Tolvern saw the light at the last moment, a glowing blue spot that rose up from the water and jabbed her ankle. A painful jolt touched every nerve in her body. Her muscles seized and wouldn’t move or respond. She’d been leaning over after her two companions, and now slid off and fell. She hit the warm water with a splash.
Tolvern couldn’t feel her limbs, but there was a sensation of sinking. She must be under water. Were her lungs opening involuntarily as she sucked in water and drowned?
Then strong, bony hands grabbed her ankles and yanked her back. She started to feel her body again as they threw her down in the reeds on the edge of the lake.
Tolvern spit out mud and water. “My friends. You have to—”
A hand struck her across the face, and her head rocked back. Strong hands pinned her arms, and someone else tied her ankles together. She was terrified for Carvalho and Nyb Pim, imagining them drowning in the lake, but then she heard the former groaning and the latter said something in Hroom. A blow, a grunt from Nyb Pim as they silenced him again.
Wait, what about Brockett?
Keep quiet, you fool. Don’t let them know you’re there.
But only moments later, she heard Brockett’s shouts. “Let go of me! I’m not your enemy. We’re here to help you.”
“Don’t fight them!” she cried. “Don’t resist.”
That was the wrong thing to say, and it was misunderstood. The glowing blue tip came toward her again. She saw it this time and squirmed to get away. It touched her back and held there. Pain burned along her skin and through her body until it felt like electricity was shooting out her fingertips.
Vaguely, she heard Nyb Pim crying out in his language. She couldn’t open her mouth to scream, and blacked out.
#
Tolvern came to with a groan. Her hands and wrists were bound, and she was slung over someone’s shoulder. The one carrying her was tall and strong, and for a moment, she thought that Drake had come for her and was hauling her to safety.
She soon recognized the truth when her side rubbed painfully against a bony shoulder. It was a Hroom who had her. There were more Hroom in front and behind. Something crackled and sizzled in the darkness, and the smell of burning vegetation filled the air.
She groaned in despair as she realized the depth of her predicament. The Hroom ignored her, but a human voice chuckled from the darkness in front of her.
“Have a good nap?” Carvalho.
“What’s going on?”
“Let me see. While you were sleeping like a babe, the Hroom gave Nyb Pim a working over. Brockett made a run for it. He was caught, of course. This time they were more careful tying him up.”
Brockett spoke up behind them. “That’s an understatement. These blasted cords—I can’t feel my hands and feet.”
“How did you get away in the first place?” Tolvern asked. “Maybe if we all tried it at once.”
Their captors seemed to pay no mind to their conversation. That could be a very bad sign—maybe they meant to kill the prisoners—but in the meantime, she would collect as much information as possible.
“Forget it,” Brockett said. “I still had Carvalho’s knife. Nobody had checked me. I had to try. If only—” he grunted, “—they weren’t so blasted tight.”
“Nyb Pim?” she said. “Are you out there? Are you okay?”
“He is gagged and cannot answer,” Carvalho said. “Possibly unconscious. They were not gentle.”
This was worrying on several levels. “Any idea where we are?” she asked. “Or where they are taking us?”
“Shall I ask them for you?” Carvalho said. “Let me see, how do you say ‘geographical coordinates’ in Hroom?”
“Oh, shut up.”
“I admit my error,” he said. “Offering to surrender did not, in fact, help our situation. And I believe I will owe Capp twenty pounds, as well. Not that it is a debt she will be able to collect, unless she wants to rob a dead man’s possessions.”
“Why the devil are you so cheerful?”
“I am not, I am terrified. But, what can you do?” She could almost hear his shrug.
Tolvern slumped in frustrated exhaustion. The party of Hroom—there seemed to be about a dozen—burned their way through the jungle with some sort of energy tool, possibly the same devices that had rendered her party helpless. The weapon that had touched her body was definitely a Hroom shock spear, but these other ones seemed to have undergone some sort of alteration.
The Hroom stopped twice to rest, and Tolvern got a glimpse of the one who’d been carrying her. Like roughly half the group, she was a female, with a smaller frame and more delicate facial features than the males. Even so, she was more than a foot taller than Tolvern, and strong enough to carry the human woman through the jungle for two hours. All of these Hroom were lean, but very strong.
