Blackbeard superbox, p.24
Blackbeard Superbox, page 24
“Sure, but we aren’t in the habit of transplanting our vermin.”
“Here it is!” Smythe said. “This way.”
“On some worlds, vast flocks of goats and sheep have turned grasslands into deserts,” the Hroom countered as they set off again. “And you carry rats and mice wherever you go.”
“Not on purpose,” Smythe said, looking up from his computer. “Right, Commander? Why would you transplant man-eating lizards?”
But Tolvern seemed to have tired of the conversation, and she came up with Drake, who was taking a turn with the machete. He needed a break from the chatter, but didn’t mind his commander’s company.
“Let me go next,” she said.
“Didn’t you have a go already?”
“Only for a few minutes.”
Smythe had stopped again to study the computer, and Drake leaned on the machete and looked Tolvern over. Sweat soaked her tank top, showing more of her body than he was used to seeing. She had strong arms and legs, with a lean figure.
“Why, Captain,” she said lightly. “I don’t usually catch you checking me out.”
“As per fleet regulations, I avoid ogling my junior officers.”
“I was joking.”
Drake smiled. “So was I.”
Curiously, she blushed. Or maybe that was just a flush from the heat. He turned discreetly away to let her regain her composure, even though he was unsure why he’d left her embarrassed. He hadn’t said anything improper, only light banter. To be safe, he should clear up any misconceptions.
“I was only looking you over to see if you seemed tired,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“I’m sorry, sir. Capp was teasing me earlier, and I might be overly sensitive at the moment.”
“Teasing you about what?”
“About being sweet on you.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know!” Tolvern said quickly. “Here, give me that.”
She snatched the machete and began hacking at the ferns ahead of them, swinging away madly as if to prove that she still had energy to spare. Drake stared after her, dismayed, as she began to disappear into the growth, until shortly he could see her primarily by the shaking ferns. What had gotten into her? This heat was making people crazy. The sooner they got to the road, the better.
“Actually,” Smythe spoke up, “it’s this way we want to go.” He pointed in a different direction from where Tolvern was going.
Drake sighed. “Commander! You’re going the wrong way. Hello?”
The hacking sound stopped. “Yeah, I heard you,” came her disgusted voice from the vegetation some fifteen feet or so ahead of him.
Suddenly, Tolvern cried out. Her shout was followed by a piercing, bird-like shriek, and then a gunshot. Another shriek.
Drake unslung his rifle at Tolvern’s cry and waded after her. He lowered his shoulder and bowled through the broken, oozing vines and fronds. He came upon his first mate lying beneath some animal that resembled a giant, hairless cat with scales. It had a short, toothy snout, and its legs were wrapped around Tolvern. At first glance, it looked as though she was struggling as it tore into her, but the thing was motionless and bleeding from its head. The struggles were Tolvern’s attempts to shove the dead body off her.
Drake helped Tolvern get free, even as she insisted she was fine and could take care of herself. She stood up and pawed at a slimy, yellow liquid oozing down the side of her face and neck. It was the same substance that had covered Carvalho’s hands when he’d picked up the dead snake. Some kind of blood, apparently. Drake used his water to wash it off.
Others pushed their way in. The first to arrive was Nyb Pim. His red, mottled skin blended in with the vegetation. He looked down at the creature with his big, liquid gaze.
“That answers the question about pouncers,” he said.
#
Nyb Pim and Carvalho were at the front of the column when they hacked free of the undergrowth and found the estate road. They called for the captain, and Drake pushed his way up to take a look.
A gash of muddy, red soil cut through the jungle. The vegetation on either side was scorched, wilted, as if it had been burned as it encroached, but already there were red tendrils creeping out in an attempt to reclaim the narrow strip of cleared land. Muddy ruts pocked the road, hovered over by swarms of insects with metallic green and gold wings.
Drake pulled the team back into the protective cover and radioed the ship. Capp answered.
