Starship Blackbeard

by Michael Wallace

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The Starship Blackbeard Series

Book #1 – Starship Blackbeard

Book #2 – Lords of Space 

Book #3 – Dreadnought (coming in 2015)

copyright 2014 by Michael Wallace

Cover Art by Lorenz Hideyoshi Ruwwe

Chapter One

The warning light flashed yellow on the airlock door, and James Drake braced himself to be ejected into space. His pod contained several other court-martialed marines and space sailors, also strapped into their seats, also headed for the helium-3 mines of the system’s outer worlds. He didn’t know how long the others were in for, and he didn’t care. Didn’t even know if they were innocent or not. It was only the injustice of his own sentence that burned him, the disgrace to his good name.

Two years. You can survive that.

He guessed that his two years of hard labor was one of the lighter sentences. The last perk of being an officer. Only two years—long enough to get him out of the way as the navy mopped up untidy details in the aftermath of the war. But if the Admiralty thought he’d return docile, begging to be readmitted, they were mistaken. The instant he finished his sentence, he would return to Albion to fight the injustice that had sent him away. Fight to regain his commission. Find out whoever had framed him for the destruction of the merchant ship.

Through the transparent partition, he could see the second pod, also preparing for ejection. Not human in there, but long-limbed, pink-skinned Hroom. Their fate was more grim still. Instead of being fired toward the mining ship, they’d be launched toward the slaver now in orbit around Albion, to be shipped to the sugar worlds and worked to death. Terrible criminals, supposedly. Most likely poor, dumb civilians caught on the wrong side of the war.

A cool, clinical woman’s voice came into the pod. A computer. The crew of Ajax called her Jane. He supposed it was the last time he’d hear her voice.

“Twenty seconds to launch. Prepare for rapid acceleration.”

The yellow light flashed faster now.

The man next to Drake whispered the Lord’s Prayer in Old Earth English. A chaplain, he’d tried to lead them all in prayer minutes earlier, but one of the marines had cursed him and his god. This time all were bracing themselves for a pop, a hiss, and a giant fist to slam them into their seats as they hurtled outward.

“Ten seconds,” Jane said.

Drake looked out at the beautiful blue-and-green sphere of Albion one last time. The island continent of Canada stretched below, verdant and beautiful, with the Zealand Islands curving from the west coast into the ocean like a string of jewels. He looked for his home island of Auckland, but it was covered with clouds. He’d spent his childhood dreaming of the day he’d turn sixteen and join the Royal Navy and get off that boring rock. Now, he wanted nothing more than to sit in the sleepiest pub in the sleepiest farm village with his feet warming in front of a peat fire.

This latest mission aboard HMS Ajax had lasted seventeen months. Almost a year and a half in deep space, spending blood and treasure for the kingdom, and he’d only made it home for three days. Then arrest, court-martial, and sentencing. One nightmare after another, until here he was, strapped down in this pod. The injustice of it felt like a hand tearing at his heart. Worst of all, he didn’t know where to direct his rage. Who had betrayed him?

“Five seconds.”

Drake shut his eyes and counted silently. Five, four, three, two, one . . . zero?

Jane’s voice came through again. “Recalculating. Eight seconds . . . recalculating. Ten seconds.”

The ship shuddered. A malfunction, he thought. A defective transport pod.

He opened his eyes. The slave pod was gone. It had launched, disappeared into the black void. But Drake and the other criminals were still strapped into their chairs.

“Pod eleven launched,” Jane’s voice whispered in her soothing, computerized voice.

“Aren’t we pod eleven?” someone asked.

“Life support readings normal,” Jane continued. “Pod eleven docking with transport ship in thirty-seven seconds.”

“You dumb tit,” one of the men said, to nervous laughter.

“Hey, Cap’n,” someone else said. “Ain’t this your ship? What’s wrong with her?”

“Maybe it’s no mistake,” said a young marine with the Albion lions tattooed on her right forearm. “My commander coulda issued a pardon.”

Someone snorted at this, a loud, braying laugh like a donkey.

“Could be,” she insisted. “I punched him in the nose when he cheated at cards. Gave me thirty bloody months for that!”

“Nobody cares,” someone else growled. “So shut yer gob.”

Someone else took exception to this, and soon the prisoners were arguing.

“Keep quiet,” Drake said, annoyed by the chatter. He knew his ship and was listening for familiar sounds, like a man with a cranky furnace who knows what is wrong by its groans and hisses.

“Nobody asked you,” one of the men said, the one who’d started the arguing in the first place. He was a burly man, older, with a saber scar across one cheek. “Anyhow, you ain’t captain of this ship no more, so stop acting like it.”

Like the others, Drake was dressed in a pair of brown overalls with a red prisoner’s circle over the chest, but the others had recognized him at once. Apparently they kept up on the news in the planetside jails.

“Cap’n better watch his back,” another man said, this one dark skinned and with a wolfish smile. He was the one who had been defending the woman with the lion tattoos. “In the mines, we’re all equals, eh? No man got any rank. Plenty of tools lying around. Accidents happen. Know what I’m saying?”

There was a hint of nervousness in the laughter that followed. Drake wasn’t worried about the implied threat. Some people were bullies and cowards. Others craved leadership.

He imagined how it would go. They would test him, he would fight back and win. An officer in the Royal Navy—even disgraced—was a man of breeding, culture, and education. Much of that education was in how to dominate those of a lower station. The natural order would not change simply because he had entered a prison camp.

The ship shuddered. A familiar rumble vibrated through the hull. That was Ajax’s plasma engines firing up. She rolled slowly away from the planet. What the devil? Did they really not know the capsule had failed to launch? And why were they moving, anyway?

Four other ships came into view. Two were light corvettes, the third a cruiser like Ajax, long and lean and hungry looking. The fourth was the lord admiral’s flagship, HMS Dreadnought, looking like a wounded monster of the deep, her sides scarred with deep gashes from where the enemy had raked her with kinetic fire. Dreadnought dwarfed the orbital fortress at her rear, where she would be in repairs for weeks.

Some of Drake’s fellow prisoners began to laugh. They seemed to be thinking the same thing, that there had been a malfunction and nobody realized they’d failed to launch. They’d now go off . . . well, wherever Ajax was headed. Problem was, she wasn’t supposed to go anywhere, which Drake knew, but the others didn’t. These weren’t his men and women, but a random collection of discipline problems.

The lord admiral had put Captain Rutherford in command of Ajax while he chose a new captain, but Drake guessed that his first mate, Commander Jess Tolvern, was the actual officer at the helm. Tolvern was a capable officer, but she didn’t have enough experience to earn her bars yet. In any event, she was tainted now. They were all tainted. Tolvern had tried to testify at the court-martial, had argued angrily that the charges were false. Drake’s pilot was caught falsifying permissions to hack the Royal Navy defensive grid to get records of the battle. He’d probably lost rank as a result of that little stunt.

Tolvern may not have lost rank, but defying the admiral would no doubt hold back her career for years to come. She’d been her typical self in court, sarcastic and abrasive in the face of injustice. Navy barristers had called her to the stand, hoping that she would pin blame for the disaster on her commanding officer’s shoulders, but had shortly declared her a hostile witness.

As a result, the admiral didn’t even trust her on an interim basis; he’d put Captain Rutherford in charge of Ajax. Drake’s old ship would continue in orbit until the board approved a new commanding officer. So where was Tolvern going?

Ajax wasn’t the only ship in motion. Dreadnought remained in place, but the other three ships began to turn in their direction. After a moment of what looked like hesitation, Ajax’s sister ship Vigilant didn’t follow, but presented a broadside. The cruiser’s outer shields retracted, hiding the lions of Albion and showing the black, snub noses of cannon.

“King’s balls,” the woman with the lion tattoos cursed.

The other prisoners fell silent, staring out the window. The plasma engines were still warming up and hadn’t reached critical. A double thump vibrated through the hull, this at a lower frequency. That was the warp point engine coming online. It took several hours from ignition switch to jump, but it burned so much energy just to contain the reaction that it was only turned on when it would be used.

More cursing greeted this.

“We’re bloody trying to jump?” someone cried.

“I don’t believe it, we are. We’re going to run.”

“Captain? What’s going on?”

Of course, now they all looked to Drake for leadership, now that their stones were on the anvil. He didn’t answer. But he knew. He suspected the other prisoners did too.

Tolvern, you fool.

His first officer was leading a mutiny.

Chapter Two

Drake wasn’t surprised when the airlock opened and Jess Tolvern appeared. She wore a tight red combat jumpsuit without insignia that showed her lean, muscular body. Her hair was in a bob, the current military fashion for women, and she wore pistols in holsters on each hip. Her green eyes flashed with the confidence that always looked just shy of arrogant.

Tolvern was only twenty-six, seven years younger than Drake. He’d given her a brevet during the Battle of Kif Lagoon, when his former first mate had been killed in a broadside from a Hroom sloop of war. A shell had punctured the bridge, and the man had been sucked screaming into the vacuum of space.

Promoting Tolvern had caused some controversy, and Rutherford had privately asked Drake if he wasn’t promoting her in part because of a connection to her family back in Auckland. There was nothing inherently wrong with loyalty to an old family from his father’s estate, Rutherford assured him, so long as she was qualified. Drake assured his friend that Tolvern had proven herself. Sure, she had a good deal to learn and was a commoner, but she possessed a remarkable ability to keep cool under fire. So he had ignored Rutherford and any other doubters. Now he wasn’t so sure.

“Get the prisoners out of here,” she said over her shoulder to others who were crowding in from the hallway. “We need room for—”

“No!” Drake cut in. “This stops, now.”

Tolvern looked back at him. “Sorry, Captain, but no. We’ll argue later, if you like. For now, do what I say.”

 She came over, holding an electronic key, its chain wrapped around her fist. She swiped it over his harness, and it clicked unlocked.

Drake didn’t get up. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“King’s balls, do you have to be so difficult?”

He hooked a thumb at the viewscreen showing their surroundings. The three navy ships had their cannon exposed now, and even Dreadnought had turned a pair of deck and belly guns at them, although he knew these would not be loaded with live ordnance. Ajax was pulling slowly away from the opposing ships, but the other vessels, minus Dreadnought, were beginning to give chase.

“You will get us all killed,” he said. “And my ship blown to pieces.”

“Hardly. We caught them by surprise. They’ll need time to get those guns up. And they know it, too.” She grinned. “You should hear the threats coming over the com link.”

Tolvern grabbed for him, as if to help him up, but he pulled back. Some of the other prisoners were hollering for her to unlock them, too. Others begged her to surrender and leave them be. They wanted no part of this.

“Get up, Captain,” she said. “For God’s sake!”

Drake was still staring at the viewscreen and saw the flash of light. It didn’t come from any of the ships, but the orbital fortress servicing Dreadnought. 

“There she goes,” he said, not surprised in the slightest. “Brace yourselves.”

Ajax rocked. An explosion boomed through the ship, coming from what sounded like the aft shields. It knocked him out of his seat before anti-grav could stabilize them. When he got up, Tolvern was shouting, pushing her way back up the hallway.

Men poured into the pod from the corridor, dragging prisoners, who had their hands cuffed. Dwight Barker, Drake’s chief gunner, was among the mutineers.

“You!” Drake said. “I thought you would know better than this.”

“Don’t just sit there, gaping,” Barker said.

“I’m not gaping, I’m wondering when this farce will end.”

“Get him out of there,” Tolvern called from the corridor.

Barker grabbed him, and this time he didn’t resist. His best bet was to get to the bridge and take command. Once he did, he could order his crew to stand down so he could surrender as bloodlessly as possible. Do that quickly enough, and he might be able to plead mercy for his crew. Even an aborted mutiny would bring down the wrath of the Admiralty. Best case was that Tolvern’s little stunt would earn her her own multi-year stint in the mines. Probably Barker and the others, as well. Better than a hanging, he supposed, but completely avoidable.

He pushed through the handcuffed prisoners in the hall. One of them was Captain Rutherford, wearing his bathrobe, of all things, his hair wet, as if he’d been dragged from the shower. The man looked livid as Tolvern pushed him along.

Rutherford and Drake had fought side by side several times in the war. They’d scattered a larger enemy force, won a victory that was sure to earn them both a hero’s parade down the streets of York Town, from Kingdom Tower to the royal palace. That was before the frame-up.

“Mutiny?” Rutherford said, glaring as they pushed him past Drake in the narrow hall. “Are you an idiot?”

“I swear I know nothing about this,” Drake said. “But I’ll put an end to it. Mark my words.”

“You had better. Malthorne will blow us all to kingdom come.”

“Not you,” Tolvern said. “You’re going home.”

Rutherford wheeled on her, looked like he would have struck her if his hands hadn’t been cuffed behind his back. “Curse you, Tolvern. If this is your doing, I’ll see you hanged.”

He started to spit something else, but they shoved him and the other prisoners into the pod. It was going to be crowded in there, unless Tolvern had been stupid enough to order the existing prisoners released.

Lights were flashing in the hall, together with the siren calling all hands. Didn’t seem to be many hands available. Another shot rocked the ship, closer this time. The smell of burning plastic filled the air, and a red light flashed at an entrance to their right, indicating their airlocks had sealed off part of the ship in that direction.

Barker caught up with them in the hall, and Drake turned to him. “If you’re here, then who is at the guns?”

“Nobody. We’re short-handed, as you can figure.”

“Short-handed and short of brains.”

A wry smile from the gunner. “You might say so, yes.”

Barker was an older man, thick about the middle and with a walrus mustache. Almost sixty years old, and though his skills were not what they had been ten or even five years earlier, he’d once been one of the best gunners in the fleet, and had a long way to slip before he was merely average. And clever, too. Could have been chief engineer, if he’d been more ambitious or of higher birth.

Barker’s involvement in this scheme was surprising. Not only had age made him sensible, but he seemed to look down on Tolvern as young and callow and female—the older man had joined the navy when women were wives, daughters, maybe even whores in distant ports, but never space sailors, and certainly never officers. So why was he following her into this madness?

When they reached the end of the hall, they ran into another group of several prisoners being driven by two men with guns and stun batons. Most of the prisoners were unfamiliar, probably part of Rutherford’s crew, but two were engineers Drake had known for years. They should be putting out fires and sealing damaged airlocks, not being jettisoned with the rest of the prisoners. The men driving them, on the other hand, were the head cook and his assistant.

“We won’t be able to repair hull breaches,” Drake said, “but we can still bake a mean shepherd’s pie. Let’s get this surrender over with.”

He said this last bit as they came onto the bridge. Tolvern moved to the viewscreen, which was split between zoomed views of the battleship Dreadnought and the cruiser Vigilant and the two corvettes beginning to give chase. The corvettes were quicker out of the blocks than the cruiser, and their engines fired up more quickly. By now, they must be hauling away from Albion at perhaps twenty miles a second and accelerating rapidly.

“Get to the gunnery decks,” Tolvern told Barker. “Scrape together whoever you can find.”

“But hold your fire,” Drake called after him. “Await my orders.”

“Does this mean you’re taking command?” Tolvern asked when the gunner had hurried off. She sounded eager.

Drake grunted. “Of a mutiny? Only long enough to end it.”

Another blow rocked the ship. So far, they’d taken several shots from the fortress’s cannons, and another that felt like it had come from one of Dreadnought’s pea shooters, but hadn’t responded in turn. Good. Drake hoped to bring this to an end before anyone died on either side.

“Pod eleven launched,” said the same computer voice that had been so wrong a few minutes earlier. This time, Jane was right. Drake watched as the pod arced away from the ship and disappeared.

“Did you reprogram its trajectory?” he asked.

Tolvern winced, which gave him his answer.

“Only now we’re out of position,” he said. “So instead of making their way for the mine ship, Rutherford and the rest of your victims are jammed in a tin can, hurtling toward nothing. Wonder how long it will take to haul him back in. And how angry he’ll be when they do.”

“Rutherford is your friend. He’ll forgive you.”

“Not after this, he won’t.”

“He’ll understand,” she insisted. “I gave him the chance to join our jailbreak. Thought for a minute he’d accept.”

Drake gave her a hard look. “He was no more likely to join a mutiny than I was.”

“Stop using that word. That’s not what this is about. It’s about getting you out of here so we can prove your innocence.”

Drake looked back to the screen to see lights flashing from the side of the opposing cruiser. They were out of range of Vigilant’s cannons, but that didn’t keep her from launching missiles. The missiles sped past the two corvettes, who still gave pursuit, and accelerated toward Ajax.

“Well,” Tolvern said, sounding a little discomfited, less self-assured for the first time since she’d burst into the away pod. “That was faster than expected.”

“Aft force shields!” Drake said, more out of habit.

“Already done,” she said. “I knew they wouldn’t get their cannons up in time—well, except for the little guns from the fortress—but we took those blows. All we have to do is get to point-one light and we’ll be at jump speed.”

The nearest jump point to Albion—one of only four in the entire system—was close, but tight. That meant with their mass, they needed to be cruising northward of 18,000 miles per second, close to Ajax’s top speed. That would take time.

Nobody was sitting in front of the defense grid computer, which was charting in big purple splotches the kinetic weapons still blasting out of the fortress and the big battleship. Nobody sat in the pilot’s chair, either. Manx worked a computer in one corner, speaking into a headset to the engine room. He was a boatswain, and normally, he’d be down below. The only other person on the bridge was Tech Officer Smythe, a young man with the square jaw, intense expression, and broad shoulders of a fighter pilot. In reality, he was a computer geek, one of those guys who could run diagnostics on the engines on one half of the screen while he played a video game on the other. Now, his fingers were flying over the keyboard and across the screen as he tried to keep the hull pressurized.

“We’re not jumping,” Drake said.

“But why not?” Tolvern asked. “Admiral Malthorne is worked up by the jailbreak. He needs a chance to think clearly before he does something dumb. We’ll get you out of here and wait for the fleet to settle down. Then, when we can prove what really happened . . . ”

“Shut up, Tolvern. I need to think.”

First step was to keep them from dying. He glanced at the defense grid computer, which showed the first missile impacting in one minute and fifty-two seconds. The second would hit a second or two later. Two more missiles—these showing red—had just fired from the cruiser. They accelerated slowly, appearing at first like they’d be left behind. That meant they were bigger, probably something two-staged, with a fissile sting. If the first missiles weakened the shields, the second pair would certainly finish them off.

“Drake,” Tolvern said in a worried voice. “What do we do?”

“What are our numbers? How many joined your little scheme?”

“Seventeen.”

He gave her a hard look. “That’s not even a skeleton crew.”

“You can do it. I know you can. Just tell me what to do.”

“Get on the defense grid. We’ll absorb the first two missiles, and pray Barker launches countermeasures before we take the next two.”

“Then what?” she asked.

“Drop shields and come to a full stop. Tell them we’re surrendering and hope the admiral is in a forgiving mood.”

“For the love of . . . you can’t do that!” She had started to sit down at the defense grid, but now sprang to her feet. “After everything we’ve done for you?”

“You’ve done nothing for me, blast you. Now do what you’re told!”

The only hope was to survive the missile attack and then stand by helplessly and hope that Admiral Malthorne called off the dogs. The dogs, in this case, were the two corvettes, which were already gaining on them. Under better circumstances, he could outgun them, but not with the cruiser wallowing outside of Albion, still hammering with missiles. And the orbital fortress would be scrambling short-range fighters.

The grid showed twenty seconds to impact. He braced himself in the captain’s chair. Tolvern touched her com link and fiddled with the computer as she spoke to whoever was at the gunner decks. Hopefully, Barker.

She raised her voice. “You don’t stop them and we’re all dead!”

“Brace for impact,” Jane said. “Class two detonation expected.”

She spoke in the same calm, soothing voice that had promised him he was about to be jettisoned toward the mining ship. Now she was warning him that he was about to have a missile stab through the shields, and bury itself in the hull before detonating.

Manx flared the plasma engines at the last second, hoping to burn up the missiles, but whoever was on the other end had prepared for this, and the two missiles came swooping in at angles. The first missile thrust up into Ajax’s belly, while the second dove from above. There was a double shock, like a pair of staccato drum beats, followed by two huge, thumping explosions. The chair held him in place or he’d have been thrown to the floor.

“Status?” he said. His voice was tight.

Tolvern let out her breath. “Damage to C-deck. Engine two emergency shutdown protocol.”

“Inner hull breach?”

“No.”

“Thank God,” he said.

“Warning,” the computer said. Did her voice sound strained this time, or was that his imagination? “Class three detonation expected.”

Class three. Bloody hell.

“Barker!” Tolvern shouted into the headphones.

Lights flashed on the defense grid—chaff coming out the back end of Ajax. Drake’s thumb manipulated the controls on his chair to show the region of space behind the now sputtering second plasma engine.

They were still accelerating with only one engine, now up to 473 miles per second, with the anti-grav’s disruption field the only thing keeping them from being smashed into jelly against the back wall of the bridge from all the acceleration. But of course they needed to be closer to 18,000 miles per second to reach point-one light and jump out of the system.

“Reverse thrust,” Drake ordered. “Bring us to a halt. Drop shields.”

“But, Captain . . .” Tolvern protested.

“Do it.”

Tolvern fiddled with her computer and gave commands to Manx.

Manx spoke up from the other side of the bridge. “Um, we can’t, sir. Engine two is damaged and bleeding heat. If we slow down, we’ll melt the back half of the ship.”

“Dump the core.”

“Negative, sir. Coupling damaged. She’s good if we keep accelerating. Otherwise, we’re goners.”

Drake clenched his jaw. “Bring us to the minimum speed needed to equalize temperatures. Tolvern hail the fleet, tell them the situation.”

But either communications were knocked out, or the fleet wasn’t responding. Malthorne would be frothing at the mouth by now. It beggared the imagination that the admiral would be trying to destroy one of the most powerful cruisers in the fleet, a ship that cost a hundred thousand pounds and was the pride of the Belfast spaceyards. But the screen showed the second round of missiles closing and the two corvettes almost within range for their kinetic weapons. Maybe they’d stop when the shields were obliterated, and the engines gone, or maybe they’d finish Ajax off with lasers.

“Tolvern, what were you thinking?”

“What kind of question is that? You were framed for the death of those marines, and I’d be damned if I’d see you shipped to the mines. It was you who taught me loyalty.”

“To the crown. Not to me.” He touched his com link. “Barker?”

“Here, sir,” his gunner’s voice rasped in his ear piece.

A glance at the defense grid. Four and a half minutes until missiles three and four hit. It was like watching death in slow motion.

“Do you have a crew?”

“Jacobs is here, and two of those prisoners you freed. Woman with the Albion lion tattoos seems to know what she’s doing.”

“Can you stop those missiles?”

“Aye. Got a plan for that. Not so sure about the corvettes, though. Not running for our lives like this.”

“I want the forward gun ready. Forward missiles, too.”

“The forward gun?” Barker sounded confused.

“And make sure everyone is seated and you’ve got disruptor fields and anti-grav in order or you’ll all be smeared against the floor.”

Tolvern wasn’t stupid; her sharp look told him she understood. “You’re turning around?”

“Yes, we are going back, but not to surrender. Not now, anyway.”

“But what about Dreadnought? Vigilant is back there, too, firing missiles. And Fort William.”

“No time to argue. I need someone at the helm. Computer isn’t going to do it.”

Tolvern took a seat in the empty pilot’s chair, looking like a child with its high back. It had been built for Nyb Pim, a Hroom who was over seven feet tall, his limbs even longer than that height would suggest. She had to stretch to reach the controls.

Drake sat down. Invisible hands held him in place. He passed general orders through the ship similar to those he’d given his gunner. Then he ordered them brought around.

The ship turned, but if not for the spinning view on the screens, he wouldn’t have felt a thing. Tolvern pulled them around as fast as she could without tearing apart the mechanical systems, and soon they were shooting back toward Albion, now upside down relative to the corvettes bearing down on them.

They still weren’t going more than a thousand miles a second, a speed so slow it felt like treading water compared to the point-one light that they needed to gain before the jump. But they’d more than doubled their effective speed relative to the enemies coming at them. The corvettes flashed past in the opposite direction, no more than a few miles off port. They struggled to turn. The missiles were more maneuverable than the cruisers and banked in a hurry. Barker launched more chaff and two radiation pulses. The screens went white. When they regained focus, there was no sign of the missiles. The corvettes were now fifty or sixty thousand miles distant.

A ragged cheer went up from the other three people on the bridge. No time to relax. They were closing on Albion several times faster than they’d departed. And accelerating. Drake didn’t attempt to come in at an angle, knowing that the entire network of orbital fortresses would be on high alert already, but instead ordered Tolvern to bear down on Vigilant and Dreadnought, as if prepared to ram them.

The corvettes were once again gaining at their rear. Dreadnought had slipped its tether and was preparing its main guns. Vigilant maneuvered into an angle to rake Ajax with enfilading fire. Fort William had its own cannons.

“Sweet mercy,” Tolvern said. “We’ll be torn apart.”

Drake ignored her. Into the headset, he said. “Don’t fire until we’re past the cruiser, then give her all guns.”

“Not Dreadnought, sir?” Barker asked.

“No. Vigilant is our only threat.”

He’d better be right. The battleship, the fort, and the pursuing corvettes were all poorly positioned. They could not shoot at Drake’s ship without shooting at each other. Blowing up Ajax to abort a mutiny was a brutal step, but to finish the job, Dreadnought would risk the pursuing corvettes, too. And the corvettes hadn’t yet realized it, or they’d be veering away instead of pursuing. It was Vigilant who posed the threat, since she alone could shoot at Ajax from an angle.

Ajax streaked by her sister ship, and both launched broadsides at the same moment, cannons blazing with shot made of cobalt rods to penetrate the shields and explosive shot to tear into any resulting holes. Had Captain Rutherford been on his ship, he would have stayed still, letting his gunners and targeting computers have the best possible shot. But Rutherford was hurtling through space in a passenger pod with no engines, and whoever had taken his place on the bridge was considerably more cautious. He rolled away from Drake’s shots, and expelled as much ordnance trying to bring down enemy fire as to attack Drake’s ship herself.

Ajax slipped by nearly unscathed. In a flash they were past Fort William and skipping across Albion’s uppermost atmosphere. Even the near vacuum a hundred miles above the planet was enough to slam into them at these speeds, and the ship shuddered like a lorry hitting a pothole before it skipped off into outer space again. Two more orbital fortresses opened fire as they blazed past, but nothing hit. They were racing into the void once more.

Word came from the engine room that they had repaired the coupling on the second plasma engine. If the captain wanted, he could order it jettisoned and bring the ship to a halt. Then stand by and wait to be boarded.

Tolvern stared at him. “Well?”

“Malthorne will be screaming for blood,” Drake said. “Vigilant’s shields were poorly positioned. We hit her pretty hard when we went by. She’ll be a week in the yards. We might have even killed someone.”

He glanced at the screen. The speed was 3,400 miles per second and climbing. The corvettes had come around the planet, but they were falling behind now. Even with Drake’s ship wounded, the corvettes would never catch him in time. Only Vigilant could do that. But there was no sign of her. Again, he was lucky that Rutherford was out of commission.

“So you’re not surrendering?” Tolvern pressed.

“Not yet. No.” He turned it over. “The lord admiral won’t let this go. The helium mines will be too good for us. We’ll all hang. Every last one of us, down to the cook.”

“So we jump out of here?”

“We jump,” he agreed reluctantly. “Where can you take us?”

“I’ve got the first jump preprogrammed. After that, I’m helpless. We’ll need a pilot.”

“Make your calculations. Where are we going, Gryphon Shoals?”

“Where else?”

Drake nodded. Of the jumps directly from the home system, that was the only one that wouldn’t get them killed. It was also a place he had never dreamed of visiting. Not unless he was leading a small fleet ready to clean it up. Never as a fugitive.

He studied their speed as they accelerated. Soon they were at ten thousand miles a second, then eleven. Closing in on eighteen thousand miles per second, almost one-tenth the speed of light. Lights began flashing at seventeen thousand. Jane’s soothing voice warned that a jump was imminent.

In principle, the physics were not much different from the temporary wormholes that could shoot a small object a few billion miles here and there throughout an individual star system. In practice, the disorientation was more severe the further you jumped. And it varied from person to person, with some weak-minded new recruits losing their minds the first time they went through.

“Prepare to jump,” Jane said.

Ajax entered the wormhole. He suddenly felt stretched, his brain seemingly outside his body. For a few seconds he swore he was floating down a passageway with the anti-grav turned off. His body remained safely in the captain’s chair, while his consciousness floated past the crew mess, the quarters, the entertainment deck, and into the engine rooms, where he could see the plasma engines, still radiating heat though they’d been snuffed upon entry into the wormhole.

When he regained his senses, they were eleven light years away, outside a small, cold red sun, in the system known as the Gryphon Shoals. He was a fugitive and wanted man.

Chapter Three

Drake waited in the war room. The lights were dimmed, since Ajax was drifting through space with all but essential systems dark. If Admiral Malthorne had sent ships through to look for them, Drake didn’t intend to make it easy. But even the dim light seemed bright over the post-jump headache that was currently splitting his temples.

Tech Officer Smythe entered first, blinking and shaking his head like a dog coming out of the water. He sat opposite the captain at the big oak table and immediately pulled out a handheld computer, whose blue glow reflected off his face. Turning on the computer seemed to be a reflex, as Smythe stared at the screen with a glazed expression.

“You look stunned, Smythe. Hope you don’t have the trips.”

The tech officer looked up slowly. “Huh, what?”

“The trips. Like you hit your head.” Drake had meant it as a jest, but the longer it took Smythe to respond, the more he worried that it wasn’t a simple jump concussion, but that the man really had come out of the wormhole with his brains scrambled.

“No, sir. A little sluggish, is all.”

Jess Tolvern came in next. She had a steaming hot towel twisted and wrapped around her neck. She looked at Drake with a gray, sickly expression. Some people came out stunned, others kept their wits but lost the contents of their stomachs. The first mate was a puker. She’d changed out of her red combat uniform to a gray service jumper.

After emerging from his own stupor, Drake had gone back to his quarters. Only when he’d staggered up to his door and put his palm against the reader did he realize they’d probably changed the lock and cleared out all of his possessions. But no, his prints opened the door, and he looked about, surprised to see everything where he’d left it.

It had all happened so fast. The marines arresting him in his quarters, the false accusations, the rapid trial and sentencing, while his crew scrambled to find evidence to exonerate him. His room was neat and tidy, every one of his possessions where he’d left it. He’d stripped out of the brown overalls with the red prisoner circle, shoved them down the incinerator chute, and put on his standard service uniform with captain’s bars.

“Where’s Barker?” Tolvern asked.

Even as she spoke, the door opened with a hiss and Craig Barker came into the war room. His eyes were red and watery, and he squinted at the lights.

Drake looked at the three of them, then cast his eyes at the empty chairs around the conference table. No pilot, no second mate, no staff officers.

“Did anyone have a plan?” he asked.

“We had one,” Tolvern said. “And it worked, didn’t it? Here we are. Nobody was killed. We figured you could take it from here.”

“That was your plan? To limp into shark-infested waters bleeding from every orifice and hope none of the sharks were paying attention? Wouldn’t surprise me if half the scavengers and salvage operations in the system were winging their way here this moment.”

“I don’t think they are,” Smythe offered meekly. “The computer says . . . ”

“Screw what the computer says. Pirates don’t survive out here by telegraphing every move.”

There were only four possible jumps from Albion, which was one of the reasons why the home planet was so defensible. The Hroom frontier systems had been accessible from at least a dozen different systems each. During the war, Albion and her allies had sent in fleets from three locations. Twice—the battles of Ypis III and Kif Lagoon—Drake himself had led Albion forces in glorious victories.

As for Albion’s jump points, one took you so close to a neutron star that you and all your equipment would be fried before you got away from it. Two of the remaining jumps came into well-fortified systems that were Albion protectorates.

The fourth was the Gryphon Shoals, a barren system with no habitable planet. There was a small watch station on the third planet to send a warning back to the home system, but the rest of it was the domain of pirates and smugglers. They hid among the vast number of asteroids and rocky moons, taking advantage of both the system’s proximity to the wealthy Albion home system and its launching point to all manner of Ladino, New Dutch, and Hroom planets.

“By now they’ve found Rutherford and hauled him in,” Drake said. “Malthorne will have Vigilant and a dozen other ships jumping into the system to hunt us down.”

Tolvern shrugged, as if affecting nonchalance, though she wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Like finding a needle in a—”

“They’re going to burn down your bloody haystack until they find us,” Drake interrupted. “We’re wounded, and we’ve got seventeen people in our crew. The Punisher-class calls for a minimum crew of fifty-two. A full deck of cards. And there’s not a single royal marine on board.”

“We have twenty-four crew members, actually.”

“You told me seventeen.”

“We did. Now we have twenty-four. Seventeen in the . . . jailbreak.” She only just stopped herself from saying mutiny. Drake could tell from the hesitation. “Plus six prisoners we liberated from the away pod. And you, of course.”

Drake took a deep breath. He could feel his blood pressure rising until his pulse pounded at his temples. “You impressed the criminals? What are we, a pirate ship? May as well run up the Jolly Roger and be done with it.”

Barker started to say something, but Drake waved him off. “Here’s what I’m going to do. We’re going to put the criminals in the brig, then I’m going to hail the scavenger settlements in the asteroid belt. Soon as someone answers I’m stuffing the lot of you into the remaining pods and launching you out. Make your way as fugitives if you can. I’ll send a subspace to the fleet and wait for them to take me in.”

“You can’t do that,” Tolvern said. “Captain, listen to me. What they did to you was an injustice. A travesty. People die in the mines. Or they do something wrong, and next thing you know they’re off to the sugar worlds, and that’s the end. You know it’s true!”

“None of that matters. I didn’t turn against the fleet before, and I won’t do it now. Besides,” he added, “I had a plan. Rutherford knew I was innocent. He was going to get me out.”

“Rutherford is an opportunist,” Barker said from the end of the table. “Now that you’re gone, the door is open. He’ll be the second officer of the fleet before long, mark my words.”

“And you,” Drake said, turning on the gunner. “I’m shocked. I can see how Tolvern roped in the rest of these fools, but you? What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that loyalty is the number one lesson you taught us.”

“Loyalty to the crown!”

“I’ve been in the navy since ’98,” Barker said. “Thirty-two years. Three kings and one queen. I’ve had seven different commanding officers. Not one of them gave two spits whether I lived or died. You did. That’s where my loyalty lies.”

Seeing the look of fierce determination on the gunner’s face gave Drake pause. Barker’s defiance was mirrored by Tolvern’s jutting chin, and even Smythe had put down his computer to give a curt nod of agreement.

“And so you went along with a mutiny because you didn’t want me to face two years in the mines?” Drake asked, still speaking to Barker. “You’ve got a wife, two sons—and now, a granddaughter. You might never see them again. To save me from hard labor?”

“Aye.”

Drake didn’t know whether to be touched by the man’s loyalty or give him a good shake.

“Not just you,” Barker said. “Also, Nyb Pim.”

Drake leaned back in his chair. “Yes, what of him?”

Tolvern had already said that something had happened to the Hroom pilot; Drake assumed it had something to do with how Nyb Pim had tried to hack into the naval computers to prove his captain’s innocence. After that stunt, Drake imagined the pilot had been reassigned to a military transport vessel or some other lowly position. You didn’t throw an experienced, highly skilled pilot from the service for what amounted to an indiscretion. There weren’t three people in the navy, human or Hroom, who could match Nyb Pim’s navigational skills.

“He’s on a galley filled with Hroom,” Tolvern said. “They’re on their way to Hot Barsa.”

Hot Barsa. One of the sugar worlds. A former planet of the Hroom Empire, it was now given over to the production and export of cane sugar. The heat and humidity were such that humans could only survive if they moved from one air-conditioned space to another, which meant that the labor force was almost entirely Hroom slaves. Producing the very poison that had brought their ancient civilization to its knees.

“As a pilot?” Drake asked.

“As one of the slaves,” Tolvern said.

Drake was horrified. “But he’s not . . . he’d never touch the stuff.”

“We don’t know how or why,” she said. “They threw him in the brig for a few days. By the time he came out, he was an eater. He attacked two military police, put one of them in the hospital. Lost his freedom for that.”

Drake tried to picture his calm, analytical pilot shoving sugar into his mouth and failed. Addiction came on quickly, but it had only been two weeks since he’d last seen Nyb Pim. And already he was an eater?

“You know,” Smythe said, fingers moving over the screen of his handheld computer. “You can get to the Barsa system from Gryphon Shoals in five or six jumps.”

“The galley only left two days ago,” Barker said. “We can get ahead of it.”

