Rebellion of Stars (Starship Blackbeard Book 4)

by Michael Wallace

  “That’s done,” Pez Rykan said. “Bring them with us, and they’ll join our rebellion.”

  Brockett snapped together the sling pack. “I told you yesterday it doesn’t work that quickly,” Brockett said. “First, it has to bind to the receptors in the brain. Then, they have to suffer withdrawal like any other Hroom when he’s cut off from his sugar.”

  “You remember,” Nyb Pim said to Pez Rykan. Both Hroom had recovered from addiction. “When the sugar is taken away, you go crazy for it. That will happen to these over the next few days and weeks. Their minds will clear. They will forget all desire for sugar. But not quickly.”

  “If we take some of them with us—” the Hroom chief said.

  “No,” Tolvern said. “If we do our job, they’ll find us soon enough. For now, our job is to disrupt the camp.”

  Nyb Pim and Carvalho hauled the overseer to his feet and dragged him to Tolvern and Pez Rykan. Tolvern cast a glance at one of the other work crews, some hundred yards distant, but the slaves continued their labors. No shots had been fired; nobody seemed to have noticed the attack.

  Brockett opened his pack again, as if to remove another caplet, but Pez Rykan stopped him. “We will not waste antidote. This one is not an eater.”

  “But he’s still susceptible.”

  The Hroom chief stared down at the science officer with such intensity that Brockett took a step back. “He made his choice,” Pez Rykan said.

  “What will you do with me?” the overseer asked. It was directed to Tolvern, and in English, but it was Pez Rykan who answered.

  The chief said something in Hroom, and the overseer’s legs buckled.

  “But I surrendered!”

  “You’ll kill him,” Tolvern said. It was not a question.

  Pez Rykan cast a narrow-eyed gaze down at her. “Our god must have his sacrifice.”

  #

  They worked their way around the edge of the plantation, which stretched for tens of miles ahead of them. Perhaps hundreds of miles. Tolvern directed the attacks, leading the small band along the edge of the harvest, stepping out, taking the overseer at gunpoint, then fading back into the uncut cane. The slaves were so placid that most of the time, they resumed their labors the instant the rebels stepped away.

  Soon, they had taken nine prisoners from the overseer class and had inoculated several hundred slaves. And all without firing a shot.

  “Wait until afternoon,” Pez Rykan told her. “As the sugar wears off, they work faster, but more restlessly. They will fight over rations, resist when pushed. We will not find it so easy.”

  Tolvern glanced at the prisoners, tied together with their hands behind their backs and leaves stuffed in their mouths to keep them quiet. “What about these ones?”

  “There is nothing to discuss,” he said.

  “You don’t have to murder them.”

  “It is not murder. It is a holy sacrifice to Lyam Kar.”

  “Sacrifice, murder—looks the same from my point of view. That first one was right—he surrendered. They all did. Why kill them?” She waved her hand as he began to object. “Forget that religious rubbish, I am talking about simple decency. Keep them prisoner if you want, but don’t hack them apart.”

  “You are not the commander here, Jess Tolvern. I am.”

  With that, Pez Rykan pushed through the cane until he was at the front of the formation. Her three companions edged past the prisoners to Tolvern’s side as soon as he was gone.

  “I say we call it a day,” Carvalho said.

  “He’s right,” Brockett said. “We’re dehydrated, exhausted. We can’t keep going hour after hour in this heat.”

  “This will be the easiest day we have,” she told them. “It will only get harder.”

  “How is this easy?” Brockett said. “Even the Hroom are dragging. Look at them.”

  “Once the immunity shows, the enemy will be on to us. Then there will be resistance. For now, it’s nothing. We come, we do our business, and we leave unmolested. They’re confused when they see us, not alarmed. Not yet.”

  Nyb Pim spoke up. “Not for much longer. We are taking the overseers, and most of them are not eaters.”

  Carvalho nodded. “I don’t much care. Let the Hroom have their prisoners—these overseers would rat us out if we left them. But our Hroom friend is right. Sooner or later, someone will notice they are missing. They probably have already.”

