Starship Blackbeard

by Michael Wallace

  “As for the disgusting idea that someone might be giving sugar to our pilot, let me say this. First, there will be a guard posted at all times. Unauthorized contact with Nyb Pim is prohibited. If anyone is caught trying to pass sugar to Nyb Pim, that person will be summarily executed. Am I understood?”

  “Nobody asked to be on this ship,” Carvalho spoke up. “You ever think about that? I wasn’t even in the navy. I was on a trade ship and hauled in because my captain was passing contraband. I didn’t know nothing about it.”

  “You are free to leave at any time,” Drake said. “We have an away pod. I can fire you off and you can see if anyone responds to your distress call. You and any other malcontents. I’ll strap you in myself, if that’s what you want.”

  “So, death or slavery. That’s the choice you’re offering?”

  “Obey orders, and I’ll leave you at the first safe port. It’s likely to be a Ladino world. Then you can do whatever you’d like. Until then, I will have discipline on this ship.”

  Tolvern had finished dumping the sugar and now came to confront Carvalho where he stood. “Can you do that, Carvalho, or should I return you to the brig?”

  He stared at her a long moment, his expression hard. “Fine.”

  “Good,” Drake said. “You’re all dismissed. We have a lot of work to do. Corporal—I mean, Ensign—Capp, we seem to have drifted. Get us back on course.”

  “Aye, Captain,” she said, and there was real energy in her voice.

  She didn’t look at Carvalho, which was precisely Drake’s intent. He needed her until he had Nyb Pim back. He didn’t have much use for Carvalho.

  The rest of them filed out. Drake took Tolvern by the arm as she made her way to her computer. “You, Commander, are off duty.”

  “I thought I’d check the security system down by the isolation cells, make sure the cameras are active, and verify that Nyb Pim is still locked up. Then, I told Barker I’d meet with him about the engine. He has a possible fix he wants to run by me.”

  “You are off duty.”

  “But, Captain—”

  “Commander,” he said, voice firm. “I’ll see you again at 1300. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” In spite of her earlier protest, there was real relief in her voice.

  As she disappeared from the bridge, he thought about his crew. All commoners. Even the ship doctor, a profession normally derived from the better sorts of society, was not from Drake’s class. The man hadn’t grown up on Albion but one of the outer colonies.

  Never mind the prisoners—even considering what remained of Ajax’s original crew raised questions. Tolvern had sent off anyone who wouldn’t participate in the mutiny. It was no coincidence that the people who’d left were of a generally higher quality than those who had stayed. That was, if one only considered their station in life.

  The ones who stayed are the loyal ones.

  Drake pushed this thought out of his head and made his way to his captain’s chair. He waited until Capp glanced in his direction.

  “Did you say you know a closer jump point than the one that will take us back toward the Shoals?”

  “Aye, Cap’n. Fourteen hours closer.”

  “Roughly a day’s journey?”

  “Twenty-three hours, yeah.” She looked a little nervous. “Can’t say as I’d recommend it.”

  “There’s a star, is that right?”

  “Aye. You’re in the grav well of a star. You gotta pivot, accelerate, and execute another jump in less than two hours. Tough to do when you’re fighting the trips.”

  “I think I’ve done this jump. A red dwarf, isn’t it? It’s murder going through two jumps back to back like that, but the jump itself didn’t seem too technically difficult.”

  “Thing is,” she said, swallowing hard, her typical bravado missing, “I only seen it done once, and I wasn’t the pilot.”

  “I only saw it done once, too,” he said. “We were jumping to San Pablo. You know the world? Hroom on one continent, humans on the other. Mostly Ladino and Dutch.”

  “Yeah, I spent a week in the port. Rough place.”

  “Good spaceyards though. And it’s on the frontier, which means the Albion fleet can’t enter, according to the treaty. Can you make the jump?”

  “I-I don’t know the angle. And that close to the star, there’s some funny gravity effects. The jump point wobbles. If we mess up, if I come out of the first jump in a bad way . . . ”

  “I have faith in you, Pilot.”

  “Thing is, I’m not really a pilot. You said I could train.”

