Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3)

by Michael Wallace

  The enemy was headed away from the empire worlds, that was one safe guess. Based on the general flow of jump points in these parts, the most likely course was toward one of Albion’s home worlds: Mercia, Saxony, or Albion herself.

  But why? And with only six sloops? That was a strong force, but hardly overwhelming. Even if Albion were unprotected by the fleet, six ships wouldn’t be sufficient to fight the planet’s orbital fortresses long enough to bombard the surface. And away from the planets, HMS Dreadnought alone could fight six sloops to a standstill. Give the admiral’s battleship a few destroyers and corvettes, and it would be a slaughter.

  Still, it was strange to see the empire on the offensive this far from their home worlds. Strange, and unsettling. Rutherford thought briefly about sending a subspace to Gryphon Shoals and ordering Harbrake to come through. Vigilant would move to intercept the enemy while waiting for Harbrake’s forces to arrive. But Rutherford was low on fuel, and he had disregarded orders for long enough already. Let him make the rendezvous first, find out what Malthorne was up to, and then worry about six stray sloops of war.

  Chapter Four

  As soon as he left the Hroom, Drake felt the stress and pressure lifting from his shoulders. Ever since seizing the sugar antidote from Lord Malthorne, he’d felt as though he’d been carrying sandbags on his shoulders. He’d been torn between the moral imperative of freeing the Hroom from their sugar enslavement and the need to protect Albion from a rejuvenated empire. Drake had made his choice, and now General Mose Dryz had the antidote.

  Drake now had two things on his mind: freeing his parents from York Tower and punishing Malthorne for killing his sister Helen. Malthorne was a slaver, a warmonger, and a murderer, and somehow, Drake would bring him to justice. But first, free his parents, get them to safety.

  He led Blackbeard carefully through the Hroom systems, wary of running into the death cult faction the general had warned him about, but when the ship reached the frontier systems, he stopped taking unusual precautions and made his way directly toward the New Dutch world of Leopold. Catarina Vargus had recommended Leopold, claiming that there were always freebooters, mercenaries, and other adventurers lurking about its spaceports, looking for work. Pirates and smugglers brought their ships to Leopold’s yards for repair and supplies.

  By the time Blackbeard came into orbit around Leopold, nearly five weeks had passed since they’d left Catarina and Orient Tiger. The planet stretched dry and hazy below them, the surface cut by massive brown ranges and dotted with small, salty seas—more like large lakes, really. A few patches of green-and-gold vegetation stood out here and there, marking the limits of human settlement. Only a few million humans and Hroom lived on the whole planet.

  It may have been a hot, dusty rock, but Drake’s crew was anxious for landfall, from Commander Tolvern down to the lowest deckhand. The enlisted sorts had blown through much of their earnings from the tyrillium barge before leaving the last port, and what money had remained seemed to have found its way into the hands of people like Carvalho and Lutz, who had an uncanny way of winning at cards and dice. The two men were willing to loan back their winnings, of course, so that the crew could enjoy shore leave. Drake didn’t care who owed what to whom, so long as the peace was held.

  He had no need to land Blackbeard, and it was safer to keep her in orbit. Instead, a shuttle service carried people and goods back and forth to the surface. Tolvern organized a lottery to distribute the twenty-four-hour passes evenly over the four days the ship was to remain in orbit.

  Drake ordered Tolvern to rig the lottery. He didn’t want Capp and Carvalho on the ship together when he and Tolvern were on the surface. He trusted them more than he used to, but not fully. Capp complained about this. Couldn’t she swap with someone else and go down at the same time as her lover?

  “I need you with me,” Drake told her. “You’ve got an eye for recruiting—you can tell me who to trust and who not to trust.”

  “That’s true, yeah. But Cap’n, me and Carvalho was thinking—”

  “There’s a bonus in it for you.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Bonus?”

  “Money. Fifty guineas, to be precise.”

  That settled it.

  #

  There was a fuzzy line between pirate, smuggler, freebooter, and general adventurer here on the frontier, but as was usually the case, the ones who made a killing were the ones who kept their heads down and supplied the rowdier sorts. Most of the money on Leopold seemed to be flowing into two ports on opposite hemispheres, one high in the northern latitudes, and the other on a peninsular continent in the south, surrounded on three sides by a shallow, briny sea.

