Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) (13 page)

Somehow, Dunkley managed to get turned around and headed back toward the other human ships. Hroom guns filled the sky with flashing light. He took a vicious blow to his engines. The rear of the schooner flared, and a huge jet of plasma vented off into space. He kept going on sheer momentum, flying straight toward
Blackbeard
.

One of the sloops darted in from the side. Its long, sharp nose stabbed into the side of the schooner. There was a flash of light and a dozen secondary explosions as the schooner broke apart. The bridge of Dunkley’s ship spiraled end over end, until Hroom warships tore this largest piece of wreckage apart with pulse-cannon fire.

Catarina Vargus had come through. With the arrival of
Orient Tiger
, Drake now had three frigates and the remaining schooner to back him up. It was a formidable force, even without Dunkley. But against six sloops, none of them injured, he’d be in trouble. He could handle a single sloop himself, maybe two or three with the other ships in support. If Rutherford had been with him at the helm of
Vigilant
, he’d have liked his odds. As it was, they looked grim.

Having wiped out Dunkley’s schooner, the enemy sloops were turning, fanning out to come at
Blackbeard
. The Royal Navy called this formation a “throwing star,” and Drake knew how to break that, as well. If only he’d had more firepower to back him. Time for some improvising.

Drake called his remaining ships. “Pull back to the jump point. Guard the—”

“What do you—” Isabel’s voice interrupted.

“Listen to me! Guard the jump point, as if we have a capital ship coming through that we need to protect. Catarina, move forward as if you’re going to spearhead another wedge.”

They got it now and moved to obey. Perhaps chastened by Dunkley’s demise, even Paredes and Aguilar obeyed without comment, and soon they were in a passable example of the throwing-star-breaking formation that Drake had been thinking of before, or at least the first two-thirds of it. If he’d been able to add another cruiser or two, he’d be ready to face the Hroom.

“Debris,” Jane warned. “Impact in three seconds.”

A bit of Dunkley’s wreckage spiraled across the viewscreen. They braced themselves, and the deck shuddered as the debris slammed into them.

“Thanks for the warning, Jane,” Tolvern said sarcastically. “Really helpful timing.”

Warnings came through about shield damage from the hit, but Drake could tell from the strength of the impact, and from how long it had taken Jane to identify the threat, that it hadn’t been serious. He kept his attention glued to the evolving position of the enemy fleet.

The sloops pulled up when they were still eighty thousand miles distant, and there they seemed to hesitate. A human commander surely would have known Drake was bluffing. With the possible exception of
Blackbeard
, these were obviously pirate ships and freebooters, not any official navy. Why should the Hroom expect another cruiser to come through and not a frigate, or nothing? They must suspect as much.

But if this were really a suicide fleet, the Hroom couldn’t risk mixing it up and losing some of their firepower. A victory here would be as good as a loss unless they emerged unscathed. Drake was sure he could take out at least one of the sloops before they got him, and if he really
had
been counting on more ships to emerge from the jump point, the Hroom would have left the encounter well bloodied.

The sloops kept their formation, but turned in a wide arc and flew away from Drake and the jump point. They came out of the formation to spread into a long line as they accelerated toward the inner system and the several jump points through which they might escape. Drake let them go. The only thing to do was chart their exit from the system and pass this information along to Rutherford while he proceeded on his own course toward Albion. No word yet from his friend in the fleet, but Drake assumed that Rutherford was taking his warnings seriously.

Drake got the other captains on the viewscreen and chewed them out. This was why. Why he was in command, and the others subordinate at all times. Why they were to obey his commands without question, whether they were in battle or not. Why they should never interrupt or contradict when he was giving orders under fire. And why he would blow a hole in the next ship who defied him. If Dunkley had obeyed orders, he and his crew would still be alive. They listened, duly chastened, but Drake wasn’t done.

“This is a military mission, and it will be treated as such. It is why I have paid for all this firepower, and why, if you think you know better than I do, you are undoubtedly wrong. I am a military commander, and none of you, for all of your skills, can say the same thing. In battle, my word is law. And so is Commander Tolvern’s. If you hear it from the mouth of my commander, it is as good as if you’ve heard it from my own. Is that clear?”

