Blackbeard superbox, p.145
Blackbeard Superbox, page 145
Catarina didn’t wait for all of the ships to arrive before she had Orient Tiger join the war junks in scanning the Vargus System for enemies. Yes, the Vargus System. It was vanity to name it after herself, but what of it? Nobody was going to argue, not out here. She was lord of this system, of this entire sector. The only one who knew how to get in and the only one strong enough to colonize it.
Her fleet had emerged into a classic Earth-like solar system of the kind that people had sought out ever since the Great Migration five hundred years earlier, when humanity first took to the stars. The Vargus System had a G-type main sequence star, five rocky inner worlds, and six gas giants, with a mineral-rich asteroid belt separating the inner worlds from the outer. The third planet had acidic oceans and a few hardy bacteria and single-cell plants living beneath a thick, crushing atmosphere.
The fourth planet, however, was something else entirely. Ninety-eight percent standard gravity, four large continents rich with natural plant and animal life. Climate zones that ranged from jungle to desert, to vast grasslands and millions of square miles of temperate forests. Rich in minerals, the correct oxygen levels. Everything a world needed but intelligent life, and Catarina Vargus’s colonist fleet would correct that deficiency.
The jump point into the Vargus System was out near the largest of the gas giants, and Catarina currently sat too far out for a good scan of her new home world, but she had video from an earlier visit, and now pulled it up on the little console next to the captain’s chair. There it was, turning lazily, a cool blue-and-green sphere, wreathed in clouds. It was a jewel without price, the kind of planet that the Kingdom of Albion would have paid dearly to control, to settle.
“And it’s all mine,” Catarina said.
“All ours you mean,” a voice said behind her. It was Enrique Da Rosa, her first mate, now coming onto the bridge. He’d been down in the engine room, working with engineering to keep the damaged jump point engine from blowing up as they went through.
Da Rosa was an older man, balding up top, with a gradually thickening middle. He’d captained several ships himself throughout the years, and at one point was an ally of Catarina’s father, then an enemy, and later an ally again. If not for the vagaries of fate, she might be serving under him instead of vice versa. He was both capable and experienced.
Catarina changed her screen to show the ships of her fleet. “Mine, Da Rosa. The realm of Queen Catarina the First.” She grinned. “But every queen needs her nobles. Would you rather be a baron or an earl? Maybe I should thaw your wife out of stasis and ask her. I’m sure she has an opinion.”
Da Rosa scowled and tried to give a little harrumph, though the effect was weakened by the look of satisfaction he was struggling to hide. “She’d have several opinions, in fact. Depending on mood and time of day.”
The others on the bridge were talking in excited voices as the last of the ships came through, and Orient Tiger received word that no pursuit had been spotted.
“For now, I’ll settle for first mate,” Da Rosa continued. “At least until I’m off this bucket of screws and bolts and have my feet on solid earth.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Go ahead, relax a little. We’re through, we got the equipment and supplies on hand, and fourteen thousand settlers are waiting on ice, ready to start this thing. There’s no Albion king to hassle us, no Royal Navy. None of those pirate idiots followed us through. Even the damn alien birds won’t find us in here.”
“We’ll see.” Da Rosa settled into his seat. “Apex is still lurking around somewhere. They must be. If not, those pompous bastards in the navy wouldn’t be so agitated. You know they’d rather retire to their smoking rooms with their pipes and snifters of brandy to discuss past glories.”
“I’m not so sure,” Catarina said. She thought about a pair of navy officers she knew personally. “Some of them have war in their blood.”
“Burris, show me the barges,” Da Rosa said. “Let’s make sure the goods are still in orbit where we left them.”
“Relax,” Burris said. He tapped his console, and one of the larger moons of the nearest gas giant came into view.
Catarina leaned forward. “Where are they? Around the back side?”
“Looks that way,” Burris said. “Give it a minute and they’ll swing around.”
“Any number of things could have gone wrong,” Da Rosa said, his tone gloomy. “Never liked leaving those colonists in stasis so long, not unattended. And are we sure we had them in stable orbit? And another thing that’s bugging me . . .”
