Blackbeard superbox, p.35
Blackbeard Superbox, page 35
She was so wound up that she didn’t remember her makeup and her slicked-back hair until she got to the bridge. Nyb Pim glanced up, Smythe too, but neither seemed to notice her changed appearance. Capp, who was more observant than both of them put together, was reading something on her screen, brow furrowed, lips moving as she labored over the words.
Tolvern walked toward the war room, and this motion finally caught Capp’s eye. “Hey, Tolvern, check out this subspace message that just came in. King’s balls, you’ll never believe it!”
“One moment,” Tolvern said, and pushed into the war room.
There was a small bathroom off the room, and she went inside and locked the door. She lathered her hands with soap and water and scrubbed at her face. Only when it was clean, and the clip pulled from her hair, did she look in the mirror. Her familiar features stared back at her, the eyes that were not particularly striking, but with good color and symmetry. Her nose, a little quirky, yes, but not too big. She had nice lips and good teeth. And if her cheekbones were not distinguished, at least she had an excellent complexion.
She’d meant to consider herself defiantly in the mirror, tell herself that she was more than a match for Catarina Vargus, but instead she suffered a fresh welling of emotion. Tears rose in her eyes. This made her angry.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she growled. Her eyes stopped watering.
Tolvern stood staring at herself in the mirror, making fierce faces, even purposefully allowing herself to look ridiculous, until she was composed enough to go back out again. The risk had passed. Nobody would know but the captain of Orient Tiger, and the unexpected compassion the woman had shown seemed to indicate that the secret would be safe.
What does it matter, anyway?
Let Drake take his lover. There was nothing wrong with that. He was a good man, and honorable, and there was no doubt he would still do the correct thing by his crew.
As for Tolvern, she would be fine. She’d made a mistake, and what of it?
She remembered Capp’s urgency, and found herself curious as to what message had arrived. Who even knew their location enough to send such a message?
Tolvern came back onto the bridge to find Capp pacing the floor, while Smythe and Manx were in communication with engineering and the gunnery, respectively.
“What is it?” Tolvern was suddenly aware that she’d been off her post against the captain’s orders. If he couldn’t leave his commander in charge of the bridge, who could he trust? She vowed not to make that mistake again.
“The Royal Navy is in the system,” Capp said. “Captain Rutherford, on Vigilant. He’s the one who sent the message.”
The news was like a slap. “Dear God. How long until they intercept us?”
Over the past week, they’d picked up bits of news as the two pirate ships jumped ever deeper into Hroom territory in search of the tyrillium barge and her escorts. There had been another battle between Albion and the empire, and much of the Royal Navy was in motion. Dreadnought remained in orbit around Albion, the lord admiral engaged in unknown business on the surface, but he was expected to ship out soon. Meanwhile, nothing had been heard of Rutherford’s fleet since it defeated the empire forces at San Pablo. Now, Tolvern realized with horror that Rutherford must have been tracking them all along. He’d caught Blackbeard out here, far from any safe port or jump point.
“No, it ain’t that,” Capp said. “That’s the crazy thing. Rutherford is demanding our help.”
Chapter Eighteen
Drake’s first indication that something had gone wrong came when Catarina suddenly sprang to her feet and grabbed for her pants and boots. She yanked them on, snatched up her gun and holster, and strapped them in place. She pulled on her vest and zipped it up over her breasts.
They’d been lying in each other’s arms talking ever since coming out of the shower. Catarina had asked Drake if he and Tolvern had ever been lovers. He assured her that they had not, and neither had he been intimate with any other crew member. This answer seemed to satisfy her, and for the first time, the thought crossed his mind that maybe Catarina held genuine affection for him.
To that point, he’d assumed that she’d come for a bit of pleasure. Come to him to take what she wanted and leave. Not so different from how she’d tried to take the gold. She wanted it, she thought it was hers. In this case, a moment of fun, but nothing more. Drake had been prepared to deal with the situation on those terms, but now he reconsidered. What if she were interested in a deeper relationship?
