I am unable to give you its course, because I am following a similar route and cannot risk the navy detecting me. Forgive my lack of trust. But the Hroom were observed leaving Hades Gulch.
Rutherford stopped reading and turned over this initial part of the message in his head. That answered one mystery: the destination of the alien fleet Rutherford had spotted after the encounter with the star leviathan. He hadn’t been able to guess their intentions. The Hroom fleet wasn’t powerful enough to menace Albion’s home system—or so Rutherford had thought—and he hadn’t been strong enough to challenge them alone. He’d passed along the sighting to the Admiralty, but otherwise continued to his rendezvous with Harbrake. Now, he knew. The Hroom really did intend to attack Albion, the fools. They must be desperate.
A message flashed in from Harbrake’s ship, Nimitz. Rutherford glanced at it. Harbrake had detected Vigilant entering the system, and was sending updated information, which Rutherford scanned, even as his thoughts remained on what he’d read of Drake’s subspace.
Six sloops of war wouldn’t be enough to defeat Albion’s orbital fortresses. Hroom sloops could orbit, bombarding the surface, but they couldn’t enter a planet’s atmosphere and escape again. Albion’s forts would be sufficient defense. To be doubly sure, Rutherford could recommend that Malthorne leave a pair of destroyers and a few torpedo boats in place. He wouldn’t even have to tell the admiral what he’d heard, or from whom he’d heard it. A simple precautionary warning would suffice.
Rutherford moved back to finish Drake’s message.
This is not scaremongering when I say that you must stop them. This fleet belongs to a rebel faction that worships the Hroom god of death. It is a death fleet. A suicide force. They do not mean to return, they mean to lay waste to the entire planet. They left Hades Gulch 63.25 hours before the sending of this message.
If Malthorne will not listen, then you must face them alone, even if this means open rebellion against the fleet. In that case, send a subspace to the following systems, and I will join you in defeating this menace. I travel with allies.
Captain James Drake, Starship Blackbeard (HMS Ajax)
This was followed by a list of several systems where Rutherford was to send messages if he wanted to reach Drake. Presumably, one of them represented Blackbeard’s true location. Rutherford closed the message, encrypted it a second time, and filed it away.
A suicide fleet was another matter. Rutherford most certainly would need to go back to Albion and take ships with him. He needed to catch the Hroom in open space, before they entered the atmosphere on their final, deadly mission.
Wait, when did Drake say he’d spotted the fleet? Had he said 63.25 hours ago? Rutherford had assumed, at first glance, that Drake had seen the same Hroom fleet Rutherford had observed in Hades Gulch. It was the same size Drake described. But that was ten days ago, and the aliens had been jumping out of the system at the time. The Hroom wouldn’t have returned, would they?
There’s a second fleet.
It made sense. A large fleet would have a hard time passing through all those systems undetected. The Hroom must have divided their force in two. If one was caught, the other might still slip through.
At least two. What if there’s a third? Or a fourth?
What if there were thirty sloops approaching Albion? Was that likely? A number that large would represent most of what had survived the last war. If this so-called death cult had such a force, they were more than a faction, they were practically the entire Hroom navy.
Rutherford stepped out of the war room. “Caites, Pittsfield, you will join me in the war room at once.” Then, to distract the others, he said, “Norris, I just received a message from the Admiralty. I’ll need you to open a subspace channel to send a reply. But I don’t want you wasting power, so scan for a likely spot before you do. Swasey, plot a course across the system, but don’t send the data to the rest of the fleet just yet.”
Caites and Pittsfield eyed him curiously as they followed him into the war room and he shut the door. He shared Malthorne’s orders first. They were to proceed across the system to rendezvous with the admiral’s flagship, and from there, jump into San Pablo.
“No doubt Harbrake has received similar instructions,” Rutherford said when he’d finished, “and will be expecting me to lead the fleet.”
“And you don’t intend to obey them, sir?” Pittsfield asked.
