Starship Blackbeard

by Michael Wallace

  Tolvern pointed her pistol at the pirate. Drake shouted at her to go after the men with the hand cannons instead. Neither shot was easy, but Vargus had to be two hundred yards away and partially shielded by his men. She didn’t obey. Instead, she squeezed off a shot at Vargus, which drew the pirate captain’s attention and fresh gunfire from him and his men. Bullets pinged off the catwalk, the walls behind, and the ship. Capp cried out and clutched her leg. Only grazed, she was shooting again seconds later.

  Now they were beset from three directions: from across the catwalk, from Vargus and his men, and from the two with the hand cannons below who had enough covering fire to emerge from behind the debris where they’d ducked moments earlier. Drake, Rodriguez, Tolvern, Capp, and the remaining guard fought back, but they no longer had the concentrated firepower to force any of their enemies to take cover.

  Just when it seemed things couldn’t get worse, some eighteen or twenty newcomers came running in through the open hangar doors, brandishing weapons. At first Drake’s heart leaped, thinking that the fresh forces could only be reinforcements for the beleaguered defenders. Maybe they were Rodriguez’s men from elsewhere in the yard, or maybe word had reached Ajax, and Barker had sent out all available forces, though it didn’t seem as though enough time had passed.

  Then he caught a better look. They weren’t guards or other regular forces, but another mismatched, hodge-podge collection of men and women—even a few Hroom—armed with all manner of pistols, assault rifles, grenades, and other nonstandard weapons. They wore everything from jumpsuits to the leather vests favored by smugglers and pirates. It would appear that the only reinforcements would be Captain Vargus’s.

  Ronaldo Carvalho swaggered in at their head. He brandished a heavy assault rifle and wore holsters with pistols and hand cannons, a belt of grenades going over one shoulder. The fool was overweighed with weapons and ammo, but then again, the battle was already as good as won.

  “Now you’ll get it, you bastards,” Capp said. A grin spread across her face.

  Tolvern turned on her, sputtering, face red with rage. “Why, you treacherous—” She lifted her gun.

  Drake shot out a hand and grabbed her wrist. Capp was looking down at Vargus and his men. Her taunt hadn’t been meant for them; it was directed toward the pirates.

  At that moment, Carvalho opened up with his assault rifle. It sprayed gunfire toward Vargus’s men, who threw themselves down. In an instant, the battle had flared up with renewed intensity. Vargus directed all his fire against Carvalho and his men.

  This gave Drake and the others the opportunity to focus on the enemies on the opposite side of the catwalk. They brought down two of them and forced a larger retreat. His flank secured, Drake ordered them to shoot down at the hangar floor, bringing in gunfire behind. The distance was still too great to be effective, but it kept the pirates from taking cover as the newcomers pressed forward. Carvalho himself stood in the middle of it all, shooting relentlessly with no concern for his own well-being.

  “Get down, you fool,” Capp said. Worry pinched her voice.

  Drake was shortly disabused of hopes for a quick victory as Vargus reorganized against the new threat. Already three of Carvalho’s men had fallen, against maybe twice that many pirates. There were still plenty of combatants on both sides, and bullets and grenades were flying everywhere.

  Vargus and a small knot broke free and sprinted across the floor. They were headed toward the hole in the wall where they’d blasted their way in. There must be a vehicle of some kind to carry them away. As they ran, they hurled grenades behind them, which exploded into a screen of smoke and fire. They were joined by the survivors from the group that had fled the catwalk above. Other pirates were still caught in the firefight.

  Drake and his band had a better view of the escaping pirates. They rose, no longer concerned about return fire, and blasted down at the men and women running. Two of the fleeing attackers fell. Several others streamed out the hole in the wall and escaped. Vargus was next, too far, and at a bad angle to shoot. He was at the hole; he’d get away.

  Tolvern steadied her pistol arm with her left hand on her right wrist. She squeezed off one final shot as Vargus reached the hole. The pirate captain fell.

  “I got him!” Tolvern’s voice was high and quivering with excitement. “I really got him!”