  “So they ran off,” Tolvern said. “That must happen all the time.”

  “Once or twice, maybe,” Carvalho said. “Not nine times. They must have noticed by now. They will be looking for us.”

  “Good point. Wouldn’t hurt us to stop for the day while we figure stuff out. You guys stay here, I’m talking to the chief.”

  She pushed ahead to catch up with Pez Rykan, thinking about what the others had said. Probably time to change their strategy. Scope out an area first. Come in quickly, get the job done, and fade away to reappear at a different part of Malthorne’s estate. It would be slower, and sooner or later, they’d still face resistance, but it would be less risky than working all day along the same side of the plantation.

  But as she reached the chief, he came to a stop at the edge of the cane. His body went rigid. Tolvern came beside him and looked out to see what had him alarmed.

  They’d hooked several miles northeast alongside the plantation as the day passed, crossing several dirt roads and ignoring the tempting target of a sugar mill. The mill would be well guarded, most likely by humans, to make sure slaves didn’t charge the sugar silos. There would be plenty of time to destroy the sugar stores once their rebellion had grown.

  They’d come through the cane looking for another clearing where they could force the antidote on a work crew, but instead, they’d stumbled upon a slave village. There were slave quarters, a company store to provide food and clothing to the workers, and guard posts at either entrance. A lorry idled in front of the rear guard post.

  Tolvern caught her breath when she saw what had made Pez Rykan stiffen in alarm. A human guard and two Hroom lined up some fifty or sixty slaves, who knelt in front of a long, freshly dug trench. Most of the slaves were old, their skin tanned to leather by decades of exposure to the sun, but there were a handful of younger Hroom. One was missing a leg at the knee, the wound covered with a dirty bandage. Another slave’s shoulder hung funny, as if it had been hit by a piece of machinery and badly broken. Another wore a bandage over one eye.

  This was a culling. The old, the injured. Those whose value was lost and could not be recovered. There was no gentle retirement on Lord Malthorne’s plantations, where toothless old Hroom sat in rocking chairs and reminisced about their days as Hroomlings. No food or shelter for the idle. Work or die.

  The human guard stood with his hands on his hips, watching with a slack, emotionless expression. One of the Hroom overseers walked to the end of the row, gun at the ready. It would begin now.

  Even as this realization hit Tolvern like a fist to the gut, Pez Rykan was lifting his rifle and signaling for the others to follow him. He bent in a crouch, body tensed as his fighters hurried up beside him.

  The Hroom guard fired. The first victim slumped and fell into the trench.

  Tolvern grabbed Pez Rykan. “No!”

  “Let go of me, human.” He was too strong, and shrugged her off.

  Carvalho and Brockett grabbed hold of the chief. Nyb Pim threw his arms around him.

  “Listen to me!” Tolvern said, even as the gunfire continued, marking its grisly harvest. “There are guard posts. A lorry. Must be fifty armed humans in that camp, and some of them have heavy weapons. We’ll be cut to pieces.”

  “I cannot—I will not let them.”

  “You have no choice.” The gunfire continued, almost drowning out her voice. “Stop! Listen to me. This is our chance. Look!”

  There, to the right of the store, was the perfect target. It was a long, wooden building, some forty feet high and two hundred feet long. It slumped
to one side, as if the rotting wood could barely hold itself up in the searing tropical heat. She’d seen a building like that before, albeit smaller, while traveling across one of the few places on Albion itself where slaves were kept as agricultural workers.

  Pez Rykan stopped struggling and stared. He let Tolvern pull him back into the protective curtain of sugarcane.

  “A slave barracks,” she said. “Think about it.”

  “Yes, Jess Tolvern. Yes, now I see.”

  There would be hundreds living under one roof, sharing cots, with bunks stacked on top of bunks from floor to ceiling. Get inside at night, and the rebels could do more mischief in fifteen minutes than they’d do in a week attacking the cane fields.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Drake made the jump into the San Pablo system a week after leaving Hot Barsa. He’d received word from Isabel Vargus that Lindsell’s fleet was racing to intercept her, and that left the jump point undefended. Still, when he raised his groggy, throbbing head after going through, he anxiously scanned the screen for enemy vessels. The nearby space was clear.

