Chapter One

Pez Rykan never intended to become a rebel chief, only to stay free in the bush.

Years before his escape, at the age of ten, he’d been taken as a slave after his home world fell to Albion. Slavers arrived soon after the surrender of the planet, slaughtering resisters and forcing sugar on millions. The young Hroom took his first spoonful of sugar from the shaking hand of his mother, while a human with a gun looked on. Within two days, Pez Rykan could think of nothing else but securing his next dose.

They shipped him on a packed, stinking slave galleon to the Malthorne estates on Hot Barsa. Eight weeks in transit; hundreds died en route. The healthy and ill alike were put to work. More died.

Pez Rykan was a willing laborer from the beginning. He never complained, never shirked his duties, even when the work stretched to sixteen hours a day during the harvest, with his only relief being his sugar rations. He always ate his ration down at once, sank into a swoon, and roused himself at the touch of a whip on his shoulders. Then it was back to work.

Over the years, he grew unusually tall and strong for one who’d been ravaged by addiction since his youth, and was frequently put into the crews performing the most back-breaking work of the plantation. There was a lot of it. The humans rarely used machinery when sheer, brute slave labor would do.

When Pez Rykan was about twenty, he was sent deep into the jungle with several dozen other slaves and their handlers to clear new cane fields. A strange lowland illness swept over the company shortly after they arrived. As the Hroom fell sick and began to die, the humans fled the pestilent land, abandoning them. Pez Rykan awoke one day from the illness, dehydrated, hungry, and desperate for sugar.

He staggered out of his tent to find the dead everywhere. Bugs the size of his forearm chewed their faces or gnawed off limbs to cart into the brush. No living Hroom. No humans to be seen. And no sugar. Rain had battered down the tent holding the supplies and washed them away.

Growing more desperate by the hour, Pez Rykan staggered through the red jungle of ferns and vines, heading in the general direction of the plantations. He drank from muddy streams and puddles and ate small creatures to keep up his strength.

Sugar. He must have it. Find his masters and beg for relief. Yes, he was happy to return to slavery. Just give him sugar.

Somehow, he kept going for day after day. But as the days passed, it felt as though a cloud were lifting from his mind. He still needed to get back, but now began to give thought to other considerations. He picked the parasites from his body. He covered his scratches and gashes with leaves to keep his flesh from rotting. He was more cautious about the water he drank. He grew wary of predators.

Finally, nearly two months after he’d been abandoned, he staggered out of the jungle onto the edge of a recently harvested cane field. The cut stalks seemed to stretch for miles. A sickly sweet smell hung in the air. It inspired the old craving, but it was faded, like a dull ache from an old injury never fully healed.

“You! What are you doing here?” a voice said to him in Hroom.

He turned to see an overseer with a whip and a stun gun. A free Hroom, not a slave, yet with the pale pink skin of an eater. Pez Rykan looked down at his own bare arms to see them mottled red through the pink. The mark of a sugar eater was fading from his skin.

The overseer cursed. “You are one of those feral bush people, aren’t you?” His hand touched his stun gun.

“No, I . . . ” Pez Rykan swallowed. “I was abandoned in the jungle. I came back.”

The large eyes narrowed. “When did you last eat?”

“Whatever and whenever I could scavenge. This morning I—”

“Sugar, you fool. When did you last eat?”

“Weeks ago. I don’t know.”

The overseer reached into a side pocket of his trousers. He fished out a vial of sugar. “Here, take this. You’ll soon feel better.”

Revulsion mixed with craving as the overseer stepped toward him. They were alone, the two of them. Pez Rykan could easily flee into the jungle, leave all of this behind. Never work for the cursed humans again, producing the very substance that kept his body enslaved.

Pez Rykan reached for the sugar, as if someone had seized control of his limbs. But when his hand closed around the vial, it tightened and kept squeezing. The vial broke, spilling sugar all over the overseer’s hand.

“Are you mad?” the overseer shouted.

Pez Rykan wiped his hand on his damp, tattered clothing even as the overseer lapped the bits of sugar from his own palm. Then the overseer reached for his stun gun. Pez Rykan grabbed his wrist.

The abandoned slave had been living in the bush, subsisting on whatever meager food the jungle gave up. He should have been no match for the overseer. But the bit of sugar seemed to be taking effect. The overseer’s eyes widened, and his grip went slack.

Pez Rykan wrestled the stun gun free and turned it on its owner. He sent a jolt of electricity through the overseer, who collapsed to the ground, shaking and convulsing. A white rage had come over the slave, and he kept the weapon pressed against his enemy’s flesh. When he drew back a few seconds later, the overseer was dead.

Pez Rykan fled into the jungle.

For the next year, he staged solo raids on the edge of the sugar plantations, taking food, killing an occasional overseer or human, and burning a sugar mill. Then he met up with another marooned former slave by the name of Epa Pim, and they began to work together. She would eventually become his mate.

Others joined them. They became dozens. The humans mounted expeditions with their security forces but could never catch Pez Rykan and his small band. For five years, they fought a low-level bush war, always one step ahead of the enemy. And then their luck ran out.

One of Pez Rykan’s fighters was captured, and apparently she gave up the location of the free Hroom base under torture, because the enemy was soon on them. The first warning was the sound of a helicopter buzzing over the free village, and then fire bombs rained from the sky.

In came humans wearing armored cool suits and leading an army of several hundred armed sugar slaves. They rampaged into the bush village, slaughtering indiscriminately, burning people alive in their homes. Pez Rykan hadn’t expected that; Lord Malthorne’s forces preferred to take rebels and force-feed them sugar. But word had reached the swamps and jungles that Malthorne was embroiled in a civil war on Albion, and it seemed that he’d decided on harsher measures.

Pez Rykan organized a defense on the western edge of the village, at the site of a weapons cache and where the trees growing along a muddy creek provided shelter. The enemy ignored him at first, concentrating on destroying the village. They set one stilt home after another on fire, until the center of the village was a roaring inferno, and the screams of the dying filled the air. Pez Rykan lost soldiers to the fire, as they ran back to try to rescue their mates and children. But others came pouring out of the flames, and he armed them as they arrived. Soon, he had a few dozen survivors, and the enemy took note of them at last.

A helicopter fired down on them, but the free Hroom took to the creek to hide until it passed. A silver-suited human marine came forward from the village, leading his pale-skinned slaves. Pez Rykan organized a spirited defense to drive them back. At the same time, one of his fighters loaded a rocket into a shoulder launcher and fired it at the helicopter. The helicopter jammed it somehow, and the rocket went off course. But it served its purpose, forcing the craft to retreat over the jungle and away from the village.

These two small victories heartened the rebels. Pez Rykan’s lieutenant and mate, Epa Pim, began to organize a counterattack to retake the village.

“No,” Pez Rykan told her. “The village is lost.”

“There are still people alive in there!”

“I know that.” He tried to keep the shaking from his voice. “I can hear their dying screams. But there are too many enemies, and that helicopter will be back. We have to get to cover before it does.”

Indeed, he could hear the thumping again already. From the village came renewed gunfire. There was nothing left to set ablaze, and the humans were reorganizing the slaves to push against the last holdouts by the creek.

Pez Rykan hesitated a moment longer, staring toward the mass of flames, willing any survivors to come to him. Now. Hurry, before it was too late. But there was no one. Only the screaming.

He lifted his hand. “Go!”

Chapter Two

For the first day, Pez Rykan thought they’d made good their escape as they traveled single file through the dense forest. His survivors spoke in low, hooting voices—the respectful tone of the grieving. Every so often, the grief became too much, and someone let out a high, keening cry to the gods. How could they be so cruel?

They were forty-three in number when they set out—thirty-eight adults and adolescents, and five children. Two adults died of their wounds within the first few hours, and a child died shortly thereafter. A second child, his parents and siblings all killed in the village, threw himself into a crocodile-infested river as the others were searching for a way to safely cross. One of the beasts quickly grabbed him in its beak and dragged him under.

Pez Rykan couldn’t get the child’s blank stare out of his mind. The way he’d ignored the shouts to stay back from the riverbank. How he’d spread his arms wide as he waded in, as if in prayer to the god of death.

“So many dead,” he told his mate after they’d reached the forest edge late that afternoon, where they waited for a safe moment to cross the open plain. “Why so many children, so many elderly? I told people, I warned them. Send your loved ones into the bush, don’t keep them with the fighters. They are a target. We cannot protect them.”

“When can we cross?”

“Soon.”

The entire company had come to a halt in the shadow of a ruined stone temple on the forest’s edge. It was defensible against both the dangers of the jungle and the humans who were searching for them.

He listened for a helicopter, but heard nothing. “Should be safe enough to take a look.”

Epa Pim gave instructions to the camp, then tossed her head at Pez Rykan, and the pair left the others and began to climb the temple’s crumbling, vine-choked steps.

“Life is always uncertain,” she told him. “We all knew there was a risk. Some chose to accept it, to live with what fate and the gods chose for them.”

“And where are they now?” he asked. “Burned alive. Enslaved to sugar if they’re lucky. Tell me, do you think they’d have been more careful about controlling their fertility had they known?”

Epa Pim’s face hardened. “Must you be so callous?”

A hoot came out of his mouth before he could stop it. Her face hardened still further. She tromped her way up the steps, with Pez Rykan following, wanting to press her, but knowing it would only make her angrier.

They reached the top of the temple and pushed through the brush to the edge of the platform. The sun was a dying red ball on the horizon, staining the vast plain ahead of them in blood. A jagged mountain range sawed at the sky some thirty or forty miles to the north. The plain itself was flat, but for the hundreds of small hillocks rising from the tall, knife-bladed grass. Giant, leathery birds circled overhead. They were large enough to carry off an unwary Hroomling.

“Derisive laughter,” Epa Pim said, dragging him from his thoughts. “That’s all you could manage?”

“No, love,” he said. “That was an ironic, bitter hoot. It was not derisive. The enemy is not fate, it’s not the whims of the gods. The enemy is the human race—they’re the ones who killed those people, not me. So don’t call me callous. I was anything but. I was soft, is what I was. I should have forced the same conditions on the army as I . . . ” He broke off, recognizing his mistake too late.

“As you what?” she asked coldly. “As you forced upon your mate, you mean?”

“I didn’t force,” he said defensively, glad that the rest of the Hroom were below on the jungle floor. He was their chief and couldn’t be seen arguing with his mate.

“You refused to release your seed when we copulated,” she said.

“We discussed the matter at great length,” he said. “It was not the time.”

“We never discussed. You informed me.”

“Are you telling me you have regrets?” he asked. “With everything you know, you wish I’d released my seed? That we’d had offspring when they attacked the village?”

Epa Pim looked off into the distance. He couldn’t believe that she was even considering the question. Their Hroomlings would be dead now, murdered by the humans along with all the others trapped in the village.

Pez Rykan followed her gaze. It was a vast, intimidating stretch of open land. They wouldn’t cross in a night or even two. It would be several days exposed to the human helicopters. But they had to get across. There was jungle and swampland on the other side. Deep bush where the humans would never enter. But how would he cross?

Perhaps shelter could be found on those hills that dotted the plain. No, not hills. They were buildings, he realized. Temples, shrines, rail stations, and palaces. Hot Barsa had once been one of the most prosperous and populous planets in the Hroom Empire. Before the sugar. Before the endless cycles of war, truce, and more war.

He thought about the villages where he’d spent the last several years. A few huts on stilts, deep in the wilderness, any dry ground divided into tiny vegetable plots that were farmed for a few seasons until the soil was exhausted. Simple homes for a simple people. But before him was the evidence of a different past. When Hroom were masters of this world.

“Humans did this,” his mate said. She must have been thinking the same thing. “They brought our civilization to its knees.”

“There’s still a Hroom Empire.”

“At war with the humans again,” she pointed out. “How many planets will Albion devour this time? The death fleet failed, but not before inflicting a wound. Albion will be enraged. They will exact their vengeance.”

They’d only heard about the death fleet long after its defeat. Several weeks after the battle, the so-called jungle telegraph brought the news deep into the wilderness, passing from sugar slaves to escaped slaves in the bush. A cult to the death god, Lyam Kar, had attempted the atomic destruction of Albion. The humans had stopped all but one ship before it could reach its destination. That one had destroyed the capital city of York Town. But most of Albion was unscathed.

Epa Pim studied him. “Do you still think an accommodation can be found?”

“I never did,” he reminded her. “I only thought that wide-spread revolt would force the humans to stand down. But no, peace is impossible between our two species. Only a truce.”

“Even truce is accommodation.”

He thought about the burning village. “Force is what humans understand. And violence.”

“What about the death fleet?” she asked. “Had you known, would you have prayed to Lyam Kar for its success?”

Pez Rykan turned this question over. To kill humans was one thing, but to wish for the destruction of an entire planet was another entirely. And yet, looking out over the red plain ahead of him, with its ruins, wasn’t he witnessing the same thing, but done to his own people? An entire planet, its people dead, enslaved, or surviving in scattered enclaves—the evidence was in front of him.

“Yes,” he said. “If it would have ended the war, I would have exterminated the humans.”

They almost crossed the plain undetected. Another few hours, and they’d have been to the thick jungle on the other side. There were free Hroom settlements in those swamps and forests, and the wilderness stretched all the way to the mountain range, where it was said there were secret passageways to carry one through to the other side, ancient rail tunnels that cut straight through the heart of the mountains.

Dawn set the horizon on fire, and the mountains ahead looked like the mist-shrouded spine of some immense beast. Eight more miles, perhaps ten, and they’d be through the grasslands. Pez Rykan knew he should look for shelter, but the protective forest was so close that he pressed on over the worried noises of his exhausted people. Epa Pim stared at him, a hum in the back of her throat indicating uncertainty. He didn’t meet her gaze.

“Onward,” he urged. “We are close now. We—”

He stopped. A distant buzz reached his ears. At first, he thought he was mistaken, that it was just a scissor bee, circling overhead and looking for an unwary victim from which to bite off a chunk of flesh. But the buzzing soon changed into the familiar, lethal thumping.

“There!” someone yelled.

Pez Rykan turned to see a black shape to the southeast. Not a scissor bee or a stab hawk, but a human helicopter swooping toward them.

“Everyone down!” he yelled.

More than forty Hroom threw themselves to the ground. The grass was sharp and spiky here, and nearly knee high. They’d have been concealed from the ground—pouncers could lie in wait in grass this high until you were nearly upon them, then fly out with a terrible shriek and drag away the unwary. But Pez Rykan could only hope that the helicopter didn’t approach too closely or they’d be spotted from above.

The sound grew louder. A shadow passed over, the monstrous roar of a propeller churning the air directly above, and Pez Rykan’s body went limp, some ancient Hroom instinct for playing dead. And then it was past, and he drew in a deep breath. But before he could relax, the sound changed. The helicopter was banking around.

“We’ve been spotted!” Epa Pim cried.

Hroom staggered to their feet and scattered. Pez Rykan roared for them to stop, and most did. A few, civilians from the village, ignored his command and waded through the grass, trying to flee.

The rest he organized as best he could. Hroom males and females put assault rifles to their shoulders as the human craft reappeared. Pez Rykan ordered them to shoot. Gunfire lashed at the sky and forced the helicopter to swerve. A snout-like cannon on its nose fired as it did so. Bullets chewed up the ground. Hroom cried out and fell.

The helicopter circled around for another attack. Pez Rykan led about a dozen Hroom to a flanking point, where they crouched in the grass, while Epa Pim kept the main body massed, their guns facing forward to take the enemy head-on. It roared toward them.

Gunfire blasted at it from the front and side. Pez Rykan expected the cannon. Instead, light flared on the helicopter’s underbelly. A missile raced toward the main group of Hroom. There was a flash of light, and then a hammer blow struck Pez Rykan in the chest and threw him to the ground. He got up, ears ringing.

The helicopter was hovering almost directly ahead of him. Now its cannon had started up again and was pouring fire on the site of the missile blast. The grass caught fire.

Pez Rykan lifted his rifle and fired at the helicopter. Other Hroom were rising around him, and they too, began to shoot. Bullets pinged off the side of the helicopter. Too late, it seemed to notice this small but determined knot of resisters and began to swing around. But it was listing now. The engine was smoking. Pez Rykan and his companions continued to fire.

The helicopter spun in a crazy circle, bleeding smoke. For a moment, it looked as though it would right itself, but then it lurched, staggering like an eater on a sugar swoon, and fell. It hit the ground with a crunching blow. The propeller threw up clods of dirt and grass. Pez Rykan braced himself for an explosion, but none came.

He ran through the smoldering grass, looking for survivors of the missile strike, and above all, his mate. There were dead and dying Hroom all around. At last, he found Epa Pim. When he saw her, he drew short, his legs turning to mud beneath him.

Amidst the carnage, her face was untouched somehow. Epa Pim’s beautiful round eyes stared straight ahead. The smooth skin on her face and her long, graceful neck were untouched. Below that, all was a ruin. Burned and bloody, the clothing scorched completely off, her torso and legs nearly melted together into a mass of char. The smell of her roasted flesh hung in the air.

Pain clawed up in Pez Rykan’s chest. A hundred memories seemed to flash through his mind at once. He turned away, unable to bear it, knowing he would call out in anguish. And yet, how could he do such a thing when every one of the surviving Hroom had suffered equal or greater losses?

“The flying machine,” someone said. “There may be survivors. If they call for help, more humans will come.”

There were two survivors on board the crashed helicopter. One was a human, the pilot. She was badly injured. She was pinned in the cockpit, her leg shattered. Her face was pale, but she didn’t cry out, and her eyes weren’t leaking in that strange way that sometimes happened to humans when they were in great pain. As Pez Rykan drew his sidearm, she eyed him calmly.

“Mercy, please.” Her voice was quiet, with a slight tremble.

“After what you did at the village, you deserve no mercy,” he said. “But I will give you some, anyway.”

There was no saving this human female. She could not be extracted from the cockpit. There was nobody in his group of survivors who understood human anatomy. It was indeed a mercy what he would do now. He pressed the barrel of his pistol to her head. She closed her eyes.

I hold you no hatred. But you are my enemy, and either you will die or I will. If I could pull the trigger on your entire race, I would do so.

He said none of this. It was such a black thought that he wouldn’t have dared voice it.

Instead, he told the woman, “If you have gods, let them do with your soul what they will.”

He pulled the trigger.

The other survivor presented a problem. A Hroom. A free Hroom. His skin was deep purple, not the faded pink of an eater. No slave, this one. He worked willingly with the humans. Pez Rykan had known of such Hroom. They served as marines, as pilots in the Royal Navy. They lived and walked among humans.

Pez Rykan’s fighters had dragged the free Hroom to their chief and now held him up when his body went limp. A fire burned behind them, consuming the corpses of the dead.

“What shall we do with him?” someone asked.

“Prepare a platform,” Pez Rykan said. “A field temple.”

“To which god?”

Pez Rykan stared at the prisoner, whose skin flushed so deeply purple now that it appeared black. Firelight flickered off his eyes, which had rolled over, as if he were asleep.

“To Lyam Kar,” Pez Rykan said. “The god of death will have his sacrifice.”

Chapter Three

Starship Blackbeard – Four months after the atomic destruction of York Town by the Hroom death fleet

The Barsa system was swarming with loyalist forces, but Captain Drake didn’t disguise his presence as he brought Blackbeard and her task force through the jump point. He wanted a fight and swore he would get one. Two hours after the jump, he seized one of Lord Malthorne’s sugar galleons, dumped the cargo into the void, and sent the prize back through the jump point.

A day later, with loyalist forces scurrying to intercept him, he sent Jess Tolvern out with HMS Philistine. Accompanied by a pair of torpedo boats, Tolvern’s destroyer bombarded a small navy outpost on the farthest, coldest world in the system. The loyalists fought back tenaciously, repelling multiple attacks. Within forty-eight hours, two of Malthorne’s cruisers, supported by torpedo boats and missile frigates, arrived to relieve the outpost. Tolvern fled for her life.

She cloaked Philistine as soon as she’d escaped, making as if wounded and running for the jump point on the farthest reaches of the Barsa system. That was another feint. Drake gave her new orders, and sent her barreling toward the inner worlds.

To hide her true movements, Drake further split his forces, sending off his mercenary frigates and sloops to harass the shipping lanes. They were pirates, and it was a task they knew too well. Soon, all merchant traffic in the system was flying under heavy escort. Two more loyalist cruisers jumped into the system to put an end to the threat.

Drake took Blackbeard and attacked another galleon. He knocked out its engines, then fought a brief, but furious battle against her escorting torpedo boat. The loyalist ship was led by an able commander and struck a blow against Blackbeard’s armor at the helm, but the torpedo boat was no match for the heavy cruiser’s main guns. A broadside from Blackbeard tore the torpedo boat in two and vented her gasses into the void. The galleon it was escorting surrendered. He looted its cargo and let it go.

And then Drake went quiet. He cloaked, accelerated to top speed, and reversed course for the far side of the Barsa system. Ten days later, fifteen days after arriving in the Barsa system, he arrived at the rendezvous point. Blackbeard was alone while Drake’s forces spread havoc elsewhere to disguise his true mission.

He’d come to rendezvous with Nigel Rutherford and his cruiser, HMS Vigilant. Where was he?

Drake stood at the viewscreen, looking anxiously at the gray-green planet beneath them. It was the outermost of the rocky inner worlds and girdled with the remains of a small moon. The belt of debris kept them disguised from prying eyes.

But after three trips around the planet, it was clear that Vigilant and Rutherford were not waiting in orbit. Drake turned to Smythe, his tech officer. “Can you run a sweep?”

They’d taken instrument damage during the fight with the torpedo boat, and some of the systems had been offline while tech and engineering performed repairs.

“I can run anything you want,” Smythe said. “But the long-range stuff isn’t shielded yet. We’ll give up our position if we go long.”

“In that case, keep the search close. Five million miles. No, keep it under three.”

“Yes, sir.”

Twelve hours later, Drake was on the verge of sending Tolvern a subspace to warn her away from Hot Barsa until he sent further orders. There would be no attack on the sugar world without Rutherford.

But then came a coded subspace from Rutherford. It was short; it took a good deal of energy to open a temporary wormhole wide enough to send through a packet of data.

On our way. 22:30. Ready weapons. We may have company.

Drake glanced at the time on the console—19:18. Two hours and change. He re-read the message, then told Manx to get the defense grid computer up and called Barker in engineering to warn him.

“When did you say?” came Barker’s gruff voice over the com. The chief of engineering sounded grumpy.

“22:30,” Drake said. “We’ve got time.”

A grunt. “Check again.”

Drake looked down at his console and blinked. The time read 22:14. He’d been looking at it moments earlier, and it had read 19:18. He’d have sworn it. “What the devil?”

“We lost Jane in the fight with that torpedo boat,” Barker said. “She only just came back online and updated the time. You’ve been operating on pre-dilation. Now, it’s correct.”

Time dilation was minimal at ten percent the speed of light—Blackbeard’s top speed. At ten percent, you lost about fourteen minutes per day. Normally, the AI recalculated and adjusted the shipboard clocks automatically, so they didn’t fall behind real time. But they’d spent ten days galloping across the solar system, and all that time, Jane had been down. Drake had been operating on pre-dilation time and never realized it.

He uttered an oath and told Barker to get to it, then snapped new orders at Smythe and Manx, who set about their work with fresh urgency. Capp was in the pilot’s chair, but he wanted Nyb Pim on deck in case they entered combat. So he recalled the Hroom pilot from his sleep cycle.

“I’ve got Vigilant, sir,” Smythe said from the scanners as Nyb Pim came onto the bridge, blinking away the sleep and rubbing his long, thin fingers over his smooth scalp.

“Is she alone?” Drake asked.

Smythe frowned and studied his console. Drake’s throat was dry, and there was the buzz in his head that he felt before battle, when all his nerves were tingling, his senses heightened. Untold millennia of evolution, carried by his genes from Old Earth, readied him for this life-and-death struggle.

“Yes,” Smythe said at last. “She’s alone.”

Drake felt as though an electric current had been turned off. Nyb Pim had sat down, moving Capp to the subpilot’s chair. Nyb Pim’s fingers flew over his console. Capp rubbed at the lion tattoos on her forearm, staring hard at the viewscreen, which had just captured Vigilant’s shadow and was further resolving the image with every scan.

Capp let out her breath in a long blow. “Bloody hell, Smythe. Don’t make us wait like that.”

“The scanners hadn’t . . . ” Smythe started to protest, then stopped. “Wait . . . yes, there she is. Another ship. It’s Melbourne, sir.”

“King’s balls,” Capp said. “And three bloody Harpoons. Look at ’em.”

HMS Melbourne was an Aggressor-class cruiser, not quite as powerful as either Blackbeard or Vigilant, but strong enough. And she was traveling with three Harpoon-class destroyers. Who was captaining Melbourne? Was it still McGreggor? He was an able commander. It would be a fight.

The viewscreen changed over. On came Nigel Rutherford’s grim visage. “Drake,” he said in that cold, almost arrogant tone. “I’ve brought you a small gift.”

“I see that,” Drake said. “But a cruiser and three destroyers is awfully generous of you.”

“You are welcome.” A shrug. “I forgot to acknowledge your birthday. Let this be recompense.”

“Why, thank you.”

“Keep your location hidden—I don’t think you’ve been spotted. I’ll come down as if trying to shield myself behind all those moons, and you can spring an ambush. Here’s what you should do—”

“Captain Rutherford,” Drake interrupted, his tone firm.

Rutherford stared back, and the muscles tightened on his jaw. It was a challenge. What better plan was there?

Drake’s forces were a motley collection of paid mercenaries—pirates, really—and rebellious elements of the Royal Navy like Nigel Rutherford. Drake and Rutherford had spent a year as enemies after Drake’s mutiny, and though they were now on the same side after Malthorne’s treacherous grab for the throne, there was still friction between them. In principle, Drake was the head of the fleet. In practice, Drake and Rutherford were often vying for control.

Tolvern had urged Drake to declare himself admiral. That would settle command once and for all. Drake resisted. These things must be done properly. He wouldn’t have a civil war within a civil war.

Drake waited, and at last, Rutherford nodded. “Yes, sir. Your command?”

That was all Drake had needed, and he was willing to concede everything else. “It is an excellent plan, Captain. We will follow your suggestion.”

Soon enough, Rutherford was slowing Vigilant as he approached the planet. The enemy cruiser and the three escorting destroyers slowed, too, but only to launch an initial barrage of missiles. Too far out; those missiles would do little good.

Drake hid behind one of the larger moon fragments. HMS Melbourne got greedy and chased after Vigilant without waiting for her destroyers to get into position. At that moment, Drake brought Blackbeard into the open. It took a moment to drop the cloaks and get the batteries hot, but Melbourne didn’t spot them until it was too late.

The enemy cruiser was blasting at Vigilant, now within range. She swung wide to show her main guns, and that exposed her to Blackbeard.

Drake fired two torpedoes. They whipped past hastily launched countermeasures and slammed into Melbourne’s rear. The enemy cruiser snapped off missiles in response, which Blackbeard swatted away. Drake ordered the main cannon readied as they came to. By now, Blackbeard was only a few hundred miles distant.

“Fire!” Drake ordered.

Blackbeard let loose with a broadside. The shot tore into Melbourne’s shields. Another torpedo disabled the engines.

Drake expected Vigilant to wheel on Melbourne. With the enemy vessel wounded, the two rebel cruisers would shortly finish her off. But Rutherford continued, accelerating now as he skimmed above the atmosphere of the planet. He came at one of the destroyers, now isolated and vulnerable. The destroyer fled.

Melbourne fired her own guns, and she and Blackbeard exchanged fire for several minutes, but Blackbeard had gained the upper hand in the initial engagement, and pressed her advantage. Drake’s crew was readying another broadside when Captain McGreggor surrendered.

Capp pumped her fist. “Got you, ya bastards.”

Nyb Pim gave a pleased hoot, and Smythe, Manx, and Oglethorpe slapped each other on the backs, grinning. Even wounded, Melbourne was a terrific prize. Repaired and with a new crew, she’d be a powerful addition to the rebel navy.

By now, the three enemy destroyers had regrouped. But not to fight. Instead, they fled toward Hot Barsa. There, they no doubt figured, they could be protected by the guns of the orbital fortresses while they awaited orders. Drake watched their flight with dismay. That was all wrong. Clearing the region around the planet of Hot Barsa itself was the reason for all of these fights across the system. To pin down Lord Malthorne’s forces tens of millions of miles from where they’d be needed.

Having scattered the destroyers, Rutherford brought Vigilant into position to guard Blackbeard’s rear should the remaining vessels mount one last bid to free Melbourne. When the threat faded, Vigilant swung around to take possession of the prize.

“Smythe, send Tolvern a subspace,” Drake said, still worried about those destroyers.

“Yes, sir. Should I tell her the gig’s up?”

Drake hesitated. He touched the console. “Jane. I need numbers. Estimate Tolvern’s arrival time at Hot Barsa.”

“Unknown ship,” came the cool voice of the computer. She sounded almost petulant, as if she knew what he was asking, but meant him to spell it out.

“Don’t be so blasted literal minded,” he said. “HMS Philistine. According to her last known course. Give me an arrival time.”

It took several long moments before the response came back. Drake knew this was because Jane had only just come back online and was no doubt expending much of her computation power running diagnostics and repair, but it seemed like pure stubbornness.

She was slow enough that Capp and Nyb Pim had already calculated the similar data for the three destroyers by running it through the nav computer, although admittedly, this was much less precise. Tolvern had a window. A very, very tight window. Drake’s instincts said no, but they might not get another chance. This was their opportunity to fatally weaken Lord Malthorne. They had to take it.

“Sir, do you still want that subspace?” Smythe asked, his hands poised above his console.

“Cap’n,” Capp protested. “You can’t let Tolvern stand against them destroyers. They’ll eat her alive. We’ll go after ’em. Us and Vigilant. We’ll settle their hash.”

No, because there was still a powerful task force nearby, three cruisers and support craft. Blackbeard and Vigilant needed to harass these ships out in the space lanes to keep them from either crushing the mercenaries and their diversion or joining the protective cordon around Hot Barsa.

“Subspace channel is open, sir,” Smythe said. “It’s eating power. If you want to send a message . . . ”

Drake decided. “Tell Tolvern what’s coming and when. But she is to proceed as planned.”

A grim silence settled over the bridge as Smythe moved to comply. Tolvern had served as Blackbeard’s commander and Drake’s second until a few months ago. She’d been given her own ship after the Battle of Albion, and Lieutenant Oglethorpe had taken her place. They all knew her, and worried.

Drake stared hard at the console and the fading signature of those three destroyers, still accelerating toward Hot Barsa. Three orbital fortresses and now a trio of destroyers.

Jess Tolvern would have to face them all. Only two months at the helm of her first command. It might be her last.

Chapter Four

Two days after receiving the subspace warning from Captain Drake, Jess Tolvern stood in the engineering bay, watching two muscular corporals load the away pod with supplies. The pod was made to hold eight, but would only carry four on this mission. The rest of the space would be stuffed from floor to ceiling with supplies to keep the away team alive while it completed its mission.

Science Officer Noah Brockett stood next to her, rubbing at his stubble. More peach fuzz than stubble, really, a little tuft growing on the edge of his chin. He had bags under his eyes from working so hard the last few days, making him look, for the first time since she’d met him, like an adult and not a brainy teenager. In reality, he was twenty-five, not much younger than herself.

“Glad it’s not me going out in that tin can,” Brockett said.

“It’s not so bad,” she said. “Assuming you don’t die in transit.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. I saw what nearly happened to you at Albion.”

During the attack on Albion, Drake had used two away pods to assemble a rescue team on a small sloop. In calm circumstances, precision equipment and precise computation rendered such ship-to-ship transfers routine. A slingshot flung you toward another ship, and a hook and net brought you in.

But under fire, it was hell. The little sloop had rolled to avoid incoming fire, and one of the pods missed the transfer and fell into the atmosphere. It burned as it went down. The other—Tolvern’s—had nearly suffered the same fate. She’d been inches from death.

“This is safer,” she said. “It’s shielded, so it won’t be destroyed in the atmosphere. It has a parachute. Even if it’s off course, it’s got to land somewhere.”

“That somewhere could be the ocean,” Brockett said. “Or it smashes into the side of a mountain. Or it lands, and the first people to step out are carried off by lurkers. I lived on Hot Barsa. I know what’s down there.”

And Brockett had lived in the highlands, at Malthorne’s laboratories, where he’d been synthesizing the sugar antidote. Even there, it was sweltering, with plenty of nasty creatures hanging about: lurkers, pouncers, mosquitoes the size of birds, carnivorous eels. The lowlands would be a special sort of hell for humans. Only Sal Ypis, the Hroom translator for the mission, would feel comfortable in those conditions. Though she hadn’t seemed overly pleased about her assignment, now that Tolvern thought about it.

One of the corporals drove a forklift containing a flat of refrigerator-size coolers across the cargo bay. Brockett walked alongside, his hand against the coolers to steady them.

“Careful,” he said. “That’s a lot of work in there.”

“Keep back, kid, unless you want your toes mashed,” the driver said.

The corporal had a deep, masculine voice, and the stubble on his face was thick and dark, the kind that seemed poised to bloom into a full-size beard if it weren’t shaved day and night. The contrast with the science officer’s peach fuzz was telling.

But Brockett wouldn’t be dissuaded. “You didn’t tie this down properly,” he said as the forklift stopped and the man jumped down to help his partner load the coolers onto the pod. “Next load, use the straps.”

“Listen, kid, I been doing this since you were in diapers. And I don’t mean two weeks ago. So before you go telling me how to do my job—”

“Do what he says, Corporal,” Tolvern interrupted.

The corporal blinked and stared at her. “Aye, sir. Sorry, sir.” The man returned to his work.

“I don’t know,” Brockett confided to Tolvern. “Maybe I should go down instead of Henry. He’s awfully young.”

Henry Jukes was Brockett’s new lab assistant and even younger than his boss. Nineteen, was that right? Looked about twelve, to be honest. Henry had been a math whiz studying at the Naval Academy in Juneau, but he’d been home on Saxony for semester break when civil war broke out. He’d quickly enlisted to join the rebellion. She didn’t think Henry was overly political, but throw him in a lab full of cool computers and machines that whirred and beeped, and he’d do anything for the cause.

“Does Henry know how to synthesize the antidote?” she asked.

“Not yet, no. So far as I know, I’m the only one who can, unless that Hroom general has figured it out.”

“We don’t know if Mose Dryz has managed or not, but he’s got his other troubles to worry about. He’s still fighting his own civil war, and Apex is biting at his haunches.”

There was another consideration. In addition to internal struggles with the Hroom death cult and the attacks by the savage alien race known as Apex, the military commander of the Hroom Empire was himself a sugar eater. Captain Drake had given the empire the antidote—a great weapon in its struggle against human slavers—but it was unclear if Mose Dryz had done anything with it.

In any event, the sugar world of Hot Barsa was inaccessible to the empire. It was up to Drake’s fleet to spread chaos behind Albion lines.

“I could do it,” Brockett insisted. “I’ve been on Hot Barsa. I’ve dealt with Hroom before. I could explain how the antidote works better than Henry.”

“Henry will go down,” Tolvern said. “We can’t risk losing you.”

“Yes, Captain.” In spite of his brave words, Brockett sounded relieved.

The com link warned Tolvern that they were beginning their deceleration as they approached Hot Barsa. Once they arrived, Tolvern had less than an hour to send the away pod to the surface and get out. Then the three destroyers Drake had warned her about would arrive.

Tolvern touched her ear and told the gunnery to man all stations. Cloaking would shortly come down, and they’d better be ready to go hot.

When that was done, she called Henry Jukes, Sal Ypis, and the two marines who’d be accompanying them to the surface. “Collect your armaments and personal gear and make your way to engineering. I want you strapped down by oh-eight-hundred.”

The orbital fortresses held their fire as Philistine approached. She was one destroyer, and though her cannons were warm and her missile batteries exposed, she wasn’t shooting. The rebel craft wasn’t strong enough to slug it out with a fort, and so the individual commanders seemed content to wait.

Tolvern’s tech officer failed to decode the navy transmissions, but she could easily imagine what they said. Perhaps the destroyer wished to surrender—several vessels had changed allegiances since the civil war began. Or perhaps it was a feint, and there was a heavier force cloaked and approaching from the opposite direction.

Either way, the forts were strong enough to pummel Philistine into submission, yet they had no support craft of their own, since these were out fighting the multiple attacks on the system. Better to sit and wait, they seemed to be thinking. Another hour, no longer, and three loyalist destroyers would come to Hot Barsa’s aid.

Tolvern was happy to encourage this thinking as long as possible. She didn’t need long. In fact, she didn’t want to fight at all, only drop the pod into the atmosphere and scoot for cover. And so Tolvern brought her ship straight in, as if she had nothing to hide. She sent a communication to the orbital defenses, but garbled. Meant to sow confusion, nothing more. At first, it seemed to work.

But when she was a hundred thousand miles out and approaching one of the planet’s small moons, the enemy opened fire. It was a probing attack, a single missile from Fort Gamma. Meant to flush out her intentions, no doubt.

She ordered countermeasures, then squawked a protest. This time, ungarbled. Don’t shoot at us! We’re peaceful.

The enemy didn’t buy it. Fort Gamma resembled a giant, lumpy baked potato about ten miles long, and missiles and torpedoes now launched along a broad front.

Tolvern clenched her handrests on the bridge of Philistine. This was it, her first combat at the helm of her own ship. For a moment, panic came clawing up from her gut, threatening to leave her frozen in terror and indecision. But she heard Captain Drake’s calm voice in her mind, imagined how he would respond. Her fear vanished as quickly as it had arisen.

At the same time, her crew was already performing as ordered. The pilot changed the angle of approach to minimize their vulnerability. The tech officer and the gunnery launched countermeasures. Fire control systems answered fire with fire. Soon, missiles were detonating on the surface of the fort.

“Hold the cannon,” Tolvern said. Her voice sounded calm, authoritative. A voice to be obeyed. “I want them to think we’ll be swinging past for another attack.”

By now, they’d nearly cleared the first fortress and had somehow avoided taking any damage to their shields. In a moment, they’d come into range of two more forts, but she didn’t intend to wait for them to appear.

She opened a channel to the away pod, poised for launch in the engineering bay. “We start the countdown sequence in three minutes.”

“Ready and waiting,” came Corporal Martin’s gruff voice. She was the marine leading the surface expedition.

While the channel was still open, Tolvern heard Henry Jukes’s high, nervous voice. Brockett’s young assistant sounded terrified. Hard to blame him. He was about to be slingshotted in an unpowered away pod toward the planet’s surface at three thousand miles an hour, while enemies tried to blow him to smithereens.

“Captain!” someone broke in from engineering over the com. “We have incoming hostiles.”

Incoming hostiles? What? Where?

Tolvern’s fingers worked the console. Couldn’t be the destroyers. They were still too far out. Ground craft? Something hidden on the far side of the planet? Drake’s entire fleet had been studying Hot Barsa from a distance for weeks now, and there should be nothing here. Not so much as a frigate.

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

“The fort!”

She’d been ignoring the red lights, the flashing warnings, and the heat signatures along the schematic of the small moon. The fort was throwing all sorts of destruction their way, but it was the responsibility of other crew members to neutralize those attacks. Except this.

Now Tolvern understood why the fortress had seemed so calm. It had been hiding a secret. Three torpedo boats, each a third the size of Philistine, launched one by one from a hidden hanger on the side of the moon. They must have been hiding there, already manned and engines hot.

