Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) (9 page)

“So you want to know if we should disobey Malthorne and join Drake in this side expedition?” Pittsfield asked.

“That is not exactly my concern. I’d like to, of course, although we’d have a devil of a time explaining our actions. But Drake is missing a key piece of information.”

Catherine Caites was quicker than the steady, but unimaginative Pittsfield, and recognition dawned on her face. “Did you say Drake spotted this fleet two and a half days ago? And he just sent the subspace?”

“Yes, now you see,” Drake said.

Confusion spread across Pittsfield’s face. “I don’t—wait, do you mean there are
two
Hroom fleets?”

“At
least
two,” Rutherford said. “Unless the one is pursuing the other—there’s a civil war in the empire, apparently—we have to assume they’re coordinating an attack on Albion.”

“Are we sure we trust Drake?” Caites asked. “Could he be lying?”

“Why wouldn’t we trust him? It has been established that Drake was framed for his crime, and he behaved honorably when he came to our aid during the Apex attack. Our allegiance is still to Albion, the Crown, and the navy, but I see no reason to question Drake’s integrity.”

“Yes, but these allies of his you mentioned,” she pressed. “They must be pirates he hired to help rescue his parents. Do we trust
them
? I don’t think we do, and I don’t think we trust anyone who would hire them, including James Drake.”

Under other circumstances, Rutherford might have seen her comments as insubordinate, but it was Caites’s initiative that had brought her to his attention, and he carefully considered her opinion.

He was sympathetic to Drake’s situation. Shortly after leaving his old friend, Rutherford had sent messages to a few trusted allies. One was his uncle, the Duke of West Mercia, who was the most powerful lord on Mercia, a cousin of the king, and by all accounts an honorable man. The duke, who was married to Rutherford’s mother’s sister, was eighth in line for the throne, not far behind Admiral Malthorne himself. Rutherford asked the duke to petition the king to pardon Baron and Lady Drake.

But Rutherford could only frown at the foolishness of hiring pirates. The frontier worlds were lawless enough without putting more money, more equipment, and worst of all, more grandiose ideas, into the heads of the rabble who lived there.

“Yes, I see,” Rutherford said at last. “Hire pirates, engage in piracy, and you
become
a pirate, no matter the difficult decisions that led you to that point. But I don’t believe that Drake is lying so as to gain an advantage. If he were doing that, he would send us as far from Albion as possible, not draw us home.”

“Assuming Drake is telling the truth,” Pittsfield said, “there are two Hroom death fleets, apparently on a suicide mission. It will take a good deal of firepower to stop them, with or without Drake and his pirates.”

“Our fleet is filled with dunderheads like Harbrake and Lindsell,” Caites said.

“Those dunderheads are superior officers of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. You will remember your place, Lieutenant.”

“My apologies, sir. I misspoke.”

“Yes, well, they do have their limitations, I will grant you that. I would take Drake over the lot of them, but if we can’t trust his allies, where does that leave us?”

“It leaves us unable to stop the Hroom before they attack Albion,” Pittsfield said. “We have no choice but to trust them. We need Drake’s ships. And if there’s a third fleet we haven’t detected yet . . . ”

Rutherford completed the thought. “That may still prove insufficient.”

“Unless—” Caites began. “May I speak frankly, sir?”

She rubbed at the brass buttons on her jacket with one hand and tapped at the table with the other. Rutherford regretted cutting her off earlier. He didn’t want to squelch her initiative—that initiative was why he had promoted her to be his second mate. Nevertheless, it wasn’t in his repertoire to apologize for speaking gruffly.

“You may always speak frankly, Lieutenant. I only ask that you be circumspect with your language. We must not abandon decorum in our enthusiasm.” It all sounded stiff coming out of his mouth, like something his father would have said, but he thought it proper.

“Yes, sir. With all due respect, we must face these enemies with our full might.”

“Go on,” he said.

“
Dreadnought
, sir. If you were to tell the lord admiral, he could recall all navy resources to Albion.”

“He would demand the source of our information,” Rutherford said.

“You could equivocate, sir,” Pittsfield said.

“Equivocate?” Rutherford looked at him with surprise. This was unexpected from his staid, rule-following commander.

“Yes, sir.”

