Starship Blackbeard

by Michael Wallace

  The thought of a god with a powdered wig amused him enough that he was feeling more cheerful, albeit still in need of a hot shower and a massage rather than this unwanted meeting, by the time he rang at the admiral’s quarters.

  Malthorne’s staff officer welcomed him in. The lord admiral was lounging in a chair near the viewscreen, only the back of his head visible. An outstretched hand held a snifter of whiskey. Through the viewscreen came a milky-white swath of stars spread like a glittering, snowy arch through the sky. But the ship was moving, and the cool blue-and-green sphere of Albion rolled into view.

  “Captain Rutherford to see you, my lord,” the staff officer announced before backing out.

  “Lord Admiral,” Rutherford said, and waited.

  “What do you say about your traitor friend now?” Malthorne asked without turning to face him.

  Rutherford’s improved mood soured. He made his way over to the admiral without answering. It was night over the Eastern Hemisphere, the twin continents of Britain and Australia visible, separated by the Irish Sea, which was more of an ocean than sea, nearly a thousand miles wide and littered with islands. Australia was fat and wide and southern like her Old Earth namesake. Britain was long and thin, stretching from the equator almost to the north pole. The glittering metropolis of York Town sat on Britain’s eastern coast, a single glowing light with a spiderweb of cities radiating north, south, and west. York was by far the biggest city on the planet, with nearly five million people in the greater metropolis.

  “They say the population of Albion will reach a half billion this year,” Malthorne said, as if he’d been thinking the same thing. “Five thousand settlers to five hundred million in a little over six hundred years. Another fifty million living on Saxony and Mercia. We have been amazingly prolific. And yet . . .”

  “My lord?” Rutherford said, confused.

  “The Hroom Empire once numbered in the tens of billions. The aliens still outnumber humans twenty, thirty to one.”

  “And it is said that there are more sheep than people in the Zealand Islands,” Rutherford countered. “That doesn’t mean the shepherds are in danger of being overthrown by their flocks. The Hroom are a broken, tired people. Destined to be a servant class. We are young and energetic.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps.” Malthorne turned in his chair and gestured for Rutherford to take a seat.

  Vice Admiral Thomas Lord Malthorne, Duke of the Boston Plantations, had been born to one of the richest families in Britain, if not all of Albion. In addition to his estates on Albion, he also had extensive holdings on Mercia and the sugar worlds. He was King Bartholomew’s cousin, and his wife was the queen’s half-sister. With his sharp, penetrating gaze, high, balding forehead, and eagle-like nose, Malthorne looked more regal than the king himself. Whenever Rutherford found himself alone with the admiral, he was aware of the difference in their stations, both by birth and rank.

  Like his old schoolmate James Drake, Rutherford had grown up in the Zealand Islands off the coast of Canada. His father was a minor baron, and he had gone to school with merchants’ sons and daughters, had attended church with the families living on his father’s estates. It wasn’t until the Naval Academy that he fully appreciated Albion’s class divides. It wasn’t only the traditional classifications—peasants, laborers, priests, merchants, and nobility—but within the nobility itself, there were further divisions.

  Rutherford hadn’t seen the admiral’s staff officer reenter the room, but now the man brought over a silver tray with two tumblers of whiskey. Malthorne replaced his empty glass with a new one, and Rutherford took the other. The whiskey was smooth, with hints of oak and peat.

  “From your homeland,” Malthorne says. “The best whiskey available, unless you somehow find yourself in possession of Old Earth scotch. Which, I regret to say, hasn’t passed my lips for many a year.”

  The liquor warmed Rutherford’s belly and eased the stiffness in his neck. It also loosened his tongue, and against his better judgment he found himself wanting to discuss Drake and the missing Ajax.

  “He’s no traitor, my lord. He’ll return.”

  “He’s had more than enough time already,” Malthorne said. “It has been twenty hours since they jumped out of the system.”

  “Maybe he thinks we’ll kill him. Harbrake made a good attempt at it during the mutiny. Would have done it, too, if he’d been more alert. He let Ajax slip right past Vigilant and escape.”