“Not without a pilot,” Drake said. “It might take two days to get out of here if we use the computer. Then we’re just as likely to end up back at Albion. So unless you want to go sniffing around the system to see if there are any unemployed, desperate pilots idling about, looking for a suicide mission . . . ”

“We already have a pilot of sorts,” Tolvern said. She seemed to be regaining some of her confidence, and the captain had the impression she was still holding onto information. “There’s another person on board with a nav chip implanted in her head.”

“Who is this person?” Drake scoffed. “I’ve never met her.”

“One of your fellow prisoners. Name is Henny Capp.” Tolvern tapped her right forearm. “One with the lion tattoos.”

“The marine? A nav chip is an illegal augmentation. How did it go undetected?”

“It’s been disabled since she enlisted,” Tolvern said. “Smythe says he can reactivate it.”

“Easy enough,” Smythe said with a nod.

“What’s this Capp woman doing with a nav chip anyway?” Drake waved a hand. “Never mind that. You knew, that’s the point. You planned on using her all along, didn’t you?”

“Once we learned she could pilot, yes,” Tolvern said. “That was the missing piece of the puzzle.”

“By puzzle you mean mutiny and treason.”

“If there’s treason, it’s not our doing,” Tolvern said. “Captain, think about it. It was a Hroom ship we shot up. Forget what the tribunal claimed, you know. We hauled in wreckage and saw bodies, alien tech. Hroom Empire stuff. We all saw it with our own eyes. It was not an Albion trader, and there sure as hell weren’t royal marines on board.”

“You’ll notice that Malthorne yanked away the rest of the fleet and let us finish the job,” Barker said. “That way, there were no witnesses.”

“Rutherford, too,” Tolvern said. “Vanished at the most convenient time.”

“He’s not in on this,” Drake said, his faith in his old friend unshaken. “I swear it. Anyway, the lord admiral had just cause. You’ve seen how the flagship was mauled in the fight. Malthorne only won the battle because Rutherford’s fleet showed up at the last minute. I don’t know why we were accused of destroying the trader, but I don’t question the admiral’s military decisions.”

“The battle was won,” Tolvern said, “the enemy forces scattered, and everyone was hailed as a hero but you. You found the enemy fleet, knocked out a carrier, and wiped out the ship carrying the doomsday device. But no, they say that you attacked the wrong ship, killed a bunch of our people instead.”

“I’ll be exonerated. I’m not worried about this.”

“Sir,” she continued, “listen to me. We didn’t wake up cranky and decide to mutiny. You don’t know everything that happened after you were sentenced. At first, I thought they’d let us stay together, but Nyb Pim was sent into slavery, and then Assistant Pilot Jones got himself run over by a lorry while he was on shore leave. After that, the fleet said screw it, and scattered the rest of us. Or we would have been scattered, anyway. Practically every member of your crew got sent elsewhere.”

“Even the company of marines,” Barker added.

“That’s right,” she said. “Spread all over the colonies. Smythe, show him.”

The tech officer tapped his screen twice before sliding his computer across the table. It showed a list of marines, sailors, officers, even down to Ajax’s cabin boy, together with their future assignments. No two people would be serving together.

“Wouldn’t surprise me if they meant to rechristen Ajax,” Tolvern said. “It would have been like we’d never existed as a crew.”

Drake was still staring at Smythe’s screen and the note across from the assistant pilot’s name: Hit and killed by a lorry while on leave in York Town. Coroner said he’d been drinking. 

He tapped the screen and showed it to Tolvern. “You don’t believe this, do you?”

She glanced at it and met his gaze. “You tell me. Jones liked his grog, no question. But suspicious that he’d die now. The pilot is in slavery, the assistant pilot dead. Bloody suspicious.”

Yes, that’s what Drake was thinking. He’d been stripped of his commission and sentenced based on false testimony. It wasn’t the careless attack on the merchant ship that had done it, but that he’d supposedly tried to cover up his crimes by falsifying logs, even hauling in alien wreckage to make it look like he’d done what he’d claimed. He’d even managed to fool his crew, according to the court-martial.

All of it false. Until now, he’d assumed that someone else had accidentally attacked the friendly vessel, and in the chaos of battle, blame had fallen erroneously on his shoulders. That would have been very different than a conspiracy.

But now he was not sure. The frame-up looked intentional. To what point, he could scarcely fathom. Merely to hide someone else’s blunder? How would that necessitate getting rid of his pilots and scattering both Ajax’s crew and the marines posted to her?

“Henny Capp, you say?” he asked. “And she says she can pilot a Punisher-class warship?”

“Who knows?” Tolvern said. “We didn’t exactly chat about mutiny beforehand.”

Mutiny. There it was. Good for Commander Tolvern for owning her actions.

Smythe held out a hand for his computer. He tapped a few times. “Says Capp navigated a merchant frigate. Was fired after a couple of bad jumps. Tried to join the navy as a pilot, was turned down, so she let them disable her nav chip and joined the marines instead.”

Drake grunted. “And you knew all this before?”

“More or less,” Tolvern said. “We didn’t have much choice. Anyway, all we need is to get Nyb Pim back, and we won’t need her.”

Drake recalled what the prisoner had told him when they were failing to launch in the pod. “Capp said she’d punched an officer. Is that what she was in for?”

“The officer was her lover,” she said. “Tried to end things, and she got violent. He lost a rank for his role in the matter. She took a sentence in the mines.”

“Lovely. Speaking of rank, what is she?”

“Corporal.”

So, not an officer, and from her coarse accent, low-class riffraff, as his father, the baron, would have said. She had no business in the pilot’s chair. Drake had seen enough of a man’s—or woman’s—natural abilities to know that class, character, and rank didn’t always match. A commoner could be just as honorable, hard-working, and intelligent as someone of better breeding. But this Capp woman seemed to have none of those qualities. Except what was his choice? Muck around the star system looking for smugglers and pirates to see if he could find someone better?

For that matter, should he even go after Nyb Pim? What if he were seeing what he wanted to see? If this whole business was a mistake, he should surrender, turn over the ship to the navy, and return to suffer the judgment of king and country.

“There’s a conspiracy,” Tolvern said. “We need to get to the heart of it.”

“Aye,” Barker said. “That’s my inclination, too.”

“Inclination or desire?” Drake said.

“Trust your instincts,” Tolvern urged. “They never led us astray before, and they won’t now. What do they tell you to do?”

“Okay,” he said at last. “Bring Corporal Capp to the bridge. First we find out if she’s capable. Then we see if she’s willing.”

The other three leaned forward in their chairs. “And if she is?” Tolvern asked.

Drake sighed. “Then we find our pilot and rescue him from slavery.”

Chapter Four

Captain Nigel Rutherford came through the airlocks of Dreadnought and walked stiffly down the hallway toward the lift. His neck was so sore that he could barely turn it from side to side. He was already late to see the admiral but couldn’t bring himself to hurry. Probably better if he got hold of his emotions first. He was in a foul mood and not feeling favorably inclined toward Malthorne, or anyone else, for that matter.

He’d spent seventeen hours in his bathrobe, trapped in a jettisoned away pod with eighteen other sweaty, grumbling victims of the Ajax mutiny. After the first few hours, Rutherford had despaired of ever being rescued. Commander Tolvern had simply flung them into space without a preprogrammed trajectory, and the search area had expanded geometrically as they raced away. Just a blip in the cosmos, impossible to locate; when Rutherford was a fighter pilot, one of his mates had been lost in space after being forced to eject from his ship, his distress beacon broken. A wretched way to go.

But no, someone had noted their trajectory and, when the fleet could be bothered, finally sent someone to fetch them. About bloody time. Five more minutes and he’d have throttled every last person in the pod with his bare hands.

He caught the lift, turned his whole body to push the button to take him to the officer deck, then waited for the door to shut. A young ensign came running down the hall just as the doors began to ease shut.

“Hold the door, sir!” he gasped.

Rutherford held out a hand to the young man. “No. Take the next one.”

With his other hand he mashed the Door Closed button. He went up alone. He was in such a foul mood that he felt a twinge of malicious satisfaction to see the young man’s look of dismay. He, too, was late for an important meeting, it would seem. Let the boy get a flogging, for all Rutherford cared.

“Wonderful. I’ve turned into Captain-bloody-Bligh.”

He could finally see Bligh’s point of view in the Old Earth story about the mutiny on the Bounty. Sometimes what was needed for discipline was a good old-fashioned whipping.

People in the kingdom, and especially in the fleet, tended to romanticize the stories of the British Empire, America, and all of that other English history from before the Great Migration, but not that one. If Albion ever needed to invent an indigenous religion, Captain Bligh would make a prime candidate for the role of the devil. Maybe Napoleon or Hitler would also serve, but they seemed a little too much like real historical figures.

Then who would be the Albion god of his new religion? Admiral Horatio Nelson? Queen Victoria?

“George Washington,” he said with a chuckle as the doors opened.

The thought of a god with a powdered wig amused him enough that he was feeling more cheerful, albeit still in need of a hot shower and a massage rather than this unwanted meeting, by the time he rang at the admiral’s quarters.

Malthorne’s staff officer welcomed him in. The lord admiral was lounging in a chair near the viewscreen, only the back of his head visible. An outstretched hand held a snifter of whiskey. Through the viewscreen came a milky-white swath of stars spread like a glittering, snowy arch through the sky. But the ship was moving, and the cool blue-and-green sphere of Albion rolled into view.

“Captain Rutherford to see you, my lord,” the staff officer announced before backing out.

“Lord Admiral,” Rutherford said, and waited.

“What do you say about your traitor friend now?” Malthorne asked without turning to face him.

Rutherford’s improved mood soured. He made his way over to the admiral without answering. It was night over the Eastern Hemisphere, the twin continents of Britain and Australia visible, separated by the Irish Sea, which was more of an ocean than sea, nearly a thousand miles wide and littered with islands. Australia was fat and wide and southern like her Old Earth namesake. Britain was long and thin, stretching from the equator almost to the north pole. The glittering metropolis of York Town sat on Britain’s eastern coast, a single glowing light with a spiderweb of cities radiating north, south, and west. York was by far the biggest city on the planet, with nearly five million people in the greater metropolis.

“They say the population of Albion will reach a half billion this year,” Malthorne said, as if he’d been thinking the same thing. “Five thousand settlers to five hundred million in a little over six hundred years. Another fifty million living on Saxony and Mercia. We have been amazingly prolific. And yet . . .”

“My lord?” Rutherford said, confused.

“The Hroom Empire once numbered in the tens of billions. The aliens still outnumber humans twenty, thirty to one.”

“And it is said that there are more sheep than people in the Zealand Islands,” Rutherford countered. “That doesn’t mean the shepherds are in danger of being overthrown by their flocks. The Hroom are a broken, tired people. Destined to be a servant class. We are young and energetic.”

“Perhaps, perhaps.” Malthorne turned in his chair and gestured for Rutherford to take a seat.

Vice Admiral Thomas Lord Malthorne, Duke of the Boston Plantations, had been born to one of the richest families in Britain, if not all of Albion. In addition to his estates on Albion, he also had extensive holdings on Mercia and the sugar worlds. He was King Bartholomew’s cousin, and his wife was the queen’s half-sister. With his sharp, penetrating gaze, high, balding forehead, and eagle-like nose, Malthorne looked more regal than the king himself. Whenever Rutherford found himself alone with the admiral, he was aware of the difference in their stations, both by birth and rank.

Like his old schoolmate James Drake, Rutherford had grown up in the Zealand Islands off the coast of Canada. His father was a minor baron, and he had gone to school with merchants’ sons and daughters, had attended church with the families living on his father’s estates. It wasn’t until the Naval Academy that he fully appreciated Albion’s class divides. It wasn’t only the traditional classifications—peasants, laborers, priests, merchants, and nobility—but within the nobility itself, there were further divisions.

Rutherford hadn’t seen the admiral’s staff officer reenter the room, but now the man brought over a silver tray with two tumblers of whiskey. Malthorne replaced his empty glass with a new one, and Rutherford took the other. The whiskey was smooth, with hints of oak and peat.

“From your homeland,” Malthorne says. “The best whiskey available, unless you somehow find yourself in possession of Old Earth scotch. Which, I regret to say, hasn’t passed my lips for many a year.”

The liquor warmed Rutherford’s belly and eased the stiffness in his neck. It also loosened his tongue, and against his better judgment he found himself wanting to discuss Drake and the missing Ajax.

“He’s no traitor, my lord. He’ll return.”

“He’s had more than enough time already,” Malthorne said. “It has been twenty hours since they jumped out of the system.”

“Maybe he thinks we’ll kill him. Harbrake made a good attempt at it during the mutiny. Would have done it, too, if he’d been more alert. He let Ajax slip right past Vigilant and escape.”

“I am well aware of Captain Harbrake’s limitations.” Malthorne smiled, but it was an unpleasant, toothy grin, lacking humor. “Perhaps if you had been alert yourself, you could have stopped this. Instead, you let a conspiracy pass undetected right beneath your nose.”

“An error that I regret, my lord,” Rutherford said, forcing humility into his voice.

“You were taken in the shower. By a woman, a commoner. Good God, man. Why didn’t you fight back?”

Rutherford didn’t answer.

“And before that,” Malthorne pressed. “You could have showed leadership at any point. Crushed the rebellion before this commander, this commoner, had inflamed the more excitable members of your crew.”

“Yes, my lord.”

It wasn’t Rutherford’s crew, of course. The conspiracy must have been afoot long before he took temporary command of Ajax, only a single day before Commander Tolvern broke into his room and burst in on him while he was in the shower. She held a pistol, and gave him three choices: join the mutiny, surrender as a prisoner, or die if he resisted. Rutherford was armed with a bar of soap. What could he have done?

Malthorne sighed and looked out the window. The planet had rotated beneath them, and they were now looking at daylight rising over the New Atlantic, the vast, island-less ocean between Albion’s eastern and western hemispheres.

“You were not the best captain in my fleet, Rutherford.”

“No?”

“Only number three, you understand.”

What kind of nonsense was that? How many dozen men had command of a ship in the Royal Navy? And he was the third best in the entire fleet? There was no shame in that.

“But your betters, McCreery and Drake, are no more. McCreery has a proper excuse. He gave his life in service to his king and country. Drake is another matter. He made a blunder and has compounded that blunder with one treachery after another. Better he had died. That leaves you, Rutherford. You’re the best now, God help us. You’ll need to bring him in.”

“Not Harbrake?” Rutherford said, innocently.

“No, not Harbrake, the fool. Caught with his trousers down by Drake’s little maneuver. No, you’re the best man for the job, especially if given proper resources. The question is, are you sufficiently loyal to do what needs to be done? Or will you face your old friend in combat and let him slip away because of some misguided sense of camaraderie?”

“My loyalty,” Rutherford said, “is to my king. No bond of friendship would break that.”

“I would have expected the same words from Drake’s mouth. And yet, here we are. Ajax missing and Drake a traitor. He might be fifty light years away by now. Or he might be hiding on the dark side of the moon, waiting to launch a treacherous attack. How will you find him?”

“He jumped to the Gryphon Shoals.”

“I know that, you fool.”

“What I mean is that he’s probably still there, because he doesn’t have a pilot. Harbrake has sent ships to search for him. He intends to bombard pirate redoubts and take prisoners, but I doubt the dreck of the system will have anything useful to say, if they’ve seen Drake in the first place.”

“My time is too valuable to hear a regurgitation of facts already in my possession.”

“Yes, my lord. My apologies. The system is big and scattered. Harbrake didn’t send enough forces to do the job properly. There may be other pilots. Once Drake finds one, he’s sure to jump again. I suggest you send another task force to augment Harbrake’s ships.”

Harbrake had taken as flagship his own cruiser, HMS Nimitz, a sturdy, if somewhat-outdated, Aggressor-class cruiser, together with frigates, corvettes, and a destroyer.

Malthorne finished his whiskey and waved away the staff officer when the man tried to give him another. “And if we don’t find Drake before he jumps again? What is he likely to do next? Where is he likely to go?”

“I hope he will surrender, my lord. He didn’t want the mutiny—he told me as much when I was being shoved in the capsule with the other prisoners. Once he has regained control of his ship—”

“His ship?”

“Excuse me, of Ajax. Once he has regained control, he will most likely surrender, while seeking some sort of amnesty or accommodation for his crew. He won’t want to see them hanged, regardless of their crimes.”

“And when he doesn’t surrender?”

“If he doesn’t—” Rutherford began, then stopped to think.

What was James Drake’s primary character trait? Loyalty, yes. To king, crown, and country. And also to his friends, to his crew. Rutherford owed his own position in part to Drake’s assistance over the years. They’d formed a friendship all the way back in the Academy, when the two middle sons of minor barons made a pact to someday rise to the heights of the Admiralty. Drake had risen first and fastest but had always reached back a helping hand. Of course, he never let on that he was the one pushing for his friend’s promotion, but Rutherford heard it from other sources. Drake had spoken highly of him to the lord admiral, or had praised his actions in some minor battle or skirmish. During the war, he’d given Rutherford plenty of chances to show his qualities.

Rutherford had no doubt that if he were the one unjustly accused of destroying a trade galleon from the York Company, accidentally killing royal marines in the process, and then covering his mistake, Drake would have seen to it that he was exonerated. Drake claimed he was innocent, and his friends on Ajax all believed him. So Rutherford had been working to this very end when the unfortunate mutiny occurred.

“Captain?” Malthorne said as the silence stretched beyond a few seconds.

“What happened to Drake’s pilot?” Rutherford asked.

The admiral blinked. “The Hroom fellow? What of him?”

“I’d heard he was thrown in the brig for improprieties related to the naval computer network. But he never came back to the ship. When I tried to track him down—Ajax could hardly fly without her pilot—he seemed to have disappeared.”

“Is this relevant?”

“It may be, my lord. That depends on what has become of the Hroom.”

“Someone gave him sugar while he was in the brig. By the time he came out, he was an eater. You know how they are. There was an incident. The end result is that the fellow is on a slave galley being shipped to Hot Barsa.”

“I see,” Rutherford said.

This was strange. Not so much that the pilot would find himself under sugar’s dizzying, addictive spell. The Hroom were helpless before it. When humans had met the empire two hundred years ago, it had been at the apex of a thousand-year expansion. Within a few generations, the civilization lay in shambles. Millions of Hroom were now working on the sugar worlds, bent in the very sugar cane that had sapped their race of any other desire than to get the next sweet fix.

But how was Malthorne privy to such details about the Hroom pilot, when the interim captain of Ajax had been unable to track down the simplest details? And what Rutherford didn’t tell the admiral, but had discovered, was that Captain Drake’s entire crew, down to the company of royal marines that had been on board, had been scheduled for dispersal throughout the fleet. An entire new crew would man Ajax henceforth.

Who had made such an order? There was no record. The order seemed pointless, so Rutherford countermanded it. His countermand was countermanded in turn. By whom? That was unknown. There were maybe a dozen men and women in the fleet who could have done it, and Rutherford had been in the process of discovering who when the mutiny struck.

Now, he suspected he knew the answer. The lord admiral himself had given the order. He must have caught wind that there would be a mutiny. Then why hadn’t he warned Rutherford or taken any other measures to secure the ship?

“And you think Drake will go after this Hroom?” Malthorne asked.

“Yes. Or rather, no. I think he will surrender. But if he doesn’t, that is the logical step.”

“A waste of time. His pilot is already an eater.”

“Hroom can recover from that,” Rutherford said. “Drake will think so, anyway. He will feel responsible for what happened to his pilot and attempt a rescue and a detox. Ajax has no pilot—Drake needs one, and he’d just as soon use the one he knows.”

“That will take time,” Malthorne said. “And more time still to find the galleon.”

“When did the slaver set out?”

“A few days ago. Her name is Henry Upton, and she’s as slow a vessel as anything in the York Company fleet.”

“But she still has a head start,” Rutherford said. “My guess would be that Ajax and the slaver would arrive in the Barsa system at roughly the same time.”

“And what do you propose to do?”

“I suffer no such shortage of pilots, and I have fast warships at my command. I’ll take Vigilant and a task force of frigates and torpedo boats. The Third Fleet is in the Barsa system already. I’ll warn them that Ajax is on its way. If I set out now I can arrive before either Drake or the slave galleon, set a trap, and wait.”

“And when you find him, what will you do, then?”

“Whatever you wish of me, my lord.”

“Demand Drake’s surrender. If he refuses, destroy him. We cannot risk Ajax free in the space lanes.”

“Yes, my lord.” A leaden weight settled in Rutherford’s stomach at the thought of attacking and killing his old friend. But what choice did he have?

“There is one thing. You will not take a task force. Only Vigilant. Do not announce your destination or your intentions. Set out via the Jericho system instead of a more direct route for Barsa. I’ll make sure the Third Fleet is out on maneuvers.”

“My lord?”

Malthorne rose to his feet and stepped up to the window. He gestured for Rutherford to join him, and the younger man obeyed. Dreadnought had once more circumnavigated the planet and was above Britain. Clouds had come over York Town, darkening the center of the continent.

“There are enemies in the navy,” Malthorne said, his voice low. “Men who would take advantage of Drake’s treason. Who would send him aid, if they could find him.”

“Who are these people?” Rutherford asked, shocked by the accusation. “What do they want?”

“I don’t know who they are, not yet. But they want to overthrow King Bartholomew. That is their ultimate aim. For now they hope to foment civil unrest. To that end, I want this mission to be secret. When you have taken Drake, one way or another, I want you to come to me quietly and tell me what you have done. Do not broadcast your victory to the fleet.”

“I understand, my lord.”

“The other mutineers are to be put in the brig under strict quarantine. They are not to see anyone, nor to send or receive messages of any kind. I would prefer that none be killed in the engagement—my intent is to interrogate them at length—but my primary desire is not that they be protected. They are, after all, criminals of the most vile sort. Should some, or even all of them be killed in the engagement, it would be no great loss.”

Again, Rutherford thought of the orders given to scatter Ajax’s crew among the fleet. The admiral must know something, or think he knows something, about the men and women under Drake’s command.

“Yes, my lord. You can count on me.”

Chapter Five

Drake took Tolvern with him down to the crew mess. They were midway through a forty-two-hour slog between jump points, and the enlisted men and women were drinking, playing cards, or relaxing with vid sets. The air smelled of cigar smoke and booze.

A man was telling a filthy joke about Hroom mating habits when the officers entered. Someone spotted them and cleared his throat. The joke died on the man’s lips. It was the fellow with the saber scar across his cheek who’d been rescued from the pod during the mutiny. The man who’d sneered that Drake was no longer captain. He sat down in a hurry, and the room quieted.

There were roughly a dozen people in the mess, and of them, fully half were rescued prisoners. The only one of the prisoners who wasn’t present, in fact, was the Church of Albion minister who’d been praying the Lord’s Prayer in Old Earth English.

Tolvern nodded to the corner. Henny Capp, the royal marine who’d been serving as their pilot, sat behind a mug of grog, her arm draped possessively over the shoulder of the dark-skinned prisoner who’d threatened that Drake had better watch his back in the mines. Fraternizing was a serious offense, and the man acted like he wanted to edge away from Capp, but she made no effort to move her arm. Neither did she try to conceal the full pint of grog in front of her, what looked like a double ration.

“Care for a drink, Cap’n?” she asked with a grin as Drake and Tolvern pulled up chairs. “Figure the likes of you got good wine and beer, not this piss-flavored water, but personal tastes and all that. Give the word, and Cook will pour you up.”

“The computer finished running,” Tolvern said. “According to Jane, we’re not on any known charts. You’ve taken us two jump points into deep void. That’s quite a trick.”

Capp rubbed a hand over her shaved head, as if feeling for the nav chip buried in her skull. “You gave me two weeks to get us to Barsa, and I’m getting you there in ten days. Seems I should be on the receiving end of some gratitude here. So what’s with the suspicion?”

Drake reached across the table and rolled up the woman’s sleeve to show the golden lions rampant on Capp’s forearm. “Patriotic sort to get the Albion lions tattooed on. Old tattoos, too. But you’ve only been a marine six months. Before that you were some kind of smuggler?”

Capp thrust out her chin. “Yeah, but I’m reformed. Ask your computer bloke. It’s all in the database, right?”

“We’re cut off from the database, as you bloody well know,” Tolvern snapped.

“Well excuse me if I ain’t privy to that detail.”

The commander looked ready to snarl something else, but Drake put a hand on Tolvern’s arm to calm her. She needed to learn that sometimes the best way to get information was to let the other person do the talking.

Capp’s male friend moved to extract himself. His name was Ronaldo Carvalho, and he was from one of the Ladino planets, though Drake didn’t know anything else about him. He mumbled something about reporting for duty. The mess had cleared out except for the cook, who now went around clearing glasses and wiping up spills with a bar towel. Capp scowled after Carvalho as he slipped out the doors, as if annoyed that he’d left her alone.

When she looked back at the captain and the commander, she didn’t seem quite so cocky. “What’s this all about? Am I in some kinda trouble?”

“You got the lions on your arm because you were just that patriotic,” Drake said. “It was only then that you joined the smugglers and pirates of the Gryphon Shoals. Then about six months ago, you had another change of heart and joined the royal marines.”

“I couldn’t get in before, and that’s the honest truth. I wanted to be a pilot in the navy, but I failed the tests. Said I wasn’t smart enough, but you know what I think?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Drake said.

“I think it was on account of my birth, you know. I wasn’t officer breeding nor education. Least they admit it in the merchant fleet. Wouldn’t let me pilot there, neither. But out in the shoals, they ain’t so fussy.”

“You were a pirate?” Tolvern asked in a sharp tone.

“No! I mean, I fell into . . . well, into some bad company. Smuggling and the like. You got that figured out, right? Then, I don’t know. Bug kept itching at me. Came back to Albion to try again. They still wouldn’t let me pilot, but they let me enlist in the marines. Figured I’d see some action that way.”

“Is that so?” Drake said.

Capp looked between them both. “I don’t understand. I’m doing right by you, ain’t I? We’re most the way to Barsa already, and ain’t nobody found us yet.”

Drake nodded at Tolvern. She reached for her waist, which made Capp flinch, but it wasn’t to get her side arm. Instead, she retrieved a computer from her hip pocket.

“Jane isn’t too sure about this,” she told Capp, “but she seems to think we’re going to jump about here.”

Tolvern pulled up a chart and showed it to their would-be pilot. It was the Santa María star system, with two planets under nominal control of Ladino colonists from the final wave of human immigration from Earth a couple of hundred years earlier.

“That’s right,” Capp said. “But there ain’t no other way to get to Barsa from here. Not directly, anyhow.”

“Seems like a good place to strip down a captured Albion warship,” Tolvern said. “Outside control of the crown, and maybe someone figures the king won’t start a war over a ship that had been taken in mutiny already. A lot of money in that.”

“Your friend from the jettison pod,” Drake said. “The one you were fraternizing with earlier. Carvalho, isn’t it? He’s Ladino. Wouldn’t happen to be from the Santa María system, would he?”

“I don’t know, I never asked him. Listen, I’m telling you. We gotta go through Santa María unless you want to fight the navy direct. Then we rev up the engines and come into Barsa from the outer worlds. We jump closer, and we’ll run into the Third Fleet. Frigates and cruisers and everything.”

Drake fixed her with a sharp gaze. The woman looked back without flinching, which showed steady nerves.

“You’ve done well so far,” he said. “Moved us farther and faster than I could have hoped.”

“I ain’t so good past Barsa. Afraid I’d get us lost. These inner systems I know pretty well. What are we doing there, anyway, Cap’n?”

“You let me worry about that,” he said. “Just get us safely to the Barsa system. If there are any surprises, any treachery, I have the means to crush it.”

Ajax was still wounded from her recent scrape with Vigilant, but he had no doubt this was true.

“Ajax is a Punisher-class warship,” he added. “I don’t expect any aspiring pirates would be so foolish as to attack her. But I always keep my guard up, Corporal. That is what necessitated this visit. I’m sure you understand.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

#

“I don’t trust her,” Tolvern said as she accompanied the captain back to the bridge.

“I don’t see as we have any choice in the matter.”

Drake was happy to get away from the smell and sloth of the mess. He’d seen better discipline among the prisoners in jail while awaiting his trial. And he was tired. He’d been up for twenty hours and needed sleep, but first he wanted to check progress on the hull repairs, as well as make sure that the second plasma engine was functioning as it should. They really needed a fortnight in the docks, but where would he go? To Santa María with a crew of twenty-four and no marines?

“If Capp got out a subspace message,” Tolvern said, “we might find a whole crew of pirates and the like waiting to strip us for scrap.”

“Maybe. Or maybe she’s come around. She’d be in the mines now if it weren’t for the mutiny.”

“That’s not going to change her nature, Captain. The woman is still a smuggler at heart. And she’s apparently taken up with this Ladino. What’s he about?”

They came onto the bridge. Tech Officer Smythe was the only one in the room. It was disconcerting to stare at the wide, nearly empty space. All the screens, from the nav computer to the defense grid, were scrolling displays for crew who were not present. When Smythe turned his chair to consult another display, even he disappeared from view, and for a moment Drake felt as though he were looking at the bridge of a ghost ship, hurtling through the cold black void at 11,000 miles per second.

When Drake was a young ensign aboard HMS James Cook, they’d found just such a ghost ship while on a reconnaissance mission. It was the shape of a turtle and the size of a small city, cruising along at the relatively sluggish pace of two percent the speed of light. When it was towed in, it was discovered to be some sort of generation ship, but ancient—thousands or even tens of thousands of years old. Those long, silent years had left its surface pitted and scarred.

There was no sign of passengers or crew, or even indication of what kind of race had been on board, though people had assumed humanoid. Those were the only sorts of aliens so far discovered. But for all Drake knew, it had been built by a race of super intelligent octopus. Whoever they were, there was no trace of them, no sign of who they were or why they’d left.

How many such ghost ships wandered the empty voids of space? Some of them, he knew, were human, their engines failing, their final passage uncharted.

“Do you still intend to surrender?” Tolvern asked when he’d taken the captain’s seat.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’m not keen to fit my head into the hangman’s noose.”

“This is my fault,” she said.

He turned with a raised eyebrow. “Why, yes. Yes it is. But now that I know what happened to Nyb Pim, I’m more inclined to forgive you. We could hardly see him shipped off to die in the cane fields of Hot Barsa.”

“That’s just it,” she pressed. “That’s my loyalty. You are loyal to your crew, and your crew returns those feelings.”

“That wasn’t your oath,” he reminded her.

“Damn the oath. I couldn’t let you fall for something you didn’t do. It was a bloody crime, and I had to stop it.”

“Two years. Then I meant to return and clear my name.”

“The death rate in the mines is twelve percent per year. Smythe looked it up.”

“Only the weak ones die. I am not weak.”

“No, Captain.” A funny look came over her face. “You are not.”

“To answer the question, I’m going to find out who turned my pilot into an eater before I make any decisions. Not one word of that story makes any sense.”

“You think some larger plot is afoot?”

“Don’t you?” he asked.

Jane’s voice came over the com. “Four hundred million miles to destination. Estimated nineteen hours and twenty minutes before final acceleration required.”

Drake smiled at his first mate. “Practically there already. Only four hundred million miles to go.”

#

True to form, Corporal Capp hadn’t known the jump points closer to the planet, so they entered the Barsa system in the middle of the gas giants, another half billion miles from the rocky inner worlds. Smuggler routes, of course. When they popped out, a couple of tramp frigates were rendezvousing a few hundred miles away, no doubt exchanging illicit cargo. They caught one glimpse of the big navy cruiser and fled for their lives.

Capp, sitting in Nyb Pim’s pilot’s chair, took some time picking out Hot Barsa from a vast swath of stars, planets, and other objects visible from the sector. Scans found no unusual ship traffic in the region, so when she found the planet, Drake simply pointed Ajax in its direction and fired up the engines. Soon, they were hurtling inward as fast as they could travel and still keep cloaked from subspace radar.

The Third Fleet was lurking around here somewhere, he knew. Maybe no carriers or battleships, but certainly a task force. They were close both to Ladino worlds and systems teeming with Hroom. In other words, it was an ideal intersection between a sugar world, huge sugar markets, and lawless human opportunists. A show of royal power kept the vultures away.

The next day, still tens of millions of miles out, Drake rolled out of bed to discover two welcome bits of news waiting for him. Smythe had picked up chatter on military channels indicating that the Royal Navy vessels had departed the system shortly before Ajax’s arrival. They’d gone off to investigate unusual empire fleet movements near the frontier.

Better still, scans had picked up their target. It was Henry Upton, an aging galleon named after one of the founders of the York Company, and a pioneer of the trade that carried sugar, gold, and slaves in a triangle between Albion, the Ladino worlds, and the Hroom homelands.

Henry Upton had jumped into the system between Hot Barsa and her sister planet, an ocean world with the unimaginative name of Cold Barsa, given because it was locked in an ice age. If the jump point hadn’t currently been located on the opposite side of Hot Barsa’s orbit, she’d have arrived carrying her slave cargo within a few hours.

Commander Tolvern was fidgeting madly in the war room as she briefed Drake on these developments, her words coming out faster than a cobalt cannon on automatic fire. Smythe and Capp were also in the room, their fingers flying over handheld computers, barely paying attention to the commander.

“Excellent news,” Drake said when Tolvern paused to take a breath. “Smythe, what is Henry Upton’s top speed?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes. Here we go. She’s got a single nuclear engine. Max speed five hundred miles per second.”

He thumbed at his screen, and the captain had the distinct impression he was moving back and forth between technical specifications and something personal.

“What the devil are you doing there?” Tolvern said. “Writing your memoir?”

“Multi-tasking,” he said.

Tolvern snorted. “Probably playing Romans vs. Soviets again.”

Smythe blushed, and this time Drake thought she was closer to the mark. “Anyway,” Smythe said, “I give the slaver three days until she’s in range of the plasma tugs that will tow her in to Hot Barsa.”

This was a relief. He’d half expected to arrive and find Henry Upton already in orbit, her slaves being shuttled to the surface. He didn’t have the crew or the armaments to run Hot Barsa’s fortresses and take the fight to the surface.

“Even better than that,” Smythe added, “the galleon is so slow that she’s coming in for a slingshot around Cold Barsa to shave a few hours off the trip.”

It was a common tactic for slower merchant ships. The idea was to whip around a planet, using the gravitational pull to boost its speed toward its final destination.

Drake leaned forward in his chair. “Capp, can we get there first?”

The corporal flashed a toothy, predator-like smile. “Aye. Six hours until Henry Upton shows up. We can get to Cold Barsa in three.”

“You see?” Tolvern said, her voice rising in excitement. “Talk about lucky.”

It did seem unusually fortunate. He could lurk around the backside of Cold Barsa, and the galleon wouldn’t spot them until he’d pounced. They’d have maybe five minutes of warning to send a distress signal. By the time help came, Drake would have his prize and be fleeing toward a safe jump point. And with the Third Fleet shipped off, there would only be a few patrol boats and short-range fighters to give chase, anyway.

But experience had taught him to be suspicious of luck. As even the ancients had noted, any battle plan fell apart at first contact with the enemy. The key was not to get caught with your trousers down when that happened.

Smythe looked up from his computer and pushed back his glasses. “Barker wants to know which weapon systems to bring online.”

“The biggest risk is stumbling into a trap,” he said. “What I want—”

Capp snorted. “Out here? How do you figure they’d spring a trap? Fill the galleon with explosives or something?”

“Let the captain speak,” Tolvern said, tone peevish.

“What I want,” Drake continued, “is shields up at all times. No cannon, no missiles. We’re not here to kill anyone, and we’re not here because of romantic notions about freeing slaves or any such rubbish. One and only one slave—that’s all we care about.”

“What if they start shooting?” Tolvern asked. “Henry Upton is unescorted, so I figure she’s carrying light armaments.”

“Nothing we can’t handle. She’s going slow enough we shouldn’t have trouble harpooning her. If she gets testy, we’ll knock her around a little with the chase gun.”

“We need a boarding party,” Tolvern said. “Hard to manage without marines on board.”

Capp flexed her arms. “I’m a marine. Gimme a gun and saber and I’ll go aboard.”

“Funny,” Tolvern said. “I thought you aspired to be a pilot. Okay, that’s one. I suppose I’d better make two, so I can keep an eye on this one.” She nodded toward Capp.

“This I’d like to see,” Capp said. “I imagine you waving around a saber all dainty like.”

Tolvern sprang to her feet, bristling, but Drake grimaced and motioned for his first mate to sit back down. Yes, this insubordination was intolerable, but they wouldn’t be serving with the woman or her fellow criminals much longer. For now, better to keep the peace.