“I suppose I could. It is not in my nature, of course.” Rutherford felt the need to add that. “But I could concoct a lie about how we captured a Hroom prisoner during this business with Apex, how he told me under duress that there was a suicidal fleet approaching, and how we have twice detected them since.”

“That would keep Malthorne from suspecting Drake,” Pittsfield said. “A lie, yes, but an honorable one, given the circumstances.”

“It would also pull the entire Royal Navy to Albion at just the moment when Drake is trying to rescue his parents,” Rutherford said.

Pittsfield stared at his hands.

“Commander?” Rutherford prodded.

Pittsfield looked up. “It is the best way to save Albion. We join Drake in battling the Hroom as soon as they jump into the system, while Malthorne sets up in orbit with his own forces to mop up whatever gets past us. That seems the obvious tactical solution. Morally, I am not so sure.”

“We can’t save Drake’s parents at the expense of the whole planet,” Caites said, “but we can look for a way to shield his escape, at least. I can imagine several scenarios by which that would be possible.”

“Can you?” Rutherford asked. “I confess that I am struggling to think of any.”

“Admittedly, anything that occurs to me would be a long shot.”

Rutherford turned it over for a long moment, but in the end, there seemed to be no way to do his duty to Albion and fully protect his old friend at the same time. Faced with that conundrum, there was only one possible choice.

He touched his ear. “Norris, is that subspace channel ready to open?”

“Almost. Give me five minutes, sir.”

“Good. I will have the message for you then. Lieutenant,” he said to Caites when he’d ended the call to Norris, “open your computer. I will dictate.”

She obeyed. “Ready, sir.”

Rutherford sighed. “One moment, I need to compose it in my head, first. It isn’t easy to gracefully betray a friend.”

And then he began. A sick feeling had settled into his gut by the time he finished.

Chapter Eight

Two jumps after Hades Gulch, Drake was running through the subspace frequencies, hoping for a message from Rutherford, when
Blackbeard
came under attack. The ship was at the lead of a long column, stretched at intervals of roughly two million miles, to better hide the signature of his fleet. They would only draw together during the final approach to the jump point. After
Blackbeard,
came Isabel Vargus on
Outlaw
, followed by Paredes’s and Dunkley’s sloops, Aguilar on
Pussycat
, and finally, Catarina guarding the rear with
Orient Tiger
.

The next jump point was only a few million miles beyond the uninhabited system’s star, and
Blackbeard
was cutting through the asteroid belt, midway there. Scans had come up clean; they appeared to be alone in the system. So it was a shock when two torpedoes corkscrewed out from a cluster of asteroids a few hundred thousand miles below them and to starboard. Warning lights flashed on the bridge.

Barker’s people were alert in the gunnery, and they launched countermeasures. Manx followed with two electromagnetic pulses from the defense grid. One of the torpedoes wandered off course, but the other barreled toward
Blackbeard
.

Jane helpfully chimed in to state the obvious. “Torpedo impact in four minutes and twenty seconds. Class two detonation expected.”

“It appears to be a Mark-IV, sir,” Tolvern said. “We can outrun it.”

Drake studied the data that Smythe was sending across. Mark-IVs were an obsolete design last used in the navy more than three decades ago. About fifteen years ago, the Admiralty had sold several thousand of them to Ladino colonies fighting a frontier brush war against the Hroom. As soon as that conflict cooled down, many of those missiles had made their way into private hands. This pair had been launched from an asteroid about two miles long and a mile wide. A rock big enough to hide a significant pirate base.

“Not today,” he told her. “Today, we teach these people a lesson before the rest of our fleet stumbles through. Capp, bring us around. Get behind the asteroid.”

Nyb Pim was off duty, leaving Capp in the pilot’s chair. “What about that torpedo?”

“You let me worry about suppressing enemy fire. Get us behind the asteroid.”

Tolvern sent a warning to the other ships in their fleet, while Drake told Smythe and Barker what he intended. They kept working at the final torpedo, even as Jane’s updates grew more frequent, and, it seemed, more urgent sounding. Twenty seconds out, Smythe disabled the torpedo by sending it a bogus command to disarm the warhead; there were benefits to facing old navy ordnance. The torpedo slammed into the side of the ship, but didn’t detonate. Jane reported minimal damage.

