Drake raised his eyebrows. “Is that so?”
Barker’s mustache twitched some more. “Back when we were running low on ordnance in the battle for Persia, I went scouring storerooms for spare shells, and found this stuff behind some canisters of dried potato flakes. Don’t know why it didn’t get junked when we stripped Blackbeard in the yards and upgraded her into a battle cruiser, but there it was.”
Tolvern nodded. “Barker mentioned it to me about the same time Fontaine told us we’d need to enter the home system alone, and that gave me an idea.”
“And you thought to remake the bridge into this old, cobbled together version from our pirate days? Good heavens, the lot of you must have been bored these last several weeks, haven’t you?”
Nevertheless, he was pleased as he took his seat, and the others were grinning. All this felt so familiar, so comfortable. It was only when Smythe put up a map of the system with Nyb Pim’s course charted through it that he remembered where he was.
It was a chart he’d never before seen on his screen, a system he’d never crossed, but at the same time it was instantly recognizable. A star chart taught to every schoolchild on Albion, as familiar as their own.
They’d entered the system at a jump point in orbit near a medium-sized gas giant, brown and cream in color, with thick, instantly recognizable rings. The name of the planet was Saturn. Not the ringed gas giant New Saturn in the Mercia system, but the Saturn.
Farther out, two smaller gas giants, Neptune and Uranus, with a small, icy world beyond that, Pluto, with its oversized moon and irregular orbit.
The next planet in was Jupiter. Again, the Jupiter. Several of its moons had been famous colonies before the days of the Great Migration. The colonies on Ganymede and Io had been obliterated by Adjudicator attacks, but Europa was still intact and scanning their ship hard as they accelerated toward it. Europa was famous in Albion history, being the last stop for refueling and supplies before the original colonist ships had departed for the stars.
One of Drake’s ancestors, a man from the nation of New Zealand, had come aboard a colonist ship with his two sisters and their husbands at this final stop, the very last of the original colonists to join the fleet that had settled Albion.
After Jupiter came the asteroid belt, where most of the minerals used to construct the colonizing fleets had been mined, followed by Mars, Earth’s earliest colony, and the site of the yards where those fleets had been constructed. The yards were still active to this day, and Fontaine’s ship had been built there.
And finally, Earth and her moon. One, the cradle of humanity, and the other the first extraterrestrial world where humans had set foot after finally escaping the mother planet’s gravity well uncounted generations after their ancestors had first gazed in wonder at the stars. Neil Armstrong’s footsteps on the moon were the most famous in human history.
Earth was a different place than when the ancestors of Blackbeard’s crew left her behind. Since those days, a warming climate had gradually pushed human civilization toward the formerly inhospitable north country. When Albion’s settlers left, the most powerful countries on Earth had been the Anglo Federation and the Han Empire. By the time the Adjudicators attacked, Greenland was the world’s great power, with several smaller rivals across Siberia and the northern reaches of the American Continent.
Of these nations, all but Alaskanada had been completely destroyed in the attack, but civilization held on in Patagonia, parts of the central Eurasian landmass, and various island nations, mountainous and desert regions, and other scattered lands that had escaped the alien bombardment.
Even after several cycles of plague, famine, migration, and war, there were still more than two billion people living on Earth itself, four times Albion’s population. And while there was no planetary government to speak of, neither was there disunity. Any squabbling had been put aside to face the existential threat of the Adjudicator attack, and they maintained that united front now that Albion was sending her representatives to . . . what?
Earth didn’t know what its former daughter colony intended, only knew that she’d grown powerful and demanding. To be honest, Drake didn’t know Albion’s intentions, either.
He asked Smythe to show Earth on a side screen. Long-range scans shortly brought it into focus. Blue and green, with the outline of continents so familiar that he felt like he was looking at a simulation instead of the real thing.
“Is Earth ours, now?” Tolvern asked quietly. She’d taken her seat next to his, and leaned toward him while the others busied themselves with their work.
“She’s either ours or we’re hers. Most everything in between has been devastated, and there are too many threats to stay independent until humans have rebuilt our strength.”
“Are you thinking about the insectoids?”
He was, in part. When Fontaine had explained that wedge of insectoid stars, Drake had immediately wondered what would happen when they were freed from Adjudicator attack. Would they go into expansionary mode, spreading like colonies of ants at the expense of whatever stood in their way? And if so, would humans eventually find themselves taking on exactly the role the ghouls had followed all these centuries?
He hoped not. The creatures were intelligent, and quite possibly could be negotiated with. They might not be violent warriors, nor guilty of any crime except the same one the Adjudicators had used to condemn all sentient life, even their own ancestors.
But after two horrific wars in the past few years, against two very different types of aliens, and with the Hroom conflict only a few years in the past, as well, someone had to lead the defense of the human race and their allies in the Hroom civilization.
Earth may have more people, but her fleet, as impressively as it had fought, wouldn’t have been able to defeat a collective raid of Scandian star wolves or the general’s fleet of sloops of war. Perhaps not even the Singaporeans. And of course, Terran forces were far weaker than Albion’s, and therefore, must fall under the protection of the Royal Navy.
Under its protection and command.