  Capp eyed him with a worried expression. “That was a hard one, Cap’n. You took it worst of all. I was about to call Doc up here to have a look at you.”

  The others on the bridge were already up and about. Oglethorpe blinked and rubbed at his temples. Manx chased down a couple of pills with a glass of water. Smythe was already fumbling at the tech console. Capp was yawning in the way people sometimes did when they were fighting nausea, but she seemed alert. Certainly, more so than Drake himself. He felt almost drugged.

  His other ships were a destroyer, a frigate, and two torpedo boats, and they were already moving while Blackbeard was still dead in the water. Such a strange, unsettling phenomena, these jump points. Like every atom in your body had been disassembled and then strung together five light years away.

  Smythe put up scans of the near space. A comet was hurtling through the San Pablo system, and flared white across the viewscreen only a few hundred thousand miles away. It seemed to be right on top of them, but that was an illusion caused by the vast distances. It stretched like a long, glowing white fire across the viewscreen until Smythe continued his scans elsewhere.

  The computer picked up a flurry of new messages, which Jane sent through, one by one. The first came from Hot Barsa. Tolvern had stirred up a hornet’s nest on Malthorne’s largest estate. Closer to hand, Vargus had already scraped with Lindsell, who’d forced her to withdraw. She had several merchant vessels she needed to protect—the shipment of arms for the forts.

  But where was she? Smythe scanned the system for ships and only turned up the usual suspects to be found in San Pablo: miners, scavengers, smugglers, mercenaries, and other unsavory types. Nothing of either Vargus or Lindsell.

  “Where in the black void are they?” Drake asked.

  “I’ll keep looking,” Smythe said, “but it might take some time if they’re both cloaked.”

  “Vargus’s merchant frigates have no cloaking,” he reminded the tech officer.

  “Don’t suppose they’ve busted out of here, do you?” Capp said.

  Drake raised an eyebrow. “Busted?”

  “You know, bug—I mean, left in a hurry. Busted out of here. Jumped to Peruano or something. Might be safer there, if Vargus’s sister’s about, doing whatever business she’s up to.”

  “Vargus had better not have busted anywhere. Certainly not to Peruano. By the time we get that ordnance to the forts, Dreadnought will have seized them and reduced Rutherford’s fleet to salvage.”

  “Might not have had much choice,” Capp said. “Not if Lindsell slapped her around a bit, if you know what I mean.”

  “Found them, sir!” Smythe said.

  Now Drake understood. Lindsell and Vargus’s forces were eclipsed by the sun, which had kept Blackbeard’s initial scans from detecting the two forces, but a star was just gas, and one could peer straight through it with the right array of instruments.

  The two sides ducked and weaved near the tiny, sun-scorched, innermost world of the system. They were almost close enough to exchange blows, with Lindsell anxious to engage, and Vargus equally intent on avoiding it.

  “She’s clever, that one,” Capp said. “Almost as clever as her sister. Know what I mean, Cap’n?”

  He was well aware of the Vargus sisters’ qualities. In this case, Isabel Vargus’s flight to the rocky innermost world might have saved her life. It kept her close to the jump point. Break free, and she could make a run for it. If not, she’d be closer to Drake when he came through to help. The planet itself was an obstacle to put between herself and Lindsell, who she could not outrun in open space. And her position on the far side of the sun helped hide Blackbeard from immediate detection.

  Drake told Oglethorpe to send word to the other ships: travel cloaked, follow Blackbeard up to the sun’s corona. They were going to come in quietly. See if they could get the jump on Lindsell.

  “Send Vargus a coded message,” Drake said. “Tell her we are on our way. Capp, plot a course.”

  The pilot interfaced her nav chip with the nav computer and came back with two suggestions a few minutes later. The most optimal one, at least in terms of secrecy, took them awfully close to the star, almost inside its transition zone.