“You’ll stay here,” Drake said to Tolvern. “I’ll lead the boarding party myself. I need to see what’s going on. If there’s anything else afoot here, I need to know.”

“But, Captain—”

“If anything happens to me, you’ll be needed here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s two,” Drake said. “Who else?”

“I know three blokes who’d be keen to get some action,” Capp said.

“And what kind of action would that be?” Tolvern asked, innocently.

“Commander!” Drake said.

“Sorry, sir.”

“I’d rather not have your blokes, as you put it,” Drake told Capp. “One wild card is more than enough.” He glanced at the tech officer, who was still doing something on the computer. “Smythe?”

“Me, Captain?” he squeaked, which drew a snort from Capp and a sigh from Tolvern.

Smythe licked his lips, turning pale. He looked every bit the royal marine, with his natural physique and strong jaw. Everything except the squinting eyes behind glasses and the full, reddish lips.

“No, not you. Get Barker, ask him if he’s got anyone in weapons or engineering he can spare. He won’t like it—he’s more undermanned than anyone—but our shields will be up anyway, so there shouldn’t be much trouble while we’re out.”

As predicted, Barker wasn’t happy with this, but eventually the gunner found two men he said he could spare. One was a former special forces fellow by the name of Oglethorpe who’d transferred into gunnery after getting his shoulder messed up in combat. He’d lost most of the motor control in one arm, but he was still a big, intimidating fellow.

The other was Manx, the boatswain, currently at work repairing hull damage from their engagement outside Albion. The man’s only experience with weaponry came from basic training, but he was healthy and game. Drake remembered how he’d filled in on the bridge during the mutiny and figured the man was steady enough.

That made four in the boarding party. The captain needed a fifth, and as Smythe cut the channel with Barker, Drake eyed Capp across the table.

“I’m telling you,” she said. “You want someone good, you should take my mate, Carvalho. He’s real handy with a gun.”

“Captain,” Tolvern said in a warning tone.

Drake ignored her. “Good enough, Corporal. I’ll take a chance.” He rose. “That will be all.”

#

Soon they were pulling in behind Cold Barsa, the icy world white and glittering beneath them. The only ice-free water was a thin belt girdling the equator, and from space one couldn’t discern the difference between glacier-covered land and frozen ocean. A small, rust-colored moon came wobbling into view, tracing its rapid path around the planet.

Drake met the four others from the boarding party in the armory to get them acquainted with the boarding rocket and pressure suits. He repeated his plans for going onto Henry Upton, explained about the harpoon and tether. 

“And no shooting unless shot at,” he said, as he pulled on the pressurized trousers. “Is that clear?”

They nodded. Oglethorpe and Manx seemed relieved, while Capp and Carvalho looked disappointed. He ordered them to suit up while he hurried back to the bridge to check the situation one last time.

Tolvern eyed the captain. “We just picked up Henry Upton. She’ll be coming around the planet in eighteen minutes.”

“Still alone?”

“So far as we can tell.”

“If it’s a trap,” he said, “and I find myself in trouble, don’t be a hero. Just get out of here as fast as you can.”

“Hmm.”

“Tolvern, that’s an order. Do not come for me. Cut the tether and run. Am I understood?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Sir, with all due respect, I could tell you yes, I would abandon you, but I think we both know what I will do in the heat of battle.”

Chapter Six

Vigilant came in quietly, trailing Henry Upton at a distance of 11,500 miles. The slaver didn’t know Vigilant was there because Rutherford had never warned her; he couldn’t risk Drake having a spy on the galleon who could tip him off. Instead, Rutherford had waited cloaked at the jump point until Henry Upton came through and then followed stealthily.

Rutherford had half expected his old friend to ambush the galleon at the jump point, but the next most likely spot was Cold Barsa, where the lumbering galleon meant to fling herself around the planet to slightly increase her pathetic speed as she came in toward the tugs that would haul her in to Hot Barsa. And so Rutherford had shields down and weapons on standby as they approached the ice-covered planet.

Just inside a million miles of the planet, his tech officer reported the wake of plasma engines. Something big and fast had passed nearby a few hours earlier. Military, most likely, although the wake was too washed out to glean more than that. Rutherford’s pulse quickened. Admiral Malthorne had sent off the Third Fleet, and nothing else left in the system was big enough to leave that kind of signature. Nothing but Vigilant or Ajax, that was.

The bridge was tense. Commander Pittsfield was in contact with the gun decks and engineering, and there was chatter going back and forth that Rutherford did his best to block out.

“Engineering is asking to bring down the cloaks,” Pittsfield said.

“Negative,” Rutherford said.

“But sir, that leaves us vulnerable to laser fire.”

Rutherford fought down an angry retort, instead giving Pittsfield a withering stare. The commander turned quickly back to his computer display.

“Leave the cloaks up,” Pittsfield said into his com link. “Captain’s orders.”

It wasn’t that Pittsfield was wrong. Cloaking interfered with the primary shields. Laser and other concentrated energy fire that would otherwise be deflected harmlessly into space could cut right through the hull, even saw it right in two if placed properly.

But there were only two ways to detect a Punisher-class cruiser under cloaking. First was detecting the wake of its engines, as he’d done with Ajax. But that’s why Rutherford was drafting in Henry Upton’s wake. Second was an array of listener-whisperers, waiting silently to send their reports. There’s no way Drake had set up such a defense. He lacked both the equipment and the time.

It was the questioning of his orders that drew Rutherford’s ire. Earlier in his career, he’d have ordered a man flogged for insubordination at such a crucial moment. That anger sometimes got him in trouble; he’d often thought since Drake’s fall that he’d been the one destined to kill his career with a blunder, and not his friend. Most likely, Rutherford had always figured, he would draw his side arm and shoot someone who’d aggravated him. If it was an enlisted man, he’d probably escape the subsequent inquiry, but if it was an officer, unlikely.

He was still struggling with his anger when Henry Upton came in at Cold Barsa and bent its trajectory to whip around the planet. It vanished on the screen as it disappeared over the horizon of the cool white sphere beneath them. At five hundred miles a second, the two ships would circumnavigate the planet in less than a minute, and Vigilant would have her in sight again.

Rutherford still didn’t like losing sight of the other ship, not for a single moment. He counted the seconds, the icy surface of Cold Barsa nearly a blur below as they hurtled around after the galleon.

They came around the other side, and the viewscreen found Henry Upton. But she was no longer alone. The fat, turtle-like craft was still lumbering forward. But there, next to it, lay the long, lean shape of a Punisher-class cruiser. Its shields were up, the golden rampant lions stretching brilliantly alongside, the sun catching them in all their glory. Blackened scarring marked the surface where she and Vigilant had traded blows less than two weeks earlier.

Less than a minute had passed, yet already Ajax had harpooned the galleon like it was a star leviathan, the vast beasts that roamed the depths of space. Drake meant to board the vessel.

“Drop cloaking!” Rutherford cried. “Present starboard guns!”

#

Drake flew along the tether toward the slaver galleon with the rest of the boarding party. The five of them wore pressure suits with helmets and sat astride a boarding rocket, which looked like a giant green banana with a long, tungsten-steel ramming snout and hot gasses venting out the back side. Both ships, the tether, and the five men and women flying between them were hurtling through space at several hundred miles per second, but the moon and planet were eclipsed behind Ajax, with nothing but the starry void ahead. He couldn’t feel the enormous forward speeds, only the few hundred miles an hour zipping them the mile or so between the two ships.

Jane’s stern voice sounded in his helmet. “Deceleration in three seconds.”

Drake was strapped into his seat, every bit of him clamped tightly onto the boarding rocket, but the rapid deceleration shoved him forward against his restraints. The ugly, pitted surface of Henry Upton loomed. The nose of the banana launched free, spouting its own rocket. It followed the tether to the nose of the harpoon, which had expanded to open a passage to let them through the outer hull. The ram-like protrusion now disappeared inside. There was a flash of light. Gasses and debris came venting into the void.

It slammed against him as they burst through. Then they were inside and tumbling free of the boarding rocket as it released its restraints. They were between the two hulls, both inner and outer now breached, with air venting into space rushing past them like a hurricane.

The ship lurched as Drake and his companions struggled forward to get in past the inner hull before the breach was sealed. They were at the edge of the anti-grav field, and he still felt semi-weightless, bouncing along from step to step. He grabbed the wall to keep from stumbling, then bent to help Manx, who had fallen.

At first he thought the ship’s movement was the galleon pilot attempting evasive maneuvers. It had been less than a minute since Ajax harpooned her, and so far Henry Upton had given no indication that she knew she was being boarded.

“Captain,” Tolvern’s tense voice said from inside his helmet as he got Manx to his feet. “We’ve got trouble.”

“Use the chase gun. Show them who’s boss.” He was surprised that the galleon would be so foolish as to shoot at them, but it wouldn’t take much to settle matters.

“It’s Vigilant. Came in behind the galleon. Must have been cloaked.”

Drake muttered an oath. “Are they shooting?”

“No. Rutherford is demanding our surrender.”

Rutherford. Blast it. Where the devil had he come from? Whatever he’d done, it had been a clever maneuver, and as luck would have it, he’d caught Drake off his own ship. What would he do now? Was he ruthless enough to finish the job? Drake thought he was.

There was shouting on Tolvern’s end, but she’d covered the com link or pulled away, and he couldn’t pick up what she was saying. Then she came back on. “He’s testing our shields. I need to break the tether and evade. I’ll come back for you.”

“Don’t break free. Pull in closer. Hug the slaver tight.”

“But—” she started to protest, then seemed to get what he was driving at. “Yes, sir.”

During this conversation, Drake and the others had gained the inner hull and now removed their helmets and tossed them back over their shoulders, where they hung by their straps. Capp had one gun out—a standard-issue assault rifle—with another dangling from her waist. This was a nonregulation hand cannon. The others, Oglethorpe, Carvalho, and the boatswain, Manx, each had pistols and assault rifles. Carvalho also wore a saber, as well as a bandolier of grenades. Where the blazes had that come from? For that matter, where had Capp found her hand cannon?

The five of them stepped into the corridor just as two crewmembers opened the airlock at the end of the hall and came running toward them. One was human, the other Hroom, tall and thin, with pale pinkish skin and a high, bald forehead. They wore bulky packs, with hoses and nozzles in hand. They’d evidently come to spray the breach with a rapidly expanding foam. A temporary patch until engineering could more permanently seal the hull.

They were coming at a run and had so much momentum that they were halfway down the hallway before they seemed to register the intruders. The pair came to a full stop, turned, and began to run in the opposite direction.

“Stop!” Drake ordered, “or I’ll shoot.”

They didn’t stop. Capp lifted her rifle and squeezed off two shots. The human fell. The Hroom came to an immediate halt and raised his hands. Capp and Carvalho ran past the dead man and grabbed the arms of the Hroom, who stood head and shoulders above them.

“Manx,” Drake said, “seal the breach.” As the boatswain grabbed the pack and nozzle from the dead man, the captain, followed by Oglethorpe, strode up to Capp. “What the hell are you doing?”

Capp was stripping off the Hroom’s pack and checking for weapons. “You told ’em you’d shoot.”

“That’s what I told them, you fool. I told you there would be no shooting unless shot at. And you killed the human, too. Why did you do that?”

She turned the Hroom to face the captain. “This one is an eater. I figured he’d be more cooperative.”

The he was actually a she, Drake could see now. Taller than a male, with large eyes and even more delicate facial bones. Capp was right about the other part, though. A Hroom’s natural skin tone was mottled reddish orange, like the leaves of a maple tree in autumn. It was the color of the jungles of their home worlds, where it was said they’d evolved to blend with the colors of the giant, woody ferns. But when Hroom turned into eaters, the pigments bled from their skin, until they had a grayish-pink hue. Like this one.

Tolvern spoke into Drake’s ear. “Rutherford is giving us thirty seconds. Then he’ll shoot.”

“I need five minutes.”

“Dammit, Captain. I told you. We don’t have five minutes.” Her voice was even more strained than before.

“Deal with it, Commander.” Drake cut the link.

She’d better figure it out in a hurry. Circumstances had left them short handed, forced Drake to lead the away party himself, and that meant there was no other leadership on board Ajax but his commander. There was nothing he could do from here except jeopardize his own chances on board the slave ship.

He turned to the Hroom. “I’m looking for Nyb Pim. Do you know him? Where is he?”

“You have . . . ” the Hroom began in her high, cooing voice. She licked her lips. “You have sugar to eat?”

“Do I look like I’m carrying sugar? Of course I don’t. Do you know Nyb Pim? Yes or no?”

“I have sugar,” Capp said.

The marine reached into one of the pockets in her suit and pulled out a fistful of sugar packets. They were the size used for sweetening tea, but slavers sometimes used them to tempt children and thereby spread the addiction. It wasn’t much. A full-grown Hroom like the one facing them might eat two or three pounds of the stuff a day.

“Where did you get that?” he demanded.

“We’re on a Hroom slave ship,” Capp said. “Seemed like it might come in handy. I visited the mess and asked Cook to unlock the sugar cabinet.” She held out a sugar packet for the Hroom, who grabbed for it. “Ah, ah,” Capp warned and pulled it away.

Carvalho jabbed his gun to push back the Hroom, who was looking like she’d leap for Capp to get her hands on the stuff. “You lead us to our pilot, and you can have the sugar,” he said. “Name is Nyb Pim.”

The mere sight of the fistful of sugar packets had set the Hroom trembling. She couldn’t stop staring at it. The slave galleon had been traveling for many days through the void, and Drake wondered if the sugar rations had run out.

It was ruthless, uncivilized behavior tempting her like this, but it was effective. The Hroom gave the toss of her head that served the same purpose as a nod did to humans.

“Nyb Pim? I not know this Hroom.” She stopped, mouth pinching. This one apparently didn’t speak English very well. “He on . . . ship?”

“Where are the quarters?” Drake asked. “We’ll look for him ourselves. The rooms for the slaves,” he added, when the Hroom looked back in confusion. “Where are they?”

 “All together. All in one place.”

“Probably one big room,” Capp said. “You know how these eaters get. Run out of sugar, and they’ll go nutso. Better to keep them in a single, central location.”

Drake found it hard to imagine Nyb Pim falling so far so fast that he’d go crazy when cut off from something he’d never tasted until a few weeks ago.

Henry Upton shuddered beneath their feet. No sound of an explosion reached his ears, but something had hit the ship. He’d told Tolvern to hug the galleon, thinking this would keep Rutherford from firing. Maybe she’d brought it too close, and they’d bumped.

“Take us there,” he told the Hroom.

“You come this way,” she said and gestured back the direction from which she and her human companion had come. She glanced down at his body, but then she stared at the sugar packets that Capp was zipping back into her pocket.

Using the spray sealant taken from the dead man, Manx had been hosing down the inner hull until he’d filled the breach with hardening foam. Now he tossed aside the pack and picked up his rifle. The five of them led their prisoner up the hallway in the direction she’d indicated.

Few space ships were built with comfort in mind, but the slave ship was particularly cramped and claustrophobic. The passageway was slender enough that they were forced to travel in single file, and once they rounded the corner, the Hroom could no longer stand erect, but was forced to bend so low that her long hands nearly dragged on the floor. Drake and the taller members of his crew had to duck to get through airlocks. The air had the oily smell of leaking lubricant and the tangy, almost citrus-like scent of Hroom.

The air grew chill the deeper into the ship they traveled. Slavers were kept cold to pacify the Hroom. They prospered in warm, almost sweltering conditions, but turned sluggish in cold weather. Their guide slowed her pace as they continued. She stopped where the passageway branched, blinking with evident confusion.

“Move it!” Capp said and jabbed her rifle into the alien’s back. This got the Hroom going again.

They squeezed through another open airlock door to find themselves in an even more narrow passageway, this one coming to a dead end. A human soldier with a stun gun stood in front of a door on the far side. He was scowling, his head cocked, as if he were listening to instructions through his ear piece. He spotted the intruders, and his expression changed to alarm.

“They’re here!” he cried to whomever he’d been talking to. He lifted his stun gun. “Stand back!”

Capp lifted her assault rifle. “Put that down or so help me I’ll knock one right through your skull.”

The guard threw down his weapon and put his hands on his head. Drake squeezed past both Capp and the Hroom. He yanked out the guard’s ear piece and tossed it to one side. “Open the door.”

“The hell I will. It’s full of eaters. We didn’t have enough sugar for them all.”

“Corporal, if he doesn’t open this door by the time I count to five, kill him. One . . .”

The guard slapped his hand against a touch pad outside the door. It scanned his palm. The door hissed open. A blast of cool air rushed out. It was dim in the large open room, and as Drake stepped inside, his eyes struggled to adjust to the soft red lights along the ceiling. It was a vast, cavernous space.

The center of the slaver was apparently one huge room, a hundred feet square and maybe fifteen feet high. Bunks stacked to the ceiling, so close one on top of the next that a Hroom was pretty much forced to lie down. And there were three or four Hroom per bunk, all jumbled together. Some were naked, others wore rags.

“Nyb Pim!” he shouted. “It’s Drake. Where are you?”

None of the Hroom answered. Most lay motionless on their cots, their big, liquid-black eyes open and unblinking. Others were moaning and thrashing, spittle foaming at their mouth. They saw the two humans and began cooing, begging.

“Sugar!”

“Give me sugar.”

“I must eat!”

“Captain,” Tolvern said in his com piece. “I’ve pulled in the ship. We’re breaking through to the bridge. Have you got him?”

“I’ll have him in a second. I’ll meet you there.”

Tolvern’s maneuver must have worked. Hauling Ajax in next to the slaver had kept Rutherford from getting a clear shot. With luck, he wasn’t shooting at all, not being able to destroy them without also taking down the galleon.

Drake scanned the room desperately as he squeezed down the passageway between the stacked bunks. The citrus smell was enough to make one swoon. Capp came after him. She covered her mouth and nose with one hand. She slapped away a long, bony hand that groped for her.

“Disgusting. Absolutely friggin’ rubbish,” she said. Drake thought she was talking about the slaves, and was about to snap a retort, but then she added, “I ain’t much a fan of the Hroom, but I don’t care if it’s human, alien, or animal. You treat people like this, and you deserve a bullet.”

The floor shuddered again.

Tolvern spoke up. “Rutherford is giving it to us. Doesn’t seem to care if he takes out the slaver with it. What should I do?”

So much for the hope that Rutherford would show restraint.

“For God’s sake, Tolvern. Deal with it.”

She cut the com without another word.

The ship shuddered. This time, he heard the thump of the explosion coming from above and aft of their position, vibrating through the floor. Somewhere, a distant warning alarm sounded. Oglethorpe shouted from the passageway.

“Nyb Pim!” Drake shouted. There was no answer.

“How the blazes are we going to find him?” Capp said. “They all look the same to me in here.”

Drake shoved his side arm into its holster and held out his hand. “Give me the sugar packets.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Give them to me, now.”

“King’s balls! We’ll be torn apart.”

She fumbled with the zipper of her jumper, where she’d shoved them after tempting the Hroom in the corridor.

He grabbed the handful of sugar packets. “I have sugar. I will give it to the Hroom who finds me Nyb Pim. He’s in this room.”

The room erupted in cries and begging pleas. Hands groped and grabbed, but Capp bashed them away with her rifle butt. One Hroom came scrambling down from an upper bunk, springing from ladder to ladder like a spider. Red light reflected off his eyes, and his lips pulled back in a snarl as he prepared to launch himself. But other hands seized him, and a brawl broke out, which spilled to the floor. Shortly, a mass of biting, hitting bodies clogged the way forward.

“I have Nyb Pim,” someone shouted.

“No, you don’t. I have him.”

Hands dragged one of the Hroom forward. He was nearly naked, dressed in rags, and struggling feebly. Drake recognized his pilot, the curve of his nose and the sharp cheekbones. But as they pushed him forward, an initial feeling of relief gave way to alarm. Nyb Pim was in no condition to move.

Drake tossed the handful of sugar packets. The Hroom set upon them like starving dogs. He took advantage of the distraction and grabbed Nyb Pim by one arm. Capp got the other arm, and they dragged him toward the door. More Hroom came at them, and Drake called for help. Carvalho, Oglethorpe, and Manx waded into the room from the corridor. Carvalho slashed with his saber to clear a path. Soon, they had Nyb Pim into the hallway, and the door shut again. Drake took a deep breath of the filtered air, relieved to be out of that suffocating closeness.

There was no sign of the human guard who’d let them into the room, but the Hroom was waiting anxiously for the promised sugar. Drake had thrown it all away.

“Sugar. Must eat sugar.”

Capp found a few more packets in the bottom of her pocket. The Hroom snatched them and shoved them, paper and all, into her mouth. Capp had one more packet, which she tore open.

Drake understood what she was about. He gestured at Nyb Pim. “Open his mouth,” he told Carvalho.

Nyb Pim had collapsed to the ground and rolled onto his back. Carvalho bent over him and pried his mouth open. Drake took the packet and poured the sugar in. Nyb Pim’s mouth worked to swallow it.

Within a few seconds, the glazed look had cleared from the pilot’s face. It was like watching a dead body rise from the embalming table, the dead eyes blinking and looking about him. His gaze fixed on Drake, who returned an encouraging smile. Sirens were wailing, and another explosion thumped through the ship. Recognition dawned on the Hroom’s face.

“No, I don’t want to. Put me back.”

“You’re not yourself. We’ll—”

Nyb Pim sprang to his feet. He swung wildly at Drake. Acting on pure instinct, the captain flattened himself against the side of the corridor. The blow glanced off his cheek. Capp and Carvalho set into him with their rifle butts. Drake ordered them to stop.

The other Hroom had finished the sugar and was already begging for more even before they’d finished subduing the pilot.

“We have more,” Drake lied. “Take us to the bridge, and you can have it all.” To the others, he said, “If Nyb Pim won’t come willingly, drag him.”

“Don’t take me,” Nyb Pim begged as they seized him. He struggled, flailing. “Please, Captain. I need sugar!”

Chapter Seven

Drake and the rest of the boarding party reached the bridge of the slaver, dragging Nyb Pim along. The bridge smelled of chemical retardant and burning plastic. The captain of Henry Upton and three of his officers were spraying a wall of computer equipment to put out an electrical fire. Lights flashed, warning voices and sirens sounded from every corner.

The slaver crew didn’t see the intruders until Carvalho and Capp were on top of them. Soon, the crew was disarmed and standing in a sullen knot against the blackened, smoking bank of equipment.

The captain was a sallow, jowly man about forty-five or fifty, with thinning hair and a belly that overhung his belt. He wore a faded merchant uniform and presented a slovenly appearance as he looked over his captors. His gaze fixed on Nyb Pim, who was being held upright by Oglethorpe and Manx.

“You came to rescue a bloody slave?” the captain said. He had a low York accent.

“He’s no slave,” Drake said. “And if I looked through the cargo, how many more people would I find who’d been tricked into slavery? All of them?”

“You’re a fool.”

Capp had a fistful of the man’s uniform at the shoulder and gave him a jerk. “Hey, Cap’n, whadya say we shove a pound of sugar up his arse and toss him into that room we came out of. The Hroom’ll tear him apart.”

The ship shuddered. Fresh alarms sounded.

“Commander,” Drake said into the com link. “How are we doing?”

Tolvern’s voice came through in his ear piece. “We’re right up against the hull, sir. Probably fifteen feet away from you, on the outside, starboard side.”

“I need you on the inside, Tolvern.”

“Working on it, sir. Hull is compromised. We need to make a seal or you’ll all be sucked into space.”

Another shuddering explosion.

“Better hurry or we’ll be sucked out anyway.”

“Two minutes, sir.”

“You’ll pay for this,” the captain of the slaver said. “York Company is backed by royal sanction.”

Drake fixed him with a cold gaze. “This ship may be owned by York Company, but the cargo isn’t.”

That law was over twenty years old, put in place as a good-faith measure during one of the many truces between Albion and the Hroom. York Company, with its ties to both the lord mayor of York and the crown itself, had been accused of running slave operations within Hroom-controlled worlds. Since then, slaves were owned by third parties, not York Company.

“Makes no difference. We transport the cargo.”

“Who bought these people? Who are you working for?”

When he didn’t answer, Capp gave him another shake. “You better answer real quick, or my mate here will cut you up good.” Carvalho drew his saber at this threat.

The ship shuddered again, but this time Drake heard voices from his right, on the other side of the starboard-side wall. It must be Tolvern’s crew, cutting through the last few inches to the bridge.

“Look at your friend,” the slaver captain said with a disgusted nod toward Nyb Pim. “He doesn’t want to go. All he cares about is his sugar. Look! Can’t stop searching for it. See those shelves in the corner? Emergency rations, in case the Hroom ever revolted. Fifty pounds of the white stuff.”

Nyb Pim stiffened at these words, as if an electric shock had ripped through his limbs. He broke free of Oglethorpe and Manx, who seemed to have relaxed their grip on his arms, and dashed toward the shelves. Drake had moved toward the slaver captain since they’d arrived on the bridge, and with Capp and Carvalho keeping the prisoners, he was the only one in position to intercept the Hroom before he reached the sugar. The last thing he needed was for Nyb Pim to stuff sugar into his mouth until he fell into a swoon, eyes milky and glazed, like they were blocked with cataracts. He lowered his shoulder to stop the hard-charging alien.

Nyb Pim slammed into him, and he fell. Now on the ground, Drake got his arms around the Hroom’s legs and temporarily brought him down, but even for his size, Nyb Pim seemed possessed of unusual strength in his desperation to reach the sugar. He got back up and sprang at the shelves, ripping open the doors.

The slaver captain took advantage of the chaos to grab for Carvalho’s sword. The other three officers went for Capp’s gun. One of them got his hands around the barrel, and she squeezed the trigger. It fired. The man fell back with a cry. Capp turned on the other two and gunned them down. Carvalho fought free and slashed at the slaver captain. The captain fell back, clutching a bloody gash across his chest. Carvalho lifted the saber for a killing blow.

“No!” Drake cried, rising to his feet. “We need him alive.”

Nyb Pim let out a terrible wail from the other side of the room, his owl-like voice rising to a screech. He was tearing through the shelves, which contained log books, hand computers, and a variety of electronic odds and ends, but no sugar. The whole thing had been a bluff on the part of the slaver captain.

Shouts came from behind Drake. He glanced over his shoulder to see Tolvern’s head and shoulders squeezing through a breach in the hull.

Drake reached for the Hroom. “Nothing here. Time to go. Come on.”

Nyb Pim wheeled on him. His long, bony hand formed a fist, and before Drake could flinch, the Hroom struck him across the temple, and he went flying. He hit the ground, dazed, and was only partially aware of the shouting and struggle. Oglethorpe and Manx were struggling with Nyb Pim, someone was crying for them to shoot him—or maybe, not to shoot him, Drake couldn’t tell.

Above it all, Nyb Pim raged in his native tongue and then in English. He pleaded to be released, begged for sugar, begged them to kill him.

Henry Upton shuddered. Drake got on his hands and knees and scrambled toward the hole Tolvern had opened in the hull. Somehow, he made it through to his own ship.

#

Ajax’s initial moves had caught Rutherford flat-footed, and it took some time to regain the initiative. After sending over boarders, Drake’s ship had then methodically reeled in the merchant ship. Ajax took Henry Upton with her into a barrel roll. Clever tactic. Made it impossible for Rutherford to get a clean shot.

After his own attempt to harpoon the pair failed, Rutherford gave up worrying about collateral damage. He fired his cannon at Ajax, trying to cripple her shields. About one shot in three hit the merchant ship instead. Flashes of light and puffs of debris vented into space.

After several minutes of this, Ajax apparently had what she wanted and cut loose. She shoved off from Henry Upton and began a rapid acceleration toward what Rutherford presumed was a jump point to flee the system. He maneuvered around the crippled merchant ship, now tumbling helplessly end over end, and set off in grim pursuit.

It would take Ajax time to accelerate to jump speed and however many hours to reach the jump point itself. Meanwhile, Rutherford methodically pounded at her rear shields with missiles and then used his cannon again when he’d caught up to her. The other cruiser did not fire back, but kept all power on the shields. Even so, they shortly began to weaken. Ajax pulled a couple of slick maneuvers to lose him, but Rutherford had little difficulty keeping pace. It was only a matter of time.

And then a distress call came through from Henry Upton. The captain of the galleon claimed two hull breeches he was unable to seal. The escape pods had been destroyed in Vigilant’s bombardment. The merchant ship would shortly break apart, with all souls lost, unless Vigilant rushed back to give aid.

Rutherford turned to his tech officer. “McCormick, how many on board Henry Upton?”

“A crew of thirty-two, sir,” McCormick said after a moment. “Assuming none have been killed.”

“What about cargo?”

“Plus roughly eight hundred and fifty slaves,” McCormick said.

“Acceptable losses if we can bag Ajax,” Commander Pittsfield said. “The York Company will holler, but what can they do? Ajax is our prize.”

Rutherford wasn’t sure, but he’d rather not find out.

“Hail the enemy.”

Drake came on the screen moments later. He looked haggard, and there was a streak of blood across his right temple. The view was tight, Rutherford noted, with nothing else visible on the bridge, as if his old friend didn’t want conditions to be seen.

“Calling to surrender?” Drake asked with what looked like a forced smile. “Very well, I accept.”

Rutherford had no time or patience for banter. He explained the situation with Henry Upton. “You’re beaten. You know this, and I know this. It is only for you to decide to capitulate or be destroyed.”

“So you’ll keep coming after me and let all those people die? There must be close to a thousand on board. Why don’t you go back and save them while there’s still time?”

Rutherford smiled. “You can do that yourself. Lower your shields and come to. I’ll follow you to the merchant ship. No more lives will be lost.”

“Merchant ship? Call it what it is. A slaver. Do you know who was on board?”

“Your pilot. Yes, I know.”

“He is an officer in the Royal Navy. We protect our own, Nigel. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about human or Hroom. You know this. You felt this way yourself at one point, or was I mistaken?”

Rutherford ignored the forced familiarity of Drake using his given name. “He’s not an officer any more, he’s an eater. I don’t care what he was, that’s what he is now, and is anyone surprised? Maybe they’ll all be eaters eventually, maybe it’s inevitable.” He made his tone conciliatory. “Stand down, surrender. We’ll discuss matters when I have you on board Vigilant. If you have a grievance, I’ll hear you out. No need to rush back to Albion. We can put in for repairs at Hot Barsa.”

Drake turned his head slightly to the right, as if listening to someone speaking from off screen. “They’re now saying twenty minutes until Henry Upton breaks apart. That doesn’t leave you much time. Better turn around before it’s too late.”

“Stand down, Drake,” Rutherford said. “You’ll be responsible for all those deaths.”

Drake smiled and then cut the com link. Rutherford cursed at the blank screen. He’d hoped Drake was bluffing, that he wouldn’t keep running.

“Turn around?” Pittsfield asked. “Captain?”

Rutherford didn’t answer. It wasn’t only the slaver that was troubling him, but that Drake had grown so ruthless and desperate. Rutherford had hoped to take him on board after capturing Ajax, speak to him as one captain to another. Drake’s behavior made no sense.

He truly believes he is innocent.

The evidence against Rutherford’s old friend had seemed solid. Records confirmed it. The computers had shown falsified logs. The man had blundered and then attempted to deceive both his crew and the navy. This mutiny was one more mistake in an escalation that would see Drake dead.

But there was a familiar note in his friend’s voice. Confidence, the rightness of purpose for which he was known. Rutherford had forgotten how utterly certain of himself Drake could seem when he thought he was in the right. A niggle of doubt burrowed into Rutherford’s gut. What if he was trying to kill an innocent man?

He’s not innocent of mutiny. That much is clear.

Yes, but there were times when a man could disobey a wicked order. What if Rutherford were ordered to bring the entire fleet into orbit around Albion and bombard it with nuclear weapons? Would he do it? Surely not.

“We need orders, Captain,” Pittsfield said, sounding nervous.

“Continue pursuit. Give that traitor all he can take. We’ll take his ship anyway, and he’ll have the blood of all those people on his hands. His decision, not ours.”

“Yes, sir.”

But no sooner had he spoken, than a message came through from the fleet. When Rutherford had come around Cold Barsa to find Ajax trying to board the merchant ship, he’d sent off a subspace message to fleet headquarters to say that he’d engaged the enemy. It was standard practice, in case there were any vessels in the area who might send help. He’d reported that Ajax had Henry Upton harpooned and intended to board her.

Nearly an hour had passed since he’d sent the message, and an answer had come back from Albion.

Destroy Ajax if you must, but do not risk the merchant ship.

Rutherford sat in stunned disbelief when Pittsfield relayed the message. “Repeat that message, Commander.”

Pittsfield read it again.

“We can sacrifice a Royal Navy cruiser, but we’re to preserve a beat-up old merchant ship?” Rutherford said. “What is Henry Upton worth, a few thousand pounds? Her cargo a few thousand more?”

“That is what it says, sir.”

“I know what it says, Commander.”

Rutherford stared at the viewscreen, at Ajax, her hull pitted by the bombardment of Vigilant’s cannons, which had punctured the shields and were now starting to tear up her underbelly. A few more broadsides, and he’d have her crippled and helpless. There would be no need to destroy Ajax or its crew. Another shot broke through, and fire and debris flared into space.

“Perhaps it is a mistake,” Pittsfield said. “I could request clarification. The order doesn’t make sense. It will take another hour to get an answer. By then—”

“It is no mistake,” Rutherford said bitterly. “Break off pursuit. We will obey orders.”

“But sir.”

“Do what I say!”

Mutters and dark looks swept over the bridge as Pittsfield relayed the captain’s orders. Under normal circumstances, Rutherford would not have tolerated such dissent, but they only mirrored his own anger at being called away.

The enemy vanished from sight as Vigilant swung around to return to Cold Barsa. Henry Upton was still turning end over end, her distress calls ever more frantic. Rutherford reversed the engines when they got within a few tens of thousands of miles, slowing rapidly to match the merchant vessel’s course and speed. He fired a harpoon to grab hold so he could stabilize her enough to bring in.

But the harpoon came loose when they started to bring her in. It had attached itself to a damaged part of the hull that now broke free. Drake ordered another harpoon launched. This one took hold. But when the merchant ship was still a hundred miles out, a tremendous fissure opened midway down her hull. She broke in two, spewing debris into space.

By the time Vigilant finished picking through flotsam, she’d rescued fewer than twenty survivors, these protected in undamaged, airlocked sections of the ship. Because the ship had split right down the central hold, the only Hroom among the survivors were crew. The cargo had all vented into space. These few Hroom survivors were still raving eaters, demanding their sugar rations the instant they came on board.

And of course, Ajax had vanished. Cloaked, fleeing toward some distant jump point. The Barsa system was full of them.

Vigilant made a course for Hot Barsa with the two largest bits of wreckage in tow. Long before she arrived, the first of many recriminating messages had begun to arrive from the Admiralty.

Chapter Eight

After Tolvern had brought Captain Drake back from the slaver and broken free, she’d turned over the bridge with a flood of relief. Drake would save them. She didn’t know how, but he would.

But for the next hour, things had seemed excessively grim. Vigilant had kept pace beneath them only a few hundred miles away. She’d rolled onto her side to present a broadside to Ajax’s belly. They’d already taken several shots underneath, but the truth was that nowhere on the shields could take a sustained bombardment. Tolvern was itching to return fire, but that would mean lowering their own shields. The instant that happened, Rutherford would tear them apart.

“Come on, Nigel,” Drake muttered after he’d spoken to Rutherford about Henry Upton’s desperate situation. “Do the right thing.” His face was pale and his jaw rigid. Blood seeped out from beneath the bandage Tolvern had sprayed on his forehead.

The terrifying thing was that Drake had told Tolvern if Rutherford did not, in fact, give up the pursuit, then he’d surrender. He wouldn’t sacrifice all those humans and Hroom left on Henry Upton. She didn’t relish the thought of being responsible for the death of all souls on the slaver, but if it were up to her, she would keep running. Any number of things might happen to give them a chance to reach the jump point.

Jane’s cool voice came over the com system. “Thirty-seven hours to jump point at current trajectory and acceleration.”

Capp was sitting in the pilot’s chair. She had her eyes closed, her nav chip in communication with the nav computer. But she opened her eyes at Jane’s voice. “We know that, you stupid cow.”

Drake let out his breath. Tolvern looked up to see Vigilant peeling away, cannons retracting. She scarcely dared hope.

A feint? Would more naval vessels come tearing in from their flanks? When none appeared, she finally stopped holding her breath.