She was getting dressed so quickly that Drake grew concerned. “Is something wrong? Did you get a message from your ship?”
It was the only thing he could think of that would get her moving so quickly. They’d each put in their com links as soon as they’d dried from the shower, even as they lounged in their underwear.
Now she touched her ear and confirmed his suspicions. “I’m on my way to the pod right now,” she said, not to Drake, but to some distant listener. “Be there in ten minutes.” When she looked at him again, her face was hard and serious. “You’d better get to your own bridge. If they don’t know yet, they will soon.”
“Know what?”
“Your navy friends. Seems they’ve found us.” With that, she left.
Drake’s own call came even as the door to his room was still closing. It was Capp, sounding agitated, begging him to hurry to the bridge. It only took a moment to get dressed, run his fingers through his hair, and make for the lift.
He came onto the bridge to find Tolvern in the captain’s chair, with Capp next to her. The two women were discussing something in agitated tones.
Capp spotted Drake. “There you are! You’ve got to see this.”
Tolvern’s face darkened, and she didn’t look at him as he came over, only jumped out of his chair and made her way to her own console. He didn’t have time to consider this odd behavior before he was at the console and reading what had agitated them. It was a message from Captain Rutherford.
We are under attack from two vessels of unknown alien origin. Do not trust myself strong enough to combat them. Fleeing toward your location. In the name of Albion and His Majesty, King Bartholomew, this is bigger than either of us, and I beg your aid.
Captain Nigel Rutherford
“Where is Rutherford’s fleet?” Drake asked, figuring if the man knew his location enough to send a subspace, then it should be easy enough to detect the man’s task force. Cloaked or not.
“No fleet, sir,” Tolvern said. “Only Vigilant. She’s headed this way at top speed.”
Tolvern sent him the coordinates, and Nyb Pim offered that if the two pirate ships continued at their present course and speed, it would take sixteen hours for Vigilant to overtake them. Blackbeard and Orient Tiger were currently flying more or less away from Rutherford, but if they turned around, they could rendezvous with Vigilant in a couple of hours.
But Drake didn’t want to consider that possibility while he was still confused about the particulars. Also, that would mean abandoning and possibly losing the tyrillium barge.
“Who is pursuing him? Empire sloops of war?”
“That’s the strange thing,” Tolvern said. “There’s no sign of any pursuit. Vigilant seems to be alone. Maybe they’re cloaked, but we can’t detect anything.”
“Tolvern and me have been trying to figure out why Rutherford would make up that kind of story,” Capp added. “Don’t make much sense. But he must be lying, right?”
“If it’s a lie, it’s both clumsy and cowardly,” Drake said. “That isn’t Rutherford’s style. Smythe, send me your scan.”
The tech officer sent through the data. It held nothing that Drake could see other than what he’d already been told: Vigilant, coming after them at ten percent the speed of light, seemingly alone. Still too distant to see whether her shields were up, but she wasn’t cloaked, so he assumed yes.
“Maybe there were Hroom,” Tolvern said. “But they’ve gone now. Could be he’s still spooked, if they were two big sloops and they caught him alone and unaware.”
“He didn’t say Hroom,” Drake said. “He said two vessels of unknown alien origin.”
This caught everyone’s attention. “Surely he didn’t mean that,” Tolvern said. “Surely he meant an unknown Hroom faction.”
“I’m not sure of anything at the moment.”
“You know how it is,” Tolvern said. “There’s probably another civil war in the empire, it’s always falling apart. That’s what Rutherford means by unknown. Not some unknown species. That would be crazy.”
“We know other aliens are out there,” Drake said. “We’ve seen strange ships.”
“Derelicts,” Tolvern insisted. “Ancient things, from long-extinct races.”