  “Yes, and you will. In fact, I don’t intend for you to execute this jump alone. I’ve got a full day—”

  “Technically, twenty-three hours.”

  “Plus a couple of hours from the first jump to the second. More than a day, in fact. Nyb Pim hasn’t been an eater for long, so if we can keep him from the sugar . . . What do you know about that? Anyone feeding him?”

  “Don’t know what you mean. I didn’t have nothing to do with that.” She seemed to catch herself, and added, belatedly, “I mean, sir.”

  “But you might know someone who did. Someone feeding him sugar. Someone who might still do it. Maybe you could put out the word. We’re going to do a jump that might tear us into individual atoms if we don’t get it right. It would be helpful to have our pilot off the sugar by then.”

  Barring that, he wondered if he should have kept back a bit of sugar, just in case. The only thing worse than an eater piloting your ship was an eater on withdrawal doing it. Give the Hroom some sugar, wait for the swoon to pass, then sit him in the chair and hope he had enough functioning brain cells to do the job.

  No choice now; Drake had made the decision. There might not be another grain left on board. If there were, he hoped it was getting dumped quietly down the incinerator at this very moment.

  “I don’t know nobody who gave him sugar,” Capp said. “But just in case, I’ll put out the word. Never hurts for people to know what’s serious, if you know what I mean.”

  He’d already declared that anyone passing sugar to Nyb Pim would be summarily executed. Would it really take word from Capp before anyone took that seriously? If so, who was really in charge of this ship?

  Chapter Eleven

  Ten hours after Drake sent her from the bridge, Tolvern felt almost human again as she joined her captain at the front of the isolation block. The guard shifted his shotgun to one shoulder and saluted with his free hand.

  “Any trouble?” Tolvern asked.

  “No, ma’am. He was raving pretty good last night, but a few hours ago, we passed in food, and he ate it. Even pushed the bowl and plate back through the chute.”

  “That’s good news,” she said. “What did he have?”

  “Hot oatmeal, two raw eggs—usual Hroom breakfast.”

  “And he ate it all?” she asked, surprised.

  “Every last bit. Even asked for more, but Doc said he shouldn’t overdo it since he hasn’t been eating for so long.”

  “What do you think about that?” Tolvern said to Drake as the two of them walked to the cell with the green light over the door. “That’s a good sign, right, Captain? I think he’s going to pull out of it.”

  “You’re chipper this morning,” he said.

  “Feeling great. Nobody is trying to kill me, for one.”

  “You just got on shift. Give it a few minutes.”

  “Ha!”

  It wasn’t the relative safety of their current position that had improved her mood so much as the nine glorious hours of sleep. She’d followed them with a scalding shower and a full breakfast of scrambled eggs, buttered toast, sausage, and fried tomatoes, washed down with an entire pot of tea. Over the past few days she’d been feeling more and more glum, worried that she’d made a terrible, life-ending mistake in seizing Ajax from Rutherford to free her captain. But this morning, she was more convinced than ever that Drake had been innocent all along, that he had enemies who had fram
ed him. He would be exonerated soon enough.

  Drake cupped his hands at the window then stepped aside to let her have a look. She peered into the cell.

  Nyb Pim sat on the floor facing the corner opposite his cot, his knees tucked to his chest. He’d finally stripped out of the rags they’d found him in on the slave ship and put on the pair of trousers. There was a shirt, too, but it sat on the floor, and the Hroom was bare from the waist up, his back to them.

  He didn’t have the faded pink color of a eater, nor that starved, rib-showing look like the Hroom she’d seen on the bridge of Henry Upton. But there was something disturbing about the way he sat there, motionless. While she watched, a shiver worked itself down his spine, and turned into a shudder as it hit his limbs.

  She stepped away from the window and reached out to open the door. “Better stand back, sir. Just in case.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. My head is still aching from last time.”

  The captain had come armed not with his standard side arm, but with a stun gun at his hip. He now unlatched the holster and flicked on the gun. It whirred to life.

  Tolvern put her hand on the pad, and the door slid open. Nyb Pim didn’t turn.

