Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) (10 page)

Drake needed his best pilot, so he woke Nyb Pim from his sleep cycle and ordered him to the bridge to take his place at the nav computer.
Blackbeard
flew above the surface of the asteroid at low elevation three times, searching for the entrance into the pirate base. It was well disguised, but on the third pass, someone on the asteroid lost his nerve and tried to fire a missile. Barker’s team was ready for it, and brought the missile down before it was off the launch pad.

Blackbeard
retreated a few hundred miles and hammered the missile site with cannon fire, while the Vargus sisters brought their frigates in under his suppressing fire. Isabel was even more aggressive than her younger sister, scouring away the dust with her plasma engines while her guns tore chunks from the surface. Catarina found an exhaust port and dropped a pair of bombs down it. Once she had blown a hole into the fort, she landed the ship and charged in at the head of an assault team. There was a brief firefight in the tunnels, and the pirate fortress surrendered. One of Catarina’s men was killed, two were wounded, and a number of enemies had fallen. Drake was relieved when Catarina called and he heard that she was uninjured.

The whole fight had taken less than two hours, which left another four to snag whatever useful loot they could find. Drake checked again for a subspace from Rutherford (there was none), then prepared two away pods so he and an away team could supervise the looting. He brought his toughest people, led by Capp and Carvalho. They were all too eager, and came to the away pod loaded with grenade bandoleers, pistols, and hand cannons.

The asteroid was an old mining operation and riddled with tunnels. These tunnels were stuffed with looted goods, and the pirate crews were already tearing through boxes and drinking liquor by the time Drake arrived. A brawl broke out when someone discovered a crate of Old Earth brandy, and they were soon guzzling twenty-guinea bottles as if they were watered-down grog. Heaven help them if they found anything valuable.

His own people were staring, wide-eyed, with greed and surprise at the mayhem. Drake tapped Carvalho on the shoulder.

“If you can stage-manage this foolish behavior, there will be a nice bonus in it. Can you manage without bloodshed?”

Capp pushed her way in. “You bet we can! Me and Carvalho, we’ll crack some skulls, you watch us. Hey, you!” she bellowed. “This here is a respectable operation, you hear? Put that down!”

Carvalho and two other men from Blackbeard—Mora and Lutz—waded in, elbows swinging, grabbing men and separating them. Capp started after them, but Drake grabbed her arm.

“Not you, Ensign. I need you for the main business at hand.”

“But, Cap’n!”

“Do you really want to brawl with that rabble? There’s a bigger reward if we keep our wits about us.”

She stared after Carvalho and let out a wistful sigh. “Aye, Cap’n. Lead the way, and I’ll follow.”

They found Catarina in the command center of the base, a room built into the gray rock, lined with computers and equipment. It looked like a subterranean version of a starship’s bridge. A man sat in a chair, his hands cuffed behind him, staring straight ahead, expressionless. He had blond hair, turning dirty gray at the temples, with long sideburns in the fashion many New Dutch wore these days. Catarina stood with her hands on her hips, questioning him in sharp tones. Next to her stood Nix, the fellow with the Gatling gun for an arm who had once belonged to her father’s crew.

A dead man lay on his back a few feet away, his eyes staring at the flickering lights overhead, a small hole in his skull leaking blood. His hand still gripped a shotgun. Neither Catarina nor her companion paid the body any attention as they grilled the prisoner.

The grim expression disappeared from Catarina’s face as she spotted Drake. “There you are.” She stepped over the body and plunged her fingers into Drake’s hair. “Come to take your plunder?”

Drake glanced at Capp, whose eyebrows shot up as she seemed to recognize the innuendo. “What the—?” Capp said.

“Oh, never mind me,” Catarina said. “I am having my fun with your captain, is all. He seems a little stiff, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, better be careful about that, luv, or he’ll have you scraping barnacles.”

“Will he, now? It’s not his barnacles I want to scrape.” Catarina winked at Drake, and he felt his face go hot. She gestured at the man in the chair. “This is the fool who shot those missiles. He doesn’t seem to recognize the trouble he is in. Name is Van Gelder.”

“I don’t know who told you that,” Van Gelder said in a light Dutch accent, “but I am not responsible for this base.” He glanced sideways at the ugly fellow holding the Gatling gun to his skull. “I am just a technician.”