Drake slumped in his chair, and Tolvern hurried over to catch him in case he fell. He looked up with a dazed expression. He should be in sick bay for a concussion. Nyb Pim had apparently struck him on the temple with a closed fist before they’d subdued the alien and dragged him through the breach to Ajax. The Hroom was currently locked in an isolation cell.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is my fault.”

“Rubbish. You executed perfectly.”

She used her sleeve to mop at the blood now trickling down his temple. “You should go to the sick bay, sir.”

Drake grimaced and glanced back at the screen. “Yes, perhaps you’re right. Keep us on course. If Rutherford turns around and gives pursuit, hail me at once.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Otherwise, see to our pilot.” A quick glance at Capp, who looked like she was half dozing in the pilot’s chair. “We need Nyb Pim here as soon as possible.”

Tolvern watched Drake rise to his feet and go for the door. He was moving like an old man, his arms wrapped around himself as though he’d cracked a rib. She wanted to go to him, urge him to lean his weight into her, but was afraid that gesture would be misinterpreted.

The captain was a tall man with a strong, handsome jaw. He had dark hair and piercing hazel eyes with flecks of gold in them. When she’d first been assigned to Ajax, nearly five years earlier, she’d been in awe of him, so much so that a fellow ensign had joked that she was in love with the young captain. That had left Tolvern so flushed and angry that she’d challenged the accuser to a duel, which had been laughingly declined, at which point she calmed.

She wasn’t in love with him. That was rubbish, and anyway, it would have been pointless. Drake was of noble blood, and she was a commoner. Even if she had been so inclined (and she was not, she insisted to herself), she may as well fall in love with the crown prince, for all the good it would do.

Drake had never treated her like a commoner, but with exacting correctness according to their comparative naval ranks. He consulted, but never deferred. And since he had always put his weight in favor of her various promotions, he must hold her in some esteem. If only she were as confident in herself.

Tolvern stayed on the bridge for another hour to be sure that Rutherford had let them escape. No word from Drake; she figured he was sleeping off a concussion. She told Capp to maintain their current course except on override from herself or the captain, then went down to the sick bay. She resisted the urge to check in with Dr. Lee to see about the captain’s concussion, and instead went to the isolation cells. It was here they kept people quarantined who’d been exposed to a xeno-virus or who were receiving treatment for severe radiation exposure. There were only five cells, enough for a contaminated away team, but not enough to contain a major outbreak. Right now, only one cell had a green light above the door.

Two men stood in front of the cell block. Tolvern’s thoughts were elsewhere as she arrived, and she supposed they’d been posted as guards. Only when they looked up, their low voices abruptly ceasing, did she fully take in the scene.

One of them was Carvalho, the Ladino she and the captain had spotted in the mess cozied up to Corporal Capp, and the other was one of the older criminals freed at the same time Tolvern had rescued Drake. He had an ugly scar across his right cheek, but it was almost obscured by gray and black whiskers, since the man hadn’t shaved in what, ten days now? Tolvern couldn’t remember his name at the moment. The men were standing too close to each other, as if they’d been sharing a secret or swapping something between them.

She swore she caught a guilty look on the bearded fellow’s face, and he shoved his hands so quickly into his pockets that she figured he was hiding something. Carvalho, however, leaned back against the wall with such a cool look on his face that she questioned her growing suspicion.

“What are you doing here?” Her hand wanted to go to her side arm, even though she told herself that was ridiculous.

“Nothing,” Carvalho said. “Quiet place to shoot the breeze, that’s all.”

“Is one of you on guard duty?”

“Huh?”

“The guard,” she said. “Who is it?”

The second, older man looked at her as if this were the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. “Ain’t no guard. Can’t hardly spare one, now can we?”

“You two seem idle enough. Don’t you have somewhere better to go? Engineering could put you to work. Assisting the boatswain or some such. We’ve got all sorts of trouble and no use for idleness.”

“Not our shift,” Carvalho said sullenly. “We’re off until twenty-two hundred.”

“I’m pretty sure this is all hands on deck, so unless you’re asleep or eating, I suggest you find something useful to do.”

They slouched off from the isolation cells, and she stared hard at their backs until they’d disappeared. She turned her gaze back to the empty corridor. What the hell were those men doing here, anyway?

Tolvern stepped up to the window of the cell with the green light above the door. Captain had said Nyb Pim was in a bad way; she didn’t want to open the door and find him crouched, ready to fling himself at her.

The cell was about eight feet by four feet, with a bunk along the wall and a stainless steel toilet. Some shelves for personal belongings. A tight-weave carpet covered floors, walls, and ceiling. The cell had an entertainment screen, but no keyboard or other computer equipment.

The pilot wasn’t lying on the bunk, and he wasn’t watching or doing something on the screen. Instead, he’d squeezed himself into the far corner and drawn his bony knees against his chest. His high, bald head was tucked between his knees. He was still dressed in the rags Drake had found him in, when he’d been squeezed into the hold of the slaver with hundreds of other Hroom. A uniform lay in one corner, tossed in apparently, then ignored.

Tolvern checked her side arm. It was loaded, but she wished she’d swapped it at the armory for a stun gun. If Nyb Pim tried anything funny, she didn’t want to kill him protecting herself. She put her hand against the reader.

“Commander Jess Tolvern,” she told it. “Open the door.”

The door slid open. The Hroom didn’t look up.

“It’s me. Tolvern. How are you doing, mate?”

Nyb Pim lifted his head slowly, like a turtle emerging from its shell. He looked at her through large, watering eyes. “Did you bring my ration?”

Tolvern took a deep breath. She was still in the hallway and could shut the doors without moving backward, in case he decided to come after her. Nyb Pim had always been such a calm, measured sort that it felt like pure fancy to be expecting such a reaction. And yet.

He struck the captain. Don’t forget that.

“I have to tell you something. It’s going to be hard to hear. I need you to stay calm.”

“I want my ration. It is late.”

“We need to detox you. I’m afraid there aren’t going to be any rations.”

Nyb Pim had scarcely moved except to lift his head, but now he unfolded himself like a giant insect and sprang for the door. He loomed above her, nearly seven and a half feet tall to her five feet seven, and his arms were so long that his fingers were practically at her throat before she could so much as take a step backward.

She was so startled she didn’t have a chance to speak, but slammed her hand on the pad. The doors zipped shut, and not with the cautious glide of the doors on the lift, but with all the urgency of a breached airlock sealing itself. Nyb Pim slammed against the other side with an incoherent scream. He shoved his face against the tiny, three-inch-thick window.

“GIVE ME MY SUGAR!”

Nyb Pim beat and thrashed against the door as Tolvern backed away. She came out of the cell block and called down to engineering. Barker came on.

“Hey, Barker. It’s Tolvern. I’m short-handed—got anyone you can spare?” Her calm words belied her pounding heart and dry mouth.

“What do you think?” he grumbled. The gunner sounded exhausted and ready to bite her head off.

“I really need someone. Nothing difficult, guard duty.”

“Oh, you do, huh? You got any idea what we’re dealing with down here? The engines are status yellow, and that’s the best of what I’ve got. Shields damaged, and we’re still leaking air. You don’t even want to know what the waste system is like at the moment. Let’s just say I wouldn’t drink the water until further notice.”

“I’m not messing around,” she said. “You must have someone. I need a guard, and it’s urgent.”

“Hah. Okay, then, fine. I’ve got a couple of freed prisoners down here. More trouble than they’re worth. How about I give you one of them?”

She thought about the two men she’d caught in the cell block when she’d arrived. “No good. I need someone I can trust. Captain is in the sick bay with a concussion, and I need to stay on the bridge until he comes back. I can’t be trusting smugglers and pirates.” When he was silent on the other end, she said. “I’m in command, Barker, and I’m telling you what I need. Do I need to make it an order?”

He sighed. “Fine, but you’ve got to give me more than that.”

She told him how Nyb Pim had nearly attacked her. “Doesn’t seem to be anyone here keeping an eye on him. I need someone with a gun and some discipline. Someone who isn’t so dumb as to open the door or to stand outside pouring sugar into his coffee, know what I mean?”

“All right. I’ve got someone. Wouldn’t say he’s the brightest fellow I’ve got, but he obeys orders. You know Harrison?”

“Yeah, he’ll do. Send him up.”

Tolvern cut the link and made her way back up to the bridge. She passed Harrison in the hallway, and then she shared the lift with Carvalho. No sign of the second man. She stared straight ahead, but the big Ladino’s eyes ranged up and down her body. Blasted criminal types—she couldn’t wait until they could all be dumped in some backwater, and Drake could get a real crew. She endured his visual groping until he got off, then continued up to the bridge.

No sign of the captain yet. Capp was lounging in the pilot’s chair, smoking a cigar as if it were the crew lounge. Tolvern ordered her to put it out. Capp grunted, took a final puff, and ground it out in an ash tray. A trail of smoke drifted into the air, as lazy and sullen as the corporal herself.

“Where do you want to go, anyway?” Capp asked. “Back to the jump we came in on?”

“No, that’s where they’ll look for us.”

“I could take us to Fantalus. It’s closer.”

“Hmm.” As far as Tolvern could remember, the Fantalus system was the gateway to nowhere useful. “And where do we go from Fantalus?”

Capp looked sheepish. “Back to Gryphon Shoals.”

“Do you know any other jumps from this system?”

“No, just those two.”

“Well, then. Fantalus, I suppose. It’s a different route, so there is that much.”

“Guess it’s better than sitting around scratching our balls,” Capp said.

Not that either woman possessed such a thing, but why speak properly when a vulgarity was at hand? Again, Tolvern was counting the hours until they could dump Capp, Carvalho, and the lot of them.

She thought briefly about calling the sick bay to see if she could get advice from the captain, but she knew what he would tell her. Until they had Nyb Pim back in the pilot’s chair, they didn’t have much choice but to backtrack toward the Gryphon Shoals. Seemed to be the only place Capp could reliably get them that wasn’t swarming with Royal Navy.

About an hour later, Tolvern got word from medical that Drake was under light sedation in his own quarters, sleeping off his concussion. Tolvern had been awake for almost twenty hours now. Under normal rotation, she’d be midway through her sleep shift. In fact, getting herself some rest would be not only desirable, but expedient. Hard to say how long until the captain returned, and they needed someone fresh at the helm. Maybe she could grab a few hours as they made a straight line toward the jump point.

But who could she leave the bridge to? Smythe was fresher, only midway into his shift, but he was a tech officer in every sense of the word; if it wasn’t computer related, he didn’t know what to make of it. She could call Barker again, see if he had anyone else to spare, but she could only imagine his tone of voice.

She turned her gaze to Capp, who had picked up the cigar and was chewing on the end while she thumbed through the nav computer with her eyes half-closed. No, don’t even think of it.

So Tolvern settled into the captain’s chair with a suppressed sigh. Nothing was happening on the viewscreen, so she queried Jane to ask about the shields. The answer was not pretty.

She was running through scenarios in her head of what they would do if they approached the jump point to find a couple of navy corvettes lurking, when Jane picked up a message sent via the coded Royal Navy subspace channel.

Supposedly, Jane always spoke in the same tone whether she was relaying what was for supper in the mess or warning of pending core meltdown, but Tolvern swore she could hear all manner of emotions in the computer’s voice. This time, Jane sounded skeptical as she relayed the message.

“Captain and crew of HMS Ajax, return to Albion and surrender and you will be granted a full pardon.”

Chapter Nine

Drake woke to his com link chiming from the bedside table. At first, it seemed like a part of his dream, in which he was on the deck of Ajax, giving battle orders. Only at the same time, in that strange way of dreams, the ship wasn’t Ajax, it was a seagoing vessel, a quaint Old Earth-style aircraft carrier. They were being attacked by war planes of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and Jane’s computerized voice kept warning him that a wave of kamikazes was inbound.

“Captain? Are you there? Captain?”

Only gradually did he come awake, and even more gradually did he realize it wasn’t Jane’s voice he was hearing, but Commander Tolvern’s. Why was he so groggy? Oh, yes. The concussion, the sedation.

He reached for the com link. “Yeah, what is it?”

“Can I come in?”

As soon as he sat up, the room sensed his movement, and a cool blue light suffused his cabin, just bright enough to see its general outlines. During the bombardment, the doors to his cupboards had been knocked open, and his books had come spilling out. He hadn’t bothered to pick them up; he’d barely managed to strip out of his clothes and toss them to the floor as he collapsed into bed.

“Open,” he said.

The door to his room slid open, and a blinding light came in from the hall. He squinted until the door had closed. Tolvern stood silhouetted near the doorway.

“Problem?”

“Many problems,” she said. “But mainly, you’d been asleep for some time, and Doc told me to check on you.”

The wall display read 0412 hours. Good heavens, how long had he slept? Eleven hours? He hadn’t set an alarm, but couldn’t remember the last time he’d needed to. He kept his body under the same discipline as the ship, and normally found himself waking between six and seven hours after he crawled into bed, regardless of how tired he was. That must have been strong stuff the doctor had given him.

He tossed off the blanket and grabbed for his trousers, which were located at the foot of his bed where he’d tossed them. By the time the lights finished coming up, he had an undershirt on, too.

Tolvern looked around the room, a half smile at her lips. “What a pig sty. How do you live in such filth?”

“Funny girl,” he said, wincing as he bent to grab some headphones and stick them in a drawer.

Together, they picked up the books that had been knocked out of his shelves by Vigilant’s guns. In a moment, they had everything straightened up.

His room was small by land standards, but of course it was still the largest quarters on the ship. He had his own bathroom, a small kitchen so he didn’t have to eat all his meals in the officers’ mess, and a small nook for reading that also boasted a great audio system on which he listened to classical music, Bach and Judas Priest being his favorites of the old masters.

But it was such a small space that even a single item out of place made it feel cluttered and unlivable. It was only a sanctuary from daily life on the ship if he kept it spotless.

He’d been to Tolvern’s room once, and that was two years earlier, during a rare lull in the war, when they’d been able to celebrate Twelfth Night like civilians. Tolvern had acted as captain, and he’d played her cabin boy. He appeared dutifully at her door to escort her to the bridge. She’d cracked the door just enough to slip through sideways. But he’d caught a glimpse inside. Dirty clothes and dishes everywhere. Drawers hung out, the bed was unmade and askew in the room, and pictures of her parents, nieces and nephews, and the family dog had been tacked haphazardly to the walls. Half-read books lay spine up on her little desk.

“Captain Tolvern,” he’d said in a tone of faux concern, “have you called the MP? It seems you were robbed during the night.”

Now he looked her over more closely. Her eyes were red, with bags beneath them, and her hair was mussed, and her uniform crumpled. One of the buttons of her vest was undone, and she had what looked like a grease stain on her pant leg, as if she’d eaten standing at the computer instead of in the mess.

“You should have called me earlier. You must be fifteen hours over your shift.”

“Eighteen and a half,” she said. “I don’t dare leave the bridge for more than twenty minutes. Afraid I’ll come back to find a new regime in place.”

“The problem with mutiny,” Drake said, “is that when you’ve finished you’re left with a crew of mutineers.”

She grimaced. “It’s not the mutineers. Corporal Capp and the other prisoners worry me more. Her lover, that fellow Carvalho—I swear he’s a pirate, or I don’t know the meaning of the word.”

He cast a glance toward the bathroom, needing a hot shower, followed by several cups of even hotter tea. When he glanced back, Tolvern was stifling a huge yawn. The tea could wait, he decided.

“Give me five minutes,” he said. “Then you can brief me in the war room before I send you down. No, better yet. Come talk to me while I get cleaned up.”

He went into the bathroom and turned the water to maximum heat in the hope that it would cut his headache, which was starting to return. Tolvern stood outside the bathroom while he showered, shouting in to him what had occurred since the doctor drugged him up.

While still in the Barsa system, she’d received a message offering amnesty if Drake and his crew would surrender to the Royal Navy. She’d ignored the request, figuring that it was a trick, and continued to the jump point.

They’d jumped to Fantalus, a system whose binary stars left its planets alternately boiling or frigid and which was therefore uninhabited except for a few easily avoided outposts. They were now racing toward the next jump, on their way back to the Gryphon Shoals. Tolvern didn’t know where else to take them. Until they had their pilot back, they were stuck with what Capp could do, which was very little. Tolvern figured that they might be able to find someone to finish their repairs in the shoals.

That was unlikely, Drake thought, though he didn’t say this aloud. From what Tolvern reported about their damage, he figured they’d need at least a week in the yards and about twenty thousand pounds to complete the repairs. This was a military vessel; they had no money on board except what pocket change could be found in possession of the crew. Drake thought he might have a few guineas and a couple of half crowns, and doubted anyone else would do much better.

Anyway, the operations in the Gryphon Shoals were small-time. Ajax needed major shipbuilding prowess. And that meant Nyb Pim in the pilot’s chair.

Unfortunately, the news wasn’t good for the Hroom pilot. He’d only been an eater for a few weeks, and Drake had been under the impression that the relationship between Hroom addiction and detox proceeded in a non-linear fashion. A Hroom who’d been an eater for five years might need a decade to recover, but a Hroom who’d only been on the sugar a few weeks might only need a few days. If that. The pilot should already be pulling out of it.

Drake told her this as he grabbed his towel and climbed out of the shower. He looked up from pulling on his underwear to see Tolvern casting a surreptitious glance at him from where she stood outside the bathroom. She met his gaze and looked away, blushing.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Doc checked me out. Nothing else broken.”

“What? Oh. Well, I was wondering,” she added quickly. “You slept long enough. But now that I’ve had a good look, you seem healthy enough. A few bruises.”

“My apologies, Commander. I meant to get up earlier, I really did.”

“Anyway,” she continued as he came into the front room and grabbed his socks and shoes, “I’m wondering if someone is still feeding him sugar.”

He gave her a sharp look. “What do you mean?”

She told how she’d caught Carvalho and one of the other prisoners, a man she’d since discovered was named Lutz, standing outside the isolation cells, scheming.

“I went back down a couple of hours later to see if Nyb Pim would be more reasonable, or if he’d try to attack me again. He was twitching in the corner. Wouldn’t respond.”

“Sugar swoon?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe that’s a symptom of withdrawal. I asked Doc—he said either was possible.”

“So you’re thinking they got to Nyb Pim, told him they’d bring him sugar if he . . . what, exactly?”

She shrugged. “Nyb Pim might have promised all sorts of stuff to get his fix. Maybe he can deliver, maybe not. Smythe was able to pull up info on Carvalho. He was arrested for selling military supplies to civilians on the black market. This seems like something he’d do.”

“We’ll soon put an end to it.”

“I already did. Lutz and Carvalho are in the brig. Took them at gunpoint myself.”

That was a problem. On the one hand, Drake was furious that the two men would be undermining his attempts to get their pilot out of isolation and back where he belonged. Some captains—Rutherford came to mind—would have grabbed the man, had him whipped and his possessions searched. Then dumped him out the airlock if anything turned up. Maybe in the heat of battle, Drake would have done the same thing. But now was not the heat of battle. Now he was short-handed.

“What about Capp?” he asked.

Tolvern looked proud of herself. “I waited until she was off shift and asleep in her quarters before arresting her friend. She’ll be up soon, though. I imagine we’ll need to massage things. Carvalho is pretty mad. Lutz actually threatened me.”

“We might need to release them.”

“What? No. Captain—”

“It’s a delicate situation. We barely have crew enough to fly. Capp might be Carvalho’s lover. Imagine if she refuses to navigate. We’re suddenly drifting helplessly through space with no way to jump.”

She jutted out her chin. “We’ll find a way.”

“The Fantalus system is as good as uninhabited. The closest settlement is five light years away. The plasma engines top out at twelve percent light speed. I suppose we could send out a subspace distress signal and wait to see who shows up, but I doubt we’d like the result.”

“And you think letting them go is the answer? I know what I saw.”

“Then there are the other prisoners. What are they going to think if we throw their mates in the brig based on a suspicion?”

“The devil take them all. Sooner we dump these villains, the better.”

“Agreed,” he said. “But until then, we’ve got to work with the crew we’ve been given.”

He didn’t point out, though he’d been thinking it more or less continuously since the mutiny, that Tolvern’s rash decision was the cause of this entire mess. If she’d done her duty, obeyed orders no matter where in the fleet they’d sent her, they wouldn’t be running for their lives with a bare-bones crew with poor discipline and suspect loyalties.

Except Drake was no longer certain the mutiny was a mistake. Well, Tolvern’s motives were certainly mistaken. But some curious things had turned up. What had happened to Nyb Pim was chief among his concerns, but he was also wondering why Rutherford had broken pursuit to go back and rescue the slaver. Drake had made the suggestion himself, but he hadn’t expected the man to take the bait. In fact, he’d been fully prepared to surrender so as to save all those humans and Hroom. Did Rutherford truly break off to rescue the crippled ship, or did he break off out of sympathy for his old friend? Drake couldn’t decide.

And then there was the curious message offering a pardon if Ajax surrendered.

Why would they do that? A trick to recover the cruiser, as Tolvern suggested? Surely Admiral Malthorne would never do such a thing. The man’s pride wouldn’t allow it, for one. For another, both Malthorne and Rutherford would know that Drake would recognize a bluff when he saw it. Discipline was so precarious in the lonely depths of space that mutiny must be put down with all violence. They would never offer amnesty, unless . . .

What if there had been something, or someone, on the slaver of critical importance? And now they thought he had it.

He needed to speak to Nyb Pim. And he couldn’t do that until he had the man detoxed. And that meant imposing discipline on his broken, rebellious crew.

Drake buttoned his jacket and told Jane to open all channels. Tolvern gave him a curious look.

“This is Captain Drake speaking. All hands are to report at once for a ship-wide meeting. If you are currently bleeding from a chest wound or your finger on the button is the only thing preventing an engine meltdown, you may hail me with your excuse. Otherwise, you will appear on the bridge by 0445. Refusal of this order will be considered mutiny and treated accordingly.” He ended the transmission.

To Tolvern, he added, “Release the prisoners.”

Chapter Ten

Drake stood in the center of the bridge with his hands clasped behind his back. The last person in the room was Carvalho, who wore a deep, angry scowl. He shot a poisonous glare at Tolvern, then cast a glance at Capp, who sat at the blacked-out nav computer, rotating her chair on its pivot and scratching idly at her lion tattoos. Barker stood near the door, by one of the boatswains and a young engineer. He had a computer in his palm, and he was surreptitiously glancing at it, seemingly unable to turn away from the repairs for even an instant. Smythe was doing the same over at his console, but for all Drake knew, the tech officer was playing Romans vs. Soviets again. Even the cook wore a sauce-splattered apron and carried a ladle in hand, as if to make his own point about how critical his work was.

Tolvern leaned against a cart she had wheeled in from the mess hall, and a few people pointed at it and whispered. Others were chatting idly amongst themselves, paying no attention to anyone or anything but their own petty concerns.

The lack of discipline had infected the entire crew. That would change now.

Drake pulled up a viewscreen. Nothing but deep space, an unfamiliar swath of bright, cold stars. Red, blue, yellow, orange. A glowing white shroud sliced along the y-axis from their point of view, and to starboard lay the bruised purple smear of a vast nebula, like a royal cloak covered with glowing diamonds and rubies.

“Thirty-seven hours until the next jump,” he said. Most people stopped talking, but a few whispered conversations continued. “In total, we’re three days’ travel from the nearest planet with a breathable atmosphere.”

He drew his gun and pointed it at Corporal Capp. The conversation died. Capp stiffened and stopped swiveling in the pilot’s chair.

“If I shoot the corporal, we won’t be able to find the jump point.” He pointed the gun at Barker. “If I kill the chief engineer, the damaged engines will melt down.”

Drake slid the gun back into its holster. He walked to his chair and sat down, then turned it to face them. He brought up his computer. “If I initiate certain emergency protocols, our atmosphere will vent out. Right there you have three people standing between you and death. But it goes deeper than that. Anyone in this room could kill himself and all of us. Push the wrong button, lean against an armed torpedo tube when it’s closed . . . we’re all gone.”

This was a bit of hyperbole; there were safeguards against random mental breakdowns and general dumbfoolery. But he had their attention now.

“And if that isn’t enough,” he continued, “the might of the Royal Navy has turned its attention to us. They will blow us straight to hell if they can. One careless subspace message, and we might pop out of a jump point to find Dreadnought herself waiting to devour us.”

He gestured at the viewscreen, and all eyes went to it. “That’s the void. There’s nothing out there but empty space. People seem to forget that. Carelessness, lack of discipline—we’re one false move from dying at any moment.” He nodded at Tolvern.

On his insistence, she’d gone back to her room to change her jacket and brush her hair and had come back gulping hot tea. She hardly looked fresh or well rested, but she’d managed to feign something approaching alertness. Now she cast a glare across the room.

“Some of you don’t seem to know your positions,” Tolvern said. “And circumstances have forced changes in other areas. So that there can be no doubt, let us review them now.” She glanced at her hand computer. “Chief Gunner Barker, you are now head of engineering as well. Oglethorpe has a brevet to sublieutenant, and you may assign him duties as you see fit. Manx . . .”

She went through the list. The cook was now alone, as was Doc in medical. Nurses and assistant cooks were placed, temporarily at least, in more critical roles. Carvalho went to engineering, something mechanical that kept him away from critical systems. His fellow schemer Lutz would work with the boatswains on a shift schedule that kept the two men from overlapping their down time. Carvalho’s lover, Corporal Capp, would stay on the bridge where the officers could keep an eye on her. Drake had more information on that score, but Tolvern didn’t reveal that yet.

“Are there any questions?” Drake asked.

Capp waved her hand. “Yeah, Cap’n. I got one.”

“Stand up when you address your captain,” Tolvern snapped.

Capp rose from the chair. “Excuse me, Commander Tolvern.” Too much emphasis on that last part to be sincere. Capp looked back to the captain. “Do we have any sort of plan, Captain? Or are we just playing at navy discipline here? They ain’t gonna let us back in because we start salutin’ and wearing our uniforms all pressed and nice.”

“I’m glad you asked that,” Drake said. “We need repairs beyond what we can manage in transit. That means putting into a yard. Ideally, this would be a naval yard, but since that is impossible, it means going to one of the Ladino worlds or maybe a New Dutch port, outside the control of the kingdom. It’s likely to mean some nonstandard tech.”

Some of the more alert sorts, including both Capp and Carvalho, but also Barker, Smythe, and several others of the original crew, passed looks among themselves. How would they pay for such a thing? And why would they be cobbling on foreign tech if they didn’t mean to keep flying around the sector away from the fleet? No doubt many of them had already discussed these doubts privately.

He didn’t have answers yet, so before anyone could voice these questions, he pressed on.

“Corporal Capp, you’ve done well navigating us this far,” he said. “I see no reason why the navy refused your attempts to become a pilot.”

Capp’s eyes widened, and for the first time the slouch left her posture.

“But you have a good deal to learn. You’re being promoted to subpilot and brevetted to an officer—ensign, level two. You will train under Nyb Pim when he returns to the bridge.”

“But he’s an eater. How am I supposed to—?”

“He’s not an eater. Someone trapped him, and I’m going to find out who. Meanwhile, he’s going through detox. Commander?” Drake nodded at Tolvern again.

She opened the cart and took out several sacks of sugar, containing about ten pounds each, together with a box containing sugar packets. The cook said this was all he had in the kitchen. It had been under lock and key; there were Hroom in the fleet, after all, and plenty of sugar smuggling.

Tolvern carried the sugar to the incinerator. The sacks were too big for the little chute on the bridge, so she tore them open and poured the sugar down it. Then she emptied the packets into the incinerator as well.

“Naval regs prevent sugar being held privately,” Drake said as she worked, “but I’m declaring an amnesty through the end of today. Turn it in to Commander Tolvern, and there will be no consequences.”

“No sugar at all?” someone grumbled. “Not even in the kitchen?”

“The only Hroom on board is in the bloody isolation cell,” someone else said.

“We’ve got a little honey on board,” Drake said. “Not much. We’ll save it to sweeten tea. Cook tells me it will last about a week if rationed.” Several people grumbled or scowled at this.

“If I hear so much as a hint that someone has a secret stash, figuring ‘what’s the harm, it’s not like I’m going to do anything bad with the stuff,’ the next step will be to put every last bit of tea on board down the incinerator. I’m as Albionish as anyone here. If I have to give up my tea, I will be very cranky. Heads will roll.

“As for the disgusting idea that someone might be giving sugar to our pilot, let me say this. First, there will be a guard posted at all times. Unauthorized contact with Nyb Pim is prohibited. If anyone is caught trying to pass sugar to Nyb Pim, that person will be summarily executed. Am I understood?”

“Nobody asked to be on this ship,” Carvalho spoke up. “You ever think about that? I wasn’t even in the navy. I was on a trade ship and hauled in because my captain was passing contraband. I didn’t know nothing about it.”

“You are free to leave at any time,” Drake said. “We have an away pod. I can fire you off and you can see if anyone responds to your distress call. You and any other malcontents. I’ll strap you in myself, if that’s what you want.”

“So, death or slavery. That’s the choice you’re offering?”

“Obey orders, and I’ll leave you at the first safe port. It’s likely to be a Ladino world. Then you can do whatever you’d like. Until then, I will have discipline on this ship.”

Tolvern had finished dumping the sugar and now came to confront Carvalho where he stood. “Can you do that, Carvalho, or should I return you to the brig?”

He stared at her a long moment, his expression hard. “Fine.”

“Good,” Drake said. “You’re all dismissed. We have a lot of work to do. Corporal—I mean, Ensign—Capp, we seem to have drifted. Get us back on course.”

“Aye, Captain,” she said, and there was real energy in her voice.

She didn’t look at Carvalho, which was precisely Drake’s intent. He needed her until he had Nyb Pim back. He didn’t have much use for Carvalho.

The rest of them filed out. Drake took Tolvern by the arm as she made her way to her computer. “You, Commander, are off duty.”

“I thought I’d check the security system down by the isolation cells, make sure the cameras are active, and verify that Nyb Pim is still locked up. Then, I told Barker I’d meet with him about the engine. He has a possible fix he wants to run by me.”

“You are off duty.”

“But, Captain—”

“Commander,” he said, voice firm. “I’ll see you again at 1300. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.” In spite of her earlier protest, there was real relief in her voice.

As she disappeared from the bridge, he thought about his crew. All commoners. Even the ship doctor, a profession normally derived from the better sorts of society, was not from Drake’s class. The man hadn’t grown up on Albion but one of the outer colonies.

Never mind the prisoners—even considering what remained of Ajax’s original crew raised questions. Tolvern had sent off anyone who wouldn’t participate in the mutiny. It was no coincidence that the people who’d left were of a generally higher quality than those who had stayed. That was, if one only considered their station in life.

The ones who stayed are the loyal ones.

Drake pushed this thought out of his head and made his way to his captain’s chair. He waited until Capp glanced in his direction.

“Did you say you know a closer jump point than the one that will take us back toward the Shoals?”

“Aye, Cap’n. Fourteen hours closer.”

“Roughly a day’s journey?”

“Twenty-three hours, yeah.” She looked a little nervous. “Can’t say as I’d recommend it.”

“There’s a star, is that right?”

“Aye. You’re in the grav well of a star. You gotta pivot, accelerate, and execute another jump in less than two hours. Tough to do when you’re fighting the trips.”

“I think I’ve done this jump. A red dwarf, isn’t it? It’s murder going through two jumps back to back like that, but the jump itself didn’t seem too technically difficult.”

“Thing is,” she said, swallowing hard, her typical bravado missing, “I only seen it done once, and I wasn’t the pilot.”

“I only saw it done once, too,” he said. “We were jumping to San Pablo. You know the world? Hroom on one continent, humans on the other. Mostly Ladino and Dutch.”

“Yeah, I spent a week in the port. Rough place.”

“Good spaceyards though. And it’s on the frontier, which means the Albion fleet can’t enter, according to the treaty. Can you make the jump?”

“I-I don’t know the angle. And that close to the star, there’s some funny gravity effects. The jump point wobbles. If we mess up, if I come out of the first jump in a bad way . . . ”

“I have faith in you, Pilot.”

“Thing is, I’m not really a pilot. You said I could train.”

“Yes, and you will. In fact, I don’t intend for you to execute this jump alone. I’ve got a full day—”

“Technically, twenty-three hours.”

“Plus a couple of hours from the first jump to the second. More than a day, in fact. Nyb Pim hasn’t been an eater for long, so if we can keep him from the sugar . . . What do you know about that? Anyone feeding him?”

“Don’t know what you mean. I didn’t have nothing to do with that.” She seemed to catch herself, and added, belatedly, “I mean, sir.”

“But you might know someone who did. Someone feeding him sugar. Someone who might still do it. Maybe you could put out the word. We’re going to do a jump that might tear us into individual atoms if we don’t get it right. It would be helpful to have our pilot off the sugar by then.”

Barring that, he wondered if he should have kept back a bit of sugar, just in case. The only thing worse than an eater piloting your ship was an eater on withdrawal doing it. Give the Hroom some sugar, wait for the swoon to pass, then sit him in the chair and hope he had enough functioning brain cells to do the job.

No choice now; Drake had made the decision. There might not be another grain left on board. If there were, he hoped it was getting dumped quietly down the incinerator at this very moment.

“I don’t know nobody who gave him sugar,” Capp said. “But just in case, I’ll put out the word. Never hurts for people to know what’s serious, if you know what I mean.”

He’d already declared that anyone passing sugar to Nyb Pim would be summarily executed. Would it really take word from Capp before anyone took that seriously? If so, who was really in charge of this ship?

Chapter Eleven

Ten hours after Drake sent her from the bridge, Tolvern felt almost human again as she joined her captain at the front of the isolation block. The guard shifted his shotgun to one shoulder and saluted with his free hand.

“Any trouble?” Tolvern asked.

“No, ma’am. He was raving pretty good last night, but a few hours ago, we passed in food, and he ate it. Even pushed the bowl and plate back through the chute.”

“That’s good news,” she said. “What did he have?”

“Hot oatmeal, two raw eggs—usual Hroom breakfast.”

“And he ate it all?” she asked, surprised.

“Every last bit. Even asked for more, but Doc said he shouldn’t overdo it since he hasn’t been eating for so long.”

“What do you think about that?” Tolvern said to Drake as the two of them walked to the cell with the green light over the door. “That’s a good sign, right, Captain? I think he’s going to pull out of it.”

“You’re chipper this morning,” he said.

“Feeling great. Nobody is trying to kill me, for one.”

“You just got on shift. Give it a few minutes.”

“Ha!”

It wasn’t the relative safety of their current position that had improved her mood so much as the nine glorious hours of sleep. She’d followed them with a scalding shower and a full breakfast of scrambled eggs, buttered toast, sausage, and fried tomatoes, washed down with an entire pot of tea. Over the past few days she’d been feeling more and more glum, worried that she’d made a terrible, life-ending mistake in seizing Ajax from Rutherford to free her captain. But this morning, she was more convinced than ever that Drake had been innocent all along, that he had enemies who had framed him. He would be exonerated soon enough.

Drake cupped his hands at the window then stepped aside to let her have a look. She peered into the cell.

Nyb Pim sat on the floor facing the corner opposite his cot, his knees tucked to his chest. He’d finally stripped out of the rags they’d found him in on the slave ship and put on the pair of trousers. There was a shirt, too, but it sat on the floor, and the Hroom was bare from the waist up, his back to them.

He didn’t have the faded pink color of a eater, nor that starved, rib-showing look like the Hroom she’d seen on the bridge of Henry Upton. But there was something disturbing about the way he sat there, motionless. While she watched, a shiver worked itself down his spine, and turned into a shudder as it hit his limbs.

She stepped away from the window and reached out to open the door. “Better stand back, sir. Just in case.”

“You don’t have to tell me. My head is still aching from last time.”

The captain had come armed not with his standard side arm, but with a stun gun at his hip. He now unlatched the holster and flicked on the gun. It whirred to life.

Tolvern put her hand on the pad, and the door slid open. Nyb Pim didn’t turn.

“Pilot,” Drake said. He took the first step into the room, and Tolvern had a hard time not grabbing his shoulder to pull him back to safety. “Lieutenant Nyb Pim, it’s me, your captain.”

The Hroom’s high, melodic voice had a hollow sound to it. “Did you bring sugar?”

“There will be no more sugar, Pilot. We dumped it down the incinerator. There isn’t a grain left on the ship.”

A hoot, which passed for a laugh, came from the Hroom. “Or so you think.”

Tolvern now came in. She’d undone the strap on her own weapon. This one was loaded with bullets, and she was prepared to shoot if necessary.

“We know about Carvalho and Lutz,” she said. “Captain said anyone caught passing you sugar would be killed. Guess that did it for them. Lutz handed over two pounds of the stuff.”

