The Queen's Pardon (Alexis Carew Book 6)

by J. A. Sutherland

  She heard shouts behind her as the others crowded into the quarterdeck, but could spare no thought for them. There’d been, she thought, no more than two other pirates in the compartment when she entered. Perhaps three, as Tinkham’s midsection had blocked a bit of it from her vision. Her lads should be able to handle those with no problem, armed as they were.

  A glance down from her place with her head in Tinkham’s gut, and between his tucked and twisting legs, gave her a glimpse of the navigation plot’s far edge and she knew the quarterdeck’s forward bulkhead was close on that. She tensed her neck and shoulders for the impact and got an elbow pointed forward just as they struck.

  The elbow was low, not quite in Tinkham’s solar plexus, but enough that the impact drove the man’s breath from his body, stopping him in mid-curse, as he’d been letting off a stream of them through their entire flight across the compartment.

  They rebounded from the bulkhead and Alexis took advantage of the pirate’s momentary limpness to grasp an arm and swing him around in midair. His arm behind his back with one hand and her other on Tinkham’s shoulder, she could just reach the upper bulkhead with her feet to impart a bit of force and get them out of midair.

  Tinkham smashed into the navigation plot’s surface with Alexis’ full mass atop him, her knees tucked up so that the full force of the impact was focused on his upper body.

  What little air Tinkham had been able to recover whooshed from his lungs and he went limp.

  Alexis kept her grip on his arm, twisted well up between his shoulder blades, while she scanned the quarterdeck.

  Nabb had stayed with her, and he had one of the pirates face-first against a bulkhead, his pistol at the man’s head. Two others, Benny, of her boat crew, and the lad, Aiden, had the other in a similar position. There appeared to be only the two pirates, then, and Tinkham in the quarterdeck. Likely their middle watch for the crew, with Tinkham abed and only station-keepers on the quarterdeck. The few others of the boarding party who’d followed her here were clustered at the hatch.

  “You lot find Mister Dockett and help clear the ship,” Alexis ordered, and the men scattered down the companionway. She nodded to the others. “Benny, take this bastard, will you, so that I might get my feet on the deck?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Benny was an older man, topman turned gunner when his back would no longer take the strain of all the pulley-hauley outside on a ship’s hull. He adjusted the younger Aiden’s grip on the pirate a bit, passing on his own experience at keeping a man still and compliant.

  “Watch the squirmy bastard,” Benny said, “an’ if’n he moves wrong, you pull on this —” The pirate screamed. “—see?”

  “Aye,” Aiden said.

  Benny then pushed off the deck to meet Alexis in midair and take her grasp on Tinkham.

  Alexis pushed off the pair and stretched out her feet to contact the deck with a satisfying click from her boots’ magnets. That done, she reached up and grasped Tinkham’s leg to pull those two down beside her.

  “Thankee, sir,” Benny said.

  His own boots firmly on the deck he was better able to pin the still gasping Tinkham to the bulkhead with a thick forearm.

  Alexis took a deep breath herself.

  Mongoose’s quarterdeck was well in-hand. Given the ship’s time when they’d struck — quite late if Tinkham’s dress was any indication — most of the pirate crew would have been on the berthing deck, with only watch-keepers and a few night owls awake. Dockett and the rest of the men should have no trouble overpowering those, assuming Blackbourne’s estimate of the number of pirates aboard was accurate, something she’d taken with more than a grain of salt in her planning.

  She nodded. “Right, then.”

  It was time to bring Mongoose’s systems back to life and —

  “Mister Dockett’s compliments, sir, and the pirates in the engineering spaces are threatening to blow the fusion plant!”

  The spacer hovering in the hatchway was out of breath from his race up and forward from the bosun, and white-faced, no doubt from fear the pirates would make good on their threat.

  Alexis sighed. “Of course they are.”

  Thirty-Three

  “You stay away!”

  Alexis peered around the hatch coaming into Mongoose’s engineering space.

  The squat mass of the fusion plant took up most of the compartment’s center, with a ring of control panels and monitoring stations around the bulkheads.