As for Nyb Pim, she heard him groaning enough to know that he was at least semi-conscious. Why they’d beaten him and not the humans, she couldn’t say. From what Carvalho told her, he hadn’t been resisting, had kept trying to negotiate to the end. Either he’d said something horribly rude in the Hroom language, or they’d singled him out for abuse as a traitor to his race. Neither possibility spoke to negotiating a release.
A different Hroom picked her up when they set out again. He was rougher, continually shifting her from shoulder to shoulder. Once, he tossed her painfully to the ground while the Hroom cut fronds to form a makeshift bridge and get across a shallow, muddy ravine. The water gurgled sluggishly below and didn’t seem like it would be hard to ford by foot. But the Hroom wouldn’t enter water that was more than ankle deep.
Morning came. As the gray turned to burnt orange, the nighttime creatures stopped their racket and were replaced by cawing, cackling birds and buzzing winged insects. The bugs attacked Hroom and human alike, but seemed to prefer human flesh. Tolvern’s captor chased away the sparrow-size mosquitoes, but didn’t bother with the tiny stinging gnats or the little blighters that settled insolently on her earlobes and nibbled away. They were no bigger than house flies, but the inability to brush them off drove her crazy.
The sun rose higher and hit them like a hammer whenever the jungle thinned. Tolvern’s tongue turned to leather. She needed water. Once, they brushed against a fern laden with rainwater, and it showered down on her face, but she could only lap up a few drops.
Finally, they came into a small, semi-dry clearing. Tolvern’s captor swung her around and dropped her to the ground. She landed with a grunt and levered herself to a sitting position. The other three were dumped unceremoniously next to her.
They’d reached a small village hidden in the jungle. It was a collection of fifteen or twenty shacks on raised stilts no more than a hundred yards from one side to the other. Red fern branches draped from the eaves, making the buildings look like part of the landscape. A disguise for prying eyes in the sky, she supposed. Hroom milled about, carrying shock sticks and human assault rifles. There were no other humans and no Hroomlings about.
Tolvern didn’t have all of the answers, but she could make a few guesses. These weren’t sugar slaves, and they weren’t simply feral Hroom, or they wouldn’t be armed like this. They’d have spears and the like, as they’d have been hiding from humans for generations. These must be armed insurgents.
Nyb Pim was awake and blinking his large eyes. A crust of blood stuck to his temple where they’d hit him, but he didn’t seem badly injured, only knocked around. It had been hours since talking brought the wrath of their captors, and Tolvern was debating if the same would hold true now, when something caught her eye. She drew her breath.
All the houses in the village faced a large, raised platform in a small clearing in the center. A short staircase led up to the platform. At the bottom of the staircase sat a wooden post about ten feet tall, carved with contorted, hideous faces, human and Hroom skulls, and figures writhing in pain. But this wasn’t what had frightened her. It was what she spotted on the platform itself.
; Dead, mutilated humans covered the platform.
Chapter Thirteen
After securing Fort Gamma, Drake and Rutherford met with Commander Gibbs in her war room. Drake had spent so long in the tight confines of a warship that the space Gibbs enjoyed felt almost cavernous. The room had twelve-foot ceilings and a massive table that could have seated twenty. If you moved it to the side, you could easily fit another table of equal size in the room.
Gibbs retracted the blast shield, and a twenty-foot port window revealed a view of Hot Barsa. The red mountains and jungles of the northern continent rolled slowly beneath them. The coast approached, with a wide blue ocean. Islands stretched like glittering rubies on a long chain that thrust up and over the north pole.
A Punisher-class warship like Vigilant or Blackbeard was an enormous piece of machinery, but it was built for speed and power, not comfort. The living quarters were squeezed around the massive engines, the guns and other armaments, and the engineering bay. Enlisted men were forced to hot bunk, which meant that few beds were ever unoccupied for long. Officers like Capp enjoyed private quarters, but they were little more than large closets. Only the captain had any space, with a tiny kitchen, a small nook for reading and study, and a separate sleeping area. Drake’s entire quarters could have been tucked into one corner of this room.