Drake wanted to call Orient Tiger, but his computer showed that Catarina’s pod was still in transit, about to dock. Another few minutes before he could share information.
“Pilot,” he said. “What do you know about this?”
Nyb Pim looked up. “I have no understanding of current empire politics—my loyalty was always to the fleet, although not completely aligned with Albion herself. But it would not surprise me if there were multiple civil wars within the Hroom home systems. The empire has been in a state of collapse since long before my time and only unites when the time comes to fight Albion.”
“Yes, I know,” he said impatiently. “But what about aliens? Other races and civilizations?”
“I do not know. I have heard things, that there were other contacts before the encounter with humans. But that happened long ago, so far as I can tell. I hesitate to parse Captain Rutherford’s message. Either interpretation seems possible.”
“Where are those other Hroom?” Drake asked, remembering the pair he’d hired at the San Pablo yards. “Down in engineering? Get them up here, I’ll want to talk to them. Maybe they know something.”
Tolvern turned to obey.
Drake checked his screen. Catarina’s pod had docked. “Capp, hail Orient Tiger. I want to talk to Vargus.”
Catarina was on the bridge now and answered the call herself. “What a surprise. I never thought you’d miss me so soon.” She gave him a sly smile.
Her innuendo caught him off guard. And in front of his crew, too. He could only hope they took it as a jest.
“You know what this is about, Ca . . . Captain Vargus,” he said, only just catching himself from calling her by her given name. “What is your assessment?”
“We can take Vigilant. Blackbeard can match her gun for gun, while my ship flanks from above, firing missiles to disable her shields.”
“So you think Rutherford is lying, and it’s a trap?”
Catarina frowned. “How do you mean, lying?”
Drake suddenly reassessed the situation. She hadn’t been recalled to her ship because of the message; all she knew was that a navy cruiser was pursuing them at top speed.
“Check your computer. I’m sending a transmission.” His fingers moved over his console.
She looked down, her screen out of his sight, but he could see confusion and doubt spread across her face. When she looked up, her gaze was steady, but she looked troubled.
“We’re not detecting any other vessels,” she said. “Must be a trick. I’ll bet Rutherford has other forces in the system. Hidden behind some moon, or cloaked. Rutherford means to delay us long enough for them to join the fight. If we follow the tyrillium barge’s original course, we’ll be through the jump before he reaches us.” A shrug. “Might be trading one trap for another, of course, but that’s our safest bet, if you ask me. I say we ignore the message and continue.”
“I know this man,” Drake said. “It’s not a trick. I have no idea what he’s talking about with these mystery ships he claims are attacking him, but it’s no game. He wouldn’t lie.”
“You sound awfully sure.” Her frown deepened. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of obeying the order.”
“I’m considering it,” he admitted.
“Are you mad?”
“Captain!” Smythe shouted. “We found them!”
“Found who?” Drake asked.
Catarina vanished, her call abruptly terminated, as Smythe, in his excitement, had replaced the entire viewscreen with Vigilant. At this distance, the long-range scanners could only show blurred, indistinct images of the navy cruiser. But then Smythe pulled the view out to a wider angle, and two other vessels came into sight. They followed the cruiser off the port and starboard, each a third again as long as Vigilant, but long and slender, like spears. With that profile, they would possess a fraction of the mass of the navy cruiser.
Where the devil had they come from? Was their cloaking really so effective as to render them invisible, even when all of Blackbeard’s instruments had been directly focused on them? And what the hell were they? He’d never seen anything like them.
“Talk to me, Smythe. Please tell me you can identify these craft.”
“Negative, sir. Unknown vessels. The engines are emitting no known signature.”
The two spaceships had materialized only a few thousand miles behind Vigilant, and Drake at first assumed that they would shortly overtake Rutherford. They must have been pursuing him for some time, which meant impressive speed to overtake a Punisher-class cruiser with its heavy plasma engines.