  Past it, along the far, aft bulkhead, two pirates sat on the deck, hands atop their heads in surrender.

  It was the third pirate, the one whose foot she could just make out where it extended from behind the fusion plant itself, who was the worry.

  “He’s got the bloody patch off the plant housing and his pistol right up in it,” one of the surrendered pirates called out.

  Alexis could see the patch made to the aft bulkhead, where it had been breached in Mongoose’s approach to Erzurum. It lined up with where the threatening pirate sat, so that must be where the fusion plant’s wall had been damaged, causing the SCRAM that shut Mongoose down in her attack on the planet.

  “Would he have been able to get the patch off?” Alexis asked in a low voice.

  Dockett shrugged at her from his position on the hatch’s other edge.

  “No telling what half-arsed work they made of it,” he said. “Or if a pistol shot’ll breach what’s left. If they’d done a proper job, filled in the whole of it, we’d not be here.”

  Alexis shuddered. A breach of the plant’s containment vessel would end it for all of them, her lads and the pirates both, as Erzurum came to have a brief, very small second sun in orbit around it.

  It would not do the threatening pirate much good either, which made Alexis wonder what he hoped to get out of this.

  “What’s your name?” she called out.

  “Pullink — and you stay away!”

  “All right, Pullink, so what is it you want?”

  “Off the ship and get away!” Pullink yelled.

  “That was the plan, Pullink,” Alexis said. It was. She’d have to do something with the pirates she took off Mongoose and, if she could ever get this settled and bring their second boat up, the other ships in orbit. Dumping them in Erzurum’s swamps seemed to be the best option for keeping them out of the way. “You and your mates back down to Erzurum, safe as houses, right?”

  “Not us, you lot!” Pullink yelled back.

  “Oh.” Alexis shrugged. “Well, that’s not going to happen, Pullink, so what’s your second choice?”

  “Blow us all to hell!”

  Alexis sighed. Well, at least they had the bargaining positions well-established.

  “Look, Pullink, we’re in a bit of a fix here, aren’t we? All your mates have surrendered, even those two in there with you, see?”

  The pair of pirates on the floor along the aft bulkhead nodded vigorously, their eyes never leaving Pullink.

  “Give it up, mate,” one of them said.

  “Is that devil, Dansby, out there?” Pullink called. “Let me hear his voice again before I send us all to hell!”

  “Who’s Dansby?” Dockett asked.

  “That fellow we got Mongoose from,” Nabb said.

  “What, the sort of …” Dockett frowned. “Odd I can’t recall what he looked like, but —.” He shivered.

  Nabb shook his head. “No, that’d be the Foreign Office man what makes your bollocks crawl up inside. Dansby’s the one you’d like to have a pint with and hear a tale or two … providing your purse was never out of a hand.” Nabb pursed his lips. “Better your purse were left hidden elsewhere with him, come to that.”

  “Oh … well, he seemed a decent sort — for all that.”

  “Gave the captain Boots, he did.”

  “Well, then, a fine gentleman, ain’t he? What’s he got to do with this lot?”

  “Gentlemen?” Alexis interrupted. “If you don’t mind?”

  “Aye, sir,
sorry.”

  “Pullink,” Alexis called. “Wouldn’t you rather just go down to the planet than blow up?”

  “Ha!” Pullink yelled. “‘Just give up,’ he says. ‘We’ll drop you on a nice planet,’ he says. You tell Dansby I’ll not fall for such again!”

  “He’s been going on like this since we come aboard,” one of the surrendered pirates said. “Recognized the ship as some old Elizabeth and ain’t shut up since about how we’re all doomed to be aboard her.”

  “I told you!” Pullink yelled. “I told you Dansby filled his ships with trickeries and treacheries and what’d we just get, eh? Trickeries! Now that devil’s aboard and we’re all doomed anyways!”

  “Avrel Bloody Dansby is not here, Pullink!” Alexis yelled.

