Chapter One

Henny Capp lay in bed, counting the minutes until Carvalho arrived. She knew he’d be tired after getting off shift, as he’d spent ten straight hours on a spacewalk, while he and his fellow engineers worked outside in the vacuum to repair a problem with the new shields. They weren’t retracting properly, which made it impossible to deploy the underside battery. Carvalho would come to her room wanting to collapse.

Capp didn’t care how exhausted he was. She was horny, and she meant to get some before she let him sleep a wink. If he didn’t come to her straightaway, she’d threatened, she’d hunt him down in the crew berths and drag him out by his stones.

This was the first night ever that Capp would enjoy a private berth, and she meant to put it to good use. A perk of her promotion to officer. The room was cramped, it was true, barely long enough for her cot and a toilet—she was a lowly ensign, after all, and didn’t have so much as her own shower—but it was quiet. And private.

No more hot-bunking, where you showed up in the crew quarters just as the previous bloke rolled out of bed. Climbed into bed to find the mattress still warm, the sheets carrying some jerk’s sweat and body odor. Others snoring above and below, coughing, farting, talking in their sleep, tossing and turning, and doing every other imaginable thing to annoy and aggravate.

As for hooking up with a fellow crew member, forget it. Capp and Carvalho made love anywhere they could steal a moment of privacy: engineering closets, an away pod, even inside an empty torpedo tube. Technically, so-called fraternizing was against regulations, but even Captain Drake had lightened up since leaving the spaceyards of San Pablo. Hard not to, them being fugitives and all, their crew rounded out with pirates and smugglers.

The clock showed 0515. He’d sent a message swearing he’d be off by 0500. So where the devil was he?

Capp was on the verge of springing up and grabbing her jumpsuit to go track him down in the crew berths when a light tap sounded on her door.

“That you?” she asked.

“Who else would it be?”

“Better be,” she said. “I’m naked and ready to jump the first bloke I see.”

His sigh was audible through the door. Capp grunted. This might be harder than expected.

She didn’t bother to cover herself with the blanket as the door slid open and Carvalho slipped inside. The hall light showed streaks of grease across his cheeks, and his eyes were bloodshot. Then he was inside, and the door closed, leaving them in the dim light of her bedside lamp.

“It is you, luv,” she said with a smile. “You kept me waiting so long I didn’t much care anymore. Another twenty minutes and I woulda reached into the hall and grabbed the first warm body I could find.”

Carvalho sat on the edge of the bed, barely looking at her as he yanked off his boots. “It’s a mess out there. Captain was right. We left San Pablo too fast. Should have stuck around the yards a few more days making sure everything was in order. Lot easier than working the repairs out here.”

“Stick around and get blasted by the Royal Navy? No, thanks. You heard Rutherford is bombarding San Pablo, right? That’s us he’s trying to kill.”

“Scoot over,” Carvalho said.

“No room. You’ll have to lie on top of me.” She reached a hand down between his legs. “Got something down there for me, luv? How about you let me have a look?”

Carvalho took her hand and pulled it away. “Come on, Capp, I’m knackered.”

“You don’t seem that tired to me.”

“And you know what else?”

“What?”

He started to say something, then stopped himself. “Look, I shouldn’t have come.”

“What’s this all about?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You’re not that deep, luv. So don’t go pretending you’re keepin’ secrets and whatnot.”

Carvalho grunted. He was still sitting up, and strangely, he really did seem to have something eating at him. That was new and unwelcome. If Capp wanted some bloke who needed to pour his heart out with angsty crap, she wouldn’t be with Carvalho. But she supposed it wouldn’t hurt to listen, so long as he didn’t make a habit of it.

“You can tell me while you take your clothes off,” she said.

“Don’t you think about anything else?”

“When I haven’t seen you in thirty-six hours? No, not really.” She pouted. “I ain’t fooling around here. And I know you’re plenty capable unless you been dippin’ your oar in other waters.”

“I haven’t, and you know it.”

“Yeah, I know. And I don’t much care, anyhow, so long as you keep enough for me.”

Her hands worked at his jumpsuit while she spoke. She unzipped it and peeled it off his broad, muscular shoulders. She trailed her fingernails down his chest with one hand while she worked the suit off him with the other. As she’d told him, he really wasn’t that complex, and he was soon doing what she wanted him to.

But he seemed distracted, and she had to do most of the work. It wasn’t the best lovemaking, that was for bloody sure, but it sufficed for her needs. Later, as she lay on top of him, her head against his shoulder, drifting to sleep, he cleared his throat.

“You know what Vargus gave them on Captain Kidd?” he said. “Half for the officers, and half for the crew. Then the crew divvied up the loot however they wanted. Guy gets injured, they give him a double share. Loses an eye or a limb, they double it again.”

“Where’d you hear that?” she asked.

Carvalho rested one of his hands on her butt and rubbed the other idly over her freshly buzzed scalp. “Common knowledge. That’s the way pirates work.”

“Well, we ain’t pirates. So we’ll do whatever Captain Drake decides. You heard what he said.”

“All those guys didn’t join us in San Pablo so they could earn navy wages. What’s that, two pounds a week for an enlisted man like me?”

“Too late for that now. Twenty hours and we’ll be in battle. Let’s get in and out of there alive before we start bellyaching about pay.”

“It’ll be too late, then.”

“King’s balls, will you leave it alone? Ain’t got no choice now, not here in the void with half the damn navy searching for us.”

“We got a choice. A big one.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” she said.

“Ah, forget it. I’m going to grab some shuteye. Things will look better in the morning, I’m sure.”

Capp pushed herself up. She’d shut off the light after they finished their lovemaking, but now turned it on again. “Spit it out. What are you going on about?”

“Never mind.”

She slapped a hand against his chest. “Enough of that crap. What’s this all about? And where did you get that stuff about how Vargus paid his crew? We killed that bastard at the yards, wiped out most of the rest of them, too.”

“Didn’t kill his daughter.”

Capp frowned, thinking of the dark-haired, flashing-eyed daughter of the pirate captain. “Catarina Vargus?”

“She sent me a message. Couple of days ago, right after we shoved off.”

“King’s balls. And you didn’t tell me? And what’s she got to offer, anyway? Her daddy’s ship was stripped for spare parts. She’s nothing without a ship, just another gun for hire.”

“What if we say, for the sake of argument, that she had her own ship? That sometimes she flew with her old man, and other times she set off on her own?”

“Now you’re just making stuff up,” Capp accused.

“Fine, whatever. Believe what you want.”

“And what does she want, revenge?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, then?”

He shook his head. “Like I said, forget it. You’re in a mood, and I’ve decided to settle for two pounds a week till I see how things shake out.”

“Dammit, Carvalho, will you tell me?”

“Forget it. I know how you’re sweet on him.”

“For the cap’n?” she scoffed. “What a bloody fool you are. Let Tolvern pine after Drake, I ain’t at all keen on him.”

“How am I supposed to tell otherwise, the way you’re talking about him all the time?” Carvalho said sullenly.

“It’s called loyalty, you idiot. Drake gave me a chance as pilot—weren’t nobody else who did that. Coulda shoved me off on San Pablo, or when he got back that Hroom, but he didn’t. You should be feeling something yourself. If it weren’t for the captain, we’d both be in the mines.”

“And I pulled his stones out of the fire on San Pablo, so that makes us even. Except I’m getting two pounds a week, while he takes what he wants. Anyway, I don’t believe you. I think you are keen on him. That’s what all that needling of Tolvern is about. You’re telling the commander what you’re really feeling yourself.”

“Hah!”

Capp didn’t know if she should be impressed that Carvalho was actually thinking about stuff a little deeper than usual, or annoyed that he was so wrong about her feelings for the captain. Capp was the sort of woman who knew exactly what she did and didn’t want, and if she’d been hot for the captain, she wouldn’t have been pining hopelessly for him like Jess Tolvern was. She’d have done something about it.

“Are you jealous?” she asked. “Is that what this is about?”

“Hell, no.”

“You are, aren’t you? Listen to me. Drake is the son of a baron. He’s a stiff, upper-class son of a bitch. That’s pretty much the opposite of what I want, and that’s the bleeding truth. Now what’s this about Catarina Vargus? What did she tell you? What does she want?”

“Nope, I’m not talking about it anymore.”

He thrust out his chin and narrowed his eyes. She’d seen that stubborn look before and knew he meant business, but she had no intention of letting it go herself, either.

Capp started to press on, only to be interrupted by the chime of her clock, warning that she was shortly expected on the bridge. Was it that late already?

“Good,” Carvalho said as she climbed out of bed. He pulled up the blanket and made a show of rolling over to face the wall. “Now maybe you’ll let me sleep.”

“Did you send Catarina Vargus a return message?” she asked. “Look at me. Did you?”

“Not yet, but I’m thinking about it.”

“Don’t you dare. I’m serious. We’re going into battle, and the last thing we need is that pirate wench knowing where we are. Who knows what she’d do, or who she’d tell?”

He looked troubled at this, and this only deepened her suspicions. “You didn’t, did you? Because if she knows that we’re on our way to Hot Barsa, and the fleet were to somehow find out—”

“Why would she tell anyone? She’s not exactly on friendly terms with Albion herself. Her old man shot up a Royal Navy cruiser.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Capp said, as she pulled on her underwear and grabbed for her jumpsuit where it lay crumpled in a pile. “How about, ‘Hey, Captain Rutherford, give me a thousand guineas and I’ll tell you where you can find Drake and the rest of the fugitives’? Catarina Vargus gets her revenge and a nice payoff at the same time.”

“I didn’t tell her.”

Capp studied him as she zipped up her jumpsuit and swatted at the worst of the wrinkles, before picking up her socks and shoes. “You better be telling the truth.”

Her com link opened. It was the captain. “Are you up, Ensign?”

“Aye. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Make it two. We’ve got a situation.”

“Yes, sir.”

The line went dead, and she turned back to Carvalho with a scowl.

“I am telling the truth,” he insisted. “Now get going. Forget I said anything.”

“You keep saying that,” Capp muttered as she slipped out of the room.

The corridor was empty, which was good. It wasn’t exactly a secret that Carvalho would be sleeping in her room, but she didn’t want to make a spectacle of it, either.

Blasted Carvalho. Now he’d put her in an awkward position. Should she tell Drake and Tolvern what he’d said about Catarina Vargus, or not?

It was a favor Drake had done her, and make no mistake. Once the captain had his precious Hroom pilot back, out of detox for his sugar addiction, what did he need her for? She could navigate about five jump points, and another eight or ten with some difficulty. Using great concentration, she could interface her nav chip with the nav computer and maneuver the ship around any given star system. But compared to Nyb Pim, her piloting skills were rubbish.

Not to mention that she could barely read and write—which had been displayed to humiliating effect when the captain insisted that she write up the specifications of a jump point. Capp was the daughter of a stevedore in the York spaceyards and a barmaid. Her type didn’t get much schooling as a general rule. The captain didn’t need much more excuse to dump her at the first opportunity and pick up someone better as Nyb Pim’s subpilot. She didn’t want to give him another reason to doubt her.

By the time Capp got to the bridge, she’d decided. Probably Carvalho had nothing. Catarina Vargus must have got her hands on a new ship, probably some crappy little tramp frigate outfitted with a deck gun or two. The woman had sent Carvalho—and a bunch of other riff-raff, no doubt—a message asking if he wanted to join her new crew. Made all sorts of promises about treasure and the like. Trying to raise a crew on swagger and wishful thinking. If Capp told Drake, it would amount to nothing except to remind the captain that she herself was of the same lowly origins as Carvalho and the rest of the scum they’d scraped up in San Pablo.

And so when she came onto the bridge, she made her way to the pilot’s chair without saying a word to the captain, the commander, or anyone else about what she’d heard about Catarina Vargus.

Chapter Two

Drake glanced up as Capp came slinking onto the bridge. Her clothing was rumpled, and she had the look of someone who had rolled out of bed three minutes earlier.

He could see Commander Tolvern scowling as she looked over the subpilot’s disheveled appearance, and hoped that Tolvern would mention it to her the next time they were alone. The two women had gotten off to a rocky start, but seemed to be forming an unusual friendship since their time on San Pablo.

Capp toggled screens on the nav computer. She looked distracted, didn’t seem to understand yet why he’d called her to the bridge early. Drake wondered which she’d notice first, the missing pilot on the bridge or the minefield they were approaching at nearly four thousand miles per second. He turned back to his terminal, where he’d been reading Barker’s latest report about fixing the shield retractors.

“What’s this red thingy we’re coming up on?” Capp asked at last.

“About time,” Tolvern said. “Thought maybe we’d blast right through it before you noticed.”

“So what is it, sensors or something?”

Tech Officer Smythe looked up from his own terminal. “That red thingy is an array of Youd mines.”

“What’s a Youd mine? Captain?”

Drake was glad neither he nor the commander had mentioned Capp’s slovenly uniform, as it appeared there were more critical deficiencies to correct in the recently promoted subpilot. “Didn’t you read your briefing?”

“What briefing?”

Drake sighed and turned to Tolvern. “Commander.”

Tolvern looked peeved. “Aren’t you reading your memos?”

Capp looked back and forth between the three others on the bridge, before finally returning her gaze to the commander. “I was off shift.”

“Off shift isn’t the same as offline,” Tolvern said. “You’re supposed to check your memos and briefings.”

“Even when I’m sleeping?”

“You set an alarm. You wake up and check your messages midway through. We’re only a few hours out from battle. Or worse, if you don’t get us through these mines.”

“But where is Nyb Pim?” Capp sounded almost desperate. “Why can’t he do it?”

“He’s in detox with the shakes,” Drake said. Now she understood, but her reaction wasn’t inspiring confidence.

“Again? Did he get hold of some sugar or something?”

“He might be in and out for weeks. Anything he can give us, I have to save for Hot Barsa itself. That means I need my subpilot—that is to say, you—to get us through this minefield.”

Jane’s calm computer voice helpfully chimed in. “Thirty minutes to minefield. At present course, nineteen class-two detonations expected.”

“Then it’s a good thing we’re not taking the current course, isn’t it?” Drake said, still staring at Capp.

She started to respond, but Barker came through on the com link, asking if Drake could come down to engineering. Barker had a possible fix to the shield retractor that would allow them to use the newly installed battery of cannons on the belly. No, Drake said, he could not. Not right now.

“What about those mines?” Capp asked when he’d ended the call. “I don’t even know what a Youd mine is. Isn’t anyone going to tell me?”

Drake forced himself to remain calm. “Tolvern, take the helm. Capp, come with me to the war room.”

“Alone, sir?” Capp asked.

“Yes, alone. And be quick about it. I don’t have time to waste.” To Tolvern, he said, “Keep us on course until we’re back. We won’t be long.”

“Better not be,” Tolvern muttered.

Once the doors had closed on the war room, Drake told Capp to take a seat before sitting down himself. He fought to hide his frustration as he looked at the young woman anxiously rubbing the lion tattoos on her arm.

For the hundredth time in the past several weeks, he bemoaned the loss of his navy crew. Except for Tolvern, Drake, Barker, and a few others, he was left with these former prisoners and newly recruited pirates and smugglers. How in the blazes was he going to run the orbital forts around Hot Barsa, let alone lead an assault team on Admiral Malthorne’s estate, with a crew such as this?

“You did fine in actual battle, Ensign. This is nothing. Just a minefield.”

“But what’s a Youd mine? What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a name. A navy classification. When a Youd mine detects you, it sends a signal to all the others in the cluster, and the whole minefield gives chase. That’s what Jane meant about nineteen detonations against the hull.”

“Wouldn’t nineteen class-two detonations tear us to pieces?”

“Sure, if we were foolhardy enough to stumble through and let them pummel us. We aren’t. We picked up the field with long-range sensors and know exactly where they are. We’re still several million miles away. If I didn’t think you could bring us through safely, I’d have turned us around already and looked for some safer approach to the inner worlds of the system. So you see, I’m not worried.”

At this, Capp calmed down a little. “Yeah, I guess that’s right. Sorry, I ain’t so sure of myself at the moment.” There was still something in her tone that made him hesitate.

“Are we good?”

“Will Nyb Pim be okay?”

“I’m sure he will. He suffered a relapse, is all. I don’t mean he got his hands on sugar, so you don’t need to worry about that, but he started shaking in his chair a couple of hours ago. I sent him to the sick bay as a precaution.”

This was all true. The Hroom had turned violent during the worst of his withdrawal, and Drake hadn’t wanted to chance another incident. Apart from that, he needed Nyb Pim at his sharpest, most able, as they approached the planet.

“Good, because I don’t think I can hack it on my own.”

“You managed quite well before we recovered him from the slaver,” Drake pointed out. “Piloting solo, you seemed quite confident. Tolvern would even say you were cocky. Where has that woman gone? I need her back.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong.” Capp rubbed a hand over her scalp. “Maybe it’s ’cause nobody expected much, and now they do.” She tapped her chest, where the ensign insignia was sewn onto her jumpsuit. “Or maybe it’s this gold bar you gave me. I’m an officer now, that’s kinda crazy. Know what I mean?”

“A junior officer,” he said with a smile. “You have plenty of time to grow into the position, Capp.”

“Okay. I’m feeling better now.”

“There’s one other thing. As soon as we run the forts, we’re bringing Ajax—excuse me, Blackbeard—to the surface.” Drake stopped, uncertain as to how much he should reveal.

“Aye, Cap’n?”

He thought about what Tolvern would say if she knew what he planned to do with Capp when they reached Hot Barsa. Tolvern would be alarmed. Beyond alarmed. And maybe she’d be right; if Drake trusted any of the newer crew members, that trust was thinner than the hair on Lord Malthorne’s bald spot.

“Never mind,” he said. “Let’s get through that minefield, first.”

Commander Tolvern gave him a questioning look as Drake and Capp emerged from the war room onto the bridge. He returned a shake of the head to say that now was not the time. Instead, he settled in the captain’s chair and watched as Capp sat and interfaced with the nav computer. She looked more confident now.

“Ten minutes to minefield,” Jane helpfully notified him. “At present course—”

He tapped his console to cut her off. “Since we’re changing course, that isn’t helpful.”

Nobody else spoke as Capp worked. Drake quietly ran his own calculations and picked out an alternative that would scoot them along the edge of the minefield. With any luck, they’d survive the encounter, but he wasn’t confident with what he saw. Capp had better find a safe course, and hurry up about it, too.

Drake hadn’t known exactly where to find the minefield, only that it was somewhere between Hot Barsa and her ice-covered twin, Cold Barsa. Because the Barsa system had so many jump points, it had been impossible for the navy to guard all of the approaches to the inner worlds with ships from the fleet. So a few lanes were marked safe for the merchant fleet, and everything else was declared a minefield, whether there were mines or not. Now that Captain Rutherford’s task force had renewed the fight with the aliens, the minefield would be active again.

Capp looked up with about five minutes to spare. “Got it!”

She sent over her proposed course. It showed Blackbeard zig-zagging through, never coming close enough to any of the Youd mines to trigger their swarming behavior.

“Excellent. Commander, verify and plot that course.”

Tolvern’s fingers flew over her console. Shortly, the minefield came within range of the ship’s short-range scanners, and Drake brought up the viewscreen to focus on the nearest mine. It was only a few hundred thousand miles distant. It wasn’t until he filtered the bright white light of the system’s young star blazing off port that he could actually see the thing, lurking quiet and deadly.

The mine had the fractal shape of a giant snowflake, about seventy feet from point to point, and sat motionless in space so as to render its profile nearly invisible. Beneath that motionless exterior lay a deadly array of instruments, plasma engines for giving pursuit, and an explosive stinger powerful enough to rip a small hole through the armor of a Hroom sloop of war—or a modified Royal Navy cruiser like the one Drake was flying.

“Course plotted,” Tolvern said.

“Jane?” Drake asked the computer, wanting verification. “Estimated collisions with the upcoming minefield?”

“Probability of one or more collisions: 5.6 percent. Probability of three or more collisions: 1.3 percent. Probability of five or more collisions . . . calculating . . .” Jane was silent for a long moment. “—less than .2 percent. Unknown factors include—”

“I’d rather have zero,” Drake said, as he cut Jane off once more. “But given the circumstances, I’ll take those odds.”

Drake called down to engineering to help Barker understand the instructions he’d be receiving about powering up and down the second plasma engine as they danced their way through.

Moments later, Blackbeard dropped several hundred miles per second as she cut sharply on the Z-axis. Then they hooked starboard to thread another needle between the sensors of two more mines. Next came a sharp yaw to the left, followed by an aggressive change to their pitch, until they appeared to be diving straight down relative to their previous course, even though this took them further away from Hot Barsa. The floor vibrated during the sharpest course corrections as the anti-grav shifted to compensate. The perspective spiraled through the viewscreen until the stars looked like they were swirling down a vast interstellar toilet bowl.

When Blackbeard finally straightened out, the system’s white-yellow star blazed off port once more. They’d successfully waltzed their way through, as graceful on their feet as Drake’s sister trying to catch the eye of a rich earl at the king’s ball. The image gave him a warm nostalgic glow. Why had he been thinking about his family? It was almost Michaelmas, he supposed, a time when he’d always tried to get leave so he could return to the family estate. They always ate goose, and he smiled to think of how his younger sister, Helen, used to sneak down to the kitchen to get at the fruitcakes before they were served. He would take both of his sisters duck hunting at the lakes, and whatever they shot they would give to the peasants of the estate. Not this year.

“We did it,” Drake said. “No pursuit. We got through unscathed.”

“Not entirely, sir,” Smythe said. The tech officer kept working at his computer. “Our wake seems to have washed over those last couple of mines.”

“You’re sure?” Drake asked sharply.

“Pretty sure, yeah. The way we were going, our engines were like two big fire hoses blasting this way and that. Do that as long as we did, and stuff is likely to get wet.”

“I see.”

“Assuming they were scanning for such a thing,” Tolvern said. “Were they, Smythe?”

“Yes, sir,” Smythe said. He tapped his fingers over his console. “That’s how I found the minefield in the first place. They were hammering away with active subspace scanners.”

“I didn’t think about getting detected,” Capp said. “Maybe I could have tried something else.”

“We had no time for that,” Drake said. “Anyway, what’s done is done.” He glanced back at the commander, who was chewing on her lip. “So they’ve sent a warning to the fleet,” he continued. “Maybe they identified us from our wake, maybe not. But either way, the navy knows something is headed toward Hot Barsa. Something that doesn’t want to be seen.”

“The forts will be on alert,” Tolvern said. “And the destroyer will have its guns ready.”

“We knew that already, what with Rutherford stirring up the Hroom again. It’s the other royal ships lurking in the system that worry me. Jane,” Drake queried, “how long to Hot Barsa at our current course and speed?”

“Calculating . . . 12.4 hours.”

That long? He’d been thinking closer to eleven. Either way, it was too long. In addition to travel time, he needed several hours for the assault itself and more time to make a clean getaway.

“Tolvern, get Barker on the com. I want us accelerating to maximum speed. Drop cloaking, just hit that throttle with everything we’ve got. At this point, if we’re spotted, it almost doesn’t matter.” He rose to his feet.

“Where are you going?” Tolvern asked.

“To engineering. It’s time to see about that new battery. At this point, it’s either working, or it’s not. We have no more time to mess around. We’re going into battle.”

Chapter Three

Blackbeard came blistering toward Hot Barsa at nearly ten percent the speed of light. From a distance, the planet was a speck of light, not much bigger than the background stars except that being much closer it moved across the viewscreen as they hooked wide to come down over the north pole and what Drake had determined was the weakest of the planet’s six orbital fortresses.

But at this speed, they would flash by Hot Barsa like a bullet zipping past a man’s head. Drake had to brake, and brake hard, to get them to slow down enough to descend through the planet’s thick atmosphere. Drop from ten percent the speed of light to one percent, then to a few thousand miles an hour, and they’d expose themselves to punishing attack for an unacceptable length of time.

So he only ordered them to slow when they were two minutes from the planet. They’d only shed a fraction of their speed as they blew past the world several tens of thousands of miles outside the atmosphere, but Drake was curving sharply to port at the same time, and a few minutes later Blackbeard came screaming around in orbit like a distant satellite.

Nyb Pim sat in the pilot’s chair, with Capp next to him working the nav computer in support. The Hroom was all concentration now, suffering none of the shakes that had been troubling him. He threaded them expertly through a path that only gave the orbital fortresses a split second to attack before Blackbeard had zipped past again. The enemy didn’t even try to hit them at first.

But on the third pass, Blackbeard had slowed enough that the first of the orbital fortresses opened fire. During its orbits, the ship came in view of four of the six at one point or another, and all of them started shooting by the fourth time around. The two biggest delivered the biggest punch. These had been built into the side of Hot Barsa’s two small moons—themselves captured asteroids the shape of ten-mile-long baked potatoes—and presented formidable arrays of cannon, torpedo, and missile batteries. Soon, dozens of projectiles were flying out, and missiles and torpedoes came corkscrewing after the renegade ship.

Drake had been studying the calculations coming through from Capp. “Mark this course,” he told his pilots, and gave coordinates.

“Confirm heading,” Nyb Pim said. It was rare for the Hroom to question Drake’s orders, but he seemed to have correctly deduced that such a course would take them back toward deep space.

“You heard me. Twelve seconds on that course, then reverse to bring us around. Keep with present deceleration. Remember Ypis III.”

“Yes, of course.”

The Hroom would be understanding now why Drake had given the order. The captain had used this same tactic during the war while coming between two poorly coordinated Hroom fleets that had ended up doing each other more damage than they’d done Drake’s task force. Too much ordnance in play at once, directed by too many competing fire-control systems. Nyb Pim had been Drake’s pilot for that battle. He executed the maneuver even better this time.

They’d evaded most of the enemy fire by the time they came back around. What didn’t blow itself up either lost itself to their rear or was brought down by Barker’s chafe and other countermeasures. Only two small kinetic cannon blasts hit the ship, and the shields shrugged them off with minimal damage.

Still, there were several tense minutes during the final approach, when they came down atop the north pole. The polar fortress spotted them and brought out its main guns as they came toward it. Blackbeard was traveling much slower now, and the fort seem to have all the time in the world as the ship continued to decelerate in preparation for entering Hot Barsa’s atmosphere.

The polar fort was supposed to be the smallest of the six in orbit around the planet, but on the viewscreen it seemed massive and deadly. The fort commander could boast double the guns of the starship, and an endless supply of torpedoes and missiles compared to Drake’s. In addition, its batteries and bombproofs burrowed into the side of a small, captured asteroid, with hundreds of feet of protective rock making it look almost impregnable, like a mile-long tortoise with guns. Against it, Drake had a couple of feet of tyrillium armor. He could not afford to stand off a pace and slug it out with that beast.

The mood on the bridge was tense, silent, as lights flared along the side of the fort, its weapons discharging.

Drake called the gunnery. “Hold the broadside. Give her the secondary battery.”

“Aye, sir,” Barker said. He delivered it in his customary growl, but Drake heard the quaver in his voice.

“Those guns had better work,” Drake muttered to himself.

They’d left San Pablo last week after a rushed job in Hubert Rodriguez’s spaceyard. Rodriguez was skilled and reliable and had helped fight off a pirate attack attempting to seize the ship and kill its crew. He’d incorporated the shields and batteries of Captain Kidd—a pirate vessel Drake and his crew had trashed in battle—into HMS Ajax. The ship had left San Pablo rechristened as Blackbeard, more formidable than ever. But they’d left in a rush to get away before Rutherford’s naval forces arrived to crush them. The urgency had come at the expense of proper diagnostics on the new systems.

Blackbeard shook as the first missile penetrated their countermeasures and detonated against the shields. Moments later, the schematic on Drake’s console lit up with simulated explosions. Most of the hits struck them on the belly, where shields were weakest. Damn.

Three more flashes. Same exact place, right on the belly. He braced for shuddering explosions, alarms, and Jane’s ominous assessment of damage. Nothing. They didn’t seem to be hit. Then he realized. Those three flashes must have come from the new battery, installed on the ship’s underside with the guns stripped from Captain Kidd.

Of course. Engineering may have incorporated the new guns and torpedo tubes, but Smythe hadn’t yet reprogrammed the schematic. The computer was registering the firing of the guns as detonations.

Explosions ripped into the side of the polar fort.

“Yes!” Tolvern exclaimed.

Drake called down to Barker. “Concentrate on the forward enemy batteries. We’ll be swinging right past.”

He wished he could roll back and give the fort a full broadside, let them see the full might of a Punisher-class warship, but he needed to keep his shields up around the main batteries. Blackbeard was already taking blows right and left, testing her shields, so recently repaired.

And something else was bugging him. It took a moment to register what. Where was the destroyer? The navy warship was supposed to be either in orbit around Hot Barsa or patrolling the near space lanes. He believed it was HMS Javelin. She wasn’t powerful enough to tackle a cruiser like Blackbeard on her own, but could provide devastating support fire. But there was no sign of her.

Smythe hunched over his console, hands moving, his face bearing a look of intense concentration. He muttered something about pulse countermeasures, though whether to himself or through the com to engineering, it was hard to say. Nyb Pim was maneuvering them expertly, his eyes staring at his screen, while his long, red fingers danced over the console. Capp sat next to him, also interfaced with the nav computer, running calculations in support. Tolvern kept in contact with engineering and fire control, her words coming as fast and punctuated as a Gatling gun.

Two more torpedoes slammed into the ship, but they didn’t detonate. Either success for Blackbeard’s countermeasures, or a failure of the enemy armaments. The polar fort loomed. Blackbeard slid past. Missiles and cannon fire chased them down.

The ship entered the atmosphere, shuddering and bucking. The fort continued to fire at them, but most of its weapon systems pointed outward, into space. It was designed to repel Hroom sloops of war, which couldn’t land planetside, but instead set up in orbit to bombard a planet. Drake’s ship didn’t suffer the same deficiency.

But he was still going too fast, and at these speeds risked either skipping straight back into space again or slamming into the surface. Drake ordered the engines reversed. All was white on the viewscreen, and then suddenly they were below the clouds and into the purplish-tinted troposphere. They soared above the ocean, heading south, still at ninety thousand feet elevation, but dropping quickly. A jagged coastal range appeared like a five-hundred-mile-long row of granite teeth. The highest mountains soared to twenty thousand feet or higher, but the world was so steamy that not even the tallest peaks were capped with snow.

Then they were past the mountain range and still descending. A forest, blood-red and unbroken, stretched as far as the screen could show. No sugar plantations here; at first glance, this appeared to be primeval jungle, the land never cleared or cultivated. But beneath those towering red ferns, he knew, lay the vine-choked remains of a vast Hroom civilization. What Hroom remained labored to produce the sugar that continued to enslave their people.

A missile streaked past. It detonated in the jungle and sent up a pillar of smoke and fire. Something struck the ship aft, making warning lights flash. Jane chimed her opinion for the first time: eleven percent damage to the deck shield. He could live with that, assuming the attack stopped.

“Bring us down,” he told Nyb Pim. “Closer.”

Soon they were racing along only a few dozen feet above the crown of the highest trees. They hooked over another mountain range, this one not so rugged, with vegetation covering every inch of its surface.

“Tolvern,” he said. “Watch for that destroyer. Is she following?”

“Negative, sir. No sign that any ships have followed us into the atmosphere.”

That made him suspicious, but they’d come in so fast there was a chance that Javelin hadn’t had time to enter the fight before Blackbeard was above the surface and out of sight. That didn’t mean the naval warship wouldn’t suddenly appear. Down near the planet’s surface, the destroyer was a threat. The fortresses, not so much.

Since the forts were positioned to repel assault from space, they were poorly placed to scan the surface. Once Drake had the batteries retracted and cloaking fully online, a zig-zagging course soon shook off the last few missiles and torpedoes chasing them through the atmosphere.

“I’ve located Malthorne’s estate, sir,” Smythe said. “It’s 341 miles to the southwest. Sending over the coordinates.”

That close? That was better than he’d hoped, stabbing in blindly as they had. Even at subsonic speeds, they should get there in forty-five minutes or so.

“Capp, you navigate us. Keep us below two hundred feet.”

“Aye, sir.”

Drake thought about what he’d planned for when they arrived at Lord Malthorne’s estate. May as well get Capp prepared now. “Call Carvalho and Oglethorpe. Tell them to be ready to disembark with the assault team in half an hour.”

“You want me to tell them?”

“Yes, you. The rest of you, into the war room. You, too, Smythe. You’ve been to the estate before.”

That left Capp alone on the bridge as the other four filed their way into the war room. She was rubbing her hand on her scalp again, looking after them with a worried expression.

“Don’t worry, if anything goes wrong, we’ll be out in two seconds.”

“Two seconds is all it will take to crash,” Tolvern muttered as the door closed on the war room.

Drake ignored her and told them all to sit.

“You’re leaving her in charge?” Tolvern pressed. “Better hope you’re right about Javelin. If we’ve got a destroyer on our tail, and that escaped prisoner is the only one on the bridge . . . ”

“You told me yourself that there was no sign of Javelin,” Drake pointed out.

“Yes, well.”

“Capp will be in charge of the bridge while we’re on the surface. Better get her used to the idea.”

Nyb Pim and Smythe gave Drake sharp looks.

“You’re kidding,” Tolvern said.

“Apart from engineering and gunnery duties—that’s Barker’s bailiwick—Capp will be calling the shots. At this point, we either trust her or we don’t.”

“Far be it from me to sound like a coward,” she said, “but doesn’t it make more sense to keep me on the bridge and send Capp in my place? Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather be out there by your side, but I can fly this ship in a pinch, and Capp is a former royal marine. Seems to me that our positions on this mission are reversed from where they should be.”

Drake laid it out bluntly. “I want Capp and Carvalho separated. He’s coming with us, so she stays behind.”

“So you bring her and leave him. I’m not sold on Capp’s reliability, but I trust her a lot more than that pirate. And if I stay behind, I can keep an eye on him. Don’t tell me you trust him?”

“Carvalho came to our aid during the spaceyard attack, but no, I don’t trust him entirely. Not yet. I want him with me, not behind on my ship, together with all the other riff-raff he recruited on San Pablo.” Drake fixed Tolvern with a look that he hoped was both stern and sympathetic. “These are the options that remain, Commander.”

Her eyes flickered, and she dropped her gaze. She was remembering her own role in this, he could see. Tolvern had set the original mutiny into motion, and while Drake no longer thought that had been a monumental blunder, given his new suspicions about Malthorne and the rest of the Admiralty, it wouldn’t hurt for her to remember that these decisions had consequences, sometimes deadly.

“I assume there is a reason you’ve called us in here,” Nyb Pim asked in his soft, high voice. “And it wasn’t to tell us that you’re leaving Ensign Capp in charge. Have you made a decision?”

“About the antidote? No. I still don’t know what I’ll do. We have to get our hands on it, first. Then I’ll decide.”

“I see.”

Nyb Pim’s goal, Drake knew, was to distribute the antidote from one end of the sector to the other, freeing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of his fellow Hroom from sugar addiction. And likely dooming Albion and the other human worlds, as well, since they would lose their one advantage over the ancient alien race.

“We don’t have much time,” Drake said. “Less than an hour. How should we approach the lord admiral’s estate?”

“Is there a need for strategy?” Tolvern said. “We land right in the middle of the estate and use the ship’s guns to defend us as we approach the laboratories.”

“Is that possible?” Nyb Pim said. “I thought there was a small airport, but no spaceport. Where would we land the ship? Maybe Smythe knows.”

The tech officer looked up from his hand computer, blinking. “What? Oh, right. No, there isn’t a spaceport, but I can’t see why that matters. We’ll burn up the tarmac or wherever we put her down, but we’ll have no problem getting airborne again.”

This was not new information to Drake, who had been turning over the details of their final approach for the past few days. The problem wasn’t the condition of the airport.

“Too conspicuous,” he said. “Landing so close to the manor house and other buildings would alert Malthorne’s security forces, and they’d send a distress signal. If Javelin finds us, she can bomb us from orbit. I’d rather land some distance off and make the final approach on foot. Get right in there before we’re detected.”

“That will be tricky,” Smythe said. “Malthorne’s estate is in the highlands, where it’s cooler. There aren’t any sugar plantations around, or other flat, uncleared terrain, only jungle.”

“Nothing suitable?” Drake asked. “Not even a stretch of bare rock or gravel?”

“It’s wet and warm and sunny,” Smythe said. “Every inch is covered with vegetation. We could burn out a landing zone, I suppose. Pass over a few times with the plasma engines until we’re sure we’ve found a flat spot.”

Drake thought for a moment. “Burning a landing zone will attract attention. Not the same as landing a warship in the middle of the estate, but someone will surely spot a big column of smoke and fire out in the jungle.”

“Could be that it helps us,” Tolvern said, “if the estate sends a few men to investigate and we can thin their ranks before we approach.”

“Unless they’re expecting us already,” Drake said. “If they’ve heard that a ship blasted its way past the forts, they might send a message to the fleet instead. Then we’re back to facing the destroyer coming after us.”