“It’s a dangerous road we’re on,” Drake told her. “The king is now officially the Emperor of the Combined Realms. It’s not very far from there to full-on despot.”
“The king is no tyrant.”
“Tyranny is not required for an empire to run the liberties of its people into the ground. Anyway, he is only one man, and he won’t live forever. The king or queen who comes next—make that the emperor or empress—might be a very different sort of person. Parliament is also capable of starting wars of aggression for its own purposes.”
“Then we must maintain the independence of the admiralty,” Tolvern said firmly, “so that the Royal Navy remains a bulwark against despotism.”
Having fought Lord Malthorne, as well as reined in vainglorious officers like Edward McGowan, Drake was far from confident that the Royal Navy would always act in the best interests of its people, either. A navy’s purpose was to make war, and when you were built for war, you tended to see conflict everywhere. Quite often, you started it yourself to justify your own existence.
He pushed these thoughts to the back of his mind and stared at the screen showing Earth. For now, his duty was to make contact with the governments of the planet and ensure they understood the military situation and the costs, consequences, and benefits of joining the Albion-led alliance.
And if they refused to join, he wouldn’t make war against them, but neither could he allow them to prosper and threaten the spacelanes. If that meant choking their system, putting them back into a bottleneck, rather than risk chaos across the old colony worlds until they complied, so be it.
“The Martian base sent us a message,” Smythe said. “As soon as we cross Jupiter’s orbit, they want us to retract all weapon systems and approach the inner system uncloaked.
“They want us to, Lieutenant?” Tolvern asked. “Or is it a demand?”
“It is worded somewhat stronger than a request, and softer than a demand, si
r.”
Tolvern glanced at Drake, who nodded.
“Inform them that we’ll comply,” Drake said. “With the caveat that the defense grid remains active. They know that if they pull something tricky, they don’t have the firepower to take us down before we bring our systems online and give them a good beating.”
Albion approached Earth from a position of strength. Her navy was the dominant power in the sector, and had defeated all opposition. She had absorbed those enemies who could be reasoned with, and obliterated those who could not. Whatever happened in the upcoming negotiations, let neither side forget that.
#
Are you new to the Blackbeard Universe, or have you read the complete sequence of books that set up the Alliance Trilogy, with epic battles against Hroom death cultists, brutal Scandian raiders, treacherous Albion lords, and a life and death struggle with the alien race known only as Apex?
You can get the earlier series in cost effective compilations through the following links:
Series One & Two: Blackbeard Superbox
Series Three: The Complete Void Queen Trilogy
If you have read the books already, let me encourage you to give my fantasy works a try. I’m including the first two chapters of The Red Sword below the afterword. Check it out and see if it catches your attention!
Afterword
It has been a long, crazy ride since I first wrote the mutiny of the crew of HMS Ajax as they freed Captain James Drake after an unjust court martial. Drake, Tolvern, Capp, Smythe, and the rest soon seized a pirate frigate to strip it for spare parts, changed the name of the ship to Blackbeard, and set out to rescue their Hroom pilot, Nyb Pim, from sugar slavery, and the series was off and running.
After that, we got to know the noble and ancient Hroom race, and pulled together disparate elements of the human colonies of the Great Migration, including Ladinos, Singaporeans, Scandians, and more. We visited planets with mosquitoes the size of birds, saw giant toads that emerged during torrential rains to devour everything in their path, and even fought a battle on the surface of a star leviathan.
And of course, our villains. First came the treacherous Lord Malthorne, but don’t forget Hroom death cultists, brutal Scandian raiders, and our two main alien villains, the genocidal Apex with ritual slaughters that make the Aztecs look like amateurs, and the sneering, cult-like Adjudicators, who were determined to reduce any starfaring civilization to the stone age.
Finally, we reestablished contact with Old Earth and caught a glimpse of a humanity emerging from chaos to once more fulfill its destiny and colonize the stars. Of course, threats remain, both from within, in the form of the risks that all empires must face sooner or later, and from without. It’s a universe teeming with threats, and Albion and her allies must already be wary of the insectoid worlds brought to their attention during the Adjudicator wars.
For now, however, I’m going to take a break and write a few different things. I’ve been told that I hold my writing career back by not writing solely science fiction, or only fantasy, or even just historical novels. It’s probably true, as a lot of readers only read one kind of thing (not you though, right?), and I have to build a whole new audience every time I shift gears. Of course, I’m as curious as anyone about what secrets, threats, and mind-blowing alien ecosystems the universe might hold, so we’ll see how long I hold out.
Until then, dream of the stars.
For those of you who are curious and flexible, my new fantasy trilogy has a lot of the same types of imagination and characters you’ve come to love in the Blackbeard books. I’m including the first chapter of the first book of my recent fantasy series, The Red Sword. Take a look below and see if it grabs you!
The Red Sword (Excerpt)
by Michael Wallace
The Red Sword - Chapter One
Markal was tending the severed head of his master when a knight stepped into the garden with a drawn sword. Sunlight reflected off the knight’s gleaming breastplate, blinding the apprentice wizard, who stood staring, his work covering the dead man’s head forgotten.