In deep space, torpedo boats of this size escorted larger ships. They were not swift enough or powerful enough to brawl with even a modest-size ship like the rebel destroyer. But here, protected by the massive guns of orbital fortresses, their maneuverability and acceleration made them a lethal addition to the battle.

Tolvern didn’t have time to curse the intelligence failure that had dropped the three ships into her lap, she was crying for evasive maneuvers. One of the enemy craft descended immediately into the stratosphere over Hot Barsa’s northern continent and blocked the destroyer’s descent toward the surface. Launch the pod from here, and it would merely be target practice for enemy guns.

The other two torpedo boats came at Philistine from the rear, forcing her toward a second fortress, now swinging around the planet, already launching missiles.

Philistine shuddered. Class three detonation, the computer said in a dry voice. Thirty-two percent damage to the shields. Kinetic fire raked her underbelly. Missiles and torpedoes raced out to meet her.

“Pull up!” Tolvern cried to her pilot. “Get us out of here.”

The pod was unlaunched, still in the engineering bay where she’d left it. And there it would stay. The mission was already aborted.

She slammed her fist on the handrest. “Dammit!”

Then, embarrassed about her outburst, she concentrated on getting out alive. The engines had taken a hit, and they’d suffered a slow leak to the plasma containment system. She had to build a whole lot of speed before she lost too much juice. With no other options, she pointed away from the three incoming destroyers and accelerated at top speed in the opposite direction. She held her breath, waiting for the torpedo boats to follow, or worse, for scans to reveal new enemies incoming from this direction. No, thank God.

Once they’d escaped the final, pursuing fire from Hot Barsa’s forts, she sent an emergency subspace to where Drake and Rutherford were rendezvousing. She’d failed. Worse, she’d taken so much damage that she’d need help getting out of the system alive.

Finally, Tolvern called the away team to give them the bad news. They’d been down there, quietly waiting out the shuddering attacks in the isolation of the pod. Unsure whether they’d be blown apart or launched without warning toward the planet to complete their mission, all while taking fire. Henry must be white with terror, poor kid. Corporal Martin and the others must be ready to strangle him.

There was no answer. Great. The pod systems must be fried. She told engineering to send someone to give the away team the bad news in person and assess damage. Was the pod even salvageable?

Someone from engineering responded a few moments later. “Multiple hull breaches along the engineering bay. We’ve almost got it contained, but . . . yeah, it don’t look good.”

Tolvern’s mouth went dry. “Tell me.”

“Looks like it punctured the away pod,” the man said. “No life readings on board. Afraid we lost ’em, Captain.”

Chapter Five

A few weeks later, Captain Drake waited in the war room as the other members of his council arrived one by one. He had to control the tempo of this meeting—he couldn’t give out all of the information he was sitting on. If he did, the loss in the Barsa system and their subsequent flight to San Pablo, harried and pursued until friendly mercenaries showed up to tip the balance, would seem like the beginning of Lord Malthorne’s final victory.

Tolvern arrived first, her eyes averted, shamefaced. From her perspective, it had been a debacle. She’d not only failed to launch the pod, but seen her away team killed. Her destroyer, Philistine, had barely escaped and was now being towed to San Pablo for extensive repairs. A few months in command, and she was already bereft of a ship, her crew scattered to other vessels in the fleet.

Rutherford came next, alone. He’d wanted to bring Pittsfield, his second in command, but the war room was already going to be crowded, and Drake didn’t need the distraction. Rutherford’s mouth formed a grim line, and he grumbled the barest greeting at the other two.

Next came Catherine Caites, now captain of her own cruiser. She was roughly Tolvern’s age, and during the initial fleet organization on Saxony, there had been a discussion of whether to put Caites on the cruiser and Tolvern on the destroyer, or vice versa. It was a major promotion for both women. Caites had at least commanded a torpedo boat before, and that settled it. She was given the powerful HMS Richmond.

Rutherford had first elevated the young woman, and his decision now looked prescient. Caites had fought with distinction in the most recent action, single-handedly holding off enemy forces while the rest of Drake’s fleet jumped for safety, and then coming through unscathed herself. Rutherford now greeted Caites as if she were a full peer, in contrast to how he’d addressed Tolvern.

Finally, Drake called in three others from his crew: his pilot, Nyb Pim, Science Officer Noah Brockett, and Henny Capp.

Capp looked nervous as she entered, uncomfortable. She was from a low background, raised in the working-class neighborhoods of York Town. On Saxony, Rutherford had barely tolerated her. Drake willed both of them to hold their tongues.

Rutherford leaned back in his chair. “Well? We’ve failed. Now what?”

Drake considered how much of his new intelligence to admit, and how quickly. Best to start with the good news.

“Not a failure. We lost two mercenary frigates, but we picked up another cruiser.”

Lost didn’t mean destroyed. It meant they’d abandoned the fight, taken their money and run. No doubt they’d return to piracy. They might even prey on Drake’s own shipping out of Saxony.

“You mean Melbourne?” Rutherford asked. “Will she even fly? Six months in the docks, and how will we pay for it?”

“That’s the good news,” Drake said. “We got a communication from Rodriguez in the yards. He’ll fix her for eight thousand pounds.”

Rutherford stared. “After the beating we gave her? Are you certain the villain doesn’t intend to steal her from us? And when?”

“Several months, admittedly.”

Rutherford threw up his hands. “There you go.” He grunted. “And I suppose Tolvern will captain it? She got her first horse shot out from under her, so why not give her a better one?”

“More good news,” Drake said. “Philistine is in better shape. Most of the damage proved superficial. He says three weeks, and she’s back in space. We do some final in-orbit repairs, and she is good to go.”

Tolvern was shifting in her seat, and he was already getting off track. He needed to cut this off before she offered to resign her commission and Rutherford tried to accept.

“We’ve got other worries,” Drake said. “First among them, Dreadnought.”

This got their attention. The word hung in the air. Vice Admiral Thomas Lord Malthorne’s battleship had taken a beating, first at the hands of the Hroom sloops of war, and then from the rebellious ships fighting his attempt to destroy his former allies. Floating in orbit around Albion, it was still the most powerful ship in known space, but they’d assumed it would be in repairs for the better part of a year. Malthorne was fighting on multiple fronts, and the atomic bombing had destroyed the planetside headquarters of the Royal Navy, together with much of the material and personnel who could have done the repairs.

Unfortunately, they’d all been wrong on that score.

“Dreadnought has left orbit,” Drake said. “One of our spies on Fort William said she shipped out three days ago.”

“Bloody hell,” Capp murmured.

“Our source says Malthorne is taking a pass around the sun to test her systems,” Drake continued. “Once she’s proven spaceworthy, he’ll load her up with marines, collect an escort, and set out on an expedition. But where?”

“The planet of Saxony, I should imagine,” Rutherford said. “Malthorne wouldn’t leave orbit for anything less than total victory. With the unrest on Albion, there is no assurance that another claimant won’t seize the throne in his absence. For such a risk, the reward must be very great indeed.”

“Could be Mercia,” Tolvern said. “The planet is not firmly in either camp yet. A show of force would compel allegiance to the crown.”

“I don’t think so,” Drake said, in response to Tolvern. “Malthorne has offered Mercia a carrot—trade concessions, new estates on Hroom worlds for Mercian nobility. All if she remains neutral. Bash Saxony with a big enough stick, and Mercia might decide that carrot looks pretty sweet.”

“Quite right,” Rutherford said. “One swift blow against the only world we control, and we are finished.”

“Then we return to Saxony, sir?” Caites asked. The question wasn’t directed to Drake, but to Rutherford.

“What choice do we have?” Rutherford said. “If we lose Saxony, we are reduced to a fleet without port or resources. May as well turn to piracy—we’ll be finished as opposition to the lord admiral.”

“We can reach Saxony with plenty of time to set up our defenses,” Caites said, “but we’ll be forced to leave Philistine and Melbourne on San Pablo.”

“Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves?” Tolvern asked. “Captain Drake hasn’t ordered any such movement.”

“We have to defend Saxony,” the other woman said. “Unless you’d see us reduced to piracy.”

Capp leaned back in her chair and rubbed at the lion tattoos on her forearm. “And what’s wrong with a bit of piracy? Cut off that bastard’s sugar, take his coin—we’ll hire all the mercenaries we need out here.”

“That is absolute rubbish,” Rutherford said.

Capp shrugged and leaned back farther. Any more, and she’d dump her backside on the floor. “Saxony is a bit of rock. What do we care for it?”

“That bit of rock has fifty million of our people on it,” Caites said.

Drake wanted to let them talk it out, interested in opinions and options, but it seemed that the room was dividing into two camps, and he needed to cut that off before it led to a split.

“Enough arguing about Saxony,” he said. “And Ensign, you will kindly sit up. This isn’t the mess hall.”

Capp did so at once.

Nyb Pim cleared his throat with a sort of humming. “May I ask about Hot Barsa? Are you intending now to abandon it?”

“We’ve still got two hundred thousand doses of antidote,” Brockett said. “We could make another go of it.”

Needless to say, both the former sugar addict and the scientist who’d been working to duplicate the sugar antidote had been all in favor of moving directly against Malthorne’s holdings on Hot Barsa. Turning over the antidote to the free Hroom on the surface could swiftly weaken the admiral’s hold on the world.

“We made an attempt,” Rutherford said. “It failed. It is time to turn to other options.”

“It shouldn’t have failed,” Tolvern said. “It was well conceived. I never counted on those torpedo boats. Caught me off guard, damn it. I should have wondered. Those forts were too bloody passive. Too smug. It was obvious they were going to spring a trap.”

“Any one of us would have made the same assumptions,” Rutherford said. “You deserve no blame. You were a single destroyer, and you fought well.”

Tolvern seemed to appreciate this nod to her abilities. Some of the tension dissolved from her features. “Still. We were close, we nearly launched the pod. Now, the team is dead, and we are several light years away.”

Brockett leaned over and spoke in a low voice for Nyb Pim’s benefit. The alien nodded solemnly. Meanwhile, Caites brought up something on a hand computer, which she showed to Rutherford. Tolvern repeated her self-criticism. Capp brushed it aside. There was some discussion of what, if anything, might have been done to get past those forts.

While these side conversations continued, Drake raised a screen on the table. He brought up a map of the sector, with the human systems stretching along the left side in green, blue, and yellow, and the Hroom Empire a massive swath of red on the right and above. The size of the respective regions was deceptive, as many of those Hroom systems had collapsed into sugar addiction and civil war. He pressed a few buttons, and the colors changed to reflect this. This information would be familiar to most of them, except for a sickly orange underneath and to the rear. It stabbed through the red, already close to bisecting the entire Hroom Empire.

Tolvern spotted it first. “What is that?”

“Apex. They’ve launched a massive assault on the empire.”

“When did this happen?” Rutherford asked.

“When did it happen, or when did I hear of it? The news came yesterday. General Mose Dryz sent me a subspace message asking for help. Seemed to have begun four months ago. More or less at the same time that we were fighting the death fleet.”

This quieted the room. They couldn’t help but notice the length of that salient into Hroom territory. That was a dozen systems, right there, in only four months. All gobbled up by the predatory alien race.

“And the Hroom have the audacity to demand our help?” Rutherford said. “York Town is a smoldering, radioactive ruin thanks to them. What nerve to ask our assistance at this moment.”

“That was not the general’s doing,” Nyb Pim said. “That was a cult dedicated to the god of death.”

“Still Hroom,” Caites said. “There isn’t one person in Albion space who would lift a finger to save them right now.”

“I don’t know about that,” Tolvern said, “but we can’t help them, even if we wanted to. Dreadnought is readying a jump. Malthorne is coming at us. Are we forgetting that? The Hroom are on their own, whether we want it or not.”

“But if we help them—” Nyb Pim began.

“Are you daft?” Capp said. “We can’t even help ourselves. What’re we going to do for the general?”

“You’re all missing a critical detail,” Drake said.

He pushed a button on the console, and the map flipped upside down. They were now looking at it from below. Take away the familiar perspective, and you could see that orange gash through Hroom space for what it was.

“My God,” Rutherford said.

Drake nodded. “That’s right. It’s no attempt to divide the empire. That attack is meant to get at the humans.”

They knew precious little about the bird-like Apex. There were apparently two related, genetically engineered species in the alien civilization. They had energy weapons that could penetrate standard tyrillium armor. They exterminated their enemies, rather than conquered them. Literally ate them, when they could.

The intelligence was sketchy, but it seemed that Apex wars were a struggle for dominance. Humans had only faced them in battle once. Drake, Rutherford, and the pirate ships had defeated a small Apex force with a bit of trickery. Now, it seemed, the aliens wanted to get at the human systems and see who was the true apex predator of the sector. To Apex, the Hroom were just the carcass over which the two predators would be struggling. Like a wolf pack and a grizzly fighting over a dead moose.

“I figure we have four or five months before they reach human space,” Drake continued. “They’ll tear through these outer systems. The New Dutch are scattered, and the Ladino disorganized. The pirates and mercenaries will run—they won’t stand and fight. Maybe another month after that before Apex reaches the Albion worlds.”

“What options does that leave us?” Rutherford said. “Surrender to Lord Malthorne, or keep fighting him and face extermination as a race? It’s a devil’s choice.”

“About Hot Barsa—” Nyb Pim began.

“That plan is dead,” Caites said grimly. “I think we can all agree on that much.”

Rutherford, Tolvern, and Capp nodded. Among the humans, only Brockett looked uncertain, and that was because he seemed to have pinned his hopes on his sugar antidote. Drake thought it time to inject new energy into the failed plan.

“Not entirely, no,” he said. “I would like to consider another move on Hot Barsa.”

“With all due respect,” Rutherford began, with an acidic edge to his voice that indicated a certain lack of respect, “Lord Malthorne’s main flaw as a commander was his insistence on pursuing unwise expeditions. It’s how the death fleet got through—Malthorne wasted time fighting pirates when he should have been returning to Albion with all haste.”

“That is irrelevant,” Tolvern said.

“Hardly irrelevant. That is precisely what Drake is proposing here. We had the element of surprise and failed anyway. Now, the enemy will be prepared. We would need a direct assault with all of our resources to take Hot Barsa. Even then, our chance of success is not assured.”

“That much is true,” Drake agreed. “I wouldn’t expect it to be easy.”

“And to what end?” Rutherford said. “We foment rebellion on Hot Barsa. That takes fruition in a year or two, as slaves become immune to sugar, flee the plantations, and join the slave revolt. Malthorne loses his source of revenue. Meanwhile, the war ends.”

“Because while we’re at Hot Barsa, Malthorne seizes Saxony,” Caites said. “We disrupt his sugar plantations. He ends our entire rebellion.”

Rutherford gestured at her with a short nod, as if her words were so obviously true that they didn’t even need a verbal agreement. “And even if it’s all a feint, if Dreadnought is incapable of jumping from Albion, what about Apex? The aliens will be at our throats, and we’ll be no closer to defeating Malthorne. Humans will be divided. Then destroyed.”

“You are forgetting the psychological impact of attacking Hot Barsa,” Drake said. “Spreading rebellion was never a long-term plan. With Dreadnought back in the space lanes, it’s more likely than ever to have the desired effect.”

He explained his strategy. They would gather whatever mercenary forces they could muster, pull the other ships away from Saxony, and bring everything at Hot Barsa. They’d drop a team to the surface, spread the antidote far and wide, and send taunting messages to Albion boasting of what they’d accomplished.

Malthorne’s weakness was pride. He’d earlier let the Hroom death fleet slip through while he launched a punitive expedition against pirates. On another occasion, he’d arrested Drake’s parents and murdered Drake’s sister to retaliate for the burning of his manor house on Hot Barsa. He’d sent Rutherford far and wide to track down and kill Drake. The lord admiral was a man who acted out of anger and revenge.

“What will he do when he learns we’ve all but abandoned Saxony?” Drake said. “Will he take Dreadnought and seize the planet? Or will he ignore it and come after us? I think he’ll come. With his sugar plantations threatened, I’m almost certain of it.”

There was a long, full pause.

“That is a terrible gamble,” Rutherford said at last.

“We are reduced to such wagers,” Drake said. “We must defeat Malthorne and do so quickly. If not, Apex will arrive to find us weaker than the Hroom. Just another carcass to pick over.”

“Then it will end at Hot Barsa,” Rutherford said. “A final naval battle. The winner leads the defense. The loser dies.”

“I’d suggest surrender if I thought Malthorne would take it,” Drake said. “It would be worth it to save Albion.”

“Oh, he would take our surrender,” Rutherford said. “Under generous terms, no doubt. But then he would renege on the arrangement and hang the lot of us, the defense of our home worlds be damned.”

“Yes, exactly that.”

Rutherford glanced at Caites. She raised her eyebrows and gave a little shrug. Drake looked to his own people. Nyb Pim seemed eager, while Brockett looked more circumspect. He would be imagining his own role in this; with Henry Jukes dead, there was nobody else who could fill the critical role on the away team. Capp and Tolvern looked ready to go along with whatever Drake suggested.

“Then it’s settled,” Drake said, without waiting for Rutherford to give his official assent. The time for that had passed. Drake had listened, he had shared information, and now he would decide. “Send out the word. There’s no disguising our plan this time. We’ll come in like we mean it.”

It was a single, desperate roll of the dice. God help him if the numbers came up wrong.

Chapter Six

Two days later, Drake and Tolvern were planetside, standing on the blistering tarmac at the San Pablo spaceyards. Isabel Vargus’s pirate frigate Outlaw sat shimmering in the heat. It had been repaired from the damage of the Battle of Albion, and now Vargus had returned to port to install a new missile battery. She stood with her hands on her hips, seemingly oblivious to the heat, shouting up at the crew doing final maintenance, while Drake looked over the guns.

Vargus’s mechanical eye rotated to follow Drake as he reached up to touch the tyrillium armor of the underbelly. It felt sound enough—that slightly yielding surface that could nevertheless absorb laser energy and turn away massive explosions—but it was black and scarred, the repairs like makeup over a badly burned face.

“I’ll paint her belly next time around,” Vargus said.

“You managed to repaint the shark teeth on the nose,” Tolvern said.

“Aye. Got to look to the important details.”

“You’ve even put blood dripping off the teeth,” Tolvern said. “Anyone ever get close enough to see it?”

Vargus grinned. “By the time you see the blood, you’re being boarded. But it’s for the yards. Reminds people not to mess with me. Menacing, wouldn’t you say?”

Menacing, all right. But also one ugly piece of work. Back when Ed Robertson of the Royal Navy flew her, she was a sleek corvette. A wolf, meant to hunt in a pack. Now, re-christened Outlaw and overhauled several times, she more resembled a giant horned lizard. Tough enough, but no beauty to her.

Isabel Vargus had once compared herself to her ship. Her sister, Catarina, was the beautiful one. The younger of the two, Catarina had received a posh education on Albion and didn’t have a face marred by injury. Drake thought Isabel overly hard on herself. There was still plenty of beauty in her. And where was Catarina, anyway? Some distant system, raising her secret pioneering fleet. Those ships, and especially Catarina’s own Orient Tiger, would have been a powerful ally in the fight. Isabel, sturdy and dependable as her ship, was still here. That counted for a good deal in Drake’s book.

“You’ll be ready to fly?” he asked.

“I could leave right now, if I needed to,” Vargus said. “In fact, if I hadn’t been scraping around for your fleet, I’d probably be in orbit already. It’s kept me away from my work.”

“Any troubles finding people?”

“Nah, you’ve got a good reputation. Plenty of blokes happy to fly for you. So long as you hand over the gold up front. And you’re the one giving orders, not that stuffed shirt, Rutherford.”

In many ways, Drake was as much of a stuffed shirt as Rutherford, or had been, anyway. He’d never meant to consort with pirates and mercenaries, that was for sure. But he’d tried to carry over as much honor as he could. He paid his debts. He thrashed anyone who crossed him, and thrashed those who crossed his loyal compatriots. Fly next to Blackbeard and you might be killed in battle—those were the risks—but you’d never be cheated.

“I want my guns aligned before we launch,” Vargus said. “Easier to fix here than in orbit. But the other ships are coming out of the hangar. Take a look. Tell me if there’s anything you don’t like.”

Some of the craft were already out, sitting on the tarmac while forklifts and stevedores hauled in fresh supplies. Others came creeping out, pulled by lorries. Drake and Tolvern took a walk to inspect them.

Drake was already perspiring before they set out, but sweat soon streamed down his temples and from his armpits. San Pablo had been a Hroom world, but this western continent was now given over to Ladino settlements. It had been warm last time they’d visited these yards, but the hot season had arrived. It was not only baking beneath the direct sun, but humid, like a steam bath.

“I suppose I should get used to the weather,” Tolvern said. “It’s pretty much like this all the time in the lowlands of Hot Barsa.”

“It was brutal enough in the highlands.” He eyed her. “When did you figure it out?”

“That you were sending me on the away team? About three seconds after you said we’d be going back.” Tolvern unfastened her vest to let it hang open. Sweat dampened the linen shirt underneath. “Your first away team was killed. We need a new one. Brockett is a given—nobody else understands the antidote now that Henry is dead. I figured you were eying Nyb Pim to replace Sal Ypis. You need a loyal Hroom translator. Capp could be your firepower. That leaves only a commander.”

“And it turns out that I have an able military leader who is temporarily bereft of her ship. She is the logical choice for the mission.”

“Hah. Able? Not so sure about that part. I had one command, and I blew it.”

“Could have been worse,” Drake said. “You could have lost your ship.”

“Didn’t I? It’s out of commission for weeks.”

Tolvern tossed her head to the two largest hangars in the yard. Rodriguez was repairing the crippled HMS Melbourne in one, and in the other, Tolvern’s destroyer.

“Let me tell you about my first command,” Drake said. “I took the helm at Fort William. I was supposed to leave Albion orbit, take a swing around Thor to get the feel for my ship and new crew, and then rendezvous with a task force under Captain Peter Daw to jump to Fantalus. Do you know Daw?”

Tolvern shook her head.

“He’s retired now. An old fellow when I served under him, with mutton-chop whiskers so big they needed their own berth. A perpetually stiff upper lip and eyebrows drawn up in disdain as if the universe itself was an affront to his dignity. So much starch in his uniform, he could have been killed in battle and it would have kept him propped up at the helm. Not the sort of man you wanted to keep waiting.

“So when one of my new engines malfunctioned, I didn’t return to Fort William like I should have. Instead, I ran it hot to get to the rendezvous in time, figuring we were putting into port a few days after the jump, where I could see it repaired. Engineering warned me. I ignored the warning. Ten days into my first command, I had to dump plasma to keep my ship from blowing up.”

Tolvern laughed. “That’s pretty embarrassing, all right.”

“Oh, it gets worse. Imagine this. We were nearly at jump speed when I had to dump, so now I tell Daw to go through, and I’ll meet him on the other side. I can make it to port on one engine, no problem. He goes through, and engineering tells me I need to squeeze out a bit more speed or I won’t make it through the jump. So I run my second engine hot.”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t make it.”

“Oh, I made it. The engine didn’t, though. We arrived dead in the water. Nothing but auxiliary power. I had to be towed.”

Tolvern winced. “Ouch. Why have I never heard this story before?”

“If it had happened to you, would you be spreading it around?” Drake remembered the smirks on the faces of the navy engineers as they strolled onto his ship, cracking jokes about his broken-down engines. “And you don’t fix a burned-out plasma engine with duct tape and chewing gum—you need a new containment field. I would be sixteen days at the naval yards while Daw set off without me. A hunk of rock twelve million miles from anything—my crew was thrilled, let me tell you.”

“Wait, is this the same base where you fought the Hroom raiding party?”

Drake allowed a smile. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

“I’ve heard that part.”

“I was waiting to see if the Admiralty would court-martial me or merely toss my captain’s bars in the trash when three sloops of war attacked the naval outpost. I held them off for sixty-four hours while I waited for Daw to relieve me.”

“And that’s why you didn’t lose your commission, I suppose.”

“You feel like a goat now, Tolvern,” he told her, “but take care of business on Hot Barsa, and you’ll return feeling ten feet tall. They’ll build a statue to you back home some day.”

“Hah. Even on Auckland, they’ve got bigger celebrities than that.”

“Who? The annual winners of the local sheep dog trials?” Drake said. He and Tolvern were both from the same sleepy rock way out on the end of the Zealand Islands. “Or maybe that guy who built his entire home out of seashells. Remember him?”

“Thanks, Captain,” she said.

“For what?”

“For making me feel better.”

“It’s always a good idea to pump someone up before you send her to her near-certain death.” He said this with a smile in his voice, but perhaps it was a little too close to the truth, because her expression turned serious again.

They spent a little bit of time looking at the mercenary ships on hire. Mostly pirates, obviously, although in a time of war, that designation was fluid. Malthorne had hired a few privateers himself to harass shipping out of Saxony, but Drake had an easier time finding ships. Malthorne had ordered the atomic bombardment of San Pablo’s eastern continent, destroying the Hroom cities on that side of the planet in order to stir up war against the empire. Even on the human side, that gesture had been taken poorly.

There were several small schooners and two frigates, plus several ships that were harder to define. New Dutch and Ladino craft stripped down and cobbled together from so many pieces that Drake could only categorize them as “war ships,” “salvagers,” and “armed galleons.” Not to mention a few that he considered so underarmed and poorly armored that it was pointless to hire them at all. Tiny three- or four-men craft that had to be hauled through jump points, but then could scurry around asteroid belts, staying out of the way of powerful enemies. Unless Isabel Vargus had a darn good reason, he’d tell her to cut them loose.

The sum total was unimpressive. Drake thought Blackbeard and Vigilant could handle the lot. Certainly, they’d be no match for Malthorne’s heavy cruisers, corvettes, and destroyers, let alone Dreadnought. But, if you threw in Vargus’s Outlaw, plus the always-reliable Pussycat, he supposed they would serve their purpose.

“I wish we had Orient Tiger,” Tolvern said after they’d chatted briefly with one of the schooner captains. “Catarina’s ship is better than any of these, and I’ll wager she’s ten times the commander, too.”

“Catarina Vargus only looks out for herself,” he said. “So put that idea out of your head.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m just saying. If there’s a way to put out the word, if we can lure her back, she’s worth the money. I’d even take that scary mate of hers with the Gatling gun for an arm.”

By now, they’d taken a tour around the tarmac and visually inspected the mercenary armada. The shuttle was waiting to haul them back into orbit, where the fleet was finishing taking on supplies in preparation for a quick departure, but Tolvern wanted to take a final look at her destroyer. They entered the hangar to see her ship stretched out beneath cranes. Men and women crawled like insects over the hull, using torches to cut loose segments of damaged plating. Holes opened deep into the interior, where others worked on the electrical, plumbing, and other internal systems.

Tolvern muttered a low oath. Then, “Sorry for the bad language, sir. I just—to see her like this.”

“I understand. Get it out of your system and move on. You’ve got a new mission.”

“Yes, sir.” She paused. “So, me, Brockett, Capp, and Nyb Pim? Will you bring on Philistine’s pilot while we’re gone?”

“Not Capp. She stays on Blackbeard,” Drake said. “She’ll pilot while Nyb Pim is on Hot Barsa, translating for you.”

“I could use a marine. Someone handy with a gun. Who will go in her place?”

“Carvalho.”

He said it simply, but studied Tolvern’s face to see how she’d react. Tolvern and Capp had become friends of sorts since those initial days of the mutiny, in spite of their class and education differences. But Tolvern had never warmed to the rough Ladino gunner. He was Capp’s lover, and seemed to enjoy goading Tolvern. Drake didn’t think Carvalho held any malice for her, but Tolvern took it seriously.

“Carvalho is good with a gun,” she said, tone cautious. “Keeps his head in a scrape. I used to think he was a backstabbing crook. More interested in drinking, thieving, and screwing anything that walks than being a good crew member.”

“And now? What do you think?”

“I suppose he hasn’t stolen anything for a while.”

Drake smiled. “Capp will miss him for the other two things.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Drinking, she can do on her own. And I’m sure she’ll find a fellow to fill in for the rest.”

He’d lightened up on the fraternization rules, partly because he’d violated those rules himself with Catarina Vargus, but he still preferred having Capp and Carvalho separated during combat. In any event, Carvalho would manage well enough on Hot Barsa. No questioning his bravery or ability.

“Well, then,” Drake said. “Let’s get back to Blackbeard and figure out how to get you down to Hot Barsa alive.”

“I would appreciate that, sir. And to be frank, I’d appreciate making plans for a safe exit, while we’re at it.”

Chapter Seven

Drake emerged from the return jump into the Barsa system to find an urgent message from the Earl of Westmarch, who had been installed as governor of Saxony. No coward, he’d been justifiably alarmed to see the remaining rebel ships abandon Saxony and set off for parts unknown. Meanwhile, the governor had caught wind of Malthorne’s departure from Albion on Dreadnought. Word had it that the brutal General Fitzgibbons had troop transports filled with Royal Marines.

Malthorne could only mean to seize Saxony and flatten the rebellion in one blow, the earl insisted. Drake absolutely must return at once to mount a defense. The earl was an efficient administrator and a calm hand at the wheel in managing the jittery populace of Saxony, and so the strength of his demand indicated near panic, so far as Drake could tell.

Another problem was Mercia. The third planet in the core Albion kingdom had been flirting with joining the rebellion for the past several months, but now the Mercians had cold feet. Rutherford’s uncle, the Duke of West Mercia, declined to stake his claim to the throne of Albion. This, in spite of the fact that he was closer in line than Malthorne, was not a usurper, and seemed to have no tyrannical impulses. Overthrow Malthorne, and it was clear that the people of Albion and her two colony worlds would support the duke.

But the duke said he didn’t want the throne. Neither did the other powerful dukes, earls, and barons of Mercia want anything to do with the rebellion. The Mercians still claimed neutrality, but they would apparently return to Albion’s fold without complaint if the rebellion was put down.

Blasted cowards is what they were. They didn’t want Malthorne—the man had as good as killed King Bartholomew himself and meant to corrupt the throne for his own vainglory—but neither did they think the rebellion stood any chance. Not with Saxony abandoned by the rebel fleet.

Drake calmly sent responses to both Saxony and Mercia. In it, he broadcast his next move. Drake had tested the Barsa system’s defenses and found them wanting. Now, he was back in the system to mount a full-scale assault on Hot Barsa. He meant to wipe out Malthorne’s forces in the system, capture or destroy his sugar galleons, and widely distribute arms and the sugar antidote to rebellious Hroom. Once the primary source of Malthorne’s wealth was wiped out, he would return to Saxony to defend the planet.

All of this pronouncement was meant to find its way into Malthorne’s hands. To goad him, force him to defend his land and wealth on Hot Barsa.

Had Drake been the one in possession of Albion, with eighty percent of the Albionish population, two-thirds of the fleet, and the majority of its resources, he’d have abandoned Hot Barsa and focused on seizing Saxony. At the helm of Dreadnought and with Fitzgibbons’s marines, that could be done whether Drake and Rutherford returned to Saxony’s defense or not.

But he was not the lord admiral. The lord admiral was a proud, vengeful man. Acquisitive and greedy. Drake counted on these character flaws to force Malthorne to defend Barsa. And so he made sure that the enemy received word of his intentions.

But first, a terrific fight awaited them as they approached Hot Barsa. Two enemy cruisers, backed by three times that number of destroyers, corvettes, and frigates, took up position near Cold Barsa, readying a defense of the inner worlds. Captain Lindsell, formerly of HMS Calypso, had been given command of Churchill. She was the third of the Punisher-class cruisers, equal to Vigilant and Blackbeard. Lindsell was a hothead. Why was he holding back in a defensive posture? He must be expecting aid or planning a trick of some kind.

Well, then. Drake had a few moves of his own to play.

He sent Vigilant and a few support craft in a feint toward the enemy fleet, then charged the bulk of his forces toward Hot Barsa. Lindsell didn’t bite. Instead of waiting for the attack, his fleet abandoned Cold Barsa and moved to intercept Drake. Rutherford turned and followed in Vigilant.

Meanwhile, four more rebel ships had jumped into the system from a jump point deep on the Z-axis, opposite the sun. These were two captured and refurbished cruisers, HMS Richmond and HMS Calypso, plus two missile frigates. Caites was in command on Richmond, and she’d picked up a corvette and a destroyer from the forces called out from Saxony. Caites’s ships recovered quickly from the jump and raced toward Hot Barsa to join the battle that was brewing in the inner system.

There were now four separate forces converging on the sugar world. The most powerful of these was Lindsell’s fleet. It would arrive shortly after Drake and pin his forces against the forts. Then it would be up to Rutherford and Caites to relieve him while he dropped Tolvern to the surface.

Or, he could abandon the attack on Hot Barsa, gather his forces, and fight Lindsell away from the planetary defenses. If he meant to destroy them in open battle, that would be the prudent move.

But there was a ticking clock. He had to get Tolvern in and then withdraw. Find out if Lord Malthorne was on his way or moving on Saxony.

Drake woke from his next sleep cycle and arrived on the bridge only three hours out from Hot Barsa, with the ship already decelerating. Capp was in the pilot’s chair, with a young ensign assisting her. Nyb Pim was no longer on the ship; the fight would go on without the Hroom pilot’s masterful skills.

“Are we on course?” Drake asked Capp as he settled into his chair. “Good. Get me Outlaw.”

Isabel Vargus appeared on the screen moments later. She flashed that lean, wolfish smile that both Vargus sisters wore when anticipating battle. “Ready for bloodshed and plunder, Drake?”

“We’re not here to take prizes,” he said.

“As you wish.”

“Is the away pod ready to go?”

“Everything but the passengers. Tolvern is here with me. The others are relaxing in the mess. Should I send them down?”

“Still too early. Give me another hour—I’ll let you know.”

“Got it.”

“Don’t forget those torpedo boats when you go in. We’ve got to assume they’re still lurking in their hangars. Might be other nasty surprises, too. Those forts pack a punch.”

“You just keep those cruisers off my back, James Drake. I’ll worry about the forts.”

These pirates could be prickly when it came to their ships, but Isabel Vargus had allowed Tolvern to assist on the bridge. For that, she was grateful. It helped with the nerves. Nyb Pim, Brockett, and Carvalho sat in the mess, eating, playing cards. Waiting and helpless, the way she saw it.

It was awful being away from one’s station in battle. You felt the ship’s engines straining, the artificial gravity shifting you about as it kept the massive g-forces from turning your body to jelly. If something hit the ship, it shuddered through the hull and into your very bones, but you had no idea how serious it was until the sirens started and the air filled with smoke. No, it was better to be up here, watching the action play out.

As for the battle itself, she didn’t like how it started. Drake’s fleet was delayed by the slower mercenary vessels, and Lindsell caught him before they’d come within range of the orbital fortresses. He’d be forced to deal with this threat, and so Tolvern was not surprised when his strong, serious face appeared on the viewscreen.

“This is it, Vargus,” he said. “You’re on your own. Take care of my people.” And then he was gone.

“You ready?” Vargus asked.

“Just about.” Tolvern didn’t rise from her seat. “How long have I got?”

The other woman shrugged. “Ten more minutes and we’re under fire. I’m gonna bob and weave to get past that, then we’ll make one pass before I skip off the atmosphere. Second pass is when you launch. Let’s say twenty minutes until I need you strapped down.”

“In that case, I’ll stay. Better send those other guys down, though.”

A raised eyebrow from Vargus. “Oh, sure. Make them sweat it out.”

Tolvern returned a smile. “Command has its privileges.”

“Hah. In that case, make yourself useful. We’ve got an underpowered defense grid computer. Once the fur is flying, it can’t keep track of it all. Kipper has his hands full and could use your help. Forget my bloody shark teeth—we survive this encounter by avoiding direct fighting. You see anything coming in straight, launch chaff. I’ll turn and take it at an angle.”

Vargus turned away and gave orders to Tolvern’s companions, sending them to the away pod. Tolvern took her place at the defense grid station.

She found herself liking Vargus. It helped that Isabel hadn’t slept with the captain like her younger sister had. But there was a certain whimsy about her that Tolvern hadn’t noticed before. She’d bleached her hair since the Battle of Albion, except for a shock of pink. Her vest buckles were made of punched-out coins, and her vest sported a fringe of tiny silver bells that jingled when she walked. Unlike the businesslike bridge of a naval ship—which Blackbeard maintained even after going rogue—Outlaw’s reflected a lighthearted crew. Skulls, plastic sharks, and strings of beads hung from consoles. The captain used an Old Earth-style ship’s wheel to swivel her chair about to face various crew members.

Even the way Vargus spoke to her crew was different, more like they were peers. Not the Royal Navy way of stuffy formality. Of course, there was a reason why naval forces fought with discipline and deadly precision, while these mercenary types scattered when things got tough. Let’s see how they did when those forts let loose.

But curiously, the forts held their fire, at least initially. Vargus sent Pussycat out front. Aguilar’s squat, warthog-like pirate frigate suffered poor maneuverability, but boasted enough arms and armor to deliver and take a beating. Pussycat was to trade blows with the forts while the rest of the mercenary force swooped in for a closer pass.

But nothing happened. The nearest fort, the same ten-mile-long baked-potato rock whose torpedo boats had mauled Tolvern’s destroyer a few weeks ago, swung around the planet and out of range without firing a single shot. A second fort came around the planet. The instruments on board Outlaw lit up with enemy targeting systems, but the thing didn’t fire. Pussycat launched an exploratory missile. It thumped the hollowed-out asteroid, but did little damage. Still no return fire.

Vargus cursed. “What the hell are they playing about?”

Tolvern remembered the torpedo boat surprise. “Careful. Whatever it is, it’s bound to be ugly.”

“Better get yourself below. Won’t be long now.”

Tolvern left the bridge, reluctant to depart before the mystery was resolved. She hurried to the lift, prepared to brace herself against the wall if they were hit. The lift dropped her right into the frigate’s hold. Long and deep enough to hold plenty of contraband or plundered loot, it was currently stuffed floor to ceiling with ordnance: crates of bullets for Gatling guns, stacked and secured shells for the cannon, and missiles and torpedoes of various origins. All it took was one shot penetrating Outlaw’s armor along the belly or spine, and boom! You’d need a microscope to detect the remains.

The away pod was wedged into the back corner, between a pallet of powdered soup and six casks of rocket propellant. She had to turn sideways to get to the airlock button. The door zipped open, and she squeezed in.

Her three companions were already inside, squeezed between the supplies of the away mission. Nyb Pim had folded himself like an insect to get his long legs in place. Brockett spread his legs to fit around crates of antidote, food, and other supplies. Carvalho, wearing a tank top that showed off his broad shoulders and muscular arms, carried a crate of goods on his lap.

Carvalho’s eyes ranged up and down Tolvern’s body as if he were checking her out in a tight gown instead of the formless jumpsuit she was wearing. She didn’t have much of a figure to look at, anyway. Too slender and boy-like. She knew he was giving her that look to throw her off her guard.

“About time,” he said with a grin. “What were you doing up there, having tea with Vargus?”

“Tea and biscuits.” Tolvern sat in the empty seat, pulled the harness over her shoulders, and buckled down. “And those little cucumber sandwiches with the crust cut off. Now get that crate off your lap and strap it down. Soon as we’re off, it turns into a missile.”

Carvalho did as she said, then leaned back in his seat with his hands behind his head and his elbows resting on more coolers. “Seems pretty quiet. Aren’t we in combat yet?”

As if in response, the ship shimmied. It was a subtle feeling, quickly compensated for by the antigrav, but Tolvern caught it well enough. Something was happening up there.

“Seems the answer is yes,” Tolvern said.

Brockett closed his eyes. “When do we launch?”

“Getting cold feet over there?” Carvalho said.