“Doubt they’d be that alert,” she said. “Smythe said the estate is guarded by private security, not royal marines. Chances are, they haven’t heard anything about us, and even if they have, maybe they’d figure they can handle it.”

“Our plan can’t rely on the incompetence of Malthorne’s forces in order to succeed.”

She shrugged. “They’re civilians. Incompetence is my default assumption.”

“Tell me about the admiral’s estate,” Nyb Pim said to Smythe. “You said the manor and the outbuildings are built on some sort of platform. What kind of stone is this platform?”

“How do you mean?” Smythe asked.

“What color are the stones? How big are they?”

Drake wasn’t sure how this was relevant, but he was curious how the tech officer would answer the Hroom’s questions.

Smythe furrowed his brow. He’d been out on Malthorne’s estate when the lord admiral had taken Dreadnought into the system, but he could be remarkably unobservant at times. It depended on the situation. If it was computer equipment, software, or anything that could be assembled and electrified, Smythe remembered every detail. This was not one of those cases, and Drake knew that he would eventually come up blank.

“Didn’t we already establish that this was a temple to the god of death?” Drake asked the Hroom. “Are you having second thoughts about that?”

“I want to be certain. It could be some other ruined structure the lord admiral used as his foundation. A temple to Lyam Kar—the god of death—is always built atop giant blocks of basalt. To represent the sleep of death.”

Drake didn’t quite follow, nor did he understand how this detail mattered, but something in Nyb Pim’s voice made him press forward. “Think, Smythe. Black basalt. Is that what you saw?”

“Maybe? Yes? There were vines and things growing from it where they hadn’t been burned down, but that sounds about right.”

“Only now I worry that I put that thought into your mind,” Nyb Pim said. “Humans are susceptible to misremembering details.”

“It was flat on top, I’m certain of that.” Smythe sounded more confident this time. “And there was a steep staircase of dressed stone leading to the jungle floor.”

“We’re pressed for time,” Drake cut in impatiently. “Is this important?”

“It may be, yes,” the Hroom said. “If it is a temple to the god of death, then there will be a second, smaller temple a few miles away, this one made of white marble. A temple to Lyam Kar’s brother, the god of rebirth. They are always constructed in pairs and at a predictable distance.”

“Would it be big enough to hold the ship?” Drake asked.

“I think so, yes. Nice and flat up top.”

“Sounds perfect,” Drake said.

“It should be easy enough to scan for it,” Smythe said.

“We might be flying over the jungle looking for something that doesn’t exist,” the Hroom said. “That seems risky, given the circumstances.”

“As is everything in this mission,” Drake said. “So we’re all set.” He rose. “The three of you go to engineering and check gear, make sure that the rest of the team is assembled and prepared. Damn, if we only had a helicopter to bring us in the last few miles. But I suppose we’ll have to do it on foot.”

“Where will you be, sir?” Tolvern asked.

He tried not to grimace and forced confidence into his voice that he did not feel. “On the bridge, coaching Ensign Capp as she brings us in for a landing.”

Chapter Four

Captain Rutherford of HMS Vigilant had pursued the Hroom frigate for two days from San Pablo. The alien ship had made several attempts to lose them, had made a feint toward one jump point, then tried to slink away toward a second while cloaked. Before attacking the Hroom spaceyards on San Pablo, Rutherford had seeded the system with detectors so he could get advance warning of a Hroom counterattack, and one of these caught the escape attempt. Rutherford continued his relentless pursuit.

The Hroom was only an hour ahead of Rutherford’s task force when it reached the second jump point and disappeared from the system. Rutherford sent an order for the other ships to run checks on their warp point engines in preparation to follow him through.

Worried messages came back to him from the rest of the task force. Captain Harbrake on HMS Nimitz seemed especially concerned about stumbling into a trap. Harbrake was rubbing his hands together nervously when he appeared on the viewscreen, his big, hound-dog eyes adding to the effect of a man who would rather be drinking a snifter of brandy in front of a peat fire on Albion than entering battle. A gentleman warrior. Only never mind the warrior part.

“Are you sure this is wise, Rutherford? It’s a Hroom system on the other side of that jump.”

“Nominally,” Rutherford said. “A few mining colonies overrun with sugar eaters. Practically abandoned. Slavers come and go at will. No, I don’t think we’ll be under much threat, and if we are, this fleet has more than enough firepower to respond.”

“But the next few systems have enemy naval bases,” Harbrake whined. “If the Hroom on San Pablo sent distress signals, that’s about where the enemy would be by now. We might come out the other side to find half the Hroom navy waiting for us.”

“Good. I hope so.”

“Good? Captain Rutherford, pray let’s not do anything hasty.”

How could Harbrake be so craven? Anyway, that worry about the Hroom navy was nonsense. Albion had extracted all manner of concessions after the latest war, and Rutherford personally knew, after fighting that final, decisive engagement at Drake’s side, that the Hroom navy was decimated. They hadn’t materialized another fleet or two in the past few months.

“Yes, good. Excellent, in fact. The lord admiral ordered us to destroy all enemy ships in the San Pablo system,” Rutherford said. “To prevent any from escaping, should they make an attempt.”

“But they’re no longer in the system. And anyway, it’s only one little frigate. Barely armed. Captain Crispin says—and I agree with him—that a more prudent course would be to return to the Barsa system and resume the search for Captain Drake and his mutinous crew.”

Harbrake continued with the excuses, but his words soon turned into a drone. The more excuses he gave, the less weight they carried. It sounded like cowardice, plain and simple.

Rutherford let him go on for a few more minutes before cutting him off. “If you wish to send a message to the lord admiral to complain that we’re pursuing the enemy too ruthlessly, go ahead. Perhaps Malthorne will elevate you to the flag officer of the expedition. Until then, we’ll continue as ordered. Is that understood, Harbrake?”

A moment of silence as Harbrake looked back at him. A vein pulsed on the man’s forehead, and his jaw clenched. “Yes, sir.” The screen went blank.

Rutherford turned back to his console. There was nothing to do now except verify that the other ships in his task force—two cruisers, besides Vigilant and Nimitz, plus six destroyers and eleven torpedo boats—were ready for the jump. It was a formidable force, and he was only short a battleship or carrier to make it the most powerful fleet he’d personally commanded. If any Hroom warships were dumb enough to be waiting on the other side, he would smash them to bits.

Maybe he should have kept Harbrake on the screen for a few more minutes. The older officer’s whining kept Rutherford’s thoughts from returning to the battle at San Pablo. If one could call it a battle. He’d come into orbit around the planet and done a quick scan of both the human and the Hroom continents to search for Drake’s ship, which had supposedly been under repair in one of the spaceyards on the surface. Malthorne said the Hroom continent. Rutherford had his doubts. Even more doubts when he finished the search.

There had been no sign of either Drake or HMS Ajax. The Hroom had detected Albion warships in the system in defiance of the recently signed treaty and sent protests. Rutherford dropped one of his destroyers into the atmosphere and buzzed it provocatively over the Hroom cities. Someone foolishly fired a couple of missiles in an attempt to drive off the destroyer. That gave Rutherford his pretext, his cause juste.

Rutherford had set up in orbit for thirty-six hours, bombarding the Hroom cities with atomic bombs. He hadn’t carried a large arsenal—a little over fifty small warheads. But he fired them all. When he was finished, the major Hroom cities lay in smoking, radioactive ruins. Protests came raging in from the Hroom Empire before he’d finished, and even the human governor—some Ladino—had complained angrily, though his continent was protected from fallout by a wide ocean.

Rutherford issued a curt response to human and alien alike. The Hroom had attacked first; he had had no choice. Inside, he was twisting with anger that Malthorne had pushed him to this.

It was a bloody ruse of war, is what it was. There had been nothing honorable in his actions. He hadn’t come to San Pablo to track down a missing royal warship and bring its renegade captain to justice. He’d come to start a war.

Upon leaving San Pablo, Rutherford had attacked and destroyed two Hroom merchant ships and then set off in pursuit of a third. It had no armaments, was not even smuggling sugar. There was no reason to attack it except to follow orders. He was inclined to let it escape, if not for his damn orders.

If there was a massive Hroom fleet on the other side of that jump, so be it. It was nothing more than he deserved. He almost wished such a thing were possible. Fighting real enemies would be a relief.

The viewscreen chimed again with more communication from Nimitz. Harbrake was back, looking through with those droopy eyes.

“What the devil is it now?” Rutherford snarled. “If you’re going to give me some rubbish about ambush, you coward, then I swear to God I’ll—”

“It’s about the jump formation.” Harbrake’s voice was as tight as a twisted rubber band.

Oh. Yes, of course. They couldn’t go through the jump as currently arrayed. They had to funnel through the jump, and what’s more, Rutherford should pull them in tight, so they all came in one after the other. His ships would be helpless for a brief moment on the other end as the crews fought through their jump concussions. Coming through quickly was safer, as more rapidly recovering ships would be able to give cover to their slower counterparts in case there was, in fact, an ambush waiting.

Rutherford looked around his bridge. Commander Pittsfield was staring at him, wide eyed over the outburst, while the pilot was frowning down at his hands. The tech officer blinked from his console, looking awkward.

Harbrake glared in barely concealed fury from the viewscreen. His eyes didn’t look so much like a hound dog’s now. And he didn’t seem particularly craven, either, more like he was on the verge of challenging Rutherford to a duel.

Rutherford wrestled his anger to the ground. It was that old rage coming through, and once again, he’d nearly snapped. He’d humiliated Harbrake in front of his inferiors, both here and on Nimitz. That was an inexcusable breach of etiquette for an officer and a gentleman. Rutherford’s father was a baron on the Zealand Islands back on Albion, but there had always been rumors of commoner blood in the family tree, and at moments like this, he wondered if it were not true. Otherwise, how to explain his lack of self-control?

The moment called for an apology.

I beg your pardon, Captain. I spoke hastily, and perhaps I’d begun to question the wisdom of dismissing your counsel.

He couldn’t bring himself to do it. “You are right, Harbrake.” That was all he could manage, and he almost choked on that. “Calypso and Vigilant will take the vanguard. Then we’ll bring the destroyers through, followed by the torpedo boats. Finally, the last two cruisers. Nimitz and Richmond will emerge with main batteries at the ready. The rest will enter the jump point with all shields up.”

Harbrake gave a curt nod and killed the connection.

Rutherford stared at the screen as it resolved itself to a split display of the two destroyers flanking his ship. He took a deep breath and forced down the residual anger at Harbrake and the other captains. These were the men Malthorne had given him. He had no choice in the matter, so he had better start trusting them if he was going to challenge the Hroom closer to their core systems.

Warp engine checks passed for the entire task force, and Rutherford gave orders for the final acceleration to the jump point. The ships pulled into line, one after the other, a few hundred miles apart, which was almost the same as touching at these speeds.

The computer gave the three-minute warning.

Commander Pittsfield passed this warning through the general com link. “Three minutes to jump. All crew seated and secured.”

Vigilant was the first ship. So much time on a straight course, first in pursuit of the Hroom frigate and then racing toward the jump point. Now they had arrived.

“Thirty seconds to jump,” the computer warned. “Ten seconds.” A pause. “Five seconds.”

Then they were through.

Entering a jump point was not like falling asleep, but exiting the other side felt a lot like waking, except as if from a blow to the head, not a restful nap. One minute you were here, fully conscious. The next, you were there, fighting to consciousness.

Rutherford shook his head, groggy and stunned. A dull throbbing came from a spot behind his left eye, and more throbbing in the back of his head. He blinked, trying to remember for a long moment where he was and what he was doing. Lights were flashing, voices speaking in his head. His brain emerged from the fog like a computer booting up, the most critical information coming online first.

Jump point. Vigilant. Task force. Enemy ship.

“Captain!” someone said. “Captain, are you there?”

It was Pittsfield’s voice. The commander sounded slightly more alert than Rutherford felt. Pittsfield was pointing at something. The viewscreen.

Rutherford was almost fully alert now, and the headache was already fading. This was not the trips. It wouldn’t even be a particularly severe jump concussion, not for him.

His eyes tracked where Pittsfield was pointing. An enemy sloop of war filled the viewscreen.

Chapter Five

The first breath of Hot Barsa’s atmosphere felt like a hose had been shoved into Drake’s mouth and steam pumped into his lungs. Blackbeard sat hissing behind them as a warm drizzle fell onto the steaming hot surface. The vines and other vegetation atop the temple platform lay smoking, leaves withered, dead birds curled on their backs with their leathery wings crisped.

Carvalho bent and picked up something that looked like a long, blackened eel but with the appendages of a giant centipede. “Snakes with legs. How weird is that?”

“Put it down,” Tolvern told him. “This isn’t a nature walk.”

“Look at your hands,” one of his mates told the Ladino when he’d tossed it aside. The woman gestured with the muzzle of her assault rifle. “That yellow crap, what is it?”

Carvalho made a disgusted sound when he saw the slimy yellow liquid that had come off the dead snake, and wiped his hands on his pants. Several of the others laughed at him. A harsh, jeering cry from some bird or animal sounded from the jungle, and the laughter died.

Drake took in the dozen members of his team, who stood gaping at the forest of red ferns that grew around the temple platform on which they’d landed. More of the strange, leathery birds flew overhead, and insects the size of a man’s fist buzzed past like little helicopters.

“García, Thatcher, Mora, take the perimeter,” Drake said. “You see anything funny, you warn Ensign Capp on the bridge. Let Blackbeard’s deck guns settle it—don’t you try to fight it out.”

“You mean make a perimeter up here?” Thatcher asked in a low, nervous voice. He was one of the men who’d recently joined the crew on San Pablo, and at the moment, he looked as if he were regretting the decision.

“Up here?” Tolvern scoffed. “What good would that do? You need a vantage that the ship doesn’t have.” She pointed to a pile of rubble that had tumbled from one corner of the temple platform. “Get down there and set up a lookout. Go!”

The three men moved tentatively toward the steep staircase that led to the jungle floor. Drake glanced up at the sky. It had a maroon tint from the surface, and the sun was dull and hazy through the clouds, but scorching hot nonetheless. No sign of enemies in the sky. He knew the navy would be searching, but it was a big continent, and unless they’d been tracked, the search could take days. He didn’t intend to be here that long.

Once Drake was satisfied that they were alone, he led the remaining members of the assault team down to the jungle. García, Thatcher, and Mora were hacking six-foot fern fronds to act as camouflage for the lookout he’d identified. The men moved tentatively along the edge of the jungle, as if expecting a tiger to leap out of the brush and drag them away.

But the others glanced longingly in the direction of the three lookouts. Everyone but the three men in question knew that theirs was the safest part of the whole expedition, here within the protective fire of Blackbeard’s deck guns. The rest of the team had to slog through the unknown dangers of the forest and approach the rather better understood dangers of Malthorne’s estate.

Smythe consulted his computer, then pointed. “It’s this way.”

Drake eyed the nearly impenetrable growth ahead of them, all vines and brush and ferns with six-foot stalks.

“It seems thickest in that direction,” he said. “Perhaps if we go south for a stretch until we get past the worst of it, we could hook back around again.”

“I’m showing a ravine and a river that way,” Smythe said.

“That isn’t necessarily a problem,” Tolvern said. “We might be able to follow the riverbank.”

“You’ll want to stay away from the river,” Nyb Pim said.

The Hroom was the only nonhuman in the dozen people who’d come out of the ship, and the only one who wasn’t panting in the tropical heat and humidity.

“What is it, those crocodile things you see on San Pablo?” one of the men asked.

“Twenty-foot eels, actually,” Nyb Pim said. “But they’re not confined to the river. They can walk on their fins and come onto the bank to hunt. Some species hunt in packs.”

Tolvern shuddered. “Twenty-foot eels that hunt in packs. We’ll stay away from that, thank you very much.”

Drake wasn’t so sure. What were giant eels compared to firearms? But the human members of his team already looked spooked by their surroundings, excepting Carvalho, who had squatted to look at a strange, segmented bug-lizard thing crawling by his boot. He seemed fascinated by the strange world. The rest of them looked ready to scramble up the stairs to the ship. Some fierce pirates they had turned out to be.

“Anyway, this direction is the shortest,” Smythe continued, wiping the moisture from his computer screen. “Some hard slogging, then we’ll hit the main estate road. We can follow that straight to the laboratories.”

There didn’t seem to be an alternative other than picking up the ship and landing right next to the lord admiral’s manor house, which Drake had already ruled out.

“We’ll go two-by-two,” he said. “The last three together. Front pair will take turns cutting a trail.”

In addition to their firearms, the remaining nine members of the assault team had come armed with cutlasses, sabers, and machetes. They set into the jungle with a few tentative hacks, but as it started to give way, they picked up the pace. The vegetation was perhaps less woody than Terran plants, and cut easily, but it was so dense that it took time to forge a path. They made slow but steady progress toward where Smythe said they would find the road. A few minutes later, they reached a flat, sandy patch of ground that had been stripped of vegetation.

“You will want to keep an eye out for lurkers when we cross bare patches,” Nyb Pim said. “Look for their dens.”

“What the hell is a lurker?” one of the men asked.

Drake actually knew this. The animal was found wherever Hroom lived. “Picture a giant lizard with six legs that lives in a burrow.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Tolvern said. She wiped at the sweat on the back of her neck. “How big are we talking when you say ‘giant’?”

“The size of a lion,” he told her. “And venemous. They nest in colonies.”

“King’s balls,” she cursed. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

“Hold up,” Smythe said. “My map lost its bearings. I think someone is jamming our connection with the satellite mapping system.”

“You want us to hold up?” Tolvern said. “Here?”

“I’m not trying to!” he protested.

“Are there pouncers in these jungles, too?” Drake asked Nyb Pim.

“Undoubtedly. Hroom have lived on this planet for a thousand years. You’ll find pretty much everything here that you’d find on any of our worlds.”

“What is it with you people and recreating your natural ecosystem?” Tolvern asked. She was kicking at the ground, as if trying to uncover lurker dens.

“Humans do the same thing,” Nyb Pim said. “Your settlers bring Old Earth livestock and pets everywhere you go.”

“Sure, but we aren’t in the habit of transplanting our vermin.”

“Here it is!” Smythe said. “This way.”

“On some worlds, vast flocks of goats and sheep have turned grasslands into deserts,” the Hroom countered as they set off again. “And you carry rats and mice wherever you go.”

“Not on purpose,” Smythe said, looking up from his computer. “Right, Commander? Why would you transplant man-eating lizards?”

But Tolvern seemed to have tired of the conversation, and she came up with Drake, who was taking a turn with the machete. He needed a break from the chatter, but didn’t mind his commander’s company.

“Let me go next,” she said.

“Didn’t you have a go already?”

“Only for a few minutes.”

Smythe had stopped again to study the computer, and Drake leaned on the machete and looked Tolvern over. Sweat soaked her tank top, showing more of her body than he was used to seeing. She had strong arms and legs, with a lean figure.

“Why, Captain,” she said lightly. “I don’t usually catch you checking me out.”

“As per fleet regulations, I avoid ogling my junior officers.”

“I was joking.”

Drake smiled. “So was I.”

Curiously, she blushed. Or maybe that was just a flush from the heat. He turned discreetly away to let her regain her composure, even though he was unsure why he’d left her embarrassed. He hadn’t said anything improper, only light banter. To be safe, he should clear up any misconceptions.

“I was only looking you over to see if you seemed tired,” he said. “You know that, right?”

“I’m sorry, sir. Capp was teasing me earlier, and I might be overly sensitive at the moment.”

“Teasing you about what?”

“About being sweet on you.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I know!” Tolvern said quickly. “Here, give me that.”

She snatched the machete and began hacking at the ferns ahead of them, swinging away madly as if to prove that she still had energy to spare. Drake stared after her, dismayed, as she began to disappear into the growth, until shortly he could see her primarily by the shaking ferns. What had gotten into her? This heat was making people crazy. The sooner they got to the road, the better.

“Actually,” Smythe spoke up, “it’s this way we want to go.” He pointed in a different direction from where Tolvern was going.

Drake sighed. “Commander! You’re going the wrong way. Hello?”

The hacking sound stopped. “Yeah, I heard you,” came her disgusted voice from the vegetation some fifteen feet or so ahead of him.

Suddenly, Tolvern cried out. Her shout was followed by a piercing, bird-like shriek, and then a gunshot. Another shriek.

Drake unslung his rifle at Tolvern’s cry and waded after her. He lowered his shoulder and bowled through the broken, oozing vines and fronds. He came upon his first mate lying beneath some animal that resembled a giant, hairless cat with scales. It had a short, toothy snout, and its legs were wrapped around Tolvern. At first glance, it looked as though she was struggling as it tore into her, but the thing was motionless and bleeding from its head. The struggles were Tolvern’s attempts to shove the dead body off her.

Drake helped Tolvern get free, even as she insisted she was fine and could take care of herself. She stood up and pawed at a slimy, yellow liquid oozing down the side of her face and neck. It was the same substance that had covered Carvalho’s hands when he’d picked up the dead snake. Some kind of blood, apparently. Drake used his water to wash it off.

Others pushed their way in. The first to arrive was Nyb Pim. His red, mottled skin blended in with the vegetation. He looked down at the creature with his big, liquid gaze.

“That answers the question about pouncers,” he said.

Nyb Pim and Carvalho were at the front of the column when they hacked free of the undergrowth and found the estate road. They called for the captain, and Drake pushed his way up to take a look.

A gash of muddy, red soil cut through the jungle. The vegetation on either side was scorched, wilted, as if it had been burned as it encroached, but already there were red tendrils creeping out in an attempt to reclaim the narrow strip of cleared land. Muddy ruts pocked the road, hovered over by swarms of insects with metallic green and gold wings.

Drake pulled the team back into the protective cover and radioed the ship. Capp answered.

“Everything okay, Cap’n?” she asked. “Those blokes on the perimeter said they heard a gunshot.”

“We’re fine. Some creature tried to eat Tolvern, and she shot it.”

“What about Carvalho? He’s being careful, right? If that big lug—”

“Ensign,” he interrupted.

“Sorry, sir. What is it, sir?”

“We’re down in the weeds and running blind. What are you seeing out there?”

“Nothing. No sign of the destroyer, and we ain’t getting shot at from the forts, neither. Got to figure they’re stirred up out there, but they don’t see us. At least, it don’t seem so.”

“And the estate?”

“Can’t spot it from here. Sensors aren’t picking up anything, but that don’t mean much, seeing as we’re in the middle of the jungle and all.”

“I figured as much,” Drake said. “You see or hear anything funny—anything flying overhead, for example—you let me know.”

He cut the link. The call had been a risk, as would any future communication, but the success of his plan relied on Malthorne’s men being ignorant of their presence. Assuming he was right, and the forts hadn’t warned civilians on the planet, there was no reason that estate security would be scanning for illicit communication.

They were stepping tentatively onto the road when the rumble of an engine caught their ears. Drake ordered them back into the vegetation. A lorry rolled by a few seconds later, the tires hitting ruts and kicking up muddy water. Drake peered through a break in the vegetation and spotted two men with assault rifles sitting in the back, perched atop crates of supplies. Cigarettes dangled from their lips. The lorry itself was driven by a Hroom with the pale, pink skin of a sugar eater.

Drake waited until the lorry was gone before he poked his head back out and listened. No more vehicles, only the incessant buzz of insects and the distant screech of birds and animals.

Smythe pointed in the same direction taken by the departing lorry. “That way to the manor house and labs.”

They made quicker time on the road, but the downside was that it was an open highway for insects. The things buzzed past their heads, landed in their hair, and came in to lick at their sweat with long, hummingbird-like tongues.

It may have been the highlands, but they were on some sort of plateau, and the ground was mostly flat, except for occasional hillocks that flanked the road on either side. On one of them, a fern the size of an oak tree had come loose and fallen atop other ferns in the jungle below, and where it had broken from the hillock, it had exposed the edge of a wall made of cut stone. It occurred to Drake that all of these hillocks might be buildings or temples.

He glanced at Nyb Pim to see his pilot watching him. “There was a large city here once,” the Hroom said.

“How big?”

“Roughly the size of York on your home world.”

Drake could see now that the land was dotted with ruins beneath all that vegetation, but it was still hard to picture. Not so much that a Hroom city had been populated by millions—alien cities of that size still existed on those planets where the empire had not yet collapsed—but that after only a few generations, the jungle had so completely reclaimed it.

One of the men screamed from the back of the column. It was Oglethorpe, the former special forces fellow who’d transferred to the gunnery when his left shoulder was messed up in combat. He was spinning about madly, reaching around with his good arm to claw at something on his back. Tolvern swung her rifle butt at his shoulder blades, and Oglethorpe went down. He groaned and rolled onto his belly. Drake hurried back.

A dead insect as big as a crow was attached to Oglethorpe’s back by a proboscis the size of a drinking straw. Tolvern’s blow had ruptured the creature’s belly and spilled out a mix of yellow and red blood, the latter apparently what it had sucked from Oglethorpe’s back. Its wings still fluttered. Tolvern yanked it off and boot stomped it until it stopped moving.

They helped Oglethorpe to his feet. He looked at the dead insect and shuddered. “What the hell is that?”

“A mosquito,” Smythe said.

“That’s a bloody mosquito?” Oglethorpe cried. “King’s balls!”

“That’s what passes for them around here,” Smythe said grimly. “I told you. They’re all over the place.”

“You also said it wasn’t mosquito season,” Tolvern said.

“It isn’t!”

“What do you use for mosquito netting out here,” Drake said, still disconcerted to see so much of Oglethorpe’s blood smeared into the ground, “razor wire?”

“Keep moving,” Nyb Pim said. “Oglethorpe’s blood will attract more of them.”

That was enough, and they redoubled their pace. But it didn’t earn them respite for long, and soon they were facing more of the ugly blighters. Being vigilant, they were generally able to scare the things off, but one of the bugs circled relentlessly as people flailed, its long, scissor-like proboscis probing the air. The company was more terrified of the mosquito than they had been of lurkers and pouncers, and if Drake hadn’t stopped them, they would have fired their rifles wildly into the air in an attempt to bring it down.

Finally, the mosquito buzzed off, and most of the other bugs vanished over the next several hundred yards, as well. A pungent smell soon filled the air. The road passed over a rusty iron bridge that crossed a ravine filled with muddy, fetid water. Below, creatures with large, bulging eyes broke the surface to study them before disappearing again.

“Are those the eels?” someone asked nervously.

“No,” the Hroom said. “It’s something else you don’t want to meet.”

“Come on,” Drake said. There was green, Earth-style vegetation on the other side of the bridge, and he was anxious to reach it.

First came tall stalks of grass, then fields of herbs—that was what he’d smelled on the bridge—followed by a second bridge and ravine.

“This is the buffer zone,” Smythe said. “The strong-smelling herbs and the ravines are meant to keep out the bugs. Doesn’t always work. The land is perfectly adapted for Hroom vegetation and animals, not Terran. Anyway, don’t leave the road. The ground is mined.”

“Look, Captain,” Tolvern said. “The guard post.”

Drake had already spotted it. Standing right in front of the second bridge, the post was a squat little building made of the same blocks of cut stone that had formed the side of the exposed ruins they’d seen earlier. There was a lorry parked next to it, but it wasn’t the vehicle that had driven by them on the road. As they approached, a man drew open a rain-streaked window to peer out at them, and two more guards came out of the building, one human, the other a Hroom. Both were armed.

These two aimed their rifles at the newcomers, and the man inside the bunker shouted a challenge.

Chapter Six

Captain Rutherford shook off the jump concussion as he stared at the Hroom sloop of war. It was shaped like a long, smooth submarine with a fifty-foot spike at the end. The tube-like shape of the ship helped with cloaking, and the spike on the end was heavily shielded, allowing the sloop itself to be used as a ram. That spike could split a small ship in two or puncture straight through a larger, double-hulled vessel to puncture a huge gash in the main decks.

Hroom pilots had an uncanny ability to charge in for close-quarters combat, and the ramming tactic had been effective in earlier wars. But during the reign of Queen Ellen, Albion’s research labs had developed superior shielding, and since then, when a Hroom sloop rammed a larger ship like a cruiser or a battleship, the spike tended to break off and vent the Hroom bridge and its officers into space. In the face of such technological countermeasures, the Hroom might have been expected to alter their warships accordingly, but the empire was in long-term decline, and most of their warships were decades out of date.

“Lower shields,” Rutherford ordered. “Present tubes one and two. Main battery at the ready. Are Nimitz and Richmond through yet?”

Pittsfield turned slowly from staring at the viewscreen. His eyes had a glazed expression, like he was drunk or had suffered a concussion. “Wha—?”

Rather than waiting for the fool to pull out of it, Rutherford thumbed on the com link to give the orders himself. He had to repeat them before he got a response from the gunnery.

Meanwhile, he braced for an attack from the enemy’s guns, grateful that there was only a single sloop of war protecting the frigate Rutherford had chased out of San Pablo. The frigate stood at a distance of several thousand miles, shielded behind the sloop. It had come to a halt as if intending to act as spectator for the pending battle. What fools. A single sloop wouldn’t stop Rutherford for long, and then he’d be after the merchant frigate again.

Unless there’s a bigger fleet on the way.

That was a worrying thought, but he put it out of his mind for the moment. He had his hands full with the sloop.

So far, it was not firing. Neither did it attempt to flee. It stood with its main guns presented, and its serpentine missile batteries exposed. At this close range, the bomblet swarms would be devastating.

Messages started coming in from other ships of the fleet, as officers and crew recovered from the jump. Everybody wanted to know if they should shoot. Rutherford sent orders to prepare all appropriate weapon systems, but held off the order to open fire.

“McCormick—” Rutherford started to say, before remembering with a scowl that Admiral Malthorne had replaced his tech officer with Norris, who had proven himself competent enough, even if Rutherford didn’t trust him under the circumstances. “Excuse me, Norris. Hail the enemy ship. See what they want.”

“And what if they act belligerent?” Pittsfield asked. “Do we open fire? Are we at war, or not?”

“Yes, Commander, I know. That’s what I’m trying to decide.”

“The sloop is not responding, sir,” Tech Officer Norris said. His fingers moved along his console. “In fact . . . ” he began, a frown spreading.

“Yes?” Rutherford said impatiently. “What is it?”

“I think it’s dead.”

“What do you mean?”

The tech officer amplified the enemy ship on the viewscreen. At range, it had appeared strong and deadly, perfectly positioned to blast whatever came out of the jump point with all available weapon systems. Upon closer inspection, Rutherford saw that a line of holes perforated the hull from bow to stern, as neat as needle stitches. Each hole was small, not bigger than a man’s head, but there were dozens of them.

“King’s balls,” one of the other ensigns on the bridge exclaimed, and Rutherford glared him into silence before turning back to Pittsfield.

“What kind of weapon leaves that mark?” Rutherford asked.

Pittsfield looked bewildered. “Nothing I’ve ever heard of.”

“Norris, do a more thorough scan and send your findings to engineering and the gunnery. Maybe someone there knows something. Commander . . . oh, for God’s sake,” Rutherford interrupted himself, as a thicket of urgent messages kept coming through to his console. In addition, three fleet officers were trying to hail him on the com link.

He took a moment to look over the messages, in case someone had found something useful. No. Most were still making excited noises about whether or not they should attack.

Rutherford sent out a general notice that amounted to “shut the hell up already and let me think.” When that was done, he started over with Pittsfield.

“Commander, send a destroyer to harpoon that merchant frigate and bring her in. If she tries to run, destroy her. Otherwise, I want to talk to her captain.” To the tech officer, he asked, “Is the sloop a derelict? Maybe it has been out here for a while.”

“Negative, sir. Her engines are still warm. Impossible to say how long ago this happened, but certainly within the past few days.” Norris was still studying the results of his scan with a deepening scowl. “There are at least a hundred holes in the outer hull, sir. More than a dozen go straight through.”

“Attacked from the outside, right?” Drake asked. “It couldn’t be the result of an internal explosion?”

“Definitely from the outside. But here’s the curious thing. The Hroom shields are still intact. Whatever went through did so without disabling them first.”

That was both strange and alarming. No Albion weapon had done this. Rutherford had never heard of such a thing, and his forces were the only ones anywhere near this system. Could the Hroom be testing a new weapon system, something that would make hash of Albion’s shields? He imagined his own ship with those neat holes. Vigilant would be as structurally sound as a sugar cube dipped in hot tea.

No, that didn’t make any sense, either. If the Hroom had such a weapon, why would they test it on a perfectly good warship, what amounted to one of their main ships of the line? And test it here, where it might be seen by the enemy? What’s more, the engines were still hot; there must have been crew on the ship.

“Scans are showing dead bodies on board,” the tech officer added, confirming what Rutherford had already guessed. “And I heard back from engineering. They’re baffled. They’re running a few scans of their own, but right now, nobody knows anything.”

The only other possibility Rutherford could think of was a Hroom civil war. Seemed unlikely, especially given the unknown weapon system, but what was the alternative? Maybe the frigate captain had seen something.

“Sir,” Pittsfield said. “The destroyer has harpooned the frigate and is bringing her in. But look at these images.”

The commander split the viewscreen and showed the merchant frigate from the destroyer’s perspective as the harpoon dragged it in for capture. A neat row of holes ran along the side of the frigate, most of them punching from one side to the other. The merchant had shared whatever fate had befallen the Hroom warship.

Rutherford’s mouth went dry. The merchant frigate had only been an hour ahead of his task force when she jumped through. Whoever had done this was close at hand.

He finally dropped his gaze to his blinking console and sorted through the latest messages. Most were easily dismissed, the requests of captains and commanders unable to think for themselves. But one of the eight-man torpedo boats, under command of a young lieutenant by the name of Catherine Caites, had detected the wake of an unknown ship.

Rutherford got her on the com. He didn’t know the woman, but she spoke with the accent of a West Canadian, not too far removed from how they spoke in the Zealand Islands where he’d grown up. There was something trustworthy in that accent, not like all these people from Britain that Malthorne had saddled him with.

“The wake is fresh, sir,” Caites said. “At least two different ship signatures, although it’s hard to tell for sure.”

She sounded young, and the accent might have been trustworthy, but the female voice didn’t inspire confidence. Rutherford would never have promoted a woman to command even such a small ship as a torpedo boat, not when there were no doubt more deserving men in the fleet.

“Hroom or human?” he asked.

“I couldn’t say for sure. There’s something . . . odd about the signature. Requesting permission to reconnoiter and take a closer look.”

“Very well. You’re attached to Nimitz. She has better instruments. But you may attend her in escort.”

“With all due respect, sir, Captain Harbrake is perhaps too cautious. Time is of the essence.”

“I see your point. Let me find one of the destroyers to lead you.”

“We can accelerate faster, sir, traveling alone. Every moment we wait makes it less likely that we’ll find anything useful.”

It was borderline insubordination, but Rutherford was pleased to have someone finally show initiative, so he let it pass. “Very well. Go take a look, but do not engage with any enemies. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.” Caites was gone.

Yes, quite a bit of initiative in fact, a commodity in precious short supply. Maybe, this once, he should overlook her gender in favor of results. Time would tell.

Word came through from the captured frigate a few minutes later, confirming that there were no survivors on board. Meanwhile, Calypso had harpooned the Hroom warship and was bringing it in as well. Rutherford doubted that the larger ship would have survivors either, but he wanted to make a closer inspection of the sloop’s shields to see what had left all those perforations.

But no sooner had a boarding party entered the captured ship than an excited message came through from Captain Lindsell of Calypso. The warship had a number of dead Hroom, floating in the vacuum after the ship had lost its air and antigrav. But when Lindsell’s boatswains began cutting away a segment of the destroyed ship’s hull, they’d stumbled over an undetached escape pod. Inside were two survivors. They’d apparently been trapped for some time and must have witnessed the entire battle. Better yet, both of them spoke English.

Not twenty minutes later, Rutherford had the Hroom aboard his own ship and restrained in the brig. There was no word yet from Caites’s expedition in her torpedo boat, and by now Rutherford was desperate for answers, so he went down to personally see to the interrogation of the prisoners. The two Hroom were dehydrated, feverish, and above all, raving for sugar, which nobody had yet provided.

Rutherford had no intention of sending them into a swoon, where he would be unable to extract anything useful, so he ordered them dragged to their feet while the interrogation continued.

The Hroom begged, threatened, screamed. It was all so much babble that he was about to give up and leave them to their guards, when one of the Hroom lurched against his restraints, eyes bugging. He strained toward Rutherford. Spittle flew from his mouth.

“Apex will kill you all!”

Chapter Seven

“Follow my lead,” Drake told the other members of the assault team as they approached the two guards in the middle of the road. One of the guards was human, the other Hroom, but they both seemed alert and suspicious. “Nobody act tense. Don’t lift your weapons.”

Subterfuge wouldn’t have been necessary if he meant to kill the guards. The pair in the road could be cut down in two seconds, and while there was a third guard inside the building, the man had carelessly opened the window to study them, rather than peering through the water-streaked plastisteel.