  The northern hemisphere was cooking in the height of summer, so Drake went south. The shuttle carried him, Tolvern, and Capp to a small settlement named Brinetown. The buildings were red mud brick, and from the air, Brinetown looked like a low-slung tent city alongside a shallow bay. Dry berms divided the bay into squares, each one a mile or two across and shaded an unnatural color: red, purple, or sickly green. The shuttle driver said they were evaporation ponds to extract dissolved minerals from the sea. As the shuttle came down, a vast flock of pink birds lifted flapping from the water’s edge, and as one bumped off the windshield, Drake was surprised to see that they were Old Earth flamingos.

  The shuttle landed at the spaceport on the edge of town. A motley collection of spacecraft stretched across the tarmac or sat in hangars, these latter visible through open bay doors. Many of the ships were no larger than torpedo boats—salvage vessels, cutters, asteroid scrapers, and the like—but there were several larger frigates and schooners. Armed men patrolled the perimeter of these ships, eyeing each other warily, and Drake was again glad that he hadn’t landed Blackbeard; he’d have needed to guard her at all times.

  The air was so dry it seemed to suck the moisture from his lungs when the three of them stepped onto the tarmac. No wonder Nyb Pim had declined shore leave—the Hroom would have withered to a husk in this climate. At least it wasn’t overly hot, thanks to their arriving near the shortest day of the year. He paid the shuttle driver, who waved them back so he could lift off.

  “Well,” Capp said, scratching at her lion tattoos as they shaded their eyes to watch the shuttle blasting skyward. “Here we are. Now how do we get to town?”

  “What do we need in town?” Drake asked.

  “Gotta find taverns and the like,” Capp said. “You know, where these blokes we need are hanging out. Like on San Pablo.”

  “Seems like everything and everyone we need is right here,” Drake said.

  “But—”

  Tolvern patted Capp’s shoulder. “The captain isn’t one for bars and taverns. I told you, this isn’t shore leave. This is work, it’s why we’re putting gold in your pocket.”

  “Don’t mean it can’t be fun, too.” Capp looked glum. “Look at me. What did I get dressed up for?” She wore tight pants and a leather vest unzipped enough to show cleavage. She wore polished, black, knee-high boots with silver buckles. Eye shadow gave her eyes a smoky look.

  “I was wondering the same thing,” Tolvern said. “Were you hoping to meet someone? Wouldn’t Carvalho be jealous?”

  “Of what?” Capp sounded baffled.

  “Of, you know, giving it to someone else,” Tolvern said.

  “Giving it? Listen to you, all prissy like. Why should he care? I ain’t gonna run out of it or nothing. King’s balls, Tolvern, where are you from, anyhow?”

  “Civilization. You might have heard of it.”

  Drake shook his head, mildly amused, and walked toward one of the larger hangars to his right. The others followed. As he walked, he took in the spaceships, the lorries shuttling workers and supplies around, the cranes moving pieces of decking and other heavy equipment. He’d been hoping to spot a familiar ship, but Orient Tiger was not in evidence. He’d known that, of course. He’d sent coded subspace messages upon entering the system, and Catarina had not responded. Still, on
e could hope. Catarina clearly knew the world, and it was as good a place to put in for repairs and resupply as any.

  A lorry with six-foot-high tires rumbled out of one of the hangars, pulling a frigate on a wheeled trundle. The aft portion of the ship, from the side-mounted cannon to the engines, had the clean, sleek profile of a Royal Navy corvette, but the prow was the stubby nose of some other ship, painted to resemble a shark’s toothy snarl. Painted across the side in big block letters: OUTLAW.

  “I wonder if that’s Robertson’s old ship,” Drake said.

  “Who?” Capp asked.

  “Edward Robertson,” Tolvern filled in. “Got rammed by a sloop a couple of years ago, and the crew abandoned ship. Captain sent around a salvage operation after we’d driven off the Hroom, but someone had already snagged the wreckage and made off with it. We always wondered if it was pirates.”