“Two pounds.” There was something sinister in the Hroom’s tone, and his body tensed.

“Don’t even think about it,” she warned. “That crap went down the incinerator with the rest of it. This ship is clean.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Nevertheless, Nyb Pim’s body relaxed. He still had his long legs drawn to his chest, his back turned.

“How are you feeling?” Drake asked. “Can we trust you?”

Another hooting laugh. It shortly died. Nobody spoke for a long moment. Tolvern was beginning to think they should give it another day or so, except Drake had already changed course, and they were going toward the jump point that would bring them out within the gravity well of a red dwarf. They didn’t have time to straighten this out, they needed the pilot to snap out of it in a hurry.

“They always tell you,” Nyb Pim said after a moment, “one taste on the tongue, that’s all it takes. You hear it, you see the fools who’ve sold their souls into slavery, who have degraded our ancient and glorious civilization and everything it stood for. But you tell yourself that this may be true for the weak willed, not for you.”

“So that’s why you did it?” Tolvern asked. How could he have done something so stupid? He’d always been the most sensible person on the ship save the captain. “To prove you were different?”

“I wasn’t so deluded as that. My brother became an eater, together with most of my village. My parents, too. I saw what it could do when I was still a Hroomling. Once my family was destroyed, they shipped me off with human missionaries who never let me near the stuff.”

“That’s exactly what I thought,” Drake said, sounding relieved. “I knew you must have been tricked somehow.”

For her part, Tolvern was more confused than ever. “But how is it that you didn’t recognize what was happening? It’s only pure white sugar that does it. Mix it with something, even dissolve it in water, and sucrose is no more dangerous than any other sweet substance. It’s only the pure stuff that sets you off, so how did you possibly put some in your mouth without knowing?”

“And when you did,” Drake added, “why didn’t you go straight to the sick bay for treatment? You must have recognized what was happening the instant it hit your tongue. You must have known you’d been poisoned.”

“I wasn’t poisoned.”

“You know what he means,” Tolvern said. “Same thing, isn’t it? You were a pilot of a Royal Navy cruiser before you tasted it. A few days later, you were a slave.”

“I wasn’t poisoned,” Nyb Pim insisted, “because I ate the sugar of my own free volition.”

“What?” The word exploded from her mouth. “King’s balls, why would you do such a thing?”

“And I did so knowing slavery would be the result. Indeed, that was my intent all along.”

The captain looked stunned.

“Are you mad?” Tolvern said.

“It’s a curious thing,” Nyb Pim said. “They have slaves to work the sugar worlds. Millions of them, and millions more needed. A place like Hot Barsa is too steamy, too tropical. Riddled with disease. Humans die. Hroom die, too, but we’re expendable. They can always ship in more. They need so many of us because the demand for sugar is endless. The more sugar they ship, the more slaves they need. The more Hroom that become enslaved, the more sugar they need. An endless circle, like a snake biting its own tail.”

“Why did you do this to yourself?” the captain asked.

“I didn’t set out to. I set out to prove you innocent. I got into the computer, sure that whoever destroyed that York Company clipper was the culprit, that you had been framed.”

“Yeah, we all figured that,” Tolvern said.

Nyb Pim unfolded himself from the floor. She braced herself for another charge like the one yesterday, but this time he moved shakily to the cot. His limbs were trembling, and he closed his big, liquid eyes for a long moment as if fighting a bout of vertigo. He opened his eyes again.

“But we all assumed it had been an accident,” Nyb Pim continued. “That some other captain had mistakenly destroyed the company ship and cast about for someone to blame. I found archival footage of the battle, before it was doctored to show Ajax doing the attack. It was clear that the attack was intentional. The clipper tried to surrender.”

“Who did it?” Drake asked.

“A small, unmarked pirate ship carrying Royal Navy ordnance.”

Tolvern was growing excited at this. Something was rotten in the navy. They weren’t in mutiny so much as trying to track down illegal behavior within the fleet. As soon as Malthorne knew the truth, they would be vindicated. If the lord admiral wouldn’t act, Drake could take matters straight to the king.

“The pirate ship sent a boarding party,” the pilot continued. “They removed something from the merchant ship. Upon their return, they ordered the clipper to stand by with shields down, and then they fired a full broadside. There were no survivors.”

Drake cocked his head in that distinctive way that said he was getting something through the com link tucked into his ear. After a moment, he turned to Tolvern. “We’re needed on the bridge. There’s another ship.”

Her pulse quickened at this. She glanced at Nyb Pim then back to the captain. “What about him?”

“We’re approaching a jump point,” Drake said to the Hroom. “Things get tricky after the jump. I could sure use you on the bridge.”

Nyb Pim was still sitting on the edge of the cot, and now grabbed for his shirt. He looked toward the still-open door that led to the corridor as he unfolded the shirt. But then he stopped and set the shirt back down.

“It’s not safe, Captain.”

“Are you a threat?” Drake asked, his tone measured.

“I thought about getting back to the chair, and then I thought about certain crew members who’d slipped me sugar earlier. And I started thinking about how I’d get to them.”

“I knew it,” Tolvern said, face flushing. “What did I tell you, Captain? Was it Carvalho and Lutz?” she asked the Hroom.

“Time enough for that later,” Drake said. “Stay here for now,” he told Nyb Pim. “But we’re coming up on the jump point. Meditate, pray to your gods—whatever it takes. I need you with me, and I need you clean and sober.”

He grabbed Tolvern, and the two of them backed into the corridor and closed the door to the cell. She followed the captain past the guard, reluctant to leave, even under imminent threat. More questions now than ever.

What the devil had been on that merchant clipper? It had been flying under the Albion lions; it was a high crime to disturb her passage, let alone destroy her with all hands lost. Then, to pin her destruction on Captain Drake? And whatever Nyb Pim had learned made him become an eater of his own free will? That made no sense.

They had more immediate concerns as they reached the bridge. Smythe sat at his computer, hands flying over the controls and occasionally tapping the screen as he brought up various images. Capp paced back and forth in front of the pilot’s chair, rubbing her hands together.

“You see!” Capp cried when she spotted them. She pointed at the viewscreen.

A dark, shadowy form slid across the screen, its outline blurred and shifting, as the long-range sensors attempted to pull it into focus. It was still a million miles away, but it had the profile of a warship.

“Calm down,” Drake told the young woman as he took his place in the captain’s chair. “It’s flying away from us at the moment, not engaging. No doubt it’s on its way to the same jump point as we are.”

“Jane,” Tolvern said, taking her own seat next to him. “Give us the specs.”

Jane’s cool, clear voice came through. “Ship identification unknown. Unregistered. Hull is a heavy frigate, provenance New Dutch, Van Dyke class with deck and hull modifications. Engine signature Ladino. Weapons detected: six torpedo tubes in Mark IV array, three kinetic cannons, these being roughly—”

“Enough,” Drake interrupted. “We get the gist.”

Indeed. New Dutch hull with Ladino engines. Torpedo tubes in a Royal Navy configuration, but a nonstandard number of cannon. And it was hauling toward the same, chancy jump point out of the system. Nothing legit, but this was no small-scale smuggler, either. This was a pirate frigate.

“What do you think, Commander?” Drake asked Tolvern. “Coincidence? I didn’t expect to run into someone way out here beyond Fantalus’s gas giants.”

“Yes, I think coincidence,” she said. “On their way out of the system after doing . . . well, whatever ugly business they were about. If we were any smaller, they’d turn on us, but they’d be a fool to tangle with a cruiser of our size and strength.”

“We could ignore her. Hold back, let her make the jump, then come in after her.”

“By now they’ve identified our ship class at least,” Tolvern said. “And if the pirates don’t know we’re outlaws ourselves, they’ll be pissing themselves trying to get to that jump point in time.”

“I’ve got it!” Smythe exclaimed, looking up from his computer. “It’s the Captain Kidd. Plasma signature matches exactly.”

Captain Kidd? That didn’t mean anything to Tolvern except as the name of the Old Earth pirate. But Ajax hadn’t been in the position of hunting down pirate ships. They’d been off warring against real enemies for the past two years.

“Fairly notorious,” Drake said. He apparently knew more than she did. “Captain Kidd mixed it up with HMS Richmond last year. Richmond got the worst of it.”

Tolvern didn’t think much of Richmond or her crew, but it showed that this pirate ship wasn’t afraid to tackle solitary ships of the Royal Navy. She’d have relished the thought of bagging the prize under other circumstances. But after the mauling at the hands of Vigilant a couple of days earlier, she was no longer so confident. What if the pirates weren’t pissing themselves, but preparing to circle around and give battle? What would Ajax be worth? She’d make a terrific pirate ship in the wrong hands. Surely the pirate captain wouldn’t be so foolish as to make the attempt.

“Tolvern?” Drake said.

“I hate to linger in the system,” she said. “For all we know, Vigilant spotted us jumping out of Barsa and came after us. And if Rutherford has called for reinforcements, we might be facing a full task force in a day or two.”

“We’re not exactly ready for battle against the pirates, either,” he said. “Are there any other jump points we can find in the system?”

“We can’t let the pirates get away,” Capp said, her voice high and excited. “What if they’ve heard of us? They’d sell us out to the fleet, you know they would.”

That was one more good point, Tolvern conceded, even as she was irritated that the subpilot was speaking out of place.

“That only matters if we stay in the system,” Drake said. “Once we’re gone, it doesn’t matter if we’ve been identified or not.”

“Captain Kidd is accelerating,” Smythe said.

“What’s her jump speed at estimated mass?” Tolvern asked.

“Point-oh-eight-two, plus or minus a thousand.”

“Slower than us, sir,” she told the captain.

That was a chancy assumption. The speed needed to jump through space was a function of the mass and shape of the ship and how tight or loose the jump point itself was. It was not altogether linear, and of course, there were other factors involved than jump speed in how one might select engine power. A pirate ship might have larger-than-required engines so that it could outrun other vessels, either to overtake them in attack or flee when overmatched. But Ajax had been built with similar considerations.

“Bring us up to point-oh-six,” Drake said. “Let’s see what Captain Kidd does.”

Tolvern thumbed the command on her console. Moments later, Barker called up from the engine rooms, as she’d known he would, demanding to know why she’d called for more power to the engines. They were still a long way out from the jump. She told him the situation. He grumbled at this.

“Put Barker on the bridge channel,” Drake said.

She obeyed. The engineer’s gravely voice came through for the others to hear.

“Captain, you there? I don’t care for the thought of another fight so soon, and I’m not afraid to say it.”

“Explain yourself, Barker,” Drake said.

“Don’t need much explaining. Shields won’t stand the abuse, and I could use about ten more crew down here for the weapons systems.”

“We’re not fighting Vigilant,” Drake said. “It’s a pirate ship.”

Barker grunted. “I know it. And if this were Vigilant, I’d say it was suicide, but pirates or no, I don’t care for it one bit.”

“So we’re incapable of fighting?” Drake asked. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

Now Barker sounded more hesitant. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

“We need your exact status,” Tolvern said. She understood that the captain appreciated an unvarnished opinion, but the engineer’s equivocating grated on her. “Can you fight or not?”

Barker grunted. “Well, guns are back on their carriages, and we have sufficient ordnance for a fight so long as it doesn’t carry on too long. Responses will be sluggish, given how we’re undermanned.”

“We’re a million miles out,” Drake said. “There’s a bit of time yet. But get your men and women out of bed. Anyone you need. I want you on full standby in ten minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There’s another consideration,” Tolvern told the captain when Barker was offline. “We’ve been racing around for a couple weeks now without putting into port. The scoops have been collecting hydrogen while we’re at cruising speed, but it hasn’t replaced more than fifteen percent of what we’re burning. We accelerate to jump speed now, and we might be running on fumes in a few days.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that possibility,” Drake said. “We might come limping into San Pablo.”

“Captain Kidd is accelerating,” Smythe said. “She’s trying to outrun us.”

“Just what I thought,” Drake said with a smile.

There was something cunning in that smile, and Tolvern suddenly knew that she wasn’t privy to all his thoughts. He was scheming. That he had any sort of plan at all gave her renewed hope.

“Hail the ship,” Drake said. “I have a proposal to put to our pirate friends.”

Chapter Twelve

Captain Nigel Rutherford took Vigilant down through Albion’s atmosphere. The ship shuddered and bucked like an unbroken horse with a rider on its back. He stared out the window at the surface as it came rushing up. The continent of Britain peeled away from Australia, and soon he could see mountains, lakes, and rivers resolving themselves. Finally, the wide, fertile York Plain, golden with autumn wheat from horizon to horizon.

The plain ended at Lake Huron, the nearest of the Great Lakes. It was daytime, and there was cloud cover to the east, so he didn’t immediately pick out York Town. Then he saw the skyscrapers of the Kingdom Towers in the center of the city, the downtown area curving in an arc along the banks of the St. Lawrence, with bridges running back and forth across the river.

The royal palace and its vast estates lay between the west bank of the river and the forests stretching to a distant mountain range on the north. It was a huge wooded parkland almost the size of the city itself, thousands upon thousands of acres.

The Punisher-class cruisers were the largest naval ships capable of landing planetside. Unlike a carrier, or the great battleship Dreadnought, which was built to brawl with enemies in space, Vigilant and her sister ships Ajax and Churchill were occasionally called on to engage air forces inside a planet’s atmosphere. They could disgorge marines in the middle of a hostile city, while bombarding the enemy with cannon and missile, a laser tracing a scorching ray back and forth until the city was aflame.

But it took a hardened carbon fiber and tyrillium surface to withstand the tremendous heat of her plasma engines upon takeoff and landing. Had he attempted to land at York’s commercial port, he’d have melted the tarmac. And so Rutherford ordered them to approach from the south toward the military spaceport some thirty miles distant from the palace and fifty miles outside the city.

A strange, unpleasant sensation settled deep in Rutherford’s bones as the ship powered down upon landing, the pull and tug of natural gravity for the first time in months. In space, the anti-grav systems kept the bones from eroding, but real gravity was a different sensation. It felt like his bones were shifting in place.

You’re going to feel some serious shifting if you’re not careful.

His bones might shift right out of their sockets when they hoisted him by his wrists for a flogging. His neck bones might shift when he dangled from a rope, a noose about his throat.

#

Rutherford stepped onto the tarmac, where the air was so hot that it seemed to suck the breath from his lungs. It radiated through his boots, nearly cooking his feet inside. Only gradually did the crisp autumn breeze drive away the heat left by Vigilant’s engines. It carried the scent of forest, something he hadn’t smelled in a long time but that seemed so green and welcoming he thought a desire for it must be written into his very DNA.

A military vehicle painted the red and gold of Albion came rolling toward where he stood. As ordered, he was alone, without so much as a staff officer to accompany him. He’d told Pittsfield that the crew had been commanded to go through standard decontamination procedures. Pittsfield’s raised eyebrow showed how much he believed that particular story. They hadn’t been planetside, so there was no point in decontamination.

The vehicle pulled to a stop, and two naval police officers jumped out. They had side arms and grim expressions. The lead man saluted, which eased Rutherford’s fears that he was under arrest. Nevertheless, he was hardly at ease, given the circumstances.

“Captain Rutherford?”

“Yes.”

“Come along. The admiral is waiting.”

Once he was inside the lorry, it raced across the tarmac toward the gates of the spaceport. There were guard towers and checkpoints, but they were not challenged and soon reached the open road beyond. The lorry joined civilian traffic for a stretch, then turned onto another military road. A mag-lev rushed by to their left, the entire train appearing and vanishing in an instant. After driving through the countryside for about an hour, they passed through a small town of two-story, red brick houses, each tucked one against the other, before turning onto a country lane. A gate soon blocked their passage. The driver showed his credentials, and an armed guard opened the gate and waved them through.

They drove another twenty minutes through a large estate with fields, stables, and a pair of tenant villages, tidy but modest, and then drove through another checkpoint before they approached the manor house itself.

Sitting on a rise at the heart of Lord Malthorne’s estate, the manor was like a small palace itself, with two huge wings spreading out from the looming central part of the house to embrace a courtyard. Walled gardens and carefully cultivated woodland walks stretched toward a small artificial lake. A small island lay in the center, topped by what looked like a Greek temple. Beyond the lake lay a vast woodland, which also belonged to the lord admiral. The property was some hundred thousand acres, but Rutherford knew it was only a fraction the size of the vast sugar plantations Malthorne held on Hot Barsa and Setoom.

The naval police sent Rutherford out of the lorry and walking toward the front door, while they remained behind. He stood alone at the ten-foot, double oak doors, and when they didn’t open of their own accord, lifted the brass knocker and let it fall with a boom.

A butler in coat and tails gestured him into a vast open foyer with a curved marble staircase sweeping to the second floor, then another elegantly dressed servant brought him into a two-story library that smelled of pipe smoke and old books. He accepted an offer of tea and sat next to a large globe of Old Earth. He turned it idly while sipping his tea, noting how comically small were the original British Islands that all Albionish claimed as their ancestral home. At least some of the other homelands—America, Canada, and Australia—looked like they had some heft to them.

“It is beautiful,” Admiral Malthorne said, coming into the room. “The most beautiful planet you will ever see.”

Rutherford sprang to his feet and saluted. “Old Earth? There was some sort of war, wasn’t there?”

“King Hubert used to dream of sending a fleet back to the home system. Unite all of humanity.” It wasn’t an answer to Rutherford’s question. “His son is more practical. We have troubles enough in our own neighborhood without setting off on fanciful adventures.”

“Have you been, my lord?”

“Yes, I have. Or to the Earth system, anyway. I never landed on Earth itself.”

Malthorne took the opposite chair. The globe sat atop a small, oak accent table, and the admiral now opened its drawer and pulled out a pipe and a tin of tobacco. He pressed tobacco into the pipe, packed it with a silver tamper, then finished filling it. A moment later, he was puffing.

Before Vigilant’s final approach, Rutherford had taken care to have his dress uniform ironed. He’d put on his ribbons and tassels and made sure the buttons on his vest were polished. He greased his hair and parted it in the middle. Current fashion was a close-shaved head, but the officers of the Royal Navy were more conservative, and he was glad he’d been too pressed to cut it recently. It fell in slick curls over his ears.

But now he felt overdressed. The admiral was not in uniform at all, but wore a smoking jacket and riding trousers, with polished, knee-high boots. He had the look of a man who had stopped in for a quick pipe before changing his jacket and taking his horse and dogs out for a hunt.

“It was about twenty years ago,” Malthorne continued between puffs. “The king sent me with a task force to see the lay of the land, so to speak. It’s no easy journey—there’s a vast, lawless swath of systems between here and there, plus a star going nova to get around. We fought off pirates and petty warlords. One charted jump had collapsed, and we ran out of fuel getting to the next. Becalmed for three weeks while we scooped hydrogen. Rations ran low, not helped by an infestation of rats. It was only when we had resorted to eating the little blighters that we put down the infestation.”

Rutherford had never heard of this expedition. “What did you discover, my lord?”

“At Earth?” Malthorne smiled. “That is classified.”

“I see.”

And now the admiral’s face hardened. “You failed, Captain. And failed badly.”

Rutherford looked down at his tea. The mug was cooling in his hands. “Yes, my lord.”

“Drake has escaped. Again. You destroyed Henry Upton against direct orders.”

“No, my lord. I never received them until it was too late. We returned at once. The ship broke apart before we could haul her in.”

“Which would not have been a problem if you had defeated Ajax to begin with.”

“My lord—”

Malthorne waved his hand dismissively. “I’ve read the report, seen the footage. You had Ajax in your grasp. Her shields were down, you could have finished her easily.”

“But that’s when you ordered me to turn around!”

“I grow weary of your excuses, Captain. You were given excellent information, you knew how to trap the enemy. Yet you still failed.”

Rutherford sat silently stewing at this. He hadn’t been given information; those were things he’d figured out for himself. What’s more, Malthorne had sent away the fleet before the engagement. The intention had been to lure Drake into a trap. In reality, it helped the man escape.

“It was only a slaver,” Rutherford said. “I don’t think it’s any great loss.”

“Oh, you don’t? Then it’s a good thing your duty is not to think but to obey.”

What was the admiral going on about? Since when was a captain of the Royal Navy not allowed to think? It’s why he’d thrashed the Hroom sloops of war at Ypis III and again in the Battle of Kif Lagoon. In that second engagement, he and Drake had been outnumbered four to one by the enemy. But the Hroom commanders had been ponderous, inflexible. When conditions changed, the two Albion captains had more deftly altered their battle plans and won a smashing victory as a result.

“Was there something important about that particular slaver?” Rutherford asked. “Besides Drake’s pilot being on board, I mean?”

“Yes. Obviously.”

Rutherford waited for the admiral to elaborate, but the man sat brooding without speaking. Pipe smoke wreathed his scowling face.

Rutherford was growing more confused by the minute. If whatever the slaver carried was so important, why had it been traveling without an escort? Why had Malthorne sent off the naval resources in the Barsa system? They could have come in to rescue Henry Upton while Vigilant chased down and destroyed Ajax. For that matter, why summon Rutherford to the Malthorne estates? Why not speak on the admiral’s flagship in orbit? Or bring down the young captain himself, while leaving Vigilant in space?

Never mind. That wasn’t his responsibility. Thinking in the moment yes, but questioning naval strategy? No, that was not his duty.

“I’ve been turning my thoughts to what Drake might do next,” Rutherford said hesitantly.

“Yes?” The other man’s tone was dull, disinterested.

“He has his pilot. According to survivors from Henry Upton, this particular Hroom—”

“There were survivors? Why was this not in the report?”

“I didn’t think it worth mentioning, my lord. We took fewer than twenty on board, and most were Hroom. I sent them on to Hot Barsa, together with the wreckage.”

Now Malthorne sat up straight. “How much wreckage?”

“Two big chunks of the hull. The engines seemed like they could be salvaged, and I thought the York Company would want their logs and the like. It was probably a waste of time, but—”

Malthorne sprang to his feet and hurried from the room. Rutherford stared at the admiral’s pipe, smoldering on its tray where the man had left it. Now that was curious. Whatever, or whoever, had been on that ship sure had the admiral agitated.

Malthorne returned a few minutes later, seemingly calmer. He took his seat and relit the pipe, which had gone out in his absence.

“Excuse me,” he said, with no further explanation for his behavior. “Tell me, where has your old friend gone now?”

“Drake?” Rutherford said. “Assuming he doesn’t intend to surrender or abandon his ship and hide—and I see no evidence that he will do either of those things—then he has got to set about repairing his ship. And I imagine Drake will see to it that his Hroom pilot gets off the sugar.”

“Once an eater, always an eater,” Malthorne said.

“Perhaps. I’ve seen them detoxed. In any event, I have to think that Drake will go to heroic efforts. He risked his life for a reason.”

“He has managed to jump about without his pilot so far.”

“I looked into that,” Rutherford said. “It seems that one of the liberated prisoners was a former merchant pilot—a certain Corporal Capp. Maybe Drake used her to get to the Barsa system. But her abilities would be limited. Drake needs Nyb Pim back in the chair.”

“Supposing he manages to detox the Hroom. What then? Where is the best place for a renegade to get repairs?”

“The Gryphon Shoals, maybe.” Rutherford shook his head as he gave it additional thought. “No, not for Ajax. The yards would be wholly inadequate. They’d need something big. A naval yard. Something in Ladino or New Dutch space. Or one of the Hroom worlds. Of course he’d need money, too.”

“Money. Yes, that is a good point.”

“I’d say Ladino. Maybe Argentina or San Pablo. Peruano also has decent yards. The governor there would probably turn a blind eye to a renegade Albion ship.”

“Then I’ll send Vigilant at the head of a task force,” Malthorne said. “Let’s say I give you Richmond and Nimitz. Calypso, too. Plus a few destroyers and torpedo ships. Enough that you can divide your forces as needed and still have the firepower to handle Ajax.”

It wasn’t firepower that concerned Rutherford, it was command. These ships the admiral mentioned were captained by overly cautious men and women, not the type to outwit James Drake. He’d have rather named his own task force, with superior command. But these ships were the ones Malthorne would have chosen had he been venturing out with the mighty Dreadnought. Commanded by those who were loyal to the admiral.

Malthorne fixed him with a penetrating gaze. “Is there a problem?”

“No, Lord Admiral. That should be sufficient.”

He wanted to ask about the strange reaction over the slaver wreckage, or why Malthorne had ordered Vigilant brought planetside. After consideration, he decided not to press.

“Very well. You have your orders.”

#

It was early evening when the naval police drove Rutherford off the Malthorne estate. When they were passing through the estate village, the lorry slowed to wait for a group of laborers trudging across the road behind a large tractor. The tractor itself was driven by a human, but curiously, the workers were all Hroom, tall and slender.

Hroom were a tropical people and wore jackets against the chill autumn air. As the lorry drove past, a Hroom with a pack and chemical sprayer met Rutherford’s gaze through the window. The worker’s face was a pale pink, his eyes glazed. An eater, a slave.

Rutherford turned away, frowning and unsettled.

It was not illegal to bring slaves to Albion, although Rutherford had heard grumbles that the Hroom were upsetting the long-established relationship between the land-owning class and free labor, at least in the countryside.

He was sure his father would never do such a thing, or any of the landowners of Canada. They were a conservative, almost reactionary people in the Western Hemisphere, especially in the higher classes. And while he didn’t agree with his father’s views on many things, in this case, he wondered if the Baron Rutherford might not be correct.

Not that the captain was afraid of Hroom. He’d had them in his crew, and they were intelligent and diligent so long as you kept them from sugar. Even eaters didn’t bother him. In larger numbers, empire Hroom with fleets and firearms might be a threat, but not eaters. So long as the sugar kept coming, they were as docile as hunting hounds.

His thoughts turned again to Drake’s pilot and the destroyed slave ship itself. So much fuss over so little. He couldn’t see the point of it.

Soon they arrived at the military spaceport. Vigilant sat on the tarmac, a long, hungry, wolf-like form. It looked enormous from this vantage, surrounded by small support vehicles, with work crews going over the shields and men climbing inside the twenty-foot-high exhaust ports off the back engines.

Inside the ship, unfamiliar men and women were moving about the corridors. He assumed at first that they were technicians and other workers giving the ship an interior tuneup to match what the navy crews were performing on the outside. It was only when he reached the bridge and saw unfamiliar faces in the pilot’s chair, at the tech officer’s console, and even in the signal officer’s chair that he reconsidered. What the blazes?

Commander Pittsfield was still there, thank God. He was scowling, his arms crossed. His gaze met Rutherford’s and he shook his head.

Rutherford now understood why Malthorne had ordered him to land at the spaceport. And why he’d been summoned personally to the lord admiral’s estate. That way he hadn’t been around to complain while they replaced most of his crew.

Chapter Thirteen

Drake kept the view tight so the pirate captain couldn’t see his bridge. No sense letting the other man spot the empty chairs. He sat sprawled casually, as if this sort of business were typical. Jane whispered information about Captain Kidd in his ear.

The man appearing on the other side looked the part. He had long, braided hair, turning gray at the temples. A scar curved around his left eye. A long, aquiline nose dominated his face, which was adorned with gold hoops in his ears and gold beads on the drooping ends of his mustache, which draped over a braided beard.

An attractive young woman stood at the shoulder of the pirate captain, staring through the screen with a sharp gaze. She had dark hair in a bob, and she wore a tight jumpsuit with a red skull emblazoned across the chest. The jumpsuit was unzipped enough to show cleavage, and there was a ruby pendant the size of a bloody eyeball between her breasts. At first, Drake thought her the captain’s wife or mistress, but as she leaned in to whisper in the older man’s ear, he noted a similarity between them. His daughter, Drake thought.

Another person passed through the view of the pirate bridge. This one was a Hroom, his skin the native mottled reddish orange. Not an eater.

Jane spoke in Drake’s ear. “Captain Pete Vargus,” she said. “Illegitimate captain of the so-called Captain Kidd. Known felon, wanted dead or alive by the Royal Navy.”

Was there something disapproving in her voice, or was that Drake’s imagination?

“Captain Vargus,” Drake said with a smile, as if he’d known the name already. “The pirate who gave Richmond so much trouble. Seems your past has caught up with you.”

“We’re no pirates,” the man said with a grunt. “We were in uncharted space when Richmond attacked us unprovoked. What do you want? An apology for damaging her while we fought for our lives? Very well, I am terribly sorry for any misunderstanding.”

“What is your cargo?”

“None of your business.”

“Is it valuable? I’d hate to destroy it without knowing first what it is.”

“Bring it on,” the other captain blustered. “I gave Richmond a whipping, and I’ll do the same to you. Put you down like a mad dog.”

Drake smiled. “Doubtful. Have you heard of the Battle of Ypis III? This ship single-handedly forced the surrender of three Hroom sloops of war. I’m sure I could manage your rickety piece of rubbish with little trouble.”

“Not today, you won’t. I can see your shields. You took a beating in some kind of fight. Probably out of ammo too, am I right? I’m no idiot—you’re trying to take me on pure swagger.”

Drake’s thumb moved. “Barker, show our friends the crotalus battery.”

The external viewscreen flared white. When it resolved focus again, two missiles streaked away from Ajax. They accelerated rapidly, but it would take time to overtake Captain Kidd at her current speed.

“Three minutes to impact,” Jane said.

“I can call them off,” Drake said. “Or I can fire more if this is not sufficient. I have plenty, as you’ll soon see.”

As per Vargus’s sneering remark, some of this was, in fact, swagger, but not all of it. They’d done precious little shooting since the mutiny. The shields were in rough shape, but they had more than sufficient firepower.

“My shields can take it,” Vargus said, though there was something else in his voice. Uncertainty, perhaps? “What do you want? You’re a fool if you think we’ll surrender. Those missiles hit, and I’ll give you one hell of a fight.”

Drake leaned back in his chair, waiting.

“Well?” Vargus demanded after several seconds. “What do you want?”

“Money.”

“Money?”

“Twenty thousand pounds. You can pay it how you like. I’d prefer King Bartholomew’s frowning face on the coins, but I’ll take guilders or pesos. Even gold bullion, if that’s all you’ve got.”

“Why, you . . . ” He sputtered. “This is robbery!”

“Said the pirate to the highwayman.”

“If you think I’m going to pay—”

“Barker, fire two more missiles,” Drake said. Two more streaked out, joining the first. To the pirate captain, he said, “You know I can take you. I’m in position. If you try to come around at this distance, I’ll fire off my missiles to keep your shields up, then stand by to knock you apart with a broadside when you close. My own damaged shields will never be a factor.” Drake glanced at Commander Tolvern, who stood to one side chewing her lip. “My commander thinks I could take you with my chase gun alone. I’m tempted to try, if only for the sport.”

Vargus cursed him.

Jane’s voice spoke up again “One minute to impact. Expected shield damage twenty-seven percent.”

“Now I’m no mathematician,” Drake said, “But after the second pair strikes, it seems that your shields will be at forty-six percent. Optimistically speaking.”

“Stop! Disarm the missiles. I’ll pay.” Vargus waved his hand to the young woman, who had moved off to a computer at one side. “Cut power. Come to.”

Tech Officer Smythe waved his hand, and Drake looked over to see the young man shaking his head and pointing to his console. Drake looked down at his own display to see what Smythe was sending over. It showed Captain Kidd still accelerating. What’s more, Vargus was bringing out some sort of weapon system. Capp started to say something, but Tolvern held out a hand to stop the other young woman before she could give the pirates information through the open channel.

“You’re lying,” Drake started to tell the other captain. Then all systems suffered a hitch, and everything turned black. Everything was offline for two long seconds, then the systems began to recover. When the lights came back up, lights and alarms were flashing everywhere. Captain Kidd had disappeared from the screen.

Captain Kidd had hit them with what the navy called a flash-bang. It was a huge electromagnetic pulse, often with a neutron burst. Shields caught most of it, but as it washed over the hull, it forced backup systems online while everything resolved itself. Smythe worked furiously to regain control, while Tolvern shouted back and forth with Barker.

“Missile impact in . . . ” Jane began. “Recalculating. Recalculating.”

She was recalculating because the second pair of missiles were squirting in random directions, like balloons inflated and then sent shooting off with a hiss of air and corkscrew flights. There wasn’t going to be an impact to calculate.

“What about the first salvo?” Drake asked.

“One of the missiles hit, sir,” Tolvern said. “Minimal damage. The other is gone—hard to say what happened. There she is!”

She, in this case, was Captain Kidd, now appearing on the screen. Vargus had turned her around, and she was coming up at Ajax’s belly, where shields were weakest after Rutherford’s attack.

“Roll her over!” Drake said, sensing what the enemy ship intended. “Full barrage.”

The pirate ship fired missiles at distance and torpedoes as she closed. Barker fired the Gatling guns, taking out the first missiles, then Tolvern rolled as Drake had ordered. There was something off with the anti-grav after the flash-bang attack, and he was first lifted in his seat and then slammed down as if by a lead fist, crushing the air from his lungs. He almost blacked out. Capp had fallen from her seat and now crawled shakily back up.

The aft shields took the punishment of the torpedoes. Jane’s warning voice came on to tell him just how badly they’d been damaged, but he ignored her, ordering another roll, this time to present cannon.

Captain Kidd executed its own rolling maneuver, and the two ships squared against each other like a pair of Old Earth sailing ships aiming their cannon, preparing to stand and trade blows at a few dozen yards. In this case, a few hundred miles, but the effect was the same.

The enemy ship loomed in the viewscreen. A white skull lay atop two crossed sabers. It was the bloody Jolly Roger. Vargus. The cocky fool wasn’t hiding his piracy, he was reveling in it.

Captain Kidd got the first shot, raking Ajax’s exposed side. But she only had three cannon. Ajax had eight heavy cannon. Barker took his time before firing. Explosions lit up alongside the Captain Kidd from stern to bow, blooming red and orange.

The pirate ship fired again, then made to break free. Ajax launched another broadside. These projectiles hit the armored underbelly of the enemy ship, but as it spun away, bits of debris spiraled into space, broken out by explosive decompression of failing airlocks. They’d punched through the pirate ship’s armor.

The pirate ship tried to flee, but Drake brought Ajax in behind to give pursuit. He felt his bloodlust rising, like an ancient Viking warrior locked deep in his DNA, now breaking free, grinning savagely. Ready to deliver the killing blow.

No. That wasn’t his intent.

“Hail Captain Kidd,” he said, intending to demand a surrender.

“Enemy communication system offline,” Jane’s voice said.

“We must have knocked it out,” Tolvern said.

Drake called down to Barker. “The pirates can’t hear us. Fire a warning shot across her bow.” Then, to Tolvern. “We’ll force her to a halt and communicate via signal flares if she can’t come back online.”

After a few seconds, another missile streaked from Ajax’s bays. It overtook Captain Kidd and flashed over her bow. The missile then doubled back and raced once more toward the pirate ship. It exploded harmlessly in front of the ship’s bow. Drake smiled at Barker’s freelancing. The implication was obvious.

We can destroy you at any time.

But the enemy didn’t seem to get the message.

“They’re not slowing,” Tolvern said.

“I see that. Jane, give me status of enemy shields.”

“Estimating . . . starboard shield forty-three percent. Rear shield, ninety-two percent. Deck shield, ninety-eight percent. Port shield, 100 percent. Deck shield, one hundred percent. Confidence level of estimate . . . medium-high.”

Captain Kidd had weathered the encounter better than expected. The exchange of broadsides had ripped her up pretty good, but Drake was disappointed in the damage caused by that initial missile strike. He needed something kinetic.

“Barker,” he told the gunner. “Give me torpedo bays one and two. Now.”

Two torpedoes left Ajax. They moved sluggishly at first and only gradually pulled away from the cruiser as they closed the distance to the rear of the enemy ship. On the viewscreen, they presented a similar profile to the missiles but were heavier, made of depleted uranium, with an explosive first stage. At fifty miles, the noses of the torpedoes broke off, raced ahead, and detonated against the rear shields.

While the shields were dealing with this, the main mass of the torpedoes slammed into Captain Kidd, one after the other. There was a double flash. When the viewscreen came back, the pirate ship was flaring plasma, no longer accelerating.

“Jane. Enemy rear shields?” Drake demanded.

“Estimating . . . ” Jane waited. “Estimating . . . recalculating.”

She was having a hard time calculating through the secondary explosions rippling along the backside of the pirate ship. No time to wait. “Bring her along starboard. Present broadside."

Capp worked the controls, with Tolvern giving orders to the gunners and engineers. They tried to come along the weakened side of the enemy ship, but the pirates rolled expertly away to present their stronger shields. The enemy got off a shot with one of her cannon as she rolled around again, and Ajax shuddered from the fire. Warnings flashed on his console.