  “You’re going to cook us like a lobster in its shell,” Oglethorpe said gloomily.

  “No,” Smythe said. He was running his own calculations and sending them through to the captain. “We’ll survive. It will be toasty, though.”

  “Set the course,” Drake told Capp. “Oglethorpe, send that through to the other ships. Smythe, if you can think up anything clever to cool our quarters, it would be appreciated.”

  “Bring it on,” Capp said. “We ain’t scared of a little heat, are we, Cap’n?” She unzipped her vest partway, as if in anticipation. It was a foolish gesture, as they wouldn’t detect any change for at least an hour. “Whatever it takes to get around there without being spotted. I’ll take it all off if I need to.”

  #

  Toasty proved to be an understatement. The tyrillium armor couldn’t absorb all of the energy hammering down on them, and other cooling methods proved inadequate, at least on Blackbeard.

  A dry heat, yes. That didn’t matter so much once the temperature topped one hundred and kept climbing. Soon it felt like a baking oven.

  Drake sweated out the end of his shift and returned to his quarters. He stripped to his underwear and lay on top of the sheets.

  He was tempted to cool his quarters. Give him some relief at the expense of a small temperature rise in the rest of the ship. He could justify it by saying that the captain, of all the crew, most needed to be well rested before battle.

  But, no. Word would get out if he told engineering to tweak the climate control. The hit to morale would negate any small advantage he might gain by sleeping in comfort. And it would be unfair to the rest, no matter if they knew or not. A captain’s duty was to suffer with his crew.

  He drifted in and out of sleep for a couple of hours, then got up and took a shower. There was no cold water; it was all hot. He got a little relief as he dried, but the water seemed to transition directly into sweat as he dressed. May as well go to the bridge. They’d be coming around the star by now.

  “Jane, give me a climate update.”

  “Non-optimal for human survival,” the computer began. “Climate control systems, including—”

  “Just give me the temperature.” The heat left him irritable, and it was hard not to snap.

  “One hundred and eight point three degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “And how fast is that climbing? Where were we an hour ago?”

  “Contradictory questions,” Jane said. “The temperature has not increased. It has dropped point-eight degrees in the past hour.”

  Oh, that was good. The worst was over, then. “And the other ships? How are they holding out?”

  Jane returned a negative understanding, and he clarified. What w
as their temperature? All four were cooler than Blackbeard. Their weaker shielding was more than compensated for by a higher surface area to mass than the larger cruiser, which made it easier to shed heat through their armor.

  Drake left his room and made his way to the bridge, passing a few sweaty, haggard-looking crew members on his way.

  Oglethorpe was off, and Capp sat at the helm. Her buzzed scalp gleamed. She’d unzipped her vest all the way, but closed it halfway as he entered.

  Barker from the gunnery was at the tech console. Manx was also at work. It felt slightly cooler on the bridge, or maybe that was his imagination.

  “Better bring people back on early,” Capp said as she made way for Drake. “Nobody’s asked me, but I’d say all hands.”

  He glanced at his console. Another few minutes, and they’d be far enough from the star to shed heat. That would bring the temp down in a hurry.

  As for the action playing out by the rocky innermost world, Drake was surprised to see that Lindsell had not yet engaged. Some of this was due to Isabel Vargus, who’d managed to keep the planet between herself and the enemy fleet. But Lindsell had either committed some tactical blunder, or was being unusually cautious, or he would have caught her by now. Those transports were Vargus’s weakness. Surely, Lindsell knew it.

  “Personnel will continue as scheduled,” Drake said, in answer to Capp’s suggestion. He’d have taken that sort of impertinence from Tolvern, who had earned the right to question him. The subpilot, not so much. “We have nearly two hours until we engage.”

  “Not quite, sir,” Barker said from Smythe’s station. “Look at this.” He sent over data.

  At first, it was a jumble that he struggled to decipher, even with the console rendering it visually. But as the data came into focus, the first twinge of worry hit. They weren’t the only ones traveling cloaked. Someone else was approaching the developing battle, fully cloaked.