  “Pilot,” Drake said. He took the first step into the room, and Tolvern had a hard time not grabbing his shoulder to pull him back to safety. “Lieutenant Nyb Pim, it’s me, your captain.”

  The Hroom’s high, melodic voice had a hollow sound to it. “Did you bring sugar?”

  “There will be no more sugar, Pilot. We dumped it down the incinerator. There isn’t a grain left on the ship.”

  A hoot, which passed for a laugh, came from the Hroom. “Or so you think.”

  Tolvern now came in. She’d undone the strap on her own weapon. This one was loaded with bullets, and she was prepared to shoot if necessary.

  “We know about Carvalho and Lutz,” she said. “Captain said anyone caught passing you sugar would be killed. Guess that did it for them. Lutz handed over two pounds of the stuff.”

  “Two pounds.” There was something sinister in the Hroom’s tone, and his body tensed.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she warned. “That crap went down the incinerator with the rest of it. This ship is clean.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Nevertheless, Nyb Pim’s body relaxed. He still had his long legs drawn to his chest, his back turned.

  “How are you feeling?” Drake asked. “Can we trust you?”

  Another hooting laugh. It shortly died. Nobody spoke for a long moment. Tolvern was beginning to think they should give it another day or so, except Drake had already changed course, and they were going toward the jump point that would bring them out within the gravity well of a red dwarf. They didn’t have time to straighten this out, they needed the pilot to snap out of it in a hurry.

  “They always tell you,” Nyb Pim said after a moment, “one taste on the tongue, that’s all it takes. You hear it, you see the fools who’ve sold their souls into slavery, who have degraded our ancient and glorious civilization and everything it stood for. But you tell yourself that this may be true for the weak willed, not for you.”

  “So that’s why you did it?” Tolvern asked. How could he have done something so stupid? He’d always been the most sensible person on the ship save the captain. “To prove you were different?”

  “I wasn’t so deluded as that. My brother became an eater, together with most of my village. My parents, too. I saw what it could do when I was still a Hroomling. Once my family was destroyed, they shipped me off with human missionaries who never let me near the stuff.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” Drake said, sounding relieved. “I knew you must have been tricked somehow.”

  For her part, Tolvern was more confused than ever. “But how is it that you didn’t recognize what was happening? It’s only pure white sugar that does it. Mix it with something, even dissolve it in water, and sucrose is no more dangerous than any other sweet substance. It’s only the pure stuff that sets you off, so how did you possibly put some in your mouth without knowing?”

  “And when you did,” Drake added, “why didn’t you go straight to the sick bay for treatment? You must have recognized what was happening the instant it hit your tongue. You must have known you’d been poisoned.”

  “I wasn’t poisoned.”

  “You know what he means,” Tolvern said. “Same thing, isn’t it? You were a pilot of a Royal Navy cruiser before you tasted it. A few days later, you were a slave.”

  “I wasn’t poisoned,” Nyb Pim insisted, “because I ate the sugar of my own free volition.”

  “What?” The word exploded from her mouth. “King’s balls, why would you do such a thing?”

  “And I did so knowing slavery would be the result. Indeed, that was my intent all along.”

  The captain looked stunned.

  “Are you mad?” Tolvern said.

  “It’s a curious thing,” Nyb Pim said. “They have slaves to work the sugar worlds. Millions of them, and millions more needed. A place like Hot Barsa is too steamy, too tropical. Riddled with disease. Humans die. Hroom die, too, but we’re expendable. They can always ship in more. They need so many of us because the demand for sugar is endless. The more sugar they ship, the more slaves they need. The more Hroom that become enslaved, the more sugar they need. An endless circle, like a snake biting its own tail.”

  “Why did you do this to yourself?” the captain asked.

  “I didn’t set out to. I set out to prove you innocent. I got into the computer, sure that whoever destroyed that York Company clipper was the culprit, that you had been framed.”

  “Yeah, we all figured that,” Tolvern said.