“Everything okay, Cap’n?” she asked. “Those blokes on the perimeter said they heard a gunshot.”
“We’re fine. Some creature tried to eat Tolvern, and she shot it.”
“What about Carvalho? He’s being careful, right? If that big lug—”
“Ensign,” he interrupted.
“Sorry, sir. What is it, sir?”
“We’re down in the weeds and running blind. What are you seeing out there?”
“Nothing. No sign of the destroyer, and we ain’t getting shot at from the forts, neither. Got to figure they’re stirred up out there, but they don’t see us. At least, it don’t seem so.”
“And the estate?”
“Can’t spot it from here. Sensors aren’t picking up anything, but that don’t mean much, seeing as we’re in the middle of the jungle and all.”
“I figured as much,” Drake said. “You see or hear anything funny—anything flying overhead, for example—you let me know.”
He cut the link. The call had been a risk, as would any future communication, but the success of his plan relied on Malthorne’s men being ignorant of their presence. Assuming he was right, and the forts hadn’t warned civilians on the planet, there was no reason that estate security would be scanning for illicit communication.
They were stepping tentatively onto the road when the rumble of an engine caught their ears. Drake ordered them back into the vegetation. A lorry rolled by a few seconds later, the tires hitting ruts and kicking up muddy water. Drake peered through a break in the vegetation and spotted two men with assault rifles sitting in the back, perched atop crates of supplies. Cigarettes dangled from their lips. The lorry itself was driven by a Hroom with the pale, pink skin of a sugar eater.
Drake waited until the lorry was gone before he poked his head back out and listened. No more vehicles, only the incessant buzz of insects and the distant screech of birds and animals.
Smythe pointed in the same direction taken by the departing lorry. “That way to the manor house and labs.”
They made quicker time on the road, but the downside was that it was an open highway for insects. The things buzzed past their heads, landed in their hair, and came in to lick at their sweat with long, hummingbird-like tongues.
It may have been the highlands, but they were on some sort of plateau, and the ground was mostly flat, except for occasional hillocks that flanked the road on either side. On one of them, a fern the size of an oak tree had come loose and fallen atop other ferns in the jungle below, and where it had broken from the hillock, it had exposed the edge of a wall made of cut stone. It occurred to Drake that all of these hillocks might be buildings or temples.
He glanced at Nyb Pim to see his pilot watching him. “There was a large city here once,” the Hroom said.
“How big?”
“Roughly the size of York on your home world.”
Drake could see now that the land was dotted with ruins beneath all that vegetation, but it was still hard to picture. Not so much that a Hroom city had been populated by millions—alien cities of that size still existed on those planets where the empire had not yet collapsed—but that after only a few generations, the jungle had so completely reclaimed it.
One of the men screamed from the back of the column. It was Oglethorpe, the former special forces fellow who’d transferred to the gunnery when his left shoulder was messed up in combat. He was spinning about madly, reaching around with his good arm to claw at something on his back. Tolvern swung her rifle butt at his shoulder blades, and Oglethorpe went down. He groaned and rolled onto his belly. Drake hurried back.
A dead insect as big as a crow was attached to Oglethorpe’s back by a proboscis the size of a drinking straw. Tolvern’s blow had ruptured the creature’s belly and spilled out a mix of yellow and red blood, the latter apparently what it had sucked from Oglethorpe’s back. Its wings still fluttered. Tolvern yanked it off and boot stomped it until it stopped moving.
They helped Oglethorpe to his feet. He looked at the dead insect and shuddered. “What the hell is that?”
“A mosquito,” Smythe said.
“That’s a bloody mosquito?” Oglethorpe cried. “King’s balls!”
“That’s what passes for them around here,” Smythe said grimly. “I told you. They’re all over the place.”
“You also said it wasn’t mosquito season,” Tolvern said.
“It isn’t!”
“What do you use for mosquito netting out here,” Drake said, still disconcerted to see so much of Oglethorpe’s blood smeared into the ground, “razor wire?”