They were just doing their job, and Drake would rather not kill them. It must be tedious to guard the road for day after day against smugglers and free Hroom rebels, and it had made them careless. The two humans had the look of young guys just out from Albion, maybe former marines now turned private contractors. Come to Hot Barsa, spend a couple of years in the sweltering heat to save a few hundred pounds to take back home to buy a little house, get married, or whatever. The Hroom was an eater. That was evident from the pale, pinkish skin. But there was no need to kill any of them.

What’s more, if Drake could grab them quickly, they wouldn’t have a chance to radio a warning to the rest of the estate. Drake and the others sauntered toward the post as if they’d passed this way a dozen times before.

The man with the rifle squinted suspiciously through small, pig-like eyes, and cast a quick glance at the third member of the guard post, the man leaning out the window, then looked back at Drake. “Who are you?”

“We work for the lord admiral,” Drake called back. He kept his tone commanding and made no attempt to disguise his upper-class accent. “We were driving up from the lowlands when the lorry broke down. Hit a rut and broke an axle a few miles back.”

The man’s eyes widened slightly as soon as Drake began to speak, and he looked suddenly nervous to be confronting someone of obvious breeding. Nevertheless, his tone was insolent and suspicious. “Yeah, is that so?”

“That’s right, and I don’t have time for your attitude. I’ve got a report to make.” Drake kept walking. “Do you have a working com link? Ours went out.”

“Hold it right there!” The man lifted his gun, and the Hroom followed his lead.

Drake and his companions stopped. They were still twenty feet distant. So much for the hope that they’d saunter up and get into the guard house before these three woke up.

“A vehicle passed through here five minutes ago,” the man in the road said. “They didn’t say nothing about armed blokes coming up the road behind them, let alone that someone was broken down and needed help.”

“And I would like to know why,” Drake said, his tone peevish. “We tried to flag them down. They didn’t so much as slow their lorry.”

“Yeah,” Tolvern grumbled next to him. “What’s up with that? Is this a no hitchhiking zone, or what?”

“Maybe they thought we were lurkers,” Drake said. “They looked terrified enough.”

“Probably afraid of mosquitoes, is all,” she said. “You see those guys in the back flailing at the bugs?”

The man at the window snorted, and even the Hroom smiled at this. Some of the suspicion faded from the eyes of the man who’d been questioning them.

Drake was dripping with sweat. The sun was the hammer and the humid air the hot tongs that had squeezed their bodies of liquid. Not one of them had more than a mouthful of water left in their canteens. But it wasn’t only the sun making Drake sweat now.

Don’t be idiots, he thought. I don’t want to kill you.

“You can use our com link,” the guard said at last. “But what the hell are you doing out there? There’s nine of you, all armed, and you aren’t on our list of arrivals.”

Drake had given this some thought on their approach, and the lie came easily to his lips. “Like I said, we work for Malthorne, we’re trying to put down the insurgency in the lowlands. You know the free Hroom attacks? Over the last week, we’ve been chasing a band into the highlands. We think they might have a base up here somewhere.”

“Never heard of them in the highlands,” the man said. “They generally stick to attacking the plantations. Well, I guess that’s good enough. You can use the com.”

Drake started to step forward, waving his hands at his companions to follow. A few more steps, and they’d be up to the wide-open door of the guardhouse. A quick command, and they’d have these three prisoners.

“They’re lying,” the Hroom guard said unexpectedly.

He hadn’t spoken a word to that point, and Drake had paid him little attention, figuring that the alien’s thoughts would be turned to his next sugar ration.

“Shut up,” his companion said, good-naturedly. “We don’t need to know everything going on out there.”

The Hroom stared at Nyb Pim, who was in the middle of Drake’s team, Carvalho and Haws, but hardly inconspicuous, being over seven feet tall. This one facing them was shorter, but still tall, but the thing that set him apart was his light pink, almost white skin, the color not so different from a redheaded human with a sunburn. The hue was nothing like Nyb Pim’s skin, now almost completely returned to its natural pigmentation. Even before the Hroom spoke, Drake knew what he would say.

“He’s not an eater, he’s a free Hroom.” The alien kept his gun pointed at Drake’s chest.

“Big deal,” Tolvern said quickly. “We’re from Albion, and we don’t need permission from you to bring a free Hroom to Hot Barsa.”

“Hold on, he’s right,” the human guard said. “Why would Malthorne send a free Hroom down to fight free Hroom? What kind of idiots do you—”

A gunshot. The Hroom guard’s head jerked backward, and bits of brain and blood sprayed out. Drake threw himself to the side as the surviving guard in the road lifted his weapon. Drake came up shooting, even as bullets zipped past his head. His weapon joined others in gunning down their opponent. In seconds, both guards lay dead in the road.

But getting the final man was a different matter. He’d pulled back inside the guard box at the first shot and shoved the window shut. A second, smaller slit opened below, no wider than the barrel of the gun that now thrust through. A spray of gunfire splattered the road. One of Drake’s companions cried out, but he didn’t turn to see who had been hit. Instead, he squirmed forward on his belly until he got a good angle on the guardhouse door, which was still open. Tolvern came up beside him and took a knee. He hiked himself up so he’d be in better position.

“I’m going in,” she said.

“No. Shoot at the door. He’ll come to close it.”

The rest of his team were blasting away at the building, and chips of stone went flying, but they couldn’t get into the guardhouse and even had a hard time suppressing return fire from the solitary enemy inside. Tolvern fired twice through the open door, then waited.

An arm came out to grab for the handle. Drake took aim and shot it. A cry of pain. The arm jerked back inside.

Suddenly, the guard was shouting. “Help! I’m under attack.” He must be on the com. “They killed the others. I’m the only one—”

Drake and Tolvern sprang to their feet and sprinted for the open door. They came through to find the remaining guard sitting with his left hand mashing down a button on the com link and his right cradled in front of him, bleeding. His gun lay on the floor. As they entered, the man looked up at them with a wild, panicked expression.

“For God’s sake!”

It was unclear if the man was demanding help from the estate or pleading for mercy from the attackers. But Drake couldn’t wait for more information to reach his enemies. He lifted his gun and finished it.

Drake was down a man after the attack on the guard post, or more precisely, a woman. Her name was Silva, and she’d been one of the new crew from San Pablo. Silva had volunteered to go with the away team, and her short, muscular body seemed well suited for the mission. But nobody seemed to know much about her, not Carvalho, who had recruited her, nor any of the others who’d joined them in the sweltering spaceport on San Pablo.

After a quick inspection proved that no more enemies remained inside the squat guard building, Drake glanced at Silva’s body, sprawled on the road, her mouth and eyes open to the bruised sky as the drizzle splattered across her face. One hand still gripped her rifle, which Carvalho now pried loose. A white scar stretched across the dead woman’s palm from her index finger to the corner opposite her thumb. It looked like a scar from grabbing a blade in a fight, which reminded Drake that Silva was a woman with a history, an individual.

“Get her into the guard building,” he ordered. “I won’t leave her out here to be dragged off by animals.” After additional thought, he added, “Get the dead guards inside, too. They deserve the same.”

Drake turned over his options. His first choice was to simply call the estate headquarters and say no worries, everything was under control. Bluff that he was one of the guards. But given the final, frantic communication from the guard post, that would hardly be believed. Instead, Drake thought he might get someone on the com and embellish the story. They had been attacked, the guard’s two companions killed. By whom? By animals. Yes, some wild pack of something had come out of the brush, crossed the first bridge, and ambushed the other two guards.

Before this thought could clarify itself, the telltale rumble of a lorry engine reached his ears.

“Take cover!” Tolvern said. “We’ve got company!”

Where to take cover was the real question. The guard post sat on an island of sorts, between two ravines. There were no trees or rocks behind which to hide, only ankle-length grass with sharp, serrated blades. They could take cover in the guard post, but that would be exactly the place to draw attention from the arriving vehicle. Then they’d face another firefight, and perhaps not come out on top this time.

If instead Drake could get his forces across the second bridge, they could perhaps gain the trees on the estate side. But the bridge was a good hundred feet wide as it crossed the ravine. If the lorry reached the bridge before they got across, they’d be exposed with nowhere to run. The expedition would come to a swift and inglorious end.

Drake eyed the ravine beneath the bridge, and that gave him an idea. “Down below. Quickly!”

Few people seemed keen on this plan, for it meant descending the muddy slope toward the sluggish water below, and they were no doubt thinking of giant eels. To punctuate this worry, something big swirled below the surface of the water as they approached the edge of the ravine.

“I’m not going down there,” Haws said in a nervous voice. “Them eels are down there. Maybe crocodiles, too.”

“It’s bullets you should be worried about,” Tolvern said. “Now move it!”

With encouragement from the braver in the group, they scrambled down the muddy slope, then moved along the bottom of the ravine to get some distance from the bridge above. They flattened themselves against the muddy side and waited. The buzz of insects filled the air, but it was soon overpowered by the approaching rumble of the lorry.

“Listen to me,” Drake said, his face pressed into the mud. “The water can’t be more than ten feet wide.”

“Don’t tell me we’re swimming across,” someone moaned.

The rumbling engine was growing louder. It had been long enough that Drake now wondered if they might have crossed the bridge in time after all. But there had been no way to be certain.

“Listen up,” he said. “The lorry will go straight to the guard post. It will take them a minute or two to puzzle out what happened. By the time they figure it out, we’ll be on the other side—and yes, we’re going to swim.”

“What about the eels?” Tolvern said. “I hate to sound nervous, but . . .”

“That wasn’t an eel,” Nyb Pim said. “Looked more like a crocodile.”

“Wonderful,” she said.

“You’re being ridiculous, all of you,” Drake said. “Forget the gunfire, the guards trying to kill us, what’s got you terrified is the thought that an overgrown lizard has crawled into this little puddle?”

He was about to assure them that they’d be across in two seconds, but then the lorry came bumping and coughing over the bridge. Nobody spoke or moved. Drake didn’t so much as turn his head to look up. If they were spotted, if one of the men above happened to look down instead of across to the guardhouse, Drake and his companions would be mowed down before they had a chance to lift their weapons. Then the lorry was gone and rumbling to a stop by the guardhouse.

“Up, everyone,” he said in a harsh whisper. “Go!”

Nyb Pim was already entering the water, and waded to the other side without swimming. It came up to the tall Hroom’s shoulders, though, and others were forced to paddle with their weapons and gear held above the water until they were scrambling terrified out the other side. They didn’t hesitate, but went clawing and fighting up the slope to the grass and trees above them.

Drake waited until all the others were either on the opposite side or in the water before entering. He was halfway across, his boots shoving off the mud at the bottom as he paddle-swam, when Tolvern looked back at him as she gained the bank, and let out a squeak. She pointed, gaping, toward the water. It churned, and a knobby, scaly snout broke the surface. Drake lunged forward. He caught Tolvern’s outstretched arm and hauled himself onshore. She grabbed for her gun.

“Don’t shoot!” he shouted.

Instead, she dragged out her saber. Water dripped off the end. Drake felt something at his back as he rose and drew his machete. He turned to see an enormous snout lunging for him. Not so much like a crocodile, but like a long, sharp beak with opposing slicing horns on the front, for shearing. Tolvern swung her blade as the scaly monster snapped for Drake’s legs. The blade caught it across its snout, and it twisted, snarling, to take her instead.

Drake hacked at its scaled belly with all his strength. Its skin was hard, but he’d caught the thing right beneath its foremost clawed leg, and it hissed and snapped at the machete. It fell back into the water with a thunderous splash.

Drake was sure that all the noise would have alerted the occupants of the lorry, but as he joined the last of his comrades, he could hear the guards shouting to each other about what had happened at the guardhouse. It was too distant to pick out distinct words.

Drake’s team hid in the brush, and somehow he wasn’t surprised that even this Terran vegetation hid vermin: biting ants and enormous wasps. Carvalho brushed into a stinging plant and soon had a rash. The climate seemed tailored to encourage unpleasant biting, stinging things. But nobody complained; it was better than the crocodile with the monstrous, turtle-like beak.

They were still hiding in the brush above the ravine when the lorry came back across a few minutes later. Drake supposed they’d left some of the guards behind at the post, but it was hard to say what they were thinking at the estate. Maybe the estate thought it was a quick raid, or maybe they were fully alert. Could be that Drake had made a mistake in leaving Silva’s body behind. Or maybe that had successfully confused Malthorne’s people.

When he determined it was safe to move again, Drake looked around for Smythe, who he discovered hunched miserably a few feet away. “How long until the woods thin out?”

The tech officer wiped his computer screen on the back of his pant leg and peered down at it. “A quarter mile, more or less.”

“Good, let’s move out,” Drake told the others. “Stick to the trees.”

He glanced back into the ravine a final time before they left. Two eyes emerged from the water and looked up at him. He caught a glimpse of the long, horny snout, and some fifteen feet away, the tip of the thing’s tail. Then it submerged again. Tolvern stood by Drake’s shoulder, looking down.

“Some planet, huh?”

“About this Hroom rebellion,” he said. “Maybe we should let them have the place. Keep their crocodiles all to themselves.”

She raised an eyebrow. “What, that little thing? I thought you said it was just an overgrown lizard.”

Chapter Eight

They suffered no more misadventures as they approached the heart of Admiral Malthorne’s estate. Once they emerged from the jungle and passed the security on the perimeter, the grounds took on the appearance of a country estate on Albion, albeit with sharp-bladed grass infested with biting ants. The tropical trees dripped with moss, looking nothing like the stately oak and maple of the Drake estate in the Zealand Islands.

Mounds rose here and there across the grass, some only a couple of feet high, but others ten, twenty, even thirty feet tall. More overgrown ruins, apparently, and Drake was reminded that there was an entire Hroom city buried beneath his feet. Once there had been elevated rail cars, twisting skyscrapers, and vast, ziggurat-like temple complexes.

The trees grew thicker for a stretch, and they followed an overgrown trail for several minutes before the woods thinned to present a view of the heart of the estate, which sat on a grassy hill several hundred yards from their position. Tolvern passed Drake the binoculars, and he took a closer look. The hill seemed to be a flat platform like the one where they’d landed Blackbeard, only several times the size and height.

A road twisted in three switchbacks to reach the top of the platform. Two large buildings sat up top across a flat expanse. Lorries parked in front of the buildings to the left, and people were moving about up there, although from this distance it was impossible to tell if they were armed, or even if they were human or Hroom.

A traditional manor house sat to the right of these buildings, the sort that fine gentlemen and ladies had been building for a thousand years, since the days when the peerage of Old England built them across the breadth of their small island home.

Drake had seen many of the fine manor houses on Albion, and it wasn’t until he glanced away that he realized how ridiculous the house looked, here on a distant world, squatting atop the temple platform of some ancient, alien god. The lord admiral didn’t even live here. Did he ever come? Even in the highlands, the climate was rarely pleasant. And it was a backwater. When Malthorne was on shore leave, he would surely stay at his home estate, where he would be surrounded by others of rank and privilege.

The buildings to the left looked nothing like the manor. Rather, they had the appearance of warehouses or factories. What were the dark things out front by the lorries? They looked like the broken shell plates of a giant beetle.

He handed the binoculars back to Tolvern and asked her opinion. “Looks like a ship’s hull,” she said.

Drake took them back. Yes, of course. A ship’s hull, broken into pieces. He could see it now.

“I guess we found Henry Upton,” he said. “Or what’s left of her.”

“May she burn for the eternities,” Nyb Pim said, his voice hollow. “And if her captain and crew survived, let them die badly.”

Drake glanced at his pilot, surprised to hear the Hroom curses coming out of his mouth. In addition to being maledictions of a sort, the phrases also indicated a certain religious sense, and Drake had never taken his pilot for one who held to traditional Hroom beliefs. There was an Old Earth saying about atheists and foxholes, and he supposed the same would hold for a Hroom who’d been a sugar eater carried off to slavery.

Smythe took a turn at the binoculars. “That’s them, that’s what we’re looking for. The laboratory is on the left. The other building is a factory.” He handed them back.

Drake took a closer look at the people moving about in front of the laboratory. They seemed to be armed gunmen hurrying toward the manor house. No doubt Drake’s forces were the cause of the alarm. But whatever steward lived in the house in Malthorne’s absence must not comprehend the nature of the threat. Armed attackers had overrun one of the outer guardhouses and disappeared, that much was apparently known. That the target was the laboratories, rather than the manor house, was not.

“Smythe, you said you can jam the security perimeter?” Drake asked.

“Working on it now, sir.”

“How long?”

“Five minutes, maybe a bit longer.”

“Quicker would be better.” Drake turned to the others. “Carvalho, Haws, go to the edge of the woods and find a better view of the estate. See if you can see around that ship wreckage and tell me what’s behind it. I need to know what we’re dealing with here.” He dialed through to the ship, hooking Tolvern in on the call. “This is the captain. We’ve found the laboratory, and we’re going in.”

“Are you okay?” Capp asked. “We heard more shooting. Sounded like a bloody firefight.”

“We had an incident getting in. Lost one person, but we’re now onto the estate.”

“Who was it?” The ensign’s voice was tight. “It wasn’t—?”

“No, it wasn’t Carvalho. It was Silva. There will be time for that later. I need you to listen.”

Drake told her to recall the three men he’d left to guard the perimeter and make sure the ship was ready to go. Keep the engines warm. He’d soon need Capp to bring Blackbeard in for an extraction.

“Got it?”

“Aye, sir.” She still sounded distracted. “Be careful. All of you.”

“No messing around. I want you in here, all guns blazing, on my command.” He ended the call and turned to Tolvern, who had been listening to the whole thing. “You see. That’s why I wanted Capp and Carvalho separated. That’s why naval regulations forbid fraternization with fellow officers.” He glanced to where Carvalho and Haws had gone, some fifty yards off now. “It puts us all at risk. Puts the mission itself at risk. No one person’s life is favored over another’s.”

“Except yours, sir.”

“What?”

“Your life, Captain. That’s the one life we protect at all costs.”

He gave her a sharp look. “Not in battle, you bloody well don’t. In battle, every life is equally important.”

Tolvern nodded, but she looked unconvinced. In any event, now was not the time to squabble over that kind of nonsense. Capp’s evident worry about her lover vindicated his decision to separate them, and reminded him to be more vigilant about preventing any more such attachments among the crew.

“Got it, sir,” Smythe said. “Defense matrix is down. Cameras offline.”

“What about the landmines?”

“They’re down too. At least, I think so.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, sir,” Smythe said, more confidently this time. “They’re offline.”

Tolvern got back on the com and recalled Haws and Carvalho, who came trotting up moments later with intelligence. There was a helipad, a helicopter, and more men with guns behind the wreckage of Henry Upton.

“Good to know,” Drake said. “Ready? Let’s go.”

He led the eight of them walking at a swift pace out of the woods, across the wide expanse of lawn toward the temple platform. The helicopter lifted into the air when they were halfway across, its rotor thumping loudly in the thick tropical air. It loitered for several seconds above the platform, and Drake braced himself for it to come swooping toward them, firing its guns. But then it dipped its nose and thumped to the west, toward the guard post. He had to assume that the crew had spotted the armed party crossing the grounds. But then, why hadn’t they flown over to investigate?

“That was me,” Smythe said smugly, in answer to Drake’s unspoken question. He’d kept his nose at his handheld computer. “I sent a false message that the rebels had been spotted escaping into the jungle west of the guardpost.”

“Excellent. Whatever else you can do to sow confusion, do it.”

“I’m now sending a message purporting to be from a group of guards patrolling the grounds. That would be us, in case we’ve been spotted. We haven’t found anything and are returning to the temple platform.”

“Will it work?” Tolvern said.

“It should.”

Smythe didn’t sound as sure of that as Drake would like. Nevertheless, the tech officer had already proven invaluable. It was taking longer to cross the open lawn than expected, and Drake hadn’t fully considered that having the estate perched atop a temple platform meant that defenders would have a long, wide view of their approach. Their success depended on deception.

A few minutes later, they reached the base of the enormous temple and the road that cut its way to the top in a series of switchbacks. A lorry came rumbling down toward them. It was the same vehicle that they’d spotted on the jungle road, hauling freight up from the lowlands. Drake motioned his people back to let it past and gave a casual wave to the driver.

“My God,” Tolvern said in a low voice as they got up. “Careless idiots. They’re going to let us just waltz in there, aren’t they?”

But it was not to be. As soon as they reached the top of the platform and turned toward the doors of the laboratory complex, a second lorry came across. It slowed as it approached.

“Kilcup wants you at the manor,” the driver began. “He—” The man stopped. “Who the hell are you?”

Drake had by now glanced into the lorry and saw that the driver was alone. Drake pointed his gun through the open window. “Don’t make a move.”

The driver mashed down on the gas. Drake fired. Bullets filled the cab. The lorry lurched, drifting, as the driver slumped over the wheel. Tolvern ran and caught up with it, opened the door to drag the man out, and jumped into the driver’s seat. She brought the lorry to a halt, and the rest of them piled in, with Drake up front with Tolvern, and the rest in the back.

The gunshots had brought unwelcome attention, and guards turned toward them. Shouts, gunfire. Tolvern swung the vehicle around and mashed her foot on the gas. She shifted, and they raced toward the laboratory complex. She came tearing in, then slammed on the brakes and brought them jerking to a halt. They jumped out shooting, exchanging gunfire with two men coming out the front doors to investigate. The men fell, but more gunfire lashed at them from behind, knocking out the tires and pinging off the side of the vehicle. Half the team, led by Carvalho, moved as if to set up a perimeter behind the lorry, so the others could assault the building itself.

“No,” Drake ordered. “Take position behind the wreckage.”

The blackened hull of Henry Upton still lay in pieces to one side. As damaged as it had been by Drake’s attack, it would still provide far better shielding than the lorry, which could be cut apart by a heavy machine gun. The four men moved quickly to obey.

The remaining four members of the assault group—Drake, Tolvern, Nyb Pim, and Smythe—burst through the doors and into the facility. They found themselves in an open foyer, the air blessedly cool and dry after the muggy jungle. The sound of gunfire continued, muffled, from outside.

Drake eyed the hallways leading in opposite directions, the staircase climbing from the foyer to a mezzanine level above them. “Talk to me, Smythe. Where do we go?”

The tech officer glanced up from his computer. “Up the stairs and then down the hallway.”

There didn’t seem to be any guards left in the labs themselves, but there were plenty of people working inside. As soon as they reached the mezzanine level, Drake ordered two men in lab coats taken as prisoners. They begged not to be killed. Moments later, a woman poked her head curiously out of her office, as if drawn by the shouts of her coworkers. Drake forced her at gunpoint to join the party.

So close to their target now, Nyb Pim seemed anxious to race ahead, eager to get his hands on the sugar antidote, but Drake insisted on caution. They cleared each room and corridor as they moved deeper into the building. He hoped Carvalho and the others were holding their ground.

“Time to stop hiding,” Drake said to Tolvern. “Get Capp on the com. Tell her the situation—make sure she doesn’t kill our own guys when she comes in.”

Tolvern began speaking to Capp in a low voice as they proceeded cautiously down the hallway.

The laboratories were bigger than expected, and it cost precious minutes going from room to room. They soon came upon a big room filled with refrigerator units, freezers, and rows of computers, microscopes, centrifuges, and other equipment. By now Drake had a good dozen men and women in lab coats as prisoners. Some looked terrified, others indignant, even furious. None would give him the information he needed.

One of the older technicians seemed to be in charge, or at least the others obeyed him when he ordered them to calm down. The man certainly looked the part of a lead scientist; he wore a lab coat and horn-rimmed glasses and had a shock of white hair, with a high widow’s peak.

“Let me try this again,” Drake said when he had them all inside the large room. “I only need one thing and you can all go free. Where is the antidote? Is it in this room?”

The lead scientist frowned and shook his head, as if confused. “You keep saying that. We have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The sugar antidote. It cures sugar eaters. I know the lord admiral brought it here for study. Where is it?”

“We’re doing nothing of the sort,” the man said indignantly. “This is a legitimate research facility. We’re breeding new strains of sugarcane that can handle the native toxins and poor soil in the highlands. An antidote? If such a thing exists, I’ve never heard of it, and neither has anyone else here.”

“It came with the wreckage of the slaver. The pieces are lying outside—you know what I’m talking about.”

“I have no idea why they hauled that here, but it has nothing to do with us.”

Drake was pretty sure he was lying. “Then I’ll try someone else. Tolvern, make an example of this man.”

She forced the scientist to his knees, screamed at him to put his hands behind his head, and placed the barrel of her gun to his skull. The man stared straight forward. His face was pale, his lips pressed together, but he didn’t volunteer information.

Drake wasn’t about to execute the man in cold blood, but he needed them to think he would. “We’ll need two more,” he told Tolvern. “Three dead—that will show them we mean business.”

Drake picked out a woman, also older, also with an air of authority about her. “You. On your knees. Unless you have something to tell me.”

The woman dropped to her knees without a word.

“That one, too,” Drake said, pointing to a younger woman with glasses, who was trembling and pale.

Tolvern forced her to kneel next to the other two. Now both of the women were looking to the lead scientist, eyes wide and terrified. But none of the three spoke, nor did any of those still standing.

“You won’t get anything from us,” the leader said. He lifted his eyes to Drake. “None of us know what you’re talking about. Whatever you’ve heard, whatever you think you know, it’s wrong.”

Drake wasn’t sure if the scientist was calling his bluff, or if the man truly didn’t know. Either way, the response raised doubts. Could he be wrong? No, not unless the whole story of the sugar antidote were to unravel.

Given enough time, he was sure he could break one of these people, but by now Blackbeard would be lifting off, enemies would be coordinating their attack on Carvalho’s men, and quite possibly someone would have notified the destroyer and orbital fortresses of the attack on Admiral Malthorne’s estate. He needed to get the goods and get the hell out.

But before he could figure out a new angle, Nyb Pim spoke up. “Don’t you see what your sugar has done to my race? It has enslaved a billion people and wrecked a great civilization. Is there not one of you with the conscience given to every sentient being? Is there not one man or woman who will help us find this cure to my people’s misery?”

Drake winced. Nyb Pim should have kept his mouth shut. The moral posturing would only backfire. Hroom outnumbered humans ten to one on this planet, and no doubt the scientists and technicians had considered many times what would happen if the sugar curse were lifted from the masses who labored in the lowlands. All they had to do was look around; the estate was built atop an ancient Hroom temple. Anywhere you dug, you were likely to find the bones of their once-proud civilization.

These scientists were the last people who could be expected to wish away humanity’s greatest weapon in the struggle with the Hroom. For that matter, even Drake wasn’t settled on the issue. He meant only to liberate the antidote from Malthorne and leave the troubling decision of what to do with the blasted thing for a later date.

“Excuse me, I can help you.”

Drake turned toward the voice in surprise. The speaker was a solemn-faced young man, tall and slender. His accent, his fine, cultured air, and the easy manner of his posture made Drake think he was of good breeding—if not of the landed gentry, then at least a young man with an education.

“Quiet, Brockett,” the older scientist said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, sir, I believe I do.”

“Not another word.”

“You’ll find what you’re looking for in the walk-in refrigeration unit on the right,” the young man said.

“Damn you, Brockett.”

“Get him out of here,” Drake said, pointing to the older scientist. “As a matter of fact, get them all out of here, except for this one.”

Tolvern and Smythe hustled the rest of the scientists out of the room at gunpoint. When they were gone, Drake turned back to the young man.

“They’re gone, Mr. Brockett,” he said. “Will you help me?”

The young scientist looked a little pale, but met the captain’s gaze. “I have two questions. What do you intend to do with it? And will you kill me when I give it to you?”

“I won’t kill you. If I were that kind of man, I’d have started executing your friends when they wouldn’t cooperate.” Drake forced himself to speak calmly, even as he felt the precious seconds ticking by. “As for the other question, I don’t know what I’ll do with it, but I won’t leave it in the lord admiral’s hands. I don’t know what Malthorne intends, but he means to use it for ill, you can mark my words. And if I can’t find it, I will destroy this facility and everything in it.”

“Will you give it to the Hroom?”

Here, Drake hesitated and glanced at Nyb Pim. “Not yet, no. I need to think about it. If I do share it with the enemy, it will be with conditions.”

“You sound like an honest man,” Brockett said. “My father always said that you can tell a gentleman because he will give you a straight answer.”

“I do so when I can, Mr. Brockett,” Drake said.

“Sir,” the Hroom said. “May I offer my opinion?”

“Not now, Pilot.”

Capp came through on the com link. “Cap’n, we’re up. Taking fire. Can we come in yet?”

“One minute, Ensign.”

“But Captain!”

He ended the call.

Every instinct was telling Drake to run, go, before the situation degraded. But there was something about the confidence in Brockett’s comportment that told the captain that the young man wouldn’t be bullied into handing over what he was demanding.

“Where is it?” Drake asked.

“I’ll show you on one condition.”

“I told you already, I don’t know what I’ll do with it, and I won’t make any promises one way or another.”

“Not that. My condition is that you take me with you.”

Drake’s eyebrows went up. “You don’t even know who we are.”

“I can guess. You’re the one who destroyed the merchant ship. The rogue navy captain.”

“I thought they were calling me a pirate now.”

“They are.”

The building shook from an explosion, and the lights flickered. Drake grabbed a nearby table to steady himself.

“The lord admiral will order me killed if I give you what you want,” Brockett continued. “Anyway, I know things that can help you.”

“About the antidote?”

“Yes, I can replicate it. I’ve learned the trick of it.”

Drake didn’t need to hear any more. “In that case, yes, please come. I give you my word as a gentleman—whatever value that may hold, given the current circumstances—that if you behave honorably and truthfully, you will be treated well.”

Brockett didn’t wait for him to finish before he was rushing to the larger of the walk-in refrigeration units. He ordered Drake and Nyb Pim to fetch two coolers from some cabinets on the far side of the room. When they returned, Brockett cleared off shelves in the refrigeration unit and tossed in vials of liquids and powders.

By now, the building was shuddering from a series of explosions, and both Capp and Tolvern were frantically calling Drake on the com link. He told Capp to come in for a landing and Tolvern to release the scientists and meet him downstairs in the main lobby.

“Tell them to run,” Drake said. “They won’t want to be in the building when we get started on it.”

Drake, Nyb Pim, and the young scientist came into the hallway to find it filled with smoke. The sprinkler system came on and sprayed them with warm water. Nyb Pim and Brockett each carried one of the coolers, while Drake cleared the way holding his rifle. He scared off the few workers they encountered and soon joined Smythe and Tolvern in the foyer.

Tolvern eyed Brockett. “Don’t tell me he’s coming with us.”

“It was a condition of his help. It seems Brockett would rather not face the lord admiral.”

She sighed. “Something wrong with your existing collection of sidekicks?”

He didn’t have time for banter. “What is the situation?”

“Blackbeard has landed. She’s giving them hell outside. Carvalho and his boys are still pinned down behind the wrecked slaver.”

“Good enough. Let’s get out of here.”

A wall of steamy, smoky air hit them as they burst outside. The stench of burning plastic and fuel oil filled their lungs and sent them coughing. The four men Drake had left to guard the perimeter remained ducked behind the wreckage of Henry Upton, uninjured, but not daring to lift their heads and risk the fire blasting away across the open air. Thankfully, none of the gunfire seemed to be coming from the enemy, but that didn’t make it any less hazardous.

Blackbeard sat on a smoking stretch of the temple platform, midway between the laboratories and the manor house. The burning wreckage of the helicopter lay on its side in front of the ship. Blackbeard’s deck gun thumped at several enemies hunkered down at the estate. When it had suppressed that gunfire, it turned to blast at the laboratories.

“What the hell are they doing?” Drake said. “Doesn’t Baker know we were in there?”

Tolvern looked pained. “I told him to do it.”

“You did?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d get the antidote, or that you’d get all of it. And I thought you said you wanted to burn it to the ground on our way out of here.”

“Not while we were in it! Tell Blackbeard we’re coming across.”

Tolvern called in the order, and the deck gun swung around to attack the manor house again. Drake ordered the assault team forward. They ran, heads down toward the ship, hoping the deck gun didn’t turn toward them. The staircase dropped to the scorched temple platform, and they scrambled up it. Bullets pinged off the side of the ship.

Soon, they were safely on board with the staircase rising behind them and the doors closing. Moments after that, the ship lifted off the steaming surface of the planet. As Drake came running onto the bridge, he checked the viewscreen to see them climbing rapidly, the jungle swallowing Malthorne’s estate below. Fire engulfed the laboratories, aided by the hot plasma ejection from the engines. A second, smaller column of smoke rose from the lord admiral’s manor house. No missiles or gunfire chased after them. The deck gun kept pounding the complex until they’d climbed above the clouds and lost sight of the surface.

Nobody shot at them, and Drake began to hope that they might reach deep space without further incident. One final run past the orbital fortresses, this one easier since they’d be accelerating instead of slowing their approach, and then they’d be safe.

But they came up over the north pole to discover two navy warships lying in wait. One was the destroyer HMS Javelin. The other was a corvette. The two ships must have been cruising the near space lanes a few hours earlier when Blackbeard made her approach, and had come racing in to join the fight. They now lay side by side next to the polar fortress, all batteries presented for an attack.

Chapter Nine

Drake stared at the enemy ships, frozen with indecision. Blackbeard could handle a single destroyer. And Drake was confident he could fight a destroyer and a corvette to a stalemate, hold them off long enough to make a run for it. He could accelerate faster than the destroyer and had a higher top speed than the corvette. If the corvette caught him before he could outrun her, she’d do so away from the destroyer’s protective guns, and Drake could quickly settle matters.

But he didn’t dare lower his shields to give fight until he was out of range of that orbital fortress. Its guns overmatched anything that Drake could bring to bear, and it had enjoyed several hours to prepare for Blackbeard’s return. As he fled, the two warships in pursuit, the fortress would pound him with missiles, torpedoes, and cannon fire. He’d have sooner taken his chances against the lord admiral’s battleship. At least Dreadnought would be one single enemy, not three.

Drake forced confidence into his voice. “Run us by the fort,” he told Tolvern, “and straight on toward the destroyer.”

“Yes, sir.”

He could only pray that at least one of the enemy commanders would be incompetent, hesitate as he came in for the direct assault. Even then, he needed a whole lot of luck.

Drake looked around the bridge, prepared to give a pep talk, but the confidence of his crew surprised him. Not one of them seemed to be panicking. Nyb Pim worked at the nav computer while Ensign Capp sent him numbers. Smythe, his hair still damp from the muggy drizzle of Hot Barsa, sat at his station, fingers flying over the console. Manx assisted at the defense-grid computer. Finally, Tolvern sat next to Drake, working her own computer. If she felt fear, it didn’t show on her face.

His heart swelled with pride to see them in action. He’d lost many of the highly trained crew who’d manned his bridge during the glorious victory at Kif Lagoon, but he’d take this band of misfits over them any day.

Gunfire and missiles lashed at Blackbeard as she raced toward the destroyer. The direct approach kept her profile as narrow as possible and allowed Baker and Smythe to fight off a good portion of the attack with countermeasures, but the ship shuddered as they took a missile blast on the bow, and more cannon fire pounded them front and aft. Jane warned of more incoming fire, a torpedo circling in from behind. Class-two detonation expected.

Drake kept his straight approach as long as possible in hopes that the destroyer would fear being rammed. Such a direct strike would be catastrophic, but more so for the more slender destroyer than Drake’s cruiser. But the opposing captain seemed to recognize it as the bluff it was and stayed in position, as did the corvette, both ships attacking mercilessly with cannon and missile.

Blackbeard sheered to starboard at the last moment and threaded the gap between the destroyer and the orbital fort. It was a space of only a hundred yards, and extremely risky at these speeds, shuddering under enemy fire and the strain of escaping the planet’s gravitational pull. But Tolvern, together with the pilot and subpilot, executed the maneuver perfectly, and they slipped through nearly unscathed.

Unfortunately, the corvette had spotted the maneuver and was already accelerating to cut Blackbeard off and force her back into an open position against the guns of the destroyer and the fort. Drake’s shields had already taken damage on that side, and he couldn’t risk facing the corvette’s guns. But neither could he risk circling the planet to flee in the opposite direction. The commanding officers of the other five orbital forts were no doubt licking their chops at the prospect of setting off their batteries against this insolent pirate cruiser that eluded them earlier. Some of those forts were monsters compared to this little one.

“Captain!” Tolvern shouted. She pointed at the viewscreen.

Fresh worry clenched at his gut. The screen showed yet another ship barreling in from space to join the fight. It looked like a missile frigate, midway in size between the destroyer and the corvette. She was coming at such an angle as to pincer Drake between the destroyer, the cruiser, and the fortress, where he’d face a devastating four-way attack. He couldn’t even return fire; he didn’t dare bring down his shields.

Missiles came zipping out from the frigate.

“Brace yourselves!” Drake cried. “Jane, impact analysis?”

His only hope, slim as that seemed, was to absorb the oncoming blow and escape in the chaos as the swiftly approaching frigate raced through the midst of the other ships.