Catarina slapped him on the side of the face. “Shut up, we know who you are. Three different people fingered you as the leader of this operation.” She turned back to Drake. “My sister is shaking them down for more information, but I thought I would have more luck if I separated Van Gelder from the others. But he’s not cooperating, so I might have to shoot him and try someone else.”

Van Gelder paled. “I’m telling you—” He looked to Drake. “Please, you look reasonable. Tell her. I’m not in charge.”

“If not you, then who?” Drake asked.

Van Gelder hesitated. “A fellow named Jones. From Albion.”

“I don’t believe you,” Drake said, “but it doesn’t really matter. We’ll find what we’re looking for. Those who cooperate will be treated well. Those who don’t will suffer the consequences.”

Catarina turned suddenly to Capp. “Cut off his stones.”

“Huh, what?”

“You heard me. Take that knife at your side and hack off this bastard’s testicles. You’re not too dainty, are you? You don’t look like the squeamish sort.”

“Sure, I guess I could,” Capp said, drawing the long blade from the sheath. It had a wicked curve on one side and a brutal, serrated edge on the other.

Van Gelder sprang to his feet, taking the whole chair with him, as he was handcuffed to it. Catarina’s man knocked him on the head with his gun barrel, and he fell on his back with a groan. Drake lifted the chair up and waited for the man to stop wincing from the blow.

“Catarina, enough of that. Capp, put away the knife. We’re not going to emasculate you, Van Gelder. I don’t have any use for torture.”

“Thank you, sir,” the man said weakly.

“But I do not have much use for the uncooperative, either. If you don’t tell me what I need to know, I will set a fire on my way out and burn out all of the oxygen, and that will be the end of the lot of you.”

“How do I know you won’t anyway?”

“I am not that sort of man. Do I
look
like that sort, or sound like it? No, I am not. I keep the agreements that I make. Where is your ship?”

“Ship?”

“I am losing patience, Mr. Van Gelder,” Drake warned.

Van Gelder furrowed his brow and seemed to come to a decision. “There’s an underground launch pad on the other side of the asteroid. We have two short-range scrapers armed with five-inchers. We can’t jump—neither ship has a warp-point engine.”

“Then how are you resupplied?”

“We aren’t. We’ve been hiding here for fifteen months. No ships coming and going—that would have risked the whole thing. We have a pair of heavy freighters on retainer. Soon as things turned hot, we were going to call them in to haul us out, together with all our goods. That was the plan, anyway.”

“They got hot, all right,” Catarina said.

Nix chuckled, and grinned at Capp with his gold teeth gleaming. Capp winked at him.

Isabel Vargus entered the room. She was beaming with excitement. “We found the big payload. Dad would have been proud, Cat. We’re going to be rich.”

The older sister explained. Interrogations had turned up the motherload: seventy thousand tons of partly refined platinum ore stuffed into one of the tunnels. The pirates had captured a freighter from a
different
operation that had stolen the ore and was making off with it, before they in turn stole it for themselves. Isabel’s man was still assaying the haul, but the best guess was that the platinum, when refined, was worth fifty thousand or more.

“We cannot take it,” Drake said. “It’s too big, there’s no way to move it.”

“Speak for yourself,” Isabel said. “I’m sure as hell not leaving it behind.”

“You can come back for it if you want to, but we’re going to complete the mission as planned. We’re not hauling around a bunch of dirt, and we’re not waiting here while we try to locate a freighter to haul it away for us, either.”

“Does that mean you’ll kill the prisoners?” Isabel asked. She stared at him, her mechanical eye dilating. “Because otherwise, it will be gone by the time we get back, and I’m not giving it up.”

“What if I let you keep it?” Drake asked Van Gelder. He lifted a hand to stop Isabel’s angry protests. “You stole it, it’s yours fair and square.”

Isabel was still sputtering. “No way. That ore alone is worth more than your whole mission, and we didn’t have to face the bloody navy to get our hands on it.”

“Let’s say it’s worth fifty thousand pounds,” Drake told her. “For the sake of argument. That’s
after
it’s refined. It’s not worth a fraction of that now. It’s ore, you need to get it out of here and keep from getting robbed yourself. If you break our contract, you can bet that I’ll spread the word about what you’ve got. Then we’ll see if you can keep it.”

“You’re a bastard, Drake,” Isabel said. She turned to Catarina. “Is he always like this?”