“It’s the waiting that’s killing me.”

“How you doing, Pilot?” Carvalho asked Nyb Pim. “You are made of braver stuff, I would think.”

The Hroom answered in his high voice. “I am feeling a sensation that could best be described as a mixture of anticipation and absolute terror.”

“Nerves, my purple friend. That’s what you’ve got. A bad case of the jitters. You’ll be fine. You, too, Brockett. It’s Tolvern here I’m worried about. Sending in a girl to do a man’s work—that’s risky business.”

“Good thing Capp isn’t here,” Tolvern said. “She’d have your stones off for that one.”

Carvalho laughed again. “Just a bit of fun, Commander. Won’t hurt you to laugh at a joke now and then.”

“It’s Captain Tolvern, now,” she said in an icy tone. “Keep up the insubordination, and I’ll be taking your balls off myself.”

He blinked. “What—?”

Tolvern smiled sweetly. “That was me, laughing at a joke.”

“Hah! There you have it!”

Vargus’s voice came over the com. “Ready down there?”

Tolvern had been subconsciously expecting Jane’s cool computer voice and was startled to hear an actual person. It wasn’t comforting. Vargus sounded tense and anxious. Again, Tolvern wondered what was happening. No time to ask, and she shouldn’t distract the woman from her duties anyway, not to satisfy idle curiosity.

“Ready for launch,” Tolvern confirmed.

“We’re looking at—let’s see—I’m going to say twenty seconds. Good luck.” She cut out.

“Twenty?” Brockett squeaked. “What about a countdown? I’m not ready.”

Carvalho checked his harness. “You said the waiting was the worst part.” His Ladino accent and slow delivery made him sound especially indifferent. “Well, you got what you—”

Suddenly, they were thrown against their harnesses. Carvalho’s words choked off in a squeak. Then the world was spinning as the pod tossed about. Tolvern looked through the tiny port window opposite and saw the red-and-blue planet spinning crazily beneath them. Outlaw spun past them on the opposite side, receding quickly.

The disorientation was so sudden and so complete that for a moment Tolvern thought she’d lose her breakfast, and then they’d have vomit spinning around with them. But the pod shortly settled into a single, straightforward motion. She fought down the nausea, but her stomach was still a nervous, writhing mass of snakes.

“That wasn’t twenty seconds,” Brockett protested.

“It was apparently a rough estimate,” she said.

“How long until we’re down?” he asked.

“Never done this before. Not long, I would think.”

Nyb Pim spoke up. “Three or four minutes to hit the atmosphere, then a plummet to 25,000 feet, at which point the parachutes begin to deploy. Another seven or eight minutes until we hit the surface.”

“That long?” Tolvern asked.

They were vulnerable every moment they were above ground. From the assault on Malthorne’s estate last year—the one that had seized the sugar antidote and brought Brockett onto the crew—she remembered that the orbital fortresses were poorly positioned to shoot down into the atmosphere. But there could be ground fighter craft and anti-air weapons to target them.

“Um, guys?” Brockett said. “I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but is that one of ours?”

Brockett pointed at the port window. Tolvern had looked away when the spinning view made her sick. Now, she returned her gaze to the window. A ship came directly at them. It had the long, lean shape of a torpedo boat.

No, it was not one of theirs.

A torpedo boat had two tubes, plus a light belly gun for destroying small craft and causing general mayhem. This gun was pointed in their direction, and now it flared to life.

Chapter Eight

Drake had his hands full holding off Captain Lindsell’s fleet of cruisers and support craft when Isabel Vargus tried to hail him on the screen. He didn’t have time to deal with her. Rutherford hadn’t yet arrived to relieve him, and Lindsell pressed the attack the moment Vargus’s pirates left him for their run at the planet. Drake kept his distance from the forts. His only goal was to shield Vargus while she sent the away pod to the surface.

The forts were still holding their fire. They’d absorbed Pussycat’s barrage, seemingly unconcerned about whatever minimal damage their dug-in armaments were taking. Neither did they attack Blackbeard and her fellow ships from the rear.

Vargus hailed him again, this time more urgently. He put her on.

“Torpedo boats,” she said. “They’ve spotted the pod and are going after it.”

“Get in there. You need to protect Tolvern as she goes down.”

“I won’t last five minutes against those forts.”

“They’re not even shooting,” he said.

“That’s what worries me. What are they hiding?”

“Vargus, get down there and cover her.”

“Look at your screen, you dolt! That’s what I’m doing. Now I need you to cover me.”

Ah, now he understood. He’d been so worried about Lindsell, who was now splitting off two destroyers to gnaw at Blackbeard’s flank—driving off the missile frigate that was protecting that side of Drake’s formation—that he hadn’t taken close enough note of Vargus’s own skirmishes. She was chasing three torpedo boats that were skimming a few hundred miles above the atmosphere.

Vargus and her fleet had both speed and power enough to deal with three torpedo boats. But the action was taking place to the northwest of one of Hot Barsa’s orbital forts, and a second fort came swinging around the planet over the north polar region. Vargus would shortly be caught in a devastating crossfire.

Drake cut his connection with Vargus and turned to his tech officer. “Smythe, get me Rutherford.”

Lindsell was coming at him again, having weakened Drake’s center by forcing him to address the attack on his missile frigate.

“Rutherford is still five minutes out,” Smythe said. “Vigilant’s batteries are at the ready. Rutherford is hot for battle and awaiting orders.”

That explained Lindsell’s fresh attack. He was trying to get his licks in before Vigilant and her support craft arrived. Yet there was no attempt to force the rebels closer to the orbital fortresses. That’s what Drake would have done; smash his enemy against the planetary defenses. Unfortunately, Drake couldn’t take advantage of this lapse. He had to relieve Vargus.

“Capp, take us down.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Commander—” Drake turned to the commander’s chair, but of course, Captain Tolvern wasn’t there. Instead, it was Lieutenant Oglethorpe.

Oglethorpe had been filling the role of first mate since Tolvern’s promotion. An able man, but without her ability to juggle multiple tasks. Oglethorpe was coordinating with the gunnery at the moment and couldn’t be torn away. So Drake sent orders to his beleaguered frigate and the single destroyer he’d sent to relieve her.

Pull back toward Vigilant, he told them. Captain Rutherford was to take command of the frigate and her support craft, then hit the enemy hard enough to get Lindsell’s attention.

By the time Drake turned back to his console, Capp had taken Blackbeard away from her protective screen and was charging after Vargus near the planet’s surface. Moments later, they were in range. Drake hit the closer, more powerful fort first, pounding the surface with missiles, while holding his cannon in reserve, ready to blast any exposed armaments.

At last, the fort responded. It launched two torpedoes and let loose with its cannon. Blackbeard rolled to present a broadside. The hull vibrated with outgoing fire.

“Class three detonation expected in eight seconds,” Jane warned coolly.

One of the enemy missiles had locked on and snaked its way past countermeasures. Drake braced himself. It crunched into the fore shield, just above the bridge. The explosion knocked Capp from her seat. Alarm bells clanged.

“Bloody hell!” Capp said, picking herself up.

“Fore shield at eighty-two percent,” Jane said.

More sound and fury than actual damage. Drake relaxed his grip as the ship stabilized. A brief, pungent smell of burning plastic entered the bridge, but the filtration system whisked it away. The alarms shut down, and lights went from flashing red, to orange, to green.

Eighty-two percent. That wasn’t bad. Not good, either, and he didn’t want to take any more blows if he could help it.

“Get us beneath it,” he told Capp. Then, to Oglethorpe, “Tell the gunnery to ready the lower battery.”

Capp rolled the ship as they approached the fort from beneath. Now belly up, they let loose with the smaller lower battery. Lights flashed along the length of the orbital fortress. Dust and debris spouted into space like ash from miniature volcanoes. The fort fired back, but the response was subdued.

“They’re still holding back,” Drake said. “What is going on?”

Perhaps if Tolvern had been there, she might have had a response, but nobody on the bridge seemed to have any suggestions. Never mind—he’d take the weak response and hope it lasted.

With Blackbeard guarding the pirate fleet’s rear, Pussycat and two schooners got into a scrape with the polar fortress. That left Vargus’s own Outlaw free to hunt the torpedo boats. The torpedo boats had been shooting their guns at something now entering the upper atmosphere, but had to abandon the chase. They bobbed and weaved, trying to come back toward the protection of the fortresses.

Outlaw caught one of them, disabling her engines. Drake drove off the other two with missiles.

“Where’s that pod?” Drake asked. “Is it in the atmosphere yet?”

“Must be,” Smythe said. “I can’t detect it, anyway. Not giving off any sort of signal, either.”

Was it supposed to? He couldn’t remember what Outlaw had been carrying. Navy tech, he thought, the pod modified to double for both away missions and escape. Those torpedo boats had been tearing off shot from their Gatling guns. A small pod plummeting through the atmosphere hardly made an easy target, but they’d thrown a lot of metal out there. One on-target burst would tear through that pod like it was a tin can.

He couldn’t worry about that now. Tolvern was either safely descending, or not. Nothing he did here would change that. It was time to pull free of the planet. Rutherford’s forces were now fully engaged with Lindsell’s larger fleet and barely holding on.

Blackbeard swung toward Outlaw, now pulling up with her schooner escort. Still exchanging fire with the nearest fortress, the combined force now fought their way to Pussycat. Once Blackbeard and the entire mercenary fleet had formed a single unit, they broke clear.

He braced himself for a final surprise from the orbital fortresses. A nasty departing gift that would explain why they’d held back during the battle. But no, the forts seemed content to let them depart. How strange.

A thought occurred to him. What if—? No, there would be time to worry about that later.

For now, he had to worry about Captain Lindsell. The man was proving an able commander. His own ship, Churchill, was the equal of Vigilant and Blackbeard, and he used his armaments to full effect, while sending in his destroyers and corvettes to drive off Vigilant’s support craft. The smaller ships Drake had left behind were helpless to intervene. In fact, Lindsell’s advantage was growing with every passing moment. He’d already wounded several craft, while suffering minimal injury himself.

And then Drake came roaring into the fight. He brought Blackbeard straight at Lindsell, while Outlaw and Pussycat targeted his vulnerable left flank. That left the enemy cruisers pincered between Blackbeard and Vigilant. The two sides exchanged blows for several moments before Lindsell ordered a retreat. He first tried to get past Blackbeard to reach the protection of the fortress guns. Drake landed two torpedoes against the lead enemy destroyer. Explosions rippled along her surface.

Lindsell now ducked down on the vertical axis. Destroyers formed a protective screen to guard his rear. Drake and Rutherford weren’t able to prevent the enemy’s escape, but they pounded Lindsell’s destroyers as they fled. All of them suffered damage, some serious. One lost its entire rear shield, and if the rebels could have landed one more blow, they’d have either destroyed it or forced its surrender.

Unfortunately, Drake’s forces were all out of position, and he was unable to give chase. By the time he regrouped, Lindsell was gone.

But it was a victory. Only four crew members had died across the entire fleet, these lost when a shell penetrated a schooner’s bridge and killed her officers. The schooner itself would be easily repaired, but that was one captain who wouldn’t be enjoying his mercenary bonus.

A subspace had been waiting for Drake when the battle ended. It came from a source in the fleet, one who had already passed Drake valuable information on two other occasions. Dreadnought had jumped into the Gryphon Shoals. That was not the course for Saxony. It would, however, bring Dreadnought toward Hot Barsa.

Rutherford came on the viewscreen as the fleet reorganized several hundred thousand miles out from Hot Barsa. His face was flushed.

“Lindsell, hah! Cocky shopkeeper’s son. Did you see him tuck his tail and run? That was a beautiful thing.”

Drake would have smiled to see his old friend abandon his decorum. And he was feeling some of the same. They’d fought an able opponent and thrashed him. But the truth was that Lindsell had escaped with his forces intact. Those two destroyers were still maneuverable and keeping up with the enemy fleet as it made for Cold Barsa, some fifty million miles farther out from the sun. Wait until Lindsell joined Admiral Malthorne.

“Your pirates did well enough,” Rutherford added. His tone was grudging. “I expected them to cut and run, but they went right up against those orbital fortresses. Of course, it helps matters that the forts offered such a feeble defense. The fools were confused, I dare say. Didn’t know if they should defend themselves or defend the planet.”

Yes, that. Drake had now had a chance to think, and he doubted Rutherford’s explanation held. This was the second attempt at Hot Barsa. Admiral Malthorne was the largest landowner and slaver on the planet by far. He knew they had the antidote. Surely, he knew by now why the rebels were so keen to get a team planetside, and had ordered the most vigorous possible defense to prevent it from happening.

“Does this mean you trust Isabel Vargus at last?” Drake asked.

“I trust her far enough not to abscond with our plans and join the enemy. I will concede that much.”

“How about our silver? Would she abscond with that?”

Rutherford narrowed his eyes. “How do you mean?”

“Because I mean to send the mercenary fleet back to San Pablo with our remaining coin.”

“Excuse me?”

“If the mercenaries leave now, they have time for a quick trip to San Pablo and back. Buy as many arms as we can afford. Hire on a couple of merchant galleons if we can.”

“We’ll need more than our remaining coin to pay for all of that,” Rutherford said. “Might have to see if your friends at the yards will offer the goods on credit.”

“Credit is probably necessary,” Drake agreed.

HMS Melbourne may or may not be finished with her repairs by the time Vargus arrived. If not, Drake could offer the cruiser as collateral. If she were ready, he’d face the small matter of fitting her with a crew. Might not be possible in such a short time.

“I am not sure it is necessary,” Rutherford said. “We are well set for arms already. And why wouldn’t we accompany the mercenaries if there’s time for a round trip?”

“Because you and I are going to attack those orbital fortresses. This time, we’ll go in with all guns blazing.”

Rutherford’s frown deepened. “That little scrape was one thing. A full-on assault is another matter entirely. What makes you think they won’t hit us with all their firepower this time around?”

“It’s not a question of won’t,” Drake said. “It’s a question of can’t.”

Chapter Nine

The first torpedo boat missed Tolvern’s away pod with its guns. It was past them in a blink, tossing the pod in its superheated wake. A second boat came in, guns flaring. Most of the bullets zipped harmlessly past, but at least one slammed into them. It punctured the pod.

Something splattered Tolvern’s face. Brockett screamed. She wiped away the splatter, thinking it was liquefied science officer, but was relieved to find it was meat sauce. The bullet had hit a crate of food. Brockett was uninjured.

And if that crate had been ammunition, the whole pod would have gone kaboom. Lights out. End of mission.

As it was, they were still in space, and their air shrieked out through a hole the size of a half-crown. Nyb Pim had the presence of mind to shove a pulverized can of food at the hole. It made a final slurping sound as the vacuum outside grabbed the can and held it tight.

They were now spinning crazily, and Tolvern scrunched her eyes shut. Waiting. The torpedo boats would come by for another pass, this time at a slower speed. This time, the bullets would find them, find the ammo.

Nothing. Only the howling wind as they entered the atmosphere. Must be Vargus. The pirate captain must have followed the torpedo boats toward the planet, risking the fortress guns to chase them off. Slowly, the pod stabilized. It was still spinning, the planet swiping across the port window every few seconds and then disappearing. But more slowly now. The lurching in Tolvern’s stomach stopped.

“We are okay,” Carvalho said. He sounded like he was talking to himself, not the others. “A little hole—nothing terrible. The parachute is undamaged. It will deploy.”

“No, we’re not okay,” Brockett said, voice pinched. “It’s all wrong.”

Tolvern didn’t like his tone. “What makes you say that? How can you tell?”

“That bullet altered our trajectory.” Brockett said this with his eyes closed. He looked green from motion sickness. “The engine wash, too. Remember that? We’ve been thrown off course.”

“Surely, not much,” Tolvern said. “A few yards. Fifty feet, maybe?”

“Fifty feet up there. Fifty miles down below. Maybe five hundred. Maybe we’ll end up in the ocean.”

“You are not making any sense,” Carvalho protested.

“Explain it to them, Pilot,” Brockett told Nyb Pim.

“Carvalho, you understand the importance of calibrating a gun scope, do you not?” Nyb Pim asked.

“Of course, but—”

“Imagine that your scope is fractionally misaligned. At fifty yards, you miss by an inch or two. You still hit your target. At fifteen hundred yards, you miss by four feet. What if you had to fire your gun from a range of fifteen hundred miles? How far would you miss?”

Carvalho cursed in Ladino. Then, “Diablos, what do we do now? Where will we come down?”

“Not in the ocean,” Tolvern said. “You can put that fear to rest.”

“How can you be sure?” he asked. “The planet is eighty percent water.”

“Because we were launched almost at the center of the main continent, which is still an awfully big target,” she said. “The mountains are a bigger worry. We should come down soft enough, but that northern range is really rugged. We land on the wrong peak, and we’ll be stuck high and dry. Could be months before Drake is able to extract us.”

“It might be never,” Nyb Pim said. “Look.”

He pointed one of his long, bony fingers at the instrument panel above Tolvern’s head. She twisted to see. The panel was a black sheet of plastic. No data scroll, no flashing indicators. Nothing.

“Blast it,” she said. “It’s fried. Must have taken a second bullet.”

“What about the parachute?” Brockett asked. “Will it still deploy?”

That was a good question. It operated on a different system than the console, and she thought it had a mechanical backup which deployed automatically when a certain pressure threshold was reached, but gunfire might have torn it up, too.

Tolvern managed a grim smile. “If it doesn’t deploy, our landing site is the least of our concerns.”

It was getting warm in the pod. Vargus’s crew had welded on scraps of old tyrillium armor to take the friction of the atmosphere that would otherwise burn them to a cinder. That armor had probably absorbed fire and saved their lives. But it had taken damage and was failing to deflect all the heat. Tolvern’s molded seat was getting so hot it felt like she was sitting on a rapidly heating griddle.

Brockett stared out the porthole. “Any moment now.”

They hit clouds. Visibility was gone. What was the cloud level? Shouldn’t the parachute be out by now? Yet she was still floating in her seat. The wind kept shrieking around them.

A pop, a shudder. Then it was as if a rope yanked up on them from above. Tolvern’s seat seemed to shove her from below. The parachute had deployed.

“Dios mio,” Carvalho said. “I thought we were done for.”

Nyb Pim unhooked his harness. He made his way over to Tolvern, bent nearly double to keep from hitting his head on the human-size ceiling. They hit an air pocket, and he staggered into a stack of crates.

“What are you doing?” Tolvern asked as he reached over her shoulder.

“I am attempting to reset the console. If the parachute deployed electronically, it means the power systems are still active.”

The console beeped, which Tolvern took as a good sign. A moment later, a yellow light blinked, and instructions scrolled across the screen. Nyb Pim made a pleased-sounding hum deep in his throat. He returned to his seat and strapped himself in.

“Well done, Pilot,” she told him.

The others stared over her head, occasionally calling out the altitude as they came down. At two thousand feet, Tolvern checked her straps one last time and closed her eyes.

“A thousand feet,” Brockett said. “Five hundred. Here we go!”

Tolvern braced herself. They hit. The ground seemed to give way, before bouncing them up again. Trees? No, they’d started to settle again. The pod rolled onto its back, and black liquid sloshed up the porthole. Water.

“Everyone out!” she cried.

They unstrapped themselves and shoved boxes aside as they made for the exit. The exit was now above them, thank God, and not facing down into the water, but there was no guarantee it would stay that way. Tolvern slapped her hand on the pad, and the door slid open. Muggy, almost steam-hot air rushed into the pod. It smelled like rotting eggs and moldy vegetables.

Tolvern got her arms out and hoisted herself onto the surface of the pod. She blinked against the hot red sun shining overhead. The sky was orange and hazy.

They’d landed in a swamp on the edge of a small lake, in the midst of a carpet of spreading red lily pads, each big enough to hold a man. A forest of enormous, red, fern-like plants marched from the shore into the lake, with knobby roots lifting them above the water. The parachute had hit one of these fern trees, torn loose, and hung limply from its fronds.

Meanwhile, the bed of lily pads that had caught them was giving way, and the pod was slowly sinking. Water reached the open hatch as Tolvern reached down to hoist Brockett out. It poured over the edge and into the open interior.

She got Brockett out, and he slid down the side of the pod to one of the lily pads. It heaved up on the end as it took the man’s weight. Disturbed by the movement, water insects the size of Tolvern’s hand dove away with oar-like appendages. A water snake or large eel slithered past.

Nyb Pim got his long arms and his head and shoulders out, but the pod had begun to tilt as it filled, and he nearly fell back. By the time she got him out, Carvalho was waist-deep in water inside, and the pod was sinking quickly.

He handed up a box, which she tossed down to Nyb Pim on his lily pad. The black water was already up to his shoulders.

“Get me out of here!”

“Guns!” she cried. “We need weapons.”

He ducked under and disappeared for a long moment. The pod was completely submerged now, and Tolvern felt like she was balancing on a sinking ship as water rose to her ankles. Brockett and Nyb Pim called to her, urging her to get Carvalho out.

He came up sputtering, holding two assault rifles, and swam clear just as the pod rolled. Tolvern pitched into the water. It was as warm as a bath and tasted of mud. She came up spitting, grabbed for Carvalho, and the two of them flailed toward the lily pads where the others dragged them out.

Some large creature roiled the water near where the pod had vanished. She remembered the crocodile-like creatures with the horny beaks that had attacked them last year in the highlands. The four of them stood still for a long moment, tense and waiting. Finally, the water calmed, except for a few bubbles from where the pod had disappeared. It had completely vanished in the ink-black water.

“What have we got?” she asked.

“Two rifles,” Carvalho said. “Forty rounds each.”

“And the crate?”

Brockett turned it over. “Zip packets of dried carrots.”

“Carrots?” Carvalho grumbled. “What are we, rabbits? There was good beef stew on that pod. I should have checked the bloody label.”

Forget carrots and stew. Their ability to purify water, start a fire, defend themselves, and communicate with the universe was all gone. Not to mention that they’d lost the thousands of doses of sugar antidote that had brought them to Hot Barsa in the first place.

“We can’t sit here feeling sorry for ourselves,” she said. “First thing is to get off the lake so we don’t get eaten by whatever is down there. We’ll figure it out once we get to the woods.”

“Bet the jungle is full of lurkers and pouncers,” Brockett said glumly.

Nevertheless, what was lurking beneath the water frightened her more than anything that might attack them in the jungle, so they set about stepping from one lily to the next on their way to the shore. It was only about twenty feet until the lilies gave way to sharp reeds.

“How deep is it from here?” Tolvern asked.

Nyb Pim stood on the last lily. He bent and thrust a forearm down. “A few feet, then it’s solid. We can walk from here.”

Not solid, exactly. More like thick, boot-sucking mud. Tolvern tried to balance the need not to lose her footwear with the desire to get out of the water and on shore as soon as possible. They were making a good deal of noise sloshing along, and she kept a wary eye behind her, waiting for a horny snout to break the surface.

The fern forest was thick with vines and interlocking branches, and they sloshed around the side of the small lake until they came upon a dead, rotting fern tree bent at a right angle over the water. It seemed like a good place to get out. She grabbed the trunk, hoisted herself up, and reached out her hands for the box. She secured it between two dead fronds so it wouldn’t fall, then helped up her companions, one after another. Soon, all four sat on the trunk, several feet above the water. High enough to stay out of reach of lunging crocodiles? She hoped so.

Nyb Pim reached for an adjacent fern and broke off two fronds, which he draped over them to block the sun. With no breeze and the air like steam, it didn’t help much.

Tolvern stared out at the water, now unbroken by a single ripple. They were only fifty feet from where the pod had sunk. Taking in the surrounding alien landscape, with a swampy, nearly impenetrable forest around this black, deadly lake, she felt nearly overwhelmed. What a desperate situation. They should have landed on a dry plain, fully stocked, not here.

She glanced at the others. Carvalho took off his shirt and spread it on the trunk in the sun. Too muggy; it would never dry. Nyb Pim sat with his knees pulled up against his chest, deep in thought. Brockett tried in vain to clean off his damp glasses. None of them let their feet dangle over the edge.

“We can’t sit here forever,” she said.

“And what do you suggest we do?” Carvalho asked.

“We need those supplies.”

“They are at the bottom of the lake, in case you did not notice.”

“Look,” she said, “the middle of the lake is clear of lilies. They only grow around the edges.”

“So?” Carvalho said.

“So, the whole thing is only a few hundred yards across. Why don’t they grow right into the center? Probably too deep there—that means it’s shallow where the lilies grow. The pod landed on the lilies. The shallow part.”

“She’s right,” Brockett said. “The water is so black, you can’t see a thing, but I bet the top of our pod is only a few feet down. Our supplies—all of them—are in waterproof containers.”

“We need to try,” Tolvern said.

Carvalho had looped his gun sling around a brown stump on the edge of the main trunk, and now unhooked it. “Go ahead, Brockett. Swim for it. I’ll keep you covered from right here.”

“Me?”

“I will go,” Nyb Pim said.

“Do you know something we don’t?” Carvalho asked, coming over to sit by the Hroom. “Like maybe the lake isn’t as dangerous as it looks?” He sounded hopeful.

“It is deadly,” Nyb Pim said. “In more ways than you’d expect.”

He reached and plucked something from Carvalho’s shoulder. It was a leech, about two inches long and the exact bronze color of the man’s skin. The Hroom put it on the trunk of the tree and smashed it with the palm of his hand. Blood and a yellow, pus-like substance squirted out.

“Rayos!” Carvalho said.

He stripped to his underwear and found three more leeches on his body. Tolvern had only been in the water seconds, but she found her own leech on the inside of her upper arm. It was pale pink, the color of her skin. When she plucked it off, she didn’t feel a thing, but it was engorged with her blood.

Brockett peered down at the thing as she went to smash it with the rifle butt. “Fascinating,” he said. “They match the color of your skin. Remarkable mimicry for a parasite.”

Carvalho blew air through puffed cheeks as Tolvern settled down, seemingly calmer. “You are right, Commander. We will go in the water. It’s the only way to get the hell away from this lake. But it shouldn’t be you, Pilot.”

“Why not?” Nyb Pim asked.

“You are our translator,” Carvalho said. “Our only hope is to find those rebel Hroom. Brockett knows this business with the antidote. We cannot lose him. And Tolvern is our commander.” He sighed. “That leaves me.”

He stood, still wearing only his underwear, and walked along the length of the trunk where it hung over the water, as if he meant to take a leap. If he jumped from the end, he’d be halfway to the disturbed lilies where the pod had gone down.

“Wait,” Tolvern said. When it came right down to it, Carvalho could be plenty brave, but it was too much for one person. “Come back here, it’s not going to work like that.”

He turned. “How do you mean?”

“It’s going to take all day to get our stuff out. One guy can’t do all that. We’ll take turns.”

“Someone still has to go first.”

“Right, but we’ll be civilized about it,” she said. “I’ll hold up fingers behind my back. One to four fingers. You can each guess. If nobody gets it, I’ll go myself.”

“Let the gods decide,” Nyb Pim said. “Yes, that is fair.”

But in the end, “the gods” chose Carvalho to go first anyway. He made his way back out to the end, grumbling that if he’d gone in when he’d first proposed, he’d be out of the water already.

“You see anything coming after me, you shoot it. And if something gets hold of me, and you can’t get a clean shot, don’t let me suffer. Shoot me before it drags me down.”

“Not going to happen,” Tolvern said. She hefted one of the rifles. Nyb Pim had the other. “But keep it quiet. Don’t go splashing around.”

“What do you think I am doing here? Paddling around the lake collecting botanical samples for Brockett? Of course I will keep it quiet.”

Carvalho crawled the final length of the trunk. It bent toward the water near the end. When he could go no farther, he grabbed hold of it and lowered himself tentatively until his toes broke the surface of the lake. Tolvern half expected a monstrous snout to rise up, water streaming from its nostrils. But all was tranquil. Carvalho took a deep breath and dropped.

He came up quickly and swam in a rapid breaststroke towards the broken lily pads. When he reached the spot, he stopped and treaded water.

“I can feel it with my feet! It’s right below me, and not very far down, either.”

“Good!” Tolvern called back. “Now shut up and get to work.”

Carvalho kicked his feet up and dove down. He was under the water for several seconds before he popped up again. He turned around, reoriented himself, and dove again.

But this time, he didn’t come back up. Tolvern held her breath, her heart pounding. Several more seconds passed. It had been too long. Something had taken him. Good heavens, why had she sent him out? They knew something was in the water; she’d seen it moving. Why had she been so stupid?

Finally, his head broke the surface. He gasped for air. He was empty handed, but didn’t make another attempt, only swam quickly for the overhanging tree. When he reached it, Tolvern and Nyb Pim grabbed his outstretched arms and hauled him onto the trunk, where he lay gasping for air.

Tolvern and Nyb Pim plucked off the leeches from his body. There were at least a dozen.

“Well?” she demanded.

“I felt it all right. The opening. Right down against the mud where it hit after the pod rolled. Can’t get inside, though. Opening is too narrow with it half-buried.” Carvalho held his thumb and index finger about two inches apart. “This much is all you’ve got.”

“Could you shift it?” she asked.

“I tried. It’s full of water and wedged in the mud.”

“Maybe if we all went,” Brockett said.

“No good,” Carvalho said. “We’d need rope. Some machinery. I don’t know—air bladders to raise it to the surface. Something.”

A knot of despair rose in Tolvern’s breast. “Where are we going to get anything like that?”

Nyb Pim shielded his eyes with his hand and looked up at the sun. Tolvern followed his gaze. What time of day was it? Hard to tell here on an alien world, but she guessed they had a few more hours until dusk. They’d better start thinking how to spend the night. Could they recover the parachute from the other side of the lake and use it for a tent?

“We shouldn’t sleep here,” Nyb Pim said when she’d shared her thoughts.

“Why?” Tolvern asked. “What are we facing?”

“I am not sure. But whatever is in the water, it wants to eat us.”

Chapter Ten

They couldn’t get the pod out of the mud, but Tolvern couldn’t very well leave it, either. It had everything that would keep them alive in this steamy, swampy wilderness. It had a bloody blowtorch, for god’s sake, so they could practically burn their way out of here when the machetes failed.

Nighttime was coming. What the hell was she to do? She needed to improvise something quickly. Tolvern eyed the parachute, still dangling from the fern a couple of hundred yards away. Either cross open water (hell no) or try to get there via the jungle. Neither sounded easy.

“We’ve got to get that before it’s dark,” she said. “It will keep out some of the predators, I’d think. Not as good as an open clearing and roaring fire, but something.”

“And bring it back here?” Brockett said.

“Away from the water is better,” Nyb Pim said. He had the rifle across his bony lap and rarely took his eyes off the lake below them. “Whatever is in the water—”

“You said that already,” Tolvern pointed out. “It’s hard to find a better spot to sleep than this dead tree.”

“Technically, it’s not a tree,” Brockett said. “It’s a pteridophyte. Like a fern.”

“Fine,” she said. “Still the best place to spend the night. Wide enough you won’t fall off, elevated.”

“Trust the Hroom,” Carvalho said.

“Oh, I do. But take a look. How are we going to get five feet through this vegetation, let alone over to the parachute, then haul the blasted thing through the jungle and . . . go where, exactly?”

They fell silent, because of course she was right. They had few options. The rifles would serve them well if anything attacked in broad daylight. The dried carrots would keep them from starving for a few days, at least. It had rained a few minutes ago, and they slaked their thirst by funneling water dripping off fronds. But they had no tools. What she wouldn’t have given for one of the machetes submerged on the pod.

“I do have this,” Carvalho said.

He’d been lounging this whole time in his underwear, and now fetched his trousers, still spread out and wetter than ever. He reached into one of the deep side pockets and pulled out a folding knife. The six-inch blade had a wicked curve and a serrated back edge.

“King’s balls, that’s the best tool we’ve got,” she said. “Why didn’t you mention it earlier?”

Carvalho shrugged. “Non-standard equipment. The captain doesn’t like people walking around armed. Anyway, I forgot I had it.”

She stood up, testing her balance as the dead fern trunk moved with her shifting weight. “Put your pants on. Shirt, too.”

She watched him as he did so, her eyes lingering longer than necessary on his muscular shoulders, arms, legs, and buttocks. Turning back to the other two, she handed her rifle to Brockett.

“You know how to shoot this thing, right?”

“I can, yes.” The science officer didn’t sound completely confident, but from the way he handled the weapon, he didn’t seem helpless, either.

“Never mind.” She took it back. “I’ll keep it myself. How about you?”

“Yes, of course,” Nyb Pim said. He patted the rifle on his lap. “My naval training included it.”

“Good. Carvalho and I are going after that parachute. We’ll stick to the shore. Not in the water, and not cutting through the jungle, either. You should have us in view at all times. Cover us.”

Carvalho pulled on his wet socks and boots. “Maybe one of us should stay to do the shooting.”

“I want to scout out the lake. But you can stay if you’re feeling nervous. You already proved your manliness.”

He winked at her, then made his way along the dead trunk to land. He jumped onto the shore, his boots squishing in the mud. He grabbed hold of an overhanging branch from another fern tree to keep from sinking deeper, and held out his hand for her.

“Come on.”

She declined his aid and swung herself down. He shrugged and unfolded his knife again. They picked their way slowly along the shore, with Carvalho in the lead. He sawed through vines and any draping fronds that couldn’t be pushed aside. Tolvern kept her rifle unslung and her eye on the forest, trusting Nyb Pim to cover them from attacks originating in the lake. Something crashed through the underbrush a few yards away, but she didn’t catch a glimpse of what it was.

“I saw you watching me while I dressed,” Carvalho said when they were out of earshot of the others.

“Shut up, you did not. I was looking for leeches, that’s all.”

“If you say so.” His muscles strained as he leaned into a frond to bend it out of the way. “Are you so shy you couldn’t undress to let your own clothes dry out?”

“Did it work? Are yours dry?”

“Well, then. Take off your clothes and let me have a look at your body. That would be only fair. You were looking, I saw you.”

“I was looking for leeches,” she repeated. “But apparently, I only saw a lech.”

He turned with a grin. “I told Capp I was going to seduce you once we got to the planet. She bet me twenty pounds I couldn’t do it.”

“Hah.” Tolvern was almost certain he was jesting. “That’s good drinking money.”

“I know. But I was thinking about buying a new hand cannon next time I was on San Pablo.”

“Good money for Capp, I mean. If you survive to pay your debt, tell her to offer you double or nothing and she can increase her winnings.” She shrugged. “I don’t believe it anyway.”

“Why not?”

“I know what Capp is like, and I know what she says, but I still don’t think she’d be keen to hear you talking to me like this.”

“Believe it. She’s mentioned seducing you herself.”

“In that case, you’ll both be disappointed, won’t you?”

“Give me time. The expedition is early yet.”

“Not that early, Carvalho. You’re not the last man in the fleet I’d sleep with, but you sure as hell aren’t the first, either.”

“Well, yes, but Captain Drake isn’t here, is he?”

Tolvern was grateful she was hot and flushed already, or she was sure she’d have turned bright red.

“It’s only having fun, Captain,” he said. “Don’t look so put out.”

“Will you shut up and focus? Something’s going to jump out of the jungle and drag us off while you’re screwing around.”

But Carvalho was apparently the most aggressive life form on the lake, and they reached the fern tree without so much as a bug bite. As they climbed it, however, Tolvern disturbed a six-legged lizard as big around as Carvalho’s forearm, which came out snapping and hissing. It spit something that hit her neck and burned.

She swatted at the lizard, but the blasted thing wouldn’t abandon its post. Carvalho got up and around and saw that the creature was protecting a clutch of eggs. Tolvern was able to circle and climb up after him, and the animal retreated to its lair among the fronds.

They reached the parachute. It was dry, the silk-like material having repelled any water. The cords were tangled pretty well in the vegetation, though, and Carvalho had to cut at them.

“Here, pull this,” he said.

“I’m trying.”

“You all right? You look sick.”

Tolvern rubbed at the stinging substance on her neck. It was making her lightheaded. Stupid lizard.

Carvalho stripped off his shirt, soaked it in one of the water pockets on the fern fronds, and scrubbed at her neck. His chest was in her face.

Another chance to show his muscles. But once the gunk was off her neck, she was grateful. The burning went away almost at once, and her head cleared.

“I’m okay now,” she said. “Thanks.”

He looped the befouled shirt through his belt rather than put it back on, and the two of them wrestled with the parachute until they got it loose. It was actually two parachutes, the first designed to tug out the second, larger one. The big one was too large to carry, designed as it was to drastically slow the pod’s plummet to the ground, so they separated the pair. They folded up the bigger one as best they could and wedged it partly in among the branches. Might need the material later.

When that was done, they wrapped the smaller one into a bundle. Even this was big and bulky. Tolvern glanced across the lake, wishing they had a boat. They’d be across in five minutes. Brockett waved to them, and she waved back to let the other two know she and Carvalho were okay.

It was now almost dusk. They were at a high latitude, and it was apparently summer, according to the rotation of the world, which wobbled much like Albion and many other Old Earth-like planets. That meant they had a little time before it grew dark, but she didn’t want to mess around. Time to think about their second goal: getting away from this lake to higher, dryer, and more open land.

She climbed the fern tree to get a better view of their surroundings. To the north lay a series of swampy lakes much like this one. The land to the east was even less promising, what looked like continual marsh. They might get away from large water-dwelling predators there, but you couldn’t sleep in reeds and six inches of muddy water. The west and south were pure jungle, not a clearing to be seen. Not even so much as one of the mounds that marked old Hroom ruins on so much of the planet.

She leaned down to Carvalho and told him what she saw.

“The jungle to the west,” he said, “how far can you see?”

“Not far, maybe a mile or two. There’s a row of taller trees blocking my sight.”

“So maybe there is something on the other side.”

“Maybe,” she said, doubtful. “It’s too far to make an attempt tonight. We’ll have to sleep at the lake tonight.”

“Nyb Pim isn’t going to like it.”

“Who can blame him? But look, we’re at least four hours on this planet after getting shot up by Malthorne’s torpedo boats. And we’re not dead yet. Let’s see if we can make it through the night.”

It was nearly dark by the time they made it back to the others and formed the parachute into a crude shelter. Supper was freeze-dried carrot soup mixed with rainwater. It was . . . edible.

The air inside the shelter was sweltering, but a slight breeze had picked up over the swamp, so they stayed outside on the branch while they drank down the soup, using the packets as crude bowls. Nyb Pim laid out the risks.

“We’re safe from leeches,” he said. “They’ll come out of the water at night, but the nylon should keep them out.”

“Can’t feel the confounded things,” Brockett said. “If there are enough of them, they might very well drain you dry, like an army of tiny vampires.”

“Same goes for eye suckers,” the Hroom added. “The shelter should keep them out.”

Brockett’s eyes looked ready to pop out. “What’s that?”

“Precisely what it sounds like. They anesthetize your eyeballs and suck out the fluid while you sleep. With luck, the nylon will protect us from mosquitoes and bone diggers,too.”

“What the devil is a bone digger?” Brockett cried.

“Aren’t you a scientist?” Tolvern said. “Where’s your sense of curiosity?”

“Not so curious I want to wake up with bone diggers covering my body.”

“Only one,” Nyb Pim said. “Once it lays its eggs in you, the others will leave you alone.”

“Enough with the vermin talk,” Carvalho said. “It is making me squeamish. Tell us about the big dangers.”

The list was long and lovingly described, as if the pilot was proud of the native wildlife of the Hroom worlds. Lurkers and pouncers, of course. Then you had carnivorous eels, various crocodile-like creatures, turtles the size of an armored car that could take off a leg with one bite. Leathery, nocturnal birds that hunted in flocks and had a venomous bite. And those were only the things Nyb Pim knew about.