“Class-three detonation in five seconds,” the computer voice said. She sounded remarkably calm, almost sedate.

Class-three? That was it? Was Jane drunk with a bottle of gin in some back alley hard drive of the network? That was some computer malfunction that could downgrade all those missiles and torpedoes into a single class-three detonation.

The back of the ship shuddered. That was a rear missile Jane had counted. The others she seemed to have missed entirely.

He gripped the armrests and stared at his console. The schematic showed all shields intact, with only the rear panel blinking yellow against a sea of green. Any moment . . .

“Captain!” Tolvern shouted. There was no panic in her voice, only excitement.

He looked at the viewscreen. The missiles streaked past Blackbeard and toward the two royal navy ships. The corvette launched countermeasures, but too late, and several of the missiles slammed into her bow. The final missile punched through the damaged shields, and a secondary explosion burst through the deck. The corvette broke off pursuit and limped away, venting debris and flaming gas.

The frigate raced past them, engaged briefly with the destroyer, then wheeled and came in behind Blackbeard, as if to guard her flank. Drake stared, disbelieving. The frigate was helping him.

“Who the devil is that?”

“It’s not navy, sir,” Smythe said from his tech console. “Still analyzing her wake, but she seems like a Ladino craft.”

“A pirate,” Drake said, wonderingly. It could only be. But who? And why?

He didn’t wait to discover the identity of his mysterious benefactor, but ordered shields down and the main batteries deployed. They had reached a speed of almost a thousand miles per second and were at the outer edge of effective fire from the orbital forts. He kept going another forty thousand miles, then pulled short and presented a broadside. The frigate veered off at an angle, then she, too, turned to present her main guns at the incoming destroyer.

Javelin fired two more salvos at Blackbeard, then, eyeing the larger cruiser with the frigate in support, apparently decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and fled back toward the safety of the orbital fortresses. Drake turned his ship back toward deep space and punched it. The frigate was fast and kept up the pace only a few thousand miles to their rear. She didn’t fire, but her guns and torpedo tubes were still at the ready.

“Smythe,” he said. “I need a name, an identity.”

“Still working, sir.”

“Hurry up, dammit. I need something.”

Tolvern tapped at her console. “Captain, the frigate has delivered a message.”

“Yes?”

“Sending it through now, sir.”

Dear Captain James Drake,

I bugged your ship before you left the San Pablo yards. It is continually sending me subspace signal indicating your current whereabouts. It was a simple matter to track you to the Barsa system, and I can find you wherever you go from here.

You will follow me to the Seraphim system. If you do not, I will be forced to patch your signal to the Royal Navy, who has offered a rich bounty for your capture or death. If you fire on me, if you try anything treacherous, I will be delighted to let Lord Malthorne himself know of your whereabouts.

CV

CV? He remembered the young woman standing behind Captain Vargus’s shoulder on the bridge of Captain Kidd. Dark hair, flashing eyes. She’d worn a tight jumpsuit unzipped to show the upper swell of her bosom, and a ruby pendant that dangled at the end of a necklace to lodge in her cleavage.

Catarina Vargus.

Tolvern had shot her father dead during the battle at the San Pablo yards. Drake could only suppose that the daughter meant to seize his ship and maybe his crew, as well. Apparently, destruction at the hands of the Royal Navy hadn’t been enough revenge to suit her taste.

“I’ve got it, sir,” Smythe said. “The name of the ship is the Orient Tiger. A pirate frigate. Vargus’s old warship before he sold it to buy Captain Kidd.”

Sold within the family, apparently.

“What does the message say?” Capp asked.

He ignored the subpilot. Tolvern had read it already, and he wanted her insight. “Commander, what do you advise?”

“Better to fight her now than stumble into an ambush in the Seraphim system. Maybe follow her until we’re sure we’ve lost those navy ships, then turn on her and show her what’s what.”

“If we do that, she’ll carry through with her threat.”

“Soon as we wipe her out, we do a full scan for this bug,” Tolvern said.

“Will someone tell us what’s going on?” Capp said.

“Not now, Ensign,” Drake said. “Engineering already ran a full scan coming out of the yards,” he said to Tolvern. “Whatever this is, it’s well hidden.”

“Please tell me you’re not going to submit to her ridiculous demand,” Tolvern said. “There’s a trap on the other side of that jump. You know it.”

“That was my first thought,” he admitted. “But I’m reconsidering. She took a devil of a risk, tangling with the Royal Navy just so she could work her revenge in private.”

“More than revenge. She wants your ship.”

“Yes, I thought of that, too.”

After another moment of thought, he shared Catarina Vargus’s message with the rest of the officers on the bridge. Nyb Pim made a humming noise, an indication of surprise for a Hroom.

Capp took a moment longer than the others to decipher the note, but when she had, she drew in her breath. “King’s balls.”

“Yes, quite,” Drake said.

In all truth, he was intrigued. And more than a little grateful that Catarina Vargus had saved him from destruction. A few months ago, he would have dismissed her as another pirate lowlife, good enough for the gallows, but not much else. Now, he was willing to consider that her motives might extend beyond murder and plunder.

“Orient Tiger is changing course, sir,” Smythe said. “And she’s cloaking herself.”

“Give me her plasma signature and I can follow,” Nyb Pim said. “So long as we stay within a few thousand miles. We’d better hurry, though.”

Interesting. So the Hroom wanted to follow and see what Vargus wanted. He was usually more cautious than that. And then Drake saw the reason. The Seraphim system had easy jump points into the Hroom Empire. Go to Seraphim, and Nyb Pim would be a good deal closer to his ultimate goal of disseminating the sugar antidote.

Drake made a decision.

“Raise shields. Full cloaking. We’re going to follow this pirate and find out what she wants.”

Chapter Ten

Apex will kill you all!

What the devil did it mean? Captain Rutherford had been puzzling over the phrase since hearing the captive spit it out. The Hroom had raved, fighting his restraints, threatening, begging for sugar to eat—everything, in short, but providing more information. Only that one phrase. A threat, a warning?

Apex.

Rutherford had tried for several more minutes to get through to the prisoner, but he eventually gave up and went back to the bridge to see if any more information had come through from the fleet. Harbrake called to discuss repositioning their ships against possible attack, and when that call ended, Pittsfield told him that Catherine Caites wanted to speak with him. Rutherford had sent the young lieutenant and her torpedo boat to investigate the wake of the ship that had presumably destroyed the two Hroom vessels. Perhaps she had new information.

Rutherford took the call in the war room. He put Caites on the screen.

She had a proud, confident air to her, and her eyes were the hazel color with green flecks common to the upper classes of the Zealand Islands. In fact, she reminded him a little of Helen Drake, James Drake’s younger sister. Helen was as pretty a girl as one could imagine.

“Have you found anything?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. I followed the wake. The ship that left it has jumped out of the system for parts unknown.”

“Parts unknown? You mean she jumped back to San Pablo, don’t you?”

“No, sir. The ship left via a different jump point.”

“That isn’t possible, Lieutenant. The next closest jump point must be two hundred million miles from here.”

“They left via a temp point, sir. It’s already degrading.”

Good heavens, a temp point? That was even more implausible. It was not uncommon to come across a temporary jump point, an unstable rift in space that would open to some distant point and then degrade within a few days or weeks. But nobody would jump into such a thing. Not willingly. Not until it had been charted, and temp points rarely stuck around long enough to chart. Go through and you might find yourself somewhere unpleasant—within the corona of a star, say, or next to a neutron star—or nowhere at all. Pop out into the void three light years from the nearest star with no other jump points in sight, and the temporary point collapsing behind you, and then what?

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Rutherford let the skepticism color his voice as he prepared to end the call. “Send your data to my pilot.”

“I already did, sir. Or rather, to Calypso’s pilot. He was a classmate of mine at the academy, and I asked if he’d look it over before I called. I didn’t trust my findings, as you can imagine. I wanted to be sure.”

“Yes, well.” Rutherford didn’t know if he should be pleased with her initiative or annoyed at the breach of protocol. Perhaps a little of both.

“He confirmed that it’s a temporary jump point. It’s already decaying, and he estimates it will be gone in less than five hours. And that’s not the half of it.” Caites hesitated, and Rutherford had the impression it was for dramatic purposes, not because she was uncertain. “My instruments were showing a subspace channel.”

“What do you mean?”

“For sending subspace messages. You know, the channels we open to communicate with the fleet. They’re wide enough to send through a stream of atoms. A subspace channel is a jump point, of sorts, only very small.”

“I know the science,” he said peevishly. “But what does this have to do with the temporary jump point you claim you detected?”

“Because I followed the wake of the mystery ship and it ended where I was detecting the subspace channel.”

“What?”

“It isn’t a subspace channel, it only looks like one. It’s a full-size jump point. An artificial jump point.”

Caites sounded more than a little smug at this revelation. No wonder that she would be. If such a thing were true, it would be revolutionary. Neither Albion nor the Hroom Empire possessed the technology to force open a jump point big enough to send through a physical object larger than a stream of atoms. Not so much as a miniature probe, never mind an entire ship.

The ramifications staggered him. It took tremendous resources to catalog the ever-shifting natural jump points. And those jump points occurred irregularly and in generally inconvenient places. But imagine a ship that could manipulate space whenever it wished and pop up wherever it wanted. No more long slogs from one jump point to the next. Such a ship would travel like a stone skipping across a pond and cross the entirety of charted space in a few days, one jump after another.

Rutherford was still digesting this information when Caites cleared her throat. “Will that be all, sir?”

“What? Oh, yes. Well.” Rutherford peered into the screen at this confident young woman. “Where are you from, Lieutenant?”

“Albion, sir. West Canada, the coast opposite the Zealand Islands.”

“I thought you might be. I can hear it in your accent. Who is your father? A gentleman, I presume?”

“Yes, sir. My grandfather owned a prosperous estate, and my father’s eldest brother inherited it. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. Sir Reginald Caites.”

“Yes, I have.”

“My father is not so prosperous as my uncle, but he received a small inheritance from his maternal side that was sufficient for our needs. I enjoyed a proper education.”

“I thought so. Your good breeding is apparent. How old are you, Caites?”

“Twenty-eight, sir.”

“That old? With such initiative, I’d have expected you to be commanding more than an eight-man torpedo boat by now.”

“Generally, the accusation is that I have too much initiative, sir. I was first mate of an Alliance-class corvette, but I ran afoul of my captain.”

“Who was your captain?”

“Harbrake, sir.”

“Ah, yes. I’d forgotten he was on a corvette. Perhaps he didn’t fully appreciate your qualities, Lieutenant. Send me your data about the jump point. I will call you if I have questions.”

He ended the call. At first, his thoughts lingered on Catherine Caites, not so young as he had presumed. Old enough to be better positioned within the fleet, given her background and abilities. Never mind serving on Nimitz as Harbrake’s commander, she could be captaining the vessel instead of him. Rutherford had little use for the cautious, overbearing man, except that he was Admiral Malthorne’s pet. Better to have a woman of initiative like Catherine Caites.

But Rutherford’s thoughts quickly turned to the artificial jump point. What were the Hroom about, first destroying two of their own ships with a new weapon system and then showing off their ability to create a jump point out of pure vacuum? Did they mean to intimidate Albion into calling off the war?

What they didn’t expect, he guessed, was for anyone to follow them through. After all, what fool would stumble blindly through a temporary, rapidly decaying jump point? But if Caites was right, that jump wouldn’t lead to a black hole or the empty void of space, it would go somewhere useful. No doubt one of the planets at the heart of the Hroom Empire.

Rutherford thought briefly about sending a message to the Admiralty. But instinct told him to hold this close to his chest until he was sure of what he was facing.

He came back onto the bridge and eyed Commander Pittsfield. No sign of Lieutenant Billings, the second mate and one Malthorne’s loyalists, foisted off on Rutherford during the wholesale crew replacement on Albion a few weeks ago. Billings had been in the sick bay since coming out of the jump. Seemed he suffered the trips every single jump. Worthless fool.

Caites had sent the requested information by the time Rutherford took his seat. He looked it over and was shortly satisfied that she’d given him an accurate summation of the situation.

“Captain,” Pittsfield said. “We’ve got a subspace from HQ. There’s trouble in the Barsa system. We have new orders.”

“What kind of trouble?” Rutherford asked with a frown. “Empire forces?”

“It’s not the Hroom, sir. It’s Captain Drake. He’s fleeing the system, and the navy is rushing forces to intercept him. We’re ordered to join the hunt.”

Rutherford wanted nothing more than to race back and face his old friend in combat. Preferably one on one, Vigilant against Ajax, or whatever Drake’s old ship had become since her overhaul in the San Pablo yards. Attacking Drake with an entire task force would hardly be a fair fight.

But he had bigger worries now, worries the Admiralty knew nothing about. Finding out what was on the other side of that jump point was of far greater importance than hunting down a single rogue navy captain and his crew of pirates, freed prisoners, and mutineers. Drake was an annoyance, more of an affront to Malthorne’s ego than a threat.

Rutherford read the official order, which was rather strangely worded, as such things went.

Flag-Officer Rutherford,

At 0924 hours, November 27, 2630, the traitor James Drake attacked naval resources outside Hot Barsa and led a ground assault team that killed many civilians and destroyed much property. Drake escaped before he could be intercepted and is now fleeing the system.

He must be stopped at all cost. This will take priority over engagement with empire forces.

You will proceed to the Gryphon Shoals via the San Pablo, Fantalus route. Leave Calypso, two destroyers, and a missile frigate at San Pablo. Leave Richmond and three torpedo boats at Fantalus. Proceed with Nimitz to the Gryphon Shoals. You will receive new orders as information becomes available.

With resolution,

Vice Admiral Thomas Lord Malthorne

That explained the curious way the orders were worded. They seemed to come directly from the lord admiral himself, and not the staff officer normally tasked with such things. How odd. Then Rutherford remembered that Malthorne had extensive holdings on Hot Barsa. Was that what was behind Drake’s assault? A personal vendetta against the lord admiral for his role in stripping Drake of his commission and sentencing him to hard labor?

And was Malthorne’s response a similar act of vengeance? Because it beggared understanding that the navy would be rushing resources to track down the man when it had just initiated a new war with the Hroom Empire.

Pittsfield interrupted Rutherford’s musings. “I’ve relayed orders to prepare all ships for a return jump. I gave Harbrake thirty minutes to complete his investigation of the destroyed Hroom warship. Perhaps he can find something useful before we go.”

“Belay those orders. Pass this message in its place. Harbrake will leave at once. Nimitz will proceed through the jump as the flagship, with Harbrake in command of the task force.”

“Sir?”

“We are staying behind.”

Not staying behind so much as setting an immediate course for that temporary jump point, to squeeze through before it decayed further and broke apart. They would emerge God only knew where. It was dangerous, but Rutherford counted the secrets that lay on the other side as absolutely necessary to the prosecution of the war and perhaps even to Albion’s long-term survival against the empire.

But he didn’t say this part aloud. Let the crew digest one bit of difficult information at a time. He waited for Pittsfield to finish passing along his orders.

“One more thing, Commander. There’s a lieutenant on a torpedo boat who has provided some valuable intelligence and showed initiative and energy. I want her brought on board before the fleet departs. Her name is Caites, and her boat is attached to Nimitz.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I need that groggy fool in the sick bay sent over to Nimitz. Billings. He has important intelligence for Captain Harbrake.”

“What kind of intelligence, Captain?”

“The intelligence that Billings’s worthless hide has been replaced as second mate of HMS Vigilant by Lieutenant Catherine Caites.”

Chapter Eleven

Commander Tolvern was surprised to receive an invitation from Captain Drake to dine with him in his cabin. Were it to become known, the mere existence of such an invitation would set tongues wagging—Capp’s and Carvalho’s at the very least—so she determined not to mention it to anyone.

Why would Drake allow such a rumor to be started, unless he were oblivious that bringing her to dine would suggest something improper? And then it occurred to her that maybe he really did mean something improper, that he’d invited her to his room with the intention of . . .

That’s ridiculous. Put it out of your head.

Nevertheless, Tolvern took extra care with her appearance before going to his room. She showered, slicked back her short hair, even put on a bit of lipstick (a very small bit), and changed into a freshly laundered uniform. She had a bottle of perfume she’d been keeping since her last shore leave on Albion, and she opened it and took a whiff. Hmm, that was strong. On second thought, she returned it to the shelf. The smell of soap and clean skin would have to suffice.

Drake was out of uniform when he greeted her at the door, wearing comfortable trousers with a drawstring and a white linen shirt open at the cuffs and throat. He looked her over.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “aren’t you off duty? If this is a bad time . . . ”

“It’s a great time,” she said hastily. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted to talk operations, what with the jump coming and all.”

“No, it’s just dinner. The less we talk about military business, the better.”

“I’ll go back and change.” Tolvern was thinking again about the perfume. Wouldn’t hurt to put on a dab when she was in her room. “Give me five minutes.”

Drake took her arm before she could turn away. “Come on in, you’re fine dressed as you are.”

Inside, a delicious smell hung in the air, like beef and mushrooms and frying onions, and her stomach rumbled. She forgot her embarrassment and followed Drake to the kitchen, where he stirred something delicious and creamy on the stove. He pulled a loaf of bread from the oven and set it steaming on a cutting board.

“When did you learn all this?” she asked. “Doesn’t Drake Manor have an army of cooks?”

“Why do you think I learned?” he said with a smile. “The food in the navy was so bad in comparison that I knew I’d be forced to cook my own food if I ever wanted a decent meal again. Here, make yourself useful, and put together this salad. Assuming you know how to cook, that is.”

“Please. My father is your father’s steward. Our entire staff consisted of one maid and one deaf old man who used to come around to help in the garden. We prepared our own meals. I learned to cook before I could ride a bicycle.”

Tolvern reached for the knife to cut the tomatoes as she said this, and wasn’t paying attention. The knife slipped from her grasp and clattered to the ground, making Drake dance back to avoid the falling blade. She bent for it, blushing furiously.

Drake raised an eyebrow. “And are toes one of the things you learned to cook?”

“Sorry, sir. Sorry.”

“It’s fine. No, wash it off, first.”

Another blush. “Sorry, Captain. I got flustered.”

“Would you mind very much calling me James?”

Her heart fluttered. “No, sir. I mean . . . James, sir.” She winced. What an idiot.

He laughed. “I know it’s improper. Your father started calling me Mr. James Drake from an early age, and I suppose Mr. Drake would be fine if we were still back home. But after so long as your captain, that would sound even stranger to my ears. I don’t mean you to start calling me by my given name all the time, but I need this pressure off my shoulders, and you’re the only one I can count on as a friend. So, just for tonight?”

“Of course. And you can call me Jess.” She hesitated. “Just for tonight, naturally.”

“Jess. Certainly.”

“Or Jessica. That’s my full name, that’s what my family still calls me. No, wait. Jess is fine. Now I’m babbling like an idiot.”

He smiled. “Tell me something interesting about yourself, Jess.”

“Like what?”

“The usual stuff people talk about in situations like this. Are you reading anything at the moment? What was your favorite subject at the academy? What are your sisters and your brother doing these days?”

With such a ridiculous prompt as that, she didn’t think there was any way she’d be able to talk to him, but after a tentative start, she was off and running. As she helped him set the table, it occurred to her that she was still babbling, that he was saying very little in return, so she asked him a couple of polite questions. He answered briefly, and then she found herself jumping into the silence and chattering on again.

As soon as she realized this, it was like someone had glued her mouth shut. She could no longer think of a single thing to say that he might find interesting.

Dammit, can’t you act normal?

“How is your family?” she asked, then forced herself to stay quiet long enough for him to answer.

“I wish I knew, but I don’t dare contact them. I imagine my parents are worried sick, if not my sisters, too. I imagine your family is worried, too.”

“I sent a message—not from the ship, of course,” she added hastily. “From San Pablo.”

“Be careful. Someone still might intercept it.”

“It was just before we left. I wouldn’t have put us at risk, you know that.”

“I’m more worried about the risk to your family. You don’t want them associated with your actions, not now.”

“You don’t think they’d hurt our families, do you?” Tolvern asked.

“Probably not, but I’d rather not put it to the test. My sister Madeline married just last year, and her husband is a lieutenant in the Third Fleet. They seemed to be hoping my name would help his career. They’re disabused of that notion by now, I’m sure.”

Tolvern had pleasant memories of the older of the two Drake girls, who was about her own age. Madeline had been a cheerful, friendly girl and never looked down on the steward or his family. A good friend. She had taught Tolvern how to ride and kept a roan mare just for her friend to use. Tolvern didn’t know the younger sister, Helen, nearly so well, but had the impression that she was bright and pretty and beloved by the rest of the family.

“What is Helen doing?” she asked. “Is she going to the academy? She seemed clever enough.”

“More than clever. She’s the brightest of any of us.”

“She plays chess, doesn’t she? My father was telling me she’s really good.”

“A little too good. I was the one who taught her, but by the time she was fourteen, I could no longer defeat her.” He smiled, as if thinking of some specific memory. “But I don’t think Helen will go to the academy. Her ambitions are more limited, like my mother’s.”

“Don’t tell me she wants to stay on Aukland,” Tolvern said. “There’s a big universe beyond that little rock.”

“I don’t know. Helen is curious enough about the outside world—she practically lives in my father’s library—but she has no real desire to travel. I think she’d be satisfied marrying a gentleman of intellect and good humor who possesses some means, and then raising a dozen children with him.”

“Seems a waste, but I suppose Albion needs women like that, too.”

“So says the crown, anyway,” Drake said. “If we’re to fulfill our so-called destiny, we can’t be taking all of the clever women and sending them to the academy. The king calls it skimming the cream.”

It seemed unfair to Tolvern that this should be the case. Nothing stopped a man from having a family and a navy career at the same time, but put a woman in the navy and suddenly the paths to domestic happiness closed off for her. She couldn’t fraternize with her fellow officers, and unlike what a male officer enjoyed, when she returned planetside to Albion, there would be no balls set up to introduce her to handsome single men.

So what should Tolvern have done? Stay in her father’s house, waiting to be courted by some young bachelor with prospects? Such men did not always materialize; she had two unmarried aunts who seemed reasonably attractive and well spoken. One had moved to Cardiff to make her own way in life, while the other had waited and waited and waited to be courted. Neither had married, but one woman’s life seemed particularly circumscribed, as if she were still waiting, now in her forties, for that suitor to arrive.

Not that Helen Drake ran any risk of that sort of outcome. The captain’s sister was young, pretty, and the daughter of a baron—any man would find her a prize worth pursuing. The privilege of class and rank, Tolvern supposed.

The food was ready, and they ate. It was quite good. Maybe not like a fine restaurant in York Town, but better than navy slop, that was for sure. Of course, it helped that the captain had access to higher-quality ingredients than they stocked in the ship’s kitchen.

“Thank you for that,” Drake said when they’d finished. “I hope it wasn’t improper to ask you to dinner. I didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable.” He rose, and she rose with him.

“Not at all,” she said, thinking he was on the verge of dismissing her.

“Would you care for some dessert?”

She quickly sat back down. “I’d love some. What did you make?”

“Fruit tartlets. I got frozen blackberries on San Pablo—cost me a fortune, as you can imagine—and I didn’t want to just eat them plain.” He hesitated. “I’m not sure how they turned out, since I substituted honey for the sugar.”

“I’m sure they’ll be great, James.”

Drake brought out two individual pastries, together with a bottle of port, which he used to refill their wine glasses. The tart blackberries reminded her of scouring the bushes that grew on the edge of the estate, where pasture became forest. Tolvern and her sister would go foraging, filling their buckets and their bellies at the same time. They’d come home with stained fingers and scratches on the back of their hands. Eating blackberries so many light years from home brought a twinge of nostalgia.

“Could have turned out worse, I suppose,” he said. “But that honey flavor adds a strange element.”

“It’s delicious.”

The port was combining with the wine already in her belly to make her lightheaded and less tightly wound than earlier. Also, perhaps a little reckless. A calm, rational voice deep in her head told her to shut her trap, that she was borderline drunk and would regret that reckless feeling later, perhaps deeply.

She ignored the voice.

“It must be hard being captain,” she said. “Feeling apart from everyone else.”

“Sometimes.” He seemed to look past her shoulder, eyes growing unfocused. “Yes, you could say that.”

“You look like you’re remembering something.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.” A wry smile. “An old girlfriend.”

“You had girlfriends?”

“You sound shocked. Yes, I had one girlfriend, anyway. We met the summer before I went into the academy.”

“I don’t suppose it was anyone I know. Some earl’s daughter, no doubt.”

“Actually, no. That’s why we aren’t together. I think you might know her. Marianne Elliot.”

Tolvern blinked. “Mary Elliot? She was my sister’s best friend growing up!”

“Yes, I know. That’s what my father kept reminding me. A classmate of his steward’s daughter. Her father a shopkeeper and her mother a hospital nurse. Marianne Elliot was hardly a high-born lady. Not fit to be a match for a baron’s son, even a baron with such minor holdings as my father’s.”

Tolvern was surprised at the turn of jealousy deep in her gut, and she fought it down. Why should that matter to her? She had nothing against Mary Elliot or her family. Mary had been a pleasant girl, reasonably attractive and with a bright, sparkling wit. Strong willed and fiercely ambitious, given where she’d started in life.

“Rather funny thing,” Drake said. “Did your sister tell you what became of Mary?”

“Went to York after finishing her studies, that’s the last I heard. After that?” Tolvern shook her head.

“Mary borrowed a sum of money and started a business. Got involved in politics after the parliamentary crisis. There’s word she’s going to stand for a position in the House of Commons next year.”

“Really? Then I guess your father would really disapprove now. Your grandfather was in the House of Lords, wasn’t he?”

“Not so fast,” Drake said with a smile. “Mary must have made a fortune in the trades, or she couldn’t afford to stand for parliament. We’re a small barony, barely solvent. Money would trump breeding, and even politics, in my father’s eyes.”

“Then you still think you might . . . ?”

“What? No, that ship has sailed, as the old saying has it. She married a gentleman from Britain. They have a child together.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. But surely there are other prospects for a man of your breeding and accomplishments.”

“I have had none.”

She scoffed. “I can’t believe that.”

“It’s my own decision, of course. I haven’t put myself in the proper situations—balls and dinners on Albion, I mean. I was busy and not given to seeking temporary company in distant ports, as some are wont to do. Of course I have the same desires as any other man.”

“However?”

Drake gave an affected shrug. “The navy has been my lover.”

“She’s a fickle mistress.”

“Yes, quite.” He drank the last of his port. “And not nearly so warm in bed as a woman.”

Tolvern glanced at her empty glass and wished she’d had one more drink to steel her courage. The captain had loved a commoner, he had expressed his loneliness, his desire to share pleasure with a woman. James Drake was a man lacking in artifice; she did not think he had invited her here with the intent of seducing her. Nevertheless, here she was, and the opportunity was full in her hands to press herself upon him. Would he refuse her if she made a move?

“Enough of my troubles, Commander Tolvern.”

“Jess,” she reminded him. “We were going to use proper names tonight, remember?”

“Yes, sorry. Jess. Old habits, you understand. Quite difficult to shift one’s preconceived understanding of a person.”

That punctured her courage. “Yes, true. Well, I suppose I should be going.”

“I’m sorry, that didn’t come out very well. I’ve always thought highly of you, of your family. What I meant is that I see you as an officer, my very competent second in command, and it’s unusual to see you on a private basis, even one so harmless as this. I hope I didn’t offend you just now.”

“Of course you didn’t,” she said quickly. “I understand perfectly what you meant and what you didn’t mean. It’s just that I’m on my last sleep cycle before the jump, and I want to come through well rested. Thank you for a most excellent meal, and for the conversation. I would be happy to do it again whenever you need company.”

“There is one thing you could do for me before you go back to your rooms,” Drake said. “Ensign Capp is also off shift. Could you take her to the mess and buy her a drink?”

“Now?”

“Yes, I know you’re tired, but could you?”

“First, dinner with the captain, and then, drinks with the subpilot?” she said in a light tone. “That’s a lot of fraternizing for one night. Anyway, I’m not sure another drink would be a good idea. I’m rather lightheaded as it is.”

“A cup of tea, then. It’s not for the sake of camaraderie. I need information, and I think you’re the best person to dig for it. Seems you and Capp formed a rapport in San Pablo, a friendship of sorts.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. More like a cordial partnership.” Tolvern hesitated. “What kind of information do you need?”

“Barker has completed a full scan of the ship. He insists there is no bug, no tracking device on board. Nothing sending out an illicit signal. Could be that he’s mistaken, that one of Rodriguez’s engineers buried an object deep in the hull when we were in the yards for repairs, but Barker is absolutely confident. The alternative is that Catarina Vargus lied to me, that she found us in the old-fashioned way—someone told her how to find us. Is still telling her.”

“And you think it’s Capp?”

“Not necessarily. Forced to hazard a guess, I would say one of the pirates we picked up on San Pablo. But they were recruited by Capp and Carvalho, who may know something. I trust Capp more than her lover, and so there you have it. Will you talk to her?”

“Yes, of course, but I thought you’d decided to meet with the pirate’s daughter, anyway.”

“I have, yes. I’m curious, and it’s a good way to stall Nyb Pim about this antidote thing.”

“The scientist from Hot Barsa, this Noah Brockett fellow, he’s all set up in the lab?”

“Getting there,” Drake said. “It won’t be long.”

Tolvern circled back to Capp. “But I guess you’ll want to find out anyway. Be helpful to know what Catarina Vargus does or doesn’t know, regardless of what she tells us when we get there.”

“Exactly.”

“In that case, sure, I’ll talk to Capp. I don’t fully understand the woman, but I know she won’t turn down a free drink.” Tolvern rose to her feet. “Thanks again for the dinner, James.”

“You’re more than welcome. But I suppose we should go back to ‘Captain’ and ‘Commander’ now. Wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea.”

“No, I guess we wouldn’t.”

Tolvern felt deflated as she walked to the lift. How was it that she felt more lonely now than before she’d had dinner with the captain? He had been accommodating, friendly, complimentary. And he hadn’t invited Barker to dinner, or Nyb Pim. She was the one he’d chosen to open up to. So why was she so down?

Because there’s no pretending any longer, that’s why.

There it was. Her heart had leaped when Drake confessed his loneliness. Was he, could he possibly be talking about her? She’d been so willing to throw herself on him and so embarrassed when it was clear that no, he hadn’t been even slightly interested, that it was impossible any longer to avoid the obvious.

“I’m in love with the captain,” she whispered to herself as the lift doors closed with her inside.

How ridiculous was that? She may as well have been a child daydreaming in the back of the class about her father’s young master and doodling on her notebook: “Lady Jessica Drake” with a big heart around it. But he’d fallen in love with Marianne Elliot, hadn’t he? She was a commoner too, and not so beautiful or accomplished (well, back when it happened) that it was impossible to imagine him doing it again.

There was the small matter of fraternization, of course. Captain Drake’s opinion on that subject was well known.

Tolvern looked first in the mess, supposing that Capp was already at the bar, drinking and carousing with her friends. But she was not there. A couple of quick calls confirmed that Capp was not on the bridge, either, nor in engineering or the gunnery. She must be enjoying the solitude of her room, perhaps even napping off schedule, and so Tolvern made her way to the officer berths above the bridge. She knocked gently.

“Yeah, who is it?” came Capp’s low York accent from the other side of the door.

“It’s me, Tolvern. You have a minute?”

“Important, is it?”

“I wouldn’t have come to your room if it weren’t. Can I come in?”

“Sure, I don’t mind, ’cept I’m lounging in my underwear.”

“If it bothers you, then pull on some pants already.”

“Don’t bother me if it don’t bother you.”

The door opened, and Tolvern stepped inside. It closed behind her.

“Actually,” Tolvern said, “if you want to get dressed, I’ll treat you to a drink in the mess. I haven’t used all my rations.”

As she said this, her eyes adjusted to the dim light, and she saw that Capp wasn’t alone. The woman stretched feline-like along her bed, wearing nothing but panties and a camisole that barely contained her straining breasts. Carvalho sprawled behind her, his back pressed against the wall so he’d fit on the narrow bed. A sheet covered him to his waist, but it left exposed his lean belly and his muscular chest with its dark curly hair.

“Normally, that would sound pretty good,” Capp said. “I ain’t the sort to turn down a free drink, you know that. But I’m not sure I want to get up as of yet.”

“You have company,” Tolvern said stupidly.

“Aye. But he don’t mind, do you, luv?”

Carvalho smirked his answer. “She can join us if she wants.”

“Shut up, you.” Capp slapped his chest playfully. “And put your pants on, she don’t want to see you hangin’ out. Make room.”

The room was only a few feet wide and barely long enough for a bed and a toilet. The air was close, with the musky smell of lovemaking. Tolvern wished she could simply melt through the door and back into the corridor.

“We’ll talk later. It’s not important. Really, no,” Tolvern said to Carvalho, as he sat up and grabbed for his underwear at the foot of the bed. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

She slapped open the door and fled into the hallway before she could see any more. The sight of Capp and Carvalho together on the bed, the scent in the room, his muscular body—it was all too much.

Tolvern sent Drake a quick message as soon as she reached the safety of her room. Capp, she explained, had been in her room and not inclined to go out. Let the captain parse that sentence for meaning. But, Tolvern added, she would approach Capp again as soon as it was possible.

Message sent, Tolvern undressed for bed. Her mind was still churning, her head light from the wine and brandy, as she turned off the lights and crawled under the sheets. She thought about the captain, remembered Carvalho lying half naked in bed. She was simultaneously horrified and aroused.

Sleep was a long time coming.

Chapter Twelve

Drake followed the pirate ship warily through the jump point. He emerged, stunned, on the other side, half expecting to find himself under attack from a motley fleet of pirate vessels left lurking there by Catarina Vargus in anticipation of his arrival. If he didn’t think his shields strong enough to weather a barrage and his engines powerful enough to quickly outrun any subsequent pursuit, he wouldn’t have risked it, the woman’s threats notwithstanding.

As it was, there was nothing on the other side but Orient Tiger, Catarina Vargus’s pirate frigate, and she’d already set course and begun to accelerate. No hiding this time; Vargus apparently felt secure enough in the system to travel uncloaked, but not so secure that she wanted to linger in front of the jump point to see whatever ships might be following them through.

Drake followed her for another seven hours, passing through an asteroid belt, before Orient Tiger slowed and eventually came to a stop within the ring of moons surrounding a purplish gas giant. There was a small mining colony on one of the moons, but Vargus seemed to know this as well and kept herself shielded from the moon on the far side of the planet.

The pirate frigate hailed Blackbeard, and Drake opened a channel on the viewscreen. Catarina Vargus appeared. She wore her leather vest, partly unzipped, and the ruby pendant, which glowed blood red, throbbing under the reflected light of her console.

Vargus smiled and didn’t look at all upset to see Drake on the other side.

“James Drake. The man who killed my father.”

“That was never my intention.”

“Perhaps not, but it was inevitable when you pursued Captain Kidd and demanded her cargo. If you’d known my father at all, you’d have known that he would have never capitulated to such blunt tactics. That he’d have fought back, and when defeated, would have come seeking revenge.”

It was the first time Drake had heard the woman’s voice, and his first thought was surprise that she sounded so cultured. Not like her father’s rough way of speaking. If he’d closed his eyes, he’d have thought her a lady from southern Britain. A woman of education and breeding, perhaps accomplished as a singer, given the smooth tone of her voice. Yet she so clearly looked like her father, with her bronze skin and flashing dark eyes. Only with better effect. She was a beautiful woman and seemed to know it.

“If you’ve come for revenge, you’ll be quickly disabused of that hope,” he said.

“Revenge?” Vargus laughed, and the sound was without malice. “No, I would thank you, if the circumstances were otherwise. Look at me now. I have my father’s old ship, my own crew.”

“It’s not so powerful as Captain Kidd,” he reminded her.

Her eyes flashed. “It was powerful enough to save your life. Now tell me why I should have bothered if you’re going to behave with ingratitude.”

Drake wasn’t in the mood for verbal sparring. “What is it you want?”

“Bluntly? To discuss your cargo and what you plan to do with it.”

“What do you know of my cargo?”

“You went to Hot Barsa for a reason. A good deal of effort to run those forts. Not once, but twice. I assume that whatever risk you took promised some reward of appropriate value.”

“That’s my own business.”

“Come, don’t be so hostile. I only want to discuss it. Why don’t you come over, alone, and we’ll speak one on one and see if we can come to an understanding.”

“Why don’t you come here, instead, if your intentions are peaceful?”

Vargus returned a grin, her teeth white and gleaming. “Because I don’t trust you, James Drake. Last time around, you were shooting my father in the back when he was trying to escape.”

“As you might imagine, that incident makes me reluctant to put myself under your power.”

“And as you might imagine, the reverse is also true. You’re a known pirate killer. I’m a known pirate.”

“I’m not going over without some sort of security guarantee.”

“Very well. How about this? I will leave my shields down and my batteries retracted so long as you are on my ship. As you seem delighted to point out, your vessel—what is it you’re calling it now, Blackbeard?—is more than strong enough to crush me in a fight. I would assume your crew could manage well enough whether you were on board or not.”