They said it was.

“Good. Stand by and await my orders.” He ended the call and settled into his chair, deflated. Numbers and memos flashed across his console as reports poured in from his ship and elsewhere in the fleet. They blurred past his vision. He could only think of the destroyed schooner. The image of it bursting apart was seared into his mind.

“A costly lesson, sir,” Tolvern said. “But perhaps necessary.”

“Perhaps.”

“Let us hope,” Nyb Pim said, “that future lessons do not require the destruction of one of our warships and the death of the sixteen crew members on board.”

Capp slumped in her chair and rubbed at her buzzed scalp. “Dunkley, you are a bloody fool. You threw your life away, mate.” Capp had tried to pummel the man when they encountered him on Leopold, but she didn’t sound like an enemy now.

It was hard to see a silver lining in the literal cloud of debris left by Dunkley’s obliterated ship, but one thing did occur to Drake. “How much did I promise the sloop captains?” he asked Tolvern.

“Three thousand, sir. We’d already paid him fifteen hundred of it.”

“Then I suppose that’s fifteen hundred more pounds with which to bribe Catarina Vargus.”

With Dunkley’s death and the destruction of his schooner, Drake needed
Orient Tiger
more than ever.

Chapter Eleven

The day after the brawl with the death fleet, the captain sent Tolvern and Capp to the lab, where Noah Brockett said he had something to share. Tolvern had nearly forgotten about the Apex tissue samples given them by what she’d begun to think of as the friendly Hroom faction. Not that General Mose Dryz wouldn’t happily thrash Albion in battle if he could. But he wasn’t trying to extirpate the human race from this sector, either. Not like the suicidal followers of the Hroom god of death.

Drake had seemed keen to personally follow up on Brockett’s findings. But he’d finally heard from Rutherford, and Smythe had intercepted a mass of fleet communications, and these things demanded the captain’s attention. Drake had also decided that the six sloops lurking outside the jump point had constituted a new death fleet, as there was no way the other one could have been in that exact spot at that time. That warranted additional thought, and he wanted to discuss it with Nyb Pim, who had a better knowledge of the jump points in the surrounding systems.

So he sent Capp and Tolvern to see Brockett.

“I been wondering something,” Capp said as the two women took the winding corridor that led to the labs. “Do you think this science bloke is good looking?”

Tolvern had grown used to Capp’s ribbing and learned that the best way to deal with it was to shrug it off. Still, with the former marine always on her about being ‘sweet on the captain,’ as Capp put it, this new angle was a fresh annoyance.

“No, not really. Anyway, I haven’t thought of it much. I never see Brockett outside the lab.”

“I didn’t neither, not at first. He’s the geeky sort, and I ain’t usually interested in them. Nose in books all the time, and he probably smells like them chemicals they use down there. You know that stuff they pump into dead bodies so they don’t stink or nothing before you’re done with ’em?”

“Formaldehyde?”

“Yeah.”

Tolvern stopped. They were almost to the lab. “Wait, you’re asking for yourself? Are you interested, Capp?” Tolvern grinned.

The other woman blushed and rubbed her arms, where she’d rolled up her sleeves to show off the lion tattoos she was so proud of. “I don’t know. He looked like a ponce when we took him on.”

“A ponce? You mean gay?”

“You know, not manly or nothing.”

“Manly?” Tolvern smiled. “You’re not an anti-intellectual, are you?”

“I ain’t anti-nothing. And I know he ain’t gay, ’cause I caught him checking me out in the mess the other day. You know the way blokes do when they fancy you? And that got me thinking maybe he weren’t so bad after all. And maybe he weren’t a ponce, neither.”

“Brockett would be a big change from Carvalho,” Tolvern said.

Carvalho was almost a caricature of masculinity, with pirate swagger thrown in for good measure. Tolvern had stumbled into Capp’s room once while Carvalho was lounging on the bed, barely covered, and she’d had to drag her eyes away from his muscular body. He had a smug look that was both maddening and sexy, and he and Capp could scarcely keep their hands off each other.

“Yeah, he ain’t happy with me at the moment.”

“He’s not?” Tolvern frowned. “I’m sorry, did something happen?”