That was Da Rosa’s style, so Catarina let him run through his worries while she waited for the barges to orbit around the moon and come into view. Whatever the state of her supplies and her colonists-in-waiting, she was satisfied she hadn’t been followed through, so she sent orders to the fleet to match her course toward the moon. There, they would pick up the goods and make their way toward Segovia, their new home world.
“I am aware that the mood is jubilant,” Da Rosa added. “But this is serious business.”
“I’m not deluding myself,” Catarina said. “Although, sure, I might have made the whole venture sound a little more . . . well, fun than it will be. I know what’s ahead of us.”
“A long slog,” Da Rosa said.
“Right. Several years until it’s all running smoothly. But it’s not like we’ll be down there chopping wood with stone axes, starting fires with flint and steel, and chasing off predators with sharpened sticks.”
“I know the sales pitch, Captain. How many times did I help you make it? But if it were so easy to settle a planet by dropping down automated factories, Albion wouldn’t have needed their Hroom slaves. And they wouldn’t need convicts working the helium-3 mines right in the heart of the Albion System.”
“Albion is run by idiots. We are not.” She was growing irritated. “That’s enough gloom for now, Da Rosa. And enough sunshine from me. We have work to do. Soon as the barges pull around the moon, send a signal and thaw the engineers. They can run their diagnostics while they’re waiting for us to arrive in . . . Pilot?” She glanced at Gomez. “How long to arrive?”
“Six hours and twenty minutes,” Gomez said.
“Right,” Catarina said. “That will save us some time, get us to Segovia faster.”
“Here we go,” Burris said. “The barges are right where we expected them. You see, we—” He stopped abruptly.
Catarina stared at the big viewscreen, her mouth clamped shut and her lips pressed together in dismay. She’d left two massive barges in a lazy orbit around the largest moon of the gas giant. They’d been shuttled through in pieces, then reassembled on the other side of the jump point. The sensors of the entire fleet were trained on the moon, and she was seeing a composite image that, with the inclusion of the Singaporean scans, gave her as clear a view as anything the Royal Navy would have enjoyed.
Nothing was wrong with the barges themselves. They were in the right position, fully assembled. But tethered to each barge was a small ship. They were not hers.
Da Rosa broke the silence with a curse. Others exploded into agitated chatter.
“Shut up, the lot of you,” Catarina said. “Burris, get me a better image.”
“We’re 9.5 million miles out,” he said. “That’s the best I can do.”
Yes, at that range it would be hard to pick out details, even with every sensor in her fleet locked in on the moon. But there was plenty that she could see. The two ships were roughly the size of her smaller schooners, and wouldn’t carry much armor or weaponry. Little question what they were.
“Bloody pirates,” Da Rosa said.
Inside, she was all in turmoil, but she kept her tone light. “Us or them?”
Her first mate looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “You’re awfully calm. Don’t tell me you’re not pissed off.”
“I’m furious,” she said. “A year of absolute silence. Our crew has taken oaths, people have been threatened with death if they talk. We’ve put every single untrustworthy person in stasis—”
“And a lot of the trustworthy ones, as well,” he said. “Believe me, when I find the rat who blabbed, I’m going to personally throttle him. Then stab him, then throw him out the airlock.”
“Maybe nobody talked,” Burris said. The tech officer leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, a thoughtful expression on his face as he studied the screen. “Maybe we’ve found our ghost.”
Ah, yes. The ghost. That brief image in the last system as they’d approached the jump point. What had it shown? A ship of some kind, lurking near the star. Alarmed, she’d ordered sensors to bring it into focus, but whatever it was had either been cloaked or nonexistent.
“I think you’re right,” she said at last. “There was someone there after all. That someone was working with this someone.”
“We should have pulled up and let the war junks have a closer look,” Da Rosa said.
“Say we’d looked, and say we’d found the ship. Would that have made any difference? What would we have done, stuck around, trying to act casual so the ship wouldn’t know what we were up to?”