“How did all of those things get here?” Carvalho asked. “Giant turtles? Thirty-foot crocodiles?”

“Maybe they stowed away in the hold of a cargo ship,” Tolvern said with a smile. “You know, like wharf rats running up the mooring lines.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “That is a real question I have for our Hroom friend.”

“Intentionally transplanted, I would imagine,” Nyb Pim said. “Thousands of years ago, by the original settlers. They brought everything with them.”

Carvalho wasn’t ready to let it go, seemingly outraged by the hostile wildlife. “And those eye suckers, too? Bone diggers? What kind of fool transplants a creature known as a bone digger?”

“Albion has its Old Earth cockroaches, does it not?” Nyb Pim countered. “Sharks, tigers, wolves. Other dangerous creatures.”

Carvalho grunted. “You won’t find such foolishness in the Ladino worlds. We exterminate vermin, we do not release new varieties into the wild.”

“It’s about recreating a complete ecosystem and all of that,” Brockett said. “I understand the motivation. I just don’t want to become intimately acquainted with the food chain myself.”

Time to take control of this conversation, Tolvern thought. “Will the larger creatures attack us in the shelter?” she asked. “That’s the only question I’m interested in.”

“Possibly,” Nyb Pim said. “Most likely, yes.”

Tolvern glanced up at the sky, the burnt orange color faded into a red that was nearly black. The first bright star or planet shone through the thick atmosphere. There wouldn’t be much light from stars, she guessed.

“This is our plan to survive the night,” Tolvern said. “We stay outside until it’s black, then we retreat to the tent. One person sits at the entrance at all times. If that’s you, keep your body inside, your head and rifle out. It’s going to get dark—use your ears. Check yourself over every few minutes to make sure nothing is drinking your blood, or, God help you, sticking its proboscis in your eyeball and slurping out the juice.”

Nods of agreement.

She continued. “You hear anything noisy—loud splashes, claws on the trunk, a growl—shoot your gun at the noise.”

“That does not sound particularly effective,” Carvalho said. “Shooting into the dark will only waste our ammo.”

“Let’s hope the gunfire scares off whatever it is,” she said. “Anyway, it will wake up the rest of us, and we can defend ourselves as best we can if we’re attacked.”

Left unspoken was the question of how, exactly, someone would hear a strange noise. Already, a frog-like chorus had started from the reeds and marsh surrounding the small lake. Insects whirred, clicked, and chirped. Something buzzed from the other side of the lake like a distant power saw. It was already so noisy that splashes and growls might not be heard above the general racket.

“Um, guys,” Brockett said. “Are you sure they’ll wait for dark?”

He pointed out to the lake. Tolvern grabbed her rifle and raised to a crouch to see what he was pointing at. Something rippled the water where the pod had gone down. Bubbles broke the surface. Could they have come from the pod itself, some trapped pocket of air?

Then a horny snout lifted above the water, and two large, dark eyes looked their direction. Tolvern’s stomach clenched. It was the same kind of creature that had attacked them last year near Lord Malthorne’s estate. One of them had nearly grabbed the captain in its beak and dragged him down.

Tolvern flipped the safety and fired twice on semiautomatic. It was already too dark to see where the bullets hit, whether they’d plunked harmlessly into the water or slammed into the creature’s scaly hide. The thing made no sound, but disappeared beneath the surface.

Nobody said a word. They stared at the lake, waiting for it to ripple again, waiting to spot any kind of movement. She’d seen one of these monsters lunge from the water, and it was anybody’s guess if it could reach their perch on top of the dead, bent-over fern trunk. She was still bracing herself when something caught her eye in the heavens.

Several stars were now visible, and a single bright, shining object swung overhead. It must be one of the small moons in orbit around Hot Barsa that had been turned into orbital fortresses. Lights flashed along the surface. More lights flared at some distance from the fort. That would be a ship, taking damage.

Drake was still fighting it out up there. Why? He meant to dump her in the jungle and retreat to safety. Did he know she’d crash landed in some swamp? Maybe he was trying to mount a rescue. No, that was hard to imagine. Too risky. More lights flashed on the fort. It was almost to the horizon already.

Her attention was still drawn by the drama playing out in orbit, when suddenly the water erupted beneath Nyb Pim on the trunk. The Hroom hooted in alarm and sprang backward. A monstrous, horny mouth opened wide.

Gunfire blasted behind Tolvern’s shoulder. It was Carvalho. He must have been at the ready this whole time and was shooting at the creature before it had even completed its lunge.

The beast bellowed and twisted, falling back into the water. It flailed about, heaving up great spouts of water with a long, paddle-like tail, as Carvalho continued shooting. Tolvern joined him.

When the gunfire died, the water was still roiling, but there was no sign of the beast. Brockett still sat where he’d been before the attack, frozen in place. Nyb Pim wobbled and nearly fell before he steadied himself. Carvalho panted.

“That’s it,” the Ladino said. “That’s my ammo. I fired every bullet.”

Tolvern had shot three times on semi-auto. Plus the first two shots, she reminded herself. That left her fifteen bullets, if she remembered correctly. And it wasn’t even fully dark yet. Doubtful they had killed the creature, with its thick, scaly hide. Might have only pissed it off, in fact. And there could easily be more of them.

Then she caught another sight that brought all of her worries into perspective. A light. Not in the heavens, but on the surface, and close. It blinked twice on the far side of the lake. Another light blinked twice a hundred yards or so around the lake to their right. An answer to the first.

“Quiet, everyone,” she whispered. “Get down.”

They had been found.

Chapter Eleven

Dexi Gibbs appeared on Captain Drake’s viewscreen. She was the commander of Fort Gamma, one of Hot Barsa’s three orbital fortresses. The woman had a sharp nose and small eyes, reminding Drake of one of his primary school teachers from many years back. Until she spoke.

“Why in the name of Albion are you hailing me?” she said. “You are a traitor and a pirate.”

Gibbs spoke with that snooty, artificial-sounding accent gained only by those who’d spent their childhood in preparatory academies in and around York Town. Those academies fostered a clannish arrogance of the sort also seen in Lord Malthorne and his ilk. Not Drake’s type of people at all.

“You could have ignored me,” he said. “Yet you answered my call.”

“You have a dozen ships aiming their guns in my direction.” She gave a cold smile. “And I have nothing to lose by stalling until Lindsell receives his reinforcements and returns.”

Capp muttered a dark oath to Drake’s side, and he looked away from Gibbs long enough to give his subpilot a hard look. Capp needed to hold her tongue. Gibbs was bluffing, of course. Captain Lindsell’s task force had begun reorganizing farther out in the system, but for now, he hadn’t turned around to relieve Hot Barsa.

“I would presume,” Drake said to Gibbs, “that you hope, as I do, to see Albion reunited. There are too many alien threats for us to be fighting each other.”

“Ah, the traitor seeks a parlay. Come to offer your surrender, is that it? Very well, I accept. Ah, but wait. Sadly, Malthorne will have your neck in a noose, all the same. Better that you flee for your life.”

Drake noted that she’d called him “Malthorne,” and not “King Thomas the Second,” as the murderous villain was styling himself now. Interesting.

“How about cooperation,” he said. “Maybe we want the same thing.”

“Cooperation? Hah. You are a bloody fool, James Drake.”

“Turn over your fort. Your garrison will work for me. You will keep your ranks and fight for those who mean to remove the usurper. Together, we can restore the crown to a rightful heir and organize our defenses against the alien threat.”

“A rightful heir? Let me guess—you mean yourself, don’t you? You have no royal blood. Or do you refer to Nigel Rutherford? He is even more distantly related to the crown than I am.” Gibbs smiled. “No? Then perhaps you mean the Duke of West Mercia. Alas, he has declined the throne. Malthorne’s flagship seems to discourage such moves from pretenders.”

“Come now,” Drake said. “You hold no respect for the lord admiral. You’re not even flying the Albion flag, only showing the fleet colors. And you cannot withstand my forces, so even if you are a friend of Malthorne, we will bombard you into submission.”

“Impossible.”

“Is it? You have no arms. None of your forts do. Malthorne couldn’t bother to resupply you. Do you even have food? For all I know, your people are starving.”

“Where are your pirates?”

“They prefer to be called mercenaries.”

She waved her hand dismissively. “Whatever, they are still the rubbish of the sector. Where did they go?”

“To resupply you. Once you surrender, you’ll need arms and other supplies.”

“You are deluding yourself. We can hold out indefinitely if we must.”

“Very well. Prove me wrong. I had hoped you would come to your senses and save us both some unneeded headache. But so be it.”

Gibbs’s haughty expression never changed. “Go ahead and make an attempt. You will find that I have plenty of bite in me, as do my commanders on Fort Epsilon and Fort Alpha.” She cut the line, and the screen went black.

Rutherford appeared a moment later. He’d been monitoring the transmission from on board Vigilant, which sat a few hundred kilometers above Blackbeard and off starboard.

“I don’t like that woman,” Rutherford said. “She will be no ally of ours.”

After considering what he’d learned from the database about the other two commanders, Drake had pegged Gibbs as the most likely to turn. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Perhaps he should approach Alpha and Epsilon instead. No, he trusted his instincts. Gibbs was waiting for a show of force, he was sure of it.

“We’ll see. Take command of the missile frigates. Lay them off . . . ” Drake looked at Capp and raised his eyebrows in question. She fed him coordinates, which he passed to Rutherford.

“Just out of torpedo range,” Rutherford said.

“Right. We won’t take chances. The frigates can’t punch through that asteroid, anyway, so it’s mainly to knock them around a bit. Keep them distracted.”

“And the rest of us?”

“We’re going to find a soft spot and come in swinging.”

They followed Gamma in orbit around the planet as they readied their assault. Drake let the other forts catch a quick glimpse at their vanguard, curious if they would fire on him. They didn’t. No way to be sure, of course, but he was growing more and more confident that they were low on ammo.

But “low” was not the same thing as “completely depleted.” Blackbeard and Vigilant led a few exploratory passes over Gamma, then began their bombardment. The missile frigates laid down a barrage of missiles.

The muted response of the orbital fortresses had left him more and more certain of his enemy’s weakness. All three forts must already have been suffering deficiencies a few weeks ago during the battle that had so badly mauled Philistine, sending Tolvern’s destroyer to the San Pablo yards for costly repairs. They’d held back then, too.

Gamma absorbed Drake’s punishment as it completed several rotations. His ships followed it around, maintaining the attack.

And then Fort Gamma let loose. Missiles flared out. As Drake scrambled to keep from getting blown out of the sky, the fort opened torpedo tubes and exposed cannon batteries. Rutherford had sent a two-man observation craft out to scout the surface of the fortress for damage, and it was caught in Gamma’s sudden fury. Cannon fire caught it before it could get back to Vigilant. The scout ship weaved desperately to escape the guns, but they drove it down toward the planet. Moments later, it fell into the atmosphere, flaming like a meteorite.

Larger ships had begun to take damage too, as missiles and torpedoes got through countermeasures and evasive maneuvers. Chatter came down the com link, asking Drake about a retreat. Fort Gamma had been playing some sort of game, seemed to have plenty of ammo, and Fort Epsilon was about to swing into range. And what about those torpedo boats? Where were they?

But Drake wasn’t ready to abandon his hunch. “Signal the fleet to hold their position,” he told Oglethorpe. “We’ll keep up the fight.”

Blackbeard cut around to come at the enemy from a new angle. She came within range of the enemy cannons, but swung quickly to show a broadside. The gunnery let loose. Explosions lit up the side of the fort. They hit an ammo dump, and out came a spectacular display of light and burning, venting gasses.

It was night over the eastern hemisphere of the planet. They were not far from where Tolvern’s pod had entered the atmosphere. Was she looking up at the night sky even now, wondering what was going on overhead? Had she even survived the landing? They had received no word.

Drake held his breath as Fort Epsilon approached. His frigates let loose a few warning missiles, but enemy countermeasures brought three of them down. The final one detonated on the surface, sending up a geyser of dust, but causing no harm.

Gamma’s fire diminished, but didn’t stop. Epsilon didn’t shoot, and Drake told his forces to let it continue without further harassment. A few minutes after Epsilon was gone, Commander Gibbs hailed Blackbeard from Gamma.

“Hold your fire, Drake.” She sounded exhausted, frustrated.

“You still have a torpedo and two missiles in play. How cheeky. Call them off.”

“What do you think I’m trying to do?” she demanded. “Isn’t it obvious what’s happening? There’s a bloody mutiny down here is what.”

Drake took satisfaction in seeing her discomposed. Two hours of combat had wiped away her smugness. If only he were looking at Admiral Malthorne instead.

“You had your chance. Why should I give you respite?”

“All I’m asking is that you pull back. Let me get things settled. I’ll surrender as soon as I can. First, I need to get control of the mutineers.”

“How long do you need?” Drake asked. “If this is some sort of game . . . ”

“I swear to God, it’s not. Give me an hour.” Then, to someone off screen, Gibbs said, “Stop them!” She shouted something else, but the line cut before Drake could pick it up.

Two torpedo boats launched from Gamma. It was an ill-advised move, with Drake having all his guns trained on the fort. He could have blasted them apart at once, but he needed to see what was happening. If Gibbs were lying, if the mutiny was to force the surrender, and she was trying to prevent it, these two boats would be his allies, not his enemy.

The instant the two craft got free, they gunned their engines and made to flee the scene. That answered that question. Drake sent a quick message telling them to stand down. When his message was ignored, he sent Vigilant after them. Rutherford’s ship soon overtook them, and he attacked mercilessly. He tore apart the rear vessel, which detonated in a fiery death for all her crew. Vigilant swooped in behind the other craft.

That ended the fight. The torpedo boat cut its engines and surrendered.

The fort stopped firing on Blackbeard moments later. For awhile, there was nothing, and when Drake hailed Gibbs to tell her that the time was up, she didn’t answer. So it was a game, after all. He readied his forces for another attack.

Finally, the surrender came. No conditions. Gibbs claimed no allegiance to Malthorne, only that she doubted Drake’s ability to defeat him. After all, she said, the might of Albion backed the lord admiral. Drake had a poor colony world and a third of the fleet. Turning to the rebellion seemed a good way to get oneself killed. But, as she no longer had any choice . . .

Given that she’d offered her surrender, he was surprised by her candor. She’d just caused him a good deal of trouble. If he were a vindictive man, he’d have made an example of her to show the other two forts. But he was not.

That decision delivered mixed results. An hour later, Epsilon offered to join the rebellion. Fort Alpha refused to surrender. Let Drake come, Alpha’s commander boasted, he’d never break through. And this was the largest, most dug-in fort of all. Drake worried the enemy was right.

For now, he’d secure his victory. He prepared an away team to take possession of Gamma, and led the expedition himself. He brought over so many armed men that it left his fleet nearly depleted, but he wouldn’t risk an ambush. He warned Gibbs that if she were to try anything, Captain Rutherford would use his remaining atomic warheads to reduce Gamma to radioactive slag.

Chapter Twelve

Tolvern and Carvalho lay flat on the overhanging trunk, their rifles pointed in opposite directions over the lake. She’d given Carvalho seven of her remaining fifteen bullets, then sent Brockett and Nyb Pim into the makeshift shelter with instructions not to make a sound. Not that they needed a warning. All four of them had become a jangle of nerves as it grew darker and darker. Only a handful of stars penetrated the thick atmosphere. The night filled with such a racket of croaks, chirps, squeaks, and bellows that Tolvern’s whole body felt like it was vibrating.

It had been still all day, but now a warm breeze came from the direction of the mountains. A light flared again briefly on the other side of the lake, and in that moment, Tolvern saw a corner of the larger parachute that they’d snugged into the fronds of one of the giant ferns. Hanging loose, it now flapped like a flag. The movement had apparently drawn their stalkers. It would be immediately apparent that the fabric was a parachute of human origin.

Carvalho cursed in a low voice. “What do we do?”

Tolvern had no idea. It was the worst possible timing for this breeze. Why not earlier, when they were cooking in their own sweat? She’d have given anything for the slightest stirring of the air. Now, they had it, but only so it could draw attention.

“We could leave,” she whispered. “Get Brockett and Nyb Pim and go into the jungle.”

“We can’t go down there. There are bone diggers. Eye suckers!”

“Shh. Will you keep it down? We’ll deal with that if we have to.”

Still, what was the point? They’d struggled to move through the swamp in daylight, even skirting the edges of the forest; they’d never get far in the dark.

“We could surrender?” Carvalho said.

“Seriously?” she hissed. “Are you nuts?”

“That’s why we came, to find the Hroom.”

“Not like this. For all we know, these are just people of the bush, Hroom who’ve managed to evade the slavers all these years. They’ll kill us without question. For that matter, they could easily be humans or sugar slaves sent by Malthorne’s people to track us down.”

She was certain of one thing. It would be dumb to make contact under these circumstances. Beyond dumb. Suicidal.

Carvalho tried to say something else, but his voice was getting loud again, and she told him to stop talking. They settled in to wait. For a long time, there was nothing but the sounds of the jungle and lake. Tolvern brushed some crawly thing off her arm, and flinched when an animal screeched to their right. Some other animal growled, the brush crashed, and it sounded like a life and death struggle was playing out not thirty feet away.

What about their stalkers? The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced they were Hroom. No way humans would be wandering around in the dark, no matter how well armed and eager to lay their hands on the intruders. But neither human nor Hroom saw particularly well in the dark, so if she and her companions only sat still . . .

Another movement in the brush, this time to their left. The creak of a bending branch. Instinctively, she knew it was different than the animal sounds. Carvalho was lying next to her with his gun, and she felt his body stiffen.

A crack of blue lightning arced out toward the bent trunk on which they lay. It sizzled the wood next to Tolvern’s ear with a roaring crack. She smelled ozone and burning hair. The side of her face tingled.

Carvalho fired once. Someone cried out, but not in pain. A warning. The voice belonged to a Hroom. Carvalho fired twice more in quick succession.

Something moved in the brush to her right, and Tolvern, recovering from the close call of the electric attack, spotted a long, slender shadow slinking through the trees. He held what looked like a walking stick in his hand, but the tip glowed with a faint blue light. She lifted her gun to fire. But before she could squeeze off a shot, the figure disappeared into the trees.

A light blinked on the opposite side of the lake. Two lights answered with blinks of their own, but neither was close to them. There must be at least five enemies, counting the two (or more) who flanked them.

Carvalho now had four bullets and Tolvern had eight. She couldn’t sit here in the dark, waiting for another attack. Not with twelve bullets between them, and many hours until morning.

“Nyb Pim,” she said in a low voice. “Get out here.”

He came out and crawled up behind her.

“Talk to them,” she whispered. “Tell them we’re not enemies, that we’re—just explain it. You know what to say. Try not to offend them, for God’s sake.”

Nyb Pim called out in Hroom. His voice was high, with hoots and strange whistling noises. Sounds a human couldn’t reproduce, though she knew a few claimed to understand it and could manage a few very simple words. Even then, half the Hroom language was apparently just mood or sense and not words in the human sense of language.

Her Hroom pilot-turned-translator spoke for two or three minutes in what sounded like a long supplication. At last he stopped, but there was no answer from the surrounding jungle. If Tolvern hadn’t seen the electric attack and heard the voice, she’d have thought they were jumping at shadows.

“What did you tell them?”

“The truth,” he said.

Yes, but how much of the truth? And with what nuance? And if he’d admitted he was with humans, they’d expect a lie or trap. There was no escaping the human reputation, Albion’s more so, for being masters of deception.

Another electrical pulse lashed out without warning. This time, it was aimed at Carvalho. It struck him on the arm. Tolvern was touching him, and the current passed from his body to hers. Her limbs stiffened, and she only just managed to hold onto the trunk. Carvalho wasn’t so fortunate. He stiffened and lost his grip. She couldn’t move quickly enough to grab him. He fell off and landed in the water below with a plop.

“Carvalho!”

She leaned over and tried in vain to see into the inky-black water. Nyb Pim stretched out, reaching with his long arms and fingers. Another flash and crackle from one of the electric weapons, and Nyb Pim went over, too. Tolvern lifted her gun and aimed in the direction of the attack. She fired twice on semi-auto.

Tolvern saw the light at the last moment, a glowing blue spot that rose up from the water and jabbed her ankle. A painful jolt touched every nerve in her body. Her muscles seized and wouldn’t move or respond. She’d been leaning over after her two companions, and now slid off and fell. She hit the warm water with a splash.

Tolvern couldn’t feel her limbs, but there was a sensation of sinking. She must be under water. Were her lungs opening involuntarily as she sucked in water and drowned?

Then strong, bony hands grabbed her ankles and yanked her back. She started to feel her body again as they threw her down in the reeds on the edge of the lake.

Tolvern spit out mud and water. “My friends. You have to—”

A hand struck her across the face, and her head rocked back. Strong hands pinned her arms, and someone else tied her ankles together. She was terrified for Carvalho and Nyb Pim, imagining them drowning in the lake, but then she heard the former groaning and the latter said something in Hroom. A blow, a grunt from Nyb Pim as they silenced him again.

Wait, what about Brockett?

Keep quiet, you fool. Don’t let them know you’re there.

But only moments later, she heard Brockett’s shouts. “Let go of me! I’m not your enemy. We’re here to help you.”

“Don’t fight them!” she cried. “Don’t resist.”

That was the wrong thing to say, and it was misunderstood. The glowing blue tip came toward her again. She saw it this time and squirmed to get away. It touched her back and held there. Pain burned along her skin and through her body until it felt like electricity was shooting out her fingertips.

Vaguely, she heard Nyb Pim crying out in his language. She couldn’t open her mouth to scream, and blacked out.

Tolvern came to with a groan. Her hands and wrists were bound, and she was slung over someone’s shoulder. The one carrying her was tall and strong, and for a moment, she thought that Drake had come for her and was hauling her to safety.

She soon recognized the truth when her side rubbed painfully against a bony shoulder. It was a Hroom who had her. There were more Hroom in front and behind. Something crackled and sizzled in the darkness, and the smell of burning vegetation filled the air.

She groaned in despair as she realized the depth of her predicament. The Hroom ignored her, but a human voice chuckled from the darkness in front of her.

“Have a good nap?” Carvalho.

“What’s going on?”

“Let me see. While you were sleeping like a babe, the Hroom gave Nyb Pim a working over. Brockett made a run for it. He was caught, of course. This time they were more careful tying him up.”

Brockett spoke up behind them. “That’s an understatement. These blasted cords—I can’t feel my hands and feet.”

“How did you get away in the first place?” Tolvern asked. “Maybe if we all tried it at once.”

Their captors seemed to pay no mind to their conversation. That could be a very bad sign—maybe they meant to kill the prisoners—but in the meantime, she would collect as much information as possible.

“Forget it,” Brockett said. “I still had Carvalho’s knife. Nobody had checked me. I had to try. If only—” he grunted, “—they weren’t so blasted tight.”

“Nyb Pim?” she said. “Are you out there? Are you okay?”

“He is gagged and cannot answer,” Carvalho said. “Possibly unconscious. They were not gentle.”

This was worrying on several levels. “Any idea where we are?” she asked. “Or where they are taking us?”

“Shall I ask them for you?” Carvalho said. “Let me see, how do you say ‘geographical coordinates’ in Hroom?”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I admit my error,” he said. “Offering to surrender did not, in fact, help our situation. And I believe I will owe Capp twenty pounds, as well. Not that it is a debt she will be able to collect, unless she wants to rob a dead man’s possessions.”

“Why the devil are you so cheerful?”

“I am not, I am terrified. But, what can you do?” She could almost hear his shrug.

Tolvern slumped in frustrated exhaustion. The party of Hroom—there seemed to be about a dozen—burned their way through the jungle with some sort of energy tool, possibly the same devices that had rendered her party helpless. The weapon that had touched her body was definitely a Hroom shock spear, but these other ones seemed to have undergone some sort of alteration.

The Hroom stopped twice to rest, and Tolvern got a glimpse of the one who’d been carrying her. Like roughly half the group, she was a female, with a smaller frame and more delicate facial features than the males. Even so, she was more than a foot taller than Tolvern, and strong enough to carry the human woman through the jungle for two hours. All of these Hroom were lean, but very strong.

As for Nyb Pim, she heard him groaning enough to know that he was at least semi-conscious. Why they’d beaten him and not the humans, she couldn’t say. From what Carvalho told her, he hadn’t been resisting, had kept trying to negotiate to the end. Either he’d said something horribly rude in the Hroom language, or they’d singled him out for abuse as a traitor to his race. Neither possibility spoke to negotiating a release.

A different Hroom picked her up when they set out again. He was rougher, continually shifting her from shoulder to shoulder. Once, he tossed her painfully to the ground while the Hroom cut fronds to form a makeshift bridge and get across a shallow, muddy ravine. The water gurgled sluggishly below and didn’t seem like it would be hard to ford by foot. But the Hroom wouldn’t enter water that was more than ankle deep.

Morning came. As the gray turned to burnt orange, the nighttime creatures stopped their racket and were replaced by cawing, cackling birds and buzzing winged insects. The bugs attacked Hroom and human alike, but seemed to prefer human flesh. Tolvern’s captor chased away the sparrow-size mosquitoes, but didn’t bother with the tiny stinging gnats or the little blighters that settled insolently on her earlobes and nibbled away. They were no bigger than house flies, but the inability to brush them off drove her crazy.

The sun rose higher and hit them like a hammer whenever the jungle thinned. Tolvern’s tongue turned to leather. She needed water. Once, they brushed against a fern laden with rainwater, and it showered down on her face, but she could only lap up a few drops.

Finally, they came into a small, semi-dry clearing. Tolvern’s captor swung her around and dropped her to the ground. She landed with a grunt and levered herself to a sitting position. The other three were dumped unceremoniously next to her.

They’d reached a small village hidden in the jungle. It was a collection of fifteen or twenty shacks on raised stilts no more than a hundred yards from one side to the other. Red fern branches draped from the eaves, making the buildings look like part of the landscape. A disguise for prying eyes in the sky, she supposed. Hroom milled about, carrying shock sticks and human assault rifles. There were no other humans and no Hroomlings about.

Tolvern didn’t have all of the answers, but she could make a few guesses. These weren’t sugar slaves, and they weren’t simply feral Hroom, or they wouldn’t be armed like this. They’d have spears and the like, as they’d have been hiding from humans for generations. These must be armed insurgents.

Nyb Pim was awake and blinking his large eyes. A crust of blood stuck to his temple where they’d hit him, but he didn’t seem badly injured, only knocked around. It had been hours since talking brought the wrath of their captors, and Tolvern was debating if the same would hold true now, when something caught her eye. She drew her breath.

All the houses in the village faced a large, raised platform in a small clearing in the center. A short staircase led up to the platform. At the bottom of the staircase sat a wooden post about ten feet tall, carved with contorted, hideous faces, human and Hroom skulls, and figures writhing in pain. But this wasn’t what had frightened her. It was what she spotted on the platform itself.

Dead, mutilated humans covered the platform.

Chapter Thirteen

After securing Fort Gamma, Drake and Rutherford met with Commander Gibbs in her war room. Drake had spent so long in the tight confines of a warship that the space Gibbs enjoyed felt almost cavernous. The room had twelve-foot ceilings and a massive table that could have seated twenty. If you moved it to the side, you could easily fit another table of equal size in the room.

Gibbs retracted the blast shield, and a twenty-foot port window revealed a view of Hot Barsa. The red mountains and jungles of the northern continent rolled slowly beneath them. The coast approached, with a wide blue ocean. Islands stretched like glittering rubies on a long chain that thrust up and over the north pole.

A Punisher-class warship like Vigilant or Blackbeard was an enormous piece of machinery, but it was built for speed and power, not comfort. The living quarters were squeezed around the massive engines, the guns and other armaments, and the engineering bay. Enlisted men were forced to hot bunk, which meant that few beds were ever unoccupied for long. Officers like Capp enjoyed private quarters, but they were little more than large closets. Only the captain had any space, with a tiny kitchen, a small nook for reading and study, and a separate sleeping area. Drake’s entire quarters could have been tucked into one corner of this room.

Drake and Rutherford stared out at Hot Barsa for a long moment while Gibbs stood with her hands on her hips, watching them with a knowing look. She was about fifteen years older than the young captains, and was a handsome, almost aristocratic woman who would not have looked out of place in Albion high society.

Drake turned away from the window. “It is an impressive view, but I find myself wondering something. How does it feel to fly over Malthorne’s plantations, thinking about all of the slaves and sugar you’re protecting?”

“There are twenty-seven different landowners on Hot Barsa,” she said. “All powerful lords and ladies.”

“Oh, yes,” Rutherford said loftily. “That makes it all legitimate.”

“Indeed,” she said. “These sugar worlds are the source of Albion’s wealth.”

“And the source of her corruption,” Drake said. “The cause of our wars with the empire. The endless cycles of treaty violations and the need for more slaves. Always more, more, more.”

She scowled. “Where are your loyalties, men? Albion? Or these aliens?”

Rutherford sputtered, but Drake held up a hand to stop him. Let Gibbs work it out of her system. She had just surrendered her fort. That must be a blow to her ego.

“Let me tell you something else.” Gibbs pointed out the window. “That blast shield is thirty feet thick. There’s a six-inch layer of tyrillium beneath that. I’d have survived your bombardment. So a little more deference from you, if you please.”

“If that’s so, why did you surrender?” Drake asked.

“Malthorne is a bastard. He bent the Admiralty to his will and filled the fleet with sycophants and boot lickers. A few more years of that rubbish, and the Hroom would pick us apart in battle. I don’t think much of your rebellion, either—I’m counting on one of the lords of Albion solving our problem, not some ragged band of rebels scheming from the marshlands of Saxony.”

“So here you sit,” Drake said. “Waiting for someone else to make a sacrifice. Someone else to take a risk. Yes, I think we understand.”

“Malthorne left me short-handed—I only had eighty-seven men and women on this rock when you showed up. What’s more, you killed eleven in your assault, and five died before I could put down the subsequent mutiny. Eighteen mutineers are behind bars awaiting judgment. That gives you a crew of fifty-three for a fort that can house a thousand and needs a hundred and twenty crew as a bare minimum.

“How about that?” Gibbs continued. “Now you know why I gave up the fight so quickly. Why I surrendered. No ammo for my heavy weapons, no troops to defend against a ground assault. What was I to do?”

Drake took this news in dismay. He’d counted on a garrison of at least three hundred. Question them for loyalty, and imprison those who could not be counted on. That might leave him two hundred. He could spread the extra crew among his fleet to fill critical deficiencies. Instead, it seemed as though Fort Gamma would further tax his resources.

The commander smiled and made a grand gesture with her hands. “The fort is yours, boys. What will you do with it now?”

Fort Epsilon was in better shape, but only just. It had over ninety men and women dug into the rock, and almost to an individual, they had agreed to join the rebellion. Epsilon’s commander was an old classmate of Malthorne’s at the academy, but the atomic destruction of York Town had killed his entire family, and he’d secretly blamed the admiral for allowing the Hroom death fleet to break through.

As for Fort Alpha, it still refused to surrender. Drake wasted ammunition attacking it, threatened a ground invasion, and offered the commander and his officers generous terms if they would surrender. They continued to resist.

Rutherford wanted to land an assault team and take Alpha by force. It was well positioned in orbit to support an enemy fleet and could attack them if they sent forces to the planet to work mischief. But Drake didn’t have the manpower.

Instead, he set up a blockade, and captured, destroyed, or dissuaded any incoming galleons and merchant frigates. No relief would get through to Fort Alpha. No supplies would reach the surface to relieve Malthorne’s security forces. And nothing got out, either. If Drake couldn’t seize the sugar world, let it choke on unshipped sugar.

Even better would be damage on the surface. A full-scale revolt would inevitably draw Matlhorne. But there was still no word from Tolvern.

He sent a subspace to Isabel Vargus, telling her to hire more mercenaries if they could be found. He’d take ships, of course, but he mainly needed manpower. He also spent too much time and sent too many subspace messages looking for her sister Catarina. The younger Vargus sister was still out there collecting forces for her secret expedition to settle the Omega Cluster.

Drake lacked sufficient money to hire Catarina, and the only other thing she wanted, he couldn’t offer. Catarina wanted him. She wanted his ship and crew. Together, they would sneak through the decaying wormhole and leave it all behind: Albion, the war with the Hroom, Apex. Sadly, Drake couldn’t accept. And he couldn’t pretend to, either, just to secure her aid for another battle.

By now, Isabel Vargus’s mercenary fleet had jumped out of the Barsa system on its way to San Pablo for supplies. Unfortunately, neither HMS Philistine nor the captured cruiser were ready to depart Rodriguez’s yards, according to a subspace sent to Drake from San Pablo. Neither could crews be found for them.

Malthorne was on the prowl. He hadn’t attacked Saxony, thank God, but he’d crushed a small rebel refueling station in the Fantalus system. Then he’d seized two Albion-flagged galleons on their way to Saxony. Finally, he dispatched Royal Marines under the command of General Fitzgibbons to seize the rebellion’s only active tyrillium mine. Fitzgibbons savaged his way through the mining colony.

The miners were just men and women on contract, not involved politically, but Admiral Malthorne declared them traitors. He ordered Fitzgibbons to dump them into the void. Fitzgibbons took pictures of their bulging, terrified faces as they died from rapid decompression. The admiral distributed the photos across the Albion systems. A warning.

At that point, Malthorne was on his way toward Hot Barsa—or so it appeared—when he stumbled into the path of a space leviathan. Not even Dreadnought could fight it out against one of the miles-long monsters, and his forces fled the system. After that, Malthorne and Dreadnought disappeared.

And then terrible news came through from an unexpected quarter. General Mose Dryz, the military commander of the Hroom Empire, sent Drake a message. Apex had broken through the Hroom defenses.

Like a lance stabbing through a rotten melon, the mysterious alien race had ravaged several worlds and was now assaulting a thinly settled system of mixed Hroom and New Dutch humans. They’d slaughtered their way through the system’s mining colonies and captured thousands, presumably to eat them. Apex was now approaching the main world of the system. A terrified fleet of survivors scattered in all directions.

A few more months, and Apex would be at Albion’s throat. With Drake and Malthorne locked in bitter combat, what hope would they have for defeating the predatory aliens?

To add a final worry, Captain Lindsell was on the move. His still-powerful fleet headed toward the jump point to San Pablo. Someone must have tipped him off. Drake couldn’t let him attack Isabel Vargus on her return. He needed those ships, men, and supplies.

Most critically, he needed to secure Fort Gamma and Fort Epsilon. Then Drake would divide his forces. HMS Vigilant had suffered engine damage in the battle for the forts, so Drake would leave Rutherford with several ships to defend Hot Barsa.

Blackbeard herself would set off to attack Lindsell.

Chapter Fourteen

After at least two hours of sitting on the ground, a pair of Hroom roughly hauled Tolvern to her feet. They dragged her up the stairs to the platform where the dead, mutilated bodies lay. Naked torsos. Limbs torn free, with bones sticking out. Heads severed from spines, with eyes open and tongues lolling.

Metallic blue flies swarmed the corpses, and their flesh squirmed with maggots. The smell of rotting flesh made Tolvern swoon. Terror clawed its way into her gut.

Brockett and Carvalho cried out in alarm and struggled to rise.

“Quiet,” Nyb Pim warned them. “You will get her killed.”

Brockett and Carvalho immediately stopped, but they watched her with bugging eyes. It wasn’t helping. Neither was the extreme thirst that left her feeling like a sponge that had been left under the baking sun to harden and dry.

Tolvern winced as the Hroom untied the cords from her wrists. The first thing she did was tug at her sore, bug-gnawed ears. That only made the itching worse. She rubbed her wrists and bent to untie her ankles. One of her captors jabbed toward her with his shock spear. She flinched, not wanting to get a taste of that electric jolt again.

Then she steeled herself. Enough cowering. “If you’re going to kill me, do it quickly. Torture is the coward’s way out.”

He didn’t respond.

“Fine, then how about some water?”

He stared at her expressionlessly. She pantomimed pouring something in her throat and wiping her lips. He still stared, unmoving. The other Hroom said something to the first with a gesture of his staff. It had a two-pronged piece of metal at the tip and wires running down the side to a makeshift button. These weapons were hacks, broken-down pieces of equipment modified to continue functioning in the jungle. Tolvern thought about the supplies in the submerged away pod, and knew that she could vastly increase their fighting ability.

If she could somehow keep from being dismembered.

“Try again,” she called down to Nyb Pim. “Tell them. We’re here to help. We’re not with Malthorne. We know the Hroom general. What is his name? Mose Dryz. We want peace between humans and Hroom, and all the rest of it. You know what to say—do what you can.”

“I understand.”

Tolvern was encouraged that their captors let her communicate without punishing her, and more encouraged when Nyb Pim started talking and the others didn’t attack him again. By now, most of the Hroom in the village had appeared and were standing, watching, and listening.

But within a few seconds of Nyb Pim speaking, another Hroom burst out of one of the shacks and snarled at the pilot. Nyb Pim shut up.

The newcomer was a large Hroom, several inches taller than Nyb Pim, who was himself over seven feet. This one had red skin, mottled with purple and lighter pink splotches. He wasn’t an eater, she thought, but those pink spots made her think he once had been.

He towered over the Hroom pilot, who was still sitting on the ground, bound. Nyb Pim had fallen silent, and now the newcomer spoke in an angry tone. Nyb Pim looked down at the ground, not making eye contact. Proper deference from a lower Hroom to an elder, a teacher, or a military leader.

Was this tall one the chief of the whole village? She would take one small risk and find out.

“Ask him if we can have some water,” she told Nyb Pim.

“You are going to get him killed,” Carvalho said.

“We’ll all be killed if we don’t do something. And this one needs to know that Nyb Pim answers to me, and me alone.”

“Enough.” It came from the tall Hroom, and it was in English.

Tolvern sat up straight, shocked. She hadn’t heard one intelligible word since being taken captive.

“Give us water,” she insisted.

“No.”

“What you are doing is cruel. We have caused you no offense. We only defended ourselves when attacked, as anybody would have. We don’t deserve this.” So far, she’d heard two words out of his mouth. Was he even understanding her?

“I have not yet decided if you will live,” he said, answering that question, at least. “Indeed, I believe that I will kill you. The question in my mind is how it shall be accomplished.”

He spoke as well as Nyb Pim, who’d been raised by missionaries. This one had spent many years among humans. A former slave?

As for his claim, Hroom were not given to deception, did not try to bluff to gain an advantage. They were not above torturing their prisoners for information—that ugly trait had apparently evolved independently of human cruelty—but if the Hroom said he would murder them, it wasn’t to get her attention. It was because he meant it.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because humans bring nothing but misery. Because I believe you are lying to me.”

“We didn’t even know you spoke English. Didn’t you hear us talking amongst ourselves? Why would we have said all of that?”

“Deception. It is your way.”

“Ask him, then.” Tolvern pointed at Nyb Pim. “He’ll tell you.”

“Which would only prove that he was already deceived, not that what he would tell me would be the truth.”

“Listen to me. We’re here to help. We came in an away pod. Malthorne’s ships were shooting at us. The pod landed in the swamp where you found us.”

“I saw no pod. Only parachutes. Part of the deception.”

“All you have to do is ask Nyb Pim. We couldn’t have deceived him about that. Think about it. He was in the pod with us. He’ll tell you. We were shot at by Malthorne’s ship.”

Nyb Pim started to speak Hroom. Tolvern could only assume it was agreement with what she’d been saying. But the Hroom leader interrupted at once, and one of their captors jabbed Nyb Pim with a shock spear. He flopped to his side and lay there twitching.