Rutherford didn’t want to open Drake’s encrypted message and leave a further trail for network specialists to track down later, so he paraphrased. As he did, he studied Caites and Pittsfield for skepticism, but saw none.
“So you want to know if we should disobey Malthorne and join Drake in this side expedition?” Pittsfield asked.
“That is not exactly my concern. I’d like to, of course, although we’d have a devil of a time explaining our actions. But Drake is missing a key piece of information.”
Catherine Caites was quicker than the steady, but unimaginative Pittsfield, and recognition dawned on her face. “Did you say Drake spotted this fleet two and a half days ago? And he just sent the subspace?”
“Yes, now you see,” Drake said.
Confusion spread across Pittsfield’s face. “I don’t—wait, do you mean there are two Hroom fleets?”
“At least two,” Rutherford said. “Unless the one is pursuing the other—there’s a civil war in the empire, apparently—we have to assume they’re coordinating an attack on Albion.”
“Are we sure we trust Drake?” Caites asked. “Could he be lying?”
“Why wouldn’t we trust him? It has been established that Drake was framed for his crime, and he behaved honorably when he came to our aid during the Apex attack. Our allegiance is still to Albion, the Crown, and the navy, but I see no reason to question Drake’s integrity.”
“Yes, but these allies of his you mentioned,” she pressed. “They must be pirates he hired to help rescue his parents. Do we trust them? I don’t think we do, and I don’t think we trust anyone who would hire them, including James Drake.”
Under other circumstances, Rutherford might have seen her comments as insubordinate, but it was Caites’s initiative that had brought her to his attention, and he carefully considered her opinion.
He was sympathetic to Drake’s situation. Shortly after leaving his old friend, Rutherford had sent messages to a few trusted allies. One was his uncle, the Duke of West Mercia, who was the most powerful lord on Mercia, a cousin of the king, and by all accounts an honorable man. The duke, who was married to Rutherford’s mother’s sister, was eighth in line for the throne, not far behind Admiral Malthorne himself. Rutherford asked the duke to petition the king to pardon Baron and Lady Drake.
But Rutherford could only frown at the foolishness of hiring pirates. The frontier worlds were lawless enough without putting more money, more equipment, and worst of all, more grandiose ideas, into the heads of the rabble who lived there.
“Yes, I see,” Rutherford said at last. “Hire pirates, engage in piracy, and you become a pirate, no matter the difficult decisions that led you to that point. But I don’t believe that Drake is lying so as to gain an advantage. If he were doing that, he would send us as far from Albion as possible, not draw us home.”
“Assuming Drake is telling the truth,” Pittsfield said, “there are two Hroom death fleets, apparently on a suicide mission. It will take a good deal of firepower to stop them, with or without Drake and his pirates.”
“Our fleet is filled with dunderheads like Harbrake and Lindsell,” Caites said.
“Those dunderheads are superior officers of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. You will remember your place, Lieutenant.”
“My apologies, sir. I misspoke.”
“Yes, well, they do have their limitations, I will grant you that. I would take Drake over the lot of them, but if we can’t trust his allies, where does that leave us?”
“It leaves us unable to stop the Hroom before they attack Albion,” Pittsfield said
. “We have no choice but to trust them. We need Drake’s ships. And if there’s a third fleet we haven’t detected yet . . . ”
Rutherford completed the thought. “That may still prove insufficient.”
“Unless—” Caites began. “May I speak frankly, sir?”
She rubbed at the brass buttons on her jacket with one hand and tapped at the table with the other. Rutherford regretted cutting her off earlier. He didn’t want to squelch her initiative—that initiative was why he had promoted her to be his second mate. Nevertheless, it wasn’t in his repertoire to apologize for speaking gruffly.
“You may always speak frankly, Lieutenant. I only ask that you be circumspect with your language. We must not abandon decorum in our enthusiasm.” It all sounded stiff coming out of his mouth, like something his father would have said, but he thought it proper.
“Yes, sir. With all due respect, we must face these enemies with our full might.”
