Blackbeard superbox, p.107
Blackbeard Superbox, page 107
“No, it’s not an upper. You’re not jittery, you’re not drugged. It really does feel like you’ve had a good night of sleep.”
Tolvern waved her hand. “Never mind. I’m exhausted, and would rather be in my bed. But the buzzards are milling about out there. You know they’re going to make another charge before the Albion fleet arrives.”
“Those are your ships, then? You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. The big one is Dreadnought. She’s the flagship of the entire fleet. You recall my fight with Apex before jumping into the Kettle System.”
“Right. You lost a warship and came out battered. I recall.”
“HMS Swift. We nearly went down, too. I fired off a subspace message, but I never expected reinforcements. I thought Drake’s fleet was back guarding the home system.”
“So you had no idea he was coming?”
“The admiral’s response led me to believe he was abandoning us to our fate, even though he claimed help was on its way. I thought it was a feint for the enemy. Turns out it was a double feint.”
“He sounds like a clever man.” Li’s face turned grim. “But they’re too far away. They’ll never arrive in time.”
“We have to buy time. The key is the eliminon battery.”
“I know what you’re thinking, Tolvern, but give it up. There’s absolutely no way to recharge the weapon in time. In fact, we’re not even charging yet, we’re still running diagnostics.”
“What?” she asked, alarmed. “You are?”
“That’s the problem with using a weapon for the first time in eleven years—it doesn’t quite work as well as it did in drills. I figure we’ll lose two hours, maybe three. The point is, we won’t get it back online in time for the next attack.”
“I know that, and you know that. Does Apex?”
“Hard to say,” Li said. “Let’s say no. They certainly didn’t act like they were expecting to face the eliminon battery—they weren’t prepared at all. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if they know its limitations or not, they have enough firepower in their long-range weapons to stand off a pace and bombard us from a distance. That would be slow, but I’ll bet they could finish the job before your friends arrive.
“Or,” Li added, “they turn on your admiral first. The Apex fleet is huge—I have no doubt your Albion friends would put up a fight, but the aliens would prevail.”
“You haven’t seen Dreadnought in action,” Tolvern said stubbornly.
“Does it have some special weapons systems, or is it just a bigger, more powerful version of your own ship?”
“Thicker armor, more guns, more ability to take punishment and deliver it.”
“So, bigger and more powerful, but essentially the same as Blackbeard.” Li shrugged.
His implicit dismissal of her ship rankled. He’d only seen Tolvern’s cruiser when it was already battered by the enemy, its armor in tatters. Even so, even helplessly outnumbered, it had delivered a beating to the enemy. True, she’d only survived thanks to Sentinel 3’s defenses, but that was all the more reason she needed to stay alive until the admiral arrived.
“Can’t this battle station move?” Tolvern said.
His tone was wary. “Why do you ask that?”
“That wasn’t a question, not really. Smythe has been in your command module, working your systems. And I’ve seen your schematics myself. You have six plasma engines—I would have commandeered one and patched it onto my ship somehow if I’d had the time.”
“It’s too small for you,” Li said. “I have my own engineers, you know. Koh analyzed your ship. You couldn’t have outrun the birds, and you couldn’t have attained jump speeds. Not with anything stolen from my station, at least.”
“I’m not here to steal an engine. My point is that you can maneuver. Your engines share a fuel source with the plasma ejector. Turn off the ejector and you’ve got enough power to cross the entire system if you need to.”
“Not fast enough to outrun Apex. And once I start moving, I lose my cloaking, so if you’re hoping to slip quietly away before the enemy attacks, give that idea up.”
Tolvern hadn’t even considered that possibility. Was Li sure? What if Blackbeard tucked in against the battle station and they made an attempt to join up with Admiral Drake? The enemy fleet seemed divided, distracted. Apex’s ability to detect hidden enemies was weak. It might work.