“You know when we was in that pirate base, collecting loot? There was this fellow, see, real handsome. Dutch bloke. I told him I’d shoot his stones off if he didn’t show me where the treasure chest was. And he smirked at me like this.” Capp made a face. “And he said he’d show me the treasure all right. Well, what was I to do? Carvalho was all busy looting, and it had been three days! I was ready for some. What was I supposed to do?”

She sounded so earnest, but Tolvern couldn’t help the laugh that burst out. “Wait, so you’re down there looting, and you somehow end up sleeping with one of the people we’re supposed to be robbing?”

Capp looked glum. “Yeah, and Carvalho stumbled through while we was groping each other. He didn’t like that none. So now it has been a week since he’s come to my room, and I didn’t even get to finish with that Dutch bloke, neither.”

Brockett poked his head out the door of the science lab. “I
thought
I heard someone out here. Are you two coming in, or what?”

“’Course we are, luv,” Capp said. Give us a sec, will you?”

Tolvern waited until Brockett had retreated to his lab. “But when we were on Leopold, you told me Carvalho didn’t care, so long as you—how did you put it?—didn’t run out of it.”

“Yeah, but he ain’t too keen on catching me in the act, neither. Know what I mean? He’ll come around eventually, but now I’m wondering, what about Brockett?”

Tolvern laughed. “I won’t tell you no.”

“Unless you want him for yourself. I’ll step out of the way and let you have him.”

“No, not at all. Come on.”

Brockett was staring into a microscope when they entered and didn’t look up right away. His left hand fiddled with the diopter adjustment, while his right hand worked at a keypad, where he was typing notes by touch. Tolvern and Capp glanced at each other, then seemed to come to an agreement by mutual consent to wait until he was finished, not wanting to interrupt him. Whatever it was, Brockett was very intense about it. He removed a slide and clamped down another, all without looking away from his equipment.

At last, he looked up from the microscope, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and grabbed for his glasses. When he’d put them on, he turned around and blinked. “Oh, I’m sorry. Have you been there a while?”

“A few minutes,” Tolvern said. “It looked important, so we thought we’d wait.”

“What, this? No, I’m just looking at space barnacles.”

“You’re looking at space barnacles?” Tolvern asked. “What does this have to do with Apex?”

“Nothing whatsoever. It’s a side project of mine. Did you know there are eleven known varieties of space barnacle? Nine of them are related, and they seem to have a shared genetic code with the star leviathan—I think the same alien race must have created them both. Long ago—millions of years, in fact.”

“Wow,” Capp said, with no trace of irony. “That’s fascinating.”

Tolvern cleared her throat. “About your message to the captain . . . ”

“But the other two species are from an unrelated lineage,” Brockett continued, as if neither of them had spoken. “They are purely organic, like the mollusks you might find in a planetside ocean, except with adaptations for the void, of course. Where did they come from? How did they evolve for life in outer space?”

“Yes, anyway,” Tolvern said impatiently. “About your message to the captain . . . ”

“And here’s another thing. Humans have only been in this sector for a few centuries, but there are already small adaptations for our ships, a subspecies of barnacle that seems to be evolving to survive around our plasma engines. In another few hundred years, they could be a real problem, clogging up our engines and requiring costly repairs.”

“Fancy that!” Capp said. She sounded utterly sincere. Actually, a little more than sincere, and she was articulating her words with extra care. “I’d love to hear more sometime.”

“I didn’t know you were interested in genetics and biology,” Brockett said.

“It’s rather a surprise to me, too,” Tolvern said dryly.

Capp approached Brockett. “Can I look through your microscope? I want to see these space barnacles—they sound amazing.”

Brockett pulled up a chair, and Capp found a way to touch his hand as he adjusted the microscope for her. She glanced back at Tolvern. “We ain’t in no hurry, Tolvern. Gimme a chance to have a look, will you?”

Capp seemed terrible at this sort of flirting, and Tolvern didn’t know why she bothered. The ensign was more the type to grab a semi-interested man and drag him into a broom closet before he had a chance to think of all the reasons why it might be a bad idea. But Brockett was eating up the attention. Soon, the pair of them were whispering bad puns about barnacles, giggling at supposedly witty things that one or the other said.