Drake stroked his chin, thoughtful. “Give me fifteen minutes. You’ll have your answer then.”

He cut the link and called Tolvern into the war room to discuss Catarina Vargus’s proposal. When the door closed, he turned to find her wearing a scowl so deep it may as well have been sandblasted there.

“I don’t like it one bit.”

Drake sat. “I can see that.” He gestured for her to take a seat.

“So why are we discussing it?”

“Because she saved us at Hot Barsa, because she knows something of our cargo. And because she has either bugged our ship, or she has someone on board feeding her information. Did you ever speak to Capp?”

Tolvern shifted in her seat, looking uncomfortable. “I did. First time I went down, she was indisposed. But we had breakfast together this morning. I put the question to her.”

“And? Is there a spy on board, someone giving Vargus information?”

“Capp was evasive. I think she knows something, or at least suspects something. I mentioned Carvalho, and she grew especially elusive.”

This was an irritating nugget of information and brought Capp’s loyalties into question. “If I could end that relationship, I would.”

“You could kick Carvalho off the crew, but she’d go with him. Then you’d lose them both.”

“I wouldn’t like it, but this current situation is intolerable. Get Capp in here.”

Tolvern gave him a worried look. “You’re sure?”

“I’m not going to lay out an ultimatum, if that’s what you’re concerned about. In fact, I won’t even let on what you told me.”

Tolvern fetched Capp, and soon the subpilot was sprawled in her seat. Drake asked if Capp’s friends in the crew knew what they’d retrieved from Hot Barsa.

“Sure, they do. Can’t keep that sorta thing a secret for long.”

“I would imagine they are writing it off as folly on my part,” he said.

“Don’t see much use in it, that’s for sure. We ain’t in this out of any charity for the Hroom Empire, you know. Plenty of folks are disappointed we didn’t loot Malthorne’s estate on our way out of there. That’s what we were counting on.”

“I never said we were going to do any looting. If people made that assumption, that’s their own fault.”

“Not like we had much time, anyway,” Tolvern said. “We were lucky to get out of there alive.”

“Oh, I know it. I may have been on the ship the whole time, but I ain’t blind. You was getting shot up pretty good out there. And the fleet was looking for us at the same time. Don’t mean people don’t wish we’d taken the time or sent in more people to get the job done. You know those blokes didn’t join us on San Pablo so we could run around doing errands for the Hroom. Nobody much cares about the antidote excepting if it gets us a payoff somehow.”

“Vargus asked me to join her on Orient Tiger,” Drake said. “Do you think I should go over?”

Capp looked thoughtful for a moment before responding. “I won’t say yes or no, but you’ll look like a coward if you don’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tolvern said, irritably.

“Keep your shirt on. He’s our captain, that’s all I mean. We don’t want him looking like he’s scared. And you know this woman wants something bad or she wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble to pull our stones out of the fire.”

“Could be revenge she’s after,” Drake said. “I’m still not ruling that out.”

Capp shrugged. “Yeah, could be. She don’t seem too worked up about her old man, though. I’m guessing it’s something else.”

“How about if we go instead?” Tolvern said. “Capp and I will meet with her. First mate and the subpilot. That way she knows we’re serious, but you stay safely behind.”

Drake gave her a sharp look. “If you really think she’s up for revenge, then that’s the dumbest thing we could do. It wasn’t me who pulled the trigger, it was you.”

Tolvern thrust out her chin. “And I don’t regret it, either.”

“Be that as it may, you can bet she knows it, too. That she hasn’t asked to see you seems to suggest that this isn’t about revenge, but just in case, I’ll go, and I’ll go alone.”

“Captain, no. Whatever she wants, I don’t trust her.”

“Neither do I, but I don’t think I’m in physical danger, whatever she’s up to.”

“It’s not only physical danger that worries me.”

“Oh? What do you mean?”

Tolvern dropped her eyes. “Never mind. It’s just a . . . I don’t know. A hunch, maybe, that it’s a bad idea.”

“I don’t follow hunches, Commander, so unless it’s backed with rational thinking, I don’t want to hear it.”

“Go ahead, Tolvern,” Capp said, studying the commander with a half smile on her face. “If you got something to say to the captain, you may as well spit it out.”

“No, I don’t have anything,” Tolvern said hastily.

“Don’t worry, Commander,” Drake said. “We’ll hold Catarina Vargus to her word. If she tries anything, if Orient Tiger looks to make a run for it, you will blast her out of the sky, whether I’m on board or not. Can you do that, even if I’m alive?”

Tolvern looked uncomfortable, but after a moment of hesitation, nodded.

“Will you swear to it? I need the threat to be a real one.”

“Yes, sir. I will fire on Orient Tiger and either destroy her or take her captive should Vargus try anything. I swear it.”

“Hold her to it, Lieutenant,” he told Capp. “I’m counting on both of you.”

“Yes, sir.”

Drake rose to his feet. “Very well. Prepare an away pod. Send a message to Orient Tiger that I’m on my way.”

A few minutes later, he was on a pod, soaring the dozen miles between Blackbeard and the smaller pirate frigate. When he was a few hundred yards from his destination, the other ship sent out a netted hook to snag him and bring him in. He emerged from the airlock to find himself facing Catarina Vargus.

She looked even more striking in person, with flecks of gold in her eyes and a piercing gaze. Perhaps more handsome than beautiful, but quite interesting to look at. She’d have made a good subject for a portrait, and it took little imagination to imagine her bare arms emerging not from a leather vest, but a fine gown at a ball on Albion. She’d have been sure to cause a sensation as young gentlemen tripped over themselves asking her to dance.

The two men standing with her in the corridor were another thing entirely. One had an artificial eye, and a scar running from his forehead to his throat. The other was the man with the missing arm, replaced by a Gatling gun, who they’d faced in the attack on the spaceyards. It would seem that Catarina Vargus had claimed some of her dead father’s crew.

“You’re taller than I thought,” she said.

“And you’re younger.”

“I’m twenty-nine. How old were you expecting?”

“Really? You look barely out of secondary school.”

“Is that supposed to be an insult or compliment?”

“An observation. Nothing more.”

“In that case, let me observe that you look ridiculous in that uniform. The whole sector knows you’re a fugitive from the Royal Navy, so why you’re wearing the red and gold as if you still have some sort of rank or status is beyond me.”

“I suppose you’d have me wearing an eye patch with a Jolly Roger on it,” Drake said. “Perhaps carry a flask of rum wherever I go. Is that what you’d like, Vargus?”

“Please, I don’t stand on ceremony here. Vargus is my father. My name is Catarina.”

“You will excuse me, but good manners and good breeding do not permit me to call a strange woman by her given name.”

“Is that so, James? In that case, does Captain Catarina suit you?”

Drake scowled. He had soured on her after that remark about his uniform and now wanted to get the meeting over with. “Well, here I am. Let’s go to your war room and hear what you’ve got to say.”

“I don’t have a war room.”

“Then wherever we can talk in private without your henchmen lurking over your shoulder. Unless you were lying, and these men mean to take me prisoner, in which case, I should warn you—”

“No, you are not a prisoner. I meant what I said. And I do have a private place. Come with me to my quarters. We’ll talk there.”

“Your quarters?”

“If you’re worried that your crew will gossip, feel free not to tell them.” She smiled. “Don’t worry about my crew. They well know my taste in lovers. There’s no real gossip in inviting you to my room. This way.”

He followed, unsure what she meant. Did her taste run to women, not men, or was she still going on about how ridiculous he looked in his Royal Navy uniform? Either way, he was irritated that he’d followed her all this way only to find her playing games.

The pirate frigate was perhaps half the size of his own Blackbeard, but you’d never have guessed it by the size of Catarina Vargus’s state room. It had a sitting room that opened into the kitchen, with a separate bedroom and bathroom. The open bathroom door revealed both a bathtub and a shower. The furnishings weren’t as luxurious as Admiral Malthorne’s quarters on Dreadnought, but it was of equal size.

Drake looked around, wondering. “Your crew doesn’t complain?”

“They are too well paid to complain. Each man and woman on board received a bonus of ninety pounds when we put out from San Pablo, plus a promise of a share in whatever booty we take.”

“If you had that kind of money on hand, why did you attack us at the yards?”

“That was a point of honor, not money. My father could have counted the loss of Captain Kidd as a hazard of the business and taken this frigate instead. But that wouldn’t have satisfied his anger. Besides, I didn’t attack you, my father did. Please take a seat.”

She’d moderated her tone now that they were alone, and the insult to Drake’s sense of propriety had begun to ease. She pulled a bottle of wine from a rack on the wall and set it in front of him. A wine from New Catalunya, the ’04 vintage, which was exceptionally expensive.

“I am indeed honored,” he said as she returned with glasses and a corkscrew.

“I suppose with your ‘breeding’ you are an expert in wine. But I should warn you to dampen your hopes. The wine is drinkable enough, but the label is a lie. It’s no ’04 New Catalunya. This was looted from a wine smuggler and counterfeiter. It’s really a ’27 Mercia.”

“Ah, that’s a disappointment.”

“Aye.”

Nevertheless, the wine was palatable, and his mood continued to improve. “I apologize for being testy. I am grateful for your help at Hot Barsa. I was in a tight spot, I won’t deny it.”

Catarina chuckled. “Your stones were well and truly on the anvil. By the time the Royal Navy finished with you, I expect they would have been pounded to jelly.”

“You have a strange way with words. One moment, you sound like an Albion lady, and the next a Ladino smuggler.”

“As well I should. My father is a pirate, and my education included finishing school.”

“How is that so?”

Another smile. “Never you mind. Finish your wine. We’ll have a pipe together before we get down to business.”

“And you’re not going to attack me because of what happened to your father?” Drake asked. “That isn’t what this is all about?”

A shadow passed over her face, but it was gone just as quickly. “On the contrary, I’m grateful to you for that. He was never much of a father to me, and anyway, I was tired of obeying his whims. Now look at me. My own ship, no master to order me about. I’m like you, James, free and unencumbered. We are lords of space, our realm endless.”

“For being lords, we sure fled Hot Barsa in a hurry.” Drake took the offered pipe and pinched out tobacco from the silver dish. “My realm is my ship, and even there, my rule is tenuous.”

Catarina leaned back in her chair and lifted the pipe to her mouth. A smoke ring hovered above her head, slowly dissipating. She studied him with a penetrating gaze, and he got the impression that she was about to get to the heart of the matter.

“I look at you, sitting stiffly in your navy uniform, and I have one question for you, Captain James Drake. Are you still hoping to return to the navy, or are you ready to turn against your former masters once and for all?”

Chapter Thirteen

Drake didn’t answer the question right away. He took several puffs on his pipe before he was ready to respond.

“I am still loyal to Albion,” he said at last, “and as soon as she offers the olive branch, I will return to service.”

“Pretty words, but I hear a caveat in your tone,” Catarina said.

“I do not see anything in Albion’s behavior that would indicate such an offer will be made. And I find myself at odds with the current lord admiral, who I believe to be corrupt and wicked. I harbor some hope that the crown may intervene, or perhaps old friends in the navy may assert themselves on my behalf, but those hopes are fading. Do you have some specific proposal to make?”

“Two proposals, actually.”

“I’m listening.”

“There’s a shipment of tyrillium ore on its way to the Hroom world of Res II. The empire is trying to rebuild its fleet and needs the tyrillium for armor. It’s a Ladino ship out of Peruano, all perfectly legal. But this particular operation is planning to do some slaving on its way back out. Don’t ask how I know, but it’s true. The inbound cargo is extremely valuable, and the ship is armed and escorted.”

“You want me to help you seize the tyrillium as loot,” he surmised, “and are using as justification that the merchants are engaged in the slave trade. Why would that matter to me?”

“You attacked a merchant ship to retrieve your pilot, who had been enslaved.”

“A mission which largely went awry, and most of the slaves were killed in the fight.”

“So you are not against the slave trade?”

“It is a pernicious evil,” he said, “but I have not made it my particular mission in life.”

“Oh? And what was it you retrieved from Hot Barsa?”

“Yes, let’s talk about that. You claim to have bugged my ship, but it’s a curious device that sends back not just my location, but my motives for moving to that location.”

“The device is on your bridge and records your conversations,” she said.

“So your device is large enough to open a subspace channel and send through a stream of audio data? That beggars the imagination. In fact, I’ll wager that you have no such device on board.”

“Tell your engineers to look again.”

“Let’s not insult each other by dancing around what we both know to be true. There is no device. You have a spy, plain and simple.”

“Supposing I do. Does that materially change the facts of the situation?” Catarina set aside her pipe to let it smolder and die. “This proposal benefits the both of us. We’ll work together to seize the tyrillium ship. You have more muscle, but I have located the target, and I will fence the goods once taken. I think a 50/50 split is a more than generous offer on my part.”

Drake couldn’t believe that simple piracy was her entire motive. Orient Tiger may not be the match of either Blackbeard or her father’s old ship, but it was certainly capable of ranging about space preying on lesser prizes. She didn’t need to charge after armed and escorted merchants in the company of her father’s killer.

“You said you have two proposals.”

“Oh, James, don’t sound so suspicious. Here, have some more wine. No? Maybe some music will take the edge off. Do you like classical music?”

“I do. What do you have?”

“Everything I can pirate,” Catarina said with a wink. She pulled out her hand computer and set it to something early and baroque.

“The person I intend to sell the tyrillium to is another Hroom,” she continued, “a middleman on one of the core empire worlds. If we can surprise the merchant vessel and take it intact, it will be able to jump itself through. But the trip will be dangerous, what with your friends having started another war. And I’ve heard hints that the Hroom are having trouble in their core systems.”

“You mean internally? A sugar rebellion?”

“I don’t know. My contact says there is fighting, that’s all I know. Perhaps a civil war, perhaps something else. It’s the inward flank, where humans are forbidden. Everything I’ve heard is third, fourth hand. But never mind that. I’ve been promised an unbelievable sum of money if I can get my cargo to my contact.”

“Define unbelievable.”

“Over two hundred thousand guineas. Pay our respective crews, then take our captain’s shares. That’s forty thousand pounds apiece, assuming we survive, of course.”

He let out a low whistle. An unpleasant thread of greed tugged at him. “Lords of space, indeed. I could buy an estate the size of my father’s with forty thousand pounds.”

“I would have thought Albion real estate to be more dear.”

“It is a small estate,” he admitted. “On one of the lesser Zealand Islands.”

“My ambition is greater than to retire in comfort on Albion. But never mind that. You would be traveling deep into Hroom territory. If you wish to distribute this object you took from the lord admiral’s estate, this would be your opportunity.”

“I haven’t decided yet,” he admitted.

Drake hadn’t yet heard word from his new science officer. Brockett was still setting up his lab and needed to be sure he could successfully replicate the antidote with existing equipment.

“What does your pilot think of this?” she asked. “He’s a former sugar eater. He must have strong opinions.”

“He is eager,” Drake said. “No, more like anxious. Going deeper into Hroom space might put him off for a spell while I figure things out.”

“What is there to figure out? Either you wish to free the Hroom or you do not.”

“Either we will have human domination of the sector, or I will give that privilege to the Hroom. That is what is at stake, Catarina. Imagine if I break the sugar addiction in the Hroom race, and the empire regains its former vigor. There are billions of Hroom. We’ll be crushed.”

She shrugged. “Space is vast, endless. The Kingdom of Albion isn’t my concern. There is always another planet, another place to colonize.”

Drake had finished his pipe and was back to drinking wine, even though he couldn’t recall asking her to fill his glass. In spite of every instinct to the contrary, he was enjoying himself, not just the conversation, but looking at Catarina Vargus. She was a beautiful woman.

“I’ve left this region of space,” she said. “Twice, in fact, and in this very ship. The first time was after a disagreement with my father. In short, he was being a tyrant again. I hired a crew and set off for Earth.”

“Earth!”

“I didn’t make it, of course. Too many wars, too many lawless systems. Even natural hazards to work around—black holes and gamma bursts. I did meet two ships from the original home system, though. Paid a fortune for a shipment of genuine Old Earth scotch. When I finally limped home, I sold the scotch for two fortunes. The money and a bottle of the good stuff was enough to earn me back into my father’s good graces.”

“And the other time?”

“A few months ago, during the most recent war. Word had it that a big Albion fleet was on its way to San Pablo to invade and occupy the Hroom continent.”

“That was a feint. We were really attacking the empire port at Kif Lagoon.”

“Yes, well it worked. As a feint, I mean. An empire fleet showed up, and those of us with common sense decided not to stick around and see how it would play out. My father was recovering from battle injuries, and I was commanding Captain Kidd. I’d got my hands on an old Hroom chart and discovered that some of the jump points were still active. Thought I’d get out there and have a look around while things were too hot in the known systems. That was thrilling.

“First week out we narrowly escaped the jaws of a space leviathan, then debris battered the hull when we stumbled into an uncharted asteroid field. We blind jumped twice and were attacked by an unknown ship. Some alien race—not Hroom. Fortunately, its weapon systems were more primitive than ours, and it had already been mauled in some other battle, so its shields were weak. We destroyed it and hauled in bits of its wreckage. Sold that later to the Royal Navy, who are always curious about who else might be out there.

“By now my crew was on the verge of mutiny,” Catarina continued. “I’d lied to them about where we were going, thinking we’d find something useful to plunder before they were on to what I was about. Only we hadn’t, just some worthless alien tech from the derelict. My father came out of the sick bay to discover us sixty light years from the nearest known system. God, was he angry. You ever been keelhauled by your own father?”

Drake’s father was a gentle, even indulgent landlord, who had trouble evicting tenants late on their rents, even when they’d gotten themselves in trouble by borrowing money for gambling debts. “No, I can’t imagine such a thing.”

Catarina unzipped her vest and pulled it down off her shoulder. Scars marred the flesh on her back, and he winced at the sight. She shrugged the vest back up over her shoulder.

“You see why I wasn’t so upset when your commander shot him in the head. Yes, I know it was Tolvern who pulled the trigger. A pirate’s life deserves a pirate’s death.”

“Is that how you intend to go? Die in battle?”

“I don’t intend to go at all,” she said with a smile. “I’m going to make contact with some ancient and wise race of aliens that has discovered the secret to eternal life. Isn’t that every spacer’s dream?”

“Not me,” Drake said. “I would rather go peacefully, not fighting the inevitable. Leaned back in a chair in front of a peat fire on some cold and drizzly winter night, wearing a warm robe and a comfortable pair of slippers, an old sheepdog asleep at my feet. My last glass of wine drained by my side, my last pipe still smoldering.”

“Hah. I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t?” he asked, smiling.

“Let’s start with that ridiculous bit about the robe and slippers. You’re a man who sleeps in his uniform, am I right?”

“Usually my underwear, actually. I like a cold bed and warm blankets.”

“And a warm body next to you? Does that figure into your plans?”

Catarina leaned forward as she said this, her hands steepled in front of her face, her index fingers against her full lips. His mouth felt dry.

She laughed. “That look! Don’t worry, James, I’m not coming on to you.”

“I was wondering.” He leaned back, affecting more nonchalance than he felt. “Then I remembered what you said about there being no gossip in bringing me to your room, and I knew I was perfectly safe in your company.”

“I wouldn’t say you’re as safe as all of that. In another time, under other circumstances, I would throw you to the floor and ravish you.”

She hesitated, and Drake thought maybe she really would make an indelicate suggestion in spite of her protests to the contrary. What’s more, if she did, he was half inclined to take her up on the offer. He was not so eager, however, as to suggest such a thing himself. Physically, he had no qualms. He’d been perfectly frank with Tolvern about his own desires with respect to women, even if those desires were largely theoretical in nature.

In fact, under other circumstances, Jess Tolvern might have been in some danger of his attentions herself. She was clever, loyal, and not unattractive. But Drake was her commanding officer, and she was the daughter of his father’s steward. No doubt she would have been horrified to know that such a thought had crossed his mind. Her disapproval of the fraternization between Henny Capp and Ronaldo Carvalho was well known.

As for Catarina Vargus, there were no dangers of association, and the woman exuded sensual appeal. He could easily imagine the taste of her skin, the feel of her lips against his. Unzipping that vest so his hands could range along her bare flesh.

Drake cleared his throat. “I should be returning to my ship.”

“So soon?”

“Was your proposal sincere?”

“Completely.”

“In that case, I accept, but I have terms.”

“Such as?”

“Our two ships comprise a fleet, and there can only be one flag officer. No lords of space, only one person at the helm. That would be me.”

“You don’t know where we’re going,” she said.

“You will tell me. My pilot will chart a course, and you will follow. When we enter battle, you will do as I command at all times. The moment you disobey, we are no longer allies.”

Her face darkened, and her eyes flashed with anger. “Is this how you behaved in the Royal Navy, as a tyrant?”

“Not a tyrant, no, but a dictator. Every man, woman, and Hroom under my command will obey my dictates. That is the natural order of things and the key to our survival in hostile waters.”

“I am not used to being dominated, James Drake. You understand this? It is not my natural way, and I chafe at it.”

He nodded, not unsympathetic. Any good leader felt the same. “I understand, and you have the ability to choose. Right here and now. You’ve asked for my help, and I’m willing to give it. But if there is to be an expedition, I will make the ultimate decisions.”

“You may have the superior ship,” Catarina said, “but you flatter yourself if you think you have superior judgment.”

“Be that as it may, it is my judgment I trust, not yours, nor anyone else’s, except perhaps that of King Bartholomew himself. These are my terms. Do you accept them?”

Whatever prize this woman was reaching for, it overcame her natural pride, her headstrong personality, because he could see a change sweeping over her features. Her defiance dissipated. Submission replaced it. Drake suspected that her father had seen that same look as the two of them wrestled for dominance, and she had temporarily capitulated.

“Yes, sir,” Catarina Vargus said, and there was no defiance in her tone. “You will command, and I shall obey.”

Chapter Fourteen

Tolvern found herself drifting away from Captain Drake after he made his arrangement with Catarina Vargus. He’d returned to Blackbeard claiming that he was now the master of Orient Tiger and her crew, as well as his own ship, but he seemed preoccupied with the pirate captain, consulting her more often than Tolvern thought necessary, and studying whatever Smythe could dig up from the fleet archives about the woman and her father. And over the next week, he grew more distant as the two ships picked their way through neutral systems on their way to empire-controlled territory.

When Tolvern engaged him privately in the war room, he mainly wanted her analysis of Captain Vargus’s motives. What did Tolvern think? Was Vargus toying with them, or did she mean what she’d claimed about the tyrillium barge?

The two ships engaged in piracy along the way, sacking a sugar smuggler on its way to the empire. Against Vargus’s wishes, Drake dumped the sugar into the void, but kept the contents of the ship safe and dropped the crew itself in a New Dutch colony. It was a lunar mining outpost, and Drake decided it would be a good place to replenish supplies and put in for light repairs. They sold the captured merchant ship before leaving the colony.

One night, back in space and between jumps, Capp approached Tolvern in the mess with a confession. Leaning in, breath smelling of rum, Capp admitted her worry that Carvalho had been the one to tip off Catarina Vargus.

“I didn’t say nothing before Hot Barsa,” Capp said, “ ’Cause I didn’t want the cap’n to leave me on the planet, know what I’m saying? Then when Orient Tiger came in, shootin’, and I seen how she saved us, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to find out what Vargus wanted.”

Inside, Tolvern was steaming, and anxious to rush out to wake the captain and tell him that she’d discovered the traitor. Carvalho, the wretch. How dare he? But she wanted to be sure before she made accusations.

“Did Carvalho actually tell you that?” she asked. “Or are you guessing?”

“Good as confessed it to me. That bloke never was patient, but I thought he shoulda waited longer before losing faith.” Capp drained her cup. “Guess it don’t matter no more, though, since we’re all on the same side now, us and the pirate lady.”

It certainly did matter, and Tolvern wasted no time in finding the captain once she left the mess. She went straight to his room and rang. The door opened.

Drake sat in his reading nook with a book open on his lap, but he wasn’t reading. Instead, he studied a viewscreen that he’d opened with a view of near space. Over the past day, they’d been overtaking a comet that now sat some fifty thousand miles off starboard, its long, brilliant, white tail stretching across the whole of the screen.

Tolvern told him what she’d discovered. He scarcely looked away from the comet.

“Captain?” she prodded. “Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And?”

“Catarina already told me,” he said. “Carvalho wasn’t happy with the pace of our piracy. I dare say he’s happier now that we’ve made an alliance with these cutthroats.”

Catarina. Not Captain Vargus. Her given name. No doubt the woman had told Drake to call her that, had probably called him by his given name, as well.

Tolvern felt a pang of jealousy at the erosion of her intimacy with the captain. He’d asked her to call him James, but only when they were together and off duty. She had taken it as a great honor, had even briefly entertained hopes that it would lead to something else. Now, that honor was tarnished. How could he speak Catarina Vargus’s given name with one breath, as if they were dear friends, then call her a cutthroat with the next?

“If you knew already, why haven’t you done anything?”

“What can I do about it?” he said. “Dump Carvalho at the next port and find someone else? He’s doing a good job in engineering. And Capp would leave, too, and we’d be short a subpilot.”

“You have to do something.”

“Flog him? Keelhaul him? Is that really my style?”

“I don’t know, something. You can’t let him disobey you like that. That’s not your style, either. At the very least, send him out to scrape barnacles for a couple of shifts.”

“We don’t have any. Rodriguez gave the hull a good shine before we left San Pablo.”

“You know what I mean.”

Drake turned back to the viewscreen. “There’s nothing to be done for it. We’re in league with these people now. We have to conform to their ways, and that might mean relaxing discipline.”

“I can’t believe you’re telling me that. You don’t really believe it, do you?”

“No, I guess not.”

There was still something in his tone that she didn’t like, and she stayed silent until he looked up at her, then said, “Is everything okay, Captain?”

“Yes, fine. Sorry, I am distracted.”

“About what?”

“Catarina Vargus is coming over here. Yes, I know, I haven’t told you. Sorry, but I needed to figure it out myself, first, make sure I really wanted to see her.”

“Whatever for?”

“She claims she has new intelligence about the escort for this tyrillium barge we’re hunting, and she wants to discuss it in person. Apparently, we’re not the only ones with a spy on board—or so she fears.”

“I don’t understand,” Tolvern said.

“If she has a spy, if other pirates know we’re hunting for the tyrillium, than it makes sense to be careful about communication.”

“And that’s all the reason you’re bringing her here? You’re trying to keep our course a secret from the two crews?”

“Yes, pretty much.”

“I beg your pardon, sir, but I don’t entirely believe you. You seem unusually troubled.”

Drake sighed. “It’s this piracy business. Time to face the truth—I’m one of them. I’m a pirate. The last attack confirmed it. There was no other story I could tell myself, nothing about rescuing slaves or stopping pirates myself. It was an unprovoked attack. We took no damage and deprived people of their livelihood. Sold their ship for profit and distributed prize money.”

The attack on the sugar smuggler had been rather uneventful, certainly compared to the fights with Captain Kidd, Vigilant, or the orbital fortresses at Hot Barsa. But Tolvern could see why it might bother him. Yet she wondered if there were something else.

“Have you decided what to do about the antidote?” Tolvern asked.

“I have.”

A nervous tickle worked at her stomach. “And?”

Yesterday, word had come from Brockett in the science lab that he’d replicated the sugar antidote for the first time since leaving Malthorne’s laboratories on Hot Barsa. He’d administered the antidote to their Hroom pilot, and the captain had saved aside a few grains of sugar from the captured smuggler ship so he could test the antidote’s efficacy. Not yet, of course, as he needed to be sure they could spare Nyb Pim for a few days in case it didn’t work. They’d need to put the Hroom back in the isolation cells for another round of detox. But Brockett was confident.

“And I’m going to make Nyb Pim very happy,” Drake said. “The Kingdom of Albion, the entire human race, not so much.”

“I see.”

“What choice is there? This sugar antidote can secure the freedom and survival of an ancient civilization whose crime is a weakness of biology. If you see an alternative, please let me know.”

The thought of delivering such a thing into the hands of the enemy chilled her, but Tolvern couldn’t argue with him on moral grounds. Practically speaking, it seemed like a disaster, a hurricane whose full force might take years to gather. But eventually, it would crash against Albion and leave devastation in its wake.

Tolvern was in her room, dressing for bed, when Capp came to her door, asking to come in. The ensign had sobered up in the hour and a half since they’d been drinking together in the mess, and was now wringing her hands nervously as she entered the room.

“I shouldn’t have said that about Carvalho,” Capp said when the door had closed, leaving them with privacy in the tiny room. “Please don’t tell the cap’n what I told you. It was a mistake.”

“I already told him.”

“King’s balls!”

“Drake already knew. Vargus had told him there was a spy. Told him who it was, apparently.”

“He knew it was Carvalho and everything?” Capp released a string of milk-curdling oaths. “I didn’t even know it was true myself, not for sure. Maybe Carvalho didn’t mean nothing by it, or maybe they asked him to spy, but he didn’t. Why would Vargus tell on him? Don’t she want a spy on board anymore?”

“She doesn’t need him,” Tolvern said glumly. “She has the captain now, and he tells her everything she wants to know.”

Capp studied her face, then sat next to her on the cot. “What do you mean?”

“What the devil are we doing out here?”

“Pirating. Freebooting, if you like it better. I got paid fifty pounds for my share of the haul from that smuggler we took. That will buy a lot of grog, Tolvern. They say we’re going after a bigger prize, now. Could be ten times that much. Could be I send my mama a couple of hundred pounds so she can buy that cottage she was dreaming about.”

“Will you stop and think for a moment? We’re already in Hroom territory. A few more days, and we’re on our own. We get in trouble, there’s no safe port to put into.”

Capp shrugged. “A pirate’s life. Gotta risk something to get something.”

“Following Catarina Vargus, who has reason to see us dead. How do we know she isn’t looking for revenge?”

“Seems Drake and Vargus have patched things up after the death of her old man. Must not have cared for the bloke much in the first place.”

“Did you hear that she’s coming over here?” Tolvern asked.

“Catarina Vargus? What for?”

“Private meeting with the captain,” Tolvern said.

Capp raised an eyebrow at this. “How private?”

“Oh, shut up. It’s nothing like that. He’s a gentleman, he’d never be seen with the likes of her.”

Tolvern delivered this last bit with more uncertainty than she’d intended, and Capp seemed to pick up on it.

“I heard that. You’re not sure, are you? You think he might be hot for the pirate lady.”

“No, I’m not sure,” she admitted. Damn it, she was not. “He told me the other day that he was lonely. I’m afraid he’s going to fall prey to the first aggressive female who comes his way.”

“That was your permission, right there, Commander. Shoulda jumped him yourself before he changed his mind.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous. He would have laughed me out of the room, and anyway, I don’t think of him that way.”

“Sure you do.”

“I do not!”

Capp shrugged. “Keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better.”

“Even if I did—and I don’t!—it’s a ridiculous premise on the face of it. My father is a servant on the Drake estate. You’re from the city, you’ve seen the lords and ladies about. Do they mix with their servants? Do they marry among the staff?”

“So now you’re aiming to marry him? That’s a bird with a different plumage, luv.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“I ain’t missing nothing. You’re telling me that the cap’n is too good for you in one breath, and in the next, sayin’ that he fancies Catarina Vargus. And don’t give me that rubbish about fraternizing. You know that don’t matter no more. Maybe the cap’n still says it, but he ain’t serious when he does.”

“I suppose you think I should come on to him. Do you realize how humiliating it would be if he turned me down?”

“A pirate’s life,” Capp said. “Gotta risk something to get something.”

Tolvern was in the middle of her sleep cycle when the captain called her to the bridge. She was up, yawning, and pulling on her jumpsuit before she fully realized she was awake. Drake’s voice had been tight and urgent, and she didn’t so much as grab a mug of strong tea before she headed there.

She arrived to discover that she was the last officer on the bridge. The two pilots were already in their chairs, Smythe was at his station, Manx stood at the defense-grid computer, and Captain Drake sat in the captain’s chair, speaking to someone on the com while he studied the viewscreen.

The tyrillium barge stretched from one end of the viewscreen to the other, its single plasma engine glowing like a small blue star at the rear of the ship. A smaller ship snuggled up next to the nose of the barge, and a second small ship lurked along the belly, like a pair of remoras following a shark, although Tolvern knew that it was the two smaller vessels that had the teeth in this case. They were armed escorts. Had Drake been expecting that?

Tolvern took her seat. “How long have we been giving chase?”

“Since about the time you went to your quarters.”

“Why didn’t you call me earlier?”

“It was a long-range pursuit, Commander. Did you really want to sit here watching for the last four hours as we inched closer?”

The captain had a point about the sluggish beginning to such things, but they were nearing the end of that phase. In the void, the initial stages of a battle might flow as slowly as pine sap, but when matters started, they sped up in a big way. Tolvern queried Jane, who said that the enemy was already within range of long-range missiles. So far, none had been fired.

“They’ve refused to surrender,” Drake continued, “or even to acknowledge that we’re hailing them. Vargus thinks they might be approaching a jump point. We have nothing on our charts within fifty million miles, and not in this direction at all, but none of us know the system very well.”

“What are those escorts?”

“A pair of long-range patrol boats fitted with jump point engines,” Drake said. “Highly maneuverable in tight quarters, but not usually seen way out here. We’ll see how they do.”

Drake’s plan, as he explained it, was to send in the smaller Orient Tiger to drive off the escorts from the barge. Blackbeard would then hunt them down, one by one, and destroy or disable them, while Vargus engaged with the barge’s deck guns. They didn’t want to fire anything heavy at their target itself, intending to seize its cargo, not destroy it.

Drake made another call to the gunnery, then turned to Tolvern. “Get our friends on the com. Send them after the lead escort, first.”

She hailed Orient Tiger. Catarina Vargus’s smooth, insolent voice came on. “What orders from our lord and master?”

Tolvern explained Drake’s plan, told Vargus to drive off the lead escort first.

“Don’t we want to soften them up, first?” the pirate asked.

“The captain says they’re too close for shooting. We’ll risk hitting the barge.”

“It would be nice if he could tell me himself. It’s insulting to get my orders via his minions.” Vargus’s tone was more sardonic than irritated. “I might plead my case, suggest that I can hit the escorts without risk to our prize.”

Tolvern didn’t have the inclination to spar with her. “You have your orders. Obey them.”

“As you wish.” The call ended.

Vargus’s frigate accelerated. While Blackbeard tailed some few thousand miles behind their prey, Vargus brought Orient Tiger alongside the barge, and then dove in at the three ships like a wolf trying to drive a calf from its mother.

The New Dutch were canny pilots and seemed to recognize the tactic. The front ship merely hugged tighter, while the one at the rear pulled away just long enough to aim a pair of small cannons at the frigate. Vargus was forced to peel away. The barge also engaged her ship with deck guns, and two small explosions lit along Orient Tiger’s stern as Vargus retreated to a safe distance.

But the pirate captain only pulled back long enough to reorient herself for another charge. This time, Vargus swooped in so aggressively that she was nearly between the front escort and the much larger ship before the other ships could drive her off again.

Meanwhile, Drake ordered Blackbeard to close and shoot at the barge’s deck gun to see if they could disable it. When they were a few dozen miles away, Barker opened up with the Gatling guns. The barge’s deck gun was too well protected to take out, but they managed to draw its fire. The enemy scored a few minor hits.

On the third swoop, Vargus came in so tight it looked like she would ram the barge. That would end in ruin. Not only was the barge five times the size of the frigate, but her hold was full of tyrillium—Orient Tiger would smash against it like a tin can crushed against concrete. Vargus pulled up at the last moment, turning her engines against the hull of the barge to check her momentum.

The maneuver baffled the lead escort. It veered to one side to avoid collision just as Vargus pushed against the side of the barge. The escort was momentarily separated by a few miles of empty space. Before it could come in again to hug the barge, Orient Tiger shot two slow-moving torpedoes into the gap. The patrol boat was forced to peel away.

Tolvern stared at the viewscreen, momentarily stunned by the brilliant maneuver. Catarina Vargus was twice the captain her father had been.

Drake gave orders to Nyb Pim to muscle into the gap and keep the escort away. Never mind the barge’s deck gun, or, more dangerously, Vargus’s torpedoes, now wandering about looking for a target. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

And now the enemy made a fatal error. The second escort pulled away to shoot at Vargus’s pirate frigate in an attempt to provide cover for the first ship to return to safety against the barge. This left it exposed to Blackbeard, now coming up behind.

Drake was on the com, giving orders to Vargus, and that left Tolvern to give orders to the gunnery. She got Barker in the gunnery. “Prepare the main battery. Hit her hard. Ready tubes four and five.”

They came up along starboard of the rear escort and forced themselves between it and the barge before either ship seemed to realize they were there. Tolvern gave the order to fire.