  “I am well aware of Captain Harbrake’s limitations.” Malthorne smiled, but it was an unpleasant, toothy grin, lacking humor. “Perhaps if you had been alert yourself, you could have stopped this. Instead, you let a conspiracy pass undetected right beneath your nose.”

  “An error that I regret, my lord,” Rutherford said, forcing humility into his voice.

  “You were taken in the shower. By a woman, a commoner. Good God, man. Why didn’t you fight back?”

  Rutherford didn’t answer.

  “And before that,” Malthorne pressed. “You could have showed leadership at any point. Crushed the rebellion before this commander, this commoner, had inflamed the more excitable members of your crew.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  It wasn’t Rutherford’s crew, of course. The conspiracy must have been afoot long before he took temporary command of Ajax, only a single day before Commander Tolvern broke into his room and burst in on him while he was in the shower. She held a pistol, and gave him three choices: join the mutiny, surrender as a prisoner, or die if he resisted. Rutherford was armed with a bar of soap. What could he have done?

  Malthorne sighed and looked out the window. The planet had rotated beneath them, and they were now looking at daylight rising over the New Atlantic, the vast, island-less ocean between Albion’s eastern and western hemispheres.

  “You were not the best captain in my fleet, Rutherford.”

  “No?”

  “Only number three, you understand.”

  What kind of nonsense was that? How many dozen men had command of a ship in the Royal Navy? And he was the third best in the entire fleet? There was no shame in that.

  “But your betters, McCreery and Drake, are no more. McCreery has a proper excuse. He gave his life in service to his king and country. Drake is another matter. He made a blunder and has compounded that blunder with one treachery after another. Better he had died. That leaves you, Rutherford. You’re the best now, God help us. You’ll need to bring him in.”

  “Not Harbrake?” Rutherford said, innocently.

  “No, not Harbrake, the fool. Caught with his trousers down by Drake’s little maneuver. No, you’re the best man for the job, especially if given proper resources. The question is, are you sufficiently loyal to do what needs to be done? Or will you face your old friend in combat and let him slip away because of some misguided sense of camaraderie?”

  “My loyalty,” Rutherford said, “is to my king. No bond of friendship would break that.”

  “I would have expected the same words from Drake’s mouth. And yet, here we are. Ajax missing and Drake a traitor. He might be fifty light years away by now. Or he might be hiding on the dark side of the moon, waiting to launch a treacherous attack. How will you find him?”

  “He jumped to the Gryphon Shoals.”

  “I know that, you fool.”

  “What I mean is that he’s probably still there, because he doesn’t have a pilot. Harbrake has sent ships to search for him. He intends to bombard pirate redoubts and take prisoners, but I doubt the dreck of the system will have anything useful to say, if they’ve seen Drake in the first place.”

  “My time is too valuable to hear a regurgitation of facts already in my possession.”

  “Yes, my lord. My apologies. The system is big and scattered. Harbrake didn’t send enough forces to do the job properly. There may be other pilots. Once Drake finds one, he’s sure to jump again. I suggest you send another task force to augment Harbrake’s ships.”

  Harbrake had taken as f
lagship his own cruiser, HMS Nimitz, a sturdy, if somewhat-outdated, Aggressor-class cruiser, together with frigates, corvettes, and a destroyer.

  Malthorne finished his whiskey and waved away the staff officer when the man tried to give him another. “And if we don’t find Drake before he jumps again? What is he likely to do next? Where is he likely to go?”

  “I hope he will surrender, my lord. He didn’t want the mutiny—he told me as much when I was being shoved in the capsule with the other prisoners. Once he has regained control of his ship—”

  “His ship?”

  “Excuse me, of Ajax. Once he has regained control, he will most likely surrender, while seeking some sort of amnesty or accommodation for his crew. He won’t want to see them hanged, regardless of their crimes.”

  “And when he doesn’t surrender?”

  “If he doesn’t—” Rutherford began, then stopped to think.