  “I’ll not turn myself over to that devil Dansby!” Pullink yelled. “See you all in hell, first!”

  Alexis opened her mouth to respond, then frowned and shook her head. “What in the Dark did Avrel Dansby do to these people?”

  Alexis knew Dansby to be a rogue and smuggler, with little regard for the law and likely only helping her these two times for the profit and some hold the Foreign Office man, Eades, had over him, but the very real fear in Pullink’s voice, Blackbourne’s demand that Dansby must be here, and even Tinkham’s cursing spoke to a deeper, darker past than even Alexis had considered. Why, even Wheeley, at his casino, had been on guard when Alexis invoked his name.

  “When he said he’d not return to the Barbary,” Alexis muttered, “I’d thought it was for his own safety, not that the whole bloody sector would pack up and flee for Hso-hsi at his approach.”

  “It does seem he left an impression, sir,” Dockett agreed.

  That particular serpent’s past, however, was something to winkle out of him another day. For now, she had the problem of a desperate, probably deranged, pirate with his laser pistol’s barrel pressed against an ill-patched fusion plant.

  “Bring down Blackbourne and Tinkham, Mister Dockett — we’ll see if the man’s leaders can do anything with him.”

  “She’ll shoot ya in yer man axe, if y’don’t come out, Pullink!”

  “Mister Blackbourne, I don’t think that’s helping.”

  “Did it t’Old Blackbourne, lad, and he’ll say y’won’t like it a bit! Blackbourne’s word on that!”

  “Belay that, and be silent!”

  Alexis rubbed her temples in frustration. Of the two pirate leaders, Blackbourne, at least, would try talking to Pullink, while Tinkham sullenly refused, but neither did his words seem to have any hope of easing the tensions.

  “Talk t’the man, don’t talk t’the man — make up yer mind, bitch-woman.”

  Blackbourne had finally accepted that Alexis wasn’t some witch when he’d seen the flechettes Kannstadt’s man removed — with no little additional damage, as Alexis hadn’t realized the selector to make the darts her pistol fired barbed had been bumped in their travels through the swamp.

  The pirate now seemed even more unhappy that Alexis had “duped” him into believing she was a witch than when he’d thought she shot fiery bolts from her fingers and was about to set her demon familiar to eating him, and Alexis wasn’t at all certain his current term for her was an improvement.

  Neither anger at what he saw as being duped, though, nor any lingering loyalty to the band of pirates, seemed to deter him from cooperating with Alexis so long as she gave her word not to either shoot him again or hang him, should she succeed in retaking her ship and escaping.

  Blackbourne’s true loyalties appeared to lie with whichever path might keep him alive and unharmed at the current moment, rather than to anything larger.

  Dockett gave the back of the pirate’s head a knock.

  “Watch yer tongue!”

  “Our goal, Mister Blackbourne, is to get Pullink to surrender, understanding that he will not be further harmed if he cooperates.”

  “Didn’t give Old Blackbourne the chance.”

  “And you’ll have none again if you don’t cooperate — I’ve a goodly number of flechettes left, you should know.”

  “See, Pullink?” Blackbourne called out. “She has it in for the old faithful, lad, guard yerself an’ do as the bitch-woman says!”

  “Get these two out of here before they do us more harm,” Alexis said, stepping away from the hatchway.

  “Aye, sir.”

  Dockett detailed two men to take the pirates away and joined Alexis and Nabb a few meters from the hatch.

  “This’s eatin’ at our time, sir,” Dockett said.

  Alexis knew it was. “Yes, I know.”

  They had control of Mongoose, and all the pirates save those three in the engineering space safely locked in the hold — in a compartment Dansby’s notes assured her had no secret panels or locks for them to escape by. There were the three other pirate ships in orbit with her, though, and some merchantmen — plus however many pirates on Erzurum’s surface.

  No one had tried to contact the ship or Blackbourne’s boat yet, as the pirates were an independent lot, with each crew and captain making his own rules, but one certainly would sometime — and when that happened, the whole pirate force would join to recapture Mongoose.