Jane finally came through. “Rear enemy shield at twelve percent.”

“Take her back,” Drake ordered. “Chase gun at the engines. We’ll disable her from behind.”

They rained metal on the enemy ship, trying to destroy what remained of the rear shields. Captain Kidd continued doggedly fighting back. They were clearly beaten; gasses were venting like streams of milky liquid into the vacuum. One of those torpedoes had penetrated the airlocks.

“Blast you, Vargus,” Drake said. “Why won’t you surrender?”

Smythe piped up from his computer. “Enemy engines are overheating. Seems to be purposeful. I think they’re readying a countermeasure.”

“Watch it,” Capp said. “It’s another trick.”

Yes, like the flash-bang. But Drake wasn’t going to sit still to find out what. Next time might be more lethal. He had the rear shields demolished; a couple of missiles up the tailpipe would vaporize the ship. But he still hoped to disable her.

“Torpedo three and four,” he called down to Barker.

Two more torpedoes blasted loose. They were so close that the initial detonations shuddered through the hull of Ajax as well. The uranium rods thrust deeply into Captain Kidd, their progress visible all along the hull, as flames jetted into space where they passed. One of them passed all the way through, hurtling out the front like a bullet going through a watermelon.

Drake ordered them to pull back, worried the whole ship would blow apart, fissionable materials and all. His own shields were damaged, and he didn’t want to be battered with Captain Kidd’s debris. But after a few seconds, the fires finished venting along the enemy ship. Her engines blinked and went out, and then she was flying dead through space. No return fire, no signs of life whatsoever.

A ragged cheer went up from the others on the bridge. Drake didn’t join them, already thinking of how best to salvage the situation.

Chapter Fourteen

An hour later, when Ajax had harpooned Captain Kidd and brought both ships to a halt somewhere in the deep empty space on the edge of the Fantalus system, a signal finally came through from the pirates. Captain Vargus appeared on the screen. He wore a bloody bandage over his forehead that also covered one eye. No sign of his daughter or any other crew; he kept his own view close, no doubt so that Drake couldn’t see the state of the bridge. The air was hazy, filled with smoke.

Drake leaned back casually in his chair. “You could have saved us both a lot of trouble.”

“Damn you, what do you want?”

“I told you, twenty thousand pounds.”

Vargus clenched his jaw. “I don’t have it.”

“I don’t believe you. You were coming from Barsa, right? It wasn’t on a mercy mission. No doubt smuggling or preying on merchants. I’ll bet you’re loaded with gold and trade goods.”

“Any profits I was carrying have now been vaporized. Half my ship is destroyed. Would have burned us all to a crisp if you hadn’t also punctured my hull so many places there wasn’t enough oxygen for fire.”

“We’ll see about that. I’m sure you won’t mind a boarding party.”

“Send them over. We’ll give you one hell of a welcome.”

“Yes, now that you mention it, I should probably knock a few more holes in you first. There might still be too much oxygen on board. Wouldn’t want another fire to break out. That is, if you intend to resist.”

Vargus’s face went pale. “You have to at least give me terms.”

“Terms are we won’t hang you as pirates. How does that sound? I’ll put you down on a neutral planet with some pocket change and your side arms because I’m not a cruel man.”

Drake cut the link.

“Is there going to be another boarding party?” Capp asked. She sounded eager. Tolvern looked concerned.

“Attacking a slaver is one thing. Brawling with pirates on their home turf is another thing entirely.”

“Half of them were probably killed,” Capp said.

“Which would make the survivors all the more desperate.”

“We could always pepper her with more shot,” Tolvern said. “Vent out some of the air, like you said. Suffocating pirates are docile pirates.”

“I’m not so keen on killing men and women in cold blood.”

“They’d do the same to us,” she said.

“All the more reason to act civilized.”

He was still turning this over when Barker came onto the comm link. “Captain, there’s something down here you should look at.”

“I’m coming.” Drake cut the link and turned back to Capp. “Write up the specifications of that jump point and send them to my computer.”

“Write them, sir?” Capp looked suddenly nervous.

“Yes, I want to read your analysis,” he said impatiently. “What speed do we need, what’s the best approach, and all that. We’re coming out next to that star, and I want some numbers.”

“Oh, if it’s just numbers, I can tell Tolvern and have her send ‘em.”

“If you’re too lazy for hard thinking,” Tolvern said, “maybe you should go down to the kitchen and see if they need a dishwasher.”

“It’s not that . . . ” Capp began. She cast her eyes about desperately.

“I want your analysis in ten minutes,” Drake said. “Can you do that or not?”

“Aye. I’ll do it, sir.”

#

Drake made his way to the engineering bay. The big, warehouse-like room could hold equipment for royal marines but had been mostly empty since the mutiny, except for locked weapons bins and mechanical suits for the boatswains, as well as other scattered equipment. Now there were battered metal crates and bits of scorched debris strewn across the floor. Barker and Carvalho were picking through it, with the latter using a computer to catalog what they found.

Barker looked younger, more energetic than he had in years, and he seemed to have lost several pounds around his waist. He still had the walrus mustache, and was now letting his beard grow out to meet it. He wore his new insignia on the shoulder of his orange mechanic suit, which made Drake smile. He’d expected Capp to be invigorated and hopefully more loyal from her promotion, but hadn’t expected any such transformation in the gruff old gunner. Barker had been at his current rank and position for years, and Drake had always assumed he was satisfied with it. Apparently not.

Barker looked up as Drake approached. “This is all stuff we found floating around Captain Kidd when we hauled her in. What’s left of her cargo and other debris. I thought we might find something valuable.”

“Is this the part where you tell me you found Captain Vargus’s treasure chest? And there just happens to be 20,000 pounds in gold and silver coin?”

“Afraid not.” Barker pulled his hand out of his pocket and hooked his thumb at Carvalho. “You think I’d let this pirate down here if I had?”

Carvalho flashed a toothy grin. Drake grunted.

“What I found was this.”

Barker opened one of the scorched chests. It was filled with sugar sacks. Some of the sugar was partially burned, even caramelized by the heat.

“Seems to be ninety percent of what they were carrying,” Barker said. “Just sugar. Wouldn’t think there’d be enough profit to attract pirates.”

Yes, it was quite strange. The York Company had a monopoly on the sugar trade, although that didn’t entirely prevent smuggling, of course. He thought about where Vargus had been heading. One of the neutral worlds on the frontier. Under the terms of the treaty with the empire, Albion was forbidden to export sugar to any of those planets. That meant there was profit for those who could get it through.

Still, a big ship like Captain Kidd had a lot of overhead. Surely, there wasn’t enough profit (or risk) in sugar to attract the likes of Vargus and his crew.

“I want all this dumped.” Drake gave Carvalho a significant look. “Remember what I said. No sugar on board. We need our pilot.”

“Aye,” Barker said. “I would have done it, but thought you might want to have a look first.”

“And nothing else turned up?” he asked. “Just sugar?”

“That’s pretty much it,” Barker said. “Well, as far as cargo goes. Come check this out.”

The two men led him to the rear of the engineering bay. There Barker kicked apart some random bits of metal to clear a single large, flat piece of the enemy decking blown off during the assault, some forty feet square, battleship gray except for what had been painted onto its surface: a skull sitting above two crossed sabers.

“We took a trophy,” Barker said with a grin.

“I’d say that’s a good day’s work for a Royal Navy cruiser,” Drake said, “except we currently have more in common with the pirates. Maybe we should give it back with our apologies.”

“I was thinking we’d keep it for our own use.”

Drake sent up an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Sure enough. I’ll cut out the plate above your bridge and weld this in its place. We better start showing the pirate colors if we’re going to earn a reputation.”

Drake snorted at this. “We do that, we’d better rechristen the ship. HMS Ajax seems inappropriate, don’t you think?”

“I hear Captain Kidd is suddenly available.”

“Turned out that wasn’t such a fearsome name. We need something better. How does Blackbeard sound?”

Barker chuckled at this. “Starship Blackbeard. Rolls nicely off the tongue.” He turned to Carvalho. “Get suited up and stack this sugar in the main incinerator.”

Drake watched the former prisoner make his way to the mechanical suits on the far wall, still suspicious of his intentions. He waited until the man started putting on the suit before turning back to Barker.

“Speaking of Captain Kidd, I want to take her with us to San Pablo.”

“Why?”

“I need money, but not so badly that I’d sell sugar to get it. Vargus says he has nothing of value left on board. I’m inclined to believe him. So I thought we’d see what we can get selling his ship for scrap.”

“She ain’t worth much anymore.”

“Not what she was a few hours ago, I’ll agree. But she’s worth something. Let’s say the engines can be salvaged. That’s ten thousand right there.”

“Maybe eight,” Barker said.

“Eight, then. We could get another ten or fifteen from the rest of it.”

“I don’t know. Depends on what she looks like when you get inside.”

“Whatever we get would go a long way toward repairs and resupply,” Drake said. “Even ten thousand pounds would make a difference. Problem is, how do I carry her through the jump point?”

He pulled out his computer. There was Capp’s analysis, and now he understood her reticence in writing it. He could barely parse her poor English. The sentences were fragmented, the spelling its own dialect. The lower-class speech patterns—what they called York cockney—now sounded in his mind’s ear like glass scraping on metal when he read them.

His first inclination was to be irritated. Maybe if Capp didn’t balk when asked to write, she’d sound more clever than a sod digger in the Canadian peat bogs. No doubt that’s why the navy had kept her out of pilot school. But then he thought about how she must have felt writing it, worried he would stare at it and think she was an uneducated dolt.

And anyway, the numbers looked good, as did the analysis, once he got past the clumsy prose. Their target in Fantalus was a loose jump point, which meant they could arrive at a lazier angle and a slower speed and still make it out of the system. The jump point on the other side was a bit trickier. They’d need to accelerate while coming in at a precise X, Y, Z angle with minimal deviation. After that jump, Capp’s knowledge broke down. The third jump, the one that would take them to San Pablo, might be unstable. She’d need to consult the nav computer when they got through.

He shared this information with Barker to get his opinion.

The engineer frowned and rubbed at his stubbly chin. “I don’t know. I could probably coax .095 from the engines while towing the pirates. But accelerating on the other end, while caught in the star’s gravity well? Also, that close in we’d need to shift power to the cooling systems or we’d bake to a crisp.”

“So we can’t take her with us,” Drake said, frustrated.

“That would be my assessment. Not with the current deficiencies in equipment and piloting.”

A high, melodic voice sounded from behind the two men. “What if I promise a piloting upgrade? Could you manage, then?”

Drake turned on his heel. Nyb Pim had stepped through the doors into the engineering bay and was taking long strides toward them. He’d pulled on a shirt, though he was still barefoot. His color was better, and his eyes had lost the milky look. Nevertheless, his unexpected presence was alarming.

“Who let you out?” Drake demanded.

Nyb Pim gave the quick wrist turn that was the Hroom equivalent of a shrug. “The pirates let me out, it would seem. There was a flash, and the power went out. The doors opened. I went into the hallway, and there was no guard.”

Oh, yes. The flash-bang. Must have caused the doors to open, and since the ship was designed to bring critical systems online first, the Hroom might have had several seconds in which to make his escape.

“That was two hours ago. Nobody noticed you were missing?”

“Apparently not. I thought about going to the bridge, but decided that might cause more disruption than it was worth. So I went to my old quarters—do you know they are untouched since I was arrested?”

Neither had Drake’s been, so he supposed that wasn’t a huge surprise. Perhaps they’d intended to make wholesale changes once Rutherford had returned to Vigilant and a new captain had been assigned to Ajax. 

Drake cast his glance at Carvalho, who was now fully strapped into the suit and using its powerful hydraulic arms to move the heavy crates of sugar. Even the little bit salvaged was enough to addict a hundred Hroom. A single taste for the pilot would destroy the progress made in detoxing him.

Nyb Pim’s tongue snaked over his pink lips. He didn’t turn to look at the work. “Perhaps we could go somewhere else. Somewhere with fewer . . . temptations.”

“Of course.” Drake gestured toward the doors, positioning his body so as to block the view of the sugar as they moved.

“A moment, sir.” Nyb Pim turned to Barker. “Gunner,” he began.

“Chief Engineer now,” Drake corrected.

“Indeed?” The Hroom had no eyebrow to raise, but it was in his tone. “Chief Engineer Barker. Can you bring us to .092 with the pirate ship in tow?”

“Aye, but Captain says we need more than ten percent the speed of light to make the second jump.”

“There’s another jump in the red dwarf system, a looser jump. We can go through at a lower speed. But it requires a bigger pivot and takes us in the wrong direction.”

“Don’t much like the sound of that,” Barker said.

“What do you mean, the wrong direction?” Drake asked carefully.

“The jump is inside the corona of the red dwarf,” Nyb Pim said. “But if you put me in the pilot’s chair, I can take all of us through to the other side.”

Chapter Fifteen

Tolvern sprang from her chair when the door to the bridge opened, and Nyb Pim ducked his head to come in. Her heart thumped, and her hand went for her side arm. But before she could draw it, the captain followed behind. His posture was firm and confident, and the commander relaxed.

Capp rose from the oversize pilot’s chair where she’d been lounging. She stared at the Hroom with a scowl deepening over her face. She’d pulled up the sleeves on her jumpsuit to show off those ridiculous lions on her forearm, but now pulled her sleeves back down, as if self-conscious of her station in life. The tattoos were a reminder of that.

Well, what did Capp expect, anyway? Two weeks ago she’d been a prisoner on her way to the helium-3 mines. Before that, she’d served as a marine corporal, and before that some kind of smuggler. Did she think she’d be permanently elevated when they had one of the finest pilots in the navy waiting in the wings? Wean the Hroom from the sugar, and of course he would be preferable.

For the moment, Drake ignored Tolvern’s questioning look, and made his way to where Capp stood.

“How long until the jump?” Drake asked.

“Jane says forty-seven minutes,” Capp responded.

“Maintain course. Barker has new information about the parameters of the jump and what we’ll need from the engines. You will check with him.”

“Wait,” Capp said, sounding confused. “You mean I’m still doing the jump?”

“Yes, Ensign. Of course.” A slight frown passed over Drake’s face. “Now is not the time to interfere with your work. Unless you’re unsure of your calculations, that is.” A moment of silence, then he added, “Well, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. There might be a change on the other side, though, and it will get tricky. Nyb Pim will handle that jump.”

“Yes, sir.”

Drake gestured toward the war room. “Commander.”

Tolvern followed him and Nyb Pim back. She cast a glance at Capp, who settled back into the pilot’s seat with a sigh and a renewed look of complacency.

The captain turned up the lights in the war room and shut the door. Tolvern sat opposite the captain. Nyb Pim took a seat on the end and seemed to collapse into the chair, his face slack, his limbs dangling. He carried an expression of deep exhaustion, as if he’d only managed to hold himself upright with the greatest of effort.

“You’re giving Capp a false sense of security, you know.” Tolvern said.

“How so?”

“She’s going to think she’s really some sort of assistant pilot, not someone warming the seat until we get Nyb Pim back where he belongs.”

“I meant all of that, Commander.” Drake certainly looked serious enough. “All ships have an assistant pilot. Anything can happen in space, and you don’t want to be stranded because you were relying on one man. Or Hroom, in our case.”

“That doesn’t mean we want Capp on the bridge. Put her in engineering or stick her in the kitchen cooking eggs or something.”

“I’d rather have her where I can keep an eye on her.”

“You really think she’ll get in that kind of mischief in a few days?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I’m thinking long-term.”

Tolvern stared. “Wait, aren’t we dumping her at San Pablo or wherever?”

  “I’m not so sure anymore. Not sure about leaving any of them behind, to be honest.”

“You can’t be serious,” she said.

“We need more crew members, not fewer. So unless you think we’re likely to find more reliable people in the port of San Pablo than we’ve already got . . . ”

“They could hardly be worse.”

Nyb Pim cleared his throat. “Discipline seems somewhat more lax than when I last sat in this room. Since when do the crew of Ajax speak this way to their commanding officer?”

Tolvern flushed, ashamed at her conduct. “I am sorry, Captain. Forgive me, I misspoke.”

Drake dismissed her apology with a wave of the hand. “We’ve had a rough go of it,” he told the Hroom. “Mutiny, attacked twice by the navy, then this fight with the pirate ship. I am carefully choosing my battles until I decide what to do next. Tolvern is excitable, but she doesn’t worry me. I’m more concerned with you.”

Nyb Pim stared at him, unblinking. “I would imagine.”

“Are you prepared to take the pilot’s chair?” Drake asked.

“No, I’m not prepared. I wish I had a few more days in the sick bay.”

“Doesn’t seem to be a rush,” Tolvern said. “We can use Capp through to the red dwarf system, then bring Nyb Pim around later.”

Drake shook his head. “The pilot has other ideas. A looser second jump so we can haul Captain Kidd through with us. Capp can’t do it, only Nyb Pim.”

“What are you worried about?” Tolvern asked the Hroom. “The trips, the detoxing?”

“It will be a fast transition,” Nyb Pim said. “I’ll need to be mentally alert.”

Tolvern had another concern, now that she thought about it. “Is your nav chip on?”

“It was disabled when I was arrested.”

“Doc can turn it back on,” Drake said. “But you’ll need time to run diagnostics and download the current map set before you interface with the nav computer.”

“That shouldn’t take long,” Nyb Pim said. “Half an hour, maybe.”

Which didn’t leave them much time, she noted. Nevertheless, the three of them fell into silence, with the captain staring hard at his pilot.

“You want to know why,” the Hroom said at last. It was not a question.

“I want to know the why of a whole lot of things,” Drake said. “You say the attack that put me before the tribunal was not an accident. That the Royal Navy removed something from the wreckage. That you voluntarily became a sugar eater. Yes, I find myself curious.”

“There is a cure for the sugar eaters.”

“A what?” both Tolvern and Drake asked at the same time.

“Better call it an antidote. Something taken into the body that blocks the absorption of sugar into the Hroom brain. Renders it as harmless as soda water. You administer a single dose, and a Hroom will never again swoon, whether he’s an addict or not.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Tolvern said, skeptical. She glanced at the captain, who was frowning, then back to Nyb Pim. “Are you sure?”

“I’m not making it up,” the Hroom insisted.

“I didn’t say you were,” she said. “But maybe someone told you that, and you wanted to believe.”

“I’m no enemy of humans,” Nyb Pim said. “After my family broke apart, I was raised by human missionaries. I joined the Royal Navy of my own free choice. Of course I look at the decay and destruction of my native civilization with sorrow. But this began long before I was born. Generations ago, now. It seemed inevitable. The human race is young and energetic. The Hroom are tired and ancient. The sugar wars were both sign and symptom of the disease.

“The decay could not be fought,” Nyb Pim continued, “only managed. Some of us could take our place within the new human order. I understood the missionaries—their goal was to keep more Hroom from becoming eaters. I never dreamed there would be an antidote.”

“I still don’t believe it,” Tolvern said. “If such a thing were possible, the whole sector would know about it.” She looked to the captain for help, but he was stroking his chin thoughtfully.

“I learned of it hacking into the network,” Nyb Pim said. “And I knew at once I had to bring it to light. And I knew people would want to stop me. Humans would stop me. No human would want such a thing to be known.”

“We’re not all slavers,” Drake said quietly.

“No?” Nyb Pim said. He fixed his big, dark eyes on the captain.

“Who invented this so-called sugar antidote?” Tolvern asked, still suspicious. “A doctor, a scientist? Who can corroborate your story?”

“Nobody can corroborate it, not any more. The researchers are dead, murdered, as are many others who learned of its existence. The antidote was taken from the merchant ship that Captain Drake is accused of destroying, and its existence covered up. From there it went to Henry Upton, on its way to Hot Barsa. There is a small group of free Hroom living in the jungles there. Renegades and refugees. I arranged to be taken as a slave to the planet where I could be rescued by them.”

“How would you manage that as an eater?” Tolvern asked. “You wouldn’t want to be rescued, not if it meant taking you from the sugar. You’d have confessed the whole thing to your new masters.”

“Maybe,” Nyb Pim said. “I had to take the risk. We had to know where they were hiding the antidote so we could raid the lab and liberate it.”

“Then what?” Drake asked. “You’d free the slaves of Hot Barsa? What would keep the Royal Navy from landing a hundred thousand marines to put down the revolt?”

“A hundred thousand men cannot control fourteen million square miles of jungle and swamp. Meanwhile, we’d find a way to smuggle the antidote offworld. Soon we’d have a dozen rebellious worlds. I see your troubled look,” he added, looking back and forth between the captain and the commander. “You could never tolerate such a thing.”

“There are millions of Hroom living on human planets,” Drake said. “A widespread rebellion would be an ugly thing.”

“Now you see what I mean. Every human is a slaver.”

The thought of a general slave revolt terrified Tolvern. Even on Albion itself, where there was hostility to slavery as opposed to free labor, there were several million slaves. On the sugar worlds, eaters outnumbered humans eight to one, and if the free Hroom working for the York Company were counted, the ratio was more like ten to one. The same pattern played out through the several dozen inhabited systems in this part of the galaxy. Put all the humans together—Albionish, Ladino, and New Dutch alike—against a renewed Hroom Empire, no longer crippled by billions of sugar eaters, and the scenario turned scary.

Tolvern had always thought Nyb Pim one of the crew, as loyal to the navy as anyone else. Now she looked at him with fresh eyes. He was an alien intelligence from a vast, ancient people. In comparison, were humans young and energetic, or small and vulnerable?

“Captain,” she said. “We should talk in private, don’t you think?”

Drake ignored her. “I don’t understand why the navy would destroy the merchant ship and pin it on me. If this antidote truly existed, few people would have balked at the death of a small number of civilians to see it destroyed. We were fighting the Hroom at the time. We needed every advantage.”

“Peace talks had already begun,” Tolvern said. “Maybe the admiralty was worried the empire would send another fleet in anger if they found out.”

“Except they didn’t destroy the antidote,” Drake said. “Nyb Pim says it’s on its way to Hot Barsa. They killed the scientists and researchers. Why not destroy the antidote, too?”

“I don’t know the answers to those questions,” Nyb Pim said. “That wasn’t my concern, so much as getting my hands on it and seeing it spread far and wide.”

“And you’re still determined to do it?” Drake asked. “Recover the antidote, I mean?”

There was a firm set to the captain’s mouth that Tolvern recognized and a flinty look in his eyes. It was the same look he’d worn as they’d overtaken the pirate ship. The same look as when he’d led them at the Battle of Kif Lagoon, where Drake and Rutherford had annihilated a much larger Hroom force. That look normally stirred her blood, made her feel she would follow him to victory against overwhelming odds. At the moment, she found it alarming.

“Captain,” Tolvern tried again. “You’re not considering—?”

“The antidote is gone for now,” Nyb Pim said. “Henry Upton was either destroyed or taken in tow to Hot Barsa. But where? We can’t exactly search millions of square miles of cane, swamp, and jungle.”

The captain shook his head. “Actually, you’re wrong. I know exactly where it is.”

The other two leaned forward in anticipation, but before Drake could elaborate, Jane’s voice came through the general com link. “Thirty minutes to jump.”

“The rest will have to wait,” Drake said. “We need that nav chip on.”

The three of them rose.

“Tolvern will take you to the sick bay,” Drake said. “At no time will you stroll about unescorted like you did when you showed up in engineering, is that understood?”

Nyb Pim’s mouth drew into a straight line, the lips tight. “Yes, sir.”

“I trust you as my pilot, but I do not in any way trust that you’re cured of addiction. That makes you a danger to yourself and to us, and that’s where my loyalty to you ends.”

“Yes, sir,” Nyb Pim said.

“To be clear, anyone who passes you a single grain of sugar will be shot, and you will condemn yourself to slavery. This time for good. Not that I expect either of those facts to keep you from dipping into the white stuff should the opportunity present itself.”

Indeed, from the way the Hroom’s tongue passed over his lips, she could see that the mere talk of sugar had him thinking about it again.

The captain turned to her now. “Watch him carefully. Keep yourself armed at all times. If he does anything that puts your or anyone else’s life in danger, take immediate action. Lethal action, if necessary.”

“Yes, sir. I won’t mess around.”

She fixed Nyb Pim with a sharp look that would hopefully let him know that she was serious, and would thus dissuade him from any funny business the moment such a thought crossed his mind. For now, he looked as harmless as a gangly, overgrown child, but she remembered how he’d flung himself at the door to his cell.

She would not take him or his addiction lightly.

Chapter Sixteen

Tolvern scanned the bar for Capp and Carvalho but couldn’t see them anywhere in the sweaty, spice-smelling crowd that danced and swayed to the music pounding through the bar speakers. It mingled with the sound of the rooftop bars on the buildings to either side, which one could reach via rope-and-plank bridges that served as roads at night time. It was claimed that crocodile-like creatures came out of the river at night, and it wasn’t safe below.

Didn’t seem to be safe above, either. San Pablo was a low-gravity world—felt like about sixty percent, from what her bones were telling her—and giant, winged shapes soared in the crimson sky overhead, each with a wingspan of fifteen, twenty feet. They had faces like bats and feathers like birds.

An oily film coated her tongue from the charcoal fires and burning petroleum that permeated the air over the city. It was so thick, humid, and pungent that she could scarcely breath. And the heat! It was sweltering up here and suffocating down below.

There were still Hroom on the planet—the entire eastern continent was still theirs—and where the humans had built, they reused the relics of the aliens who had come before. The port of San Pablo itself was built atop an ancient Hroom metropolis, and everywhere you looked you could see spectacular stone ruins. One of their vast ziggurats—a temple of some kind, the captain had told her upon their arrival—loomed above them to the north. To the west, toward the river, lay the red palm forests that surrounded one of their ancient palace complexes, its courtyards visible if you stood in a certain place.

With the golden sun dropping over the red-forested mountain range opposite the river, the rooftop terrace presented an amazing view, but none of the humans or Hroom at the bar paid it any attention. Wrong crowd for that, she supposed.

“Hey, Commander!” Capp called.

Tolvern sighed with relief to spot Capp and Carvalho and made her way over. The pair sat near the edge of the building, away from the dancing, where it was quieter.

They’d changed out of space garb. Carvalho wore black leather pants and a vest with no shirt under it, which showed off his bulging muscles. He wore gold hoops in his earlobes and dark eyeliner. Capp wore tight pants and a leather vest of her own that was unzipped to show her cleavage. Carvalho draped an arm over her shoulder, his hand resting casually against one breast.

Tolvern glanced down at her own simple jumpsuit. Not a uniform, exactly, but it sure looked like one compared to what these two were wearing.

Thanks a lot, Captain, she thought as she stiffly took a seat next to them.

Drake, Barker, and Oglethorpe were out having fun at the spaceyards, haggling over repairs to Ajax, which they’d left in orbit above. She’d thought to go with them. But when Drake had heard that Capp had invited her into town to join her and Carvalho, he’d told her to go keep an eye on the pair.

Capp looked her over. “So this is what passes for casual where you’re from?”

“Where I’m from is the Royal Navy. I don’t get out much for shore leave, so I don’t have much use for casual clothing.”

“That your idea, or the captain’s?”

“I don’t have much use for it,” Tolvern said. “Anyway, the captain usually stays on ship, too, unless he can go hunting.”

“Hunting?”

“Big game, mostly. I’ve been with him a few times.”

“And how is it, anyway? The hunting? Has Drake got a big shotgun, or what?” Capp grinned at Carvalho, who flashed a toothy smile.

“Like I would know,” Tolvern said with a snort.

“You should. I can see you want to jump him.”

“No, I don’t. That’s against regulations.” Tolvern glanced significantly at Carvalho, though she was aware that making an issue of it now made her look childish.

Capp slapped Carvalho’s thigh. “Go get us something to drink. We’re bloody thirsty, here.”

The man sprang obediently to his feet. When he was gone, Capp pulled her chair over to Tolvern’s. She glanced at a pair of Hroom arm wrestling at the next table, then leaned in with a conspiratorial look, putting a hand on Tolvern’s knee like they were old pals.

“You come to keep an eye on me, or you looking to get laid? Couple of blokes been checking you out since you came in, but you gotta loosen up, if you know what I mean.”

Tolvern resisted the urge to ask who and where, even as she knew Capp was full of it. Instead, she shrugged. “Neither. I got sick of babysitting the pilot, so I jumped at the chance to come down and grab a drink. Relax a little.”

“Ah, he ain’t so bad, anyhow.”

“Nyb Pim?” Tolvern asked.

“Aye. I didn’t think nothing good of him when he showed up on the bridge. Figured he’d be a real arse, look down on me and all, but nah, he’s a good bloke, considering. What, being an alien and all.”

“Got us here all right,” Carvalho said, returning with three glasses that looked too big to possibly hold distilled liquor, “an’ I figure this is where some of us wanted to be all along. I might just stay if this rum is any good.” He took a big swig. “And it is!”

A roar disrupted the scene, a disturbance at the next table over. Two men poured sugar onto the ground, and several Hroom threw themselves down to scarf at it with their long tongues snaking out like anteaters devouring termites.

A man staggered past, crashing into tables. Someone gave him a kick to the backside as he stumbled through, and this brought a laugh. Thus proving that humans didn’t need sugar. The liquid stuff that had been around since time immemorial seemed to do the same trick.

Tolvern took a drink. The rum burned going down, and she told herself to take it easy. She’d make a roaring fool of herself if she wasn’t careful. Then these two would go off to work God knows what mischief, while she did her own stumbling into tables.

“Whadya think?” Capp asked. “The black fellow or the big pile of muscle over there?”

“For her or you?” Carvalho said.

“Got my eye on someone else if you don’t satisfy me,” she said. “For Tolvern.”

“Black fellow is better looking,” Carvalho said. “That other bloke is missing half his teeth. Course, he does have them muscles you was talking about, and the commander is so bloody stiff she might need some muscles to loosen her up.”

“Anyhow, look,” Capp said. “They both got ladies checking ’em out. Whadya think, is our girl here better looking?”

“Hard to say. She ain’t exactly dressed up to get lucky, if you know what I mean.”

Tolvern had been blushing through this, feeling awkward as they discussed her so casually. She’d been sure they were inventing both men from whole cloth to get her to look, but at the mention of the other women involved in this supposed competition for attention, she glanced over.

Both of the men were sitting at the bar, huge tankards of beer in hand. One was dark and lean, the other had a shock of red hair, a beard, and muscles. The one with the beard wasn’t missing any teeth that she could see. Both men looked plenty handsome.

Tolvern took another drink of rum. “You’re full of it, both of you. They’re not looking this way.”

“Course they wouldn’t be, with you all zipped up like that,” Capp said. “Come on, you’re pretty enough. Even if you ain’t looking—’cause I know you got your eye on that big-game hunter of yours—it don’t hurt to have fun, does it?”

She reached over for the zipper of Tolvern’s jumpsuit and tugged it straight down. It was playful enough, and not mean spirited, and Tolvern had downed just enough rum that she was no longer feeling so uptight. The other woman unzipped her suit halfway to her naval, until a strip of bare flesh passed right between her breasts.

“Well look at that,” Capp said with another grin. “Ain’t even got a bra on. You’re ready to take it all off. Just need permission, eh?”

This made Tolvern feel self-conscious again. She had a slender, almost boyish figure, with small breasts. Didn’t really need a bra. Not the envious combination of lean and yet still curvy that Henny Capp seemed to carry effortlessly. Most of the men glancing this way, she now noticed as she was looking around the bar, were looking at Capp, not her.

She zipped her jumper back up with an exaggerated sigh, trying to cover her embarrassment with a look of indifference. She didn’t zip it all the way, but mostly.

“Ah, you ain’t half bad, Tolvern.” Capp’s hand slid up Carvalho’s thigh. “When I met you, I thought you had the biggest stick up your backside I’d ever seen.”

“It’s still there. You just can’t see it because my butt cheeks are clenched too tight. This place makes me nervous.”

The other woman laughed and tossed back the rest of her rum. She fished out a couple of silver shillings, which she slapped on the table, then patted Carvalho’s cheek. “Get us another round, luv.”

He rose obediently and made his way to the bar. It might take a minute. There were a crowd of men and women struggling to get the barman’s attention.

“I can ditch him any time, you know,” Capp said. “You want to get lucky tonight, let me know, and we’ll jump those two blokes at the bar.”

“Wouldn’t your boyfriend be furious?”

Capp shrugged. “Nah, he’d take it as license to find some bar wench and take her upstairs. Whadya say?”

Tolvern had already had a snootful of rum and was starting to feel warm and reckless. She cast her glance at the two men. They were looking at her this time, and one of them leaned in to whisper something in his mate’s ear. The man glanced at her and winked. She looked away, feeling flushed.

“You pick first,” Capp said. “Mr. Muscles or the dark one?”

“They’re probably pirates.”

“So are we!”

“It’s not that I’m not . . .” Tolvern’s voice trailed off.

“Horny?”

“Curious. I’m curious. But, well. No, I don’t think so. Not tonight.” Just as quickly, the reckless feeling dissolved into the thick air.

“I knew it,” Capp said, nodding sagely. “You’re hot for the captain. Well, believe me, you ain’t getting far with that one, not the way you’re playing coy and all. You want that man, you’ll have to jump his bones.” She looked toward the bar, irritation flickering across her face. “Where is our rum? I’m dying of thirst here.”

#

Tolvern’s job was to keep an eye on Capp and Carvalho, not get herself smashed, but the other woman kept ordering up the rum. Tolvern was already feeling wobbly when Capp and Carvalho dragged her to the dance floor, where the three of them joined the sweating, writhing bodies. She wasn’t a great dancer under the best of circumstances, and with so much rum in her belly, she knew she was flailing about ridiculously. Capp grabbed her wrist and pulled her deeper in, and soon she was in so tight with other bodies that her rhythm, or lack thereof, didn’t matter so much.

At last she was so hot and sweaty and drunk that she had to come out to take a break. She ordered a mineral water at the bar, then went looking for a washroom. She pushed through a circle of Hroom smoking a water pipe, through a mixed group of Hroom and human playing some sort of dice game, and then through a crowd packed in near the washroom entrance. She staggered past the men and Hroom at a long, trough-like urinal, and pushed herself into the stall. A wave of nausea washed over her as she sat, but it passed.

She remembered something her father had said once when she’d had too much Christmas eggnog and complained of a hangover. After the first glass, you were only borrowing future happiness. Soon enough you’d have to pay it back, with interest. What’s more, as she’d been recently accepted into the Academy at the time, getting drunk was the quickest way to remind others that she was a commoner. A baron’s son might get away with it, but if she got drunk in public, people of better breeding would shake their heads and remind themselves that she was a steward’s daughter.

Tolvern stood and stared down as the bowl emptied and refilled with rust-colored water. The swirling looked like how her stomach felt.

“No more rum,” she mumbled.

When she came out of the bathroom, two Hroom were on the floor, fighting, while humans and other Hroom surrounded them, making bets, passing money. The brawlers had the light-pink skin of eaters, and she figured it was something over sugar. Carvalho stood to one side with another man, short and bald, one ear clipped. The two men stood in close, exchanging something, one palm to the other.

Tolvern figured it was another bet on the fighting Hroom, but then the bald man reached into a pocket and removed a heavy coin purse. Carvalho pulled apart the string and peered inside, his eyes widening. He quickly drew the string and shoved it into a pocket. He leaned in and whispered to the bald man, who nodded before slipping furtively away.

She stared hard. The bald man—she’d seen him before, and suddenly remembered where. He was one of the men she’d led in a surly procession from the captured pirate frigate. Drake had forced the pirates to sign papers renouncing their rights to their ship in return for the privilege of being spared their lives. The captain and his daughter had muttered dark oaths, but they had signed, together with the rest of the crew. Hadn’t Carvalho and Capp been in the party that handcuffed the prisoners and sent them to the space elevator to be unceremoniously dumped onto the surface? Tolvern thought they had.

She shrank into the crowd as Carvalho turned to scan his surroundings. That was a big coin purse. If stuffed with guineas and half crowns, it might hold several hundred pounds. What the devil had Carvalho given or told the bald man to get a payoff of that size?

Then, while she was still standing there, trying not to be seen, another figure picked her way through the crowd to Carvalho’s side. Capp! 

The two of them embraced, but it wasn’t for amorous purposes. Instead, Carvalho leaned in and whispered in her ear. In response to whatever he’d said, she reached out a hand and patted his bulging pocket where he’d stuffed the coin purse.

Tolvern retreated into the bathroom, her heart pounding, her face flushed with rage at the betrayal.