Drake and Rutherford stared out at Hot Barsa for a long moment while Gibbs stood with her hands on her hips, watching them with a knowing look. She was about fifteen years older than the young captains, and was a handsome, almost aristocratic woman who would not have looked out of place in Albion high society.
Drake turned away from the window. “It is an impressive view, but I find myself wondering something. How does it feel to fly over Malthorne’s plantations, thinking about all of the slaves and sugar you’re protecting?”
“There are twenty-seven different landowners on Hot Barsa,” she said. “All powerful lords and ladies.”
“Oh, yes,” Rutherford said loftily. “That makes it all legitimate.”
“Indeed,” she said. “These sugar worlds are the source of Albion’s wealth.”
“And the source of her corruption,” Drake said. “The cause of our wars with the empire. The endless cycles of treaty violations and the need for more slaves. Always more, more, more.”
She scowled. “Where are your loyalties, men? Albion? Or these aliens?”
Rutherford sputtered, but Drake held up a hand to stop him. Let Gibbs work it out of her system. She had just surrendered her fort. That must be a blow to her ego.
“Let me tell you something else.” Gibbs pointed out the window. “That blast shield is thirty feet thick. There’s a six-inch layer of tyrillium beneath that. I’d have survived your bombardment. So a little more deference from you, if you please.”
“If that’s so, why did you surrender?” Drake asked.
“Malthorne is a bastard. He bent the Admiralty to his will and filled the fleet with sycophants and boot lickers. A few more years of that rubbish, and the Hroom would pick us apart in battle. I don’t think much of your rebellion, either—I’m counting on one of the lords of Albion solving our problem, not some ragged band of rebels scheming from the marshlands of Saxony.”
“So here you sit,” Drake said. “Waiting for someone else to make a sacrifice. Someone else to take a risk. Yes, I think we understand.”
“Malthorne left me short-handed—I only had eighty-seven men and women on this rock when you showed up. What’s more, you killed eleven in your assault, and five died before I could put down the subsequent mutiny. Eighteen mutineers are behind bars awaiting judgment. That gives you a crew of fifty-three for a fort that can house a thousand and needs a hundred and twenty crew as a bare minimum.
“How about that?” Gibbs continued. “Now you know why I gave up the fight so quickly. Why I surrendered. No ammo for my heavy weapons, no troops to defend against a ground assault. What was I to do?”
Drake took this news in dismay. He’d counted on a garrison of at least three hundred. Question them for loyalty, and imprison those who could not be counted on. That might leave him two hundred. He could spread the extra crew among his fleet to fill critical deficiencies. Instead, it seemed as though Fort Gamma would further tax his resources.
The commander smiled and made a grand gesture with her hands. “The fort is yours, boys. What will you do with it now?”
#
Fort Epsilon was in better shape, but only just. It had over ninety men and women dug into the rock, and almost to an individual, they had agreed to join the rebellion. Epsilon’s commander was an old classmate of Malthorne’s at the academy, but the atomic destruction of York Town had killed his entire family, and he’d secretly blamed the admiral for allowing the Hroom death fleet to break through.
As for Fort Alpha, it still refused to surrender. Drake wasted ammunition attacking it, threatened a ground invasion, and offered the commander and his officers generous terms if they would surrender. They continued to resist.
Rutherford wanted to land an assault team and take Alpha by force. It was well positioned in orbit to support an enemy fleet and could attack them if they sent forces to the planet to work mischief. But Drake didn’t have the manpower.
Instead, he set up a blockade, and captured, destroyed, or dissuaded any incoming galleons and merchant frigates. No relief would get through to Fort Alpha. No supplies would reach the surface to relieve Malthorne’s security forces. And nothing got out, either. If Drake couldn’t seize the sugar world, let it choke on unshipped sugar.
Even better would be damage on the surface. A full-scale revolt would inevitably draw Matlhorne. But there was still no word from Tolvern.