  She needed to execute the next steps of their plan with some element of surprise, but couldn’t very well proceed with her one ship held hostage by the manic pirate intent on ending them all.

  “We could shut down the plant from the quarterdeck, sir,” Dockett suggested.

  “It’s four hours’ time to restart it —” Alexis shook her head. They were merely going over options they’d already discussed while waiting for Tinkham and Blackbourne. “— and we’d be helpless all the while.”

  “Storm in and grab him?”

  “He’d certainly hear even the most speedy rush, I think, and we’ve those two others staring right at the hatch.”

  She’d tried to get those two surrendered pirates out, but Pullink would have none of it, despite his mates being quite willing, even eager, to go and get away from him.

  “They’d certainly react somehow, and a mere twitch of his finger’s all that’s needed to send us up. He’s already objected to us telling them move away.”

  A stealthy approach had been ruled out as well. With the fusion plant in the center of the compartment as it was, there was no real way to get to Pullink on its far side without crossing some sort of open space and being spotted by either him or the other two pirates. While Pullink’s mates might not be any more interested in becoming a new sun than Alexis and her lads, they’d almost certainly react in some way and give Pullink a warning, whether intended or not.

  Nor was there any secret way into the compartment that didn’t carry the same difficulty. There was such a way detailed in Dansby’s notes about the ship, but it let out beneath one of the consoles in full view of Pullink.

  “It may be we must try Warth’s suggestion,” Alexis said.

  The poacher’d been brought up to gauge his chances of sneaking up the side of the fusion plant and slitting Pullink’s throat or shooting from hiding around the corner, but they’d all agreed any approach silent enough to make no noise to alert the pirate would present far too much opportunity for the other pirates to give the game away with furtive glances or widened eyes.

  Warth had mentioned a possibility, though.

  “It’s daft, sir,” Nabb said.

  “Daft and dangerous,” Alexis agreed. “We’ll try again to talk some sense to the man and then —”

  Alexis’ tablet pinged for her attention. It was one of the spacers she’d left on the quarterdeck — not a one of them qualified to stand a watch, nor, really, to man the stations, as she had no available officers, but the best she had at the moment. One of Kannstadt’s men had a passing knowledge of the signals console, at least — though she couldn’t risk having him use it.

  “Yes?”

  “The Hannie lad pressed a button on the signals console — couldn’t understand a word he said, me, but he pla
yed the message. One of the other ships is signaling for Tinkham and now wondering why we don’t answer, sir.”

  “Nabb, get Warth about his daft-business instanter! Mister Dockett, have Tinkham and Blackbourne brought to the quarterdeck and you stay here with your best men to deal with the aftermath!”

  Thirty-Four

  Alexis hadn’t had time to notice in the fight to retake the ship and then the rush down to the engineering spaces to confront Pullink, but Mongoose’s quarterdeck was a mess, with bits of food and trash on the floor and more than one empty wine bottle about. She took that in with a glance as she returned there with Dockett and the two pirates.

  Pirates and merchantmen — they’ve no idea how to keep a proper ship.

  The men she’d left manning the stations had done some work to at least push the bits of trash away from the more critical systems, but they’d been too busy to clean and there weren’t enough crew to devote anyone to it. If the quarterdeck was this bad, though, she wondered what the state of the berthing areas and gundeck were.

  “Are we cleared for action, Mister Dockett?” she asked.

  “Best we’re able, sir.” The bosun led Tinkham and Blackbourne to the navigation plot, keeping a wary eye on both despite their hands being well bound behind them. “Guns are loaded, but not run out. We’ve cleared the decks of the worst debris and cleaning up the rest as we wait. I shudder at how this lot goes to vacuum with so much trash about.”

  “Very well.” Alexis made her way to the signals station, making sure she was out of sight. “Mister Tinkham, you’re already dressed for having just gotten out of bed, so please make your excuses to this other ship’s call and then Mister Blackbourne will have a say.”

  “It’s Captain Tinkham and I’ll not dance to your tune.”