“Keep moving,” Nyb Pim said. “Oglethorpe’s blood will attract more of them.”
That was enough, and they redoubled their pace. But it didn’t earn them respite for long, and soon they were facing more of the ugly blighters. Being vigilant, they were generally able to scare the things off, but one of the bugs circled relentlessly as people flailed, its long, scissor-like proboscis probing the air. The company was more terrified of the mosquito than they had been of lurkers and pouncers, and if Drake hadn’t stopped them, they would have fired their rifles wildly into the air in an attempt to bring it down.
Finally, the mosquito buzzed off, and most of the other bugs vanished over the next several hundred yards, as well. A pungent smell soon filled the air. The road passed over a rusty iron bridge that crossed a ravine filled with muddy, fetid water. Below, creatures with large, bulging eyes broke the surface to study them before disappearing again.
“Are those the eels?” someone asked nervously.
“No,” the Hroom said. “It’s something else you don’t want to meet.”
“Come on,” Drake said. There was green, Earth-style vegetation on the other side of the bridge, and he was anxious to reach it.
First came tall stalks of grass, then fields of herbs—that was what he’d smelled on the bridge—followed by a second bridge and ravine.
“This is the buffer zone,” Smythe said. “The strong-smelling herbs and the ravines are meant to keep out the bugs. Doesn’t always work. The land is perfectly adapted for Hroom vegetation and animals, not Terran. Anyway, don’t leave the road. The ground is mined.”
“Look, Captain,” Tolvern said. “The guard post.”
Drake had already spotted it. Standing right in front of the second bridge, the post was a squat little building made of the same blocks of cut stone that had formed the side of the exposed ruins they’d seen earlier. There was a lorry parked next to it, but it wasn’t the vehicle that had driven by them on the road. As they approached, a man drew open a rain-streaked window to peer out at them, and two more guards came out of the building, one human, the other a Hroom. Both were armed.
These two aimed their rifles at the newcomers, and the man inside the bunker shouted a challenge.
Chapter Six
Captain Rutherford shook off the jump concussion as he stared at the Hroom sloop of war. It was shaped like a long, smooth submarine with a fifty-foot spike at the end. The tube-like shape of the ship helped with cloaking, and the spike on the end was heavily shielded, allowing the sloop itself to be used as a ram. That spike could split a small ship in two or puncture straight through a larger, double-hulled vessel to open a huge gash in the main decks.
Hroom pilots had an uncanny ability to charge in for close-quarters combat, and the ramming tactic had been effective in earlier wars. But during the reign of Queen Ellen, Albion’s research labs had developed superior shielding, and since then, when a Hroom sloop rammed a larger ship like a cruiser or a battleship, the spike tended to break off and vent the Hroom bridge and its officers into space. In the face of such technological countermeasures, the Hroom might have been expected to alter their warships accordingly, but the empire was in long-term decline, and most of their warships were decades out of date.
“Lower shields,” Rutherford ordered. “Present tubes one and two. Main battery at the ready. Are Nimitz and Richmond through yet?”
Pittsfield turned slowly from staring at the viewscreen. His eyes had a glazed expression, like he was drunk or had suffered a concussion. “Wha—?”
Rather than waiting for the fool to pull out of it, Rutherford thumbed on the com link to give the orders himself. He had to repeat them before he got a response from the gunnery.
Meanwhile, he braced for an attack from the enemy’s guns, grateful that there was only a single sloop of war protecting the frigate Rutherford had chased out of San Pablo. The frigate stood at a distance of several thousand miles, shielded behind the sloop. It had come to a halt as if intending to act as spectator for the pending battle. What fools. A single sloop wouldn’t stop Rutherford for long, and then he’d be after the merchant frigate again.
Unless there’s a bigger fleet on the way.
That was a worrying thought, but he put it out of his mind for the moment. He had his hands full with the sloop.