  What was James Drake’s primary character trait? Loyalty, yes. To king, crown, and country. And also to his friends, to his crew. Rutherford owed his own position in part to Drake’s assistance over the years. They’d formed a friendship all the way back in the Academy, when the two middle sons of minor barons made a pact to someday rise to the heights of the Admiralty. Drake had risen first and fastest but had always reached back a helping hand. Of course, he never let on that he was the one pushing for his friend’s promotion, but Rutherford heard it from other sources. Drake had spoken highly of him to the lord admiral, or had praised his actions in some minor battle or skirmish. During the war, he’d given Rutherford plenty of chances to show his qualities.

  Rutherford had no doubt that if he were the one unjustly accused of destroying a trade galleon from the York Company, accidentally killing royal marines in the process, and then covering his mistake, Drake would have seen to it that he was exonerated. Drake claimed he was innocent, and his friends on Ajax all believed him. So Rutherford had been working to this very end when the unfortunate mutiny occurred.

  “Captain?” Malthorne said as the silence stretched beyond a few seconds.

  “What happened to Drake’s pilot?” Rutherford asked.

  The admiral blinked. “The Hroom fellow? What of him?”

  “I’d heard he was thrown in the brig for improprieties related to the naval computer network. But he never came back to the ship. When I tried to track him down—Ajax could hardly fly without her pilot—he seemed to have disappeared.”

  “Is this relevant?”

  “It may be, my lord. That depends on what has become of the Hroom.”

  “Someone gave him sugar while he was in the brig. By the time he came out, he was an eater. You know how they are. There was an incident. The end result is that the fellow is on a slave galley being shipped to Hot Barsa.”

  “I see,” Rutherford said.

  This was strange. Not so much that the pilot would find himself under sugar’s dizzying, addictive spell. The Hroom were helpless before it. When humans had met the empire two hundred years ago, it had been at the apex of a thousand-year expansion. Within a few generations, the civilization lay in shambles. Millions of Hroom were now working on the sugar worlds, bent in the very sugar cane that had sapped their race of any other desire than to get the next sweet fix.

  But how was Malthorne privy to such details about the Hroom pilot, when the interim captain of Ajax had been unable to track down the simplest details? And what Rutherford didn’t tell the admiral, but had discovered, was that Captain Drake’s entire crew, down to the company of royal marines that had been on board, had been scheduled for dispersal throughout the fleet. An entire new crew would man Ajax henceforth.

  Who had made such an order? There was no record. The order seemed pointless, so Rutherford countermanded it. His countermand was countermanded in turn. By whom? That was unknown. There were maybe a dozen men and women in the fleet who could have done it, and Rutherford had been in the process of discovering who when the mutiny struck.

  Now, he suspected he knew the answer. The lord admiral himself had given the order. He must have caught wind that there would be a mutiny. Then why hadn’t he warned Rutherford or taken any other measures to secure the ship?

  “And you think Drake will go after this Hroom?” Malthorne asked.

  “Yes. Or rather, no. I think he will surrender. But if he doesn’t, that is the logical step.”

  “A waste of time. His pilot is already an eater.”

  “Hroom can recover from that,” Rutherford said. “Drake will think so, anyway. He will feel responsible for what happened to his pilot and attempt a rescue and a detox. Ajax has no pilot—Drake needs one, and he’d just as soon use the one he knows.”

  “That will take time,” Malthorne said. “And more time still to find the galleon.”

  “When did the slaver set out?”

  “A few days ago. Her name is Henry Upton, and she’s as slow a vessel as anything in the York Company fleet.”

  “But she still has a head start,” Rutherford said. “My guess would be that Ajax and the slaver would arrive in the Barsa system at roughly the same time.”

  “And what do you propose to do?”

  “I suffer no such shortage of pilots, and I have fast warships at my command. I’ll take Vigilant and a task force of frigates and torpedo boats. The Third Fleet is in the Barsa system already. I’ll warn them that Ajax is on its way. If I set out now I can arrive before either Drake or the slave galleon, set a trap, and wait.”

  “And when you find him, what will you do, then?”

  “Whatever you wish of me, my lord.”