Blackbeard’s main batteries let loose with such power that the ship rocked and the dull throb of the guns shook the floor beneath their feet. The distance was only a few miles, and the enemy patrol boat had thin shielding, sufficient to tangle with typical pirate weapons, but not to stop the main guns of a Royal Navy cruiser. She didn’t stand a chance.

Lights flared along her side from stern to prow. The plasma engine blew off like an enormous fireworks’ rocket gone astray, leaving a blue corkscrew that zipped by below Blackbeard, nearly striking them as it passed. The enemy ship gave a little shudder, then blew apart in a final, terrific explosion.

The other escort fared little better. Vargus had her separated, and the two ships were trading blows when Blackbeard joined the fight. While the gunnery prepared the main battery for another volley, Barker opened up with the smaller belly guns. This was enough to force the fleeing escort back into Orient Tiger’s line of fire. A final volley along the ship’s damaged side tore it in two. Blackbeard pulled away as secondary explosions blasted apart what was left of the wreckage.

Now stripped of its defenses, the barge continued on its way, still refusing to acknowledge any attempts to communicate.

Orient Tiger came in on one flank and Blackbeard the other. Harpoons soon had the ship fixed, and two boarding parties set off. The first pirates had just arrived when the New Dutch finally discovered a working communication system and offered a full surrender.

Chapter Fifteen

Admiral Malthorne descended from orbit with a corvette and two troop transports, each holding a company of royal marines. They descended to fifty thousand feet above the ocean, then flew west toward Auckland Island, staying out of range of the coastal radar of the other Zealand Islands. It was nighttime, and the islands glittered far to the north as they stretched from the continental shelf of Canada and into the ocean.

Colonel Fitzgibbons stood next to Malthorne on the bridge of the corvette, already wearing his battle uniform, including polished black boots and black leather gloves. He had a square head, cleanly shaven except for a bristly mustache and thick eyebrows above dark, penetrating eyes. During the war, the colonel had once leveled a Hroom town of sixty thousand when they refused to surrender. He seemed to feel little more sympathy for his fellow citizens of Albion and had not balked when given his orders.

A little brutality was in order, Malthorne decided. Time to show that he was not a man to be trifled with. Such a demonstration should not have been necessary, of course, given his station in life.

Vice Admiral Thomas Lord Malthorne was King Bartholomew’s cousin on his mother’s side; on his father’s, he issued from a line of dukes that had been growing in wealth and power for eight generations. He was head of the Admiralty, and the king couldn’t wage war without him. In fact, it could not have escaped the king’s attention that the lord admiral was sixth in line to the throne, and that the five ahead of him were two children, an unmarried woman of twenty-four, and two old men.

And so when Malthorne had demanded two companies of royal marines to put down internal dissent in the Zealand Islands, the king barely mounted a protest, even though such a thing was illegal. One of Parliament’s most closely held prerogatives was the control of military power on Albion herself. By law, the military was confined to the barracks and ports, and under no circumstances would the navy or marines enter the major cities of York Town, Sidney, Chicago, Manchester, nor any of the semi-sovereign estates. Short of an actual invasion from the Hroom Empire, should force be required on Albion, that duty fell to the private armies of the great lords, as well as to a confusing jumble of parliamentary and city militias. Thus it had been for 375 years, since the Second Albion Civil War.

It was nearly dawn when they reached Auckland. It was a small, insignificant island, some six thousand square miles of land far out in the ocean. Half of the island remained royal forest, with the rest divided among three baronies and several small towns with their own charters and government. A small, rain-drenched range shadowed the more temperate northern plains where the tenants of Baron Drake raised sheep and cattle and operated a small coal mine. Malthorne waited until his ships were over the mountains before they descended. The sun rose behind them in the east.

“Will the baron resist?” Fitzgibbons asked.

His accent was flat, neutral, spoken like a man who had never lived long in one place, who had adequate education but could not boast of particular understanding. A military mind, but nothing more.

“Doubtful. But we’re prepared if they do.”

“And his fellow islanders? They boast a militia of nearly three thousand in total, should they commit to his defense.”

“Easily crushed by the armaments of this ship,” Malthorne said, “backed by your marines.”

“More easily still from a distance.”

The colonel had made this point earlier, while they were still in orbit on Dreadnought. Demand the baron’s surrender. Should he refuse, should he resist, the battleship could bombard his estate from space until it was a pile of rubble. Fitzgibbons didn’t understand the situation. That was the downside of choosing a man with a purely military mind.

“For a man who has killed so many, you are surprisingly squeamish about spilling blood,” Malthorne said.

“The only blood that makes me squeamish is the blood of my own men.”

“Of which there will be endless quantities spilled if we do not put down the rebellion.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

Malthorne braced himself for resistance as they flew over the central plains. Dawn’s brilliant display might reveal anti-aircraft batteries set up in the estate villages, or men dug in at bunkers behind missile batteries.

But the only movement came from bewildered flocks of sheep that scattered in terror at the noise of the heavy craft rumbling overhead, and ranchers on horseback who struggled to control their mounts as their herds stampeded in every direction.

Baron Drake’s manor and outbuildings soon appeared, the white granite of the house’s cupolas and wings sitting peacefully among the estate’s modest gardens and the surrounding hunting forest of maple and elm. It was nicely situated, beautiful and verdant, but Malthorne thought of his own property on Hot Barsa, incinerated by the baron’s treasonous son, and hardened his heart.

They landed the corvette on the broad expanse of lawn above the stables, with the transports dropping down on either side. The engines scorched the lawn to brown and boiled off so much heat that a pair of small sheds caught fire. By the time Malthorne and the colonel stepped out of the corvette, the fire had spread to the stables themselves, with flames licking the roofs, crackling, roaring, and spitting sparks. Inside the stables, horses screamed in terror. A stable hand came running toward the doors to unlock them and release the horses, but one of Fitzgibbon’s men shot him dead.

Meanwhile, the transport was disgorging heavily armed marines. Some set up a perimeter beneath the corvette’s protective guns, while others moved to secure the outbuildings. Scattered gunfire came from the greenhouses. Fitzgibbons strode off to give orders and was soon leading a group of thirty or forty men toward the main house. That left Malthorne protected by several personal bodyguards and the lord admiral’s own adjutant.

Ten minutes later, Malthorne got the call that the house had been secured. He met the colonel beneath a massive chandelier in the great hall. Fitzgibbons told him that several house servants and personal guards had died trying to protect the family, but that the baron had ordered a surrender as soon as he realized the futility of his situation, and there had been no further bloodshed.

Malthorne strode into the library to find the baron in his bathrobe in a chair, the man’s gray hair wet and uncombed. The library was a fine room, larger than the manor itself justified, filled with handsome volumes and excellent furniture. Under other circumstances, the admiral and the baron might have shared a drink and discussed their shared tastes in books and malted whiskey.

“You were in the bath,” Malthorne said, amused, as he took in Baron Drake’s condition. “And I worried you would give us trouble. Where are your wife and daughters?”

The baron glared back at him and didn’t answer.

“If they think to escape,” Malthorne said, “they will shortly be disabused of the notion.”

Indeed, Fitzgibbons’s men soon found two of them, and brought them in. The baroness, a still-handsome woman of about sixty, came first, wearing a bonnet and a sun dress with a floral print, as if ready for a stroll in the gardens. Moments later, two marines led in a pretty young woman with dark hair. She was tall, with a proud look in her flashing eyes that reminded the admiral of her older brother, James Drake, who had lately caused so much trouble. Both James and his sister resembled their mother. The young woman shrugged out of the grasp of the two young marines, who seemed reluctant to hold her with force.

“Which one are you?” the admiral asked the girl. “Helen or Madeline?”

“This is an outrage,” Lady Drake said. “You have killed our servants, destroyed our property. By what right—?”

“Say nothing,” the baron told her. “We will hear what charges he brings to justify this insult.”

The admiral ignored them and fixed the young woman with a penetrating stare. “I asked you a question. What is your name? Answer at once.”

“Helen, my lord.”

“And where is your sister?”

“Do not speak to him,” Lady Drake said, her tone as haughty as her husband’s expression. To the admiral, she added, “My older daughter is married these five months. You will not find her on the property. Indeed, she is not even a resident of Auckland anymore.”

“I would like to hear your charges,” Baron Drake said. “I would like to know under what pretenses you have attacked my estate and murdered my servants.”

“I would not have thought an explanation to be necessary,” Malthorne said. “Are you unaware of your son’s treason?”

He waved for the marines to get Lady Drake seated. The older woman was agitated, and Malthorne thought she might do something foolhardy. He didn’t want any of these people dead, not today, anyway.

“I am aware that James has been accused of such,” the baron said. “Yet we have not seen him, nor heard from him since the accusation. I cannot believe it is true.”

Malthorne didn’t know if the man was lying about hearing from Captain Drake, but the rest of it was disingenuous. Only a parent could view the mutiny and seizure of a Royal Navy cruiser, subsequent fights with other navy ships, and then an attack on the lord admiral’s personal property as a mere “accusation” of treason.

“He most definitely is a traitor, and we have reason to believe you have been aiding him in his treason.”

“That’s a lie!” the girl burst out. “James is a true patriot. He loves Albion more than you or anyone else. He would never do that! And neither would my father!”

“Helen,” the father said in a warning tone. “You will hold your tongue.”

“We are at war, Baron,” Malthorne said. “This time it may be for the very survival of Albion. The Hroom will turn our cities to rubble and enslave our people if we do not resist them. In the past, your seditious behavior might have been overlooked, but not this time.”

Lady Drake’s face had paled at the mention of sedition. “What are you saying?”

“Your husband has been aiding the traitor, telling your son where the Royal Navy is searching for him, and bribing naval officers so that they will let him slip out of traps we have set for him.”

“These are lies,” she said. “Tell him, Chester. You are innocent of these charges. How could you possibly know anything about traps or bribes?”

“He already knows I am innocent,” Baron Drake said slowly. A look of understanding passed over his face. “This is not about us, dear. This is something else. Some private scheme or plot. Some way to get back at James because he remains out of reach. Am I right, Lord Admiral?”

Malthorne didn’t address this accusation. “Baron Chester Drake, your lands and holdings are hereby confiscated. You will be transported to the Tower of York to be a royal prisoner while you await trial on charges of treason and sedition. The Admiralty will demand, and crown and Parliament no doubt concur, that you be hung by your neck until dead.”

Admiral Malthorne had fixed his gaze on the baron and his wife, sitting side by side in front of the cold hearth. The marines had similarly directed their attentions. But now a motion on the periphery caught the admiral’s eye. A sudden movement, the sound of metal scraping on metal. He turned to see the girl, Helen Drake, with a pistol in her hand, drawn from a book with a false center. She lifted the pistol and pointed it at the admiral, her hand steady, her face calm, a deadly look in her eye.

A spike of fear lanced Malthorne’s heart. In that instant, he knew he would die, and all because he had been so careless as to ignore the girl, so foolish as to forget that she was a Drake, made of the same material as her older brother. He could see it in the flinty look in Helen’s eye, the set of her jaw, the way that she held the gun without fear, her nerves made of ice.

Two of the marines spotted the movement at the same time. The first man threw himself between the admiral and the barrel of the gun. The second marine grabbed for the girl herself. Helen’s gun fired twice, and each shot hit the young marine who’d used his body to shield the admiral. He fell. The second marine nearly reached her, but she took a step back and fired again. The shot hit the man in the face. Unhindered once more, Helen now turned and calmly pointed her gun back at the admiral, who had stood frozen in place, unable to move. It had all happened so quickly.

And then Colonel Fitzgibbons fired. He had not moved from his spot. Instead, he had drawn his sidearm while others flailed about or stood transfixed. He shot the girl again and again as she fell. The gunshots only ceased when the girl lay motionless, legs twisted beneath her, the pistol falling from her grasp, blood on her chest and dribbling from her mouth.

The baroness was screaming, fighting against the two men holding her. The baron raged and cursed, and shortly disappeared under a swarm of uniformed marines. They kicked and punched to subdue him. Two servants rushed into the room, and Fitzgibbons’s men shot them dead without waiting to see if they would interfere.

Malthorne’s heart was still pounding from his near death. He found his voice. “Take the baron and baroness to my ship. They will both see York Tower.”

Outside, the fresh air of the Drake estate cleared his head. He turned to Colonel Fitzgibbons, who walked beside him with a scowl.

“You saved my life, Colonel. You and your marines. If you hadn’t reacted so swiftly, I would be dead.”

“I only did my duty, sir.” His voice was tight, strained. He must be furious that a girl of seventeen or eighteen had managed to kill two of his men.

“Nevertheless, you did your duty, and you did it well. We all should have taken closer note of the girl. No blame will fall upon you for it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Times will be troubled, Colonel. I need loyal men by my side. You come from an unpropertied lineage, am I right?”

“Yes, sir. We are, and have always been, a military family.”

“No longer. Now you will have lands and a title to add to the rank of officer. These estates. Do you fancy them?”

“Yes, sir. I would say that I do.”

“Very good. I will see to it that they are yours. Taken from a traitor and given to a man loyal and true—what more could be done? But only the land,” he added, thinking of his estate on Hot Barsa. “The manor house itself, you will burn to the ground.”

“I understand.” An eager, unseemly note had entered his voice.

“See that it is done.”

Malthorne regained the skies less than an hour later, the baron and baroness his prisoners. Below, the manor house and all its outbuildings made a raging inferno in the early morning, a sight that surely must be visible for miles across the Central Auckland Plain. Helen Drake’s body was still inside, burning along with all of those beautiful books and furnishings.

Chapter Sixteen

The New Dutch were practical sorts, not given to hysterics over the loss of their ship and its cargo. The barge captain and crew readily agreed with Drake’s demands. The gun would be disabled, the shields down at all times. Blackbeard and Orient Tiger would escort them to the ship’s final destination, see the tyrillium sold to the Hroom, and then set the New Dutch crew free. Of course, Drake and Vargus would keep the proceeds of the sale, but nobody else needed to die.

There was one small, unforeseen problem. Capp and Carvalho had been inspecting the captured barge to see what other goodies it might contain when they found some of their rivals from Orient Tiger attempting to smuggle off several thousand gold coins taken from the ship’s safe. The two sides came to blows. One of Vargus’s men was shot in the leg, and one of Drake’s people took a saber slash across her chest. In the end, Orient Tiger made off with the loot, and the conflict made it to the ship level.

Drake got Catarina Vargus on the viewscreen, and she agreed with him that the only solution was an equitable division of the treasure. Equitable, as she defined it, was a 70/30 split in her favor. After all, she had found the guilders, and she was now in possession of them. The two captains went back and forth, getting nowhere, until she suggested discussing the gold coins in person. By now, Drake’s crew was riled up, not only the enlisted men and women, but the officers, as well. Even the Hroom on board seemed outraged.

Drake saw no alternative but to agree to another meeting. But this time, on his ship. He was firm on that point.

When the two of them were alone in the war room, Catarina Vargus glanced about her without sitting. “So cold.”

“Would you like me to raise the temperature?” Drake said sarcastically, as he took a seat. “Or perhaps fetch you a jacket to cover your bare shoulders.”

“Not that kind of cold. Austere, boring even. Wood paneling on the walls, paintings of ancient sailing ships and men hunting foxes with hounds. Remind me again, is this the year 2630, or have I suddenly been transported back in time a thousand years? The room even smells of pipe smoke. You and your gentleman warriors, out subduing the savage reaches of space. Isn’t that right?”

“You have a fertile imagination. There is no smoking in my war room. And perhaps you didn’t notice that my officers include women.”

“Which is why I wonder that you are so hostile to me. It cannot be on account of my sex, yet it’s mystifying how you treat me as a subordinate and not a partner.”

Catarina came up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. They were surprisingly strong, and when her finger brushed his neck above the collar, a thrill went down him. He shook off the sensation.

“I see what you’re doing. It won’t work.”

“What am I doing, James?” She took the seat next to him.

“You accuse me of dismissing you on account of your sex, and at the same time you’re not above using feminine wiles to get your way.”

“We use the tools we are given. It so happens that I possess ample sex appeal in addition to intelligence and energy. I didn’t expect you to be so hardened as to be immune. But maybe a man who would decorate his war room in this manner considers himself above female company. You’re a confirmed bachelor, I suppose.”

“Hand over the gold, Catarina. This ridiculous game is beneath you.”

“You’d end our partnership over a few thousand guilders? What is your personal share of that? It’s trifling. I thought you’d declared yourself above mere pecuniary interests. Apparently, that was a falsehood. You are more mercenary than I thought. Or are your debts to that scoundrel in the San Pablo yards greater than I’ve been told?”

“It isn’t about the money, it’s about control over our partnership. The proper hierarchy we agreed upon. You promised to obey me.”

“Submitting to your whims in battle is one thing, surrendering rewards that are rightfully mine, another matter entirely.” Catarina’s eyes flashed, and she sprang back to her feet. “I found the treasure, I seized it. In the battle, my ship took all of the risks and suffered most of the damage.”

“This time. Next time, perhaps not. But that is my call, not yours. I am the flag officer of our little fleet. I command the crew of the tyrillium barge, and I command you. If we add more vessels, if we gather every pirate ship within a hundred light years, my conditions will remain the same.”

“The devil take your conditions. I told you, James. I am a lord of space, fully sovereign. I answer to no man. I will obey you in battle—that I agreed upon—but I will not suffer under your tyranny.”

“You have no choice.”

“Is that so? What would you do if I took the money and simply ran? Would you hunt me down and kill me for it? Is that what kind of man you are?”

“I’d let you go, of course. The tyrillium is worth five times what you took in gold.”

“Five times the value, and ten times the risk. I’d take the gold and count myself lucky.”

“Then go,” Drake urged. “Keep the money and leave. I can better explain it to my crew that way. We keep the tyrillium, Orient Tiger keeps the gold. My crew can do the math.”

Catarina looked at him for several long moments as he returned her gaze without faltering.

At last she came and sat down by him again. She moved her chair next to his and leaned in so close that her breath was warm against his cheek.

“I don’t want to be your enemy, James. Please, believe me. We can have a wonderful partnership. Very prosperous.” Catarina put a hand on his knee. “And I’m not only talking about financially.”

“Is this a serious proposal, or another tactic in your attempt to cheat us out of our share of the gold?”

“I see interest in your eyes. If I slide my hand up your thigh a few inches, will I feel your interest?”

Drake was glad that his lap was underneath the table, and he prepared to grab her hand should she make good on her threat. Not that he fully minded, of course.

“On the one hand,” he said, “I’d like to think that you are sincere, that you’re not trying to play me because you’re so greedy for that money. On the other, romantic interest would complicate matters.”

“Complications are not always bad.”

“My life is already plenty complicated.”

“So what is one more thing?”

“Show me you are sincere,” he said. “Promise to send back our share of the gold.”

Catarina pulled back her hair and touched her left ear. “Da Rosa, are you there?” She frowned. “I can’t get through.”

“That’s because the room is shielded,” Drake said. He took out his hand computer and hit a couple of buttons. “Try it now.”

She tried again, and this time seemed to get someone. “Have you counted the gold? How much is there? That much? Send over eight thousand guilders to Blackbeard. Yes, I know that’s half!” she snapped. “I can do the math. Yes, I am serious. Do it at once.”

Catarina ended the call. “There, it is done. You will shortly have your gold. I hope you will trust that it is fully half.”

“Capp got a good look and seems to have an eye for that sort of thing. I’m sure she will tell me if you short me.”

“She will be satisfied, I promise.” Catarina’s hand remained on his knee, and now she leaned in. “As for what I was saying a moment ago—”

The door to the war room opened, and Tolvern stepped in. “Captain, we—” The commander stopped, and her mouth fell open as she looked them over, sitting so intimately together.

Drake sprang to his feet, embarrassed to be caught in such a position, the true folly of it washing over him. What had he been thinking? He straightened his uniform.

Tolvern recovered quickly. A brief flash of what looked like irritation, or maybe disappointment, crossed her face, and then her features smoothed. “We received a message from Orient Tiger. They are shipping over some gold. May I ask how much?”

“Eight thousand guilders,” Drake said. “Fully half. That’s what? About three thousand pounds worth in Albion guineas? Captain Vargus and I have come to an agreement.”

“Yes, sir,” Tolvern said dryly. “I can see that.”

An hour later, Tolvern had finished overseeing the counting of the gold coins. Catarina Vargus stood next to her in the engineering bay with her hands on her hips and a smooth, almost insolent look on her face. Tolvern tried not to let her jealousy rise up, but it was impossible.

Let her act casual, I know what I saw.

The woman had been all over the captain when Tolvern entered the war room. No surprise that Vargus would try to seduce Drake; she exuded sensuality and had an attitude of taking what she wanted. The shocking part was how little the captain had been resisting. When would he have stopped her, when her tongue was in his ear? When she was straddling him naked on the table? The thought made Tolvern burn. Jealousy was an emotion unbecoming to her station and to her professional relationship with the captain, but recognizing that was easier than dismissing it.

“Is something the matter, Tolvern?” Vargus asked. She studied Tolvern’s face. “Still convinced I’m trying to cheat you?”

“It’s only what I would expect. You seem like the cheating sort.”

Vargus smiled. “Do you have a specific accusation, or am I free to leave?”

“Yes, please. Go back to your ship.”

“Not yet. I have some old mates on board. They invited me for a drink in the mess.”

“Don’t you have your own crew to get inebriated with without corrupting ours?”

“There will be no inebriation. A quick drink, a few laughs at shared memories, and then I’ll be off your precious ship and out of your way.”

Tolvern forced herself to stay calm. The last thing she wanted to do was admit her jealousy to this woman. For one, Vargus was likely to blurt it to the captain, and that would raise all sorts of issues. Let Drake stay oblivious.

“In that case, you will excuse me,” Tolvern said. “I have business on the bridge.”

She reached the bridge, but found herself struggling to concentrate. She’d meant to check their hydrogen stores and had promised Barker she’d look over his analysis of the new cannon installed on San Pablo, but neither subject held her interest. Instead, she studied Drake as he gave instructions to Nyb Pim about the course he wanted to set. The captain meant to take a more circuitous route to their final destination than the one charted by the tyrillium barge, in case the New Dutch had got off a distress signal. No sense stumbling into an ambush.

Drake seemed calm, unflustered by his encounter with Vargus. Looking at him now, Tolvern couldn’t believe that Vargus had presented any risk. Drake must have been playing the woman, letting her think that her act was working. And in the end, she’d given him what he wanted: half the gold had returned to Blackbeard. What had Drake given her in return? Nothing.

“And now,” he said, “I will leave the bridge to you, Commander. We’ve got a long, hopefully quiet haul to the next jump point, and I’ve been on duty for fifteen hours.”

“No worries, sir. Go, get some rest.”

“Very good. Don’t be afraid to wake me if there’s trouble.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tolvern watched him go, then reluctantly turned back to her work. She made it through the analysis of their hydrogen stores and suggested a slight course correction to Nyb Pim so they could pass through a gas-rich patch of space where the ram scoops could replenish their supplies. But she couldn’t bring herself to tackle Barker’s memo about the cannons. It was so bloody dry and technical.

Maybe she was wrong. If Catarina Vargus truly intended to seduce the captain, why should he turn her down? Nobody else was doing the job, and Drake was lonely; he’d admitted it once, and hinted at it other times. By why did it have to be Vargus? It could easily be someone else.

“Ensign Capp?” she said.

Capp looked up from her computer. “Aye?”

“Will you man the helm? I’ve got a headache all of a sudden. I’m going to take something and lie down for a stretch.”

Tolvern furrowed her brow and put a hand to her temple, afraid, as Capp studied her, that the woman would wink and make snide innuendo. But Capp nodded. “Sure, go on, then. There’s nothing happening here, that’s for sure.” The subpilot yawned, as if to prove her point.

Tolvern left the bridge and walked down the hallway toward her room. Her heart was thumping away, and she wasn’t sure, when it came down to it, that she could actually go through with this thing.

But if she didn’t do it now, she’d never find the nerve.

Chapter Seventeen

Drake didn’t have the energy to cook dinner, but he needed to eat before sleeping, so he stopped at the mess for a quick bite. There was a good deal more joking and crude language in his presence than he’d been accustomed to before, but he made a point of not demanding special decorum on his behalf. He even sat with Carvalho and Lutz and endured their ribald humor. It was the sort of conversation that would have been better after a drink or two. Which the two men seem to have had long before he arrived.

He made it back to his room, belly comfortably full, but he wasn’t particularly tired, in spite of how long he’d been on duty. Maybe some music would relax his mind. But when he opened the door to his room, the music was already playing. For a moment, he thought he must have absentmindedly told Jane to turn it on before he arrived. Except it was a waltz, not unpleasant, but nothing he recognized or would have chosen himself. Then movement caught his eye; someone was already in the room.

And there she was, sprawled across his bed, her shoes off, her vest unzipped and partially opened, with the ruby pendant hanging between the swell of her breasts. She’d let down her hair, which draped in black curls over one shoulder. An artful position, carefully chosen for effect.

There was nobody else it could have been, yet he was still surprised to see her here: Catarina Vargus, captain of Orient Tiger, his rival and the reluctant second officer of his makeshift fleet. And now, apparently, his would-be lover.

Drake reached back and closed the door without taking his eyes off the woman.

This brought a smile. “So serious,” she said. “Until you closed the door, I thought you were going to call security.”

“You’re still wearing your gun belt. Maybe I should.”

“I’m not the only one packing heat.”

He touched a hand to his sidearm and smiled. “Is this a duel?”

“Oh, I hope so. But maybe not with pistols at—” She looked around at the tight quarters— “five feet, is it? Aren’t you the captain? Where’s your state room? My second mate has larger quarters than this.”

“The Punisher-class cruisers weren’t built with officer comfort in mind. They’re killing machines.”

“Oh, stop it with the sexy talk. You really know how to get a lady aroused. Next, you’ll be bragging about the size of your cannon. Now take off that sidearm before it fires prematurely.”

Drake didn’t miss the innuendo, but nevertheless, he removed his gun belt, and she did the same thing, only with an alluring shimmy at her waist as she got it off. The vest fell back momentarily when she bent to drop the gun on the floor, and he got a glimpse of her firm belly and the swell of one breast almost, but not quite, exposed to the nipple. She was sexy as hell.

Drake came over to the bed and sat down. “How did you get in here?”

“I knocked. Nobody answered, so I put my hand on the pad. It wasn’t locked.”

“Oh, yes. I left it unlocked for Commander Tolvern and forgot to lock it again.”

“Tolvern, you say? Are you lovers?”

“No,” he said quickly. “Of course not. She is a friend and confidant. Really, no,” he added when Catarina raised an eyebrow. “I’ve known her since she was a girl. We practically grew up together.”

“It wouldn’t bother me if you were. But I like to know who my rivals are. Now, maybe I’m wrong, but I could have measured the hostility radiating off Jess Tolvern with a Geiger counter. Seemed like jealousy.”

“It’s not jealousy,” Drake assured her. “She’s suspicious because you’re a pirate, and she doesn’t much care for this whole scheme with the sugar antidote. Then there was the business with the gold.” He took a step toward her.

Catarina still lounged across the bed, not reaching for him, not making any more move than she already had. He was aware of a choice, a step that might seem easy now, a bit of pleasure willingly shared between two people, but that had consequences going forward. It took every bit of willpower to hold back as he looked her over. Her body was both lean and feminine, and there was something sexy about the insolent look on her face, the intelligence burning in her eyes, even the way she parted her lips.

“Would you like me to leave?” she asked.

“No.”

“If you’re nervous, we could have a drink first. I get the feeling it has been a long time for you.”

“It has been, but I’m not nervous. I am deliberate. I don’t like making mistakes.”

Catarina sat up and moved the pillows behind the small of her back. Keeping her eyes on his, she deliberately took the edge of her vest and let it slip off her right shoulder. It caught against her breast and then slid free. He held her eyes for a long moment, then, just as deliberately, let his gaze drift to her exposed breast.

“Come here,” she said. Her voice was husky.

Drake fell upon her. Their lips pressed together hungrily. Catarina arched her back, breathing heavily. She grabbed his backside hard with one hand and plunged the fingers of her other hand into his hair to drag his face down to her neck, and then to her breast. She was a demanding lover, insisting, directing his every move, moving his mouth here, his hand down there. Her own hands and mouth were everywhere, sometimes biting at his neck while she dug her fingernails into his back. She tore at his clothes, ripped her own off. She shoved him down, surprisingly strong, and straddled his waist. The ruby pendant dangled from her neck. It was the only thing she was wearing.

“Harder,” she insisted as she pressed down onto him. “Yes, like that. James!”

She was making so much noise that he put his hand over her mouth to hush her. It was all terribly arousing, even as he was alarmed by the ferocity of her desire.

The lovemaking was hard and furious until they were done, and then surprisingly, she turned tender. She stroked him along his lips and cheek, and then kissed him softly along his shoulder and chest where she’d left marks. For several minutes, there was no sound but her breathing in his ear, and the sound of a waltz playing tranquilly in the background.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be so . . . you know.”

“Is it always like that for you?”

Catarina laughed, and sounded a little embarrassed. “I don’t know. It has been almost two years since I did that anywhere but my own imagination.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Well, there was one time,” she said. “But I needed to be gentle with him. I’d seduced my cousin, you see, and he was young and inexperienced.”

“You what?”

“Only a second cousin,” she said hastily. “And by young, I mean nineteen, not a child, God, no. I don’t want you getting the wrong idea.”

“I’m not sure what idea to get, to be honest. Sometimes you sound like a lady, other times like you’ll jump me in an alley, ravish me, rob me, and leave me for dead.”

“That’s not too far off how I sound in my own head.” Her hand was resting on his chest, and now she ran it down to the fine hair along his belly, and lower, where her fingers rested with a light squeeze. “Come on, let’s do it again.”

“I’m not sure I can, not so soon.”

“Don’t be silly, of course you can. We’ll be gentle this time. Is there hot water in your shower?”

“Yes.”

“And soap? Lots of soap with lather?”

“Of course.”

“Perfect. You can soap me from head to toe. And then I’ll take a turn. If you’re not ready for another round by the time that’s done, then . . . well, you will be ready.”

Tolvern hadn’t been on shift that long when she set off to seduce the captain, but nevertheless, she went back to her room to freshen up. She took a quick shower, put on fresh underwear and a clean uniform, then spent a few minutes on her hair, adding a bit of gel and pinning her bob behind her right ear. Was that still the fashion? She thought so, but she wasn’t sure. Then a little bit of lipstick—only a touch, she didn’t care to be spotted by other crew and remarked on—and a touch of eyeshadow.

Her confidence grew as she looked herself over in the mirror. She’d never be taken for a beauty; the freckles and the silly turn of her nose would prevent that, not to mention her lack of feminine curves. Nevertheless, she could passably be called cute. Those fellows at the bar on San Pablo had been checking her out, hadn’t they?

She didn’t wear any perfume, but she used a fair bit of her face lotion that smelled of Zealand wildflowers, both to soften her skin and to give her an enticing aroma. Get close to him, let him smell her clean skin, with its scent of the meadows back home. Her stomach fluttered at the thought.

Tolvern almost chickened out before leaving her room, but once she was in the hallway, she moved with alacrity. Every moment in the open risked bumping into someone who might comment on her altered appearance. Thankfully, she found herself alone in the hallway, alone on the lift, and alone again as she made her way quickly down the corridor that led to Drake’s rooms. She only hesitated when she reached the captain’s door. She knocked instead of ringing.

The way her stomach was flopping, she’d have thought she was going into battle. Her pulse made a quick, rapid drumbeat, and her mouth was dry. She imagined Drake’s expression as he opened the door. Shocked? Intrigued?

But he didn’t answer. He must be asleep, unless he was eating in the mess. It was at least ninety minutes since he left the bridge though, so he was probably back in his room. Had to be. She rang this time. Still no answer.

Tolvern glanced nervously up the corridor, not wanting to be caught out here, not by the captain, nor anyone else. She touched the link at her ear. “Jane? Where is the captain?”

“Captain Drake’s last registered position was in his personal quarters.” It was no doubt Tolvern’s imagination, but the computer sounded reassuring, even encouraging. As in, Go on, take a risk. You’re both lonely. He won’t turn you down.

There was no other choice now but to either call him or turn around. If she turned around, she might never find the courage a second time. So she called.

But again, there was no answer. Jane said he was in his room. Even asleep, he never turned his com link off; he needed to be roused in case of emergency. In fact, in this case he’d specifically told her to call if there were problems. Tolvern’s nerves now shifted to worry. Was he okay? Had something happened?

She put her hand on the palm reader, little thinking it would work. Surely it was locked. But it wasn’t, and the door slid open. She stepped into the room, and the door shut behind her. Music was playing—Strauss. She didn’t know he was into waltzes.

“Captain?”

The bed was messy, as if he’d been sleeping and had suddenly vanished. Because of the music, she didn’t immediately hear the shower, but the room was so small that she took in both the kitchen and the bathroom next to it in a single glance. The door to the bathroom was open. Now she heard the water and saw movement behind the glass, steamed up from the heat.

Of course. Drake hadn’t heard her knock, ring, or call because he was taking a shower. He must have laid down, been unable to sleep, and thought a hot shower would clear his mind. She sometimes did the same thing when she was agitated.

Tolvern’s first inclination was to back slowly out of the room, retreat to her quarters to scrub off the makeup, and return to the bridge pretending nothing had happened. Her second thought was to wait for him on the bed, maybe even strip to her underwear so there could be no doubt of her intentions when he came out. The expression on his face when he first spotted her would tell her everything.

Too weak. Too passive. She couldn’t give him a chance to think about why fraternizing with his first mate would be a bad idea, or give herself a chance for second thoughts as she waited for him. No, there was a better choice.

She made her way to the bathroom, her heart thumping, unbuttoned her uniform, and let it slip off. She went to take off her panties. Voices caught her ear. Tolvern froze; she stood so close to the shower door it would hit her if it opened.

The voices were soft, murmured, a man’s baritone, followed by a woman’s voice, low and sultry. Now, staring at the shower glass, Tolvern could clearly see that there were two bodies moving in there behind the glass, which was not so opaque or steamed over as to have blocked that, had she been paying the slightest attention.

The horrifying thought struck her that she’d been on the verge of opening the door and stumbling into the shower naked with the captain and his lover. She snatched her uniform off the floor. Every curse known to man passed through her head as she struggled to get it on.

She was still fumbling with the buttons when the shower door opened. Catarina Vargus appeared through the half-open door, naked and voluptuous, her dark hair slicked back and drizzling water that channeled between her breasts and down her smooth belly and thighs. Steam rose from her body. Vargus spotted the intruder and froze, still half in, half out of the shower. Her gaze dropped to Tolvern’s fingers, working at the buttons, then back to her face. The woman’s eyes widened. That look said everything.

She knew. She saw and understood everything Tolvern had been intending.

Of the two women, Vargus recovered first. She stepped the rest of the way out, and Tolvern caught a glimpse of Drake’s muscular back and buttocks; he was turned away from her, thank God. Vargus shut the shower door.

“Give me one second to dry off,” Vargus said in a loud voice over her shoulder. “There’s no room in here for the two of us.”

The woman gave Tolvern an urgent look toward the door and mouthed silently, “Hurry!”

Tolvern just had the presence of mind to snatch up her shoes and socks before she fled Drake’s room. Somehow, she got them on in the corridor without being spotted and made her way to the lift. She was roiling with emotion: shame, jealousy, anger at herself and the captain, and even a flood of gratitude to Catarina Vargus. The woman could have easily laughed and opened the shower door for Drake to see her. Tolvern’s humiliation would have been complete.

She was so wound up that she didn’t remember her makeup and her slicked-back hair until she got to the bridge. Nyb Pim glanced up, Smythe too, but neither seemed to notice her changed appearance. Capp, who was more observant than both of them put together, was reading something on her screen, brow furrowed, lips moving as she labored over the words.

Tolvern walked toward the war room, and this motion finally caught Capp’s eye. “Hey, Tolvern, check out this subspace message that just came in. King’s balls, you’ll never believe it!”

“One moment,” Tolvern said, and pushed into the war room.

There was a small bathroom off the room, and she went inside and locked the door. She lathered her hands with soap and water and scrubbed at her face. Only when it was clean, and the clip pulled from her hair, did she look in the mirror. Her familiar features stared back at her, the eyes that were not particularly striking, but with good color and symmetry. Her nose, a little quirky, yes, but not too big. She had nice lips and good teeth. And if her cheekbones were not distinguished, at least she had an excellent complexion.

She’d meant to consider herself defiantly in the mirror, tell herself that she was more than a match for Catarina Vargus, but instead she suffered a fresh welling of emotion. Tears rose in her eyes. This made her angry.

“Don’t be an idiot,” she growled. Her eyes stopped watering.

Tolvern stood staring at herself in the mirror, making fierce faces, even purposefully allowing herself to look ridiculous, until she was composed enough to go back out again. The risk had passed. Nobody would know but the captain of Orient Tiger, and the unexpected compassion the woman had shown seemed to indicate that the secret would be safe.

What does it matter, anyway?