So far, it was not firing. Neither did it attempt to flee. It stood with its main guns presented, and its serpentine missile batteries exposed. At this close range, the bomblet swarms would be devastating.
Messages started coming in from other ships of the fleet, as officers and crew recovered from the jump. Everybody wanted to know if they should shoot. Rutherford sent orders to prepare all appropriate weapon systems, but held off the order to open fire.
“McCormick—” Rutherford started to say, before remembering with a scowl that Admiral Malthorne had replaced his tech officer with Norris, who had proven himself competent enough, even if Rutherford didn’t trust him under the circumstances. “Excuse me, Norris. Hail the enemy ship. See what they want.”
“And what if they act belligerent?” Pittsfield asked. “Do we open fire? Are we at war, or not?”
“Yes, Commander, I know. That’s what I’m trying to decide.”
“The sloop is not responding, sir,” Tech Officer Norris said. His fingers moved along his console. “In fact . . . ” he began, a frown spreading.
“Yes?” Rutherford said impatiently. “What is it?”
“I think it’s dead.”
“What do you mean?”
The tech officer amplified the enemy ship on the viewscreen. At range, it had appeared strong and deadly, perfectly positioned to blast whatever came out of the jump point with all available weapon systems. Upon closer inspection, Rutherford saw that a line of holes perforated the hull from bow to stern, as neat as needle stitches. Each hole was small, not bigger than a man’s head, but there were dozens of them.
“King’s balls,” one of the other ensigns on the bridge exclaimed, and Rutherford glared him into silence before turning back to Pittsfield.
“What kind of weapon leaves that mark?” Rutherford asked.
Pittsfield looked bewildered. “Nothing I’ve ever heard of.”
“Norris, do a more thorough scan and send your findings to engineering and the gunnery. Maybe someone there knows something. Commander . . . oh, for God’s sake,” Rutherford interrupted himself, as a thicket of urgent messages kept coming through to his console. In addition, three fleet officers were trying to hail him on the com link.
He took a moment to look over the messages, in case someone had found something useful. No. Most were still making excited noises about whether or not they should attack.
Rutherford sent out a general notice that amounted to “shut the hell up already and let me think.” When that was done, he started over with Pittsfield.
“Commander, send a destroyer to harpoon that merchant frigate and bring her in. If she tries to run, destroy her. Otherwise, I want to talk to her captain.” To the tech officer, he asked, “Is the sloop a derelict? Maybe it has been out here for a while.”
“Negative, sir. Her engines are still warm. Impossible to say how long ago this happened, but certainly within the past few days.” Norris was still studying the results of his scan with a deepening scowl. “There are at least a hundred holes in the outer hull, sir. More than a dozen go straight through.”
“Attacked from the outside, right?” Rutherford asked. “It couldn’t be the result of an internal explosion?”
“Definitely from the outside. But here’s the curious thing. The Hroom shields are still intact. Whatever went through did so without disabling them first.”
That was both strange and alarming. No Albion weapon had done this. Rutherford had never heard of such a thing, and his forces were the only ones anywhere near this system. Could the Hroom be testing a new weapon system, something that would make hash of Albion’s shields? He imagined his own ship with those neat holes. Vigilant would be as structurally sound as a sugar cube dipped in hot tea.
No, that didn’t make any sense, either. If the Hroom had such a weapon, why would they test it on a perfectly good warship, what amounted to one of their main ships of the line? And test it here, where it might be seen by the enemy? What’s more, the engines were still hot; there must have been crew on the ship.
“Scans are showing dead bodies on board,” the tech officer added, confirming what Rutherford had already guessed. “And I heard back from engineering. They’re baffled. They’re running a few scans of their own, but right now, nobody knows anything.”
The only other possibility Rutherford could think of was a Hroom civil war. Seemed unlikely, especially given the unknown weapon system, but what was the alternative? Maybe the frigate captain had seen something.
“Sir,” Pittsfield said. “The destroyer has harpooned the frigate and is bringing her in. But look at these images.”
