t follow us through.”

  “No, sir,” Pittsfield said. “The leviathan has spit up plasma spores around the jump. A whole web of them. They’ll gum up our engines and trap us if we try to go through.”

  “Sir, may I suggest something?” Norris said.

  “No, Norris. You may not. Do what you were told.” Rutherford turned back to Pittsfield. “What is our fuel situation?”

  “Low. Not critical, but we don’t have much to spare.”

  “I don’t want to outrun it only to burn through so much fuel that we can’t make the next jump.” Rutherford glanced at Lieutenant Caites, who had been speaking quietly into her com link. “Any word from the gunnery?”

  She looked up. “We have no fission weapons on board. They were expended in the bombardment of San Pablo. Nothing else is big enough to drive off the leviathan—that is the opinion of the gunnery, at least.”

  Rutherford frowned. “I see.”

  That brutal and possibly criminal bombardment of the Hroom continent, as ordered by the lord admiral, had not only precipitated a new war, but had left him bereft of the only weapon that could drive off the leviathan. But what could Rutherford have done, disobey a direct order?

  “May I offer a suggestion, Captain?” Caites asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Wait,” Norris said, looking up. “How come you’ll listen to her and not me?”

  Because she is not an idiot.

  And because Rutherford had promoted Catherine Caites himself, had brought her on board after the initiative she’d shown tracking down the mystery of Apex. Norris, on the other hand, was one of Malthorne’s toadies, foisted on Rutherford to assure his loyalty when he faced his old friend, James Drake. And Rutherford was now fairly certain that it was Malthorne who was the traitor to Albion, not Drake and his crew.

  But Rutherford had no wish to become a tyrant. He needed to put aside his anger.

  “One moment, Caites. Yes, Norris?”

  “What about lasers? We have a fifty kilowatt, and we could use it to blind the leviathan’s sensors, maybe even burn off some of its tentacles.”

  “No, that won’t work.” Rutherford glanced at Caites, then turned to Pittsfield. “Commander, how long until we fall in range of the leviathan’s spore cannons?”

  “Ninety-seven minutes,” Pittsfield said.

  “Why not?” Norris persisted. “It’s not like the thing has tyrillium armor or anything. Why wouldn’t it be susceptible to laser fire? We have an hour and a half, we could concentrate the laser on one spot. If we hurt it enough, it might leave us alone.”

  Rutherford sighed. “Norris, a star leviathan can brush through the corona of a star, for God’s sake. A 50-kilowatt laser wouldn’t even tickle the thing.”

  “Oh.”

  Caites had waited while Norris rambled, but she’d been shifting from one foot to the other, leaning forward. She was steady, but still young, and Rutherford had learned to recognize when she was eager to share information. He made his way to her station.

  “What is it, Lieutenant?” Rutherford asked.

  “Look at this, Captain.”

  Caites had apparently been running through scans of the system, perhaps looking for other ships that might be bribed or bullied into helping them if there were no Royal Navy vessels about. Unlikely, as the Hades Gulch system was unpopulated, except for a small mining colony. And since Hades Gulch was on the edge of the Omega Cluster, which had no jump points into it, few ships had cause to pass through. This one space lane led to the Gryphon Shoals, where Vigilant was supposed to rendezvous with Harbrake and the rest of the task force.

  Rutherford leaned over her shoulder and amplified the map. It showed a small, rocky planetoid, unusually positioned between two gas giants. Perhaps an escaped moon, it had a small moon itself, nearly a third as large as the planetoid. Orbiting around them both was a strange double ring of tiny asteroids.

  “That ring isn’t natural,” Caites said, “What you’re looking at is debris from a Hroom fleet.”

  “Debris? There was no battle out here.”

  “Not in the most recent fighting. This is from the Third Hroom War, Queen Ellen’s time.” Caites scrolled her finger across the screen, bringing up text. “An Albion fleet was chasing them, and several sloops smashed into that small moon while the Hroom were performing desperate evasive maneuvers.”

  Rutherford eyed Caites with new appreciation. “How did you know where to look? I’ve never heard of this battle—couldn’t have been a pivotal one. Are you some kind of military historian?”

  “No, not really. I’d heard of the Battle of Hades Gulch, but didn’t know much about it. But there are several ships out there—a salvage operation seems to have taken up position a couple of years ago. Mixed Ladino and New Dutch.”

  “Do any of them have weapons?”

  “Nothing big enough to tangle with a leviathan. Couple of frigates, some unarmed vessels the size of my old torpedo boat. The planetside base has a small cannon and two missile batteries, but still, nothing to speak of. What they do have is a pair of nukes on the surface. Reactors, I mean, the modular stuff. It powers their operations.”