Chapter Seventeen

A Hroom strapped the four passengers into the railgun car: Drake and Tolvern in the front seats, Barker and Oglethorpe in the back. Harnesses swung over their shoulders to hold them in place as if they were in an amusement park rollercoaster. Drake looked doubtfully at the track that cut at a near-vertical angle into the hazy red mist. He could just see the distant tower that marked the cars of the space elevator, where they would dock and continue their journey into space where Ajax waited.

The Hroom spoke in Ladino with a greasy-handed female operator, then turned to the four passengers. “There is a technical issue. We expect it to be resolved in two minutes.”

“One of these days,” Barker said from behind Drake’s shoulder, “this thing is going to launch right off the tracks.”

“What makes you think it hasn’t already?” Drake said.

The elevator itself was several centuries old—Hroom Empire tech from before the wars. Composed of the counterweight of a small moon in orbit and a carbon nanotube structure stretching to the ground, it had once whisked passengers and goods back and forth from terra firma to space, saving a fortune on fuel to lift mass out of San Pablo’s gravity well. Civilization had collapsed on the world not long after the Ladino settlers—themselves a mixture of Brazilians, Argentines, and Spaniards—had migrated out from the home systems. Several decades ago, the lower machinery had failed, as had attempts to repair it. Albion engineers could have built a new elevator at great cost, but the present solution was this rail gun to launch passengers up to the lowest functioning levels of the elevator.

None of them had done it before; Drake would have brought Ajax and Captain Kidd down from orbit, but he’d needed to suss out the situation on the ground first. Make sure they could get in and out safely. Until he knew, he wouldn’t bring the ship planetside where it would be vulnerable.

After several minutes, the Hroom came back from the small stone building housing the control equipment for the rail gun. He popped open the canopy. “Excuse me. The problem should be resolved shortly.”

“How long?” Drake asked.

“Five minutes, perhaps ten.” The Hroom left without shutting the canopy.

Tolvern cleared her throat. She still looked pale from her drinking of the previous evening. “This is the point where Jane would say ‘recalculating,’ and then fall into an endless loop. ‘Recalculating . . . recalculating . . . recalculating.’”

“I just want it over with,” Oglethorpe groaned from the back seat.

“Have you thought anything more about what I told you, Captain?” Tolvern asked.

“I have. I’m looking for other explanations.”

“It was a lot of money. Must have been hundreds of pounds.”

“But you didn’t see it.”

“It was heavy,” she insisted. “Had to be a lot, even if only shillings. What could that mean? You and I both know that there’s not a blessed thing of value in our possession except the ships themselves.”

He knew that. He’d spent the day yesterday haggling with spaceport operators. The initial findings were discouraging. Turns out this sector of space was awash with equipment left kicking around after the war. Captain Kidd’s plasma engine hadn’t fetched ten thousand pounds, or even eight, as Barker had suggested, but six. The rest of the ship would bring just under four thousand more. Twenty-five hundred if he insisted on stripping out the weapons systems first. He’d wanted to keep both arms and armaments, but needed that money.

So, ten thousand quid, tops, for repairs that would have taken thirty thousand to do properly in Royal Navy spaceyards with navy contractors. But the good news was that if the wrecks themselves were going cheap, so was labor. Navy contracts had dried up with the end of the war. He’d found two different yards that bid hard and fast for the right to repair Ajax. What’s more, the master boatwright at one yard offered to trade the hulk of Captain Kidd—minus engines—against the cost of the shield repair. The yard owner would use some of the wreck to complete the patches and keep the rest.

The end result would look like the unholy offspring of a Punisher-class cruiser and a pirate frigate, but they’d be back in fighting trim. And Drake needed them battle ready. He meant to charge for Hot Barsa the instant the repairs were done.

“The question,” Drake said, “is whether Captain Vargus is scheming to get his ship back, or if he has darker plans.”

“His ship is a wreck,” Tolvern said. “Why would he want it back when we’re practically going to deliver Ajax to him? He saw her in action, he knows what she’s capable of.”

“In the right hands. Namely, mine.”

Tolvern turned her head, an eyebrow raised. “That sounds like a boast.”

Drake allowed a half smile. “Perhaps it is. Vargus didn’t show particular skill in command of his own vessel. Could be that he’s used to forcing surrender on pure swagger. A pirate’s fearsome reputation, and all that rubbish. But I suspect he wasn’t that good. It was hardly a fair fight, not like facing Rutherford.”

“We bested Rutherford, too,” Tolvern said.

“Aye, that we did,” Barker said from behind them. “But some of that was the element of surprise.”

“Bested him twice, in fact,” Tolvern said.

“Would you place money on a third time?” Barker asked. “I’d be gobsmacked if he didn’t bring a whole task force next time he comes after us. For all we know, we’ll be facing the bloody Dreadnought this time. You want to go up against her?”

The chief engineer’s more choleric assessment brought the captain some needed perspective. Drake was planning an assault on Royal Navy and York Company resources—not to mention the personal estates of Lord Malthorne himself—when at the moment he was at risk of losing his ship, and possibly his life, to a ragtag group of pirates. First, he had to take care of that small detail before worrying about Rutherford and the rest.

“The question for now,” Drake said, “is how we keep those villains from taking our ship.”

“Cancel shore leave,” Tolvern said. “Anyone who doesn’t return to space is off the crew. Anyone else—from the former prisoners, I mean—we arrest as soon as they get on board.”

“So they’re all against us, is that what you’re saying?”

Tolvern played with the straps on her harness. “What is Capp thinking? You promoted her, you gave her what she wanted. If only she weren’t involved with that cursed Carvalho. He must have turned her.”

“Where is that Hroom, anyway?” Oglethorpe asked. “This waiting is awful. It’s so bloody hot, I’m melting.”

“Whining isn’t going to help any,” Barker growled back.

The engineer was only voicing what the captain was thinking himself. Not that Oglethorpe was wrong. Drake was wrung out from the heat. And tired of lying in the rail car on his back, looking up into the hazy red sky. Somewhere up there was Ajax, and he was anxious to get back on the bridge of his ship.

“The problem is,” he said, after turning it over in his head, “we can’t toss aside crew because they might be against us. I think we need to let it play out at the yards.”

“How are we going to do that?” Tolvern said. “Say Vargus paid off Carvalho to get us out of the way. Carvalho takes some up-front money, finds fools in the city who are short on money and long on weapons and free time. Could be twenty men coming after us.”

“In that case,” Drake said. “I’d say we buy our own muscle.”

“With what?” Tolvern said. “What will we have once we’re done paying those thieves at the yard?”

“Not much,” Drake agreed, “but we have a bit. And the promise of a whole lot more. People see us hauling the sorry carcass of Captain Kidd planetside, see Ajax come thundering down, her guns bristling, they’ll know what we’re capable of.”

“More piracy?” Barker said. “That’s what you’re talking about? More pirates on board, these ones supposedly replacing the unreliable ones we’ve already got? Is that about right?”

The Hroom came over again, and conversation died.

“Okay,” he said, sounding more cheerful. “This time we’re definitely ready for launch. We thought there might be a broken segment of rail. Turns out not.”

“What do you mean?” Barker asked in a sharp tone. “How do you think the rail might be broken? It’s either broken or it isn’t.”

“No worries. It’s all fixed now.” With that, the Hroom shut the plastic canopy and hurried off.

“Are you sure we can’t stay here forever?” Oglethorpe asked. “All of a sudden it doesn’t feel so hot.”

A buzzing traveled along the rails beneath them. The rail car vibrated. It felt suddenly very small and fragile, the hazy lines of the space elevator so distant, and the rail beneath them as slender as a ribbon of glass.

“Here we go,” Barker said in a low voice. “King’s balls.”

They launched. One moment, Drake was lying on his back, motionless, his heart picking up speed. The next, a giant fist slammed into his chest, and he was hurtling upward.

Oglethorpe screamed, a long wail of “Aaaaaaaaah!” that seemed to go on forever.

Drake had traveled at 20,000 miles a second, but this rapid acceleration with no anti-grav, with the air blasting over the capsule, was a different matter. Only a few hundred miles an hour now, but still accelerating. Drake closed his eyes. The air howled outside the canopy.

It didn’t cut the sound of Oglethorpe’s scream. “Aaaaaaaaah!”

Chapter Eighteen

The next day, Tolvern eyed Drake as she followed him away from Ajax, which sat hissing and popping behind them on the tarmac. It was just the two of them, but the captain walked with a confident swagger, seeming not to care if they were ambushed or picked off by snipers from atop one of the surrounding warehouses or hangars. When had he become such a risk taker, a bluffer, like a high-stakes poker player?

Drake wore a side arm slung low on his hip, a long-barreled hand cannon. Tolvern had a revolver, plus a shotgun over her shoulder. She’d have brought even more weaponry, but Drake didn’t want them entering the yard like they were expecting a fight. Well? Weren’t they?

“Where’s Capp?” she asked.

“Sitting with a big old pile of money, waiting for us in the hangar.”

“Together with about twenty other pirates, I should figure.”

“We’ll see.” He didn’t sound concerned.

“Meanwhile, someone comes and grabs Ajax while we’re inside messing around.”

Drake gave her a side look. “Anyone tries to storm the ship, and the deck gun will settle their hash in short order.”

Trucks came rolling across the tarmac toward Ajax, ready to haul her into the largest of the hangars, a vast warehouse where men and Hroom and equipment would spend the next two weeks assisting Ajax’s own boatswains in patching her up.

Ajax stretched long and dark and mean-looking beneath the ruddy, soot-stained sky over San Pablo. Her surface was pitted and battered, but this somehow made her look only more sinister. And still a Royal Navy cruiser. Tolvern didn’t fancy the thought of patching her with parts salvaged from Captain Kidd. Whatever came out the other side, it would be ugly. 

The spaceyard was so large that it took ten minutes to walk across the tarmac, dodging support vehicles and smaller spacecraft, until they reached the vast open doors of the yard’s second-largest hangar. Inside lay Captain Kidd. She’d looked a proper wreck when Capp untethered and dropped her into the atmosphere, bandaged with temporary foam shields just so she could survive the heat of reentry. Now she looked pathetic, like an abandoned derelict floating in the abyss of deep space, barely fit for salvage.

Workers swarmed over the hull of the captured pirate ship, a dozen blowtorches cutting away chunks of shielding and the paneling beneath, which were lifted away by cranes to be stacked in one corner. Workers there numbered and labeled the pieces, which ranged in size from a few square feet to vast segments that, once removed, revealed the passages and interior chambers.

The biggest crane of all was secured to Captain Kidd’s plasma engine, which it strained to lift clear. The chains went taut until it looked like they would snap. The entire back end of the wreck started to lift, and workers atop the ship shouted and cursed as they were nearly bucked off. There was no net, and little safety equipment of any kind. Turned out the engine hadn’t been completely cut free of the ship, so they sent in a pair of Hroom with blowtorches to finish the job.

A tall, bony man, almost built like a Hroom himself, spotted them and came over. He was one of the few wearing a hard hat, and as he approached, he took it off and ran a hand along his buzzed, glistening scalp. Sweat stained his armpits.

“This is Commander Tolvern, my first mate,” Drake said to him. To Tolvern, he said, “Hubert Rodriguez. He owns this place.”

She took the sweating, greasy hand Rodriguez offered, but wiped her hand on the back of her leg as soon as the man turned back to the captain.

“Wasn’t pleased to see your friends show up at the yard this morning,” the man said in Ladino-accented English. “I know some of these people. Cutthroats and thieves.”

He drew out this last word: theeeves. 

“Believe me,” Drake said. “I’d rather have fifty royal marines to back me up. It doesn’t seem that any are forthcoming.”

Tolvern cast her eye about for the woman Drake had entrusted to take the captured ship down to the yard. “Where is Henny Capp?”

“Waiting in my office,” Rodriguez said. “She won’t let her hand off the money bag.”

“I’ll bet,” Tolvern said with a grunt. “Question is, you got anyone keeping an eye on her?”

“Two of my men. The money is safe for now. I would not put down a long-term wager, however. Not if you have run afoul of Captain Vargus. He has a fearsome reputation.”

“I’ve taken that reputation from him,” Drake said with a nod toward the dissolving wreckage of the pirate’s former ship.

“We will see.”

Against Tolvern’s better judgment, Drake had confided with the head of the yards. Rodriguez had too much money in this operation to be turning against legitimate customers. Sure, he could score a quick payoff if he betrayed them, but then who would trust him with their ship? What’s more, there was the promise of bigger prizes to come if he got Captain Drake fixed up and out working mischief again. 

“Anyway, I have not seen any sign of Vargus or his crew,” Rodriguez continued, as the three of them made their way to a metal staircase that snaked its way up to a catwalk that hooked over to his offices overlooking the hangar. “He knows this is neutral territory. If there is any fighting San Pablo will be closed to him, now and forever more.”

“He’s desperate,” Tolvern said. She cast her eye across the hangar, looking for suspicious movement, anyone who seemed to be paying them unusual attention. “Figure he’d trade one friendly port for a fresh ship and a chance for revenge.”

They walked across the catwalk and entered Rodriguez’s office. A wave of cool, filtered air washed over them, and Tolvern took big gulps, grateful to be away from the smell of lubricant and solvents and the muggy, smoggy atmosphere of San Pablo itself.

Capp sat behind a metal desk, her tattooed forearm resting over a heavy sack of coins, her side arm on the desk beside her. A computer screen hung from one wall, showing the outlines of the pirate ship and movement of cranes and workers, but she paid it no attention. Instead, she stared at two men in brown jumpsuits who were armed with shotguns and standing in either corner of the room.

“You see,” Rodriguez said, not to Drake and Tolvern, but to Capp, “I was not going to turn over the money and then steal it back from you.”

“I ain’t so sure of that,” she said. “You mighta sent your goons to rob me, then claim they went all rogue and crap.” A nod. “Hey, Cap’n. Commander.”

Tolvern stared at the woman. “Where’s your friend?”

“Who? You mean Carvalho?” She shrugged. “He’s about. Somewhere in the city, I figure.”

“Right.” She let the skepticism come through in her voice.

Capp frowned.

Drake looked around. “Nothing looks amiss here.” Then, to Capp, “We all need to be cautious. Come back to Ajax with us.” 

“What, you don’t want me to stay with Captain Kidd, keep an eye on things as they take her apart?”

“We have a lot of money here, and that makes us a target for robbery,” Drake said. “Better if we stick together. In case there’s an ambush, you know. And I’m not talking about from Rodriguez or his men.”

Something passed over Capp’s face. It wasn’t confusion—she’d picked up what the captain was insinuating.

“Wait a minute. What are you saying?”

Tolvern put her hand on her side arm. “Stand up, Capp. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Capp cursed. She started to move.

“Touch that weapon, and I’ll blow you to hell,” Tolvern warned.

“Do what she says,” the captain said in his stern voice, sounding to Tolvern’s ears like his father, the baron.

Capp stood and pushed away from the money and the desk. Anger and betrayal flashed over her face. Tolvern wondered if she could have got it wrong. What had she seen two nights ago in the city? Could she have misread the situation, and Carvalho and Capp hadn’t received a hefty payoff for betraying them to the pirates?

“I don’t want bloodshed,” Rodriguez said as Tolvern moved toward Capp with her gun leveled. “If you’re going to kill traitors, do it on your own turf, not my spaceyard.”

“I hope bloodshed will be unnecessary,” Drake said.

Capp blanched at this talk. She didn’t move as Tolvern groped her from head to toe. Tolvern lifted the other woman’s trouser leg and removed a long dagger strapped to her shin. But there were no other weapons or items of interest. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but again she had the sense that she’d made a mistake.

Drake took Capp’s gun and handed it to Tolvern as the commander backed away from the desk.

“Go ahead, sit down,” he told Capp. “We’ll do this in a civilized manner.”

“I don’t deserve this,” Capp said. “I did everything you said. I was guarding the money, didn’t take none of it.”

“It’s not the money in front of you that’s the issue,” Tolvern said. “It’s the payoff you received the other night.”

“What do you mean?” Capp’s voice was sullen.

“Commander, tell her,” Drake said.

Tolvern explained how she’d come out of the washroom to see Carvalho receiving a purse stuffed with coins. Hundreds of pounds worth, it seemed. The Ladino had tucked this away, then apparently shared whatever information he had with Capp. There was a long pause when Tolvern finished.

“Yeah, there’s money. But it ain’t what you think.”

“I hope not,” Drake said. He sounded stern, but sincere. “But you can see how it looks very bad. As if you sold us out. Took payment from one of Captain Vargus’s men. What is the plan, to give him Ajax? Were you going to kill us to ease the way?”

“No!”

“No, what?” Tolvern said. “The killing part, or the part about Vargus paying you off?”

“All of that. I swear to God. It was money some bloke owed me. Owed us, I mean. From way back when.”

Tolvern scoffed. “We’re not idiots. You’re trying to claim you show up your first night in San Pablo and some honest creditor seeks you out at a bar, anxious to settle an old debt?”

Capp didn’t answer.

“I’m losing my patience,” Drake said. “I don’t want you to be guilty, I want there to be a good explanation. I’m short on crew, and I can’t be tossing people for no reason. Especially not one who showed she could be useful, like you did. That’s why I promoted you. That’s why I told you to start finding me a crew.”

“I’m obliged, I really am. I wouldn’t do you no wrong, Cap’n. Please.”

Capp sounded sincere, and Tolvern wanted to believe her. Carvalho was a scoundrel, but the commander had been warming to this former marine with the rough speech and swagger.

“But I won’t have traitors in my crew,” Drake said. “I won’t be lied to.”

“It’s the crew you told me to raise.”

“Yes?” Drake said.

“I started putting out the word, and it turned out that there were plenty who wanted to join. City is swarming with ’em. Lotta tramp merchants put out of business. Smugglers and the like who lost their ships in the war. I thought, well, instead of collecting names to pass on, I’d get people to pay a little something to get on the list, know what I mean? Couple of coins here, couple there—Carvalho knew this bloke, see, who knew other blokes.”

“Let me get this straight,” Drake said. He still sounded stern, but some of the tension had dissolved from his voice. “You were ordered to find me the best sorts for the mission. A hundred names, and I’d choose thirty of them. Instead, you were going to recommend anyone willing to press a few coins in your palm?”

“Aye,” she said. “It weren’t no hundreds of pounds, though. Half crown to get on the list. Two quid if you found yourself chosen. But I swear, I didn’t mean no harm.”

“Listen up,” Tolvern said. She was both angry and relieved. “We’re still a military ship, and we follow military discipline. You’ll receive your pay according to military grades. There will be no bribe on this or any other matter.”

Rodriguez let out a chuckle behind them. “Glad to hear you don’t have a traitor on your hands, my friends, but if I were you, I’d lighten up on your ‘military’ discipline. None of those malvados are rushing to join your crew because they want three square meals and navy wages.”

“What do you mean?” Tolvern asked.

“People heard how you took down Captain Kidd, how you put Vargus in his place. They figure you’ll soon be hauling in the booty, and they want a piece of the action. That means pirate rules—captain’s share, first mate’s share, and so on down to the cabin boy. They want coin in palm, preferably gold and a lot of it.”

A shadow passed over Drake’s face. Tolvern also felt troubled. The captain handed her Capp’s firearm, which she was about to return to the woman when an explosion sounded from the hangar outside the office.

Rodriguez cursed in Ladino. He turned for the door, perhaps thinking, as had Tolvern, that some careless worker had stumbled across some unexploded ordnance and set it off. But when he threw open the door, gunfire came blasting up at them.

Chapter Nineteen

For some reason, the spaceyard owner’s words disturbed Drake more than the revelation that Capp had been taking a little illicit profit from filling the crew list. That bit about men and women signing on so they could get gold. Shouldn’t have been a surprise, so why was it bothering him so much?

He was so deep in his thoughts that the explosion blended into the background clank and boom of the hangar floor. It was only when the two guards grabbed Rodriguez and dragged him back to safety in the office that Drake realized that they were under attack. Bullets slammed into the windows overlooking the hangar. The windows were thick plastisteel, bombproof against the accidents that must be common in the operation taking place outside, and they didn’t shatter.

Drake drew his side arm and looked down at the hangar floor. A dozen or more armed men and women swarmed in through a gaping hole in the far side of the hangar. They’d blasted through the outer wall instead of facing the guards at the open hangar doors. Now the intruders exchanged gunfire with the men at the doors, while the workers took cover among the equipment or fled for their lives. Three men lay dead on the floor, already gunned down by the attackers, and he saw with alarm that these were some of the ones he’d hired to help guard Captain Kidd in the hangar. One of the attackers stood over their bodies, spraying machine gun fire across the hangar, and it was this that had apparently struck the window. They hadn’t yet been targeted.

Rodriguez dragged the door shut and shouted instructions to his men, who looked nervous. He drew his own side arm, a big, ugly thing with a bone handle and a long, black barrel.

Drake turned on Capp, his suspicions blooming anew. “Who are they?” he demanded.

“I don’t know, I swear.” She sounded afraid, legitimately confused. “Gimme my gun so I can fight.”

Tolvern had been on the verge of handing over the gun, but whipped it back. “Get in the corner,” she told Capp. “Drop to your knees. Do not move or I’ll waste you, got it?”

Drake turned back to the window. He searched the attackers for Carvalho, half-convinced that Capp’s partner would be leading the assault, but couldn’t see the big Ladino.

“Here they come,” Tolvern said. “Up the stairs.”

He followed her gaze. Several attackers came sprinting up the metal stairs toward the catwalk. They carried hand cannons, assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols, and they were festooned with bandoliers stuffed with grenade shells or heavy-caliber bullets. One man was missing an arm that had been replaced with a shining mechanical limb with a Gatling gun on the end. The attackers gained the catwalk and started toward the offices. When they were halfway across, a woman dropped to her knee and lifted a long-nosed hand cannon.

Rodriguez spat something in Ladino. His men fell back from the window, and Drake and Tolvern followed. A grenade slammed into it, and the window shuddered. The smoke outside cleared to reveal a spiderweb of cracks along its surface.

Drake took stock of their own weapons. A few pistols, plus the shotguns held by Tolvern and Rodriguez’s guards. That might serve if the enemy closed in, but not if they kept shooting grenades from a distance. And if Drake and the others made a run for it, the attackers had rifles, as well. The enemy could pick them off as they fled around the catwalk.

Another shot, this one against the other window. Then a third, which battered the door. Smoke seeped into the room. Outside, gunfire continued across the hangar. The ground shuddered from a thumping explosion. Drake could only presume that by now the attackers had either overwhelmed or driven off any of the defenders on the hangar floor.

“How many armed men do you have in the yard?” Drake asked Rodriguez.

“Not enough—fifteen, twenty? But they’re spread out over three square miles. We’ve had thieves before, lone desperadoes. Nothing like this. I told you, people know if they’re dumb enough to—”

Another explosion hit the window. A piece of plastisteel cracked loose and clattered to the ground. The sound of gunfire came through, louder than ever.

Had to be Vargus. The pirate had a whole crew of desperadoes. Men from whom Drake had stripped their possessions and livelihood. Vargus must have known he couldn’t take Ajax directly, not with crew still on board and manning the weapons. But if he could kill the captain and first mate while they were unprotected, perhaps even take the owner of the spaceyard hostage, then he’d stand good odds.

Drake cast a side glance at Capp, who had risen from the floor during the last attack to grab her dagger from the table. Perspiration stood out on her forehead and buzzed scalp. Was she behind this? Or surprised like the rest of them?

“Give her the gun,” he told Tolvern.

“But, Captain—”

“If she’s against us, she’ll shoot us in the back, but we’re probably dead anyway.” He paused as another blast hit the window. More plastisteel broke away. “We’ve got to get out of here before they cave it in around us.”

Tolvern held out the gun slowly. Capp snatched it back with a glower. She shoved the dagger into its hilt and checked the gun’s magazine.

“Where does the catwalk lead?” Drake asked Rodriguez. “Are there more stairs?”

“It takes you around the other side of the pirate ship. No stairs that way, but we could climb onto the crane and scramble down the side of the ship.”

“Good enough. The rest of you, listen up. This is what we’re going to do.”

Drake gave quick instructions to get them in order, then knocked open the door with his shoulder and lurched onto the catwalk. Tolvern and Capp came in behind, followed by Rodriguez and his two guards. All six of them emerged shooting.

The distance was too great for shotguns to be accurate, but Tolvern and Rodriguez’s men made a good show of it anyway, blasting away, pumping, and firing again. The enemy threw themselves to the catwalk to avoid the fire, and Drake and his companions took advantage of the delay to race around the catwalk, which continued along the wall halfway to the main doors before spanning the floor to the other side of the hangar.

The partially dismantled hull of Captain Kidd lay beneath them, too far to jump to on this side. Where the workers had peeled back the carapace, one could see the snaking corridors, the crew berths, and the officer quarters. Exposed wiring and conduits lay everywhere. Some of the spaceyard laborers had taken refuge inside, where Hroom and human alike cowered to wait out the fighting.

The attackers had nearly taken control of the hangar floor, with the remaining defenders holed up in a redoubt to one side, behind one of the cranes. They returned scattered gunfire against the men and women still moving toward them. Several men and Hroom lay dead and dying across the floor.

Renewed gunfire lashed at Drake and his companions before they could get around to the other side, where they could duck behind the highest point of Captain Kidd. One of Rodriguez’s men cried out and fell. His fellow guard tried to drag him to safety, but bullets pinged off the rail and chased him back. The fallen man was lying motionless anyway—seemed that a rifle shot had punched him in the chest, and Drake doubted anything could be done for him.

Tolvern tossed aside her shotgun and joined Capp to rise with pistols and squeeze off shots over the top of the ship. This kept the attackers from charging across the exposed catwalk. While the two women fired, Drake eyed the crane to see if it would serve to get them down. One could, in fact, lean over, grab the metal framing, and climb to the hangar floor. Unfortunately, there was shouting back and forth between some of the enemies below and the ones on the catwalk opposite. Two of the men on the floor were loading hand cannons to blast up at their position. Drake and Rodriguez aimed through the slats in the catwalk and drove them off, at least temporarily.

“Vargus,” Rodriguez spat. “Over there. Look!”

Drake spotted the pirate captain now, his familiar profile with the long, graying hair and the braided beard with drooping mustache. He stood with his back to them, directing the attack on the remaining hangar defenders near the main doors.

Tolvern pointed her pistol at the pirate. Drake shouted at her to go after the men with the hand cannons instead. Neither shot was easy, but Vargus had to be two hundred yards away and partially shielded by his men. She didn’t obey. Instead, she squeezed off a shot at Vargus, which drew the pirate captain’s attention and fresh gunfire from him and his men. Bullets pinged off the catwalk, the walls behind, and the ship. Capp cried out and clutched her leg. Only grazed, she was shooting again seconds later.

Now they were beset from three directions: from across the catwalk, from Vargus and his men, and from the two with the hand cannons below who had enough covering fire to emerge from behind the debris where they’d ducked moments earlier. Drake, Rodriguez, Tolvern, Capp, and the remaining guard fought back, but they no longer had the concentrated firepower to force any of their enemies to take cover.

Just when it seemed things couldn’t get worse, some eighteen or twenty newcomers came running in through the open hangar doors, brandishing weapons. At first Drake’s heart leaped, thinking that the fresh forces could only be reinforcements for the beleaguered defenders. Maybe they were Rodriguez’s men from elsewhere in the yard, or maybe word had reached Ajax, and Barker had sent out all available forces, though it didn’t seem as though enough time had passed.

Then he caught a better look. They weren’t guards or other regular forces, but another mismatched, hodge-podge collection of men and women—even a few Hroom—armed with all manner of pistols, assault rifles, grenades, and other nonstandard weapons. They wore everything from jumpsuits to the leather vests favored by smugglers and pirates. It would appear that the only reinforcements would be Captain Vargus’s.

Ronaldo Carvalho swaggered in at their head. He brandished a heavy assault rifle and wore holsters with pistols and hand cannons, a belt of grenades going over one shoulder. The fool was overweighed with weapons and ammo, but then again, the battle was already as good as won.

“Now you’ll get it, you bastards,” Capp said. A grin spread across her face.

Tolvern turned on her, sputtering, face red with rage. “Why, you treacherous—” She lifted her gun.

Drake shot out a hand and grabbed her wrist. Capp was looking down at Vargus and his men. Her taunt hadn’t been meant for them; it was directed toward the pirates.

At that moment, Carvalho opened up with his assault rifle. It sprayed gunfire toward Vargus’s men, who threw themselves down. In an instant, the battle had flared up with renewed intensity. Vargus directed all his fire against Carvalho and his men.

This gave Drake and the others the opportunity to focus on the enemies on the opposite side of the catwalk. They brought down two of them and forced a larger retreat. His flank secured, Drake ordered them to shoot down at the hangar floor, bringing in gunfire behind. The distance was still too great to be effective, but it kept the pirates from taking cover as the newcomers pressed forward. Carvalho himself stood in the middle of it all, shooting relentlessly with no concern for his own well-being.

“Get down, you fool,” Capp said. Worry pinched her voice.

Drake was shortly disabused of hopes for a quick victory as Vargus reorganized against the new threat. Already three of Carvalho’s men had fallen, against maybe twice that many pirates. There were still plenty of combatants on both sides, and bullets and grenades were flying everywhere.

Vargus and a small knot broke free and sprinted across the floor. They were headed toward the hole in the wall where they’d blasted their way in. There must be a vehicle of some kind to carry them away. As they ran, they hurled grenades behind them, which exploded into a screen of smoke and fire. They were joined by the survivors from the group that had fled the catwalk above. Other pirates were still caught in the firefight.

Drake and his band had a better view of the escaping pirates. They rose, no longer concerned about return fire, and blasted down at the men and women running. Two of the fleeing attackers fell. Several others streamed out the hole in the wall and escaped. Vargus was next, too far, and at a bad angle to shoot. He was at the hole; he’d get away.

Tolvern steadied her pistol arm with her left hand on her right wrist. She squeezed off one final shot as Vargus reached the hole. The pirate captain fell.

“I got him!” Tolvern’s voice was high and quivering with excitement. “I really got him!”

Capp whooped and clapped her on the shoulder, shouting across the wide expanse of the hangar. “Vargus is dead! We got him!”

Drake laughed as he studied Tolvern still standing there with a goofy grin on her face, her eyes wide.

“I could have taken that shot fifty times and missed!” she said. “All sorts of stuff in the way. He was moving. Can you believe it? What a shot!”

She was gesturing with the gun, and he pushed it to one side. “Kindly try to not blow my head off.”

Tolvern returned a sheepish look, and they looked back over the hangar floor. With the death of their captain, and the escape of many others, the remaining pirates were throwing down weapons and surrendering.

Capp poked at her leg where the bullet had cut through her trousers and grazed her thigh, then looked up with evident satisfaction of her own.

“How about now?” she said. “You two gonna trust me, or what?”

#

It was Rodriguez’s operation, and he took charge as they rounded up the prisoners and forced them to kneel on the cement floor. Rodriguez’s men dragged Vargus’s corpse in to stack with the other bodies. The sight of their dead captain brought no visible response from the prisoners. Drake looked over the captives. There was no sign of Vargus’s daughter or of the man with a Gatling gun for a forearm. They must have escaped.

When questioned, Carvalho said that he’d been in the city scrounging up potential crew for the ship when someone let slip that Vargus had also been hiring men. It soon came out that the pirate captain meant to attack the spaceyard that very day. Kill or capture Drake and his crew, then hoof it offworld with Ajax. A plot born of a volatile mix of desperation and desire for revenge.

Carvalho had tried to hail the ship, but it was already coming down through the atmosphere and not picking up transmissions, so he’d rounded up as many of his potential recruits as he could get and promised them a position on Ajax if they’d join in its defense. Now he was asking Drake to honor that commitment. The captain looked over Carvalho’s recruits with a skeptical eye.

They were a scroungy, disreputable sort. Tattoos and missing fingers. Gold hoops in their ears and noses. Dyed hair and braided beards. One woman had lost an ear, and an older man wore an eye patch. Give them a few bandanas and pantaloons, maybe a hook for a hand or a pegleg, and they wouldn’t have looked out of place on an old wooden pirate ship. Tolvern caught his eye and gave a worried shake of the head.

He sighed. What choice did he have?

“We’ll take an oath,” Drake said. “Every man, woman, and Hroom will swear it.”

“What kinda oath?” someone asked.

“Obedience to me and my rules. We keep military discipline on my ship. If you can handle that, if you want to stay alive once we’re in space, that is, then you’re welcome to join.”

There were nods and “ayes” of assent. He supposed, or hoped, rather, that his own reputation, and that of Ajax itself, had culled the malcontents and the most bloodthirsty types, but he had no illusions that life aboard the ship going forward would be tranquil and without incident. Not with these sorts making up more than half of his crew.

“There’s one other regulation you all should know,” he said, eying one of the three Hroom, her skin faded into a pale pinkish shade. “I’ll have no sugar on board. No sugar for any purpose whatsoever. If anyone needs a detox, that’s fine with me. Doc will do his best. Otherwise, you’ll find Ajax a cold, unfriendly place for someone looking to dip his snout in the white stuff.”

The eater began to edge away. Soon, she was standing back with the spaceyard workers. In contrast, the other two Hroom took a step forward, their mouths drawn into tight lines. The threat of no sugar seemed to be a feature for them, not a hardship to be endured. Any free Hroom must be living in fear of the crippling addiction that had wrecked their entire civilization.

Rodriguez waved Drake over to where the prisoners knelt. “You want to handle it yourself, or do you want me to do it?”

“Do what?” Tolvern asked, coming over with the captain. “I don’t understand.”

“No?” Rodriguez said. “Your captain does, I’ll bet.”

Drake looked over the prisoners, a cold feeling settling in his bowels like a shard of ice. There were eight of them in all—six men and two women. Gone was their swagger, the sneers they’d worn when taken prisoner. Kneeling on the hard floor, hands behind their backs, sweating while others determined their fate; they must know this was no game.

“We’re going to execute them?” Tolvern asked.

One of the prisoners started to his feet at this, but two of Rodriguez’s men bashed him in the back with the butts of their shotguns, and the man fell with a cry. The men kicked him in the ribs until the spaceyard owner told them to stop.

“But why?” she asked. “Once we’re off this rock . . . ”

“Tell her,” Rodriguez said.

“Rodriguez can’t let them go because he cannot have people thinking they can attack his yards and get away with it. Cannot have people thinking he’s a soft target. You could say the same thing for us. We let these people go once. They swore an oath before we did so. Are we going to trust them now?”

“But I shot Vargus! He’s dead.”

“You didn’t shoot his daughter,” Drake said. “And others from the crew escaped. Do you want to take a chance that these villains will rejoin them?”

The prisoners had heard all of this and now began protesting in loud voices that they’d do nothing of the sort. But Drake noted that many of them were the same ones who had sworn to abandon their ship and any thoughts of revenge. Yet here it was a few days later, and they’d tried to murder him on neutral territory. Not one of these pirates had a scrap of honor, or they wouldn’t be here.

Rodriguez seemed alarmed as the shouting and protests continued. A woman struggled to her feet. Rodriguez drew his side arm and shot her in the head. Another got up and lowered his head to charge. One of the guards blasted him with the shotgun. He fell back. Others cried for mercy, even as they looked like they’d try to get up to fight or run.

“Enough!” Drake said.

Rodriguez ordered his men to stand down. The remaining six pirates stopped struggling and shouting and looked at Drake with hope in their eyes. That hope faded when he drew his side arm.

“Commander,” he told Tolvern. “Let’s do what must be done.”

Chapter Twenty

Tolvern struggled to sleep for several days after the fight at the spaceport hangar. It wasn’t the battle itself that made her toss on her bunk at night—she’d been through all manner of terrible struggles. At the battle of Ypis III, she’d been on the bridge when the captain ordered them to land on the planet in support of the marines. They’d flown back and forth over the surface, launching a barrage of tactical nuclear weapons over empire forces.

At the Battle of Kif Lagoon, they’d torn apart several Hroom sloops of war. Ajax had flown through the debris side by side with Vigilant as the two cruisers pursued the retreating enemy. Dead Hroom littered the battlefield by the thousands, floating in a macabre tableau.

Tolvern had seen plenty of dead. She’d caused plenty of the dying herself. But no battle had ever ended like this. At night, when she closed her eyes, she saw the terror on her captive’s face as she pressed her pistol to his temple. She felt the weight of the trigger beneath her finger.

Drake had only made her kill one man. He’d taken care of the rest. But that one dead man didn’t feel like an opponent killed fairly in battle.