He sent a subspace to Isabel Vargus, telling her to hire more mercenaries if they could be found. He’d take ships, of course, but he mainly needed manpower. He also spent too much time and sent too many subspace messages looking for her sister Catarina. The younger Vargus sister was still out there collecting forces for her secret expedition to settle the Omega Cluster.
Drake lacked sufficient money to hire Catarina, and the only other thing she wanted, he couldn’t offer. Catarina wanted him. She wanted his ship and crew. Together, they would sneak through the decaying wormhole and leave it all behind: Albion, the war with the Hroom, Apex. Sadly, Drake couldn’t accept. And he couldn’t pretend to, either, just to secure her aid for another battle.
By now, Isabel Vargus’s mercenary fleet had jumped out of the Barsa system on its way to San Pablo for supplies. Unfortunately, neither HMS Philistine nor the captured cruiser were ready to depart Rodriguez’s yards, according to a subspace sent to Drake from San Pablo. Neither could crews be found for them.
Malthorne was on the prowl. He hadn’t attacked Saxony, thank God, but he’d crushed a small rebel refueling station in the Fantalus system. Then he’d seized two Albion-flagged galleons on their way to Saxony. Finally, he dispatched Royal Marines under the command of General Fitzgibbons to seize the rebellion’s only active tyrillium mine. Fitzgibbons savaged his way through the mining colony.
The miners were just men and women on contract, not involved politically, but Admiral Malthorne declared them traitors. He ordered Fitzgibbons to dump them into the void. Fitzgibbons took pictures of their bulging, terrified faces as they died from rapid decompression. The admiral distributed the photos across the Albion systems. A warning.
At that point, Malthorne was on his way toward Hot Barsa—or so it appeared—when he stumbled into the path of a space leviathan. Not even Dreadnought could fight it out against one of the miles-long monsters, and his forces fled the system. After that, Malthorne and Dreadnought disappeared.
And then terrible news came through from an unexpected quarter. General Mose Dryz, the military commander of the Hroom Empire, sent Drake a message. Apex had broken through the Hroom defenses.
Like a lance stabbing through a rotten melon, the mysterious alien race had ravaged several worlds and was now assaulting a
thinly settled system of mixed Hroom and New Dutch humans. They’d slaughtered their way through the system’s mining colonies and captured thousands, presumably to eat them. Apex was now approaching the main world of the system. A terrified fleet of survivors scattered in all directions.
A few more months, and Apex would be at Albion’s throat. With Drake and Malthorne locked in bitter combat, what hope would they have for defeating the predatory aliens?
To add a final worry, Captain Lindsell was on the move. His still-powerful fleet headed toward the jump point to San Pablo. Someone must have tipped him off. Drake couldn’t let him attack Isabel Vargus on her return. He needed those ships, men, and supplies.
Most critically, he needed to secure Fort Gamma and Fort Epsilon. Then Drake would divide his forces. HMS Vigilant had suffered engine damage in the battle for the forts, so Drake would leave Rutherford with several ships to defend Hot Barsa.
Blackbeard herself would set off to attack Lindsell.
Chapter Fourteen
After at least two hours of sitting on the ground, a pair of Hroom roughly hauled Tolvern to her feet. They dragged her up the stairs to the platform where the dead, mutilated bodies lay. Naked torsos. Limbs torn free, with bones sticking out. Heads severed from spines, with eyes open and tongues lolling.
Metallic blue flies swarmed the corpses, and their flesh squirmed with maggots. The smell of rotting flesh made Tolvern swoon. Terror clawed its way into her gut.
Brockett and Carvalho cried out in alarm and struggled to rise.
“Quiet,” Nyb Pim warned them. “You will get her killed.”
Brockett and Carvalho immediately stopped, but they watched her with bugging eyes. It wasn’t helping. Neither was the extreme thirst that left her feeling like a sponge that had been left under the baking sun to harden and dry.
Tolvern winced as the Hroom untied the cords from her wrists. The first thing she did was tug at her sore, bug-gnawed ears. That only made the itching worse. She rubbed her wrists and bent to untie her ankles. One of her captors jabbed toward her with his shock spear. She flinched, not wanting to get a taste of that electric jolt again.
Rebellion of Stars (Starship Blackbeard Book 4) Page 10