“Stop doing that!” Brockett cried. “You’ll kill him. Captain, tell them. His nervous system has already taken repeated—”

“I know, Brockett. Keep quiet.”

She was thinking. Why didn’t this Hroom want Nyb Pim to talk? The chief hadn’t stopped Tolvern from speaking, so why the pilot? But, wait. He’d allowed Nyb Pim to speak in English. It was only when he launched into Hroom that they attacked him.

“You don’t want the others to hear, do you?” she asked. “They don’t understand English, only Hroom. And you don’t want them to know what we’re saying. Because they might have sympathy for us. And that will make us harder to kill.”

The Hroom glared at her. “This is why our people can never deal with yours. We speak plainly, even when we don’t intend to speak at all. Yet your ways are cloudy to our minds. We know you are trying to destroy us, to enslave us, to weaken us at every step. Yet we cannot stop you.”

He hadn’t killed them yet; Tolvern took comfort in that. He’d ordered Tolvern dragged to the platform, where two guards stood menacingly above her. They threatened to add her to the macabre tableau of victims, but they hadn’t done it yet.

“Then do it,” she said. “If you’re only going to kill us anyway, why are you hesitating?”

“Do you know where you are sitting?” he asked.

“Seems obvious enough. A place where you murder people in cold blood.”

“A temple to Lyam Kar.”

“The god of death?” she asked. If her mouth hadn’t already been dry, it would have become so now.

He gave the wrist turn that was the Hroom equivalent of a shrug. “Perhaps our ancestors with their giant stone temples would not have recognized it as such. But we do what we can given our reduced circumstances.”

“And you tortured and mutilated these people?” she said with a nod at the rotting body parts.

“We dismembered them, as per our custom. But I gave them the right to die from hanging first. Then I cut them apart in the sacrificial manner.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Are you unaware of the nature of this world? What the humans do to us when they capture us? I was a slave for over ten years. It is a cruel, merciless fate. I will not return. I will not see any of my people return. We will die first.”

“Please, listen to me. My name is Jess Tolvern. I am a ship captain. I’m part of the rebellion attempting to end Lord Malthorne’s reign. He is the biggest slaver on this world, and I mean to do him as much damage as possible.”

“So that you can seize his plantations and sugar mills for yourself?”

“No.”

“My village is anxious to see you killed. Most of them are survivors of a terrible massacre a few months ago. Their mates, their offspring—all slaughtered. My own mate was killed by humans.”

“We took no part in that,” Tolvern said.

“We turned to the gods for relief from our pain. Some had visions of Lyam Kar. As soon as we began to offer sacrifices, our fortunes turned.”

“And you believe that killing and maiming brings this god’s aid?”

“From the god of death, yes. He is the one who will lift us to victory.”

“You didn’t answer my question. You believe this?”

He still didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “There are some who urge us to sacrifice in the old way—that is what they expect will be your fate.”

“The old way? Torture first, you mean. Am I right? Then death.”

“Removing the joints of the body, one by one. First, the digits of the feet and hands. Then the hands and feet themselves. To the joints of the arms and legs, and finally, the shoulders and hips. We did this to the dead. Now we will do it to the living. There are ways to prolong life. To give pain along with death as an offering to our god.”

Tolvern found this terrifying, but at the same time, this Hroom leader was clearly unsettled. He had refused to answer her question as to whether or not he believed torture and sacrifice helped. He had brought her here, yet allowed her to plead for her life.

“Please, what is your name?”

“Pez Rykan.”

She hadn’t expected him to answer, but was glad he had. Pez Rykan. The last name was the world where he’d been born: Rykan. Seized by Albion about fifteen years ago, it was largely depopulated now, as it was too hot for human settlement, yet unsuitable for sugar production. A good source of slaves, and nothing more.

“Pez Rykan, what will it hurt you to let us show you the away pod and what we’ve brought you? If what I’m telling you is true, it will change the course of this war.”

“I care nothing for your war.”

“Of your war. You will free the slaves. They will come to you by the thousands.”

He hesitated, and in that moment, she knew that she had him. He still suspected that she was lying. Probably was nearly certain that it was a trap, though he wouldn’t be able to see how it could be. Neither did Tolvern, for that matter. The four strangers had been clinging to a dangerous perch above the lake when discovered. Probably wouldn’t have survived the night, if Pez Rykan hadn’t come. It had been a rescue, as much as a capture.

But there was a chance. His situation was nearly hopeless, hiding feebly in the jungle, and he’d have to take it.

Pez Rykan scaled the platform and said something to the other Hroom. They pulled her to her feet and lifted her off the ground until she was high enough to see eye to eye with the chief. He studied her face, as if miraculously, he would be able to detect deception when no other Hroom could.

“I will give you two choices,” he said. “First, you confess that you are lying. That there is no away pod, no strange weapon or device that will help us in our struggle. If you confess your lies, I will see that you are quickly and mercifully executed. Even this Hroom who has betrayed his people shall enjoy a swift end.”

“And if I don’t? What is my choice?”

“If you persist in your story, I will accept it as the truth. For now. I will give you water and food. I will accompany you to the swamp where you were found. There we will discover the truth of the matter.”

“And then?” she asked.

“If these goods exist, we will recover them, and I will decide what to do with you then. But if you are lying—”

“I’m not.”

“If you are lying, you will still be sacrificed. But in the old way. Joint by joint. You will feel every cut, every pull. So long as we are able, you will stay alive while your body is ripped apart to give honor and sacrifice to our god.”

Chapter Fifteen

Back at the lake the next morning, Tolvern stood on shore with her hands on her hips as their captives searched for the pod. Four Hroom waded through the mud and reeds to where the water grew deep, probing with twelve-foot-long poles. Others hacked branches from one of the fern trees on the edge of the lake to expose its trunk. They’d hauled a thick rope from the village, which they now tied around its base.

Pez Rykan stood on the shore next to Tolvern. “I have warned you. I will not retract my judgment should your vessel fail to appear.”

“You’ll see. This is going to change everything.”

Tolvern felt confident, almost cocky. This was the entire reason she’d come to Hot Barsa, and after several narrow scrapes, she was finally ready to complete her mission. But there was no time to waste. There was a rebellion to foment.

After pronouncing judgment, the Hroom leader had put them in one of the stilt houses and brought them water. Later came food, some sort of cooked tuber and meat dish that was surprisingly edible, though she didn’t want to think about what kind of animal she was eating. They were all in better spirits after that, and ready for a return trip to the lake in the morning.

Nyb Pim remained captive at the Hroom village, but Pez Rykan brought the other three along. Following the previously cut trail, with everyone on foot now, it only took a few hours to reach the lake. Carvalho cut his own pole, and soon joined the Hroom in poking into the lake, looking for the pod. Brockett sat on the riverbank with a pad of paper and a charcoal drawing stick given him by the Hroom, running some sort of calculations about the sugar antidote.

“How far away are the plantations?” Tolvern asked.

Pez Rykan hesitated, as if trying to decide whether to answer. “The nearest estate is a day’s march to the northeast.”

“That close! That’s great news. Is it a big one?”

“Naturally,” the chief said. “It belongs to your king. He has hoarded the richest lands for himself.”

“Lord Malthorne is no king of mine. My king was killed by the Hroom, and when we replace him, we’ll choose a better sort than Malthorne, believe me. Someone honest and just.”

“Does such a human exist?”

“How many slaves on this estate?” she asked, not to be put off by his digs.

“Tens of thousands. Living in misery, worked to death to make the very poison that is killing them.”

“We’ll put an end to that, by God.”

“Unlikely. Dozens of humans and armed sugar eaters guard the estate. Our entire rebellion is a single village in the swamp. How would we manage such a thing?”

Tolvern allowed herself a smile. “Wait until you see what I have. Then you won’t be so glum.” She glanced up at the mottled skin around his neck and face, and found herself wondering. “You were a sugar slave, weren’t you? How did you escape?”

Pez Rykan didn’t answer, but kept staring out at the lake. She thought it was another case of not wanting to answer a direct question and not knowing how to equivocate, but he was staring so fixedly that she followed his gaze. Carvalho and the Hroom had traipsed along the edge of the reeds, stirring up mud. The others had tied off the massive rope, dragged the end into the water, and stood guarding the searchers.

“The devil take me,” Carvalho called back to her. “I cannot find the bloody thing. This is where I was swimming, right out from here, I would swear it.”

“Search in that direction,” she said, pointing.

“It wasn’t there. Look, you can see where we crawled out of the water, here.”

He was right. She’d had a hard time getting an angle on their landing spot from this side of the lake, although the larger parachute was still where they’d left it, and that had provided a rough guide. But now he pointed to the giant lily pads, and she could see one they’d flipped over coming up. It had never righted itself, and the underside had bleached pink in the sun.

“You were indeed lying to me,” Pez Rykan said.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “It was right there.”

“And now you have forced me to keep my promise. You will be sacrificed in the old way.”

“Someone must have moved it!”

“Nobody moved it. You would see where it had come out of the water.”

That was true. There were various tracks out of the water, places where the reeds had bent and broken as if some large animal had dragged itself to shore, but nothing nearly the size of the away pod.

“I don’t know, a helicopter, then. The humans must have spotted us landing, maybe detected us from space. They came down, hooked up chains, and lifted it straight up.”

“Doubtful.”

“You’re right, it’s got to be here. For God’s sake, you’ve got to give us a little more time. Look, I’ll find it myself.”

Without waiting to see if he would stop her, she stripped off her boots and socks and peeled off her jump suit until she stood in her underwear. She slogged through the mud past Carvalho.

When the water began to climb thigh high, she eyed the overturned lily pad and dove in. The last thing she heard before going into the warm water was Carvalho calling out for her to be careful.

She came up with a slimy taste in her mouth. The edge of the away pod should be right beneath her, within reach of where Carvalho and the others were poking around with their poles. But hadn’t it landed on this side? The higher part would be out another fifteen feet or so, in deeper water.

She swam out and prodded around with her feet. Carvalho had felt it right under him. She couldn’t feel anything, but she was also shorter than he was. She kicked up her feet and dove down to find it with her hands. It was dark as ink, and she couldn’t see a thing. Something long and serpentine slid past her in the water, brushing her with its body.

Tolvern swam down until her fingers groped at the mud. Dammit. Not down here. She came up, took a big gulp of air, and went down again. Nothing. Where the hell was it?

When she came up a second time, Carvalho pointed to her left. “You’re over too far. Move that way.”

The Hroom were talking in excited tones, pointing out to the center of the lake. Brockett was on his feet, watching her, but now his attention moved to where the Hroom were gesturing. His eyes widened.

Tolvern didn’t look, afraid that whatever she saw would terrify her into swimming for shore. And then Pez Rykan would seize her for treachery, and that would be the end of them all.

She swam to where Carvalho was pointing. She kicked up her heels and dove. Again her fingers touched the mud, but this time she didn’t come back up. She swam in circles until her lungs burned, growing more and more frustrated, as well as afraid of whatever creature the others had spotted. Then she bumped into something hard and flat. She found the edge and felt along it, and found one of the large hooks they used when loading the pods into their ejection carriages.

It was the pod all right, way down in the mud, where it must have been settling since it fell, sinking until it was nearly buried. Another day or so, and it might disappear entirely. Tolvern came up, lungs bursting.

“I found it!”

Nobody cared. It was all commotion on the bank. Carvalho yelled at her to get out of the water. She swam furiously for the shore, and he came in up to his waist to grab her arms. He dragged her into the reeds, where they promptly fell into the mud.

The Hroom were shouting, and the air sizzled with the sound of electricity and the smell of ozone. Something huge splashed behind Tolvern, but she was tangled with Carvalho and mired in the mud and couldn’t get up. Brockett screamed for them to get out and onto dry land.

“Get off me!” Carvalho said.

“I’m trying!”

A roar of pain from behind them, another huge splash, and the Hroom fell silent, except for gasps and short, relieved-sounding conversations. Whatever it was, it was over.

Tolvern was face to face with Carvalho. He looked up at her and grinned through his mud-splattered face.

“Well, Tolvern, I thought it might be pleasant to have you naked on top of me, but I thought perhaps we might do it in private.”

She picked herself up with a grunt, then helped him to his feet without covering herself. She refused to be embarrassed by her state of undress. The scoundrel had the nerve to let his eyes roam up and down her muddy body.

“Are you literally waggling your eyebrows at me?” she asked.

“Very well, I will stop.” He gave her a mocking shrug and turned his back.

She returned cautiously to the water’s edge to wash up. Without ever taking her eyes from the water, which still swirled from whatever had disturbed it, she hurriedly splashed some of the mud from her body. Carvalho did the same to one side, no longer staring at her.

Once back on shore, she told Pez Rykan what she’d found as she picked off leeches. He still seemed suspicious.

“I’ll swim down with the rope myself,” she said. “There’s a big hook along one side where I can tie it. There’s that monster to think about, though.”

“We gave it a severe jolt with our weapons,” the chief said. “I believe it will look for an easier meal, at least for now. There would be no better time to go than this moment.”

Tolvern didn’t relish the thought of returning to the water. But there seemed to be no other option. Carvalho offered to go, and she supposed she could have even pressed Brockett into action. He’d been lounging on the shore this whole time, after all. But no.

Soon enough, she was back in the water and diving with the rope. For all Pez Rykan’s reassurances, he kept his forces poised at the shore to defend her. Thankfully, the creature didn’t return. Soon, she had the rope secured and was safely out of the water.

The rope was strong enough, but the pod had nearly buried itself deep in the mud. Working together, human and Hroom, they heaved for several minutes with little effort, but by now, Pez Rykan seemed convinced and wouldn’t give up. He sent his Hroom to dive and dig through the mud to try to free the massive thing. Shortly, the straining rope caught a little slack. They redoubled their effort.

The pod came loose at last, popping out like a rotten tooth. There must have remained a small pocket of air, because once it was free of the mud, it had enough buoyancy that they were able to drag the whole thing into the reeds. There it sat, immobile, as inky water, mud, and squirming, eel-like fish drained out.

It took a few minutes of hauling out the sealed supply boxes before they got to the larger containers holding thousands of doses of sugar antidote. Carvalho and Tolvern dragged out one of the containers to Brockett, who popped the seal. Tolvern held her breath, worried that water had infiltrated and destroyed it all.

It had not. Inside, the individual boxes were all intact and dry. The individual gelatin caplets containing the antidote were undamaged.

Tolvern, excited, grabbed Carvalho by the shoulders and shook him. He stared back, grinning.

“All right, Tolvern. All right. You are going to shake my teeth right out of my skull.”

Pez Rykan stood next to them, watching with a solemn expression. “What is this?”

Tolvern stretched to clap him on the shoulder, forgetting momentarily that he’d been threatening to torture them to death only minutes earlier, and that in any event, he was not Nyb Pim, but a strange and brooding Hroom.

“This, my friend, is your magic weapon. It may not look like much, but it will change the course of the war.”

“It does not look like anything. It looks like little pills.”

“Only to the untrained eye, you grumpy Hroom. This is a weapon, believe me.”

“Speak plainly. I do not like your riddles.”

“A cure, Pez Rykan. An antidote. Feed this to an eater, and he is cured forever.”

There was a great deal of excitement in the camp when the Hroom realized what their chief had brought back with him. Arguments broke out, presumably about whether or not it was another human lie.

Tolvern insisted they release Nyb Pim. They shoved him roughly from the house where he’d been confined all day, and he told the other Hroom that he’d received the sugar antidote himself, and that it worked. Brockett produced a sugar sample, at which point the entire village fell silent. Horror on some faces, naked desire on others. Long tongues darted over lips as if in anticipation.

Once an eater, always an eater.

Tolvern had heard that expression a thousand times, usually from those convinced of the weak moral fiber of your typical Hroom and the weakness and decadence of the Hroom civilization. Practically speaking, there was some truth in it. You could cure a Hroom of short-term addiction, but you could never cure him entirely. He was always one taste away from utter collapse into depravity.

Nyb Pim tore the top off the sugar packet. He tilted his head and poured the sugar into his mouth. There was a collective gasp.

The Hroom watched Nyb Pim, wide-eyed, waiting for him to swoon. Tolvern half expected it herself, even though she knew better.

“I don’t like the way they’re looking at me,” Brockett whispered.

“They know you have more sugar.”

“I do! There’s some in my pocket.”

“I wouldn’t advertise the fact.”

She glanced at the Hroom. Most of them were staring at Nyb Pim, but some fixed their attention on the young science officer, as if they would tear his clothes off to search every body cavity for hidden sugar. How did Pez Rykan lead these people in attacking the sugar plantations without them fighting their way to the nearest mill and eating themselves to oblivion?

Nyb Pim remained calm and clear-eyed. It soon became obvious that nothing would happen to him. The sugar had been rendered harmless.

Someone exclaimed in surprise, and then all the Hroom exploded into chatter for several minutes. Tolvern watched them, amused. For a people who had built a long-lived empire stretching across dozens of star systems, they were surprisingly naïve. How easy it would have been to fake the whole experiment. How did they even know it was sugar Brockett fed Nyb Pim? Could have been some other substance. Could have been salt. The whole thing could be a plot to addict the remaining free Hroom on the planet. That’s what a human would be thinking.

Two Hroom began to edge over to where the three humans stood together. The rest clustered around Nyb Pim, babbling questions.

“You have got some of that antidote on you?” Carvalho asked, watching the approaching Hroom through narrowed eyes. “Might want to break it out right about now.”

“I was thinking about that,” Brockett said, looking distracted. “If we cut the dosage—”

Tolvern and Carvalho shielded him. “Maybe we’ll worry about that later,” she said.

She motioned for Pez Rykan to come over. The chief scowled, a facial expression that transferred readily between Hroom and human, but he came to her. As he did, the approaching pair faded back toward those surrounding Nyb Pim.

“I do not like that gesture, human,” Pez Rykan said. “It is the gesture of a taskmaster to his slave.”

“Call me by my name, and I’ll call you by yours. Like two civilized beings. Anyway, that’s not how I meant it. Listen, we’ve got to distribute the antidote to your people as fast as possible.”

“I am not yet decided.”

“No?” she said. “Then you’d better stand guard over those crates we hauled back. You’ve got eaters in your village. Reformed, yes, but not fully cured. Someone is going to get the idea that destroying the antidote is the best course.”

“Ah. Yes, I see. I believe you are right.”

“You know I’m right.”

“And then what? Say I do what you ask?”

Tolvern smiled. “How far did you say the nearest plantation is from here? A day’s march?”

“That is correct.”

“And what would happen if thousands of sugar slaves suddenly became immune?”

Pez Rykan stared at her for a long moment. Understanding dawned on his face.

“Yes,” she told him. “Now you see.”

Chapter Sixteen

Late the next day, when the company had stopped to camp before the final approach to the plantation, Tolvern finally reached someone on the handheld computer she’d rescued from the away pod. To her surprise, it was Henny Capp who appeared on the other side.

“You!” she said.

Capp grinned insolently. “Aye. Were you expecting Malthorne?”

Tolvern had tried to raise Blackbeard yesterday, but failed. She tried a couple of other ships in the fleet, but nobody answered. But she guessed Drake was out there; how else to explain the orbital battle she’d witnessed? Could he be attempting to seize the forts? She sent a cautious, coded message to the forts. Fort Gamma answered.

“Where you been?” Capp asked. “King’s balls, we thought you’d been killed.”

“Nope. Not dead. What the devil are you doing?”

The other woman leaned back in her chair, her hands behind her shaved head. “I’m in charge of this joint, wouldn’t you believe it?”

“Frankly, no,” Tolvern said, laughing. “I don’t believe that for one second.”

“You’d better, ’cause it’s the God’s honest truth. Cap’n forced this Gibbs lady to surrender, but he don’t trust her yet. Wants me to hold things down until we get stuff figured out. Then we’ll be off again.”

“Where?”

“Oh, you know. It’s that bastard Lindsell. He’s keeping us from getting our goods here and all.”

“What about Dreadnought?”

“Nope, she ain’t here yet. You don’t need to know nothing about that, what with your own troubles. Listen, you taking care of that big oaf of mine?”

Tolvern cast a glance at the camp, where two Hroom were showing Carvalho and Brockett how to gut and dress a large, scaly, pig-like thing they’d shot in the underbrush. Carvalho plunged his arms into the beast’s abdomen and pulled out a mess of guts. Brockett looked pale and swallowed hard.

“A few narrow scrapes, but we’re all right,” Tolvern said. “I still don’t understand. How are you in charge? Nyb Pim is with me. Who’s piloting Blackbeard?”

“Rutherford’s subpilot. It’s me and some of the boys down here now. Anyone acts up before Drake puts Gibbs back in charge, we’ll knock ’em around a bit. Want me to put you through to the cap’n?”

She was tempted. “No, better not. We should close this channel. Tell Drake we’ve made successful contact with rebellious Hroom. There aren’t many—it’s really just one small village of survivors—but we’re about to change that.”

“Aye.” Capp scratched at her head. “Hey, Tolvern. That boy of mine try anything?”

“What do you mean?”

Capp winked. “You know.”

Tolvern thought of Carvalho’s innuendo that first night. And how she’d fallen on top of him in the mud wearing only her underwear. Then there was the bet Capp and Carvalho had about whether he’d bed Tolvern.

“No, not really.”

“Ah, I thought he would. You know, he was telling me he could get inside your pants the first night on the ground.”

“We were kind of trying to stay alive. No time for that sort of thing.”

“Not that I think you will, luv—you’re only hot for the cap’n, as anyone but Drake can see—but you got my blessing if you’re keen. Long time down there alone, and me and Carvalho ain’t got the sort of relationship where we get all jealous-like. Anyway, there’s this bloke in the gunnery what was showing me his tools, and I been thinking . . . anyway, you want to take my fellow out for a ride, you got my blessing.”

“That’s good to know, Capp,” Tolvern said dryly. “If I feel the need for a man’s body, it’s nice to know that you will lend me one to ravage.”

“That’s what I’m saying!”

“It will be strictly professional, I assure you. Now get a message to Drake to tell him what’s going on. And send me word if anything changes up there. I intend to stir up some trouble, and it would be helpful to know if Dreadnought is about to drop a thousand marines on my head.”

“You got it, Tolvern. Keep ’em all alive down there.”

The line went dead. Carvalho was sawing with his knife at their dinner, while the Hroom showed Brockett how they lit a small cookfire in the damp conditions. Others cut dead fronds to feed the blaze. The Hroom were armed now with assault rifles, shotguns, and small hand cannons, courtesy of the goods salvaged from the rescue pod.

Tolvern eyed Carvalho again, now heaving up a massive haunch of meat to skewer it on a long pole held by Nyb Pim. He’d stripped off his shirt, and his bronzed muscles rippled, sweat running down them from the unrelenting heat. He was a fine specimen of masculinity, that was for sure. And Capp had offered. Hell, she’d practically begged Tolvern to do something with her man.

Nah. Put that thought out of your mind.

Tolvern didn’t have time for that kind of nonsense. She had an attack to plan.

They crept onto the perimeter of the sugar plantation early the next morning, when it was still more black than gray. The trees gave way to sharp grass and creeping vines, and then they hit a green wall.

One moment, the red Hroom jungle. Then a narrow burned strip to divide the incompatible human and Hroom vegetation, followed by tall, grass-like sugar cane. Tolvern filled her lungs as they pushed into the woody stalks. It was still so hot that each breath felt like steam, but the cane smelled green. A familiar smell. Comforting. There was a slight sweetness in the air. It wasn’t coming from the cane, though, but from smoke. Cane fields being scorched in preparation for harvest.

Pez Rykan’s Hroom had all taken the antidote yesterday, but at the moment, it would only be partially effective. They wouldn’t gain anything by hacking off cane and sucking out the juice; only in its purest white form did it have an effect. But still, from the way their breathing quickened around her, at least some of them were thinking of how to raid the sugar stores. Maybe even whether to surrender to the first humans they found.

The sound of singing reached her ears. No, not singing so much as full-throated humming. Pez Rykan stopped and tilted his head to listen. He gestured to their right. They pushed through the cane and into a clearing. It was the edge of a vast gash of severed cane stalks that stretched toward some hills on the horizon. Sugar cane stalks by the tens of millions, with just the cut part that she could see representing thousands of tons of sugar. Smoke trailed from a pair of distant refineries.

The humming came from roughly forty Hroom cutting and stacking sugarcane nearby. Working with machetes, the stronger ones cut it, while others tied it into huge bundles to be carried off by still more slaves toward a muddy plantation road. These hefted the bundles onto their backs, with straps around their foreheads to stabilize and distribute the weight. When they reached the road, they loaded the bundles onto one of several lorries. Other teams worked nearby, with several hundred slaves visible from where the rebels stood.

Pez Rykan’s forces came to a complete stop as they took in the scene. To a person, Hroom and human alike gaped at the size and scope of even this tiniest part of Lord Malthorne’s estate.

At the same time, the humming died. The nearest group of slaves looked at them. One, Tolvern noted, was taller than the others, and his skin was purple, unlike the pinks and pale, mottled reds of the others.

“Move!” Tolvern said.

She unslung her rifle and broke into a run, charging the small pack of slaves. Carvalho came after her. Pez Rykan and the Hroom followed, their guns and energy weapons at the ready.

Tolvern lowered her shoulder to knock aside a slave who impeded her path. Most of them had the glazed expression of those who’d recently taken their sugar and would have practically let you saw off a limb without complaint. Others moved to block her, but she and Carvalho smashed them out of the way with rifle butts when they didn’t move fast enough.

They reached the tall, purple Hroom. He wore a belt on his worksuit, with a whip on one side and a handheld stun gun on the other. He fished a computer from a hip pocket and lifted it to his mouth, as if only now recognizing the threat and calling for help.

This was the overseer. Not an eater, and in communication with the humans of the plantation. He would understand English.

Tolvern lifted her gun. “Put it down!”

The overseer lowered the computer. She barked at him to drop it, and he did. Carvalho forced him to his knees, and Tolvern turned to help Pez Rykan.

The rebels quickly herded the slaves into a small cluster. Pez Rykan spoke to them in a hooting, jeering tone, meant, Tolvern thought, to intimidate them. Several tried to edge away, but Tolvern caught them before they could break free, and drove them back in with the others.

Brockett and Nyb Pim moved through the captives, with Pez Rykan’s Hroom forcing the slaves to bend with mouths open, and Brockett and Nyb Pim sticking a caplet in their mouths. He was unarmed, but carried a sling pack from the pod holding several thousand doses in small boxes. A few slaves balked, either in the taking or swallowing of the caplet, but the rebels forced compliance at gunpoint. Soon, they had given a dose to every slave and forced him or her to swallow it down.

“That’s done,” Pez Rykan said. “Bring them with us, and they’ll join our rebellion.”

Brockett snapped together the sling pack. “I told you yesterday it doesn’t work that quickly,” Brockett said. “First, it has to bind to the receptors in the brain. Then, they have to suffer withdrawal like any other Hroom when he’s cut off from his sugar.”

“You remember,” Nyb Pim said to Pez Rykan. Both Hroom had recovered from addiction. “When the sugar is taken away, you go crazy for it. That will happen to these over the next few days and weeks. Their minds will clear. They will forget all desire for sugar. But not quickly.”

“If we take some of them with us—” the Hroom chief said.

“No,” Tolvern said. “If we do our job, they’ll find us soon enough. For now, our job is to disrupt the camp.”

Nyb Pim and Carvalho hauled the overseer to his feet and dragged him to Tolvern and Pez Rykan. Tolvern cast a glance at one of the other work crews, some hundred yards distant, but the slaves continued their labors. No shots had been fired; nobody seemed to have noticed the attack.

Brockett opened his pack again, as if to remove another caplet, but Pez Rykan stopped him. “We will not waste antidote. This one is not an eater.”

“But he’s still susceptible.”

The Hroom chief stared down at the science officer with such intensity that Brockett took a step back. “He made his choice,” Pez Rykan said.

“What will you do with me?” the overseer asked. It was directed to Tolvern, and in English, but it was Pez Rykan who answered.

The chief said something in Hroom, and the overseer’s legs buckled.

“But I surrendered!”

“You’ll kill him,” Tolvern said. It was not a question.

Pez Rykan cast a narrow-eyed gaze down at her. “Our god must have his sacrifice.”

They worked their way around the edge of the plantation, which stretched for tens of miles ahead of them. Perhaps hundreds of miles. Tolvern directed the attacks, leading the small band along the edge of the harvest, stepping out, taking the overseer at gunpoint, then fading back into the uncut cane. The slaves were so placid that most of the time, they resumed their labors the instant the rebels stepped away.

Soon, they had taken nine prisoners from the overseer class and had inoculated several hundred slaves. And all without firing a shot.

“Wait until afternoon,” Pez Rykan told her. “As the sugar wears off, they work faster, but more restlessly. They will fight over rations, resist when pushed. We will not find it so easy.”

Tolvern glanced at the prisoners, tied together with their hands behind their backs and leaves stuffed in their mouths to keep them quiet. “What about these ones?”

“There is nothing to discuss,” he said.

“You don’t have to murder them.”

“It is not murder. It is a holy sacrifice to Lyam Kar.”

“Sacrifice, murder—looks the same from my point of view. That first one was right—he surrendered. They all did. Why kill them?” She waved her hand as he began to object. “Forget that religious rubbish, I am talking about simple decency. Keep them prisoner if you want, but don’t hack them apart.”

“You are not the commander here, Jess Tolvern. I am.”

With that, Pez Rykan pushed through the cane until he was at the front of the formation. Her three companions edged past the prisoners to Tolvern’s side as soon as he was gone.

“I say we call it a day,” Carvalho said.

“He’s right,” Brockett said. “We’re dehydrated, exhausted. We can’t keep going hour after hour in this heat.”

“This will be the easiest day we have,” she told them. “It will only get harder.”

“How is this easy?” Brockett said. “Even the Hroom are dragging. Look at them.”

“Once the immunity shows, the enemy will be on to us. Then there will be resistance. For now, it’s nothing. We come, we do our business, and we leave unmolested. They’re confused when they see us, not alarmed. Not yet.”

Nyb Pim spoke up. “Not for much longer. We are taking the overseers, and most of them are not eaters.”

Carvalho nodded. “I don’t much care. Let the Hroom have their prisoners—these overseers would rat us out if we left them. But our Hroom friend is right. Sooner or later, someone will notice they are missing. They probably have already.”

“So they ran off,” Tolvern said. “That must happen all the time.”

“Once or twice, maybe,” Carvalho said. “Not nine times. They must have noticed by now. They will be looking for us.”

“Good point. Wouldn’t hurt us to stop for the day while we figure stuff out. You guys stay here, I’m talking to the chief.”

She pushed ahead to catch up with Pez Rykan, thinking about what the others had said. Probably time to change their strategy. Scope out an area first. Come in quickly, get the job done, and fade away to reappear at a different part of Malthorne’s estate. It would be slower, and sooner or later, they’d still face resistance, but it would be less risky than working all day along the same side of the plantation.

But as she reached the chief, he came to a stop at the edge of the cane. His body went rigid. Tolvern came beside him and looked out to see what had him alarmed.

They’d hooked several miles northeast alongside the plantation as the day passed, crossing several dirt roads and ignoring the tempting target of a sugar mill. The mill would be well guarded, most likely by humans, to make sure slaves didn’t charge the sugar silos. There would be plenty of time to destroy the sugar stores once their rebellion had grown.

They’d come through the cane looking for another clearing where they could force the antidote on a work crew, but instead, they’d stumbled upon a slave village. There were slave quarters, a company store to provide food and clothing to the workers, and guard posts at either entrance. A lorry idled in front of the rear guard post.

Tolvern caught her breath when she saw what had made Pez Rykan stiffen in alarm. A human guard and two Hroom lined up some fifty or sixty slaves, who knelt in front of a long, freshly dug trench. Most of the slaves were old, their skin tanned to leather by decades of exposure to the sun, but there were a handful of younger Hroom. One was missing a leg at the knee, the wound covered with a dirty bandage. Another slave’s shoulder hung funny, as if it had been hit by a piece of machinery and badly broken. Another wore a bandage over one eye.

This was a culling. The old, the injured. Those whose value was lost and could not be recovered. There was no gentle retirement on Lord Malthorne’s plantations, where toothless old Hroom sat in rocking chairs and reminisced about their days as Hroomlings. No food or shelter for the idle. Work or die.

The human guard stood with his hands on his hips, watching with a slack, emotionless expression. One of the Hroom overseers walked to the end of the row, gun at the ready. It would begin now.

Even as this realization hit Tolvern like a fist to the gut, Pez Rykan was lifting his rifle and signaling for the others to follow him. He bent in a crouch, body tensed as his fighters hurried up beside him.

The Hroom guard fired. The first victim slumped and fell into the trench.

Tolvern grabbed Pez Rykan. “No!”

“Let go of me, human.” He was too strong, and shrugged her off.

Carvalho and Brockett grabbed hold of the chief. Nyb Pim threw his arms around him.

“Listen to me!” Tolvern said, even as the gunfire continued, marking its grisly harvest. “There are guard posts. A lorry. Must be fifty armed humans in that camp, and some of them have heavy weapons. We’ll be cut to pieces.”

“I cannot—I will not let them.”

“You have no choice.” The gunfire continued, almost drowning out her voice. “Stop! Listen to me. This is our chance. Look!”

There, to the right of the store, was the perfect target. It was a long, wooden building, some forty feet high and two hundred feet long. It slumped to one side, as if the rotting wood could barely hold itself up in the searing tropical heat. She’d seen a building like that before, albeit smaller, while traveling across one of the few places on Albion itself where slaves were kept as agricultural workers.

Pez Rykan stopped struggling and stared. He let Tolvern pull him back into the protective curtain of sugarcane.

“A slave barracks,” she said. “Think about it.”

“Yes, Jess Tolvern. Yes, now I see.”

There would be hundreds living under one roof, sharing cots, with bunks stacked on top of bunks from floor to ceiling. Get inside at night, and the rebels could do more mischief in fifteen minutes than they’d do in a week attacking the cane fields.

Chapter Seventeen

Drake made the jump into the San Pablo system a week after leaving Hot Barsa. He’d received word from Isabel Vargus that Lindsell’s fleet was racing to intercept her, and that left the jump point undefended. Still, when he raised his groggy, throbbing head after going through, he anxiously scanned the screen for enemy vessels. The nearby space was clear.

Capp eyed him with a worried expression. “That was a hard one, Cap’n. You took it worst of all. I was about to call Doc up here to have a look at you.”

The others on the bridge were already up and about. Oglethorpe blinked and rubbed at his temples. Manx chased down a couple of pills with a glass of water. Smythe was already fumbling at the tech console. Capp was yawning in the way people sometimes did when they were fighting nausea, but she seemed alert. Certainly, more so than Drake himself. He felt almost drugged.

His other ships were a destroyer, a frigate, and two torpedo boats, and they were already moving while Blackbeard was still dead in the water. Such a strange, unsettling phenomena, these jump points. Like every atom in your body had been disassembled and then strung together five light years away.

Smythe put up scans of the near space. A comet was hurtling through the San Pablo system, and flared white across the viewscreen only a few hundred thousand miles away. It seemed to be right on top of them, but that was an illusion caused by the vast distances. It stretched like a long, glowing white fire across the viewscreen until Smythe continued his scans elsewhere.

The computer picked up a flurry of new messages, which Jane sent through, one by one. The first came from Hot Barsa. Tolvern had stirred up a hornet’s nest on Malthorne’s largest estate. Closer to hand, Vargus had already scraped with Lindsell, who’d forced her to withdraw. She had several merchant vessels she needed to protect—the shipment of arms for the forts.

But where was she? Smythe scanned the system for ships and only turned up the usual suspects to be found in San Pablo: miners, scavengers, smugglers, mercenaries, and other unsavory types. Nothing of either Vargus or Lindsell.

“Where in the black void are they?” Drake asked.

“I’ll keep looking,” Smythe said, “but it might take some time if they’re both cloaked.”

“Vargus’s merchant frigates have no cloaking,” he reminded the tech officer.

“Don’t suppose they’ve busted out of here, do you?” Capp said.

Drake raised an eyebrow. “Busted?”

“You know, bug—I mean, left in a hurry. Busted out of here. Jumped to Peruano or something. Might be safer there, if Vargus’s sister’s about, doing whatever business she’s up to.”

“Vargus had better not have busted anywhere. Certainly not to Peruano. By the time we get that ordnance to the forts, Dreadnought will have seized them and reduced Rutherford’s fleet to salvage.”

“Might not have had much choice,” Capp said. “Not if Lindsell slapped her around a bit, if you know what I mean.”

“Found them, sir!” Smythe said.

Now Drake understood. Lindsell and Vargus’s forces were eclipsed by the sun, which had kept Blackbeard’s initial scans from detecting the two forces, but a star was just gas, and one could peer straight through it with the right array of instruments.

The two sides ducked and weaved near the tiny, sun-scorched, innermost world of the system. They were almost close enough to exchange blows, with Lindsell anxious to engage, and Vargus equally intent on avoiding it.

“She’s clever, that one,” Capp said. “Almost as clever as her sister. Know what I mean, Cap’n?”

He was well aware of the Vargus sisters’ qualities. In this case, Isabel Vargus’s flight to the rocky innermost world might have saved her life. It kept her close to the jump point. Break free, and she could make a run for it. If not, she’d be closer to Drake when he came through to help. The planet itself was an obstacle to put between herself and Lindsell, who she could not outrun in open space. And her position on the far side of the sun helped hide Blackbeard from immediate detection.

Drake told Oglethorpe to send word to the other ships: travel cloaked, follow Blackbeard up to the sun’s corona. They were going to come in quietly. See if they could get the jump on Lindsell.

“Send Vargus a coded message,” Drake said. “Tell her we are on our way. Capp, plot a course.”

The pilot interfaced her nav chip with the nav computer and came back with two suggestions a few minutes later. The most optimal one, at least in terms of secrecy, took them awfully close to the star, almost inside its transition zone.

“You’re going to cook us like a lobster in its shell,” Oglethorpe said gloomily.

“No,” Smythe said. He was running his own calculations and sending them through to the captain. “We’ll survive. It will be toasty, though.”

“Set the course,” Drake told Capp. “Oglethorpe, send that through to the other ships. Smythe, if you can think up anything clever to cool our quarters, it would be appreciated.”

“Bring it on,” Capp said. “We ain’t scared of a little heat, are we, Cap’n?” She unzipped her vest partway, as if in anticipation. It was a foolish gesture, as they wouldn’t detect any change for at least an hour. “Whatever it takes to get around there without being spotted. I’ll take it all off if I need to.”

Toasty proved to be an understatement. The tyrillium armor couldn’t absorb all of the energy hammering down on them, and other cooling methods proved inadequate, at least on Blackbeard.

A dry heat, yes. That didn’t matter so much once the temperature topped one hundred and kept climbing. Soon it felt like a baking oven.

Drake sweated out the end of his shift and returned to his quarters. He stripped to his underwear and lay on top of the sheets.

He was tempted to cool his quarters. Give him some relief at the expense of a small temperature rise in the rest of the ship. He could justify it by saying that the captain, of all the crew, most needed to be well rested before battle.

But, no. Word would get out if he told engineering to tweak the climate control. The hit to morale would negate any small advantage he might gain by sleeping in comfort. And it would be unfair to the rest, no matter if they knew or not. A captain’s duty was to suffer with his crew.

He drifted in and out of sleep for a couple of hours, then got up and took a shower. There was no cold water; it was all hot. He got a little relief as he dried, but the water seemed to transition directly into sweat as he dressed. May as well go to the bridge. They’d be coming around the star by now.