It reminded her of when her father, Lord Drake’s steward, would bring in the pigs for slaughter. Pigs were not chickens; they knew they were about to be killed, could hear the screams of the other pigs and sense their terror. She’d seen the same look in the pigs’ eyes that she saw in the prisoners. Only this time, it felt like murder.

Tolvern woke on the morning of the fourth day to the sound of pounding on the other side of her stateroom wall. Sounded like a jackhammer. May as well have been knocking against her skull for all the hope she had of going back to sleep. She pulled on her jumpsuit and boots and strapped on her side arm as she left the ship.

Captain Drake stood by himself outside, staring up at his ship. Men and equipment swarmed over Ajax and across the hangar floor. Drake never moved; they all flowed around him.

The doors to the hangar lay open, and a lorry hauling a massive piece of paneling came backing in. Men with shotguns checked his credentials before letting him pass, while other armed guards—these ones from Ajax’s own crew—inspected the vehicle itself.

Drake glanced at Tolvern as she approached. “You look tired.”

“I haven’t been sleeping well.”

“I think I know why.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “Waking to jackhammers outside my room doesn’t help.”

“Where is your room?” he asked. “Up on the bow? Or aft of the mess?”

“You’ve been there, remember? Twelfth Night?”

“Ah, yes. I’d forgotten. The bow.”

She looked at him. How could he not know where she slept? She’d been in that room for three years now.

Drake nodded up toward the ship. “That’s what woke you up.”

A crane was lifting a piece of deck plating to fasten down above the bridge viewscreen. It was the big plate with the skull over crossed sabers. The Jolly Roger.

She snorted. “Ha. You decided to use it after all.”

“Normally, I am not a gambling man, but this decision seems like a roll of the dice.”

Tolvern studied him and was struck again by his aristocratic bearing. It was in the line of his jaw, his nose, his confident gaze, even the way he carried himself. She could imagine him taking over his father’s barony in ten or twenty years. His hair would be gray at the temples, there would be lines about his eyes.

He would have a wife, children. Almost, she could imagine herself in that role. His companion, standing at his side as an equal. But, no. That was a delusion beyond fantasy. The woman he married would come from a high family, she would have a regal bearing to match Drake’s. No man of his station would marry a commoner.

“What do you mean by gambling?” she asked, cautiously.

“We’re both at a crossroads, Commander. Don’t you see it?”

“No, sir.”

“My alternative is to contact Rutherford, meet him for a parley. Share my suspicions about the lord admiral. See if he’ll join me in a rebellion against the Admiralty. If enough join us, the king might throw his weight on our side. An antagonist in a civil war has hopes of regaining his former station in life. A traitor, not so much.”

She frowned. “I find myself doubting that Rutherford or any of the rest of them would join a rebellion whose goal is to free the Hroom from sugar addiction.”

“No, they would not.”

Tolvern glanced up at the plating with the skull and crossed sabers. “So we go all in?”

“So I go all in. That’s my crossroads. We are no longer a Punisher-class cruiser, we are something else. A hybrid. And I am no longer a captain in the Royal Navy. I have fought against king and country, I have done battle with pirates in order to steal their treasure. What does that make me?”

“A pirate, I suppose,” she said.

He smiled. “Hence, the Jolly Roger. Captain Drake of the Starship Blackbeard. Has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?”

“I’ve seen this coming. I think we all have. But how is this a crossroads for me?”

“I have made my choice, but you don’t need to follow me.”

“I see. But you always taught me loyalty, sir.”

“Loyalty to Albion. This is asking you to be loyal to me. That’s why I ordered you to kill that pirate, so you would understand.”

“Sir?”

“Don’t get me wrong. I was absolutely right that it needed to be done. Show a man mercy once, yes, but when he betrays your trust a second time, there is only one thing you can do. But as to why I told you to kill him instead of doing it myself, you needed to see. This is the consequence of our path. Bloodshed, violence. Sooner or later, we may be the ones kneeling with hard barrels pressed to our skulls. Do you understand?”

“I think I do now, yes. You’re giving me a choice. I can leave now. You’ll replace me with Capp or Carvalho. Is that what you want me to do? Walk away?”

“I don’t need to answer that question, Tolvern.”

“Yes,” she insisted. “You do. Tell me what you think I should do.”

“What do I think you should do?” Drake paused and looked up at the ship. He stared at it with a glazed expression, as if not really seeing it. “I think you should walk away. No, run as fast as you can. Change your name, take a job captaining some small, anonymous tramp frigate for a few years. Make a life for yourself in the Ladino worlds. Better yet, among the New Dutch—they’re farther from Albion. In a few years, the political situation might be different. The crown might declare an amnesty.”

“I see.” Tolvern was disappointed in a way that was hard to define. She had certainly never imagined herself as a pirate. And yet.

“That’s what I think you should do. What I want you to do is something else entirely.”

“Please tell me.”

He turned with a warm expression and put a hand on her shoulder. Her heart thudded and it felt like her tongue had turned to cotton. She remembered what Capp had said at the bar.

You’re hot for the captain.

There was a reason Capp’s words had irritated her, and it wasn’t because the accusation was pure invention.

“I hesitate to say this,” he began, then stopped.

“Captain?” she said, and it came out as a squeak.

“Our crew is pirates, prisoners, and those too dumb to stay with the navy when they had the chance.” He smiled as he said this last part, with affection in his voice. “Smythe is hard to understand, Barker is an old salt, rough around the edges. There’s Doc, I suppose, and a few of the engineers are clever enough. But you’re my confidant. The one I can talk to. I think of you as a friend. I hope that is acceptable.”

He removed his hand from her shoulder, and the light feeling passed from her head.

Don’t be a fool. What did you think he was saying? 

“I am happy to be a friend,” she said, feeling more steady by the moment. “So long as you give orders in the heat of battle.”

“Of course.” Drake looked relieved. “Then you have made your decision?”

“I’m sticking with you, sir. And if that means being called a pirate, I’ll submit to that. But I’ll need a better name. Captain Drake sounds like a pirate lord. Jess Tolvern is the name of a shopkeeper.”

“If that’s what you’re after,” he said, “you might need to fancy up your wardrobe. You need more flash and dazzle if you’re going to look the part. Jewelry, bright colors—you get the drift.”

She nodded with mock solemnity. “Do you think they sell parrots in the city?”

Rodriguez came over, powering down a hand tool and tucking it into his belt, where it joined other wrenches, screwdrivers, and the like. The man wasn’t the type to sit in his office counting his guineas and dubloons; she’d seen him scrambling over the skin of the ship and crawling inside one of the engines with a plasma welder.

“The bad news is you’re going to be weak on your underbelly,” Rodriguez said. “I can’t get any more tyrillium. You’ve got eighteen inches down there, is all.”

“Nothing more to salvage from Captain Kidd?” Drake asked.

“Not an ounce of the stuff. You were both shot up pretty good. I did what I could. The good news is this.”

Rodriguez removed a grease-stained computer from his hip pocket. He punched a few buttons. The ship was up on her struts, and now the belly shields retracted at the yard owner’s command. Three cannons emerged, black snouts menacing. The main guns of Captain Kidd, quite ingeniously installed in their own battery on the underside of Ajax.

“Anyone comes up from below and you can lay into them,” Rodriguez said.

“Then barrel roll and present the main broadside,” Drake said. “I like it.”

“I put in another torpedo tube, as well,” Rodriquez said. He thumbed the computer, and the cannon retracted. “And I’ve got a few other modifications yet to come. Did you ever face—how do you say serpentinas?”

“Serpentines?” Tolvern asked. She remembered the corkscrewing Hroom missiles, and the way they spat off dozens of smaller, impossible-to-track bomblets. “Where did you get those?”

“There’s all sorts of interesting things kicking around the yard. I’ve been saving some of them for the right buyer.”

She eyed the two men with rising doubts. How much money had been left from the sale of the captured pirate frigate after trading for repairs? A few hundred pounds? Surely not enough to augment their weapons systems.

Drake must have caught her questioning look. “I’ve made Rodriguez a few promises.”

“What kind of promises?” she asked.

“The friends who came to our aid aren’t the only ones betting on your captain,” Rodriguez said. “He was already famous from the war, and now you’ve thrashed Vargus, now you have the best pirate ship in known space. Once Blackbeard is in action—”

Drake looked pained. “I don’t know that we’re really going to call it that.”

Rodriguez frowned. “That is not what I have heard.”

“It’s more of a joke than anything,” Tolvern said. “I think we’re still Ajax for now, right, Captain?”

“Should I tell them to paint over the Jolly Roger, then?” the yard owner asked. He nodded up at the ship, where two Hroom welders were at work fastening down the panel.

The skull over crossed swords or bones had been the symbol of piracy for a thousand years, since the days of wooden sailing ships on Old Earth.

“Leave the Jolly Roger,” Drake said. “If people want to call the ship Blackbeard, let them. What people call us isn’t the important thing.”

Maybe not, but it pained Tolvern to see the Jolly Roger in place of the golden lions rampant of Albion that had once glimmered along Ajax’s flank. After the shield repairs, there was nothing left of them.

“What’s this about promises?” she asked again.

“We still owe Master Rodriguez five thousand pounds,” Drake said.

“That seems cheap for all this. Installing a serpentine alone would eat up ten, I’d think.”

“And we owe him a thirty percent share in whatever loot we take from our expedition.” Drake winced at ‘loot,’ as if it pained him to even speak the word.

Tolvern still didn’t know exactly what they were going to do on this expedition, and she doubted that Drake had told Rodriguez, either. But the captain must have given the owner of the spaceyard enticing hints if he’d handed over thousands of pounds of weapons and labor on a promised cut of future earnings.

“On second thought,” she said. “Maybe it does matter what we’re called. HMS Ajax doesn’t sound quite right anymore, does it?”

“I told you,” Drake said in a quiet voice. “You can walk at any time.”

“And I already told you.” She turned back to Rodriquez. “When’s all this going to be ready?”

“Five days. I might be able to cut it to four if I push my crew. No better than that.”

“No rush,” Drake said. “We’ll need time to buy provisions, and I need to go through Carvalho’s men one more time. Those who stay will need basic orientation before we drag them into space. I need to do it right. And maybe more tyrillium will turn up in the meantime. In fact, I’ll take a full week if it makes no difference to you.”

“You don’t have a week,” Rodriguez told them.

He explained. Not four hours earlier some sugar smugglers had reported via subspace communications from the planet of Peruano that they’d run into a powerful task force led by two royal cruisers, with corvettes, destroyers, and torpedo boats.

“Old friend of yours is leading the expedition,” Rodriguez added. “HMS Vigilant. They chased off a bunch of Hroom and Ladino traders, scoped out Peruano, and are now cruising toward a jump point that will take them here.”

“Peruano is in the neutral zone,” Tolvern told the captain. “According to the treaty, we—I mean, the Royal Navy—can’t bring warships into the system. Rutherford is going to start another war.”

“I don’t know anything about politics,” Rodriguez said, “but if they’re coming here, I can only suppose they’re looking for you. I suggest you be in space before they arrive.” He waved his hand at the ship. “I’ve got an investment to protect, not to mention my yards. I’d rather not see them overrun with royal marines.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Rodriguez was as good as his word, and four days later Drake had them lifting from the tarmac with a blast of plasma engines and a straining of the anti-grav. When they reached space a few minutes later, Drake half expected to find Rutherford at the head of his task force, lurking, waiting for Drake to show himself. No sign of the man. As they accelerated toward the jump point, they overtook several merchant ships, but saw no naval vessels or warships of any kind.

Six hours from the jump point, Drake set Jane to autopilot the ship and called several of his crew into the war room. When they’d all arrived, he cast a glance across the table and tried not to let out a long, audible sigh. It was hard not to compare this gathering unfavorably to the similar meeting six months ago before the Battle of Kif Lagoon.

Rutherford had been on board during that earlier meeting so the two captains could plan their joint assault. In addition, they’d brought their respective first officers and gunners and the marine officers who would lead the ground assault on the Hroom fortress. A formidable collection of talent, and plenty of class and breeding.

Nyb Pim and Barker had been at that earlier meeting, but he had little confidence in the rest of the crew in front of him now. No doubt Tolvern would make a great officer some day, but she was still green. Then there was Capp, volatile and dangerous. Smythe was a bright fellow, but the tech officer was so introverted that his mind was as hard to puzzle out as the ship’s AI—except that Jane was a better conversationalist. That left Carvalho, who would take the place of the two marine captains in planning any ground action. Not exactly an equal trade, two gentleman officers for a would-be pirate.

Maybe not, he reminded himself, but if not for the Ladino’s timely intervention a few days ago, he’d be dead, his ship in the hands of Captain Vargus.

Drake sat in silence until the side conversations died down and the others looked at him expectantly. He cleared his throat.

“You’re not all privy to the same information, so I want to tell you what I know, or think I know.”

Drake started by recapping what Nyb Pim had said about the sugar antidote, a way to permanently block sugar from affecting the Hroom brain. There was no saying it worked, or frankly, if it even existed, but the Admiralty apparently thought the antidote real enough to resort to bloody measures to keep it secret. The antidote had been on board Henry Upton when Ajax attacked. Presumably that’s why Rutherford had broken off combat to go after the slave ship. To keep it from being lost.

“Why not destroy it?” Barker asked. “Why send it to Hot Barsa?”

“I don’t have a good answer to the first question. I believe Malthorne wishes to study it, perhaps to know if such a thing is truly possible, because if so, it might be invented a second time. Or maybe he wishes to search for an antidote to the antidote. As for why Hot Barsa, that is easy enough to answer.”

“Smythe, bring up a map of the planet. Show us the equatorial continent.”

The tech officer tapped at his hand computer, and a globe appeared above the table, the red, cloud-covered world of Hot Barsa. Drake brushed his fingers over the projection to strip away the cloud cover. The equatorial continent sat in front of him, roughly shaped like a fat slug that stretched halfway around the planet, with only the head and horns of the slug rising to more temperate latitudes. He zoomed in on the fat middle.

“Lord Malthorne’s estates. They are nearly seven hundred thousand square miles, almost ten percent of the entire continent. Sweltering tropics, with rich, volcanic soil. Two-thirds of it has been given to sugar cane, mills, and a port for shipping the sugar. The rest of the forest is being cleared. See here?” Drake zoomed again. “Eighteen thousand square miles of bare ground, hacked and burned shortly before this projection was made. The next phase of his growing plantation.”

“And you think the lord admiral shipped the antidote there?” Tolvern asked.

“Malthorne is already the biggest slaveholder on Hot Barsa,” Drake said. “ During the war, sixteen hundred thousand new slaves were shipped to the Barsa system. The vast majority are Hroom, of course, but not all of them. Eight out of every ten new slaves came to the Malthorne estates. But he needs more. He always needs more. There is no end to the demand for sugar and the slaves to grow and process it.”

“Slaves to make sugar,” Nyb Pim said. His high voice was tight, barely less strained than when he’d been fighting his own rescue from the slaver. “And sugar to make slaves.”

“Henry Upton was almost certainly traveling to Malthorne’s estate,” Drake said. “He has the most need for new slaves and faces the biggest risk should the sugar market collapse.”

“Seven hundred thousand square miles,” Carvalho said. “How big is that? Give it to me in something I can understand.”

“What’s your home planet?” Tolvern asked him.

For a moment the Ladino looked reluctant to answer, as if suspicious of why she would ask. “Nuevo Téjas.”

“That’s easy,” Tolvern said. “Nuevo Téjas is practically a water world, just a bunch of islands. 700,000 square miles is two-thirds the size of all the land mass on your whole planet.”

“King’s balls,” Capp swore. “And it’s all jungle and swamp and sugar plantations and stuff? How the devil would we find where they’ve hid the antidote?”

“The temperature in the lowlands of Malthorne’s estate can exceed 95 degrees for weeks at a time,” Drake said. “Between the heat and the humidity, a human simply cannot sweat enough to keep cool. Not without air conditioning or some other special arrangement.”

Nyb Pim let out a little whistle through his nose. “Even for a Hroom, that is a miserable heat.”

Drake zoomed again. “These are the highlands. Malthorne keeps an estate up here, at 9,000 feet. He rarely visits—it’s mostly business staff—but he has a large research center. It’s largely agricultural science, adapting sugarcane and other human and Hroom crops to the soil and climate of Hot Barsa. The heart of the facility is only a few thousand acres. I don’t expect more than a few token guards.”

“That’s all well and good,” Barker grumbled. “But it’s not token guards I’m worried about.”

The engineer reached out a hand and brought the focus of the map back out, first to the continental view, then to the entire planet. He set it into slow rotation.

“It’s these bad boys right here.”

Barker pointed to the six fortresses in orbit around the planet. A few decades ago, the Barsa system had been on the frontlines between the expanding Albion kingdom and the crumbling remains of the Hroom Empire. The closest systems had been neutral, either splinter Hroom or New Dutch and Ladino, and Albion had suffered from extended supply lines. The crown had built fortresses into the sides of two small moons, then hauled in four asteroids, converted them into forts, and set them in orbit as well.

The concept had worked. When the fortresses repelled an invasion force in the Third Hroom War, the crown had been so taken with their success that Queen Ellen had financed the construction of a similar network around Albion herself.

“They’re not what they used to be,” Tolvern said. “Barsa is no longer on the frontier.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re in ruins, either,” Barker said. “We put in at one of them for repairs a few years back, before your time.”

Tolvern scowled at this, apparently irritated by the reminder of her youth. “I still think we can take them.”

“Don’t be cocky,” Barker said. “The fort I saw may not have been on war footing, but it wasn’t a derelict, either. Plenty of wealth flows in and out of that world. Got to be able to throw off pirates and smugglers.” The chief engineer nodded. “Every one of those forts is still capable of delivering a punch.”

“So are we, right?” Tolvern said. “Isn’t that the point of all that time on San Pablo? If not, if you’re still incapable of battle, by all means, tell us so we can correct the deficiencies while we still have time.”

“You know that’s not what I’m saying,” Barker said. “I’ll take on Vigilant, if we have to, but slugging it out with an orbital fortress is another matter. We don’t have enough firepower to silence her guns, and we don’t have enough men to storm her fortifications, either.”

“Enough arguing,” Drake said, growing impatient. “We’re not going to knock down an orbital fortress. And we don’t actually have to do that. Those things were built to repel Hroom sloops of war. The sloops couldn’t land directly on the planet, they had to send down smaller craft. We don’t have that limitation.”

“You mean to run the forts?” Capp said. She’d been watching the argument between Tolvern and Barker with a smug expression, but now she turned serious.

“That’s right. We’ll find the softest position and hit it there. Any given fort can hammer us as we’re coming in, but the orbital guns are almost all outwardly facing. Once we’re in the atmosphere, we have only ground forces to worry about.”

“A few guards, some armed Hroom,” Carvalho said. “Shouldn’t be too much trouble.”

“As if we have any clue,” Barker grumbled. “We’re even more ignorant about ground forces. For all we know, there’s an entire regiment of royal marines guarding Malthorne’s estate.”

“Actually, no,” Smythe said. He looked up from his computer, where he’d been scrolling through data—or maybe just playing Romans vs. Soviets again. “I was on Malthorne’s estate once.”

“What?” Drake said, scowling. “When did that happen?”

“I was on Dreadnought for her inaugural tour. We took a pass through the colonies to test her engines and weapon systems before she went into battle.”

“And you didn’t think that was germane to the discussion?” Drake asked. “That you knew Malthorne’s estate personally?”

Smythe wrinkled his brow, then shook his head, as if it only now were occurring to him that the captain might want to know.

“But how did you end up on the surface?” Tolvern asked. “Dreadnought is like a sloop of war—it can’t enter the atmosphere, either.”

“The admiral sent shipments down. Security equipment for his estate. There had been a slave revolt or something. I can’t exactly remember.”

“You’re a font of forgotten knowledge, aren’t you?” Tolvern said.

“Go on,” Drake urged.

Only a few weeks ago, Drake would have been shocked to hear that Malthorne had been using the mightiest battleship in the navy as his personal delivery service, but almost nothing the admiral did would surprise him anymore.

“I saw the security setup for myself,” Smythe continued. “There are minefields, some automatic guns, and a small garrison. Can’t even imagine where the admiral would station an entire regiment—the property isn’t like that.”

“What do you mean?” Drake asked.

“It may be the highlands, but it’s still bloody hot. Wet, swampy, with these mosquito things the size of a bird. I can still hear them buzzing behind me.” Smythe shuddered. “The estate is built on the ruins of an old Hroom fortress, and half of it has sunk into the ground. Malthorne built atop a giant, raised-stone platform in the middle of the fortress.”

“It’s a temple, not a fortress,” Nyb Pim said. “If it has a platform, it’s for Lyam Kar, the God of Death.”

“We don’t need to hear about your pagan death cults,” Barker said. “What about the weapon systems?”

“It’s not like that,” the Hroom said.

“The two of you can argue religion later,” Drake said. “As a matter of fact, let’s leave off the specifics of Malthorne’s estate. Smythe, write up a report. Send it around. Give us anything you can remember. Anything at all.”

“Send this bloke along with the team,” Capp said. “That’s my vote. Nothing like having a guy who has been there before.”

“Me?” Smythe squeaked.

“I’ll take that into consideration,” Drake said. “Whatever gives us the best chances.”

“Can we be clear about that part?” Tolvern asked. “Chances for what? What exactly are we going for here? The antidote and enough loot to pay our debts at the yard?”

Carvalho and Capp looked a little more alert at the mention of loot.

“More or less,” Drake said.

“And when you get the antidote, will you share it freely?” Nyb Pim asked.

“I don’t know,” Drake admitted. “This whole thing is rotten. Rutherford is in neutral territory, as if he’s trying to provoke another war. Malthorne is deep into slaving—he has enriched himself on the back of naval victories. Sugar, slaves, and war—seems there’s no way to separate them. It’s corrosive not only for the Hroom but for Albion as well.”

“Then, what?” Tolvern asked. “You’re going to flip a switch and free a billion sugar eaters, just like that? I don’t know about you, but that scares the hell out of me.”

“You’re not the only one,” Drake admitted. He glanced at Nyb Pim, who watched him with a clear, unblinking expression through his ink-colored eyes.

“You sure it’s only a billion?” Barker asked. “What about the empire? What do they do when they’re off the stuff.”

“I got no problem with Hroom,” Capp said, with a look at the pilot.

“Neither do any of us, when taken one at a time,” Tolvern said. “That isn’t the issue. We’re not talking about Nyb Pim.”

“Well, maybe we should,” Capp insisted. “This one here’s treated me good. And I knew a couple of Hroom in the Gryphon Shoals. They weren’t no trouble, either, so long as you kept ’em out of the sugar.”

“So what is your plan?” Nyb Pim asked Drake.

“I want to get hold of this antidote, see if it’s real,” Drake said. “Seize whatever documentation we can find about how it works, how to produce more, and so on.

“After that, I don’t know. I hope we get enough info from the labs to show Malthorne’s treason. I can present it to the king, perhaps find other allies in the navy. Get him removed. Maybe then we could make a new treaty with the Hroom in return for the antidote.” Drake was grasping now. “Create buffer worlds, control the supply of the antidote, I don’t know. Something to ensure peace.”

“Peace is hard enough to enforce when we’re strong and they’re weak,” Tolvern said. “Without sugar, what can we do to stop them? There are too many. Give it ten, twenty years. Eventually, they’ll be at our throats.”

Drake had no rebuttal to this. Because his commander was absolutely correct.

He rose. Tolvern sprang to her feet in response, followed by the others, one by one. Carvalho was the last to rise, and he crossed his arms, his expression pointlessly sullen, as if he still needed to show his independence.

“Everyone here had a chance to stay behind on San Pablo,” Drake said. “None of you did. Whatever loyalties you had before have been swept away. There is no more Royal Navy, only this ship and her captain. You all agreed to this, to submit to my authority.

“In return, I pledge to rule with justice, to safeguard those under my protection. To act with thought and caution, and not from whim or a desire for personal glory. No officer’s life is worth more than the life of those beneath him. And the captain’s life is of no greater value than that of his crew.”

Some of this he had cribbed from the oath that kings, dukes, barons, and other lords took when they were invested in their hereditary positions. He couldn’t speak for the Hroom, but humans needed hierarchy, demanded it, in fact. In the absence of leadership, one man or woman would naturally assume it, often at the cost of strife and bloodshed. And it was the natural tendency of the ruler to despise and bully his subjects.

Hence, the obligations from master to servant were, if anything, more important than the obligations flowing in the other direction. He needed them to know that although he ruled the ship, he would never abuse that position, never become a tyrant.

“Yes, sir,” Tolvern said. The others added their affirmations.

“And part of my duty is not to withhold information arbitrarily,” Drake added. “But the truth is, I do not yet know. We’ll go to Hot Barsa and seize the antidote. But—” and here he cast a look at his Hroom pilot. “—I don’t know how we’ll put it to use. I only promise to speak with all of you before making any decision.”

He waited for argument. There was none. He wished he could read Nyb Pim’s expression as clearly as he could Tolvern’s or Capp’s, but he couldn’t. Meanwhile, Drake reminded himself that his pilot had enslaved himself, turned into an eater, just to get his hands on the antidote. Nyb Pim may be well-behaved now, but there seemed no limit to what he would risk.

“Now,” Drake said. “I’m off shift and desperately need rest before the jump. Next time I see you, we’ll be on the other side.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Vigilant was the first ship of the Royal Navy task force through the jump. Rutherford fought off the stunned, nauseated feeling as he came out the other side, then brought Vigilant out about ten thousand miles and waited as the other ships came through one at a time. Each ship would appear suddenly, motionless and helpless for several long seconds while the crews recovered. The plasma engines would restart, and the ship would limp away from the jump point like a drunk staggering out of a tavern.

The last ship through was Calypso, another cruiser. Her captain was Hugh Lindsell, third son of the Earl of New Tasmania. Lindsell’s father was Lord Admiral Malthorne’s first cousin, and Malthorne had secured him command of Calypso less than a year out of the Academy. Young and headstrong. Yet Captain Lindsell had fought bravely—some said recklessly—at Ypis III.

Lindsell came on the viewscreen a few minutes later. The man blinked through bleary, bloodshot eyes. “Are we clean, sir?”

“The enemy sloop didn’t follow us through, if that’s what you mean,” Rutherford said. “We’re still scanning the moons of the nearby gas giant for empire forces.”

“Doubtful they are violating the neutral system.”

“Which raises the question: Why are we?” Rutherford let that hang between them for a beat, baiting Lindsell to answer. Perhaps the man knew more than he did. Perhaps not.

An empire sloop of war had followed them about the Peruano system. As per the treaty, it was alone and its shields were down. At any time, Vigilant could have blown it to pieces with a single broadside. Or turned loose a few torpedo boats to chase it off. Instead, Rutherford ignored it for several days, until finally the Hroom commander had hailed him, asking why Albion had sent an armed task force to the frontier in defiance of the treaty.

Rutherford responded that he was looking for a rogue cruiser. As soon as he found Ajax and brought Drake and his crew to justice, he would retreat from the neutral systems. Except that the treaty didn’t provide any such loophole, the opposing commander helpfully pointed out. Rutherford closed the channel and ignored any further attempts at communication.

“I will presume that the sloop sent a subspace to its headquarters,” Rutherford said when it became clear that his counterpart on Calypso had no answer. “San Pablo is even closer to the Hroom systems than Peruano. Should we expect to encounter empire forces?”

“I wouldn’t presume to speculate. You are the flag officer of this expedition.”

“I’m asking your opinion. Give it to me.”

“They’ll have an observer. Armed, I would think.” Lindsell hesitated, and Rutherford suspected he was holding something back. “But will they risk war over San Pablo? I would think not.”

No, that would be foolish. The system was as good as lost to the Hroom already, with a growing Ladino colony on one continent and an impoverished, collapsing Hroom province on the other. But the next system over held a thriving Hroom world. That must be protected at all cost.

“We’ll proceed cautiously,” Rutherford said. “As soon as the scans are finished, we’ll approach San Pablo in double crescent formation. You will lead the van. Shields up, weapon systems down.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rutherford shut down the viewscreen to find Pittsfield standing behind his shoulder, nervously rubbing his hands.

“Sir, a secure communication packet came in from the fleet.”

“What does it say?”

“For your eyes only. You are to take it alone in the war room.”

Frowning, Rutherford picked his way across the bridge. The others watched him as he went. A knot of worry settled into his gut. They were strangers to him, except for Pittsfield. Admiral Malthorne had sent Rutherford to bring in the mutinied Ajax, but apparently fearing that Rutherford would also go rogue, had changed out familiar faces for strangers. The irony was that if Rutherford did encounter Drake in combat, his green crew would put him at a disadvantage.

Drake is one man. He has one ship. You have fourteen. 

Back in the war room, he shut the door and pulled up the secure subspace channel. The message was text only:

Ajax has left San Pablo and jumped from the system. Destination unknown. Proceed to San Pablo and set up a blockade around the planet. Allow human shipping through, but turn away or seize any Hroom vessels. 

The Hroom gave aid and comfort to the traitor, and you will make an example of them. Destroy the two Hroom spaceyards and the spaceport. Do so from orbit. Do not land on the planet or send any forces to the surface.

Should any empire military forces attempt to break the blockade, you will engage them with all available firepower. Aid shall be sent to you at once.

Press “accept” when you have read this message.

Rutherford leaned back in his chair, stunned. The message was unsigned, but it had come from the Admiralty, which meant that only a handful of people could have sent it, unless the system had been hacked. He had to allow for that possibility.

But if authentic? Good God.

Only a few weeks had passed since the last battle of the previous war; the ink was barely dry on the treaty. But this? This would mean another war. Even if it were true that Ajax had been repaired in Hroom yards, would Albion go to war over the slight?

After a few seconds, the last part of the message began to flash yellow, then red. He pressed his thumb against the screen where it said “accept.” The message deleted itself.

He sent a reply.

Please confirm your orders as per the naval task force’s posture re: San Pablo. 

When it was off, he thought for a moment, then deleted the record of his own message. Better to be cautious in case they had been hacked.

This far out, it might take a couple of days to receive a response. Until then, what choice did he have? He would proceed to San Pablo as if he intended to blockade the planet. That would kill some time, and he could set up cautiously in orbit instead of arriving at once and dropping atomic weapons onto the surface to wipe out the Hroom yards and port.

Why would the aliens do it? Their actions with regard to Ajax made no sense. Word of Drake’s journey had been passing through to Rutherford, and he presumed information had been flowing outward to other interested parties as well. For that matter, why would Drake ask for Hroom help? The rogue captain had attacked and defeated the pirate ship that had given Richmond so much trouble. Then he’d jumped to San Pablo, where he’d landed at some undisclosed location. Why not the human settlements? They had yards, men willing to work for coin, even if that meant aiding the enemies of Albion. No need to consult the Hroom at all.

A darker thought entered Rutherford’s mind. The lord admiral, or maybe even the crown itself, was using Drake’s mutiny as a pretext for agitating the Hroom Empire. Malthorne wanted another war. The empire was a huge realm, with dozens of systems and billions of people. A big, indigestible chunk. But cut off pieces, like a man slicing salami, and it could be consumed piecemeal. Of course it meant a never-ending series of wars, but in the past there had always been a good reason: unprovoked attacks on Albion shipping, disruption of the sugar trade, or a denial of Albion trade privileges. Not this time. This war would be Albion’s fault, and Albion’s alone.

Maybe this time is no different. Maybe all those other wars were provoked by Albion as well. 

He quickly put that thought out of his head. And anyway, it wasn’t his duty to question the decisions of the Admiralty. No doubt there was some big, unknown piece of information to which he was not yet privy. For now, he would seek verification but act as if the orders were genuine.

Rutherford came out of the war room feeling more confident. The scan for enemy craft had turned up no activity, and the plasma engines were pushing them forward again. He took his seat and ordered Pittsfield to send a message to the rest of his fleet. Missile frigates and torpedo boats were to be on alert. The cruisers would keep shields raised, but the two destroyers would drop shields and present cannon.

“No cloaking?” Pittsfield asked before sending the message.

“No. We will come in with an aggressive posture.”

Pittsfield raised his eyebrows at this. “Has something changed, sir? Anything the rest of us should know about?”

“The message was for my eyes only, Commander. You seem to have forgotten this.”

Rutherford delivered this with a sharp look, and his first mate moved hastily to comply without further argument. Soon, the entire task force was hurtling toward the inner system, posture aggressive. Ready for war.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The cruiser until recently known as Ajax came stealthily into the Barsa system. Shields down so they could be fully cloaked, Drake took the additional precaution of lurking for hours next to a gas giant while he sent out sentinels to scan for activity. For twenty-four hours, they waited in the howling maelstrom of the gas giant’s outer atmosphere while the sentinels collected information.

When he brought them back in, they revealed that eleven Royal Navy vessels had come into the Barsa system in the weeks since the attack on Henry Upton and the battle with Vigilant. Of these, four were on their way to a jump point. The other seven were patrolling the shipping lanes. Only a single destroyer was in orbit around Hot Barsa itself. Drake thought he could handle a single destroyer without much fuss; it was the orbital fortresses that worried him.

Still, the position of the patrolling ships would force him to approach Hot Barsa at an odd angle, which meant swinging halfway around the sun and then coming at the planet from above. The weakest of Hot Barsa’s forts orbited the shallow, swampy ocean on the north pole, and that was how Drake intended to approach.

The captain was in his quarters, beneath the hot spray of a shower, turning over tactics for the pending battle, when the sound of someone pounding on his door caught his attention. He came out with a towel wrapped around himself to hear Tolvern in the corridor outside his quarters, shouting for him to open up.

“Is it an emergency?” he called through the closed doors.

“I have news.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“You’ll want to hear this. Hurry!”

He sighed, wishing he’d ignored the pounding. Tolvern seemed to have a talent for interrupting men in the shower, as Rutherford could have attested, being taken in the mutiny in just such a condition.

When Drake let her in a few minutes later, she paced back and forth across the room as she told him what had happened. Smythe had intercepted a poorly encrypted military communication. The navy was in an uproar. It seemed that a large naval task force—nearly an entire fleet—had set up in orbit around San Pablo and blockaded the planet. The Hroom objected, tried to drive off the force (the flag officer was Captain Rutherford, Tolvern added), and there was some sort of incident. The Hroom took a few shots, the fleet returned fire, and soon it was an all-out battle. When the Hroom had been destroyed, Rutherford bombarded enemy positions on the surface.

“That must be where those four ships are jumping,” Tolvern said. “They’re off to San Pablo to join Rutherford.”

“Perhaps. I’d only expect additional Albionish forces if the Hroom Empire was escalating the conflict.”

“Why the devil would the Hroom be stupid enough to start another fight?” she asked.

“What makes you think they did?” Drake finished buttoning the top button of his vest and grabbed for the towel to dry his hair. “Right now, I’d assume that every last thing coming out of the fleet contains some falsehood or other.”

“So it’s a trap? They know we’re here and want us to think they’re preoccupied?”

“I’m prepared for anything right now, Commander. Dreadnought herself might be lurking in orbit around Hot Barsa, heavily cloaked and waiting.”

“So what do we do?”

“The same thing we were going to do all along. We assume that our plans remain a secret. That Malthorne doesn’t believe we’d be stupid enough to attack the planet with a single ship. That he doesn’t know that we want to get our hands on the sugar antidote in the first place.”

“I’m struggling to understand that myself, sir.”

“Good, then the admiral will surely be caught unawares. And that’s why I’m not expecting Dreadnought or anyone else but one puny little destroyer.”

Plus the orbital fortresses, of course, but no need to point out this minor obstacle.

He dried his left ear and tucked in his com link. “Jane, how far are we from Hot Barsa?”

Jane’s cool voice came through. “Thirty-two hours and fifteen minutes.”

Drake smiled at Tolvern. “Barely half a billion miles to go. Another few hours undetected and it will be too late for anyone to stop us. We’ll drop down, grab the goods, and make a run for it. Head for the hills, as they say.”

“Just like that, sir?”

“Just like that.”

“I trust you,” she said.

“Good. Smythe and Barker were supposed to put together a simulation of how this ship will perform in battle, given how we’ve messed around with her. Let’s go to the bridge and see what they’ve got.”

“Yes, sir.”

Drake put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s time to see what Blackbeard can do.”

-end-

From the Author

Thank you for reading Starship Blackbeard. The series continues with book #2, Lords of Space. Buy it right here! If you enjoyed the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. Reviews help other readers find the books, which in turn will provide the financial support to continue writing more stories in the series. 

Impatiently waiting for the next book? Why not try out my fantasy series, The Dark Citadel, while you wait? Or The Wolves of Paris, my top-rated werewolf novel set in 1450 France? It’s a bloody good time, in both senses of the word. 

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three