“We’d have blasted ’em from the sky, of course,” Da Rosa said. The first mate’s tone was nearly a growl. “Then come through and blasted these guys, too.”
“Wouldn’t have changed a thing. Wouldn’t have stopped these looters in time. Who knows how much damage they’ve done?” A sick feeling settled into Catarina’s gut as she thought through the ramifications. “If it were me, the first thing I’d have done is vent the settlers to space, make sure they didn’t wake up at the wrong time and cause trouble.”
The others looked at her. “That’s cold,” Da Rosa said. His face turned pale. His wife and two of his adult sons were on the barges. “You’d do that?”
“Hell, no. But I wouldn’t be messing with some other fellow’s operation, either. That’s not my style. Well, unless we’re talking Albion. Even then, I wouldn’t kill fourteen thousand sleeping men and women. But yeah, I think that’s what they’ve done. Got to be sure their operations don’t trigger some automatic wake-up procedure. Probably forty or fifty pirates total on those two schooners. They couldn’t take the risk.”
“Hold course?” Gomez asked.
“You’d better believe it,” she told the pilot. “We’re going to thrash these idiots, whoever they are. Then try to pick up the pieces.”
“If there are any to pick up,” Da Rosa said. His voice had gone flat.
“We don’t know for sure,” Catarina told him. “Maybe they just arrived. Maybe that’s what the other ship was doing, setting up to give warning. Could be they see us and run.”
Da Rosa didn’t answer this.
Catarina gripped her armrests in frustration. So many months—no, years—of work to get to this point. If she’d lost all her settlers, all her supplies, what then? Slink back to the frontier worlds and return to a life of smuggling and small-scale raiding? How humiliating would that be? Everything her enemies had said about her would be proven true.
Burris must have been thinking the same thing. “Guess there’s always Admiral Drake. Bet he’d hire us on again.”
“I won’t go there again. And I wouldn’t think you would, either,” she added, eyeing her tech officer. “Former navy guy like you.”
“Drake paid us though, didn’t he? Not all of those navy blokes would have done the same. I’ll take Drake over that other one . . . what’s his name? McGowan?”
“Who knows?” she said a little too quickly. Catarina glanced to the side to see Da Rosa watching her with raised eyebrows. He knew some of her history with McGowan, and could no doubt guess most of the rest. To Burris, she added, “They’re all the same, a bunch of stuffed shirts.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
Catarina’s fleet accelerated toward the moon, where the two schooners sat tethered to her barges. Every once in a while, one of the schooners shifted a little bit, but otherwise, they seemed unconcerned by the fleet of sixteen ships, some heavily armed, roaring toward them.
Cheeky buggers, weren’t they? The ship in the last system must have sent a subspace warning that her fleet was on its way. She’d have expected them to flee. Schooners of that size had good acceleration, but a slower top speed than the faster ships in her fleet. And Orient Tiger alone outgunned the pair by a significant margin. They were running a hell of a risk scooping up goods until the last possible moment.
“How much money do we have locked up in this operation?” she asked.
“I’m not the money guy,” Da Rosa said, “but aren’t we talking hundreds of thousands of pounds?”
“It was a rhetorical question, Da Rosa. I’m the money guy—I know exactly how much it is. My point is that it’s a lot. Better than a hundred thousand just in supplies. But you can’t just haul it out of here in a couple of schooners. It took us months to shuttle it all over here.”
“They must be picking through it looking for the good stuff,” the first mate said. “Dumping whatever they don’t need.”
“Or what if it’s a big operation, and they’ve got half the pirates and smugglers in the sector involved?”
“We’ve been all over the place,” Da Rosa said. “San Pablo, Peruano, Samborondón—you name it—and haven’t heard a whisper. That would be some kind of conspiracy. Pirates talk—they don’t keep secrets.”
“I know that,” she said peevishly. “Some idiot in our fleet blabbed, for one.” Catarina gestured at the screen, where the two schooners, now in better focus, continued their work. “They must have caught us on their scans by now. What are they doing?”