There was violence in the intruder’s posture, and fear rose in Markal’s breast. The man’s sword gleamed red, blood dripping from the tip to splatter the flowers, and from there falling to pollute the sacred ground of the gardens. Clods of dirt fell from the spade gripped in Markal’s suddenly sweating hands.
By the Brothers, he’s slain the keepers.
The knight could not have reached this inner sanctum without attacking and killing the keepers who protected this space. And what of the other apprentices, Markal’s fellow students in the gardens of Memnet the Great? Had the knight butchered them, too? The acolytes? Was there nobody left to oppose the intruder but Markal?
He searched his memory for a spell that would turn aside this murderous figure. Even a bit of trickery. But how had the man found the gardens in the first place? He should have been stopped at the bridge, should have been turned away at the north gate. And Markal was surrounded by wards and runes that should have destroyed any enemy who managed to make it inside. Yet somehow this man seemed invulnerable.
“Where is he?” the knight asked, voice sharp, demanding, and Markal received his second surprise. The intruder was no man. She was a woman.
She stepped toward Markal and turned in such a way that the sun stopped reflecting off the armor and cast its warm, bathing light against the brick wall at her back, at the fruiting vines that snaked to the top of the wall, and across the woman’s face. The woman had pale skin, light blue eyes, and a long braided knot of golden-colored hair that trailed down her back.
She was beautiful and strange and terrifying all at once. Markal had seen blue eyes before, even wheat-colored hair in the markets of Syrmarria on those who were said to carry the blood of those who lived beyond the western mountains, but nobody like this, and he knew he was facing a full-blooded barbarian warrior.
The woman was tall, lean, and muscular, but her two-handed sword was at least four feet long, and wielding it would have taxed the strongest of warriors. Yet she carried it lightly, as if it were a rapier or spear.
“I asked you a question, boy.” Her accent was strange, her vowels elongated, the ends of the words swallowed. “Where is he?”
“Who?” Markal forced himself to remain calm. “There is nobody here but me. Why have you come, to kill me?”
Her eyes hardened as she stepped toward him. “If I must.”
“Like the others? Were you forced to kill them, too?”
“What others?”
“The keepers, the acolytes. You murdered them, didn’t you?”
Markal nodded toward the sword, but he’d been mistaken and it wasn’t dripping with blood after all. There was only a clean, gleaming blade. Some trick of the light? No, he’d seen red drops splatter on the flowers. But there was no blood there, either, only perfect blossoms lifting their cool yellow faces gratefully to the sun.
Another step forward. “Where is the wizard?”
Markal lifted his spade defensively, even as he recognized the foolishness of the gesture. He didn’t look at the freshly turned soil at his feet. It was damp and dark, worms still burrowing back into the ground. There were defenses in this walled garden, including the tree beneath which she stood. He could awaken it, test her abilities. Yet he was stunned that she’d made it this far, and afraid she’d shrug off any attempt.
“What wizard?” he asked.
“Don’t toy with me, boy. I will kill you if I must, kill them all, if it is the only way to force your master to face me.”
Markal thrust his spade into the soil and wiped his hands on his already filthy robes. “There is no wizard here, not in these gardens. Here you will only find apprentices such as myself, and the keepers of the gardens. We all have some small measure of magic, but there are none who can claim the title of wizard. Not here, and perhaps nowhere in Aristonia. Do you have a name of someone in particular? I might send you on your way.”
A frown
crossed her brow, making her seem more severe than ever. “The great one—I do not know his name. But he is here.” She waved her sword. “In your gardens. I have been called here. I know who he is and what he does.”
“Do you? I’m not sure I know that myself.”
A smile crossed the woman’s face, as if she had caught him in a lie. “So you do know of the wizard.”
She lifted the sword above her shoulders, but it was only to slide it into a long scabbard at her back. Markal studied the woman more closely, and noted the road grime on her face and hands, the unfastened strap of her bracer, and the scuffed appearance of her breastplate. That first impression of a knight stepping gleaming from the sunlight had been very wrong indeed.
Moving deliberately, Markal stepped up to the fruiting vines growing against the brick wall to his left. He was in one of many small interior spaces in the larger gardens, but perhaps the most potent, and that could serve him well. He plucked a round, ruby-red fruit.
“You’ve been long on the road. This plum will refresh you.”
She didn’t take it. “Plums grow on trees, not vines.”
“Not this kind. Eat it. It will help.” To show her that it was harmless, he took a bite. A sweet, juicy flavor exploded in his mouth. He picked a second one and held it out.
She took the plum and turned it over in her hand. “What is this, some spell, some trickery?”
“Not at all. I told you, I’m an apprentice—I have little magic. It is the power of this garden—it will restore.”
“Where is he?” She cast the fruit aside. “The great wizard? You have admitted he is here.”
“He was here.” Markal let his own fruit drop. “These were his gardens. But you are too late to see the master. Another assassin has beat you to it.”
“How was he killed? Poison, strangulation, magic?”
“Why does that matter?”
“It matters, as well you know.”
“The assassin cut off my master’s head, threw his body over a horse, and escaped into the desert.” This was all true, and yet only one small part of the story.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 77