  Nyb Pim unfolded himself from the floor. She braced herself for another charge like the one yesterday, but this time he moved shakily to the cot. His limbs were trembling, and he closed his big, liquid eyes for a long moment as if fighting a bout of vertigo. He opened his eyes again.

  “But we all assumed it had been an accident,” Nyb Pim continued. “That some other captain had mistakenly destroyed the company ship and cast about for someone to blame. I found archival footage of the battle, before it was doctored to show Ajax doing the attack. It was clear that the attack was intentional. The clipper tried to surrender.”

  “Who did it?” Drake asked.

  “A small, unmarked pirate ship carrying Royal Navy ordnance.”

  Tolvern was growing excited at this. Something was rotten in the navy. They weren’t in mutiny so much as trying to track down illegal behavior within the fleet. As soon as Malthorne knew the truth, they would be vindicated. If the lord admiral wouldn’t act, Drake could take matters straight to the king.

  “The pirate ship sent a boarding party,” the pilot continued. “They removed something from the merchant ship. Upon their return, they ordered the clipper to stand by with shields down, and then they fired a full broadside. There were no survivors.”

  Drake cocked his head in that distinctive way that said he was getting something through the com link tucked into his ear. After a moment, he turned to Tolvern. “We’re needed on the bridge. There’s another ship.”

  Her pulse quickened at this. She glanced at Nyb Pim then back to the captain. “What about him?”

  “We’re approaching a jump point,” Drake said to the Hroom. “Things get tricky after the jump. I could sure use you on the bridge.”

  Nyb Pim was still sitting on the edge of the cot, and now grabbed for his shirt. He looked toward the still-open door that led to the corridor as he unfolded the shirt. But then he stopped and set the shirt back down.

  “It’s not safe, Captain.”

  “Are you a threat?” Drake asked, his tone measured.

  “I thought about getting back to the chair, and then I thought about certain crew members who’d slipped me sugar earlier. And I started thinking about how I’d get to them.”

  “I knew it,” Tolvern said, face flushing. “What did I tell you, Ca
ptain? Was it Carvalho and Lutz?” she asked the Hroom.

  “Time enough for that later,” Drake said. “Stay here for now,” he told Nyb Pim. “But we’re coming up on the jump point. Meditate, pray to your gods—whatever it takes. I need you with me, and I need you clean and sober.”

  He grabbed Tolvern, and the two of them backed into the corridor and closed the door to the cell. She followed the captain past the guard, reluctant to leave, even under imminent threat. More questions now than ever.

  What the devil had been on that merchant clipper? It had been flying under the Albion lions; it was a high crime to disturb her passage, let alone destroy her with all hands lost. Then, to pin her destruction on Captain Drake? And whatever Nyb Pim had learned made him become an eater of his own free will? That made no sense.

  They had more immediate concerns as they reached the bridge. Smythe sat at his computer, hands flying over the controls and occasionally tapping the screen as he brought up various images. Capp paced back and forth in front of the pilot’s chair, rubbing her hands together.

  “You see!” Capp cried when she spotted them. She pointed at the viewscreen.

  A dark, shadowy form slid across the screen, its outline blurred and shifting, as the long-range sensors attempted to pull it into focus. It was still a million miles away, but it had the profile of a warship.

  “Calm down,” Drake told the young woman as he took his place in the captain’s chair. “It’s flying away from us at the moment, not engaging. No doubt it’s on its way to the same jump point as we are.”

  “Jane,” Tolvern said, taking her own seat next to him. “Give us the specs.”

  Jane’s cool, clear voice came through. “Ship identification unknown. Unregistered. Hull is a heavy frigate, provenance New Dutch, Van Dyke class with deck and hull modifications. Engine signature Ladino. Weapons detected: six torpedo tubes in Mark IV array, three kinetic cannons, these being roughly—”

  “Enough,” Drake interrupted. “We get the gist.”

  Indeed. New Dutch hull with Ladino engines. Torpedo tubes in a Royal Navy configuration, but a nonstandard number of cannon. And it was hauling toward the same, chancy jump point out of the system. Nothing legit, but this was no small-scale smuggler, either. This was a pirate frigate.