“Go on,” he said.
“Dreadnought, sir. If you were to tell the lord admiral, he could recall all navy resources to Albion.”
“He would demand the source of our information,” Rutherford said.
“You could equivocate, sir,” Pittsfield said.
“Equivocate?” Rutherford looked at him with surprise. This was unexpected from his staid, rule-following commander.
“Yes, sir.”
“I suppose I could. It is not in my nature, of course.” Rutherford felt the need to add that. “But I could concoct a lie about how we captured a Hroom prisoner during this business with Apex, how he told me under duress that there was a suicidal fleet approaching, and how we have twice detected them since.”
“That would keep Malthorne from suspecting Drake,” Pittsfield said. “A lie, yes, but an honorable one, given the circumstances.”
“It would also pull the entire Royal Navy to Albion at just the moment when Drake is trying to rescue his parents,” Rutherford said.
Pittsfield stared at his hands.
“Commander?” Rutherford prodded.
Pittsfield looked up. “It is the best way to save Albion. We join Drake in battling the Hroom as soon as they jump into the system, while Malthorne sets up in orbit with his own forces to mop up whatever gets past us. That seems the obvious tactical solution. Morally, I am not so sure.”
“We can’t save Drake’s parents at the expense of the whole planet,” Caites said, “but we can look for a way to shield his escape, at least. I can imagine several scenarios by which that would be possible.”
“Can you?” Rutherford asked. “I confess that I am struggling to think of any.”
“Admittedly, anything that occurs to me would be a long shot.”
Rutherford turned it over for a long moment, but in the end, there seemed to be no way to do his duty to Albion and fully protect his old friend at the same time. Faced with that conundrum, there was only one possible choice.
He touched his ear. “Norris, is that subspace channel ready to open?”
“Almost. Give me five minutes, sir.”
“Good. I will have the message for you then. Lieutenant,” he said to Caites when he’d ended the call to Norris, “open your computer. I will dictate.”
She obeyed. “Ready, sir.”
Rutherford sighed. “One moment, I need to compose it in my head, first. It isn’t easy to gracefully betray a friend.”
And then he began. A sick feeling had settled into his gut by the time he finished.
Chapter Eight
Two jumps after Hades Gulch, Drake was running through the subspace frequencies, hoping for a message from Rutherford, when Blackbeard came under attack. The ship was at the lead of a long column, stretched at intervals of roughly two million miles, to better hide the signature of his fleet. They would only draw together during the final approach to the jump point. After Blackbeard, came Isabel Vargus on Outlaw, followed by Paredes’s and Dunkley’s sloops, Aguilar on Pussycat, and finally, Catarina guarding the rear with Orient Tiger.
The next jump point was only a few million miles beyond the uninhabited system’s star, and Blackbeard was cutting through the asteroid belt, midway there. Scans had come up clean; they appeared to be alone in the system. So it was a shock when two torpedoes corkscrewed out from a cluster of asteroids a few hundred thousand miles below them and to starboard. Warning lights flashed on the bridge.
Barker’s people were alert in the gunnery, and they launched countermeasures. Manx followed with two electromagnetic pulses from the defense grid. One of the torpedoes wandered off course, but the other barreled toward Blackbeard.
Jane helpfully chimed in to state the obvious. “Torpedo impact in four minutes and twenty seconds. Class two detonation expected.”
“It appears to be a Mark-IV, sir,” Tolvern said. “We can outrun it.”
Drake studied the data that Smythe was sending across. Mark-IVs were an obsolete design last used in the navy more than three decades ago. About fifteen years ago, the Admiralty had sold several thousand of them to Ladino colonies fighting a frontier brush war against the Hroom. As soon as that conflict cooled down, many of those missiles had made their way into private hands. This pair had been launched from an asteroid about two miles long and a mile wide. A rock big enough to hide a significant pirate base.
“Not today,” he told her. “Today, we teach these people a lesson before the rest of our fleet stumbles through. Capp, bring us around. Get behind the asteroid.”