  Capp whooped and clapped her on the shoulder, shouting across the wide expanse of the hangar. “Vargus is dead! We got him!”

  Drake laughed as he studied Tolvern still standing there with a goofy grin on her face, her eyes wide.

  “I could have taken that shot fifty times and missed!” she said. “All sorts of stuff in the way. He was moving. Can you believe it? What a shot!”

  She was gesturing with the gun, and he pushed it to one side. “Kindly try to not blow my head off.”

  Tolvern returned a sheepish look, and they looked back over the hangar floor. With the death of their captain, and the escape of many others, the remaining pirates were throwing down weapons and surrendering.

  Capp poked at her leg where the bullet had cut through her trousers and grazed her thigh, then looked up with evident satisfaction of her own.

  “How about now?” she said. “You two gonna trust me, or what?”

  #

  It was Rodriguez’s operation, and he took charge as they rounded up the prisoners and forced them to kneel on the cement floor. Rodriguez’s men dragged Vargus’s corpse in to stack with the other bodies. The sight of their dead captain brought no visible response from the prisoners. Drake looked over the captives. There was no sign of Vargus’s daughter or of the man with a Gatling gun for a forearm. They must have escaped.

  When questioned, Carvalho said that he’d been in the city scrounging up potential crew for the ship when someone let slip that Vargus had also been hiring men. It soon came out that the pirate captain meant to attack the spaceyard that very day. Kill or capture Drake and his crew, then hoof it offworld with Ajax. A plot born of a volatile mix of desperation and desire for revenge.

  Carvalho had tried to hail the ship, but it was already coming down through the atmosphere and not picking up transmissions, so he’d rounded up as many of his potential recruits as he could get and promised them a position on Ajax if they’d join in its defense. Now he was asking Drake to honor that commitment. The captain looked over Carvalho’s recruits with a skeptical eye.

  They were a scroungy, disreputable sort. Tattoos and missing fingers. Gold hoops in their ears and noses. Dyed hair and braided beards. One woman had lost an ear, and an older man wore an eye patch. Give them a few bandanas and pantaloons, maybe a hook for a hand or a pegleg, and they wouldn’t have looked out of place on an old wooden pirate ship. Tolvern caught his eye and gave a worried shake of the head.

  He sighed. What choice did he have?

  “We’ll take an oath,” Drake said. “Every man, woman, and Hroom will swear it.”

  “What kinda oath?” someone asked.

  “Obedience to me and my rules. We keep military discipline on my ship. If you can handle that, if you want to stay alive once we’re in space, that is, then you’re welcome to join.”

  There were nods and “ayes” of assent. He supposed, or hoped, rather, that his own reputation, and that of Ajax itself, had culled the malcontents and the most bloodthirsty types, but he had no illusions that life aboard the ship going forward would be tranquil and without incident. Not with these sorts making up more than half of his crew.

  “There’s one other regulation you all should know,” he said, eying one of the three Hroom, her skin faded into a pale pinkish shade. “I’ll have no sugar on board. No sugar for any purpose whatsoever. If anyone needs a detox, that’s fine with me. Doc will do his best. Otherwise, you’ll find Ajax a cold, unfriendly place for someone looking to dip his snout in the white stuff.”

  The eater began to edge away. Soon, she was standing back with the spaceyard workers. In contrast, the other two Hroom took a st
ep forward, their mouths drawn into tight lines. The threat of no sugar seemed to be a feature for them, not a hardship to be endured. Any free Hroom must be living in fear of the crippling addiction that had wrecked their entire civilization.

  Rodriguez waved Drake over to where the prisoners knelt. “You want to handle it yourself, or do you want me to do it?”

  “Do what?” Tolvern asked, coming over with the captain. “I don’t understand.”

  “No?” Rodriguez said. “Your captain does, I’ll bet.”

  Drake looked over the prisoners, a cold feeling settling in his bowels like a shard of ice. There were eight of them in all—six men and two women. Gone was their swagger, the sneers they’d worn when taken prisoner. Kneeling on the hard floor, hands behind their backs, sweating while others determined their fate; they must know this was no game.