Instead, the unknown craft began to fall behind. They fired no weapons and seemed incapable of stopping or hindering Vigilant in any way. And then, as quickly as they’d appeared, the vessels vanished, one after another.
“What are they doing?” Drake asked, sure now that Smythe’s instruments would be able to pierce whatever cloaking these ships had employed.
“They’re gone, sir. I swear to God there’s no cloaking, or if there is, it’s a hundred times better than anything we can manage. We were looking right at them, and they’re gone.”
“Try again, Smythe.”
“I am. There’s nothing.”
“Check your instruments.”
“I swear, Captain!”
“You may find this difficult to believe, Captain,” Nyb Pim spoke up, “but I think they jumped.”
“They jumped?” Drake said. “There was no jump point there.”
“That we knew about.” The Hroom’s long fingers moved over the console. “Data from Ensign Smythe’s scans are fed automatically into the nav computer, which has interpreted certain irregularities as a previously unknown jump point.”
How was that possible?
There was little about the system in their charts other than the basics. The system was filled with a collection of small inner planets possessing no atmosphere, and the typical array of gas giants. Nothing habitable, and deep in Hroom territory to boot. It was quite plausible that there would be unknown jump points within the system, but what were the odds that Rutherford would pass right next to one in all the vastness of space? Nearly infinitesimally small.
Drake was still trying to wrap his mind around this when Catarina came back on from Orient Tiger. “Did you see those things?”
“I saw them. Don’t know what they are. Do you?”
“No idea. Where the hell did they go?”
“They jumped,” Drake said.
“What do you mean, they jumped? There was no jump point there.”
“There is now.”
“Captain!” This time it was Tolvern, who had joined Smythe at the tech console. “Look at that!”
He looked at the viewscreen as Catarina vanished again, to see that the unknown spaceships had reappeared, this time a hundred thousand miles ahead of Vigilant, now racing toward her in the opposite direction. The two strange craft flashed by the cruiser on either side, and Rutherford launched missiles as they passed. The strange craft fired some sort of energy weapon and vaporized the missiles, or so it appeared. Which was odd, since even the small amount of tyrillium in the missiles should have neutralized energy weapons.
But the craft didn’t fire at Rutherford’s ship itself. It was almost as if they were testing his weapon systems. And then they vanished again. For a moment, Drake could only gape.
Catarina came back on the viewscreen. “This is no kind of fight for us. Not one thing about this situation is right. Let’s get the hell out of here. Force the barge ahead of us to the jump point and go.”
“Rutherford needs our help.”
“Rutherford can go to hell. Ten-to-one odds this whole thing is a trick to get us to investigate, that these strange ships either don’t exist, or they’re experimental navy craft. Soon as we show up, they’ll blast us. He’s no friend of ours, anyway. Let’s go.”
“Captain,” Tolvern said directly through Drake’s com, on a channel Catarina wouldn’t be able to hear. “This might be it. The way to earn yourself a pardon. A pardon for all of us. If you help Rutherford, it will change everything.”
He saw what Tolvern was getting at, but she was fooling herself if she thought Admiral Malthorne would call off the dogs simply because Drake had intervened to help Captain Rutherford escape a tight spot. For that matter, Drake doubted Rutherford would forgive him, either, not even if he saved the man’s life. His old friend’s obedience was too ingrained.
“James,” Catarina said, tone warning. “We have our prize. Now it’s time to leave.”
“This isn’t part of our bargain,” he said, “and I won’t make you follow me. Take the tyrillium barge if you want, and go.”
“Don’t do this. We have to stick together. I told you, I can’t manage this course alone, I need your ship to provide the muscle.”
“Then go through the jump and wait for me,” Drake told her. “I’ll either meet you there when we finish, or I won’t, and you’ll be able to guess what happened.”
“Damn you, I’m not going back with you, if that’s what you’re hoping to pull off. Guilt me into it or something.”
“I’m not, I swear to God. Go, leave.”