Let Drake take his lover. There was nothing wrong with that. He was a good man, and honorable, and there was no doubt he would still do the correct thing by his crew.

As for Tolvern, she would be fine. She’d made a mistake, and what of it?

She remembered Capp’s urgency, and found herself curious as to what message had arrived. Who even knew their location enough to send such a message?

Tolvern came back onto the bridge to find Capp pacing the floor, while Smythe and Manx were in communication with engineering and the gunnery, respectively.

“What is it?” Tolvern was suddenly aware that she’d been off her post against the captain’s orders. If he couldn’t leave his commander in charge of the bridge, who could he trust? She vowed not to make that mistake again.

“The Royal Navy is in the system,” Capp said. “Captain Rutherford, on Vigilant. He’s the one who sent the message.”

The news was like a slap. “Dear God. How long until they intercept us?”

Over the past week, they’d picked up bits of news as the two pirate ships jumped ever deeper into Hroom territory in search of the tyrillium barge and her escorts. There had been another battle between Albion and the empire, and much of the Royal Navy was in motion. Dreadnought remained in orbit around Albion, the lord admiral engaged in unknown business on the surface, but he was expected to ship out soon. Meanwhile, nothing had been heard of Rutherford’s fleet since it defeated the empire forces at San Pablo. Now, Tolvern realized with horror that Rutherford must have been tracking them all along. He’d caught Blackbeard out here, far from any safe port or jump point.

“No, it ain’t that,” Capp said. “That’s the crazy thing. Rutherford is demanding our help.”

Chapter Eighteen

Drake’s first indication that something had gone wrong came when Catarina suddenly sprang to her feet and grabbed for her pants and boots. She yanked them on, snatched up her gun and holster, and strapped them in place. She pulled on her vest and zipped it up over her breasts.

They’d been lying in each other’s arms talking ever since coming out of the shower. Catarina had asked Drake if he and Tolvern had ever been lovers. He assured her that they had not, and neither had he been intimate with any other crew member. This answer seemed to satisfy her, and for the first time, the thought crossed his mind that maybe Catarina held genuine affection for him.

To that point, he’d assumed that she’d come for a bit of pleasure. Come to him to take what she wanted and leave. Not so different from how she’d tried to take the gold. She wanted it, she thought it was hers. In this case, a moment of fun, but nothing more. Drake had been prepared to deal with the situation on those terms, but now he reconsidered. What if she were interested in a deeper relationship?

She was getting dressed so quickly that Drake grew concerned. “Is something wrong? Did you get a message from your ship?”

It was the only thing he could think of that would get her moving so quickly. They’d each put in their com links as soon as they’d dried from the shower, even as they lounged in their underwear.

Now she touched her ear and confirmed his suspicions. “I’m on my way to the pod right now,” she said, not to Drake, but to some distant listener. “Be there in ten minutes.” When she looked at him again, her face was hard and serious. “You’d better get to your own bridge. If they don’t know yet, they will soon.”

“Know what?”

“Your navy friends. Seems they’ve found us.” With that, she left.

Drake’s own call came even as the door to his room was still closing. It was Capp, sounding agitated, begging him to hurry to the bridge. It only took a moment to get dressed, run his fingers through his hair, and make for the lift.

He came onto the bridge to find Tolvern in the captain’s chair, with Capp next to her. The two women were discussing something in agitated tones.

Capp spotted Drake. “There you are! You’ve got to see this.”

Tolvern’s face darkened, and she didn’t look at him as he came over, only jumped out of his chair and made her way to her own console. He didn’t have time to consider this odd behavior before he was at the console and reading what had agitated them. It was a message from Captain Rutherford.

We are under attack from two vessels of unknown alien origin. Do not trust myself strong enough to combat them. Fleeing toward your location. In the name of Albion and His Majesty, King Bartholomew, this is bigger than either of us, and I beg your aid.

Captain Nigel Rutherford

“Where is Rutherford’s fleet?” Drake asked, figuring if the man knew his location enough to send a subspace, then it should be easy enough to detect the man’s task force. Cloaked or not.

“No fleet, sir,” Tolvern said. “Only Vigilant. She’s headed this way at top speed.”

Tolvern sent him the coordinates, and Nyb Pim offered that if the two pirate ships continued at their present course and speed, it would take sixteen hours for Vigilant to overtake them. Blackbeard and Orient Tiger were currently flying more or less away from Rutherford, but if they turned around, they could rendezvous with Vigilant in a couple of hours.

But Drake didn’t want to consider that possibility while he was still confused about the particulars. Also, that would mean abandoning and possibly losing the tyrillium barge.

“Who is pursuing him? Empire sloops of war?”

“That’s the strange thing,” Tolvern said. “There’s no sign of any pursuit. Vigilant seems to be alone. Maybe they’re cloaked, but we can’t detect anything.”

“Tolvern and me have been trying to figure out why Rutherford would make up that kind of story,” Capp added. “Don’t make much sense. But he must be lying, right?”

“If it’s a lie, it’s both clumsy and cowardly,” Drake said. “That isn’t Rutherford’s style. Smythe, send me your scan.”

The tech officer sent through the data. It held nothing that Drake could see other than what he’d already been told: Vigilant, coming after them at ten percent the speed of light, seemingly alone. Still too distant to see whether her shields were up, but she wasn’t cloaked, so he assumed yes.

“Maybe there were Hroom,” Tolvern said. “But they’ve gone now. Could be he’s still spooked, if they were two big sloops and they caught him alone and unaware.”

“He didn’t say Hroom,” Drake said. “He said two vessels of unknown alien origin.”

This caught everyone’s attention. “Surely he didn’t mean that,” Tolvern said. “Surely he meant an unknown Hroom faction.”

“I’m not sure of anything at the moment.”

“You know how it is,” Tolvern said. “There’s probably another civil war in the empire, it’s always falling apart. That’s what Rutherford means by unknown. Not some unknown species. That would be crazy.”

“We know other aliens are out there,” Drake said. “We’ve seen strange ships.”

“Derelicts,” Tolvern insisted. “Ancient things, from long-extinct races.”

Drake wanted to call Orient Tiger, but his computer showed that Catarina’s pod was still in transit, about to dock. Another few minutes before he could share information.

“Pilot,” he said. “What do you know about this?”

Nyb Pim looked up. “I have no understanding of current empire politics—my loyalty was always to the fleet, although not completely aligned with Albion herself. But it would not surprise me if there were multiple civil wars within the Hroom home systems. The empire has been in a state of collapse since long before my time and only unites when the time comes to fight Albion.”

“Yes, I know,” he said impatiently. “But what about aliens? Other races and civilizations?”

“I do not know. I have heard things, that there were other contacts before the encounter with humans. But that happened long ago, so far as I can tell. I hesitate to parse Captain Rutherford’s message. Either interpretation seems possible.”

“Where are those other Hroom?” Drake asked, remembering the pair he’d hired at the San Pablo yards. “Down in engineering? Get them up here, I’ll want to talk to them. Maybe they know something.”

Tolvern turned to obey.

Drake checked his screen. Catarina’s pod had docked. “Capp, hail Orient Tiger. I want to talk to Vargus.”

Catarina was on the bridge now and answered the call herself. “What a surprise. I never thought you’d miss me so soon.” She gave him a sly smile.

Her innuendo caught him off guard. And in front of his crew, too. He could only hope they took it as a jest.

“You know what this is about, Ca . . . Captain Vargus,” he said, only just catching himself from calling her by her given name. “What is your assessment?”

“We can take Vigilant. Blackbeard can match her gun for gun, while my ship flanks from above, firing missiles to disable her shields.”

“So you think Rutherford is lying, and it’s a trap?”

Catarina frowned. “How do you mean, lying?”

Drake suddenly reassessed the situation. She hadn’t been recalled to her ship because of the message; all she knew was that a navy cruiser was pursuing them at top speed.

“Check your computer. I’m sending a transmission.” His fingers moved over his console.

She looked down, her screen out of his sight, but he could see confusion and doubt spread across her face. When she looked up, her gaze was steady, but she looked troubled.

“We’re not detecting any other vessels,” she said. “Must be a trick. I’ll bet Rutherford has other forces in the system. Hidden behind some moon, or cloaked. Rutherford means to delay us long enough for them to join the fight. If we follow the tyrillium barge’s original course, we’ll be through the jump before he reaches us.” A shrug. “Might be trading one trap for another, of course, but that’s our safest bet, if you ask me. I say we ignore the message and continue.”

“I know this man,” Drake said. “It’s not a trick. I have no idea what he’s talking about with these mystery ships he claims are attacking him, but it’s no game. He wouldn’t lie.”

“You sound awfully sure.” Her frown deepened. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of obeying the order.”

“I’m considering it,” he admitted.

“Are you mad?”

“Captain!” Smythe shouted. “We found them!”

“Found who?” Drake asked.

Catarina vanished, her call abruptly terminated, as Smythe, in his excitement, had replaced the entire viewscreen with Vigilant. At this distance, the long-range scanners could only show blurred, indistinct images of the navy cruiser. But then Smythe pulled the view out to a wider angle, and two other vessels came into sight. They followed the cruiser off the port and starboard, each a third again as long as Vigilant, but long and slender, like spears. With that profile, they would possess a fraction of the mass of the navy cruiser.

Where the devil had they come from? Was their cloaking really so effective as to render them invisible, even when all of Blackbeard’s instruments had been directly focused on them? And what the hell were they? He’d never seen anything like them.

“Talk to me, Smythe. Please tell me you can identify these craft.”

“Negative, sir. Unknown vessels. The engines are emitting no known signature.”

The two spaceships had materialized only a few thousand miles behind Vigilant, and Drake at first assumed that they would shortly overtake Rutherford. They must have been pursuing him for some time, which meant impressive speed to overtake a Punisher-class cruiser with its heavy plasma engines.

Instead, the unknown craft began to fall behind. They fired no weapons and seemed incapable of stopping or hindering Vigilant in any way. And then, as quickly as they’d appeared, the vessels vanished, one after another.

“What are they doing?” Drake asked, sure now that Smythe’s instruments would be able to pierce whatever cloaking these ships had employed.

“They’re gone, sir. I swear to God there’s no cloaking, or if there is, it’s a hundred times better than anything we can manage. We were looking right at them, and they’re gone.”

“Try again, Smythe.”

“I am. There’s nothing.”

“Check your instruments.”

“I swear, Captain!”

“You may find this difficult to believe, Captain,” Nyb Pim spoke up, “but I think they jumped.”

“They jumped?” Drake said. “There was no jump point there.”

“That we knew about.” The Hroom’s long fingers moved over the console. “Data from Ensign Smythe’s scans are fed automatically into the nav computer, which has interpreted certain irregularities as a previously unknown jump point.”

How was that possible?

There was little about the system in their charts other than the basics. The system was filled with a collection of small inner planets possessing no atmosphere, and the typical array of gas giants. Nothing habitable, and deep in Hroom territory to boot. It was quite plausible that there would be unknown jump points within the system, but what were the odds that Rutherford would pass right next to one in all the vastness of space? Nearly infinitesimally small.

Drake was still trying to wrap his mind around this when Catarina came back on from Orient Tiger. “Did you see those things?”

“I saw them. Don’t know what they are. Do you?”

“No idea. Where the hell did they go?”

“They jumped,” Drake said.

“What do you mean, they jumped? There was no jump point there.”

“There is now.”

“Captain!” This time it was Tolvern, who had joined Smythe at the tech console. “Look at that!”

He looked at the viewscreen as Catarina vanished again, to see that the unknown spaceships had reappeared, this time a hundred thousand miles ahead of Vigilant, now racing toward her in the opposite direction. The two strange craft flashed by the cruiser on either side, and Rutherford launched missiles as they passed. The strange craft fired some sort of energy weapon and vaporized the missiles, or so it appeared. Which was odd, since even the small amount of tyrillium in the missiles should have neutralized energy weapons.

But the craft didn’t fire at Rutherford’s ship itself. It was almost as if they were testing his weapon systems. And then they vanished again. For a moment, Drake could only gape.

Catarina came back on the viewscreen. “This is no kind of fight for us. Not one thing about this situation is right. Let’s get the hell out of here. Force the barge ahead of us to the jump point and go.”

“Rutherford needs our help.”

“Rutherford can go to hell. Ten-to-one odds this whole thing is a trick to get us to investigate, that these strange ships either don’t exist, or they’re experimental navy craft. Soon as we show up, they’ll blast us. He’s no friend of ours, anyway. Let’s go.”

“Captain,” Tolvern said directly through Drake’s com, on a channel Catarina wouldn’t be able to hear. “This might be it. The way to earn yourself a pardon. A pardon for all of us. If you help Rutherford, it will change everything.”

He saw what Tolvern was getting at, but she was fooling herself if she thought Admiral Malthorne would call off the dogs simply because Drake had intervened to help Captain Rutherford escape a tight spot. For that matter, Drake doubted Rutherford would forgive him, either, not even if he saved the man’s life. His old friend’s obedience was too ingrained.

“James,” Catarina said, tone warning. “We have our prize. Now it’s time to leave.”

“This isn’t part of our bargain,” he said, “and I won’t make you follow me. Take the tyrillium barge if you want, and go.”

“Don’t do this. We have to stick together. I told you, I can’t manage this course alone, I need your ship to provide the muscle.”

“Then go through the jump and wait for me,” Drake told her. “I’ll either meet you there when we finish, or I won’t, and you’ll be able to guess what happened.”

“Damn you, I’m not going back with you, if that’s what you’re hoping to pull off. Guilt me into it or something.”

“I’m not, I swear to God. Go, leave.”

“This is not my fight. I’m warning you, I’ll go. You won’t see me again.”

“Commander,” Drake said to Tolvern without taking his eyes off Catarina. “Get engineering. Tell them to shunt all available power to the plasma engines. We’ll need all the acceleration we can get.” He noted the dismay on Catarina’s face and wondered if he was seeing her for the last time. “I wish you all the best, Captain Vargus.”

He cut the link to her ship.

“Manx, send a message to Vigilant. Tell Rutherford we’re coming. Tolvern, I want us cloaked, and that means you two—” a nod at his pilot and subpilot— “will need to take us there indirectly. We don’t know if those alien craft have detected us, but there’s no need to make it easy for them.”

Drake made the call to engineering himself. He gave Barker a brief sketch, and told him to come to the war room in twenty minutes for more instructions. But just then, Nyb Pim sent over his best estimate for when they’d be in range of the enemy weapons. The answer was, too soon. They were energy weapons and traveled at the speed of light.

“No, hold that,” Drake told Barker. “Don’t come up, go to the gunnery. Call the bridge when you get there.”

“Orient Tiger is coming around, sir,” Tolvern said. She didn’t sound pleased. “Vargus is following us. So much for her precious tyrillium barge.”

Drake glanced at his computer to confirm that Catarina was following. Good.

Chapter Nineteen

Once Drake had sent word to Rutherford, his old friend sent back a series of hasty messages with sketchy information about the enemy. Not Hroom, not human. The ships had apparently destroyed an empire sloop of war and a smaller merchant vessel. A surviving Hroom, frothing in the grip of a sugar withdrawal, had raved something about “Apex”, but Rutherford could make no sense of it.

Meanwhile, the two pursuing vessels had been jumping in and out of range to probe and attack Vigilant. Yes, jumping; the aliens seemed capable of creating their own jump points at will. Drake didn’t have time to fully consider the ramifications, but it was disruptive technology. It could change everything. Further, the craft had energy weapons that could penetrate tyrillium armor, and they seemed able to slap down Vigilant’s torpedoes and missiles.

Rutherford’s only advantage was his ship’s greater speed. The enemy didn’t have equivalent engines, but didn’t need them, either. Their jump points were loose, and they passed through them at roughly five percent light speed. The way the two slender craft kept coming and going, Rutherford thought they were toying with him, could destroy him at any time.

Drake was troubled by this information and wished he had time to take his officers into the war room to settle them. Worry marked their faces, and even Nyb Pim was licking his lips with his long, purple tongue. Barker’s voice was tight with stress when he called in from the gunnery. Drake closed his console before addressing them so he wouldn’t be distracted by the stream of data.

“We don’t know what we’re facing,” he said, “but there’s no reason to panic. Any enemy has limitations, and it’s our job to figure out what those are. Some of you must have ideas. Talk to me.”

“We haven’t seen what kinetics do,” Barker said over the com. “Shooting down a missile or two is one thing, but can these aliens handle a barrage of cobalt and depleted uranium from our main batteries? They look fragile.”

“First, we’d have to get close enough for cannon,” Drake said. “How quickly can they jump away from us? Smythe, see if you can figure out how long it takes them to make their jump points. Is it instantaneous? A predictable distance ahead of their ships?”

“I’m checking, sir.”

“What about a laser?” Tolvern asked.

“What about it?” Drake asked.

“If they have energy weapons, if they have some way of burning through tyrillium, then maybe they’re vulnerable to laser fire themselves.”

“It’s worth a try. Barker, what have we got?”

“Not much,” the man said through the com. “A 50-kilowatt laser is our strongest. Good enough to finish off injured craft, but any sort of shielding at all is going to block it.”

“Get it ready, just in case. Also, load our heaviest shot into the batteries. Those ships can’t have much mass. When we hit them, it had better be hard. Knock them around a bit, and maybe Rutherford or Vargus will get a clear shot before they pick themselves off the floor.”

The thought of mass and inertia brought something else to mind. Or rather, almost to mind. There was an idea niggling at the edge of consciousness that he couldn’t quite grab.

The door to the bridge opened, and in walked one of the two Hroom that Drake had hired on San Pablo. It was the taller one, the female, and she approached in long strides. She said something in passing to Nyb Pim, and he responded likewise, both of them speaking in the Hroom tongue that sounded like words mixed with hoots and whistles. She nodded at the captain in greeting.

“I understand you might know something about alien tech near this sector,” Drake said.

“I have heard of it.”

“From recent encounters?”

“Not that I’m aware of. But the empire is big. And old. Humans are not the first species we have encountered. Nor even the most dangerous.”

Drake studied her. She had the deep reddish purple of a Hroom who had never been an eater, but she spoke English well, so she must have spent years around humans. “What is your name?”

“Sal Ypis, sir.”

Drake felt a twinge of recognition at the name. “You are from Ypis III?”

Hroom had three names: a first name, a surname that corresponded with their planet of birth, and something else that had to do with their maternal line that couldn’t be pronounced without difficulty. Hroom generally dropped it when speaking with humans, which sometimes led to duplicate names and subsequent confusion.

“That is right,” she said cautiously. “I believe you know the planet.”

“I do.”

Drake and Rutherford had won a great victory at Ypis III. After demolishing the empire force, Drake’s fleet had bombarded the planet from orbit while royal marines landed to occupy the surface. Millions of Hroom fled the world in a vast, rickety fleet of overcrowded merchant vessels, mining ships, barges, and anything else that could carry them offworld. Hundreds of millions more stayed behind to face the occupation. Perhaps this one was one of the refugees, and that’s how she’d ended up on San Pablo, looking for work.

Drake brought up Rutherford’s messages, then turned the console so Sal Ypis could read them. “Tell me if this means anything to you. And look at what we’ve seen so far—have you ever heard of this kind of ship?”

He turned back to the other officers, suddenly finding the idea that had eluded him moments earlier. That distracting thought about the capture of Ypis III had diverted his conscious mind long enough to allow his idea to coalesce and bubble to surface.

“Pilots, those temporary jump points—how long do they stay open?”

“Most of them are still open,” Nyb Pim said. “There’s a string of them across a hundred million miles of open space. Gradually decaying, but not quickly.”

A string of them. Wow. That was some kind of technology. It almost seemed like magic from what he knew of the physics.

“So we could follow them through to wherever they’re lurking between attacks on Vigilant,” Drake said.

“Don’t see as how that does us any good,” Capp said. “We jump through, we’d have no idea where we’d end up. Then we come out the other side with the trips, trying to pull our heads out of our asses while they shoot us full of holes.”

Yet the alien craft had performed a multitude of jumps without apparent physical effect on the crew. Maybe they had tech to deal with that, too.

“I agree with the ensign,” Tolvern said. “We come out blind, and meanwhile, they’re waiting to pounce. Don’t you think we’d better stick to chasing them off until we know what we’re dealing with?”

“No. I want to defeat them. Sal Ypis, you have something?” Drake asked. The Hroom had looked up from reading Rutherford’s messages and was studying him with her big, liquid eyes, as if waiting for him to address her.

“I know this word,” she said. “‘Apex.’ They’re aliens, yes. There was a war, a stalemate, and the alien fleet . . .” Her voice trailed off.

She turned to Nyb Pim, and they briefly spoke together in Hroom. The Hroom put their hands together, palm to palm, as their species did to indicate a conversation where two sides were sharing information.

“No, I haven’t,” Nyb Pim said, switching to English. “I was raised by humans and never heard of them before now.”

“I don’t know anything about their tech,” Sal Ypis said, also in English. “Or their tactics. Only that they were reputed to be dangerous. There are stories about what they wanted from us—I don’t know if they’re true.”

“ ‘Apex,’ that’s a translation, I assume?” Drake asked. “Is that the name they gave themselves, or a Hroom invention?”

“Hroom, I believe,” she said. “But I do not know for sure.”

“We’ve only got ten minutes,” Smythe warned nervously from his station, “and then we’ll be in the thick of it.”

Drake acknowledged his tech officer with a nod. He turned back to Sal Ypis. “Thank you, midshipman. Return to your post.”

Capp pointed at the viewscreen. “There they are, the bastards.”

The long, slender ships had jumped in again and were swooping once more to test Vigilant’s shields with a series of energy pulses.

Ten minutes. Not much time, not even to explain what he was planning. “Barker, are you still there? Shunt whatever power you can find to the rear shields. Make sure they can take a hit.”

“Rear shields, sir?”

“Yes, Chief. Rear shields. I’ll send more info shortly. Tolvern,” Drake said, when Barker was gone from the com, “send a message to Orient Tiger. Simple instructions. I want her right behind us, as close as she can get without colliding.”

“That’s pretty damn close,” Tolvern said. Her fingers were already composing the message. “You saw Vargus charging that tyrillium barge.”

“Exactly. The instant those ships jump, we’re going through after them, and I want Orient Tiger glued to our tail. Be prepared for a bump on the other side—the more Vargus can do to strengthen her forward shields, the better. And ready her torpedoes.”

While Tolvern finished sending, Drake prepared one final message for Rutherford.

Prepare your main batteries. Watch where I go and follow. Remember the battle of Ypis III.

By now, Blackbeard and Orient Tiger were racing to join the fight between the big royal cruiser and the two smaller alien craft, who had been darting in like a pair of wolves nipping at a wounded moose. Testing its hooves and horns, weakening it by attrition for the final kill. A strange and ironic turn. Normally, Vigilant would be the hunter; her prey, Hroom sloops of war.

The alien craft had been following a pattern of sorts, with each attack lasting several minutes, but at the sight of the newcomers, they broke off early and opened a new jump point. Perhaps they only meant to flee, but Drake doubted it. There had been something almost teasing in their attacks so far, as if they had been holding back. He thought they would soon come back around, so confident in their ability to evade and damage their enemies that shortly all three human ships would find themselves under assault.

Drake waited until the second of the alien craft had gone through, then he barked his orders to go after them. Orient Tiger was hugging his rear as he accelerated toward the jump, and Vigilant changed course, banking hard to come around behind the other two. Blackbeard was already at speed and hit the jump point less than two minutes later.

Drake woke, groggy and stunned from the jump, trying to remember where he was and what he was doing. Warning lights flashed, and he was lying on the floor. Some dim part of his mind said that the stabilizer fields had momentarily been knocked out of action. A woman spoke in his ear, her voice confident, assuring, yet somehow insisting that he pay attention.

Only gradually did he realize that the woman was really Jane, the computer. “Additional damage from the collision to rear shield, eleven percent.” She sounded disapproving, as if better attention would have prevented the mishap. “Damage includes a plasma leak at—”

Her voice turned into a drone as he recovered enough to hoist himself off the floor and stare at the flashing lights on his console. It was coming back to him, now. A jump after the alien ships. Blackbeard had been bumped in the back and must have taken a knock up front, too.

“Commander!”

Tolvern hadn’t yet recovered. She lay on the floor, groaning and rubbing her head. Nyb Pim was down, too, and Smythe slumped over his computer, while Manx looked down at the tech officer with a slack-jawed expression, then took him by the shoulders and shook him.

Capp regained her feet and staggered to her seat. Her fingers worked sluggishly at her console. She thumped her forehead with the heel of one hand, as if trying to knock away the aftereffects of the jump.

“Ensign,” Drake said, to get her attention. His head was growing clearer by the moment, but he still couldn’t remember why he needed to get the engines online quickly, only that it was necessary. He thumbed the viewscreen. “Engines up. Now.”

The ship shuddered, and now he remembered everything. They’d come through the jump point, one after another, each bumping into each other. Orient Tiger and Vigilant must still be jostling him. That was the origin of Jane’s disapproving analysis of the collision damage.

But what about Apex?

He searched with his instruments until one of the enemy ships came into focus on the viewscreen. The long, slender craft tumbled end over end away from them. Balls of energy dripped out the back end like sickly green droplets of blood, dissipating slowly in the vacuum. He’d come out on top of her as he’d hoped, and then Orient Tiger and Vigilant shoved him into the enemy craft. She’d taken serious damage.

Smythe was awakening, and looking at his computer, and the first thing he did was find the second ship, or rather, the first that had passed through the jump point. She was accelerating rapidly away from them.

Finally, Blackbeard edged into motion. Vigilant lay off starboard, and the two ships ground together as they separated. Data and communication started to flow in from both the navy ship and the pirate frigate. Drake ignored it for now.

Instead, he shouted to get Capp’s attention. She turned, bleary eyed.

“Follow that ship!” He called the gunnery. “Give me the main battery! And the laser, too. Barker? Are you there? Wake up, dammit.”

“Aye, sir. I hear you. Dropping shields.”

By now, Tolvern was up, still looking stunned, but seeming to recover as she made her way to her chair. Drake sent a quick message to the other two ships: finish off the crippled ship, I’m going after the other.

Blackbeard was soon in pursuit of the uninjured alien craft, her more powerful engines thrusting her toward her prey. Although she was still losing ground in absolute terms, she was accelerating faster. They were already up to five hundred miles a second. Drake didn’t know how fast the enemy needed to be traveling to punch through a jump point, but he didn’t intend to give them a chance to show him.

Drake’s console lit up like the fireworks over the St. Lawrence River on Settlement Day. Jane protested in his ear. It was the enemy craft firing its energy weapons at Blackbeard. Within seconds, it had punctured several holes in the tyrillium armor, and word came of hull breaches under emergency sealant protocols. Smythe cried that the enemy was warming its battery for another attack.

But Blackbeard returned laser fire, and that forced the Apex craft to veer away. She slowed as she performed maneuvers.

“Now we have you,” Drake muttered.

Blackbeard came in from above, and Barker let loose with the underside battery. Cannon fire raked the long, slender craft from bow to stern. Explosions lit up her surface. Again, the alien craft tried to peel away. There was nothing cocky in her movements now, but neither was there panic, as there would have been with a Hroom ship. Instead, she twisted and shimmied like a fish trying to free itself from a hook. Drake’s pilots followed every jerk and twist.

And then they were alongside the enemy craft, which presented a full profile to Blackbeard’s broadside cannon. Drake ordered them to fire. Blackbeard rolled to her side as the full force of her cannons roared to life. The ship shuddered beneath him.

Explosions ripped into the alien ship. Some internal ammunition or energy source detonated. The ship exploded. Debris pounded Blackbeard. More warning lights.

But when it was over, there was nothing left of the enemy but scattered debris. Blackbeard was wounded, her new armor pierced in multiple places, but all decks were intact, and there were no casualties anywhere on the ship.

As his officers celebrated on the bridge, Drake ordered Blackbeard around. He returned to the jump point to find Rutherford and Vargus still fighting, launching missiles and torpedoes. But they weren’t shooting at an alien craft. There were none to be seen. They were shooting at each other.

Chapter Twenty

Drake roared into the conflict with all the patience of a male lion breaking up a fight among two brawling lionesses. He fired a missile at each of them, catching Vargus’s ship on the belly shield and slamming Rutherford’s exposed main battery, which surely dismounted or destroyed several cannons.

With the fire, he sent a warning: whoever didn’t stand down at once would face his full wrath.

The bluster worked. Shortly thereafter, the two ships had disengaged and sat at a distance, sulking, while their captains pleaded their case to Drake.

Captain Rutherford, Vargus insisted, had ordered her to stand down instead of destroying the enemy craft, as she’d tried to do. Instead, Rutherford wanted to harpoon and board it. When Orient Tiger fired anyway, Vigilant tried to destroy her to protect the prize.

While the two ships mixed it up, the alien craft, stunned but not destroyed, had fled the scene. By the time the humans realized she was underway, she’d already jumped, and Vargus and Rutherford immediately resumed their attempts to kill each other.

When Vargus was gone from the viewscreen, and it was Rutherford’s turn to speak his part, Drake’s old companion expressed his fury about the interference from the pirate captain. Drake let him vent his spleen.

“I gave you orders, Rutherford,” Drake said when the man had finished. “You disobeyed them.”

“You’re not in command.”

“The devil you say. The moment you asked my help, you implicitly accepted my command. And I told you to destroy that ship.”

Rutherford thrust his jaw forward and glared at Drake through the viewscreen. “We’re at war, in case you haven’t noticed. And unless your treason has extended to a hatred for all of Albion, you know we had to take that ship. Who knows what technology we might have discovered? And maybe we could have formed an alliance with them to fight the empire together.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Drake said. “When a bear and a wolf meet over the carcass of a sheep, they don’t discuss who gets the best cuts of meat. Apex was testing you, seeing how easy you were to kill. If I hadn’t been stumbling through the same system, you’d be dead now, your technology in their hands, and not the reverse.”

“Do you know something about Apex?” Some of the anger dissipated from Rutherford’s voice. “What are we dealing with?”

“I know a few things,” Drake said slowly, as if reluctant. This was disingenuous, as he had very little information. It was likely that Rutherford knew more than he did. “I’d be happy to discuss it in person.”

“You are a traitor. Why should I meet with you?”

This brought grumbles from across Drake’s bridge. Capp cursed, and Tolvern muttered something about shoving a torpedo where the sun didn’t shine.

Drake ignored the chatter. “I am not a traitor and never have been. The incident that saw me sentenced to the mines was fabricated. What’s more, I believe that Admiral Malthorne is guilty of his own crimes in an effort for self-aggrandizement. His entire attack on my person may have been personally motivated.”

Rutherford’s face darkened at the mention of the lord admiral, and he looked strangely uncomfortable. Drake could only surmise that he knew something about Malthorne’s intentions, but that didn’t explain the look. It was almost guilt.

“Do you have news from home?” Rutherford asked.

“I haven’t heard anything from Albion since . . . ” Drake was about to say ‘the mutiny,’ but he didn’t want to poke the other man about this. “ . . . well, for at least a couple of weeks. Is something happening on the planet?”

Rutherford stared at him for a long time. “I have orders to kill you, Drake.”

“I’m sure you do. But if my saving your life doesn’t earn me an audience, then I don’t know what that says about your character.”

“My character demands loyalty to Albion.”

A bitter laugh rose to Drake’s mouth. “You don’t think I understand that? I swore oaths to king and country. I never expected to face betrayal in return.”

“This is pointless,” Tolvern said. “Send him off. We don’t need him.”

Drake gave her a hard look, and she looked away. He turned back to Rutherford. “Well? Will you deny my request because of your pride? Come over, we’ll talk, we’ll clear up misconceptions.”

He wasn’t entirely sure why he was making the offer. The friendship between the two officers wasn’t just broken, it was shattered. They were enemies now. Did he hope to somehow ingratiate himself, have Rutherford return to Albion to plead his case before the king?

“Very well,” Rutherford said at last. “We’ll meet. But we will meet on my ship, not yours. And you will change out of your navy uniform before you come.”

A flush of angry pride washed over Drake. “Take off my uniform? You must be mad.”

“Some of my men died when you attacked me at Albion. Their friends and comrades remain on board. If you come in that uniform, boasting of being a captain in the Royal Navy, a loyal subject of Albion, I cannot guarantee your safety.”

Drake hesitated. He could refuse, could cling to his pride, and close this door forever. Rutherford was his only hope to return to Albion. But if Drake were willing to renounce his citizenship once and for all, why insist on wearing the uniform that declared his allegiance to the Royal Navy?

Drake glanced at Tolvern, who now met his gaze and held it. He wasn’t sure what that look said, if it was agreement with whatever decision he was making, or if she was declaring her hostility to the whole scheme. He looked back to the viewscreen.

“I’ll come, and I’ll dress as a civilian. Commander Tolvern will accompany me.”

“I won’t see that traitor.”

“You have made your conditions. I will make mine. Do you accept, or will you go back to Malthorne knowing nothing about these aliens?”

For a moment, it looked like Rutherford would refuse, but then he nodded curtly. “Very well, Drake. Come to Vigilant, the both of you. I will guarantee your safety.”

There was crucial business to resolve before Drake went to meet his old friend turned enemy. First was figuring out where they were. Second, he had to speak with Catarina Vargus and let her know his plans.

They weren’t as far from their initial jump as he’d thought. It turned out that the two Apex craft had merely opened a passage to a new part of the same star system. No way to know if that was a limitation of the artificial jump points, or if this was only so the Apex warships could jump back and forth as they toyed with Vigilant.

Catarina had located the tyrillium barge some half-billion miles away, fleeing at top speed toward the jump point that would take her out of the system.

“I’m going to catch her before she escapes,” Catarina said over the com link when Drake had retreated to the war room to speak with her in private. “But that means leaving now. You’ll be alone with that snake.”

“Rutherford won’t harm me. If he promised safe passage, he meant it. He is a man of honor.”

“A man of honor wouldn’t have turned on his old friend in the first place. Think about it. He has tried to kill you before, why not now? Me, I wouldn’t trust him for the universe. But if you’re willing to put your life in his hands, I won’t tell you no.”

“Not that you have a choice,” he pointed out.

“It’s your life, James. I wouldn’t try to stop you, even if I could.” Catarina hesitated. “Why are you speaking with him? What do you hope to gain?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted. “I’m concerned about these new aliens. Not alarmed, concerned. Who are they, and what do they want?”

“It’s nothing to us. Let the Hroom fight them, or Albion, if they’re dumb enough to blunder in.”

“Or maybe I want nothing more than to explain myself to my old friend. To be understood. Someday, maybe, he’ll be the first admiral of the fleet. I might earn a pardon, be allowed to return to Albion and retire in peace.”

Her raised eyebrows made comment unnecessary.

“Or maybe I’m still loyal to the crown. I’ll explain Malthorne’s perfidy and see if Rutherford will help me denounce him.”

“I don’t understand you. After a taste of freedom, you’d go back to all of that? No, never mind. I need to get after that barge.”

“Is our agreement still valid?” he asked. “You’ll be alone with the tyrillium. Will you keep our agreement, or will you abscond with the goods?”

“Assuming you survive? Sure, our deal still stands. Not that I’m as honorable as your friend, Rutherford, mind you. I’d sell the tyrillium, keep the money, and feel good about it.” She said this with a wink and a tone that indicated she was only half serious. “But I have grander plans for our alliance. It’s worth something to me to keep that door open.”

“I see.” In truth, he wasn’t sure that he did. Did Catarina mean as pirates, or personally? “And how will I find you?”

“If I keep our original course, we can rendezvous in the Koris system—it gets dicey after that, and I could use your help getting through. Soon as I get to Koris, I’ll come to a full stop and wait twenty-four hours. If you don’t show up by then, I’ll go on without you.”

“Fair enough. Be safe.”

“You too, James.”

The call ended. A knock sounded on the war room door. It was Tolvern, leading Sal Ypis, the Hroom who’d claimed some knowledge of the unknown alien race. Sal Ypis looked down at him with those giant, liquid eyes.

“Sit down,” he urged her. “Tell me everything you know about Apex.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Armed escorts led Drake and Tolvern down the corridor toward the lift that would take them to Rutherford’s bridge. The two visiting officers wore civilian jumpsuits and had been forced to leave their sidearms in the away pod before they were allowed to enter the ship.

Vigilant was a Punisher-class cruiser, as had been Ajax before her overhaul into the pirate ship Blackbeard, and she had the same layout, the same lighting, the same knobs and buttons. Only the crew was different, young men and women in crisp navy uniforms, with not a pirate or smuggler among them. Hard expressions followed them through the ship, and Drake felt the weight of their anger.

Rutherford sat proudly in the captain’s chair when Drake and Tolvern arrived on the bridge. He didn’t stand, didn’t offer a salute or greeting, but stared through narrowed eyes. He waved a hand to dismiss the armed guards.

“Captain Rutherford,” Drake said, inclining his head.

A grunt. “Drake.”

Tolvern stiffened. “This is the respect we get after saving your life?”