  “Demand Drake’s surrender. If he refuses, destroy him. We cannot risk Ajax free in the space lanes.”

  “Yes, my lord.” A leaden weight settled in Rutherford’s stomach at the thought of attacking and killing his old friend. But what choice did he have?

  “There is one thing. You will not take a task force. Only Vigilant. Do not announce your destination or your intentions. Set out via the Jericho system instead of a more direct route for Barsa. I’ll make sure the Third Fleet is out on maneuvers.”

  “My lord?”

  Malthorne rose to his feet and stepped up to the window. He gestured for Rutherford to join him, and the younger man obeyed. Dreadnought had once more circumnavigated the planet and was above Britain. Clouds had come over York Town, darkening the center of the continent.

  “There are enemies in the navy,” Malthorne said, his voice low. “Men who would take advantage of Drake’s treason. Who would send him aid, if they could find him.”

  “Who are these people?” Rutherford asked, shocked by the accusation. “What do they want?”

  “I don’t know who they are, not yet. But they want to overthrow King Bartholomew. That is their ultimate aim. For now they hope to foment civil unrest. To that end, I want this mission to be secret. When you have taken Drake, one way or another, I want you to come to me quietly and tell me what you have done. Do not broadcast your victory to the fleet.”

  “I understand, my lord.”

  “The other mutineers are to be put in the brig under strict quarantine. They are not to see anyone, nor to send or receive messages of any kind. I would prefer that none be killed in the engagement—my intent is to interrogate them at length—but my primary desire is not that they be protected. They are, after all, criminals of the most vile sort. Should some, or even all of them be killed in the engagement, it would be no great loss.”

  Again, Rutherford thought of the orders given to scatter Ajax’s crew among the fleet. The admiral must know something, or think he knows something, about the men and women under Drake’s command.

  “Yes, my lord. You can count on me.”

  Chapter Five

  Drake took Tolvern with him down to the crew mess. They were midway through a forty-two-hour slog between jump points, and the enlisted men and women were drinking, playing cards, or relaxing with vid sets. The air smelled of cigar smoke and booze.

  A man was
telling a filthy joke about Hroom mating habits when the officers entered. Someone spotted them and cleared his throat. The joke died on the man’s lips. It was the fellow with the saber scar across his cheek who’d been rescued from the pod during the mutiny. The man who’d sneered that Drake was no longer captain. He sat down in a hurry, and the room quieted.

  There were roughly a dozen people in the mess, and of them, fully half were rescued prisoners. The only one of the prisoners who wasn’t present, in fact, was the Church of Albion minister who’d been praying the Lord’s Prayer in Old Earth English.

  Tolvern nodded to the corner. Henny Capp, the royal marine who’d been serving as their pilot, sat behind a mug of grog, her arm draped possessively over the shoulder of the dark-skinned prisoner who’d threatened that Drake had better watch his back in the mines. Fraternizing was a serious offense, and the man acted like he wanted to edge away from Capp, but she made no effort to move her arm. Neither did she try to conceal the full pint of grog in front of her, what looked like a double ration.

  “Care for a drink, Cap’n?” she asked with a grin as Drake and Tolvern pulled up chairs. “Figure the likes of you got good wine and beer, not this piss-flavored water, but personal tastes and all that. Give the word, and Cook will pour you up.”

  “The computer finished running,” Tolvern said. “According to Jane, we’re not on any known charts. You’ve taken us two jump points into deep void. That’s quite a trick.”

  Capp rubbed a hand over her shaved head, as if feeling for the nav chip buried in her skull. “You gave me two weeks to get us to Barsa, and I’m getting you there in ten days. Seems I should be on the receiving end of some gratitude here. So what’s with the suspicion?”

  Drake reached across the table and rolled up the woman’s sleeve to show the golden lions rampant on Capp’s forearm. “Patriotic sort to get the Albion lions tattooed on. Old tattoos, too. But you’ve only been a marine six months. Before that you were some kind of smuggler?”

  Capp thrust out her chin. “Yeah, but I’m reformed. Ask your computer bloke. It’s all in the database, right?”