“He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” Catarina seemed amused by her sister’s anger. “Come on, James, tell us what you propose as an alternative. Look at your woman here. She’s no more happy about it than we are.”

Capp had taken on a greedy, scheming look when Isabel mentioned the ore, but now she was scowling.

“It’s worth fifteen thousand,” Drake said. “That’s what I figure we would have left after we paid to haul it out of here, refined it, and sold it. A nice payday for our fleet, but it won’t go very far once you start divvying it up. And if we get attacked while shipping it, repairs could easily eat that up.”

He’d pulled the fifteen thousand pounds figure out of thin air. He hadn’t even seen the hypothetical platinum ore, and he had no idea how much it might cost to get it shipped and refined. But his confident tone seemed to give the others pause.

“Van Gelder,” Drake said. “If you give me fifteen thousand worth of bullion, supplies, and weaponry, I’ll let you keep your ore, your base, and whichever of your people wish to stay behind.”

“You’ve done fifteen thousand pounds of damage already,” he grumbled, “and killed twenty people, at least. That’s half my crew.”

“And you fired the first shot.” Drake shrugged. “But bygones will be bygones. Give the word, and the looting stops now. We’ll make an assessment, and you can help us load our ship with what we select.”

He turned to Isabel and Catarina. “Does this sound reasonable? You keep our contract, you get your share of the fifteen thousand, and everybody leaves happy.”

Isabel was still grumpy, but Catarina reminded her that the whole operation had only worked because
Blackbeard
and
Orient Tiger
were there to pound the pirate redoubt. She’d have never done it alone.

As for Van Gelder, he was not in the best negotiating position. Compared to Drake setting the base on fire on his way out, he seemed to think it was a good offer.

“Good,” Drake said, once all parties were agreed. “We’re four hours into this operation. That leaves us two hours to get the loot and go.”

#

The agreement didn’t mean that Drake needed to offer the best rates to Van Gelder and the surly people under his command. The man’s surviving crew kept hauling out various stolen goods, which Van Gelder then placed an absurdly high value on. Drake nodded seriously, listened to Capp, Carvalho, and the Vargus sisters estimate its true worth, and then took a fifty percent discount on top of that.

“Don’t try to con me, Mr. Van Gelder,” Drake said, when the man grew angry and threatened to stop cooperating. “You would never be able to sell these goods for their full value anyway.”

“This is robbery.”

“No, it’s retribution. Robbery is what you attempted when you fired those torpedoes unprovoked. Time is running out, so get moving.”

During all of this, Catarina’s crew had located the fortress’s safe; her people seemed to have a nose for sniffing out bullion. Drake only took a ten percent discount on gold and silver coins against the fifteen thousand Van Gelder owed. That seemed fair.

They ended up with sixty-five hundred pounds worth of guineas, guilders, and doubloons, plus a bunch of goods. These included the easily transportable, like liquor and foodstuffs, to the bulky: torpedoes, a hundred-kilowatt laser (Drake was thinking of Apex and the aliens’ energy weapons), spare tyrillium plating, and a six-inch cannon that Paredes took as partial payment at Drake’s encouragement. Paredes’s schooner could use an upgrade to her weak offensive capabilities. Aguilar, whose ship was already bristling with weapons, took another cannon, although when and where he would install it, Drake couldn’t imagine.

They also took on a dozen new crew members, some of Van Gelder’s more reliable-seeming people, spread among the various ships. Eleven men and women stayed behind, including Van Gelder, gloomily settling in with what remained of their base and their diminished pile of loot.

Six hours. Minor damage, one dead, and two wounded. Fifteen thousand pounds worth of bullion and goods. The Vargus sisters had been right, after all. The little pirate fleet was in a jubilant mood as it approached the next jump point. Drake struggled to keep the ships in line, insisting that they go through in the proper order.

Four of the pirate ships obeyed him, but Dunkley raced ahead in his schooner, and rather than chase him and leave the slower ships behind, Drake let him go. Dunkley jumped first. Tolvern cursed and suggested they knock him around a bit with the deck gun when they got to the other side. Teach him a lesson.

Blackbeard
came through next, with the other ships following closely behind. He emerged from the jump less confused than usual, already remembering who he was and what he was doing by the time Tolvern lifted her head and blinked groggily at him.