“No, I don’t want to hide,” she said, dismissing that idea. “And I don’t want to make a run for it at all. I’m talking about pressing the attack.”
Li’s eyes widened. “You want us to move into an offensive posture?”
“Why not? Sentinel 3 is mobile, it’s a powerful spaceship in its own right. Don’t wait for the enemy to start a long-range bombardment, move toward them as if you have nothing to fear. Blackbeard will assume the role of fire support, stand back a pace and lob missiles onto the battlefield, keep the enemy dancing.”
“Without the eliminon battery, we wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“They don’t know about the eliminon battery though, do they?” she asked. “They don’t know you need to recharge it.”
“So we gain some tactical advantages—assuming they buy it. Once they see we can’t turn it on and off at will, that goes away. They swoop in en masse and wipe us out.”
“There’s one other factor you may not know about,” Tolvern said. “The enemy forces are in disarray. There’s internal conflict in their fleet.”
She explained what she’d noticed in the battle, starting with how not all of the hunter-killer packs were fighting in harmony. The biggest evidence was how one group had jumped in front of the other, preventing an easy victory. One side seemed cautious, the other aggressive.
“It might be nothing more than bad coordination between forces,” Tolvern said, “but given the buzzards’ caste system, I’d expect them to fight as one.”
“That was certainly the case during our war,” Li said. “At least in any individual encounter. We know the greater commanders and the lesser commanders are jockeying for position within a hierarchy. It must be something like that.”
“But what if it’s something even more profound?” Tolvern pressed. “Albion just survived a civil war. The Hroom Empire is in the middle of their own. Even on your own ship, you divided into factions and fought a pitched battle, one side against the other.”
“Don’t try to put yourself in their minds, Captain,” Li said. “They’re incomprehensible, except as a force of nature.”
“I’m not so sure, not in this situation. You know what I think? I think it’s a natural condition of any intelligent species to fight among themselves, even in the face of an external threat.”
“Even if that’s true, what good does it do us?” Li shook his head. “These birds are brutal killers, and the only thing that concerns them is the complete obliteration of a rival. Maybe you can negotiate with the Hroom, but Apex is something else entirely. A deer doesn’t negotiate with a wolf. It runs for its life.”
“Albion is not a deer, it’s a lion. And we’re not running from this battle, we’re fighting it.”
“Understood. That’s not what I meant.”
“And don’t you call this the Dragon Quadrant?” she asked. “Isn’t a dragon the symbol of your Imperium? Do dragons flee for their lives?”
Li’s expression hardened. “We’re no cowards either, if that’s what you mean.”
Dragon or deer, the Imperium was nearly dead. So far as Tolvern knew, this battle station was the only force of Singaporeans still fighting. The rest of the Imperium fleet was gone, the cities of its home world radioactive slag heaps, and an Apex harvester ship was collecting the survivors to torture and feed to its troops.
“So you’ll take the fight to the enemy?” she asked.
A curt nod. “We’ll fight.”
#
Although they’d had no trouble catching an inbound pod, the Singaporeans didn’t share the Royal Navy’s system of firing pods back and forth, so Tolvern had to abandon the capsule that had carried her over, as there was no way to send it back to her ship.
Instead, Li led her down to the launching bay, where she was shown a small ship a Singaporean technician called a scooter. During Sentinel 3’s long years of isolation, the crew had apparently used them to fly around the perimeter of the station, conducting inspections of the hull and docking to complete external repairs. In a pinch Li sent them to scour raw materials from the surrounding ice, asteroids, and even the nearest of the small moons orbiting the planet. A scooter was capable of round-trip journeys of twenty or thirty thousand miles.
The tech pointed out with concern that Tolvern was unlikely to return the scooter, but Li laughed off the objection. “If all we lose today is a scooter, our ancestors will surely have been smiling down on us.”
Tolvern eased herself into the cockpit of the small craft. She was tucked right in, no room to stretch her legs. The tech leaned over her to point out useful buttons and knobs, and had to get right in her face to show her.