Nyb Pim was off duty, leaving Capp in the pilot’s chair. “What about that torpedo?”
“You let me worry about suppressing enemy fire. Get us behind the asteroid.”
Tolvern sent a warning to the other ships in their fleet, while Drake told Smythe and Barker what he intended. They kept working at the final torpedo, even as Jane’s updates grew more frequent, and, it seemed, more urgent sounding. Twenty seconds out, Smythe disabled the torpedo by sending it a bogus command to disarm the warhead; there were benefits to facing old navy ordnance. The torpedo slammed into the side of the ship, but didn’t detonate. Jane reported minimal damage.
Blackbeard whipped around the asteroid from behind. It was shaped like a giant, elongated potato, covered in warty eyes, one end broken off, perhaps by one of the other asteroids bumping around nearby. Lights flashed along its surface as Blackbeard flew over. Kinetic weapons, but the enemy fired too late, and they missed. Meanwhile, the gunnery had readied the main battery. As Blackbeard passed, she rolled onto her side and fired. Explosions ripped up the surface. Blackbeard was safely into space again moments later.
“How do you like that, ya dumb tossers?” Capp said. “Bloody fools don’t know what they’re messing with.”
But Drake didn’t like what he saw from the aftermath. Gray plumes trailed high over the asteroid, with the larger debris settling slowly to the surface, while dust leaked into space to form a hazy halo around it. But there was no fire or debris venting out, and a scan from this distance showed nothing on the surface that would give away a base. If not for the attack, it would look no different from a million other hunks of rock floating out here.
The crew of the dug-in base, whoever they were, now sat silent and unresponsive as Drake tried to hail them. No more torpedoes or cannon fire. Drake lurked nearby, waiting as the rest of the ships in his fleet slowed down and encircled the asteroid at a safe distance.
“Why did they shoot at us?” Tolvern asked.
“This is a trade lane, and we were cloaked. Bad instruments—they must have thought we were a merchant vessel traveling without escort. I’ll wager they intended to disable us and then send a ship to haul us in.”
It was a common pirate tactic. The survivors from the captured merchant ships would swell the ranks of the pirates until a system was fully infested and merchants were forced to chart lengthy detours. When the situation grew intolerable, the navy would send a task force to root them out. Drake had been on pirate-hunting missions before the last Hroom war.
“Orient Tiger and Outlaw will cover me with suppressing fire while I go in. Isabel, have the schooners withdraw to catch anyone who makes a run for it. Is Aguilar ready to mix it up? He can bring Pussycat in for close fire support if things heat up.”
“These fools are dug in pretty good,” Catarina said. “You’ll need more than one broadside to hammer them into submission. Maybe it would be better if I go down while you give better suppressing fire.”
“I am not looking for their surrender,” Drake said. “I’m going to come in low and drop an atomic bomb on their head.”
“Where did you get that?” Catarina asked.
“We’ve been carrying five warheads since the mutiny.”
“And now is when you want to use them?” she asked.
“Waste of ammo, if you ask me,” Isabel said. Through the viewscreen, the older sister’s mechanical eye seemed to glow with a strange blue light. “And a waste of good gear, too, what we destroy. Besides, I’m not sure that what they did warrants you nuking them.”
“They’re pirates,” Drake said. “They attacked us unprovoked. Destroying their base would be a favor to anyone else passing this way.”
“A fine opportunity for loot,” Isabel said. “Dumb to pass it up.”
“I agree with my sister,” Catarina said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but we don’t have time for it.”
“Oh, come on, James,” Catarina said. “Don’t play ignorant, it’s unbecoming. Who knows what we will find on that rock, and it’s all ill-gotten gains, so we don’t have to feel any guilt in liberating it.”
Drake chewed this over, glancing at Tolvern, who had been listening to the exchange. She shrugged. Drake looked back to the two sisters sharing the viewscreen. “How long would we need?”
Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) Page 7