  “We’re going to execute them?” Tolvern asked.

  One of the prisoners started to his feet at this, but two of Rodriguez’s men bashed him in the back with the butts of their shotguns, and the man fell with a cry. The men kicked him in the ribs until the spaceyard owner told them to stop.

  “But why?” she asked. “Once we’re off this rock . . . ”

  “Tell her,” Rodriguez said.

  “Rodriguez can’t let them go because he cannot have people thinking they can attack his yards and get away with it. Cannot have people thinking he’s a soft target. You could say the same thing for us. We let these people go once. They swore an oath before we did so. Are we going to trust them now?”

  “But I shot Vargus! He’s dead.”

  “You didn’t shoot his daughter,” Drake said. “And others from the crew escaped. Do you want to take a chance that these villains will rejoin them?”

  The prisoners had heard all of this and now began protesting in loud voices that they’d do nothing of the sort. But Drake noted that many of them were the same ones who had sworn to abandon their ship and any thoughts of revenge. Yet here it was a few days later, and they’d tried to murder him on neutral territory. Not one of these pirates had a scrap of honor, or they wouldn’t be here.

  Rodriguez seemed alarmed as the shouting and protests continued. A woman struggled to her feet. Rodriguez drew his side arm and shot her in the head. Another got up and lowered his head to charge. One of the guards blasted him with the shotgun. He fell back. Others cried for mercy, even as they looked like they’d try to get up to fight or run.

  “Enough!” Drake said.

  Rodriguez ordered his men to stand down. The remaining six pirates stopped struggling and shouting and looked at Drake with hope in their eyes. That hope faded when he drew his side arm.

  “Commander,” he told Tolvern. “Let’s do what must be done.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Tolvern struggled to sleep for several days after the fight at the spaceport hangar. It wasn’t the battle itself that made her toss on her bunk at night—she’d been through all manner of terrible struggles. At the battle of Ypis III, she’d been on the bridge when the captain ordered them to land on the planet in support of the marines. They’d flown back and forth over the surface, launching a barrage of tactical nuclear weapons over empire forces.

  At the Battle of Kif Lagoon, they’d torn apart several Hroom sloops of war. Ajax had flown through the debris side by side with Vigilant as the two cruisers pursued the retreating enemy. Dead Hroom littered the battlefield by the thousands, floating in a macabre tableau.

  Tolvern had seen plenty of dead. She’d caused plenty of the dying herself. But no battle had ever ended like this. At night, when she closed her eyes, she saw the terror on her captive’s face as she pressed her pistol to his temple. She felt the weight of the trigger beneath her finger.

  Drake had only made her kill one man. He’d taken care of the rest. But that one dead man didn’t feel like an opponent killed fairly in battle.

  It reminded her of when her father, Lord Drake’s steward, would bring in the pigs for slaughter. Pigs were not chickens; they knew they were about to be killed, could hear the screams of the other pigs and sense their terror. She’d seen the same look in the pigs’ eyes that she saw in the prisoners. Only this time, it felt like murder.

  Tolvern woke on the morning of the fourth day to the sound of pounding on the other side of her stateroom wall. Sounded like a jackhammer. May as well have been knocking against her skull for all the hope she had of going back to sleep. She pulled on her jumpsuit and boots and strapped on her side arm as she left the ship.

  Captain Drake stood by himself outside, staring up at his ship. Men and equipment swarmed over Ajax and across the hangar floor. Drake never moved; they all flowed around him.

  The doors to the hangar lay open, and a lorry hauling a massive piece of paneling came backing in. Men with shotguns checked his credentials before letting him pass, while other armed guards—these ones from Ajax’s own crew—inspected the vehicle itself.

  Drake glanced at Tolvern as she approached. “You look tired.”

  “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “I think I know why.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “Waking to jackhammers outside my room doesn’t help.”

  “Where is your room?” he asked. “Up on the bow? Or aft of the mess?”