Better a scooter than an unpowered pod launched on a preprogrammed trajectory. Launched to a blind spot in the ice ring, to be more precise, with no guarantee the station was even there. In comparison, a throttle and joystick in hand felt like control, even if she knew it was illusory. If only the instrument panels weren’t labeled in Chinese, the screens filled with chicken scratches.
Better not overthink it. A simple throttle and joystick—how hard could it be?
“This way of transportation worked today,” Tolvern told Li. “I’m not so sure about the future. Flitting back and forth from a few hundred miles out is one thing, but what would we do if you were on the other side of the Kettle and we needed to talk? Either we need better encryption or we need a shuttle system.”
“What’s wrong with the scooter?”
“I don’t have a launch platform that can send it out again, unfortunately.”
“Don’t you have a self-propelled pod?”
“A few,” she said. “And sure, I can send them, but you still need a way to send them back. Right now, every trip is a one-way journey—that’s going to use up your scooters and my pods in a hurry.”
“Then why did you launch a pod in the middle of battle?”
“I didn’t. That was unauthorized. We had a few issues on Blackbeard—nothing to worry about. The buzzards saw it, and I’m guessing the pair on board that pod are either dead by now, or wish they were.”
Tolvern looked up from the cockpit at Li, who stood with his hands on his hips, staring, suspicion on his face.
“I thought we were sharing all information. You certainly led me to believe so when I revealed the eliminon battery. Why are you lying now?”
“I’m not lying.” Tolvern blinked, confused. “What do you even think I’m lying about?”
Li turned to the tech. “Show her the ship.”
The other man pulled a computer from his hip pocket and touched the screen. He leaned over and showed Tolvern the screen; it was a small chart of the system. Marked in yellow was the trajectory of a vessel flying away from the Kettle.
“Your pod,” Li said.
“Can’t be. The pods don’t have that kind of range.”
“We saw your launch and picked this up from the exact region where you sent it.”
“I don’t know what that is, but it’s not ours,” she said. “Must be the buzzards. One of the lances, maybe. It swooped in, captured the pod, and is carrying it off who knows where.”
“It’s too small for a lance, and we tracked it from where you launched your pod. Who was it, Tolvern? What are you hiding?”
“I’m not hiding anything. It was your friend Megat. And the Dutch fellow who told us you were here—Djikstra broke Megat out of his cell, and the two of them attacked and nearly killed one of my crew, then made a run for it in the pod.”
“And you let them get away?” Li asked.
“They weren’t going anywhere. I told you, there’s no range on those pods. It has to be a lance.”
“Except that it’s not. That is no lance or any other Apex ship. It’s too small, and it has a plasma engine that is clearly a derivative of your own, based on the signature. It must be your pod.”
“I’m telling you, that pod is in no way capable of crossing the system, and it doesn’t have a plasma engine. Go back to your data, you’ll see the pod was rocket-launched.”
He studied her, and it was obvious that he still harbored doubts. Tolvern was done protesting; anything more and she’d start to sound desperate to convince him. Frankly, she didn’t care if he believed her or not. She’d been on the base nearly forty-five minutes already. She had to get back to Blackbeard.
“Whoever that is,” she said, “they’re leaving the battlefield, not arriving. We’ll worry about the ones already here and trying to kill us.”
“All right.”
Tolvern gave him a hand computer she’d brought over from the ship. “I worked out a few signals on my way over here. There’s a list of them here for you to study. I’ll give you simple orders, and it will be up to you to find the best way to execute them.”
“What if I need to say something back?”
“I didn’t have time for that. Maybe when this is over we can dredge up some Old Earth flag signaling or something. Visual range only.”
Tolvern buckled herself in and gestured for the tech to lower the canopy. “Time to give your scooter a test drive.”
#
They launched Tolvern on an electrified rail. It shot her away from the station, at which point she fired the ignition. Small rockets flared out from the rear of the scooter, and she fought with the joystick to stabilize. In a few moments she was racing toward Blackbeard.