  “Oh,” Rutherford said. Then, with new appreciation. “Oh. Fissile material.”

  “We’re three hours from the salvage operation,” she said, typing on her keypad. “We’ll need to accelerate to get there before we’re caught, and that means we’re back to the fuel problem.”

  “Yes, but once the leviathan is feeding, it’s no longer our problem. We’ll have time to stretch the ram scoops for a couple of days. Send this to Pittsfield.”

  “I just did, sir.”

  Rutherford turned it over in his head as he returned to his chair. He imagined the panic in the salvagers as he tore past with a ravenous star leviathan in pursuit. Their panic might serve as an additional distraction, but that felt unnecessarily cruel. No sense being brutal about it.

  “Commander Pittsfield,” he said, “contact the salvage operation. Strongly suggest that they run like the devil himself is after them. Warn them we’re about to drop a leviathan in their lap.”

  #

  A few hours later, the leviathan had closed to within a few thousand miles as Vigilant rushed toward the salvage operation. Small mining craft, scout vessels, and box-like asteroid scrapers had been fleeing in all directions like rats boiling out of the hold of a burning ship. One small vessel had been unable to detach itself from a Hroom hulk it had been salvaging, and its workers launched themselves out in an escape pod that was picked up by one of the larger mining ships before it fled.

  By the time Vigilant tore past the planetoid and its small moon, every man and woman had either fled or hunkered in some deep hole to wait out the catastrophe. Rutherford couldn’t just tear through—the leviathan might not notice all the other juicy morsels to feed on—so he hooked his ship in a big arc, just out of reach of the monster’s tentacles—and swooped back toward the planetoid and its moon, shedding speed.

  “It’s spitting spores,” Pittsfield warned, his voice tight and nervous.

  “One more pass,” Rutherford told the pilot. “Take us right through that debris.” He got the gunnery on the com. “Drop some ordnance right next to those reactors. Make them light up.”

  They came through again, and this time the gunnery let loose with a barrage of torpedoes and missiles, aimed not at the leviathan, but at the planetoid. Light flashed on the dusty, frozen surface, and giant columns of debris exploded, drifting up and up before slowly raining down under the world’s weak gravity. The leviathan was now so close that it was probing with its tentacles, trying to snag Vigilant, and spewing spore globules from its mouth, but now it hesitated. It swung one arm and looped it around the nose section of a drifting bit of Hroom wre
ckage, which it pulled toward a suddenly gaping maw. After munching the wreckage, it seemed to spot the undamaged nuclear reactors and dropped toward the surface.

  This was Vigilant’s chance, and she tore off into space, accelerating again. Even as they fled, Rutherford kept a wary eye on the leviathan. It landed on the planetoid. Miles-long tentacles tore at the surface, throwing up boulders the size of small hills as the beast stuffed the reactors, the mining buildings, and any other ores, fuel, fissile material, or equipment it could find into its mouth. With both the debris of the Hroom fleet and the remnants of the salvage operation to feed on, Rutherford supposed it would be sated and shortly venture off into the void, never to be seen again by any living being.

  #

  With the time lost evading the leviathan and collecting enough fuel to limp through the jump point, Vigilant would be three days longer in leaving Hades Gulch than planned. Rutherford sent subspace messages to the Admiralty and to Captain Harbrake to explain. The Admiralty wouldn’t be happy to hear about the destroyed New Dutch operation; to keep the peace, Albion would no doubt feel compelled to offer compensation to the affected salvagers. The fleet counted on New Dutch and Ladino colonies and mining operations for refueling and emergency repair and couldn’t afford to aggravate them while trying to fight the Hroom Empire.

  Rutherford was still ten hours from the final jump out of this cursed system when they spotted a Hroom fleet on the opposite side. Norris, duly chastened because of his failure to spot the leviathan, had been anxious to properly execute his duties, or it might have passed unnoticed altogether. The fleet comprised six sloops of war, entering through a jump point that led from the Fantalus system. The Hroom vessels quickly cloaked themselves and vanished from long-range scans, but not before Lieutenant Swasey—Rutherford’s pilot—was able to chart their course.

  The Hroom were apparently crossing the system on their way to a jump point that would take them into the deep void, a region of space not on any of Rutherford’s charts. The jump points in that section of the deep void were constantly shifting and had not previously led anywhere useful. Presumably, the Hroom had a destination in mind, but without better data, Rutherford could only speculate.