  “You’ve been there, remember? Twelfth Night?”

  “Ah, yes. I’d forgotten. The bow.”

  She looked at him. How could he not know where she slept? She’d been in that room for three years now.

  Drake nodded up toward the ship. “That’s what woke you up.”

  A crane was lifting a piece of deck plating to fasten down above the bridge viewscreen. It was the big plate with the skull over crossed sabers. The Jolly Roger.

  She snorted. “Ha. You decided to use it after all.”

  “Normally, I am not a gambling man, but this decision seems like a roll of the dice.”

  Tolvern studied him and was struck again by his aristocratic bearing. It was in the line of his jaw, his nose, his confident gaze, even the way he carried himself. She could imagine him taking over his father’s barony in ten or twenty years. His hair would be gray at the temples, there would be lines about his eyes.

  He would have a wife, children. Almost, she could imagine herself in that role. His companion, standing at his side as an equal. But, no. That was a delusion beyond fantasy. The woman he married would come from a high family, she would have a regal bearing to match Drake’s. No man of his station would marry a commoner.

  “What do you mean by gambling?” she asked, cautiously.

  “We’re both at a crossroads, Commander. Don’t you see it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “My alternative is to contact Rutherford, meet him for a parley. Share my suspicions about the lord admiral. See if he’ll join me in a rebellion against the Admiralty. If enough join us, the king might throw his weight on our side. An antagonist in a civil war has hopes of regaining his former station in life. A traitor, not so much.”

  She frowned. “I find myself doubting that Rutherford or any of the rest of them would join a rebellion whose goal is to free the Hroom from sugar addiction.”

  “No, they would not.”

  Tolvern glanced up at the plating with the skull and crossed sabers. “So we go all in?”

  “So I go all in. That’s my crossroads. We are no longer a Punisher-class cruiser, we are something else. A hybrid. And I am no longer a captain in the Royal Navy. I have fought against king and country, I have done battle with pirates in order to steal their treasure. What does that make me?”

  “A pirate, I suppose,” she said.

  He smiled. “Hence, the Jolly Roger. Captain Drake of the Starship Blackbeard. Has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?”

  “I’ve seen this coming. I think we all have. But how is this a crossroads for me?”

  “I have made my choice, but you don’t need to follow me.”

  “I see. But you alwa
ys taught me loyalty, sir.”

  “Loyalty to Albion. This is asking you to be loyal to me. That’s why I ordered you to kill that pirate, so you would understand.”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I was absolutely right that it needed to be done. Show a man mercy once, yes, but when he betrays your trust a second time, there is only one thing you can do. But as to why I told you to kill him instead of doing it myself, you needed to see. This is the consequence of our path. Bloodshed, violence. Sooner or later, we may be the ones kneeling with hard barrels pressed to our skulls. Do you understand?”

  “I think I do now, yes. You’re giving me a choice. I can leave now. You’ll replace me with Capp or Carvalho. Is that what you want me to do? Walk away?”

  “I don’t need to answer that question, Tolvern.”

  “Yes,” she insisted. “You do. Tell me what you think I should do.”

  “What do I think you should do?” Drake paused and looked up at the ship. He stared at it with a glazed expression, as if not really seeing it. “I think you should walk away. No, run as fast as you can. Change your name, take a job captaining some small, anonymous tramp frigate for a few years. Make a life for yourself in the Ladino worlds. Better yet, among the New Dutch—they’re farther from Albion. In a few years, the political situation might be different. The crown might declare an amnesty.”

  “I see.” Tolvern was disappointed in a way that was hard to define. She had certainly never imagined herself as a pirate. And yet.

  “That’s what I think you should do. What I want you to do is something else entirely.”

  “Please tell me.”

  He turned with a warm expression and put a hand on her shoulder. Her heart thudded and it felt like her tongue had turned to cotton. She remembered what Capp had said at the bar.

  You’re hot for the captain.

  There was a reason Capp’s words had irritated her, and it wasn’t because the accusation was pure invention.