“Hey, this is fun. Too bad I can’t take it for a run.” She got on the com. “I’m on my way.”
Capp answered, her voice tense. “We see you. Approach and we’ll bring you in.” Capp hesitated, then added, “Did you get an update before you left the station?”
“Negative. And I don’t want one now, do you understand?”
“Aye. It ain’t pretty, though. I can say that much, right?”
Tolvern was itching to find out what her first mate possibly meant. And she was tired, her judgment not at its sharpest. She almost asked. But there was valuable information for the enemy in almost anything they could say, and she refrained.
“Capp,” Tolvern warned. “Enough of that. Anything you need before I close the channel?”
“Aye, Cap’n.” The lieutenant’s tone was suddenly playful. “I need a handsome bloke for a roll in the sack. Did you bring me one?”
“I wouldn’t want to aggravate that collarbone injury.”
“That’s what Carvalho said. I told him not to worry, I’m safe enough, but I had to shag him three times before he’d believe it.”
Chapter Six
Tolvern had her update the moment they hauled her into the landing bay. Seeing it on the viewscreen a few minutes later only confirmed the bad news. She settled into her seat and gratefully accepted a mug of hot tea brought to her from the mess while her exhausted brain tried to make sense of the new information.
Blackbeard was no longer trying to hide, and had been scanning the system with all active and passive sensors. Admiral Drake’s forces kept their long march toward the Kettle in relief of the Albion cruiser and her new friend, but they were still a day and a half from the battlefield. Tolvern might have to fight Apex off not just once, but multiple times, if she hoped to survive long enough for reinforcements to arrive.
Meanwhile, they located the departing ship Commander Li had told her about. It was human, all right, and what’s more, Blackbeard’s database identified the type. It was a Dutch tramp frigate, barely large enough to jump. That class of ship had a single deck gun that wouldn’t do much in an actual fight, and generally stuck to areas patrolled by the Royal Navy rather than risking pirates in the outer systems. What was it doing way out here?
The ship had apparently been hidden somewhere inside the gas giant’s orbit. When the battle started, it emerged from hiding and made a run for it. Its motivation baffled her, but she suspected who was flying it: Djikstra and Megat.
“The devil only knows how they got on board,” Tolvern said.
Capp let out a burst of rude language when Tolvern shared her suspicions, but when the cursing ran its course, an expression came over her face that managed to be both outraged and admiring.
“That Dutch bloke must have stashed a ship somewhere. How do you figure he managed?”
“Indeed.” Tolvern rubbed her thumb over the handle of her mug. “How did they get the ship in place, how did they escape from the buzzards? All sorts of questions.”
“However they did it, they ain’t taking chances now. They’re hauling their arses out of here.”
Two men operating a ship alone—it was possible, Tolvern supposed. At least for now. They’d need someone to run some calculations if they ever wanted to jump, unless one of the pair had been a pilot at some point.
The mystery was driving her crazy. Where were those two headed?
“Pilot, is there a jump point out there or are they flying blind?”
“That is difficult to ascertain,” Nyb Pim said. “We do not have a good chart for this system. Smythe has been scanning, but has not yet found anything in that direction.”
Apex ships had begun to maneuver again, and this grabbed Tolvern’s attention. “All right, Smythe. Show me the bad news.”
He changed the viewscreen. More Apex ships had jumped into the Kettle System. Three more hunter-killer packs—which felt like overkill, but couldn’t make the odds much worse than they already were—and, more significantly, a second harvester ship.
This one had a different shape. It was still larger than any of its accompanying vessels, but was long and lean, with a bulbous front and a long, slender rear. It reminded her of a sperm whale, mostly head, tapering off at the tail.
“That makes two harvester ships,” she said. “Why?”
“The buzzards are anxious,” Capp said. “Want to make sure the job gets done.”