Rutherford didn’t bother to look at her, but continued to stare at Drake. “You have information about Apex?”

“I have lots of information, not only about these aliens, but other items of interest.”

“Tell me.”

“Not here,” Drake said. He looked around, noted the unfamiliar faces on the bridge. “I don’t know any of these people except Pittsfield. Some of them might be working for the lord admiral, and what I have is for your ears only.”

“All of them answer to the lord admiral, including myself. What makes you think I won’t send a subspace the moment we’re finished?”

“We don’t have to listen to this,” Tolvern burst out. “Let him discover Apex for himself.”

“Remember your place, Tolvern,” Rutherford said sharply.

“Remember yours,” she snapped in return. Drake couldn’t help the smile that came to his face at her feisty retort.

Rutherford turned to him. “Do you allow your junior officers to be so insolent?”

“She is reflecting your own direspect,” Drake said. “As soon as you treat me with decorum, I have no doubt that Tolvern’s own comportment will be correct in every way. Isn’t that right, Commander?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, Captain Rutherford,” Drake continued, “I won’t pretend we’re still friends and allies—”

“No, we are not.”

“—but we can agree to a truce while we discuss our mutual enemies. Isn’t that what you implied by asking for my help? It may have been cynical self-interest, but you implicitly promised that you wouldn’t fire on me while I was helping you defeat the aliens. One of the alien vessels escaped. We still have a mutual enemy, so I suggest we continue our truce.”

Drake didn’t need to remind Rutherford that the man had already broken that truce once, when he attacked Orient Tiger to keep Catarina from destroying the wounded Apex ship.

“I agreed to your conditions,” Drake continued. “I have the information that you need, yet I came onto your ship at your insistence. The commander and I are out of uniform. We are disarmed at the insistence of your guards. I would like a private audience in your war room. That seems a reasonable request, given the circumstances.”

“Very well,” Rutherford said. “But Pittsfield will join us. I insist. You have your commander, and I will have mine.”

That one condition wasn’t worth fighting over. “Very well. Lead the way.”

Rutherford rose. “Pittsfield, come with us. Lieutenant Caites, you have the helm.” A young woman nodded curtly at this and moved swiftly to take her position in the captain’s chair.

Rutherford led Drake and Tolvern to the war room. As the door opened, Rutherford said in a loud voice, “I will listen, but nothing you say will convince me that you are not a traitor to Albion and the fleet. Nothing, do you understand?”

Drake felt the anger of his old friend like a physical blow and was stunned by its ferocity. This meeting was a mistake. Rutherford’s pride would not allow him to accept that which he did not already believe. He was as loyal as Drake had been, but with none of the imagination.

The doors closed behind Drake, Rutherford, Pittsfield, and Tolvern. Immediately, Rutherford pulled a computer from his hip pocket and punched a few buttons. Pittsfield, a short, wiry man with a bristle mustache, quickly pulled up the main terminal at the desk. His fingers moved over the buttons.

“Looks like we’re clean,” Rutherford said.

Pittsfield nodded. “I’m showing the same thing.”

Rutherford stepped up to face Drake, until the two men were only inches apart. There was such an intense look in his eyes that Drake thought he was about to be physically struck and challenged to a duel. Then Rutherford lifted his right hand and saluted.

“Captain Drake. It is an honor to see you again.”

Drake blinked. “An honor?” he repeated, stupidly.

“I am sorry. I would blame circumstances, but in truth, my poor judgment is to blame.”

Rutherford gestured to Pittsfield, and the two men sat. Tolvern stood at Drake’s side, mouth agape, but then she seemed to understand what had happened, and sat down with a sharp look in her eyes.

“It was theater,” Tolvern said to Rutherford. This wasn’t a question. “What you said on the bridge. You have a new crew, and you don’t trust them. You think they’re spying on you.”

Rutherford nodded grimly. “I trust Caites, the second mate, but the rest are Malthorne loyalists.” His face was almost stricken, as if he’d only now realized that he’d been fighting for the wrong side. “I need to keep an appearance of hostility. I can’t have word getting back to the Admiralty that we’ve reconciled—that would never do. But friend, I am truly, deeply sorry. And you too, Commander Tolvern. Please accept my apology for the shabby way in which I addressed you just now.”

“I understand,” she said.

Drake had been taking in this stunning reversal and was the last to sit. He began cautiously. “I’m not asking for your apology. You were only doing your duty. Had our situations been reversed, had I been confused about your guilt, I’d have done the same.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Rutherford said. “You’d have fought to clear my name.”

“I’m not so sure,” Drake said, and he meant it. “I might have fought to clear you, yes, but the moment you ran off with Vigilant, I would have obeyed Malthorne’s orders to bring you in or see you destroyed. In any event, circumstances were ambiguous, not as clearly defined as I might have thought had I been in your shoes. Let’s put the fight at Cold Barsa behind us.”

“You mistake me,” Rutherford said. Again, that flash of guilt that Drake didn’t understand. “I regret the battle at Cold Barsa, but that’s not why I am apologizing. You haven’t had news from Albion, you don’t know what happened.”

A niggle of doubt worked at Drake. Know what? Had the king been overthrown? Was there a civil war? What disaster had befallen his home planet?

“I had nothing to do with it,” Rutherford said. “You must believe me. No knowledge it would happen. The lord admiral did it without consulting me. I didn’t know before, and he didn’t tell me afterward, either. The news only reached me via a friend in the fleet, who sent it to me because he knew of my personal connection to you.”

“For God’s sake, man. What is it?”

“Malthorne landed on Auckland with two companies of royal marines. His target was the Drake estate.”

Drake could barely find his voice. The look on Rutherford’s face spoke of tragedy. “What do you mean?”

“No,” Tolvern said, in a low voice. “Please, no.”

Her own family lived on the property; her father was still Baron Drake’s steward.

“I am so sorry,” Rutherford said.

“What happened?” Drake said. “Tell me at once.”

“Malthorne sacked and burned the manor. Arrested your parents and imprisoned them in the York Tower. A number of people were killed in the attack.”

The news was a blow, a fist to the gut. Drake could scarcely imagine the estate burning, marines killing people, arresting his parents. For God’s sake, why?

Tolvern’s hand went to her mouth. “Oh, my God. Who did they kill?”

“I don’t know all of it,” Rutherford said. “Some servants died, killed trying to protect the family. Others burned in the fire or died in the bombardment. And James—” He swallowed hard. “I’m afraid they murdered your sister. Helen is dead.”

For a long moment, Drake couldn’t say anything, couldn’t move, could only remember his sister, her bright, inquisitive eyes, the teasing turn at her mouth when she said something clever. Why would they kill her? He couldn’t understand it. Helen wasn’t yet twenty years old, she was a complete innocent.

Tolvern cursed. Her outrage and anguish at the death of Drake’s sister seemed both deep and genuine. “Why? I don’t understand it. Please, someone explain to me.”

“Your family is safe, I believe,” Rutherford told her. “The crown gave Baron Drake’s lands to a marine colonel, and the new owner has compelled your father to stay on as steward. I don’t suppose he would have stayed under any circumstances if anyone in his own family had been killed.”

Tolvern let out a long, relieved sigh, then turned back to Drake. She reached for his hand, then seemed to catch herself, and pulled away. He wouldn’t have minded. He felt so stricken, so hollow inside, that all he wanted was a sympathetic shoulder against which to weep.

“I am sorry, sir,” Pittsfield said. “Please accept my condolences.”

“Thank you, Commander,” Drake managed.

After that, nobody spoke for several long, excruciating seconds. Drake felt like he would drown in the silence, as it grew thick and stagnant.

“I don’t know why Malthorne would do it,” Rutherford said at last. “Your parents are in the Tower as traitors, accused of aiding and abetting your mutiny, but everybody knows the charges are a sham. I would say the admiral arrested them to force your surrender, but after . . . well, after killing your sister, there’s no way you’d be anything but an implacable enemy. The whole matter defies explanation.”

“I understand,” Drake said. His voice sounded hollow in his ears, as if he spoke from the bottom of a deep well. “Malthorne did it for revenge.”

“Revenge?”

“You heard about my assault on Hot Barsa?”

“Not the whole of it,” Rutherford said. “Only that you attacked and did some damage. The lord admiral personally sent a message ordering me to hunt you down. I wasn’t sure how much of what he said was the truth.”

“Enough of it. We attacked Malthorne’s private estate, left his manor house on fire. I suspect his attack on my family’s lands in Auckland, even the murder of my sister—” Drake’s voice caught. Could it really be true that Helen was dead? “—even that, was revenge.”

“Why did you attack?” Rutherford asked in a bewildered tone. “What would possess you to do such a thing?”

“Tell him,” Drake told Tolvern. “I can’t. I need a minute.”

Tolvern filled Rutherford and Pittsfield in on what had happened since the mutiny. The merchant ship Drake had been accused of destroying and then concealing? That had been carrying a secret antidote to the Hroom sugar addiction. It had been taken to Malthorne’s estates on Hot Barsa, seized by Blackbeard’s away team, and was now being synthesized in Blackbeard’s lab while Drake decided what to do with it.

“I don’t know what Malthorne is doing,” Rutherford said when she’d finished. “Perhaps nothing more than consolidating his control of the Admiralty by marginalizing or forcing out those who might otherwise oppose him. This business with the sugar antidote may or may not be related—at the very least, it was obvious he wanted a new war with the Hroom.”

Drake forced himself to regain control of his emotions. There would be time later to grieve for his sister and to figure out what to do about his parents imprisoned in York Tower.

“And now we have a new complication,” he said. “Apex.”

Rutherford leaned back. He glanced at Pittsfield, then turned back to Drake. “Yes, that.”

Drake thought about what the Hroom crew member had told him. “You’re the one who used that term, so I have to ask, how sure are you that these ships are Apex and not something else?”

“Not sure at all,” Rutherford said. “The Hroom survivor said the word, that is all. At first, I thought ‘Apex’ might be this new technology that allowed a ship to pierce space and create its own jump point. But as the ships chased us, it was clear they possessed an entire suite of unknown technology. The craft looked different, they had unknown energy weapons that were devastating to our armor. Even the tactics were different. Not Hroom maneuvers at all. Do you know anything more?”

“A little,” Drake said. “But it’s conjecture, told to me by Hroom. The Hroom Empire is at least fifteen hundred years old, and it has explored far deeper into this sector of space than we have. Humans have come across strange craft, ancient derelicts, some drifting for tens of thousands of years, but no other aliens besides the Hroom. The empire has. A few hundred years ago, about the same time as the Settlement, the Hroom had a short, sharp war with a race of beings they called Apex.” Drake stopped. “Again, this is mostly conjecture. It comes from one Hroom crew member, reporting on an incident from the history books.”

“I understand. Go on.”

“The Hroom were strong at the time,” Drake continued. “This other race fought hard, fought savagely, then suddenly retreated with their entire fleet for unknown parts. Physically, they were a strange race of sentient, flightless, bird-like creatures. Culturally, they were predators. Meat eaters, not omnivores like Hroom or humans. They ate both their own dead and the dead of their enemies.”

“Scans showed dead Hroom on the warship,” Rutherford said. “But not as many as we’d expected. I thought the sloop was flying with a short crew, but maybe . . . Why Apex? What does that mean?”

“It’s a Hroom term,” Drake said. “The Apex worldview, their religion, even, seems to be related to their nature as predators. They move through the galaxy hunting and eating other intelligent species. They are apex predators. They literally consume other intelligent races.”

“Why did these aliens disappear?” Rutherford asked.

Tolvern spoke up. “Sal Ypis—she’s the Hroom who seemed to know something of Apex—said they’d withdrawn because the empire was too strong.”

“Think of them like killer whales,” Drake said. “They hunt other predators—dolphins, sea lions, sharks—but they won’t hunt sperm whales. A full-grown bull sperm whale can bite a killer whale in two.”

Apparently, there had been even larger whales on Old Earth, but none of those embryos had survived the colonization of Albion. The powerful, aggressive sperm whales were the only animal that killer whales wouldn’t hunt.

“At the time, the Hroom Empire was like a bull sperm whale,” Drake said. “Apex couldn’t defeat it, so they withdrew to watch and wait. Now they’re back, and they’ve discovered that the empire is dying. After centuries of war with humans, and with a crippling sugar addiction ravaging their population, the Hroom are ripe for the killing.”

“Not that weak,” Rutherford said ruefully. “We lost too many good men, too many ships in the last war.”

“And yet, weren’t there times that you wondered why the Hroom were so slow to respond?” Drake asked. “At Kif Lagoon, we kept expecting enemy reinforcements. They never came. When the time came to end the war, the empire settled quickly, agreed to so many conditions that the lord admiral pleaded with the king to demand more concessions. That makes more sense if you assume that the Hroom were fighting probing attacks on their flanks from Apex.”

“This is conjecture?” Rutherford asked.

“Yes, but doesn’t it make sense?”

“It does,” Rutherford said, nodding slowly.

“What isn’t conjecture is that the last time Apex attacked the Hroom, they did so with a fleet of several thousand ships.”

Rutherford looked troubled at this. “And now we’ve fought them. They came after me, gave me more than I could handle. Probing, testing.” He nodded. “Like killer whales hunting their prey to exhaustion. And that second ship escaped to spread the word.”

“You shouldn’t have fought Orient Tiger,” Drake said. “You should have destroyed the Apex ship as I ordered.”

“Do not forget the political limitations under which we operate, sir,” Commander Pittsfield offered, entering the conversation for the first time. He had been listening intently. “We had to do it.”

“I pulled my punches,” Rutherford said. “I didn’t try to destroy your friends, only hold them off with sufficient firepower to avoid suspicion from Malthorne’s cronies. Unfortunately, Orient Tiger came at us swinging. I had my hands full. Before you could intervene, the enemy had escaped.”

“With word of our weakness,” Tolvern said. “How long before Apex seeks out Albion to prove its dominance? To bloody well eat us for supper? Hroom for the main course, humans as a side dish.”

“The Hroom might see that as an improvement to being our sugar slaves,” Drake said. “Anyway, we aren’t as weak as all of that. We destroyed Apex’s ship, they didn’t destroy ours.”

“Luck,” Rutherford said. “If you hadn’t been in the system already, if you hadn’t been you, but that fool Harbrake, I’d be dead.”

“Apex doesn’t know what was luck and what was skill,” Drake pointed out. “They know that two human ships appeared out of nowhere, that we showed more initiative than empire commanders, and that our combination of weapons and tactics are sufficient to defeat a pair of Apex warships.”

Rutherford sighed. “If only we’d finished the job and destroyed that second ship. We had them crippled.”

“Again, they might see that as intentional,” Drake said. “We let them go so the survivors could spread the word. A message that humans are not easy prey, that Apex should find a weaker food source.”

“Are we?” Rutherford asked. He shook his head. “We may have bought a few months, maybe a couple of years, but the empire is a rotten stump. They’ll tear it to pieces, and then they’ll be at our throats.”

“If we were smart, we’d form an alliance with the empire, instead of fighting it,” Tolvern said.

“You can forget that,” Rutherford said bitterly. “Malthorne has the entire navy in motion. We’ve already fought three minor battles against the Hroom. Word has it that the king has levied two hundred thousand new marines, and the lord admiral is stockpiling sugar. There’s no call for that unless we mean to occupy and enslave several new Hroom worlds.”

“Talk to the lord admiral,” Tolvern said. “Explain the situation.”

“Malthorne won’t listen,” Rutherford said. “He wants his war. Whatever he’s about, he purposefully started this conflict.”

“What we need is a stronger empire,” Drake said. “We can’t have the Hroom falling to pieces, attacked on both sides.” He hesitated. “We can’t have billions of them paralyzed as they wait for their next fix of sugar.”

Tolvern fixed him with a cool, steady eye. “Then you’ve decided?”

“I have. It is not merely a moral imperative, it has become a practical matter, as well.”

“So, what?” Rutherford said. “Just hand it over and let the Hroom shake off the most potent weapon we’ve got?”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Apex frightens me more than the Hroom.”

“Maybe now it does,” Rutherford said. “Don’t forget that the math is not in our favor as far as the Hroom are concerned.”

Drake didn’t want to argue this point again; he’d worked it over too many times in his own head already.

“This is a storm we may some day face. But I know Hroom. They have been my friends and my enemies. A Hroom is a rational being. In some ways, more intelligent than we are on an individual basis, but with less imagination, perhaps. More docile, more easily led, whether or not they are addicted to sugar.” Drake nodded. “But there is no inherent reason why we could not partner with them. Their minds are not so different as to be incomprehensible.”

“Whereas Apex is unknown,” Rutherford said. “Is that what you mean?”

“Not entirely unknown. What we know is ugly. How do you find accommodation with someone who would eat you? Sal Ypis said that Hroom were terrified of Apex, with whom they could not negotiate or reason. Humans, on the other hand, make them wary and cynical.”

“I can’t understand why they’d be wary and cynical,” Rutherford said dryly. “It’s not like humans are ever self-absorbed. Or greedy and grasping.”

“And yet, from a Hroom perspective, wouldn’t they prefer an accommodation with Albion to a war for survival against Apex? They’ll be more inclined to do so if we free them from the sugar.” Drake hesitated. “Come with me. Be the third ship in my fleet. We’ll be safer traveling together.”

“You know I can’t,” Rutherford said, though the reluctance was clear in his tone. “I am still a loyal officer of the fleet. And with what crew? I’ve got two officers I can count on: Pittsfield and Caites.”

“Would the rest mutiny against you?” Tolvern asked.

“Mutiny?” A wry smile from Rutherford. “Funny that you’d mention it, Tolvern.”

She blushed.

“Anyway, it’s not mutiny if the admiral has given instructions for handling a rogue captain,” Rutherford continued. “And don’t suggest sending over some of your pirates to take control, either. I wish the both of you all the best, but my place is in the fleet.”

Drake knew Rutherford too well to attempt to change his friend’s mind. Even after Drake exchanged fire with the lord admiral’s own battleship outside Albion, he’d still harbored delusions of a reconciliation. Rutherford had no such impediments, so why would he risk his position?

“But here’s what I can do,” Rutherford said. “I’ll return to Albion and explain the situation, take it straight to the king if I have to. If you can win us goodwill with the empire by sharing this antidote, maybe they’ll give us more information about Apex. That would get the king’s attention.”

“What about my parents?” Drake said. “They’re innocent. When you see the king, you have to convince him that they have nothing to do with this.”

“I will try, I can promise you that much.”

“And my sister—she must have justice. Malthorne murdered Helen in cold blood.”

“I will do what I can.”

Rutherford stood, as did Pittsfield and Tolvern. Drake followed with some reluctance. Even sitting here in his civilian clothing, he’d felt more at home, more in his element than any time since his arrest. This was his place, in the war room with his fellow officers. Rutherford, a peer, of noble blood. Pittsfield and Tolvern, fine, educated officers with energy and intelligence.

Drake’s place was here, not with pirates and brigands.

Rutherford held out his hand. “I’ll work to earn you a pardon with the king. Until then, I wish you all the best.”

Drake took the offered hand and relished the firm grip. But moments later, they were on the bridge, and Rutherford began to abuse him in front of the other officers, denouncing him as a turncoat and a coward while calling for security to escort the two visitors back to their pod. Drake now recognized this as an act, but even though Rutherford didn’t mean a word of it, somehow the abuse hurt more than ever.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Drake and Rutherford had flown several million miles from the site of the battle before meeting. As they spoke, their respective ships remained motionless and cloaked. Neither captain was keen to tempt the assumption that Apex wouldn’t return in greater force while they were chatting.

Even so, Drake figured he’d lost only about ten hours since seeing Catarina off, and she was still visible on long-range scanners. She would shortly catch the tyrillium barge before it escaped the system, and then the two ships would jump together. Before she did, Drake sent a final message to assure her that he was on his way to the rendezvous point.

Several days passed before they finally met in the Koris system, most of it in the tedium of long intra-system hauls from one jump point to the next. Drake was glad to see Catarina appear on his viewscreen, and her saucy smile showed that she was pleased to see him, as well. Her vest was still half-unzipped, that pendant with its almost obscenely big ruby nestled in her cleavage.

“Ahoy,” she said. “Or is that ‘argh’? I can’t keep my pirate lingo straight.”

“Shiver me timbers,” he said. “So you didn’t run off with the goods after all.”

Commander Tolvern snorted loudly from the other side of the bridge. She’d proclaimed herself disinterested in hearing what the woman had to say, but did not seem so disinterested as to avoid eavesdropping. She and Capp busied themselves at the tech officer’s station with Smythe and Noah Brockett, the science officer, who had come up from the lab.

“Believe me,” Catarina said, “I was tempted. And there are plenty on my ship who would have cheered me on.” An exaggerated sigh. “But no. Alas, there is some honor among thieves. Do you want to come over and discuss the tyrillium sale?”

She put a slight emphasis on the word “discuss.” Drake glanced at the others on the bridge, but they had busied themselves with other matters. Good. The last thing he needed was for anyone to suspect what had happened between himself and Catarina.

“I’m terribly busy over here,” he said with affected nonchalance. “But perhaps once we’ve completed the sale, we can hammer things out in person.” He winced at Catarina’s smile. Poor word choice.

“Well, then,” she said. “Let’s bring this plunder to market.”

She ended the call. A few minutes later, as the ships were accelerating once more, she sent more information about what had happened since they’d last spoken.

After the barge’s attempted escape, Catarina had thrown the captain and first mate in the brig and replaced them with several of her own people, and she promised Drake there would be no more trouble from the barge. For the next few days, the pirate ships and their booty traveled in peace and solitude.

But they were flying through lawless territory, and trouble was bound to find them. A week after Drake and Catarina’s rendezvous, they had their first pirate encounter. First to appear was a single frigate, which lurked behind, following silently. Then a second frigate joined, followed by a third. Drake received the first of a series of increasingly threatening messages. The pursuing ships knew what was on that barge and claimed that Blackbeard and Orient Tiger would soon be swarmed with more pirate ships if they didn’t pay protection money.

After the third such message, Drake turned Blackbeard and Orient Tiger about and came in swinging hard. The enemy pirate ships were soon fleeing for their lives, well bloodied. After that, they enjoyed peace for a few days, but on the next jump, they came right into the middle of a gathering armada of empire warships. Now it was Drake’s turn to flee in terror, while mighty sloops of war fired up their engines and made to give pursuit. Blackbeard and Orient Tiger barely made it out of the system alive with their prize ship intact.

Their target was a system where Hroom, Ladino, and New Dutch colonies worked a series of mining claims on a small, hot moon circling a rocky, lifeless planet close to its sun. Once, there had been a Royal Navy refueling station on the moon as well, but it had been shelled and then abandoned during the war. Much of the infrastructure was still in place however, and Drake and Catarina landed the barge at the abandoned spaceport while their respective ships remained in orbit.

The Hroom were not great hagglers, and the empire buyer, a pale-skinned sugar eater named Byven Teth, had brought the exact agreed-upon sum instead of playing games like a human would have done. Byven Teth expressed curiosity about Blackbeard. He didn’t seem to know about Drake’s mutiny from the fleet, but recognized a Royal Navy cruiser when he saw it, even one so altered as theirs. Drake didn’t give the Hroom information, only assured him that he was no agent of Albion, but was acting independently.

Neither did Drake mention the sugar antidote. Byven Teth asked too eagerly if there was spare sugar on board. Already, the sugar supply had become chancy with the fresh outbreak of hostilities. There were Hroom factions, Nyb Pim had said, who would be no more anxious to see the antidote distributed than would be Admiral Malthorne.

Drake and Catarina stayed in the system a week, paying too much of their hard-earned gold to repair their damaged ships. Metals and fuel were dirt cheap on the moon, manufactured goods, expensive. And labor costs were outrageous. Still, once they had made their repairs and paid their respective crews, they each found themselves in possession of roughly 32,000 pounds in gold and silver coin. It was an obscene sum of money.

Drake accompanied Catarina into the mining town on their last day in the system. They caught a movie—some show that had been popular on Albion three or four years earlier, not that Drake had seen it—and then came onto the main street to hunt for a good meal. The sun glowed red and diffuse overhead, dimmed by the plexisteel dome over the camp that kept oxygen in their lungs and radiation from frying them like eggs on a hot skillet. But it didn’t filter the stench of burning gas and cook fires. A fine dust that sifted over everything, even coating their lungs and the insides of their mouths.

Dinner was outrageously expensive, four guineas for a pair of quail with some vegetables and fresh, hot bread with real butter. He could have served a banquet for twenty people in his father’s great hall for that kind of money. But he had to admit the food was good. Half the restaurant was full of their respective crews, eating, cheering, drinking, and tipping outrageously. Capp and Carvalho caught his eye from where they’d been groping each other in a corner booth. They raised their goblets and gave the two captains a drunken salute that was soon joined by a cheer from the others in the restaurant.

Drake was happy to see Commander Tolvern absent from this display of debauchery. Her share of the treasure would be enough to buy a small estate in the Zealand Islands, should she ever be able to return. And should she be wise enough to keep her hands on the money, instead of throwing it about like the rest of the crew.

“Last day in camp,” Drake told Catarina, when the commotion had died down. “They seem anxious to make the most of it.”

“Many a fortune will be lost tonight,” she said. “And a lot of whores, barkeeps, and professional gamblers will wake with fresh silver in their pockets.”

“Did you notice that the menu is new?” Drake asked. “I’ll bet prices are double what they were a week ago. Our crew has wasted so much money they’ve inflated the entire economy.”

“It won’t last long. All that gold and silver will end up in the hands of a few rich men and women, mark my words. As for me,” Catarina added, stopping to tilt back her wine, “I may look the pirate, but I’m no fool. Tonight will be my sole extravagance.”

“Yet you can afford it more. You have more money than anyone else.”

“We have more money. Your share is equal to mine. Anyway, you understand. There’s a lot of expense in maintaining a pirate operation. If I lose my ship, these fellows won’t exactly pitch in to buy me a new one.”

“You have 32,000 pounds, Catarina. You could buy a new frigate with that kind of money.”

“And I recently did, remember? Thanks to you stealing Captain Kidd.”

“You said this was your father’s old ship.”

“Doesn’t mean that I just rolled it out of the hangar. Some other fellow was using it, and he needed to be paid.”

“So you’re in debt, that’s it. Like how I owe a share to Rodriguez for fixing up my ship when I was short of funds.”

“No debt at all,” she said proudly. “Not a shilling. I don’t mean to boast, but I have a good deal set aside, your brutal attack on my father’s ship notwithstanding. With this haul, that puts me at close to—” she lowered her voice, “—ninety thousand pounds.”

Drake whistled. “You could buy a barony on Albion with that kind of money. Maybe a small one, but still. Wait, why are you telling me this?” He eyed her with suspicion. “That’s not the sort of thing you want getting out.”

“I thought I could trust you,” she said with a smile.

“I don’t see why you should. I don’t trust you, that’s for sure.” He said this with his own smile.

“Hah. Well, I have practical reasons for telling you. As soon as we are in orbit, come visit me on my ship. I have something to show you.”

Once they were off the rocky moon, Catarina showed him a good many other things first. Their lovemaking wasn’t so frantic as the first time, but she was a passionate woman, and she liked one or the other of them to take control. Nothing passive, nor particularly gentle.

When they finished, Drake walked around her expansive quarters while she slept. It was easily four times the size of his own room, with a paper library of beautiful books, a tub that could be extravagantly filled with hot water, and its own viewport onto space. He stared at Blackbeard just off starboard, the glow of yellow from the bridge, the blue plasma engines in the rear. Behind her, the bright, fixed lights of distant stars and unknown constellations. Tolvern would be expecting him on the bridge shortly, might begin to wonder why he was staying so long on Orient Tiger. He didn’t want his commander to suspect that the two captains were engaging in any sort of relationship. Certainly not now, when he was unsure himself what, if anything, he and Catarina had together.

Soft footsteps sounded behind him. He turned to see her, a silk robe over her smooth, supple body. She wiped her hand across the viewport to black it out.

“You keep staring at that ship and you’ll be itching to get back,” she said.

He sighed. “It’s almost time anyway.”

“I know. And I won’t keep you.”

“Have you changed your mind?” he asked. “Will you come with us?”

“I’m sorry, James. No. There’s no profit in it, and too much risk. Unless you’ve changed your mind and will sell the damn thing.”

“I haven’t. It will be a gift to the Hroom. Assuming they don’t kill me for what I did at Kif Lagoon and Ypis III, I’m hoping it will earn good will, if not for me, than for Albion and the whole human race.”

“And you’re sure it even works?”

“Sure enough,” Drake said. “I broke my own rule to test it, allowed sugar on board.”

His science officer had found a willing test subject in the mines, a Hroom who had indentured himself to pay sugar debts. Drake paid the alien’s indenturehood and brought him on board. Five minutes after Brockett injected the antidote, the Hroom changed his mind. He wanted sugar after all. Now, preferably.

They threw him into isolation for a few hours to make sure the antidote had taken effect, then sent in several ounces of sugar. The Hroom had been truly desperate by then, and fell on the sugar like a starving wolf. A few seconds later, sugar crystals still around his mouth, the alien let out a piteous wail.

“I have been tricked!” he screamed in his high-pitched voice. “This is not sugar. This is false!”

Drake had been watching through the window, and turned toward Brockett. “Then it works.”

The science officer was grinning. “Exactly as promised.”

“How long until he comes out of it?”

“He needs to run the full detox. That could be weeks or months. But there’s no risk of a relapse. Sugar does nothing for him now but leave a sweet taste on the tongue. It’s only a matter of time, and he’ll be cured.” Brockett punched something into his computer. “The next step is to test it on a Hroom who was never addicted. Give him the injection, then feed him sugar for the first time.”

“We’ll let the empire take care of that part,” Drake said. “For now, keep making doses, and document how you synthesize it.”

The Hroom was still begging, screaming for sugar, saying he’d rather die than go without. He had made a terrible, terrible mistake. Could they administer the anti-antidote? Surely such a thing must exist. Drake tried to remind himself that the Hroom would better be off in the long run, but he was not sorry to retreat up the corridor and out of range of the poor fellow’s cries.

Now, Catarina put a hand on his wrist and jolted him from the memory. “You are a good man, James, but I hope this sugar antidote doesn’t become an obsession.”

“It’s no obsession,” he assured her. “I will do my duty and see this thing into the hands of the empire. What they do with it after that is up to them.”

“So you say now,” she said, not sounding entirely convinced.

He didn’t want to discuss it any longer, so he changed the subject. “How about you? Where will you go from here? Back to pirating?”

“For now, yes. Much work left to do.”

“Ninety thousand isn’t enough for one woman? Buying a barony and all of that?”

“I need two hundred. That’s the minimum.”

“Two hundred!” Drake smiled. “Why buy a barony when you can snap up an entire duchy?”

“And if a duchy is not enough, how does a kingdom sound?”

He laughed, but there was such a serious look in her eyes that he shortly stopped. “That wasn’t a jest, was it? You mean something by that.”

“James,” she said, her tone even more serious. “I am going to show you something. It is my closest-held secret. Not just what you will see, but what you will hear from my lips. I’d ask for your oath of secrecy, but no oath would be equal to a gentleman’s honor. That is what I am counting on, your honor.”

Before he could respond, Catarina touched a control pad next to the blackened viewport, and it became a viewscreen. A blue, watery planet stretched below him, sprawling continents rising from her oceans, islands dotting her seas, and a gentle blanket of clouds wrapping her in its embrace. The planet had snow caps, deserts, green forests, and great plains, but not too much of any one thing. It was a gentle, fertile planet, like Albion or Old Earth. But nowhere that he recognized at first glance.

The image was only a recording, he knew, not anything they were looking at in real time, but for a moment, the illusion was complete.

“Where is this place?” he asked. “New Dutch territory?”

“Nobody’s territory at all. Claimed by no one. So far as I am aware, no sentient being has ever set foot on this world.”

“And you found this in your wandering? I had no idea you’d traveled so far.”

“It’s not so far from here as you might think. The planet is in the Omega Cluster.”

The Omega Cluster was a group of stars some twenty light years across that should have been in the direct path of settlement in this sector of the galaxy, except that there were no known jump points into it. Several of the stars had the profile of inhabitable systems, but there was no way to get there and verify that short of a generation ship, and nobody was coughing up the money for a multi-decade mission.

“You found a jump point,” he said.

“I did.” Catarina said it with an air of satisfaction. “There is apparently one and only one way to get into the cluster. But the jump point is decaying. My nav computer indicates that it will be active another year, sixteen months at most, and then it will be gone. Meanwhile, take a look. The planet is beautiful, James. Fertile and untouched. I didn’t want to leave. Next time I pass through, I won’t. Neither will anyone else who comes with me.”

Many pieces of the puzzle that was Catarina Vargus came together. Her wandering, her money hoarding, her cryptic remarks about “lords of space.”

“Two hundred thousand pounds,” he said. “Enough to buy a small fleet and all the supplies needed to get a toehold on a new world. You’d need a couple of thousand colonists, of course.”

“That’s the easy part. The human race has never had a shortage of explorers.”

“Not just explorers, but farmers and engineers. Men and women in equal numbers. Maybe five thousand would be a safer number.”

“Now you’re getting the vision,” Catarina said.

“Not to mention seeds, animal embryos, machinery. There wouldn’t be any resupply. You might be cut off for decades. Centuries, even. You don’t want to find yourself wearing animal skins and banging stones together in a couple of generations because you didn’t think it through.”

“Not just things, but ideas,” she said. “The rule of law being the most important. A man’s rights and responsibilities clearly understood. Every person free, yet subject to the crown at the same time.”

“I see. Catarina the First, Queen of New Albion.”

She thrust out her chin. “And why not? Although I don’t like ‘New Albion’. It gives Old Albion a claim over us should they get through.” Catarina gave him a sly look. “And I don’t need to rule alone.”

“Are you suggesting that I would be king on this new planet?”

“Let’s not get carried away! I’m thinking more . . . prince consort. But your son might be king some day.”

Drake chuckled. The whole scenario was ludicrous, as implausible as it was grandiose. How would she keep the endeavor secret long enough to get there first? Would Albion simply let them go? Would it be possible to attract the right sort of colonists, or would they be adventurers and pirates? And yet, there was something terribly seductive about her vision.

“Come with me, James,” she urged. “We’ll pool our money and talents. No more Albion, no more war with the Hroom. No worries about these strange new aliens, either. We’ll be out of their reach, all of them.”

“Let me think about it,” he said. “I’m going to find the Hroom fleet and deliver the antidote, see if I can learn anything more about Apex. That’s all I can promise for now.”

Catarina looked disappointed. “Very well. But I won’t wait forever. If you won’t join me, I’ll find another partner, someone who is more committed.”

Drake was back on his ship twelve hours later. Blackbeard and Orient Tiger circled the moon twice more as they finished running diagnostics on the repaired systems. Then the two ships parted. Catarina took hers back toward the fringe worlds, where she could prey on shipping. Drake headed in the opposite direction, cutting directly toward the heart of the Hroom Empire.

Four days later, they approached one of the Hroom worlds, densely populated with cities and farms, great ports, and sprawling cities. Red vegetation and blue-green oceans stretched beneath a thick, steamy atmosphere. He expected to encounter an empire fleet, but nobody challenged him. Albion could have jumped a task force right into the system and captured the planet with an orbital bombardment and a few thousand marines.

He was tempted to harpoon a merchant vessel or two, distribute his antidote, and consider his duty accomplished, but he’d traveled too far to do a half-hearted job of it. He wanted it in the hands of military officials, with whom he could discuss its ramifications, while sharing information and concerns about Apex. About the new war between the Kingdom of Albion and the Hroom Empire.

So Drake continued through the system. His crew was jumpy, even the few Hroom on board anxious, as they penetrated deeper and deeper into the empire. Should they encounter trouble, there was no safe port, nowhere to run now but from one hostile system to the next. And still they continued.

On the fifth jump, they came out of a concussion that was more severe than usual to spot seven Hroom warships converging on their position. Two were mighty sloops of war, with the other five being smaller destroyers and mid-range patrol boats. Capp and Tolvern urged him to flee, saying they could find a less-threatening opponent to approach.

“No,” Drake said. “We’ll kill the engines, keep all systems on standby. Make no hostile moves. Nyb Pim, open a channel. Tell them in their own language that we are seeking a peaceful rendezvous. That we have very valuable cargo and information that may change the course of the war.”

“Yes, sir.”

As Nyb Pim began to speak in his hooting, owl-like language, Drake watched the viewscreen and the approaching warships all in formation. A few months ago he had been locked in combat with these enemies. Thousands of them had died by his command. And now, he was going to hand them the most valuable gift imaginable. He was either doing something noble and just, or committing a crime for which his name would be cursed by fifty generations to come.

Or perhaps, he thought, the truth was a little bit of both.

-end-

From the Author

Thank you for reading Lords of Space. The series continues with book #3, Dreadnought. Buy it right here! If you enjoyed the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. Reviews help other readers find the books, which in turn will provide the financial support to continue writing more stories in the series.

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two