  Capp grinned. “Good for them. Royal Navy don’t need it half so bad.”

  “I could use a corvette,” Drake said. “Or a half-corvette. Let’s see who owns her.”

  But when they approached, men with shotguns and hand cannons moved quickly to block them.

  “Who is the captain of this ship?” Drake asked.

  “What’s it to you?” one of the men asked. He was broad shouldered, with a square jaw and a mustache with waxed ends. He wore leather bracers on his arms and a saber in a sheath at his side instead of a firearm.

  “I would rather speak to your captain. Is he available for inquiries?”

  “Well listen to you, talking all posh like,” the man said, and his companions laughed. “Now get the hell out of here.”

  “Shut your gob,” Capp said. She put a hand on her sidearm. “Nobody talks to the cap’n like that, you hear?”

  The men tensed, and Drake pulled Capp back. There were six armed men guarding the frigate, and he hadn’t come to fight, anyway.

  Capp removed her hand from her weapon, scowling. “Wouldn’t hurt him none to be civil, anyhow.”

  “That goes for all of us,” Drake told her. He turned back to the fellow who seemed to be the leader of the guard detail. “I’m looking to hire a couple of ships, and I have ready money to spend.”

  At the mention of money, the men looked less eager to fight and more intrigued. “When?” the leader asked.

  “Immediately.”

  “Ah, then nope, we’re already hired on for some business or other,” the man said. “Don’t know what, you’ll have to ask the captain.”

  “May I speak with him?”

  “Not now, you can’t. The officers went into town to buy provisions. Won’t be back until tomorrow, I figure. If you’re looking to hire someone, you could talk to Pete Paredes, I know he’s looking for work for his crew. Just got back off salvage, and his gear was wrecked up good. That business in Hades Gulch, you hear about it?”

  “No,” Drake said. “We were beyond the frontier.”

  “Bloody leviathan. Figure Paredes will tell you about it. That’s his ship over there.” The man hooked his thumb at a lanky schooner sitting on the tarmac, where two men were scraping barnacles while two others worked on deck plating with blow torches. The schooner was half the size of Outlaw, which in turn wasn’t as big as Catarina Vargus’s Orient Tiger. Twelve crew, max, not much larger than a navy torpedo boat. Drake would need twenty ships that size to do any good.

  “I suppose we should talk to this Paredes fellow,” Drake told his companions, when the men had returned to guarding the frigate, still inching its way across the tarmac. “But let’s see if we can hire Outlaw first. Wouldn’t do us any good to land Paredes, only to find out the two captains are enemies and we’re stuck with the lesser ship.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to go into town after all,” Tolvern said.

  Capp rubbed her hands together. “Now we’re talking.”

  “I forgot to get the name of Outlaw’s captain,” Drake said. “It will be easier to find out now, rather than ask around town like idiots.” He made to approach the frigate, but Tolvern put a hand on his forearm and stopped him.

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said. “Look.”

  The rear of the frigate was now visible as the lorry turned toward a gaping hangar to the left. The name of the ship had been painted again above the plasma engines, but this time, below “OUTLAW” was a smaller word:

  Vargus.

  Chapter Five

  Vargus, Jess Tolvern thought bitterly, as a jitney carried them toward town on a dusty, brush-lined road. Camels grazed the thorny bushes along the road. Others rested in the shade of an abandoned lorry, its tires hauled off, the windshield smashed, and the paint scoured by the blowing sand.

  Why that name again? They’d fought the elder Captain Vargus twice: once, defeating his ship, Captain Kidd, and a second time, when the pirate captain attacked them in the San Pablo yards. And then Captain Drake had become entangled with the man’s daughter, Catarina Vargus. Tolvern had bumbled into Drake’s quarters thinking she’d seduce him, only to find him naked in the shower with Catarina.

  The crappy thing about an embarrassing memory—the most shameful part of shame, so to speak—was how it could spring forth in full glory at any moment. It was hard to stay angry forever, or envious, or any other negative emotion. But recall an embarrassing incident, and there it was, leering, until you were blushing all over again.