Blackbeard
whipped around the asteroid from behind. It was shaped like a giant, elongated potato, covered in warty eyes, one end broken off, perhaps by one of the other asteroids bumping around nearby. Lights flashed along its surface as
Blackbeard
flew over. Kinetic weapons, but the enemy fired too late, and they missed. Meanwhile, the gunnery had readied the main battery. As
Blackbeard
passed, she rolled onto her side and fired. Explosions ripped up the surface.
Blackbeard
was safely into space again moments later.

“How do you like that, ya dumb tossers?” Capp said. “Bloody fools don’t know what they’re messing with.”

But Drake didn’t like what he saw from the aftermath. Gray plumes trailed high over the asteroid, with the larger debris settling slowly to the surface, while dust leaked into space to form a hazy halo around it. But there was no fire or debris venting out, and a scan from this distance showed nothing on the surface that would give away a base. If not for the attack, it would look no different from a million other hunks of rock floating out here.

The crew of the dug-in base, whoever they were, now sat silent and unresponsive as Drake tried to hail them. No more torpedoes or cannon fire. Drake lurked nearby, waiting as the rest of the ships in his fleet slowed down and encircled the asteroid at a safe distance.

“Why did they shoot at us?” Tolvern asked.

“This is a trade lane, and we were cloaked. Bad instruments—they must have thought we were a merchant vessel traveling without escort. I’ll wager they intended to disable us and then send a ship to haul us in.”

It was a common pirate tactic. The survivors from the captured merchant ships would swell the ranks of the pirates until a system was fully infested and merchants were forced to chart lengthy detours. When the situation grew intolerable, the navy would send a task force to root them out. Drake had been on pirate-hunting missions before the last Hroom war.

Whoever these particular brigands were, they’d apparently realized the magnitude of their error, for now they sat silently, refusing his attempts to hail them. Moments later, he had Catarina and Isabel on a joint call through the viewscreen. He gave them orders.

“
Orient Tiger
and
Outlaw
will cover me with suppressing fire while I go in. Isabel, have the schooners withdraw to catch anyone who makes a run for it. Is Aguilar ready to mix it up? He can bring
Pussycat
in for close fire support if things heat up.”

“These fools are dug in pretty good,” Catarina said. “You’ll need more than one broadside to hammer them into submission. Maybe it would be better if I go down while you give better suppressing fire.”

“I am not looking for their surrender,” Drake said. “I’m going to come in low and drop an atomic bomb on their head.”

“Where did you get that?” Catarina asked.

“We’ve been carrying five warheads since the mutiny.”

“And
now
is when you want to use them?” she asked.

“Waste of ammo, if you ask me,” Isabel said. Through the viewscreen, the older sister’s mechanical eye seemed to glow with a strange blue light. “And a waste of good gear, too, what we destroy. Besides, I’m not sure that what they did warrants you nuking them.”

“They’re pirates,” Drake said. “They attacked us unprovoked. Destroying their base would be a favor to anyone else passing this way.”

“A fine opportunity for loot,” Isabel said. “Dumb to pass it up.”

“I agree with my sister,” Catarina said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but we don’t have time for it.”

“Oh, come on, James,” Catarina said. “Don’t play ignorant, it’s unbecoming. Who knows what we will find on that rock, and it’s all ill-gotten gains, so we don’t have to feel any guilt in liberating it.”

Drake chewed this over, glancing at Tolvern, who had been listening to the exchange. She shrugged. Drake looked back to the two sisters sharing the viewscreen. “How long would we need?”

“Twelve hours,” Catarina said.

“You think that’s enough?” Isabel said. “A couple of hours to knock out their defenses, a few more to send an assault team. Then the salvage after that.”

“I didn’t want to be greedy,” Catarina said. “But sure, if James thinks we can spare a full day, why not?”

“I’ll give you six hours,” he said. “Then we’re on our way.”

There was some grumbling about this, but in the end, they agreed. There were already agreed-upon terms for dividing loot, and it only fell on them to make sure the other ships had no objections. Given that the schooners were going to stay away from the fighting unless someone on the asteroid tried to flee, the two schooner captains readily agreed. Aguilar was even more eager to get his frigate,
Pussycat,
into the fight.