“Jane, give me a climate update.”

“Non-optimal for human survival,” the computer began. “Climate control systems, including—”

“Just give me the temperature.” The heat left him irritable, and it was hard not to snap.

“One hundred and eight point three degrees Fahrenheit.”

“And how fast is that climbing? Where were we an hour ago?”

“Contradictory questions,” Jane said. “The temperature has not increased. It has dropped point-eight degrees in the past hour.”

Oh, that was good. The worst was over, then. “And the other ships? How are they holding out?”

Jane returned a negative understanding, and he clarified. What was their temperature? All four were cooler than Blackbeard. Their weaker shielding was more than compensated for by a higher surface area to mass than the larger cruiser, which made it easier to shed heat through their armor.

Drake left his room and made his way to the bridge, passing a few sweaty, haggard-looking crew members on his way.

Oglethorpe was off, and Capp sat at the helm. Her buzzed scalp gleamed. She’d unzipped her vest all the way, but closed it halfway as he entered.

Barker from the gunnery was at the tech console. Manx was also at work. It felt slightly cooler on the bridge, or maybe that was his imagination.

“Better bring people back on early,” Capp said as she made way for Drake. “Nobody’s asked me, but I’d say all hands.”

He glanced at his console. Another few minutes, and they’d be far enough from the star to shed heat. That would bring the temp down in a hurry.

As for the action playing out by the rocky innermost world, Drake was surprised to see that Lindsell had not yet engaged. Some of this was due to Isabel Vargus, who’d managed to keep the planet between herself and the enemy fleet. But Lindsell had either committed some tactical blunder, or was being unusually cautious, or he would have caught her by now. Those transports were Vargus’s weakness. Surely, Lindsell knew it.

“Personnel will continue as scheduled,” Drake said, in answer to Capp’s suggestion. He’d have taken that sort of impertinence from Tolvern, who had earned the right to question him. The subpilot, not so much. “We have nearly two hours until we engage.”

“Not quite, sir,” Barker said from Smythe’s station. “Look at this.” He sent over data.

At first, it was a jumble that he struggled to decipher, even with the console rendering it visually. But as the data came into focus, the first twinge of worry hit. They weren’t the only ones traveling cloaked. Someone else was approaching the developing battle, fully cloaked.

It was a larger signature, and there was a good chance Blackbeard and her escorts had not yet been detected. But either way, the other side would intersect with Blackbeard before either force reached Lindsell.

“It’s leaving a big wake, sir,” Barker said. “Several ships, I should guess.”

Not good. They must have been lurking about the system already and were now rushing to Lindsell’s aid. No wonder the captain hadn’t attacked Vargus yet. He was playing cat and mouse to keep her from escaping while he waited for reinforcements.

“I was apparently mistaken,” Drake conceded. “All hands on deck.”

“Right,” Capp said. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“Oglethorpe is not on the bridge,” he reminded her. “That means you. Give the orders, Ensign.”

“Oh, right. Sorry, Cap’n.”

Capp got on the general link, and in her rough, York Town accent and with rather more rude vocabulary than necessary, she told the crew to get their sweaty selves to their posts.

Smythe arrived moments later, and Barker departed for the gunnery to prepare for combat. The air was definitely cooling now—Jane said under a hundred and dropping fast—and Drake’s head began to clear. He ordered in tea to get some caffeine in his sleep-deprived system, but kept most of his attention on that cloaked enemy task force.

So far, no sign of recognition, but the enemy might be well aware of his arrival. With a smaller signature and the star’s radiation at his back, he had an advantage, but the closer the two forces approached, the greater the likelihood of detection. There was an awfully lot of mass in the enemy formation. What nasty surprise was it hiding? Cruisers? Corvettes? A whole task force to match Lindsell’s?

“Twenty minutes,” Capp said. Her voice was tight, nervous. “Shouldn’t we think about dropping them cloaks so we can let ’em have it?”

“Quiet, Ensign.”

For such a large force, the enemy kept a tight formation. Not spread out, which made sense, given that it decreased the odds of detection. Still, there was a risk in that. So many ships traveling close together. Unless . . .

Suddenly, and with a short, sharp shock, Drake understood.

“Drop cloaks!” he ordered. “Raise shields. It’s Dreadnought.”

Chapter Eighteen

Drake stared as HMS Dreadnought dropped her own cloaks in response to Blackbeard’s action. She filled the viewscreen, a battle-scarred monster of the deep. She was long and black, with glowing instruments along the front like a hundred beady eyes. Two torpedo boats flew beneath her belly like tiny fish collecting scraps left after the beast ate.

Silence on the bridge of Blackbeard. Finally, Capp muttered an oath, and this snapped Drake to attention. He got on the com and ordered the gunnery to ready aft torpedo tubes. Smythe moved to prepare countermeasures.

They were close now, only a few minutes from combat. And he had no chance in open combat. Drake had stumbled right into the mouth of the dragon, and his only hope was to slip away before its jaws closed.

Forget the cloaking. Somehow, Malthorne had kept the movement of HMS Dreadnought, the mightiest warship ever constructed, a secret. He’d jumped several times and appeared in San Pablo without warning. It was a brilliant bit of space navigation and tactics.

Ahead of them, at the blistered inner planet, Captain Lindsell broke from his pursuit of Isabel Vargus and her mercenary fleet. Leading with Churchill, he turned his ships and accelerated toward Drake. Blackbeard’s force—suddenly much smaller than it had felt moments earlier—was about to be flattened beneath Lindsell’s hammer and Malthorne’s anvil.

“Flee, sir?” Capp said. When he didn’t answer, she prodded. “Sir?”

“No,” he said, making quick decisions. “Take us right at Dreadnought.”

“Right at her?”

“Do it! Oglethorpe, give the following commands to the other vessels . . .”

He gave instructions. Blackbeard in the lead, but all five ships going straight at the massive battleship. Even the frigate, a ship with weaker shields that was designed to linger at the back of the battlefield, hurling missiles into the fight, was to charge in, firing.

He had one chance, and that wasn’t to stay here and fight Malthorne on one flank and Lindsell on the other. His best bet was to go at Dreadnought. The battleship had dropped her cloaks late. It would take time to warm her weapons before she could fire. Drake’s ship was ready to fight already. That gave him a narrow window of opportunity.

Isabel Vargus hailed him. He put her on voice only.

“Are you mad?”

“Only desperate, Vargus. I was caught in a trap and must do what I can to extract myself.”

“If you expect me to wade in there and join you in fighting that thing, you’re out of your mind. I couldn’t even manage in a fair fight against Lindsell.”

“No, I’m expecting you to make your escape,” he told her. “Run for the jump point before Lindsell changes his mind and comes after you.”

Vargus said nothing at first, and he thought she’d cut the line. He’d already turned back to his console when her voice came through again.

“Drake, you can’t sacrifice yourself on my behalf. I’ll fight my way clear somehow. Don’t throw away your life. Or your ships. If I have to stay, I will. Might just be Outlaw. Can’t speak for these other ships.”

“You think that’s what I’m doing?” he asked. “I mean to escape this fight alive, and you are to do the same thing. Now is your chance. Run, damn you.”

He cut the line. But not before thinking about her last comment. Isabel Vargus would have come in after him, ready to throw away her life to save him. Would her sister Catarina have done the same thing? Probably not. Catarina was nowhere to be found since the Battle of Albion. Off assembling her colonization fleet, no doubt, while Drake was fighting for his life. And Catarina and Drake had been lovers.

Perhaps you’ve fallen for the wrong sister.

And then, his entire force let loose with a barrage of weapons, and the thought fled his mind. Missiles flashed into the lead, followed by more than a dozen heavier, slower torpedoes. Dreadnought began to swing wide, her main battery exposing itself. One blast from that massive array of cannon would shred Blackbeard and her companions to pieces.

If they warmed in time.

Blackbeard’s missiles pounded into Dreadnought. They had little effect. A torpedo hit moments later. Light flared near the battleship’s aft cargo bay. The next two torpedoes fell to countermeasures, and the enemy turned aside a barrage of missiles. They’d caught the enemy by surprise, but any further ordnance would struggle to get through.

“Minimal damage to Dreadnought, sir,” Smythe announced.

Drake’s five ships were upon the battleship now. Two small cannon engaged them, and Jane announced damage to the fore shields. In an instant, they flashed past. Finally, torpedoes came after them, but they’d built up so much speed that the enemy weapons gradually fell behind and then lost contact.

Capp pumped her fist and whooped, but elation on the deck was short-lived. Lindsell flew past Dreadnought in pursuit, and the battleship herself was already accelerating to join the fight.

“Now it gets interesting,” Drake said. He moved his fingers over his console. “At least Vargus got away. Rutherford and the forts will have their supplies.”

“Won’t do them much good if the rest of us are killed out here,” Oglethorpe pointed out.

Yes, and that would inevitably happen if they continued on their present course. Blackbeard could outfight Lindsell’s faster-off-the-blocks corvette in the short term, and outrun the man’s cruisers over the long haul. But he could not keep Lindsell from overtaking and gobbling up his support craft. And he couldn’t hold off Dreadnought indefinitely no matter how fast he ran. Dreadnought took longer to accelerate, but she had a higher top speed. Watching Malthorne come up behind would be death in slow motion.

He got his other four captains on the com. “Robertson, you are in charge. Break away, see if you can draw Lindsell after you. If he follows, run for San Pablo. You might find assistance near the planet. They are no lovers of Malthorne or his navy.”

“Yes, sir,” Robertson said. “And if he doesn’t? Should I come to your assistance, sir? Or perhaps use my best judgment?”

Robertson was an older man, nearly the same age as Drake’s father, and had a reputation for losing more battles and equipment than he won, which was why he was on a destroyer instead of a more powerful corvette or cruiser. Too cautious, not enough energy and initiative.

“No, Robertson. If he does not pursue, you are to follow Vargus out of the system. Report to Rutherford until my return.”

That took care of that. Moments later, the destroyer, the missile frigate, and the two small torpedo boats veered sharply away. Several minutes passed, as Lindsell and Malthorne no doubt consulted on this new development. Then Lindsell took his entire force and followed the runaways. Dreadnought continued after Blackbeard.

“As expected,” Drake said with satisfaction.

“How did you know he’d do that?” Capp asked.

“Malthorne is greedy. He wants both victories. I knew he would come after us instead of sending Lindsell, because he wishes to defeat me personally.” Drake forced a smile. “Now we’re only facing one ship, not a dozen.”

Capp nodded, though she didn’t look confident. Neither did she sound it when she finally spoke. “Seems like we have them right where we want them, eh?”

“If only that one ship were not HMS Dreadnought.”

Blackbeard was now alone. Dreadnought’s pursuit would inevitably lead to an engagement between the cruiser and the battleship. There could be only one result to such a fight. Drake was still pulling away from the larger vessel, but that was a short-term advantage. He had to avoid the fight altogether; that was the only way to stay alive. But how?

“Then you want us to continue our present course, sir?” Oglethorpe asked. “We’re going farther from the jump point, not closer.”

“We’d never make it through in time. Anyway, this is a chance for our friends in the mercenary fleet. Every moment that passes allows more time for the resupply of our forts.”

The others looked at him anxiously. He didn’t explain his plan for avoiding destruction because he didn’t have one yet. They could get back to the small planet easily enough, but it would provide scant protection. The battleship had an ability to fight at a distance and around large objects that Lindsell’s cruisers didn’t.

“Dreadnought is hailing us, sir,” Smythe said. “Ignore?”

Drake considered. “No. Let’s hear what the enemy has to say. Put him on.”

And there he was. Vice Admiral Thomas Lord Malthorne. Or, as he called himself these days, King Thomas the Second. He looked like no king now, as he was wearing his uniform, starched and stiff from head to toe. Malthorne looked down his long, beakish nose and smiled.

“I had been told that you were styling yourself in pirate garb these days,” Malthorne said, “as befitting your degraded state. Yet it appears that you have put on a Royal Navy uniform once more. Not that you have any right to defile the thing.”

“And I’ve heard that you are claiming the title of king,” Drake replied. “But you are no more a king than I am a pirate.”

There was a delay as the transmission crossed the distance between the two vessels, and then Malthorne smiled. “No? The lords of Albion tell me otherwise when they bend their knee to pay homage. The crown, when I choose to wear it, declares my legitimacy. This battleship enforces it.”

“In other words, you are king by coercion, force, and a willingness to inflict fear and pain.”

Malthorne raised his eyebrows, somehow making him look even more haughty. “Indeed, I will not deny it. Many have died who stood in my way, and why should they not have perished? Your kind would have us groveling before the Hroom, surrendering any advantage our race might have over those depraved sugar eaters, until we were the slaves.”

Drake gritted his teeth and fought down his anger. Among Malthorne’s numerous other crimes, he had ordered the murder of Drake’s sister, the imprisonment of Drake’s parents, and the destruction of his childhood home. But this was well beyond personal now, and he needed to keep that in mind rather than let Malthorne goad him into a foolish fight, Blackbeard versus Dreadnought.

“You won’t win,” Drake said. “You realize that, of course.”

“I already have.” A small shrug. “Run the calculations through your pilot, if you must, but the result is inevitable. You are running as fast as you are able. My ship’s top speed is superior to yours, and I shall inevitably overtake you. There is no relief at hand, no jump point for you to flee through. When we do engage, there is no tactic, technology, or strategem that enables your bastardized cruiser to defeat this mighty battleship.

“I am only hailing you to point out the obvious,” the admiral continued. “And to offer you this. Surrender, and I will spare your ship and spare . . . well, let us not deceive ourselves. You and most of your crew will die as traitors. Others, hung as pirates. Some few may achieve a pardon. We shall see. Surrender at once. That is your only option.”

This wasn’t any sort of offer. It was only Malthorne taking advantage of his superior position to gloat.

“Kill me, and you’ve still lost,” Drake said. “How much of your wealth is tied up on Hot Barsa?”

“Not all of it. Not even a fraction thereof.”

“I highly doubt that. Your fortune is built upon slaves and sugar. That world practically belongs to you. Well, now we have your planet at our mercy.”

“Only until we relieve your siege. Within a few weeks of your death, Rutherford and the rest of the rebels will be cut down without mercy. The sugar will flow, James Drake. I assure you of that. It will flow on Hot Barsa and many other worlds, besides.”

“You haven’t heard of the rebellion on the surface?” Drake asked. “Surely you understand by now why we attacked the planet in the first place. Our people are distributing copies of the sugar antidote we liberated from your laboratories. It will go to thousands. Hundreds of thousands. You will never regain Hot Barsa. You have no way to stop the rebellion, and no way to re-enslave its population.”

Malthorne’s face hardened. “You are a traitor, James Drake, in more ways than one. May God rot your soul in hell.” He cut the channel.

Drake leaned back in his chair and contemplated the situation. Perhaps it was not as dire as he’d originally assumed. He was still pulling away from Dreadnought, after all, which meant that the chase had yet to truly begin.

The others on the bridge worked in absolute silence for several minutes until the quiet was finally broken by a young enlisted man from engineering who’d come to consult with Smythe at the tech console. Soon, the two men were speaking in low voices, and that cut the tension.

“We done for, then, Cap’n?” Capp asked.

“Not at all, Ensign. Oglethorpe, I need a current assessment of the fuel stores. We’re going to be burning through a good deal of it in the next few hours.”

“That arrogant bastard was right though, weren’t he?” Capp said. “We can’t outrun him.”

“We won the engagement. Isabel Vargus’s mercenary fleet escaped with our needed supplies, and it appears that our support craft will reach San Pablo in safety. We’ve delayed the enemy from returning to the Barsa system, which allows Rutherford and the forts to further their preparations.”

“But what about us?” she protested. “We’re just running now, we ain’t got no course. He’ll catch us for sure.”

“I would not be so certain.” Drake allowed himself a smile. “Dreadnought is swifter, ultimately, but we have greater maneuverability. Many hours yet before we are overtaken, and even then, we’ll have some tricks to pull. No, Blackbeard cannot defeat a ship the size of Dreadnought in open combat, but given our position in the solar system, the enemy’s size is also her liability.”

“I still don’t get it. How does her being big help us out?”

By now, Oglethorpe, Manx, Smythe, and the young man from engineering were all studying him. Their expressions were hopeful, but confused. Only on Smythe’s face did understanding begin to dawn. Drake’s confidence was overstated—his idea gave them a chance, nothing more—but he needed them to shake the despair that seemed to have taken over.

“Tell me, Ensign Capp,” Drake said. “If you expose a mouse and a human to the cold of winter, which one expires first?”

“Mouse, I suppose. Gives up its heat faster, don’t it?”

“Right. A greater surface area to mass. Now reverse that, and expose them both to heat. The larger beast, barring special adaptations, will have a more difficult time cooling itself. Now, imagine if that beast also has several thousand royal marines in cryostorage who need to be kept on ice until released from stasis.”

Capp’s eyes widened. “Oh! You mean—?”

“Plot us a new course, Ensign. We’re going to run for the sun.”

Chapter Nineteen

Tolvern met with her three companions in a burned-out sugar silo. Nyb Pim checked the door to make sure nobody had followed them into the scorched, still-smoldering mill, then shut it behind him. Tolvern felt suddenly like she’d been dropped into a pan of hot, caramelizing sugar. The smell and heat were almost overwhelming.

But the shut door at least cut out the screams of dying Hroom. The battle may be over, but the killing wasn’t. The sound turned her stomach.

“I cannot bear any more of this,” Carvalho said. “How much longer with the torture and murder?”

“We have fallen in among a death cult,” Nyb Pim said. “The more victories we have, the more glory they give to the god of death. And the more victims they must sacrifice.”

“Superstitious rubbish,” Brockett said. “Lyam Kar isn’t aiding this rebellion. It’s science.”

“You don’t have to tell us that,” Tolvern said. “We all know. And I suspect that Pez Rykan does, too. He is feeding the religious hysteria for his own purposes.”

“That villain,” Carvalho grumbled. “Cut us off, will he? Watch us take our antidote and leave him on his own. How long will his little rebellion last?”

Tolvern eyed him. “You think that’s an option? He can set half the continent on fire with the doses we’ve already given him if he can only get his hands on some weapons. This thing is growing exponentially. There’s no stopping it now.”

During the days after the raid on the slave barracks, Tolvern had received a brutal education in the realities of a revolution. The Hroom guards working for Malthorne’s estate were dismembered and killed in religious rituals. That spread fear ahead of Pez Rykan’s rampaging, growing army. Many times, they arrived to find the cane fields and slave villages already abandoned. The slaves were taken away, when possible. Other times, the enemy shot them first to keep them from falling into Pez Rykan’s hands.

The slaves themselves sometimes fought back, but most took their antidote without complaint. As the rebels moved on, they left hundreds of eaters gradually shaking off their addiction. Most of the newly freed fled into the bush, leaving a desolate, abandoned plantation behind them. Others became bandits, or free-ranging rebels on their own. But hundreds more had joined Pez Rykan’s force.

Only fifteen days had passed since the first attack, and the rebel commander had more than five hundred Hroom in his army. So many had joined, they quickly ran out of arms. Tolvern had distributed the weapons and ammo from the pod, and guns taken from the enemy were given to others. That armed maybe ten percent of the Hroom force, leaving the rest to make do with spears and crudely fashioned clubs. Almost no point to it.

Still, it was no wonder that Lord Malthorne had attempted to keep the sugar antidote a secret from the Hroom. The alien race had a reputation for being docile and easily led. When conquered, they were quickly enslaved, and those free Hroom who worked with humans—Nyb Pim, for example—were well disciplined.

But release thousands of former slaves into the jungle, and you saw another side to them entirely. Tolvern wondered about General Mose Dryz of the Hroom Empire. He also possessed the antidote. If the empire ever fought off Apex, they might prove a long-term threat for human settlement in this sector of the galaxy.

“These Hroom have poor tactics,” Carvalho said. “They will get us killed if we keep fighting so recklessly.”

“That’s always been a Hroom weakness,” Tolvern said. She sat on a hardened lump of melted sugar, broke off a piece, and sucked on it. “That, and sugar.”

“I cannot abide this torture,” Carvalho repeated.

“So, what do we do?” she asked.

He grunted. “You ask me, I say we escape. They are killing humans, too. I don’t want to sit around waiting to be the death god’s next meal.”

“It is doubtful they would do such a thing,” Nyb Pim said. “That would violate some code of religious ethics, I should think.”

“Right, but you aren’t sure, are you?” the Ladino said. “It is ‘doubtful,’ you say. You ‘should think.’ What if you are wrong? What if they need a certain number of victims every day, and one day they cannot find any enemies to murder?”

“None of us want to be murdered,” Brockett said, “but where would we go? We’re a hundred miles from the landing pod. We have no way to be rescued. This is pouncer country. They dragged off two free Hroom yesterday. We go out there alone, we’re likely to die from the wildlife, if nothing else.”

“We’re not running off to hide,” Tolvern said. “Our job is to spread this rebellion.”

“That does not mean we need to do it with this brutal Pez Rykan fellow,” Carvalho said. “How many doses do we have with us, Brockett?”

Brockett glanced up with his tongue at the corner of his mouth, as if calculating. “Eight or ten thousand, I believe. Pez Rykan has the rest.”

“You see! That is plenty. We can run away. Maybe even find a different estate. Free our own slaves far from here. Two rebellions, instead of one. That is much better.”

There were so many problems with that plan that Tolvern didn’t feel the need to address it. How many days or weeks would they lose putting distance between themselves and Pez Rykan’s Hroom? How much riskier would it be to travel alone through the jungle?

And supposing they found some likely spot fifty or a hundred miles from here to open a second front. Would freed slaves follow a human commander? Not likely. She supposed that Nyb Pim could make an attempt, but he was a pilot, thoughtful and unassuming. Not the sort to lead military attacks.

Brockett’s computer beeped, and he pulled it out of his hip pocket. The science officer had been in contact with their friends in orbit, trying to arrange an orbital drop.

“It’s from Pittsfield. They can’t spare any guns or ammo.”

That was disheartening news. No guns at all? She’d asked for five thousand and hoped to get a thousand. How were they supposed to fight a rebellion when most of the rebels were armed with sharpened sticks?

“Pittsfield, that is Rutherford’s commander, yes?” Carvalho said. “Rutherford could not have given us the bad news himself?”

“Any reasoning, or just a no?” Tolvern asked Brockett.

“They don’t have anything to spare. What they do possess, they need to defend themselves. Fitzgibbons is lurking somewhere with his marines. He might take the forts by force of arms if Malthorne can’t force a surrender.” Brockett shrugged. “Or so Rutherford is claiming.”

That made no sense. If Dreadnought got close enough to the forts to land ground forces, the battle was already over.

“Compose another message,” she said.

“Hold on.” Brockett scrolled down, frown deepening. “Looks like we’ve got bigger problems.”

He handed Tolvern his computer. She read Pittsfield’s message. It was overly wordy. Buried at the bottom, after a lengthy justification of Rutherford’s reasons for denying the request for guns, she got to the meat of it.

There was an abandoned military base eighty miles to the northeast, in the cooler foothills that led to the highlands. Fort Gamma had detected enemy activity in the region. Security forces had been burning away vegetation from the overgrown facilities for the past few days, and now hundreds of security personnel were assembling from across the continent, gathering equipment and supplies. Preparing a major expedition.

There could only be one target.

Tolvern found Pez Rykan sitting cross-legged in front of the makeshift temple platform. The groans of the victims were feeble now, but two priests continued their grisly work. She took one glance at their gore-splattered faces and hands, and looked away, her stomach lurching.

Tolvern sat down at an angle, so she’d be looking at the chief and not the temple. Dear God, let that groaning stop soon.

“I do not enjoy this,” Pez Rykan said. “Not one moment of seeing my enemies suffer gives me pleasure.” He turned to stare at her. “Hroom fighting Hroom. It is the fault of humans.” He looked away again. “But these free Hroom are worse than humans. They deserve to die, and if their deaths feed the fervor of my troops, so much the better.”

“I’m not here to talk about your death cult.”

“No? You have offered your opinion on the subject many times. Why should now be any different?”

“I’ve received word from orbit. The enemy is assembling a military force in the highlands.”

“Let them come. Our strength grows every day.”

“Strength? What strength? You mean this rabble with sharpened sticks?”

“We have guns. Several dozen, in fact. Hand cannons, rifles, shotguns, even a machine gun. We have won every engagement.”

“And never fought more than ten enemies at a time,” she pointed out. “Well now you’ve had your success. You’ve set the plantation on fire and attracted real attention. Have you ever seen a helicopter? They can linger over the battlefield, raining fire down on your head.”

Pez Rykan was silent for a long moment. His already-thin lips narrowed until they disappeared. “Yes, I have seen your hovering gunships. Such things have killed people very near to . . . how do you say? Close to my heart. Is that phrase correct?”

“Then you must understand that this poorly trained, weakly armed rabble is wholly inadequate to battle against trained men and superior equipment.”

“Send your troops to help us. I saw the battles in the sky, I have heard you speaking to your generals. I know that you control the great fortifications flying overhead. Send human soldiers with weapons and training. Help us.”

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“Our position is tenuous,” she said. “We are facing a counterattack by Admiral Malthorne. We can’t spare either troops or weapons.”

“I do not believe it. I believe you wish for Hroom to die on your behalf. You have no intention of risking your human forces to free slaves. You are cowards at heart.”

Tolvern clenched her teeth. “I risked my own life finding you. I risk it every day I stay with you. I’ll be with you when those security forces attack. So don’t insult me by accusing me of cowardice.”

Pez Rykan nodded. “Very well. So you cannot send more guns, and you cannot send fighters. And you also claim that we cannot stand against the forces arraying themselves in opposition. So what do you suggest? Flee into the jungle before the enemy arrives?”

“No.” She pulled out the computer from her pocket and brought up a map of the surrounding area. “You see where we are? Here is the security base.”

“Speak plainly. I do not have experience with such maps.”

Tolvern spent a little more time pointing out their position, showing how quickly a force, once assembled, could move either from or to the security base. She gave her best guess as to when the enemy would be ready to launch their attack.

“So soon?” Pez Rykan said. “Then we are indeed in danger.”

“Only if we stay here picking the low fruit. I mean, if we keep freeing slaves while there’s no opposition. They’ll catch us with our pants down. But what if—” she added, zooming in on the road into the hills, “we take the fight to them?”

“Attack the base?”

“Yes, before they’re ready. They’ll never expect it. Too much initiative for Hroom.”

“Crushing them before they can assemble to attack?” he asked. “It might gain us time to continue our work.”

“Better than that. We’ll also liberate weapons. Guns and equipment. Ammunition. Seize our own base in the highlands from which to organize and spread the revolt. Of course, it won’t be easy, but with a bit of strategy and some subterfuge, we could make this a huge victory for our side.”

Pez Rykan’s long tongue darted over his lips in a gesture that reminded her of nothing so much as a sugar eater anticipating his next feeding. Only this wasn’t greed for sugar, but a hunger for something else.

“This mission exceeds my ability to organize,” he said at last. “I have no training in your tactics, and the wicked practice of human deception is beyond my understanding.”

“Then it’s a good thing you have me to plan the attack.”

“You would do this?”

“With two conditions. First, I give the orders. If I say pull back, you will pull back, even if victory is at hand. If I say attack, you will attack, even when it seems suicidal. It will not always be what it seems—it might be tricks and stratagems—and I can’t be stopping in the middle of battle to knock sense into your thick skull. Are we agreed? You can do this?”

Pez Rykan tossed his head in the Hroom manner that indicated assent. “Yes. For this one battle, I will accept that as a requirement of securing your aid. Your word is a command to be obeyed without question. As if from the gods. As if Lyam Kar himself stood on the battlefield. What is the second condition?”

“About your god of death.” Tolvern glanced at the temple platform. The groans and struggles had stopped, and the priests were descending from their killing place, drenched in gore. “There will be no more torture and murder. It ends now.”

“You want me to kill them first, then dismember?”

“No. You will stop killing your captives entirely. Let them go, lock them up—I don’t care which. But no more killing of those who have surrendered. That’s murder, and I won’t be a part of it.”

“Our religious code requires a sacrifice to our god.”

“And my code demands that I stop you from doing it.”

“It is too late,” he said. “We have cast our lot with the dark god. If he withdraws his blessings, we will surely lose.”

Tolvern stood up. “Then it’s up to you. You can either throw your hopes to superstition and religion and keep fighting with sharpened sticks, or you can get your hands on those guns at the enemy base. You can’t have both. And you sure as hell won’t have my help anymore.”

He looked up at her as she stood with her hands on her hips. Her face was hard, and she stared back without blinking. He’d be wondering if she was bluffing. She wasn’t. Let him balk again and she’d walk, so help her.

At last, another toss of the head. “Very well, Jess Tolvern. There will be no more killing and sacrificing of prisoners.”

Chapter Twenty

The second time into the star’s fiery embrace was worse, somehow. This time, Drake was bracing for the heat, and he was already exhausted. They chilled Blackbeard as much as possible before descending toward the sun, but the air, the floor, even the water coming out of the taps was soon scalding.

Dreadnought followed them down. She gained as Blackbeard was forced to slow dramatically, and nearly had the smaller ship in range of her guns before they fell into pace at nearly the same speed. They circled twice around the vast diameter of the sun, baking. He needed Dreadnought to pull away, then he’d make a run for it.

“It isn’t working,” Capp said. She’d stripped to a sweat-soaked tank top and had a collection of empty and partially consumed jugs of water at her feet. “We can’t shake them.”

“One more pass,” he said. “Dreadnought will be forced to retreat. She can’t take the heat.”

“In case you haven’t noticed,” Smythe said, “we’re not doing so well ourselves. One more pass, and we’ll be cooked alive.”

“We only need a few hours more than Malthorne,” Drake said.

“It’s almost one hundred and ten degrees in here!” Smythe exclaimed.

Drake fixed him with a hard stare. “I am well aware of that, lieutenant.”

“Sorry, sir.” He dropped his gaze to his console.

Yet Smythe was right. They couldn’t stand this much longer. And Dreadnought? Was Malthorne weak and feverish, yet stubbornly refusing to call off the attack? He was an older man, in his fifties, but rigid and unyielding, like a piece of rope hardened with frozen salt water. No, Drake couldn’t count on the man’s physical limitations to win this particular struggle. His battle was with the battleship itself, her physical limitations.

“Slow us down another five percent,” he told Oglethorpe.

“That will bring us in range of them guns,” Capp said. She looked at Manx, who was at the defense grid. “Right, Manx?”

“And you,” Drake told her. “Bring us in closer. I want us on the edge of the transition zone. I’ll warn engineering. We’ll need to catch that extra radiation. We’ll need Dreadnought to catch it, too.”

There were more worried noises from the bridge at this, and engineering didn’t like it, either. They were in a relatively cool band just below the chromosphere, and Drake meant to take them into hotter space. Let them figure it out. Drake was tired of explaining, and simply tired. His own collection of water jugs was nearly emptied, yet after drinking and drinking, he still didn’t need to urinate. It was all coming out his pores. Probably, they were all getting dangerously dehydrated and suffering heat exhaustion.

As expected, Dreadnought began to pull in closer as Blackbeard slowed and descended closer to the star. Jane, her voice the calmest on board, warned that they’d fallen within range of the enemy guns, and that Dreadnought’s silos were opening. Two missiles flashed out. With plenty of advance warning, Blackbeard brought them down with countermeasures. Dreadnought drew closer still.

This time, she let loose with a heavy barrage. Missiles, followed by torpedoes. Countermeasures brought down the missiles. The torpedoes locked in and closed. Three of them, all targeting the rear shields protecting the engines. One they could take. Maybe two, accepting heavy damage. The third would finish them off.

“Give them a flash,” he told Smythe.

“They’re Hunter-IIs, sir,” he said. “Hardened against that tactic.”

“Do it. Capp, prepare evasive maneuvers.”

The crew braced themselves as the torpedoes closed. When they were a few hundred miles out, Smythe pulled the trigger. A pulse of radiation burst toward the enemy weapons. At the same moment, Capp shimmied Blackbeard like a fish squirming from the jaws of a shark. The torpedoes soared harmlessly by and were soon caught in the star’s gravity well and dragged down to a fiery death.

“What’s that, then?” Capp asked. “How did we—?”

“Smythe, explain,” Drake said.

“Oh, of course,” the tech officer said. “They were already taking a beating from the energy coming off that star. A bit of extra radiation overwhelmed the shielding. How did you know that would happen, sir?”

“Catarina Vargus taught me that one,” he admitted. “I told her the Hunter-IIs couldn’t be defeated by flash-style countermeasures like the old Mark-style torpedoes. She informed me otherwise.”

He hadn’t been entirely sure it would work. The Vargus sisters were not opposed to a little boasting. After surviving several scrapes with the Royal Navy, they were entitled. Still, what was fact, and what was bluster?

Dreadnought didn’t waste more ammunition, but kept closing. Any closer, and the cannons would come into play. That was an attack for which Drake had no ideas. Simple kinetic force would pound them into submission. He told Capp to accelerate again. They were swinging around the star again and still no sign that the enemy was giving up the chase.

Good lord, it was hot. “Jane, what’s the temp?”

“One hundred twelve point two.”

“Don’t sound so cheerful about it,” he grumbled. “How are the crew holding up?”

It was a rhetorical question, and pretty vague for Jane, but the computer had an answer, nonetheless. “Two crew in the gunnery have fainted from heat exhaustion. Medical reports indicate severe heat stress.”

Capp frowned. “We got to get out of here. Tell him, Lieutenant,” she said to Oglethorpe.

“We do, and we’re all dead,” Drake said.

So what? He’d push them until they all fell, one by one. How would that help? Could he have been wrong about Dreadnought? How did she keep up the pursuit, hour after hour?

“There she goes!” Smythe shouted.

The tech officer threw the enemy ship onto the viewscreen. Dreadnought was pulling out of the chase, running for cooler air.

“Capp, get us around that other hemisphere and then take us for the Fantalus jump,” Drake said.

“Fantalus, sir?” Oglethorpe said.

“Look at Dreadnought. Malthorne can block our way to Hot Barsa. We can’t go back directly. We’ll have to go around.”

“That will cost us valuable time,” the lieutenant said. “If Malthorne turns toward Hot Barsa, he’ll arrive before us.”

“That is unavoidable,” Drake admitted.

Still, they were alive. He imagined Malthorne cursing and raging as his adjutants mopped at his brow with damp cloths. The admiral would want to continue the pursuit. At the same time, there was no longer any hope of catching Blackbeard before it jumped out of the system. Meanwhile, his sugar plantations on Hot Barsa were in flames, and Rutherford had shut down all shipping to and from the planet.

In the end, Malthorne did as he must. He turned his battleship toward the jump point to the Barsa system, and let Blackbeard escape.

Drake had achieved some important objectives, even while conceding the battlefield to the enemy. The admiral would reach Hot Barsa, but without Lindsell, who was off chasing Drake’s support craft toward San Pablo.

Once in the Barsa system, Dreadnought was nearly invulnerable from ambush and could roam around as Malthorne wished. But the admiral wouldn’t attack Rutherford and the forts without the full weight of his fleet. That bought Drake valuable time.

Drake didn’t say this aloud. The others would figure it out soon enough.

“As I commanded,” he told them. Then he picked up the last full water jug at his feet, drained it dry, and waited for the air to cool.

A large fleet was crossing the Fantalus system when Blackbeard arrived. More than seventy vessels strong, it held merchant frigates, converted liners, lumbering barges, and all manner of mining and salvage craft. They were mostly New Dutch, but also Ladino and even Hroom, and appeared to be a refugee fleet from Jericho, now under attack by Apex.

Drake ordered Capp to continue toward the next jump point, even as he performed full scans of the refugees. Let’s see what they were carrying. Some of them might be roped into assisting his fight against Malthorne. He’d offer refuge on Saxony in return.

But there was something strange about the refugee ships. The entire flotilla was completely silent, flying along at cruising speed toward the inner worlds of the system. No engines; it was traveling only on momentum. The reality soon became apparent.

It was a ghost fleet.

Scans of the largest vessels showed that their hulls had been pierced in multiple locations. Someone had come in, cut holes in each of the ships to vent out the atmosphere, and left them to continue. Dead. No survivors that they could detect. And at their current trajectory, they would eventually pass out of the system to drift forever through the endless void.

“Wait, here’s a live ship,” Smythe said. “Look.”

There it was. A long, slender, needle-like craft like the one Drake and Rutherford fought. It dipped in and out of the ghost fleet.

“Looking for some tasty bits, I should imagine,” Capp said. “They eat their victims, right? Bloody apex predators.”

Apex, maybe. Predator, not so much. This wasn’t predator behavior. Predators culled the weak, consuming their prey. This was an entire herd of refugees cut down and slaughtered. Perhaps by this single craft. It seemed to be sport, as much as anything, whether the aliens ate some of their victims or not.

“We’re cloaked, sir,” Oglethorpe said, sounding nervous. “Best be making for the next jump point, don’t you think, before they detect us?”

Drake was inclined to mix it up with the aliens. Destroy or drive off this ship, and it might convince Apex that Albion was not an enemy to be trifled with. Could he scare them away long enough to end the Albion civil war and unite the nation against this new threat? Or might he instead draw Apex ships by the hundreds? Who knew?

But here he faced a single ship, and after his other battle with the aliens, he’d mounted his own hundred-kilowatt laser to fight them. His shields, normally stubbornly resistant against any sort of non-kinetic weaponry, were vulnerable to the aliens in turn, but were they helpless? He didn’t think so. With superior tactics . . .

He shook his head. No. This was not the time. If he didn’t defeat Malthorne first, Apex would rip Albion and her people to shreds.

And so he kept a wary eye on the ghost fleet and its killer as he continued toward the next jump point. They approached it warily, half expecting an ambush either here or on the other side. But when they came through, the space lanes were clear.

Six days later, they jumped into the Barsa system. There they found HMS Dreadnought lurking in wait.

Chapter Twenty-one

It was the last night before the assault on the military base, and Tolvern had made her bed in a hammock forty feet above the ground. They were in a transition zone of mixed Hroom and Terran vegetation between the lowlands and highlands, but the forest floor was still infested with pouncers. The army took to the trees.

The Hroom were masters at manufacturing shelter out of what the forest gave them, and they bivouacked on beds made from cut branches and fronds and strung up with vines. Tolvern’s own hammock stretched between the branches of two separate trees. Carvalho’s bed hung to her right, while Brockett and Nyb Pim lay some twenty feet below them. As the sky darkened into a black, starless night, she heard the science officer and the pilot below, discussing what kind of equipment would be needed to manufacture more doses of the sugar antidote.

But soon, a breeze swept down from the mountains, driving away both the heat and the bugs, as well as drowning out their conversation. After weeks in the sweltering lowlands, Tolvern found the cool air a relief beyond words, but it sent her hammock swaying back and forth with every gust.

“Tolvern,” Carvalho said about twenty minutes later. “Are you asleep?”

“How could I be with this wind?”

“Do you still have that vine rope we used to cross the stream?”

“It’s my pillow,” she said.

“Toss the end over here. I have an idea.”

Tolvern didn’t know what he was getting at, but she threw over the end of the vine. He took hold of it and used the vine to lash the two hammocks together.

“Now take the other end and tie it down by your feet,” he told her. “There, isn’t that better?”

It was, she had to admit. Pulling the two hammocks together and tying them off had stabilized them against the wind. It turned the rough rocking into a gentle sway.

“I told you we’d be sharing a bed sooner or later,” he said.

“You’d better not snore.”