  Now she was remembering the look on Catarina Vargus’s face when the woman stepped out of the shower, naked and beautiful, to see Tolvern struggling to button up after having stripped down. What a nightmare. Thank God, Vargus had covered for her. If the captain had found out, she’d have never been able to face him again.

  Catarina Vargus must be in Brinetown with a new ship, and from the anticipation on the Captain’s face as the jitney rumbled among the red mud brick buildings, he was anxious to see her again. Tolvern was not.

  Capp sat in the back of the open jitney with Tolvern, while the captain sat up front with the driver. She studied Tolvern. “Something the matter?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “You ain’t happy to see Vargus again, are you?”

  “I haven’t given her a moment’s thought,” Tolvern lied. She pulled the computer out of her hip pocket, and brought up an info sheet about Brinetown.

  Drake glanced back. “Anyway, we don’t know that it’s her. Probably not, in fact. Catarina has other ships, and I don’t imagine she’d leave Orient Tiger unless she’d found something better. Outlaw is an inferior vessel.”

  “That lady is a pirate,” Capp said. “And when you’re a pirate, sometimes you don’t got no choice in the matter. Coulda been the navy roughed her up, and she had to find something else.”

  Tolvern scrolled through until she found something useful. “We’re looking for a place called The Apple Pie Trading Company.”

  Capp snorted. “What the—? Did you say ‘apple pie’?”

  “It’s just a name,” Tolvern said. “A place where people meet to do business. They’re not actually bartering baked goods.” She scrolled again. “They offer food and drink, though.”

  Capp looked suspicious. “What kind of drink?”

  “Don’t worry, Capp, it’s the usual libations, I’m sure—grog, hooch, fire water, demon rum, gin.”

  “Whew, you had me worried there, for a minute. ‘Apple Pie Trading Company.’ King’s balls, what a name.”

  Brinetown wasn’t a big place, maybe five or six thousand people from the looks of it, and the jitney driver dropped them in front of The Apple Pie Trading Company a few minutes later. The establishment was a restaurant on the edge of the sea, with most of the patrons sitting on a patio beneath a big sun awning, looking down at the bay. Outside and below, scrawny dogs trotted along the shoreline, fighting with crabs over dead fish that had washed up. The smell of brine and rotting seaweed wafted in.

  The patrons were mostly disreputable sorts, as expected. They drank tankards of grog and cracked the claws of some strange, lobster
-like crustacean, sucking out the meat and tossing the empty shells and the legs over the railing. Tolvern’s eyes were drawn to one table in particular. There she was, Catarina Vargus, her shoulder thrown back to show her neck, a drink in one hand. She’d cut her black curls to a bob, like Tolvern’s, but the curve of her chin was the same, the lines of her neck. A wiry, middle-aged Ladino sat with her, gesticulating as he spoke.

  Capp nudged Tolvern. She stared in dismay, waiting for Drake to finish talking to the proprietor, who insisted on taking their drink order before allowing them to sit. As soon as Drake looked up, he’d spot her.

  Why? Brinetown was small, no more than a few thousand people, and the whole planet only had a handful of ports. So it wasn’t that big of a coincidence on the surface, but if you considered all the other systems, all the other places Catarina might have gone, why here?

  “Hey, Cap’n,” Capp said. “You see what we’re seeing?”

  Henny Capp seemed to have one volume level—loud—and her voice drew the attention of Catarina Vargus and her companion. They looked up, and Tolvern did a double take. It was not Catarina Vargus after all, but some other woman.

  This woman was a few years older than Catarina, perhaps in her early thirties, and had an ugly scar from her forehead to her cheek and across one eye. It looked like a saber slash, and she’d lost her left eye to it. In its place was an artificial eye whose pupil dilated and narrowed as the woman studied the newcomers. She was not Catarina, but she looked awfully similar.

  “Now this is interesting,” Drake murmured. “Come on.”

  The woman and her companion rose warily as the three officers from Blackbeard approached. Everyone was armed, but all parties kept their hands in the open.

  “Are you the bloke who was asking about my ship at the yards?” the woman asked. “Yeah, they called to warn me—did you think they wouldn’t?”