“What are you saying, that there are other ships around?” Da Rosa asked.
“I’m still looking,” Burris said from the tech console. “But nothing is showing up. We’re close enough, I figure only Royal Navy or Singaporeans could stay this quiet.”
At last, the schooners began to nudge away from the barges, sluggishly, like scavenger fish that had been feeding on a pair of dead whales and were almost too engorged to move. One of the schooners was dragging some unidentified collection of gear, which made her burn with anger.
The fools. It was too late; Catarina was going to overtake them long before they got up to full speed. They had no hope of fighting it out, not with the firepower she had at her disposal.
“Da Rosa, hold the junks. Get their arrays fanned out. Let’s make sure we don’t stumble into a trap. The rest of the ships can follow us in. Burris, you keep looking at those schooners. I want to know what we’re talking about. Guns, armor, and the like. Pilot, maintain current course.”
Catarina took in the side viewscreen while she waited for updated information on the enemy schooners, which were still attempting to flee the scene of the crime. It showed the gas giant, a swirling mass of rust and copper. If she knew the way pirates thought, the schooners would attempt to get around the backside of the planet, disguise their direction while they threw up cloaks, and hope to slip away, each one going in a different direction. That would never work, not with the sensors Catarina had at her disposal, and they must know it, too.
So why had they waited so long to make a run for it? A niggle of doubt worked through her. She was missing something, but what?
Chapter Two
The young commander rubbed a hand over her buzzed scalp as she looked at the small viewscreen showing Catarina Vargus’s approaching fleet. The bigger frigates were already showing their guns and missile bays, which sent an excited thrill across the young woman’s skin.
“Bloody hell, them pirates sure look mad, don’t they?”
There was only one other person on the small bridge of the torpedo boat, a man who answered with a Ladino accent. “You would be too, wouldn’t you?”
“Course I would be,” she answered. She dropped her arm, with its two Albion lions rampant tattooed across the skin. “Can’t say as I blame that Vargus lady. She’s been out here working all this time, botherin’ no one, and up she comes and sees us robbing her. Bet there’s some good stuff in there, too. Don’t know why McGowan wouldn’t let us look. That pompous arse, what did he think, we’d steal it for real?”
“He thinks we are pirates ourselves.” The man shrugged. “He is not all wrong.”
Henny Capp turned to her companion, Ronaldo Carvalho. They’d been together—in every way, even the illicit ones—ever since a navy mutiny at the start of the Albion Civil War two years ago. That included a stint as pirates. Everyone knew they were lovers, which made it funny that they’d been put together on this mission.
“I don’t like the idea of shooting her, that’s all I’m saying,” Capp said. “She ain’t so bad, and she did us a good turn back when we was fighting Malthorne. Bet Admiral Drake wouldn’t have told us to shoot. Don’t seem right.”
Carvalho tapped the defense grid console, giving instructions to the crew at the torpedo bays. “Right now, I am more worried about the shooting that Vargus does against us, and not about us shooting her.”
“That’s exactly my point,” Capp said fiercely. “It’s this McGowan bloke. He don’t like her, and he don’t like us neither. He wants her ship all wrecked up, but he ain’t gonna be bothered none if we don’t come back.” The console showed control of the torpedo tubes, and she flipped the switch to open the bays. “Wish I could send Drake a message and tell him how we died.”
Carvalho gave her a sly smile. “That would be your last act? You are going to tattle on Captain McGowan? I am sure that will make you feel better as cannons tear holes in our ship and we are sucked into space.”
“Oh, shut up, you,” Capp said, but without any heat. “I’m in command here, not you, and I say McGowan is a piss nozzle.” She turned back to the screen.
In spite of her worries, things were going well. The second torpedo boat, captained by one of McGowan’s bootlickers, a kid named Williston, had come around the gas giant and was accelerating toward one of the smaller moons. It was cloaked—well, sort of—but Vargus’s two Chinese ships—the Singaporean war junks—had pulled up about two million miles away, as McGowan had predicted when planning the operation.