“Didn’t Capp tell you? I rumble like a warthog. Why do you think she kicks me out of her bed every night before she goes to sleep?”

“If it gets too bad, I’ll do the same.”

“We’re forty feet up,” he said. “That will hurt.”

“I know.”

“What’s wrong with a sharp elbow to the ribs? That will shut me up.”

“So will pouncers and tigers.”

“I can’t tell if you’re playing,” he said, “or if you still dislike me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You understand me perfectly well,” Carvalho said. “Sometimes, I see you watching, and I think you want to tear off my clothes. Other times, you say these things, and I can never tell if you are serious or not.”

“Why not both? Maybe I want to tear your clothes off first and then push you to the ground anyway.”

Tolvern meant it as a jest, but suddenly, the hammocks heaved, and Carvalho was over on her side. Right up next to her, a solid block of muscle against her lean frame.

“What the blazes are you doing?” she demanded.

“Do you want me to go back?”

“The devil take you, of course I do. Get out of here.”

“My apologies, then. I misunderstood.”

“Go on, get,” she said, pushing at him as he rolled over and climbed back to his side.

Her hands touched the bare flesh on his back and buttocks. “You’re naked!”

“It was hot. And it’s dark. Don’t you ever sleep in the nude, Tolvern?”

“But you came over to my side and you weren’t wearing any clothes at all. I can’t believe you did that. What gives you the right?”

“Again, my apologies. I will not do it again.”

Carvalho managed to say this without sounding sullen, and then fell silent. Tolvern regretted her harsh words. She’d been flirting with him more and more over the past several days and yes, she had been watching him when he stripped to wash off the sweat and grime. Sometimes, she’d even kept looking as he glanced at her and noted her gaze. No wonder he’d gotten the wrong idea.

Her fingers were practically tingling from where they’d touched his body. She imagined if she’d kept one hand on his butt and let the other touch his shoulders, his arm, his chest. If she pushed herself up against him . . .

“It’s all right,” she said a few minutes later. “I guess I see how it must have seemed.”

He didn’t answer. Asleep, then. That made her feel bold.

“Maybe I pushed you away too fast,” she added in a lower voice. “It alarmed me, is all.”

He stirred. Not asleep.

“I meant what I said,” he told her. “You understand my intentions. If you ever change your mind—and I’m not busy with Capp, of course. She is not jealous, but she must be fed first, if you understand my meaning. You know what to do should that happen.”

Did she? Could she possibly do what he was suggesting? Well, yes. What about the time she’d tried to climb in naked with Captain Drake in the shower? If not for Catarina Vargus getting there first, she’d have done it, too.

In a moment, on pure impulse, Tolvern grabbed for Carvalho’s side and swung herself over. She moved so quickly that she upset the two hammocks, and they nearly upended with a violent heave.

“Easy!” Carvalho said.

Tolvern flattened herself to stop it from swinging. “I’m sorry.”

“I thought you were trying to throw me to the ground!”

She laughed. “No, you invited me to come over, and I did. Not particularly skillfully, admittedly. I almost pitched us both to the ground.”

He said nothing, and now she really did feel herself up against his body. Her hands were up high, by his shoulders, and she buried her fingers in his hair. And then, he was kissing her. He smelled strong, masculine, and his thick stubble pricked her face. She didn’t care. Every bit of nervous energy and stress that had been building for these past weeks now sprang loose, and she wanted to devour him.

“I am naked, but you are still wearing this silly jumpsuit,” he said.

“Why don’t you take it off me, then?”

He did so, unzipping it to her navel, and then easing his strong hands in against her bare flesh. She shivered. When his thumbs brushed over her skin, she shivered harder, almost violently.

“I’m sorry,” she said. The words sounded foolish coming out. “It has been a long time for me. Your touch—”

“Do not apologize for feeling pleasure.” He kissed at her neck. “I swear I will give you a lot more before we are done.”

He eased the jumpsuit off her shoulders and down to her waist. His mouth followed it down at a leisurely pace, first kissing her neck, then the gentle swell of her breasts. Her breathing came faster and faster.

But Carvalho didn’t stop there. His mouth went down along her firm belly, and then he peeled off the jump suit and her panties in one motion. And still he kept kissing her body.

It had, in fact, been so long since Tolvern had been with a man that she’d have been embarrassed to admit it to Carvalho, Capp, or anyone else. She’d practically forgotten how to do it. But Carvalho, it was immediately clear, suffered no such lack of experience. He knew what he was doing, he did it well, and he didn’t tire quickly.

It was the night before a major military assault, and she should have been sleeping, but Tolvern didn’t get much rest. And she didn’t much care, either.

The rebels came up through the forest flanking the road the next morning. They traveled together in silence until they were roughly two miles from the enemy base, where they prepared to split into two groups. The first, let by Pez Rykan, contained the majority of the former slaves, several hundred in all, but few weapons.

The second was loaded with guns, ammo, and other equipment they’d lugged with them since dragging the pod from the mud at the bottom of the lake. This group boasted the most experienced fighters, the best shooters, and the coolest under pressure that Tolvern could identify. She and her three companions would lead this group of rebels in the main assault.

Tolvern pulled out her hand computer as Pez Rykan approached. “You have yours, right?”

“Yes. I will use it as you showed me.”

“It’s going to take us several hours to get in position,” Tolvern said, “but don’t wait that long. Maybe twenty minutes, then get to work. It will take the enemy some time to figure out what you’re doing, but then I expect them to come out of the base and attack.”

“You have left me six guns,” Pez Rykan said. “How are we to fight without weapons?”

As if to punctuate his words, a lorry engine sounded through the trees from the direction of the road. It had the low rumble of a heavy vehicle, the kind that carried either men or supplies across the muddy gash through the jungle connecting the estates and the security bases with the ports that shipped sugar offworld. Either way, it would be traveling armed, and Tolvern hadn’t given Pez Rykan enough weapons to stop even a single lorry if it were determined to break through.

“Your job isn’t to fight, it’s to make them think you’re going to fight,” she said. “That road may not look impressive, but it’s the artery to the lowland plantations. Cut it, and they have no way to put down the slave rebellion. That’s your job—shut it down. Force them to come out and open it again. Pin them down as long as you’re able, then get out of there.”

“Without arms, we will not be able to stop them from reopening the road.”

She sighed. Pez Rykan was even more literal-minded than most Hroom. She couldn’t remember Nyb Pim ever needing things spelled out like this. She’d sketched out the basics of the plan two days ago. From the way Pez Rykan listened solemnly, she thought he’d understood. The words, maybe. The logic behind them, no.

“It’s a feint,” she explained. “A trick. They’ll see you blocking the road and think you’re mounting a frontal assault, Hroom-style. You know, where you hide until the last minute, like your death fleet did, then come in for the attack in the most direct and obvious way possible. That’s Hroom thinking, and Malthorne’s goons understand it.

“Meanwhile,” she continued, “I’ll come up on their flank and attack from the opposite side of the base.”

“Do you have enough forces and equipment?” he asked.

“We’d better hope so. If the enemy commander is any good, if he’s prudent, he’ll fortify that approach at the first sign of danger. But your rebellion has trained them.”

“I do not understand. Trained them?”

“To expect a frontal attack. To know that what they see is what they get. Of course, they’ll be wary about stumbling into a firefight down here—the enemy doesn’t know the size of your army or how many weapons you possess. They’ll come down in a massive show of force. You wouldn’t be able to resist it no matter what. But that’s our opportunity.”

“What will you have me do? If not to defend our work closing the road, then what? How can we ‘pin them down,’ as you put it?”

“Stir up trouble and force them to commit. That’s all. They’ll rush out.” This was like explaining to a child, but she kept at it. “We’ll come in behind and take the base. I’ll get my people positioned at the guard towers and manning the heavy guns. Then they’ll be in trouble. They come back, we’ll attack them. They go forward, they enter the plantations, which are in disarray and embroiled in slave revolt. And if they do that, you’ll bring the rest of your army up the road, and we’ll load you up with weapons.”

“Yes, it is a good plan.”

“But you’ve got to do your part if we’re going to pull it off.”

“That will not be easy,” Pez Rykan said. “There will be a stretch of time when we will be facing them in open battle, with little in the way of arms.”

“That is our biggest risk,” she agreed. “Use the trees, use the cover. Disguise how many weapons you have. Some of your fighters will die, no matter what you do.”

Tolvern studied him, waiting for him to balk. The Hroom chief had forces now, hundreds of them. Freed slaves who had given him a real army for the first time. Her plan risked throwing that all away.

It also offered the opportunity to kick apart the whole rotten foundation of Lord Malthorne’s sugar and slave operation on Hot Barsa.

Chapter Twenty-two

“Vargus is going to get herself killed,” Drake muttered as he studied his console.

It showed the evolving situation in the Barsa system as scans, intercepted communications, and notes from his fleet began to appear following their jump. Dreadnought was already rumbling leviathan-like toward the inner system. Captain Lindsell had arrived, too, and his forces were augmented with two more cruisers, plus support craft. They were currently at the outermost gas giant of the system, but pushing swiftly toward the rocky inner worlds.

Mysteriously, the mercenary fleet was moving into position to intercept Dreadnought. Why? Vargus didn’t have a prayer of success.

“Rutherford must have given her orders,” Oglethorpe said. “Commanded the mercenary fleet to hold Dreadnought to give us time to join the fight.”

“Ain’t likely she’d agree though, is it?” Capp said. “That stuffed shirt Rutherford telling them pirates to fall on their swords—Vargus would give him the middle finger. She’d never do it, and those other blokes wouldn’t, either.”

Drake let them argue it out, listening, but not objecting, while he continued to study the data. They were too far from Hot Barsa to communicate directly, so he had Smythe send a subspace to Rutherford asking for an assessment of the current strategic situation.

As for Vargus, could she simply be protecting the goods? She’d sent the barges and tramp frigates ahead to Hot Barsa with their shipments of armaments and supplies. It was the reason Drake had ordered her to San Pablo in the first place, and if Dreadnought overtook them, the battleship would gobble them up like a tasty snack.

But no, those auxiliary ships had a good lead. Even though they flew at relatively slow speeds, Dreadnought was too far out to catch them before they reached Hot Barsa. Scans and computer estimates suggested that Rutherford and the forts would enjoy a full day to unload and organize the shipments before the battleship arrived. So what was Vargus up to?

She hesitated near a collection of asteroids that belted the system between Cold Barsa and the innermost of the gas planets. Led by Vargus’s own Outlaw and Aguilar’s stout, heavily armed frigate Pussycat, the motley collection of pirate and mercenary ships was powerful enough to give most attackers pause. Dreadnought was not most attackers.

Drake sent her a message. Don’t be stupid, he told her. Get out of there.

Vargus answered: I know what I’m doing. Go to Hot Barsa at all speed. That is an order.

“That cheeky wench!” Capp said, when the message came through. “King’s balls, what is she thinking?”

Oglethorpe looked confused. “Does this mean that Rutherford has taken control of the fleet, sir? It must have come from him. I can’t imagine that Vargus herself would presume to give orders.”

“It’s not an order,” Drake said. “She’s tweaking my ear. Probably finds it amusing.”

At one point, such insolence at a time of battle would have been highly irritating. Now, he’d come to expect it from the Vargus sisters. He imagined the smirk on Isabel’s face as she composed it.

“But there’s a serious part of this message,” he added. “She means to face Dreadnought. What can she be thinking?”

Capp grunted. “Trying to impress you, I should wager. Them sisters are rivals, know what I mean?”

“What shall we do, sir?” Oglethorpe asked.

“We make for Hot Barsa, of course. We couldn’t reach Vargus soon enough any way you look at it, so we may as well take whatever time she buys us.”

As they moved to obey, Drake kept his attention on Isabel Vargus and her looming confrontation with Dreadnought. Malthorne didn’t even bother to wait for Lindsell, but continued toward the mercenaries with nothing more than a pair of torpedo boats as escort. Confident yes, but no fool. He slowed to a prudent speed.

“I would imagine that he’s expecting an ambush, sir,” Oglethorpe said. “Something cloaked that is waiting nearby. Or perhaps a base in the asteroid belt.”

“Yes, that does seem reasonable,” Drake said. “I have my own hopes on that score.”

Although he couldn’t think who it might be. Drake had no secret fleet to draw on, let alone hidden forces capable of battling Dreadnought. And there were no fortresses among the asteroid belt that he knew of, unless there had been some deeply embedded pirate base that had been lurking there undiscovered for many years. Not likely. There was an old navy refueling station, but it was mothballed.

But there had to be something, right? Vargus wouldn’t be sitting there waiting for Dreadnought without an exit plan. A way to escape. This wasn’t like her fight with Lindsell; she had no hope of surviving even a short encounter with the battleship.

“Send her another message,” he told Smythe, then reconsidered. “Belay that order. We’ll keep on our current trajectory. Whatever she’s up to, she’s on her own.”

Rutherford responded at last via subspace.

I do not understand Vargus’s intentions. Am testing Vigilant’s engines now. Will prep for battle and await your arrival.

That must mean Vigilant’s engine repairs had been completed. Very good. If the tests checked out, Vigilant and her support craft would form a powerful opposition to the enemy. But Rutherford would have a rough go of it before reinforcements arrived. Holding on by his fingernails, no doubt.

How long would Vargus’s mercenary fleet delay Dreadnought? An hour or two. That would bring the enemy battleship to Hot Barsa thirteen hours after Captain Lindsell’s allied forces. Say it took a couple more hours for Malthorne and Lindsell to coordinate their forces. The lord admiral would enjoy eight full hours with his entire fleet before facing the last two rebel cruisers from Saxony, and nearly sixteen hours before Blackbeard arrived.

Those sixteen hours would be plenty of time to crush Rutherford and reduce the orbital forts. Dreadnought had the firepower to do both. Backed by Lindsell, he’d do it with ease.

The admiral was only two hours from the mercenary fleet when Isabel Vargus apparently had second thoughts. Her ships had been arrayed in battle formation, ready to catch Dreadnought in crossfire, but now they turned and fled toward the inner system.

“You fools,” Smythe said, as the viewscreen updated the posture of the two forces. “Why run now?”

His fingers danced over his console, moving the view first to Dreadnought and her torpedo boats, and then to Outlaw, Pussycat, and the other mercenaries.

“We shall find out,” Drake said.

The end game seemed inevitable. Four, maybe five hours before Dreadnought caught Vargus, and it would be all over. The tension was too much and too drawn out, so he left Oglethorpe at the helm and went to his quarters for some rest. He was exhausted and quickly fell asleep.

When he came back to the bridge a few hours later, he sent Oglethorpe and Manx on break, moved Capp to the commander’s chair, and had Smythe operate both the tech console and the defense grid computer. Right now, there wasn’t much to it. All the drama was playing out elsewhere in the system.

And it was indeed playing out, as the pursuit entered its final stages. Dreadnought’s batteries were warmed and almost within range. An hour out, at most. A few minutes later, Vargus brought her ships into a single file and started threading them into a minefield.

“So that was her plan,” Drake said. His stomach sank. So much for his hopes. “Why the devil didn’t she consult me first?”

“That’s them same Youd mines we went through that other time, ain’t it?” Capp said. “Seems pretty clever, don’t it? That big old battleship will set ’em off. Vargus gets through, but the mines will knock Dreadnought around a bit.”

“No,” Smythe said gloomily. “That field was laid down by the Royal Navy. I tried to hack it when we were in orbit around Hot Barsa. Then Commander Gibbs had her people make a second attempt. That failed, too.”

“The Youd mines detect and follow,” Drake said. “They send a signal to other nearby mines and form a net. It closes around you, and then you’re done for.”

“Yeah, I know,” Capp said. “I was piloting us through, remember? Nyb Pim was down with the sugar shakes. So you’re saying Malthorne can just stumble through there and nothing will happen? King’s balls.”

Drake nodded. “More or less. Vargus has a good pilot, but she’ll have to maneuver to avoid detection. The mines won’t target Malthorne’s forces, because they’ll recognize him as a friendly force. He can come right at her. It will only shorten the pursuit.”

Indeed, that’s more or less what was happening. Isabel Vargus must be in possession of good charts from Fort Gamma, because her mercenary fleet, traveling single file, moved swiftly and without hesitation, as if knowing where each and every mine was positioned. But Dreadnought, already closing, lumbered straight ahead and was now only moments away.

Suddenly, Dreadnought made an evasive maneuver. Then another. The ships were millions of miles away from Blackbeard, and it took a couple of minutes to figure out what was going on. Vargus must be firing back, though with what kind of firepower that would make Malthorne dance like that, Drake couldn’t fathom. Maybe it was Pussycat and her heavy weapons. Even then . . .

“It’s mines!” Smythe said. “She must have hacked that field after all. How the blazes did she manage that?”

Drake was looking at the same incoming data. “No, that’s not it. Look, the field is quiet.”

And then it came out. Isabel Vargus’s forces hadn’t been idle while waiting for the enemy to approach. She’d returned to the Barsa system stuffed from stem to stern with anything she could get her hands on in San Pablo. And that had included mines.

“She put down her own mines,” he said. “Entered the field before Malthorne jumped into the system and set a trap.”

And then led Dreadnought right into it. The lord admiral, his arrogance on full display, had shown no caution, thinking he was in full control of the minefield.

Explosions rocked the underside of the battleship. Another mine crashed off the bow. Mostly class three detonations—or so it appeared from a distance—so they wouldn’t cause serious damage to the shields. But Dreadnought pulled short. Drake held his breath, hardly daring to hope.

Then, to his rising elation, the enemy turned and fled for the outer edge of the minefield. Two more explosions splashed off the aft starboard shields. Another mine hit one of the two escorting torpedo boats. It lost power and spun away from the others. Dreadnought abandoned it, and it drifted helplessly through the minefield. Two more of Vargus’s mines found the wounded torpedo boat a few minutes later. It detonated.

Capp pumped her fist. She jumped from her seat and ran over to Smythe to give him a high five. He returned it awkwardly, laughing.

“Clever, Vargus,” Drake said. “Clever.”

He’d stood to watch the enemy retreat, but now settled back into his seat to see how it would play out. Dreadnought nosed around the edge of the minefield. Hard to say how many mines Vargus had laid down; maybe that was it. But the encounter seemed to have left the enemy shaken. Malthorne let the mercenaries escape.

By the time Oglethorpe and Manx returned to the bridge a few hours later, the full scope of Vargus’s tactical victory became apparent. She’d not only slipped away unscathed, but Dreadnought had lost hours skirting the vast field. The battleship cut up on the z-axis to hook around the field and swoop down on the inner worlds from above.

Fourteen hours. That’s how much time Vargus had bought Drake. She’d given them a chance.

And then, disaster struck. HMS Vigilant had remained in orbit around Hot Barsa while Rutherford rushed through repairs on her plasma engines. The repairs finished, Rutherford had taken Vigilant for a spin around the neighborhood to make any last-minute tweaks.

Four hours out, one of the engines melted down. Quick thinking by the crew vented plasma into space and saved the ship. Vigilant came limping back to Fort Gamma. What the hell had happened?

They soon found the culprit: a loyalist boatswain from Fort Gamma. The man had planted a bomb in one of the engines during repairs, then feigned illness when Rutherford attempted to press him into service on Vigilant. He was in the sick bay on Gamma when Gibbs sent men to arrest him. The man wrestled away a gun, shot two guards—one critically—and fled toward the escape pods. An alert engineer opened the pod to the void while it was still docked, and the saboteur suffocated before he could launch.

But the damage was done. Vigilant was down an engine. The second most powerful ship in Drake’s navy had been effectively crippled. The small advantage gained by Vargus’s maneuver was effectively erased. Dreadnought was looking more invincible than ever as she rumbled toward Hot Barsa, spoiling for a fight.

Chapter Twenty-three

Carvalho and Tolvern climbed the vine-choked trunk of a large tree until they got to a crook about twenty feet off the ground. Tolvern threw a rope over the branch and let the end trail to the ground. Brockett tied the other end to the barrel of a .50-caliber machine gun. Carvalho and Tolvern heaved it up to the branch.

Nyb Pim stood a few feet off with the Hroom rebels, translating the instructions Tolvern had given him. The Hroom listened impassively, occasionally making soft hoots of assent. It was a heavily armed group, carrying assault rifles, shotguns, and hand cannons, and loaded with ammo and grenade belts.

While Carvalho fixed the machine gun in place, Tolvern pulled back a branch to create a small gap in the foliage. There it was, the northeast entrance to the enemy base, some two hundred yards distant. A ditch encircled the base, followed by a thicket of razor wire, and finally, a chainlink fence topped with more razor wire. A sandbagged bunker and checkpoint sat outside the gates, with a machine gun peeking over the top. A guard tower guarded the entrance from inside, and there was no doubt another heavy gun inside, pointing out through the loops.

At first glance, it seemed secure, but Tolvern noted the open gates and the vegetation that should have been cut down. Had it been her, she’d have burned out every tree and blade of grass for a mile to deny cover to enemies.

Carvalho positioned himself behind the gun. “Idiots. They’ve left themselves vulnerable to snipers. All these trees—it is an invitation. Who could resist?”

“It’s a security operation, not military.” Tolvern fed in a belt of ammo. “The marines haven’t been here for decades. Not since the reign of Queen Ellen. Once they wiped out and enslaved the last Hroom kingdoms on the planet, there was never a need.”

“What about Pez Rykan and his sort?”

“They’ve been an annoyance at best. The rebels couldn’t recruit sugar eaters, and those few who made it into the bush were terrified of the plantations. They were either former eaters and vulnerable to re-addiction, or freeborn Hroom who had little connection to their enslaved people.

“So where does that leave Malthorne’s security personnel?” Tolvern continued. “The slavers only needed enough force to stop raids, to deter smugglers. To put down sugar riots. More about intimidation and security than fighting real enemies. They never expected a war, that’s for sure.”

“Then it was careless,” he said. “It will cost them.”

“Anyway, this base was more or less mothballed until recently. Look, you can see they’ve been burning back the vegetation.”

“How many men are inside?” he asked.

That was a good question. The enemy had assembled a formidable force in preparation to put down the sugar revolt, but most of those men had recently departed to fight Pez Rykan’s attempt to cut the road.

That didn’t mean it was abandoned. She could see the guard at the machine-gun nest. The tower was no doubt manned, too.

“Just get us inside,” Tolvern said. “We’ll worry about the rest then.”

Carvalho nodded. “I will take out the machine-gun nest first. As soon as you give the signal, it is gone.”

“Good. Then hit that guard tower. Knock it out if you can. Draw its fire if you can’t.”

“Oh, I will take care of it. Don’t worry. You keep yourself safe.”

“Right.” She prepared to climb down to where Nyb Pim and the others waited. “I’ll send Brockett up to help you load ammo. Best use for him, I figure, rather than running around getting shot at.”

“I mean it,” Carvalho said. “You be careful now, you understand? I would not want to see you die.”

“You’re not getting all sentimental on me, now, are you?”

Somehow, he managed to shrug both his shoulders and his mouth at the same time in what was a very Ladino expression. “Perhaps a little bit.”

Tolvern poised on the edge with a hand wrapped around a vine and a leg dangling over the side. “Capp might be good with what happened last night, but I doubt she’d be too keen on anything she’d call ‘feelings.’ So, we’re professionals now, right? We know what needs doing, and we’ll do it.”

“Got it.” He scowled and turned to fiddling with the gun.

It was the first time they’d mentioned what had passed between them in the hammock. She didn’t regret it—assuming, she, Carvalho, and Capp herself were right about all the parties involved—but neither did she plan to make a habit of it. And she was sure Carvalho didn’t either, if he gave it two seconds of thought.

Once Tolvern reached the ground, she gave Nyb Pim final instructions, which he translated for the others. Counting Blackbeard’s pilot, she had seventeen Hroom in her force. They came to the edge of the trees about a hundred yards outside the gates to the base.

Any natural camouflage the Hroom enjoyed among the red and purple jungle of the lowlands was negated here in the higher elevations, where Terran vegetation had taken root with all of its shades of green. But a deep ditch flanked the dirt road to drain off the heavy rains, and the enemy had not yet cleared it. Tolvern led the others into waist-high weeds and brush, and then had them fan out down the ditch, moving on their bellies.

Tolvern looked at her computer to get the time. “Five minutes,” she told Nyb Pim. “Then you go, whether I give you the signal or not.”

Nyb Pim checked his own computer and gave a human-style nod. Tolvern continued along with three Hroom, leaving Nyb Pim and the rest behind. They crept along the ditch toward the base. Only in the last fifty feet had someone bothered to burn down the vegetation, and it was here that Tolvern stopped. She looked at her computer. Four minutes and fifty seconds already. She’d cut it close.

She touched her ear to activate the com link. “You ready, boys?” Nyb Pim and Carvalho answered in the affirmative. “All right then. Go!”

Tolvern flattened herself. The Hroom behind her let loose seconds later. Nearly a dozen rifles targeted the machine-gun nest and the guard tower. A split second later came the heavier thump, thump, thump of Carvalho’s machine gun in the tree.

“Got him!” he said over the com.

She lifted her head. The gun barrel behind the sandbags tilted skyward. Now tracer bullets from Carvalho’s gun slammed into the tower itself.

“Going in,” she told Nyb Pim. “Don’t shoot me in the back.”

The assault rifles behind her fell silent. She jumped up with an encouraging shout and ran toward the still-open gates. Her three Hroom companions followed. A quick glance behind showed other Hroom pouring on the road from the ditch.

The human in the sandbag bunker slumped over the back end of his gun, which had sent the barrel skyward. Large-caliber bullets riddled his body. Never stood a chance, poor bugger.

So far, not a single response from the enemy base. Carvalho had taken out the machine gun in the first moments and now kept hitting the guard tower. He didn’t have unlimited bullets—it was no mean feat to haul those ammo cans dozens of miles through the brush—but this was no time to conserve. Take the base, and they’d get their hands on everything they needed.

Tolvern and her three companions burst through the open gates. The base was several hundred yards wide, with two long barracks on the right side, a control tower with an empty helipad in the center, and to the left, a pair of hangars flanked by the same sort of windowless concrete dormitories that housed slaves on the plantations.

Three pale-skinned Hroom ducked their heads and ran across the open space between the two barracks. One of the rebel Hroom fighters lifted her gun, but Tolvern ordered her to stand down. They weren’t going to shoot unarmed base workers, especially not when they had so many other objectives. First, the guard post.

An external metal staircase climbed to the top of the post in a series of switchbacks comprising three separate landings. Several other Hroom from the ditch were now entering the base, and here they met their first resistance. A small lorry with oversized mud tires rolled from one of the hangars. Two men stood in the back, leaned over the cab, and fired. Rebel Hroom threw themselves to the ground and returned fire.

Tolvern left this fight to others and moved quickly to secure the metal staircase. She got on the com link to Carvalho. “I’m coming up. Hold your fire.”

The gunfire halted from outside the base. She positioned two of the Hroom at the first landing while she continued up with her last fighter. She tried the heavy metal door at the top. Locked. So much for the hope that the enemy had continued their series of defensive blunders.

She removed a grenade with a timed charge, set the timer for ten seconds, and activated it. Then she and her companion ran down to the next landing, crouched with covered ears, and braced themselves. Bullets pinged off the metal railing near her head.

Then came the explosion. It shook the landing until Tolvern thought she’d miscalculated, and the entire building would collapse, staircase and all. But when the shaking stopped, it was still standing. Only the door was damaged.

It had blown inward and lay smoking on the floor inside the guard tower. She grabbed her companion, and they charged up. Maybe the guards were dead, maybe not, but she wouldn’t take chances. They came in guns firing.

At nothing, it turned out. All of Carvalho’s shooting after taking out the sandbagged gun below had been wasted. There was nobody manning the guard post. Someone had slept in, ventured off with the security forces, or taken their coffee break without leaving a replacement. There was a heavy machine gun mounted on the exterior wall, together with several ammo cans.

Tolvern and her companion dismounted the gun and shifted it to a loophole on the inner wall of the tower. The Hroom dragged over ammo cans from the corner, and Tolvern pulled back the bolt and aimed the gun toward the interior of the base.

The small lorry and its men had kept the rebels pinned near the entrance. Some of her fighters had taken refuge behind a small shed, while two others lay sprawled and motionless in the dirt, their weapons fallen. Gunned down by the enemy. Other rebels had been unable to enter at all. Meanwhile, several humans deeper in the base seemed to be organizing a defense of humans and their Hroom slaves, using the lorry as a shield.

Tolvern aimed at the lorry and let loose. The gunner went first, and then she tore up the engine block, shredded the tires, and battered down the windshield. She swept the gun to the left and right until she’d cut down or scattered all the defenders.

Their way now clear, the rest of the rebels entered the base. Tolvern stayed at the gun until Carvalho and Brockett entered a few minutes later hefting the machine gun and ammo. After they had it set up on a tripod, Tolvern left her companion in the guard tower and went down to join them. They now had three working machine guns, including the one captured outside the gates.

The gun at the guard tower kept them covered as Tolvern and Carvalho moved toward the center of the base, tossing grenades and firing at anything that moved. It took less than an hour to overrun the entire base. The attack left fifteen dead enemies, captured forty prisoners, and sent another twenty or thirty humans and Hroom fleeing in lorries down the road on the opposite side of the base. Tolvern lost four Hroom from her own force, with three others suffering light wounds.

Carvalho had pinned down the last two surviving enemies and was still trying to force a surrender, when Tolvern called Pez Rykan.

“We’ve got the base,” she told him. “Not as much gear here as I thought, but we’re still turning over rocks looking for it all. But we’ve got maybe a hundred more guns and plenty of ammo. Some new heavy weapons, too. Captured two lorries, but they’re shot up and in need of repair. Are you still pinned down?”

“No. The fight is already over. We were forced to withdraw.”

“What? How many did you lose?”

“Several dozen. Perhaps a hundred.”

Her stomach sank. “I told you not to fight, I told you to pin them down as long as you could and get out of there.”

“I had six guns and a job to do. I had no choice.”

“And where is the enemy now? Still blocked, or did they muscle through on their way to the lowlands?”

“No, they are driving back to the base. They turned around, and we couldn’t hold them. We knocked over trees in the road,” the Hroom chief continued. “Then, when they approached, we shot at them and tried to block their escape. But they seemed to understand this—I don’t know how, but they guessed our deception. We couldn’t get enough trees onto the road or force the enemy to take cover in the forest. They fought their way out again.”

They must have received word from the base. Tolvern had hit hard and fast, had captured the provisional base commander within twenty minutes of Carvalho’s first shots, but not, it would seem, before he sent a panicked message to the assault team. The commander of the assault team had reacted coolly under fire and fought his way out before the trap could be fully sprung. And now, the enemy was rushing back to recapture the base. Somehow, Tolvern had to hold it, or the entire battle would be lost.

“How many enemies are we talking about?” she asked. “Couple of hundred?”

“More like five or six hundred, I would say. Plenty of lorries and heavy weapons. Now you see why we couldn’t hold them.”

Her mouth went dry. “That many?”

“Did all of your forces survive?” Pez Rykan asked. “How many do you have left to resist them?”

Tolvern had already counted in her head. “Counting both humans and Hroom? We have sixteen.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Drake’s forces and the lord admiral’s converged on Hot Barsa within hours of each other. Captain Lindsell’s powerful cruiser fleet made an in-flight rendezvous with Dreadnought, while Blackbeard came in behind.

Meanwhile, Rutherford had shifted Vigilant into a support role between Fort Gamma and Fort Epsilon, disguising his ship’s crippled engines while also shoring up the planetary defenses. Rutherford’s frigates set up position on the flanks, and a pair of destroyers laid down mines to slow the enemy advance. Vargus’s mercenary fleet arrived next, and Drake ordered her to protect Vigilant’s rear from Fort Alpha, which had never been conquered and could provide nasty surprises in the upcoming battle.

Drake thought they were well positioned even against such a massive force as Malthorne’s. If not for victory, then at least a bloody stalemate. If Malthorne weren’t so pigheaded, he might try something other than a frontal assault, but he seemed to have no other plan than to come in hard and fast. He didn’t bother to cloak himself, either, just made a straight run for the planet, a single hammer blow meant to end the battle in the first encounter. It reminded Drake of the Hroom style of fighting. Apply overwhelming force to a single spot and keep pounding away until you either won or were utterly vanquished.

Why was Malthorne so aggressive? Probably Tolvern had a good deal to do with it.

Her rebellion was spreading its tendrils through the sugar estates of Hot Barsa. Malthorne would be itching to get to the surface to burn out the slave revolt before it was too late. Drake tried to make contact with Tolvern on the surface. Whatever she was doing was working. He needed her to keep fighting until Dreadnought had been destroyed or driven off. When that was done, he’d get the away team out of there and leave the revolt to its own devices.

But he couldn’t reach her. Why not? Tolvern had already contacted Gamma and Vigilant on multiple occasions. Now she’d gone dark just when she should have been checking in. Last they’d heard, she was preparing to fight security forces in a major battle. Had it gone wrong?

Drake didn’t have long to worry. The combined Malthorne-Lindsell fleet began its run to Hot Barsa. Blackbeard was a few hours behind. She rendezvoused with the final two cruisers of the rebel fleet: HMS Richmond, captained by Catherine Caites, and HMS Calypso, with the steady Philip Potterman at the helm. The cruisers came with a partial task force of support craft, including a corvette, a frigate, and three destroyers.

All in all, Drake’s fleet was too powerful to ignore. Even as Dreadnought approached Hot Barsa, Lindsell sheered away with several craft to protect the battleship’s rear.

Malthorne sent a final, taunting warning. No demand for surrender this time. Only a general broadcast calling on all crews to mutiny. Take back the forts, seize their ships. They’d been coerced into aiding and abetting traitors, and mercy would be provided if they turned toward their rightful king.

This had no effect on the rebel forces. It caused no defections, no additional sabotage. Any hidden enemies had already shown their colors.

Dreadnought pulled up short as she and Fort Gamma came in range of each other. Malthorne sheered off his remaining torpedo boat to block Vigilant, should she come in for an attack. Rutherford had concealed her weakness well. Didn’t do much good, though, as she was unable to fight at this range.

The battleship stood several hundred thousand miles off and heaved a massive missile barrage at the fort from a pair of crotalus batteries. There was too much firepower to fend off with countermeasures, and explosions were soon rocking the fortress. Dexi Gibbs was back in charge, but this time fully armed. In this initial stage, however, she sat and absorbed the punishment. Only when Malthorne tried to sneak through a missile armed with an atomic weapon did defense systems scramble to put it down. They knocked it away before it could do any harm.

That atomic assault had put a lie to Malthorne’s promise of mercy. Breaking through, it would have killed rebels and loyalists alike.

Under cover of Dreadnought’s fire, two torpedo boats pulled off from Lindsell’s cruiser fleet, and supported by a missile frigate, made a diving run at Gamma. This forced the commander’s hand. If one of those torpedo boats had another atomic warhead, the result could be disastrous. She unloaded her missile batteries, and then the fort’s cannons, trying to drive off the enemy craft. One of the torpedo boats took damage, and soon both were fleeing back to Dreadnought, their mission failed.

Gibbs turned Fort Gamma’s weapons on Dreadnought. The battleship swatted away missiles and torpedoes like so many pesky mosquitoes. It looked like she was preparing another run with torpedo boats. Rutherford brought up a frigate and a destroyer and swung them wide to guard against this possibility. Vigilant still lingered to the rear.

Meanwhile, Fort Epsilon came into view, but it couldn’t join the battle against Dreadnought during the brief minutes when it was in range. Instead, it had its hands full with Fort Alpha—still controlled by loyalists. After weeks of wary truce, the two orbital platforms were now fighting each other. Rutherford sent a destroyer to aid Fort Epsilon, but otherwise kept his forces at the ready.

Drake hailed Caites and Potterman. They split the viewscreen, the young, serious-faced woman Rutherford had elevated next to the craggy-faced war veteran. They were each skilled in their own way, but only a few months ago, Caites had commanded a small torpedo boat, and Potterman had spent his career at the helm of a destroyer. Neither had taken a cruiser into open battle.

“The only way we win is if we get to Dreadnought,” Drake said. “Us, Rutherford, and Vargus all at once. Pin her against the forts and finish her. Like a pack of lions bringing down an elephant.”

Caites stared back coolly. “If only the elephant wasn’t guarded by her own lions.”

“You mean Lindsell?” Potterman said from the other side of the screen. “More like a rhino, I’d say. Tough hide, sharp horn, ready to charge at a moment’s notice. Maybe we can lure him away.”

“Lindsell is aggressive enough,” Drake agreed. “Question is, does Malthorne have him properly caged, or not? The admiral has to feel invincible with Lindsell guarding his flank—why would he let the cruiser fleet out of its pen?”

“We could try a bluff,” Caites said. “I’ll come in off Blackbeard’s starboard. Take a little damage, then feign serious injury. I’ll retreat, as if forced to withdraw. Lindsell can’t resist a wounded enemy—I’ll bet he comes after me. Once I’ve got him in the open, Richmond is more than a match for Churchill.”

Not really. Churchill was the third Punisher-class cruiser, behind Blackbeard (formerly HMS Ajax) and Vigilant. Caites’s own Richmond was an older Aggressor-class cruiser. Slower, less maneuverable, and with weaker armaments. Caites meant captain to captain, of course, but even here, Drake had his doubts that she could outfight her opponent. So would Lindsell, which made it likely that he’d take the bait, suspected trap or no.

“When he takes the bait,” Potterman said, “the rest of us rush through. With Churchill out of the way, we’ll knock through the rest of those ships and get at Dreadnought.”

It was an entire battle dismissed with the wave of a hand. Drake had no doubt they could get through, but even with Lindsell out of the way, the corvettes, destroyers, frigates, and torpedo boats would put up a hell of a fight.

Still, it was the best plan he had. “We need to keep the rest of Lindsell’s forces between us and Dreadnought until the last minute. The battleship has plenty of firepower to hit us from port even while she’s fighting on her starboard side. We can’t face those guns until the rest of the fleet is defeated. Our only hope is to use her own ships as a shield.”

“Then you want me to try to lure Lindsell away?” Caites asked.

“Yes. Let’s do it.”

They ended the call. He brought up Isabel Vargus on Outlaw and explained the plan. “How hard can you hit Dreadnought on the forecastle?”

“Not hard enough. There’s more tyrillium on that one shield than in my whole fleet. To destroy Dreadnought from the front . . . it’s impossible.”

“I don’t need you to destroy her. I only need you blasting at Malthorne’s bridge. I want him rattled. I need you to draw fire.”

“Drawing fire shouldn’t be a problem,” she said dryly. “I’m sure he’s got plenty and to spare.”

“I know what I’m asking. It will be dangerous. I’ll hold you back until we’re past Lindsell. But once I’m through, I’ve got to go after Dreadnought with everything I’ve got. That means you, too.”

“What about Rutherford?” Vargus asked. “If he comes in from starboard—”

“No,” he said. “Rutherford can’t lead the charge. Not with one engine. Vigilant ventures out from the forts, and she’s dead.”

“His support craft, then.”

“You think those frigates and destroyers can stand a broadside from Dreadnought’s guns?” Drake asked.

“Who can? I sure as hell can’t.”

“Then it’s a good thing you won’t be facing the main cannons. Are you ready? We’re ten minutes out.”

Vargus nodded. Her mechanical eye narrowed, then dilated again. “If you’re going to get us killed, let’s try not to do it at Malthorne’s hands. Agreed?”

“That would be an especially humiliating end.” Drake allowed himself a smile. “Agreed. If it comes to it, Lindsell does the killing.”

Vargus grinned. “I like you, James Drake.” She gave a mock salute. “Off to execute my orders. Good luck.”

Drake closed the channel, grateful for her support, but also thinking how much better their chances would be with her sister Catarina at the helm of Orient Tiger and her own fleet. But no commander ever went into battle with the forces he wished he had on hand.

Meanwhile, Blackbeard formed the spearhead, with Richmond a few thousand miles off off starboard, Calypso off port, and a destroyer above and below. His frigates lingered behind Richmond, ready to support her exit once she feigned injury. Ahead loomed Lindsell’s fleet, a shield to Dreadnought’s sword.

“Take us in, Ensign,” Drake said.

Capp nodded. She winked at Oglethorpe, then again at Smythe. “Ready, boys? Here we go.”

The subpilot’s eyes now took on a glazed look as her nav chip interfaced with the nav computer. Her fingers moved over the console. The ship gave a subtle move beneath them. It represented a violent shift in movement, Drake knew, so much so that without artificial gravity, they’d be splattered against the far wall.

Blackbeard hurtled straight at HMS Churchill. Drake’s other two cruisers followed. The destroyers swung wide to provide fire support. Two enemy corvettes broke from the pack and pounced. They opened fire, even as the rest of Lindsell’s fleet let loose.

Drake’s forces fired their first volley in response. Soon, the region of space a half million miles out from Hot Barsa was filled with snaking missiles, lumbering torpedoes, and chunks of flying metal the size of small lorries. Blackbeard struck a lucky blow on one of the streaking corvettes and forced it to retire.

At the same time, Caites took a hit to her helm. Richmond shrugged, maneuvered and launched countermeasures to fight off the rest of the attack. The other corvette came after her, followed by two torpedo boats and supported by Lindsell’s frigates. Caites took her cruiser and veered hard from the battle. She sent a panicked distress signal over the general com. It was a convincing display, and if Drake hadn’t known better, he’d have thought her seriously wounded.

Now Caites was exposed. The corvette could pursue her, harassing, while Lindsell followed in his powerful cruiser. Drake’s forces wouldn’t be able to protect Richmond before the enemy caught her. It was the plan, though. A dangerous one, but what they needed.

But Lindsell didn’t bite. Instead, he consolidated his forces, targeted Blackbeard, and thundered forward. Drake had been outmaneuvered. The two sides were about to collide, and he had sent one of his cruisers off the battlefield.

Chapter Twenty-five

Tolvern had her small force well prepared by the time the enemy returned, with towers manned and armed, the road hastily mined, and snipers taking position in the surrounding forest. She even had an anti-tank gun, which she wielded herself. She hid in the ditch outside the base as the rumble of lorries reached her ears, and she blasted the first vehicle straight to hell. Two shots from the anti-tank gun. The second hit the fuel tank. Flames shot skyward as she hoisted the gun and raced back within the base’s protective guns.

And then the enemy arrived in bulk. They seized the road and targeted the guard tower. Tolvern had hastily welded on metal plating, but the shields also restricted her ability to return fire. Enemy forces launched mortars and grenades into the compound. Others came through the forest to take the road on the opposite side, driving out Tolvern’s snipers and replacing them with their own.

She held them off the rest of the day, but as soon as it was dark, the enemy crept up and tried to cut through the razor wire. An armored personnel carrier attacked the gates directly before Tolvern chased it off with the anti-tank gun. Somehow, they survived the night.

Three of Pez Rykan’s rebels slipped past the enemy defenses on the second day and slightly bolstered Tolvern’s force. They told her of fighting in the jungle. Pez Rykan was struggling to get her reinforcements, but he had few guns and was short on ammo. It was a terrible irony. Tolvern had all the guns and ammo she needed, but lacked the fighters to shoot them.

The third day, the first of the Hroom prisoners, forced to swallow caplets at gunpoint, began to come around. The antidote worked most quickly on the more recently addicted. Brockett tested them with sugar first, then turned them over to Tolvern to arm. She was up to twenty-five defenders by nightfall.

It wasn’t enough. The constant fire had left her exhausted and rattled. And the heat. The neverending, confounded heat. The Hroom were affected, too. Three of her fighters threw down their weapons and fled the base, running for the jungle, only to be cut down by enemy snipers. At first, Tolvern had cursed the deserters as cowards. Then, she began to envy them. By the fourth day, she was contemplating surrender.

That night, while she was climbing the staircase to take her turn in the guard tower, she glanced up to see the sky glowing. Light flashed high in the atmosphere. Moments later, more flashes, until the entire sky was lit up as if with celestial fireworks. She knew what it meant. Captain Drake had his own fight up there.

She’d tried to raise Fort Gamma or Vigilant for the past few days, but the enemy had succeeded in jamming her communication. With the fighting up above, it wasn’t like they could send her armed help, but they might be able to drop a bomb from orbit, or even parachute in arms for Pez Rykan. Maybe. She couldn’t reach her Hroom ally at the moment, either.

Carvalho rose wearily when she entered the guard room, hands on his back and groaning as he straightened himself. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

“It’s my turn,” she said.

“There are others who can handle this gun. And the enemy is holding still at the moment.”

She cupped a hand to her ear and dragged out a smile. “Sounds like gunfire to me.”

“Not on this side of the base. You need company?”

“Nah, get yourself some sleep.”

“Oh, I mean to,” he said. “Going to slump in the corner and close my eyes. Not as comfortable as a cot in the barracks, but right now it doesn’t matter much where I sleep. One of those bone diggers could burrow into my skull, and it wouldn’t keep me awake.”

“Then what good will you do here?” she asked. “Go down to the barracks. Go on.”

“Nah.” He turned on the screen of his computer and wiped away the condensation. He used the screen light to get a closer look at her. “You don’t look so well yourself.”

“You wouldn’t expect me to, would you?”

“We are both shellshocked. Here, I will stay with you and keep you company.” He turned off the computer and settled in the corner, pulling his knees up to his chest and disappearing into the shadows.

Tolvern shrugged, although she wasn’t unhappy with the company. She settled in at the gun. During lulls in the fighting, a brave Hroom mechanic had swung around and welded on more blast shielding, and the gun now had a protected slit through which to fire.

The night scope was on. The road outside the base was quiet. The enemy had made a movable barricade of trees, flanked by two burned-out vehicles. They could and often did come over the barrier and attack directly. But for now, there was no sign of movement.

“Tolvern?”

“Thought you were going to sleep.”

“Should we give up?” he asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Take what arms we can and fight our way to the forest. We might escape.”

“We wouldn’t.”

“Surrender, then.”

“Wouldn’t they kill us all anyway?” she pointed out.

“Only if we lose.”

“What do you mean, if we lose? That’s what surrender means.”

“If Drake loses, I mean,” Carvalho said. “If he wins, then the planet is ours. He can force the enemy to give up prisoners. But if he does not win, then we are trapped down here anyway.”

“You’re missing the larger strategic picture.” Tolvern swung the gun to check for movement along the ditches. She thought she’d spotted something, but now all seemed still.

“How would I miss it? We are trapped by a superior force. It is only a matter of time.”

“That’s what you’re missing, Carvalho. Time is on our side, not the enemy’s. They have to get in here. We have their food and ammo. They have no resupply. And every day we hold them here, the rebellion spreads on the plantation. Every day, new eaters are broken of their addiction. Tens of thousands of doses will go out, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.”

“And that means what?” he asked.

“It means if we hold out, a hundred thousand square miles will be lost to the enemy for good. They’ll be forced to flee for the highlands. We’ll join Pez Rykan, feed him guns and ammo, and move on to other plantations. One after another, they’ll all fall.”

In a few short weeks, she’d forced the security forces to fight and had drawn Malthorne and Dreadnought to protect the planet’s vast wealth. Without the sugar of Hot Barsa, how would Malthorne maintain his hold on the throne? He had nobles to buy off, a fleet to maintain, and new wars to finance. Even with the lands gained by stealing the crown, Malthorne needed this planet.

She caught movement through the scope. This time, Tolvern was sure. A rustle in the grass in the ditch on the right side of the road, about a hundred yards from the gates.

“We’ve got an infiltrator,” she said. “I’m going to take him out.”

But not until the enemy moved. Couldn’t let them know they’d been spotted while they were protected at the bottom of the ditch. She waited for the grass to move again. Carvalho came by her side. He grabbed the end of a belt of ammo to feed it in should she shoot.

There! A movement in the grass another twenty yards closer to her position. She squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked on with an angry snarl as she let the infiltrator have it. In the darkness, the tracer bullets looked like a glowing white knife, cutting back and forth along the ditch.

A light flashed. Something streaked toward her. It slammed into the guard tower, and she threw herself down. The room rocked with a tremendous boom. A hand-fired missile or grenade. She was rattled but unhurt when she picked herself up again. Carvalho cursed and shook his head.

Tolvern grabbed the gun again. And then, the night lit up. Gunfire flashed from both sides of the road, dozens of guns targeting her position. More gunfire came from behind the burned-out lorry. Moving figures, dozens of them.

This wasn’t an infiltrator. This was a major assault to overrun the base.

“I’m coming out,” Rutherford said.

“Hold your position,” Drake responded.

“Is that an order?” The other captain’s tone was insolent.

Blackbeard rocked from a blow to stern. Lindsell was hammering her hard with his cruiser and a corvette, and Potterman’s cruiser was caught in the crossfire of two destroyers while torpedo boats charged him from all sides, preventing him from coming to Drake’s assistance. Catherine Caites was already swinging around with Richmond, her bluff having failed, but hadn’t yet returned to the battlefield.

“Manx, is the secondary battery ready yet?” Drake asked.

“Barker says three minutes.”

Drake glanced at the console to see the enemy corvette approaching at high speed. “I need it now.”

He turned back to Rutherford, who didn’t appear on the main screen, but on the captain’s console. “Yes, that’s an order, dammit. You’ve got to keep Dreadnought off those forts.”

“I’m sitting here like an idiot. Gamma has lost her main battery, and her torpedo tubes are getting pounded. I have to bring the fight to Dreadnought. I’ve still got one engine. Let me do something with it.”

“Malthorne is turning,” Drake said. “Gamma can catch a breather in a few minutes.”

“But you won’t,” Rutherford said.

No, he wouldn’t. Caites fired off two long-range missiles. Her guns were warming. Potterman clawed his way free of the destroyers and knocked out two torpedo boats, but he was too harried to give Drake aid.

The enemy corvette streaked past Blackbeard, but Barker had finally got the secondary cannon online. They fired all three guns and cracked the corvette a hammer blow to the upper decks as she passed. Explosions rippled along her surface.

Lindsell still came at him with Churchill, together with a full complement of support craft, but Drake swung around with the main guns just as Caites lanced in at the enemy’s left flank. Drake’s own support craft were maneuvering expertly into position. It was an encounter Drake now believed he would win, given enough time.

This small victory didn’t change the basic equation. The battle was turning against them. Drake could match Lindsell, blow for blow, but here came Dreadnought. The battleship lumbered out from Hot Barsa, abandoning the attack on the forts.

Drake sent out a general order to the fleet. “Direct all fire at Churchill.”

He’d meant to break Lindsell before playing his last card. Get past these powerful forces before taking on Dreadnought. But that wasn’t going to happen in time. So he sent a message to Isabel Vargus. Now.

The mercenary fleet had been lingering just out of Dreadnought’s range and was already following the battleship as she pulled out of orbit. But now Vargus accelerated and moved to cut off Malthorne’s flagship. It might buy Drake a few minutes.

Blackbeard gave the enemy cruiser a broadside. Calypso joined Blackbeard from below, unleashing her own torpedo boats. Caites screamed in at the helm of Richmond. Suddenly, Captain Lindsell, who’d been landing most of the blows to this point in the battle, found himself under concentrated fire.

He let loose with his guns, and one of Drake’s torpedo boats broke apart. Next, two of Lindsell’s torpedoes slammed into one of the rebel destroyers. The first torpedo blasted an opening for the second one, which cut right through the heart of the ship. The rebel destroyer vented a brilliant plume of plasma and rocked with explosions before breaking in two. Escape pods jettisoned. Screams for help came across the com.

But while the enemy was attacking, concentrated firepower ripped apart Churchill’s armor both above and below. Lindsell rolled away in a desperate maneuver to save his craft. Drake hit Churchill again with his belly guns, and Calypso landed two more missiles. Lindsell fled, crippled and chased from the battlefield while the injured corvette and two destroyers tried to guard his retreat.

Instead of giving pursuit, Drake directed fire against the other ships of Lindsell’s task force, now in disarray. He’d cornered a destroyer and was hammering it into submission when Dreadnought appeared.

Malthorne’s battleship dwarfed every other ship on the battlefield. With more armaments than an orbital fortress and nearly as invulnerable, she scattered rebel ships ahead of her. They came to take shelter behind Blackbeard. Not that Blackbeard could provide much protection. Drake braced his forces.

Vargus had been pursuing in the mercenary fleet and now attacked. Outlaw led the charge, followed by several smaller schooners and frigates. The heavily armed but poorly maneuverable Pussycat swung wide and directed fire at Dreadnought’s bridge from a different angle.

Drake had hoped to force Dreadnought to confront this threat. But the battleship continued forward, turning on a small secondary battery and a few missiles to deal with the mercenaries. Even this was more than Vargus could handle. Cannon ripped apart two schooners, mauled a frigate, and knocked a hole in Pussycat’s formidable armor. Vargus pulled back from her run, her own ship emerging unscathed, but unable to continue the attack for lack of fire support.

The three rebel cruisers swung wide in end-to-end formation to attack Dreadnought with enfilading fire. When the battleship closed, they let loose with broadsides. Explosions flashed all along her surface. Dreadnought let loose with her own guns.

As if to show off Dreadnought’s power and even indifference to the combined might of the rebel fleet, Malthorne didn’t target any one ship, but fired cannon at a frigate, torpedoes at the three cruisers, missiles at the destroyers, and secondary batteries at everything else. Showing, as she did so, that she could fight everyone and everywhere at once.

The result was minimal damage to the three cruisers. But one of Drake’s remaining destroyers was in trouble, hit by missiles and stumbling from the battlefield straight into the remaining ships of Lindsell’s fleet. A rebel frigate took three torpedoes. Her ordnance detonated, and when consoles cleared, there was nothing left of her. Another frigate lost her engines and drifted aimlessly. A torpedo boat flew off, venting gasses, the crew preparing to eject.

While Dreadnought was knocking around various enemies, the mercenaries took advantage of the loss of attention. This time, Vargus seemed to catch the enemy off guard. Outlaw landed two blows right above the bridge. Pussycat landed another before Dreadnought chased them off a second time. Jane analyzed damage. Twenty-two percent degradation of Dreadnought’s secondary bridge shield.

“Capp, get us up there,” Drake said. “Oglethorpe, I want the rest of the fleet following. That’s our chance. Hit that shield with everything we’ve got.”

But Admiral Malthorne called in two destroyers to stand a few hundred miles off his bridge as a secondary defense. His main battery was hot and ready to fire again.

Another ship approached the battlefield. “It’s Vigilant, sir,” Smythe called.

And so it was. Rutherford’s cruiser was firing her remaining engine and pulling away from Fort Gamma’s protective guns. Followed by a destroyer and a frigate, Vigilant accelerated toward the battlefield.

“Balls of steel,” Capp murmured in an appreciative tone. “Bloody fool, though.”

Drake raised his old friend. “You have your orders, Rutherford. You are to stand down and protect those forts.”

“The devil take your orders.” Rutherford’s tone was unusually stiff. Almost afraid, if that were possible. What had gotten into the man? “You have no hope. Dreadnought will tear you apart.”

“And how is your death going to help that? You are the last defense of the planet. Do what I say. Get back there at once.”

“No, Drake. I will not.” Rutherford cut the link.

Malthorne’s battleship was taking fire from three sides now, but still calmly positioning herself. Another broadside from the enemy. Calypso took a pounding. Two of her shields suffered so much damage it was a miracle the cannon fire hadn’t blown through her entirely. One of Drake’s last two destroyers fled, hunted by missiles. She launched desperate countermeasures, but two of the missiles came through. More heavy damage.

Vargus was still fighting furiously, but her support vessel, Pussycat, was fleeing the battlefield, a long trail of smoke and debris pluming out her backside. Another schooner was lost. The two destroyers Malthorne had called in now turned their guns on the mercenary flagship itself, and Vargus was about to be overwhelmed.

Blackbeard and her fellow cruisers fired back with everything they had. They were scoring hits all along Dreadnought’s upper decks now, but nothing was getting through. The battleship seemed to be clearing her throat, readying all weapons for another, perhaps final volley.

Rutherford had almost reached Dreadnought. What possible good could he do? With one of his engines obliterated by a saboteur, he could not maneuver about the battlefield. He might get one shot. The first time Malthorne turned his weapons on Vigilant, she’d be finished.

Rutherford’s destroyer and frigate peeled away, shooting. Vigilant herself continued doggedly forward.

“She’s not going to fire, sir,” Smythe said.

“How do you mean?” Drake said.

“I mean, Vigilant isn’t exposing her guns. She’s readied two torpedo tubes, but nothing else is online.”

What could it mean? Rutherford’s shields couldn’t possibly hold, whether his weapon systems were exposed or not. If he was going to take such a terrible risk anyway, why not come in shooting everything he had?

And then suddenly, Drake’s mouth went dry. He understood.

“Damn you, Rutherford. No.”

Chapter Twenty-six

It took only twenty minutes until Tolvern’s base was on the verge of being overrun. Her meager forces were trying to hold both the front and rear entrances against an overwhelming attack, even while other enemies poured out of the forest and hacked through the razor wire. Every human and Hroom in Tolvern’s force was armed and shooting, but they were too thinly placed. The enemy seemed to come from everywhere.

An armored vehicle pushed up the road toward her guard post. Enemies used it for cover, as it blasted at the guard tower with one gun and struck the defenders of the gate with the other. Tolvern returned fire. Her machine gun was so hot it radiated heat like a pair of tongs pulled from a forge, and Brockett was going up and down the stairs with more ammo, until she thought she’d burn through every last can. But she couldn’t slow the enemy vehicle. It pushed forward relentlessly. And then it stopped without warning.

Rebel Hroom poured out of the surrounding forest. Most of them were unarmed—not even carrying spears—but about a dozen had assault rifles. Those with guns flanked the armored car and the forces pushing up the road behind it. They unloaded their weapons. She couldn’t see the effect on the enemy hiding behind the armored car, but it must have been devastating.

But nothing touched the vehicle itself. Bullets pinged off the armored car, and it swung its guns over to engage this new threat. The armed Hroom were only eight or ten yards distant, and they fell in a row, one after the other. The armed rebels tried to retreat to the cover of the forest, but none of them made it. The last one shuddered and collapsed just as he was reaching the trees.

The bulk of the Hroom—the unarmed ones—had taken advantage of the distraction to run toward the base gates. They came on in long, loping strides. The enemy turned its attention toward them.

Tolvern slapped her hand against her ear so hard that it hurt. The com link came on. “Get that gate open!”

It opened at the same moment that the enemy concentrated firepower on the unarmed, fleeing Hroom. The back rank fell, mowed down as from a scythe sweeping through grass. The rest, some twenty or thirty in all, poured through the open gates. Tolvern had doubled her strength in a single moment.

A ragged cheer went up through the base. The enemy vehicle lumbered forward to force its way through the open gates, but grenades, hand cannons, and a well-placed mine checked its progress. It fell back two hundred yards, where it sat, smoking, as the enemy reorganized.

Tolvern took advantage of the lull in the fighting. She left Carvalho and Brockett at the guard tower and raced down the stairs to greet the newcomers. One was Pez Rykan. He stared at her through a soot-stained face. He wore a bandage on his neck, and his left hand was heavily wrapped as well, with only the tips of his long fingers pointing out.

“You’ve had a rough go of it,” she said.

“That would appear to be a—how do you say it?—an understatement.”

Yes. She’d personally witnessed at least thirty Hroom slaughtered on the road in just the last few minutes; from the visible injuries to him and several others, this wasn’t their first fight.

“How many of your force are left in the woods?” Tolvern asked.

“Perhaps a hundred. But others are gathering in the lowlands. Our numbers will soon be rebuilt.”

“Why did you send them to the lowlands? We need them here.”

“Those are new recruits. The rest are either dead or in front of you now.”

Tolvern looked around. There might be fifty Hroom in the base. A hundred more still in the woods, apparently fighting it out with the enemy the best they could. That meant that Pez Rykan had lost more than two-thirds of his entire army in the course of a few days.

“We have plenty of arms,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow. “There is that.”

Indeed, Hroom had already raided the armory and were handing out rifles, hand cannons, and other arms. Some of Pez Rykan’s newcomers turned the weapons over like they’d picked up a venomous lizard from the jungle. That would be a problem; there was no time to train them.

Others, however, had clearly handled firearms before, and these she sent to reinforce positions around the base. None too soon. The enemy renewed its assault moments later.

“Get Rutherford on the screen,” Drake told Oglethorpe. To Capp, he said, “Bring us in.”

“Dreadnought is preparing her main battery,” Smythe said. “If we go in—”

“Do it!”

Even as he spoke, Dreadnought’s main battery let loose a fiery blast. Blackbeard fired desperate countermeasures and performed evasive maneuvers, but it wasn’t enough. Shot slammed into them. The ship shuddered, anti-grav failed, and they went flying. Drake closed his eyes, waiting for the final explosion.

Then the systems came back on. He fell hard to the floor.

By the time he and the others were climbing shakily to their feet, Jane was already on the com giving him the grim news: “aft shield, twenty-seven percent, starboard shield thirty-four percent . . . ”

She continued on, but the damage report became a drone. No need for specifics; Blackbeard had been savagely mauled. Engineering scrambled to put out fires, the gunnery reported cannon off their carriages and torpedoes being dumped into space to keep from detonating in their tubes.

Calypso and Richmond rushed in to aid Blackbeard’s retreat.

Meanwhile, Vigilant kept plowing ahead, coming straight at Dreadnought. The battleship had paid it no attention, fired not a single shot at the cruiser, though the two ships were now within range. Rutherford wouldn’t respond to Drake’s demands that he open a link. Only moments now, and it would be too late.

“He’s bloody gone over, hasn’t he?” Capp said. She sounded angry, hurt, and full of despair. “That bastard turned on us.”

She was so wrong that Drake didn’t have a rebuttal. Vargus sent a desperate message to try to get Drake’s attention, but he didn’t have time for her, either. He tried to reach his old friend one last time.

“Rutherford, for the love of God and Albion. Answer me. You don’t have to do this. Nigel!”

Dreadnought had been readying another devastating attack. This time, Calypso and Richmond were within range too, as well as the rest of the fleet. Captain Lindsell’s surviving forces formed a tight knot and made a move on the mercenary fleet.

But suddenly, the enemy seemed to recognize the threat. Vigilant was aimed right at Dreadnought, but hadn’t fired a shot. Rutherford’s auxiliary craft moved into position, but didn’t fire, either.

Too late, Dreadnought swung around to show its main battery. The cannon fired before they were all in position. Vigilant took a hard blow. Explosions rippled along her surface, bits of armor and entire bulkheads blowing off. Plasma drained out the engine like blood from a severed artery. She came at the battleship on sheer momentum.

Vigilant fired a pair of torpedoes at the last moment. There was no time for Dreadnought to deploy countermeasures, and they smashed into the battleship one after another. The cruiser, burning and venting gasses, plowed in after it. Directly into the tyrillum armor damaged by the torpedoes.

For a moment there was nothing, only the crippled and much smaller Vigilant crushing itself against the seemingly immovable battleship. Then a flash of light that blanked out the viewscreen. Radiation washed over Blackbeard, bringing down instruments.

They were only down a moment. When they came back on, Drake saw for himself the devastating result of Rutherford’s final charge.

Vigilant was no more. No sign of her, not even so much as a gutted section of the hull. In her place was a gaping hole in the side of the battleship. A hundred feet wide, it cut through armor, bomb proofs, and bulkheads to reach deep into the ship’s guts and expose them to the void. Explosions rippled along the surface, blasting new holes all along the battleship’s upper decks.

Dreadnought turned, wounded, but not yet dead. She tried to fire torpedoes to guard her escape, but they detonated on launch, causing further injury. Drake ordered his remaining forces to attack.

The remaining cruisers abandoned all caution. They pursued the wounded monster, firing away. Calypso and Richmond tried to disable the engines, while Blackbeard targeted the massive hole left by Rutherford’s sacrifice. Vargus and her surviving support craft raked the remains of Lindsell’s task force to keep them from coming to Dreadnought’s aid.

The battleship lost one engine, then another. The final two engines couldn’t build enough speed, and a single torpedo boat swooped in and knocked them out.

Again and again, Drake hammered the battleship, until it was a gutted wreck. Long after Lindsell’s forces had fled the battlefield entirely, the rebel ships pursued Dreadnought, pounding away. Still, it wouldn’t break apart. At last, drifting and helpless, someone on the helm cried desperately for terms. It was Vice Admiral Thomas Lord Malthorne himself. Or, as he’d styled himself since the destruction of York Town, King Thomas the Second.

The battle was over, Malthorne said. The rebels had won. What terms would James Drake offer?

Drake replied with his terms: unconditional surrender.

Tolvern was almost disappointed when the enemy offered to surrender. With the arrival of Pez Rykan’s forces, she’d gained the upper hand. It hadn’t been apparent until the afternoon the following day, when they’d repelled three separate attempts to break through. But the third attack, had faltered so quickly that she began to plan a breakout. Next time the enemy came, she planned to spring an ambush before they could retreat.

Then a man named Captain Betts approached under a flag of truce. He delivered stunning news. The battle in space had ended a few hours earlier. Captain Drake had apparently won, and Malthorne was taken captive. Betts, an employee of the admiral, wanted an end to the fighting on the surface, but he needed generous terms.

“How generous?” Tolvern asked warily.

Betts wanted to surrender to humans, not Hroom. He demanded a guarantee that any security forces on Hot Barsa would be allowed to surrender as combatants, that they would be free from reprisals, and that they would be safely repatriated to Albion.

And if not?

If not, Betts promised, they would fight on as long as possible. They might still be defeated, but they wouldn’t fall into the hands of vengeful Hroom.

Tolvern took this offer to Pez Rykan with her recommendation. He agreed. The hope of slavery collapsing across Hot Barsa was too much to deny, even if it meant forgiving bitter enemies. The terms were acceptable.

She’d won a stunning victory. Jess Tolvern had somehow overthrown the slaveocracy of Hot Barsa with an away team of four, several crates of sugar antidote, and hundreds of former sugar slaves willing to die for the cause.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Four weeks after the battle, Drake stood in the hallway outside the prison block with his arms crossed. Tolvern, looking smart in her new captain’s uniform, stood on one side, with Nyb Pim and the Hroom emissary on the other. Carvalho and Capp opened the door to the detention cell. Drake had warned them not to rough up or mishandle the admiral as they brought him out, but there was plenty of rude language. Drake let it pass without comment.

A month in detention hadn’t altered the admiral’s arrogance. He moved stiffly into the hallway, sized up those waiting for him with a barely disguised sneer, then looked at Drake.

“What are these Hroom doing in my presence?” Malthorne spoke as if he were referring to something foul to be scraped from the heel of one’s boot. He glanced at the emissary. “This one is an eater.”

“I wouldn’t presume to tell General Mose Dryz who to send to negotiate,” Drake said.

“Negotiate? So you will capitulate to the ones who are responsible for the atomic annihilation of York Town?”

Drake smiled. “You mean yourself? I should think not.”

Malthorne sputtered at this, and for a moment, the long weeks of isolation seemed ready to send him into an outburst. He regained control with visible effort.

“Where is my advocate?” Malthorne said.

“You have no need of an advocate at this point.”

“Then there is to be no trial? What is it you want, Drake?”

“You have already been tried and found guilty of treason.”

“Outrageous. An illegality of the highest order.”

“Under subsection 14.8 of the Navy Code, we assembled a tribunal. Evidence was presented. You had an advocate appointed for you, and she determined it unnecessary to call you as witness. She was apparently worried you would harm her case.”

“Who the devil is this advocate? One of your confounded pirates, no doubt.”

“You were charged with levying war against the realm,” Drake continued calmly, “hindering the lawful succession, and effecting the death of our lord and king. These are charges of treason. You were found guilty on all counts.”

“What do you want, Drake? What are you asking of me? To agree to place you on the throne? Is that what you are after? To seize my lands and wealth?”

These questions were so ridiculous that they didn’t merit an answer. Blackbeard and the fleet had only come into orbit around Albion two days earlier. Drake’s only thought was to secure the peace as soon as possible.

They were no longer a rebel fleet, but neither had their victory been unanimous. Captain Lindsell was still loose in space with his wounded cruiser and a flotilla of support vessels. While the fighting at Hot Barsa had raged, General Fitzgibbons had landed fifteen thousand marines on Saxony and seized control of the continent of Suffolk. He refused to surrender, although he hinted that he might retire from the battlefield with the right offer.

No offer would be forthcoming. Fitzgibbons was a traitor and the servant of a tyrant. And if Drake had any worries his refusal was fueled by the vicious attack on his family estate and how Fitzgibbons had murdered his sister Helena, they were put at ease by the reaction of others in the fleet. Catherine Caites proposed launching an atomic bombardment of Fitzgibbons and his forces.

No atomic bombing. There would be time to deal with Fitzgibbons later.

Albion itself was in turmoil. Several influential dukes and earls had come over to Drake’s side and pledged allegiance to the Duke of West Mercia, who had finally accepted the crown. But there were at least three other claimants to the throne, all of them on the home planet. No fighting yet, but Drake wasn’t about to bring Malthorne to the surface and give someone an excuse to kidnap him as part of some plot or other.

And so, he set up in orbit during the trial. General Mose Dryz’s emissary came, demanding that Malthorne be charged for war crimes before the Hroom Empire would consider any deal to jointly fight Apex. That was something Drake could not agree to. But he could make other promises.

“Well?” the admiral demanded.

“Your insulting questions deserve no answer,” Drake said. “But you are wrong. I want nothing but justice and peace for Albion. The Duke of West Mercia will be the new king. Your slaves shall be freed, and—”

“Madness.”

“—and your former plantations opened to free settlers where appropriate. I am the son of a baron and an officer in His Majesty’s Royal Navy. I ask for no other honor.”

“So what will it be? Imprisonment in whatever passes for York Tower these days? Is that to be my fate?”

“I wouldn’t need these witnesses for that,” Drake said. “And certainly not the Hroom emissary, who remains wary of deception.” His mouth formed a grim line. “Vice Admiral Thomas Lord Malthorne, you have been sentenced to death.”

Malthorne’s composure vanished. The blood drained from his face, and Capp and Carvalho grabbed his arms to keep him from collapsing.

Drake said, “That sentence shall be carried out at once.”

Tolvern had returned to her old spot in the commander’s chair. She relished the smooth contours, made especially for her body. Oglethorpe had always seemed ill at ease sitting there. Nevertheless, he’d made way for her with obvious reluctance.

The fortress formerly known as William passed below the ship, its lights glittering. It had been renamed Fort Rutherford, in honor of the sacrifice of one of the navy’s bravest officers and gentlemen. A hero, really. His death, and the death of his valiant crew, had brought about Drake’s final victory against the traitor and usurper. Dreadnought, a crippled hull, sat tethered to the fort. One couldn’t see them from this distance, but hundreds of mechanics, engineers, and boatswains were laboring around the clock to repair the massive damage to the battleship.

Drake was eager to return Dreadnought to service in their fight against Apex, but Tolvern wondered if the repairs could be completed in time. The predatory aliens had been ravaging through the border worlds and would soon enter Albion-controlled space.

Drake stood next to Tolvern, staring at the viewscreen with his hands clasped behind his back. Tolvern wondered if he was thinking of his old friend, or if he was worrying about new threats. He was back in the Royal Navy uniform, but Drake hadn’t gone pirate and back without effect. She could see it every time she looked at him. Drake was more easy in his interactions with his crew and had not replaced Capp, Carvalho and the rest with navy types. He even carried himself with more ease, as if he were more comfortable in his own skin, or least no longer needed to worry what others thought of him.

“You aren’t going to witness it?” Tolvern asked.

“I have no reason to do so. Only the Hroom emissary needs to be present.”

Maybe so, but there were plenty of others down there watching, including the rest of the officers from the bridge. Tolvern had wanted to go herself, but she didn’t want to leave Drake alone.

“Your final victory,” she prodded. “Doesn’t some small part of you want to see Malthorne’s expression when they push him into the airlock?”

“Gloating over a man’s death has never been my style, Tolvern.”

“You’re a better person than I am,” she said. “That bastard is responsible for so much misery. He deserves worse. He deserves to be drawn and quartered.”

“He may deserve it, but I take no pleasure in his execution.”

She found that hard to believe. More likely, it was something Drake aspired to. To be neutral, impassive. Just and never vengeful. But could he manage? She knew he was still angry about the senseless murder of his sister, about the death of Nigel Rutherford. Drake swore to bring Fitzgibbons to the same sort of justice that Malthorne was now facing. Why wouldn’t he be happy when the lord admiral died?

“Or perhaps it is too much of a distraction,” Drake said. “One that I cannot afford.”

“Sir?”

“We face a new threat. One that appears at first glance to be unbeatable. I won’t obsess about Malthorne while Apex is at our throat.” He turned to look at her for the first time since they’d begun speaking. “You should know something. I’ve given HMS Philistine to Jeremiah Weber.”

“I see.”

The demotion hurt. She’d taken her destroyer into battle once and seen it badly damaged. But surely her victory on Hot Barsa would have counted against that defeat. But perhaps Drake would allow her to take up her old position. She could serve with him on the deck of Blackbeard.

“I have not yet prepared your official orders, as the Admiralty must first confirm my choice, but I am willing to share off the record, if you’d like. Your new command, that is.”

“Then I’m to be captain again?”

“Again?” He smiled. “You were never demoted, Tolvern. This is an upgrade.”

“Huh? A cruiser, sir?”

Now he laughed. “In a manner of speaking.”

She stared, recognition dawning in her eyes. “Wait, do you mean—?”

“I am to receive my own promotion. And as vice admiral, it will be expected that I take Dreadnought as my flagship.” Drake raised an eyebrow. “That leaves my old ship in need of new command. Captain Tolvern of Starship Blackbeard. How does that sound? Oh, excuse me. That would be HMS Blackbeard now. We are no longer pirates.”

Captain Tolvern of HMS Blackbeard!

It almost took her breath away. If not for the pain of leaving Drake’s side, the news would have surpassed her wildest dreams. Jess Tolvern, a commoner and the daughter of a steward, was to be the captain of the most powerful cruiser in the Royal Navy.

But Drake was not done surprising her yet.

“I understand you had a . . . let us say, dalliance while on Hot Barsa.”

Tolvern’s face flushed. “Who told you that?”

“Who do you think? Capp, of course. Carvalho fessed up to her, and Capp is not the best at keeping secrets. It eventually got back to me.”

“I am sorry, sir. It was a moment of weakness.”

Not that she regretted it. A woman was entitled to a bit of adventure, a bit of pleasure when she was about to face death. Could even Drake deny it?

“Was she, um, upset?” Tolvern asked.

“Not at all. Capp was proud, I should say, that her man managed to crack such a tough nut as you. And one who, as I understand it, has been pining for another man. Me, apparently. Imagine my surprise to hear it.”

Tolvern blinked, speechless. She was aghast that Drake had heard about her silly schoolgirl crush. Capp! Good thing the subpilot wasn’t here, or Tolvern would wring her neck. Good heavens, how long until she could get out of here?

“You look horrified, Jess,” he said. His use of her Christian name was not lost on her. “Would it ease your fears if I were to tell you that I am seriously considering the idea?”

She found her tongue. “You . . . what? The idea of what?”

“I had my own dalliance, so to speak. Perhaps you have heard about it. If not, it wouldn’t take much guessing to arrive at an answer. Catarina Vargus, to be frank. The experience put certain thoughts in my mind. Now, Catarina is long gone, building a fleet for a secret and distant mission. But there are other options.”

“Please be clear.” Tolvern licked her lips. Her heart was hammering. “What are you suggesting?”

“We are at war. Now is not the time for grand gestures. But it has occurred to me that our rules on fraternization may be overly harsh. If the cream of Albion is to serve king and country, there should be a way for those people to do so without destroying their hopes for personal happiness. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes, sir. I mean, James. Yes, of course.”

He opened his mouth to say something else, but at that moment, the viewscreen switched to an internal camera on Blackbeard. It showed Malthorne, alone in an airlock, knee deep in garbage. They’d shoved him into a disposal unit, and nobody had bothered to clear it out in advance.

Good. Let Malthorne go out like the rubbish that he was.

“Jane, give us info on the disposal system,” she said.

“Disposal unit three at twenty-two percent of capacity by volume, eighteen percent by weight.” Jane’s tone was calm, clinical. “Rubbish venting in twenty-two seconds.”

Tolvern couldn’t resist. “Jane, initiate countdown. Broadcast it over the general channel.”

Drake raised an eyebrow but didn’t countermand her order.

“Eighteen seconds,” Jane said. “Seventeen. Sixteen.”

As soon as she started to speak, Malthorne turned about in the disposal unit, looking at the camera, waving his arms and saying something that couldn’t be heard. Jane was broadcasting right into the disposal unit. At ten seconds, his gestures became frantic. At five, he pounded on the airlock door, face red and eyes bulging as he screamed in silence.

Jane continued. “Four . . . three . . . two . . . one.”

The airlock opened. Malthorne and the rest of the rubbish whooshed into space. In a moment, it was gone.

Drake changed the viewscreen. Another orbital fortress rolled past, framed by the beautiful green and blue sphere of Albion beneath. In a wonderful coincidence, the Zealand Islands stretched into the ocean below them, with their home island of Auckland just visible through the clouds.

They had come full circle, Tolvern realized. The mutiny had begun in this very spot not so many months ago. Drake, unjustly sentenced for a crime he had not committed, and Tolvern making a desperate play to free him.

Now, the true villain had been sentenced and executed for the crimes that had killed millions of humans and Hroom alike. Drake had taken his rightful place as the admiral of the fleet. Tolvern would be captain at the helm of the ship where it had all begun.

She glanced at Drake, who stood tall and proud and handsome by her side. It wasn’t everything her heart desired. But it was a bloody good start.

-end-

Thank you for reading Rebellion of Stars. Read on for an afterword about the series. Meanwhile, if you enjoyed the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon.

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Afterword

Thank you for reading the Starship Blackbeard Series. Is this the end?

Yes and no. I don’t like those series that go on forever and ever, and I’m guessing you don’t either. Ten, twelve books. When are we going to find out if the bad guy is killed?

Well, this villain is dead. Admiral Malthorne, that S.O.B., got tossed into space with the rubbish. The sugar slaveocracy is in collapse, Albion is on its way to being reunified, and there may finally be peace between the humans of the sector and the ancient, but battered Hroom Empire. The story that began with Jess Tolvern’s ill-advised mutiny has come to an end.

However . . .

The sector is still in chaos. Apex is mowing down Hroom and human alike, seemingly unstoppable. General Fitzgibbons still needs to be crushed, and what about Catarina Vargus?

I don’t know about you, but I want to know. What drives a person to this one, singular goal: assemble a colonizing fleet for a one-way mission through a decaying jump point?

And what’s on the other side? The Omega Cluster is a huge unknown to both human and Hroom alike. I have a few ideas, but even I can’t say for sure until I start writing.

So watch my author page for the next book in the Starship Blackbeard universe. I’m going to launch it as a new trilogy, as this is a major story in its own right. Meanwhile, I hope you’ll take a look at some of my other offerings.

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

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven