“It is all right, sir,” Caites said. “There will be other opportunities. I do appreciate your efforts on my behalf.”
Rutherford fixed her with a sharp look. “This was not on your behalf, let us be clear about that. You are an obviously superior officer to Harbrake, and I wanted you at the helm of a capital ship before we go into battle. Just in case there are misunderstandings about my motives.”
“Why would there be?”
He put his hand on the button to keep the lift doors closed. “Because you are a woman and very young. And because you are—” he swallowed this down, uncomfortable saying it “—because you are pretty, people will talk.”
“That is ridiculous,” she said.
“I don’t know if you’re scoffing at being called pretty or complaining because of the implication of fraternization with your superior officer, but both of these things are true. And they are holding you back from your rightful place as captain of a Royal Navy cruiser.”
“It won’t hold me back for long.”
Caites had hesitated when Rutherford first proposed the plan, claiming to be unready for such a promotion, but he saw no hesitation in her now as she thrust out her chin and flared her nostrils.
“Well said, Lieutenant. It speaks to your good breeding.” He took his hand off the button, and the doors opened. “Now, let us get this ridiculous punitive expedition out of the way so we can go home and protect Albion from destruction.”
Something that he’d said or what had happened on the lord admiral’s deck had set her thinking, and not in a good way, because Caites was fuming, muttering to herself, by the time they reached the away pods. She scarcely hesitated before climbing into the cylinder and strapping herself in with a loud click. Shortly, they were hurtling through space on their way back to Vigilant.
Chapter Ten
Drake blinked at the viewscreen. His thoughts were hazy, like he’d awakened from sleep, but he had no headache, and his mind was quickly recognizing the catastrophic scenario presenting itself. Six Hroom sloops sat arrayed in what was known as a “Hroom claw” but was more like a sideways bowl, with the mouth enveloping Dunkley’s schooner, and all the Hroom pointed in toward it.
Instruments showed Hroom serpentines warmed up, and pulse cannon began to thump at the schooner. Dunkley belatedly fired up his plasma engine and began to nose around to escape the claw, which was about to clamp down, and hard.
“Gunnery!” Drake said into the com. “Tubes three and four. Barker?”
“Here, sir,” came the man’s groggy voice. “Tubes three and four.”
“And belly cannon. Fire all guns on the lead sloop.”
“Aye, sir.”
Tolvern was alert now and giving instructions to engineering, while Smythe lifted from where he slumped over his console. He shook his head and groaned.
“Wake up, Smythe,” Tolvern said. “I need those specs, and I need them now.”
“Got it, Commander,” he slurred, and began to fumble at his console.
Capp was cursing and rubbing her temples, but Nyb Pim was still staring around him with his big Hroom eyes, looking not so different from an addict at the end of a long sugar swoon. Sometimes, the Hroom seemed to come out of the jumps more slowly than humans.
Isabel Vargus came through the jump with Outlaw, but the shark-nosed frigate sat dead and motionless at the moment. Isabel’s crew would be staggering about for some time before they could be useful. Meanwhile, the slow, natural movement of the jump point gradually moved her away from it, opening a position for the next ship in the fleet, which would be Paredes on another schooner, followed by Pussycat and her heavy armaments, and finally, Catarina on Orient Tiger. Somehow, Drake had to hold the Hroom off until they arrived.
All this passed through his head in a moment, even as pulse-cannon fire slammed into the schooner. Dunkley’s shields held, and he twisted away like a fish evading a spear gun. The first bomblets swarmed out from enemy serpentine batteries. In minutes, the entire bowl-like space between the sloops of war would be filled with them.
“Echelon formation,” Drake said. “Break the claw.”
This was directed to Tolvern. She had already opened a channel with Dunkley, and gave orders. Meanwhile, Outlaw was coming about, and Isabel seemed to understand exactly what he intended. Her systems were still warming up—it would be a moment before she could join the fight—but she swung in to join him in the echelon. Soon, they were arranged on the diagonal, ready to charge and hammer the Hroom formation until it broke apart.
“Torpedoes ready,” Barker said through the com.
“Fire.”
A pair of torpedoes raced ahead of the ship, even as Blackbeard and Outlaw thrust forward, accelerating, to puncture the back of the formation. Enemy sloops moved to evade. Blackbeard’s belly cannon opened up with kinetic fire. The range was still too great, but the cannon fire forced additional evasive action.
Paredes came through the jump. His schooner sat dead, but Blackbeard and Outlaw were now roaring into the fight to help Dunkley. All Dunkley had to do was straighten his bow and lead those torpedoes in clearing a path. Blackbeard and Outlaw would follow, and, in a massive wedge, would break the claw.
But Dunkley didn’t obey the commands Tolvern was shouting through to him. His schooner was agile and fleet of foot, and Dunkley seemed to think he could ignore orders and shake off the attack alone. Bomblets swirled around him, and incredibly, he slipped between them and emerged from the bowl nearly unscathed, with Hroom warships still shooting after him.
Dunkley attempted to circle behind the cruiser and the frigate, where he could be protected by their guns—or so Drake could only guess, as the fool was ignoring all orders from Blackbeard’s deck. But by now, the two ships were racing in tandem to puncture the back of the Hroom claw, and they blew past him. The end result was that Dunkley had eluded the closing claw, but he dangled, exposed.
Paredes was still trying to get his own schooner moving, and the heavily armed Pussycat had just popped through and sat motionless. They were easy prey for the approaching Hroom warships. But the sloops ignored them and chased after Dunkley, instead. One of the sloops trained her guns and pounded the rear of the schooner. She wriggled and squirmed, but a sloop flanked Dunkley on either side, with two more above, and one below.
Somehow, Dunkley managed to get turned around and headed back toward the other human ships. Hroom guns filled the sky with flashing light. He took a vicious blow to his engines. The rear of the schooner flared, and a huge jet of plasma vented off into space. He kept going on sheer momentum, flying straight toward Blackbeard.
One of the sloops darted in from the side. Its long, sharp nose stabbed into the side of the schooner. There was a flash of light and a dozen secondary explosions as the schooner broke apart. The bridge of Dunkley’s ship spiraled end over end, until Hroom warships tore this largest piece of wreckage apart with pulse-cannon fire.
Catarina Vargus had come through. With the arrival of Orient Tiger, Drake now had three frigates and the remaining schooner to back him up. It was a formidable force, even without Dunkley. But against six sloops, none of them injured, he’d be in trouble. He could handle a single sloop himself, maybe two or three with the other ships in support. If Rutherford had been with him at the helm of Vigilant, he’d have liked his odds. As it was, they looked grim.
Having wiped out Dunkley’s schooner, the enemy sloops were turning, fanning out to come at Blackbeard. The Royal Navy called this formation a “throwing star,” and Drake knew how to break that, as well. If only he’d had more firepower to back him. Time for some improvising.
Drake called his remaining ships. “Pull back to the jump point. Guard the—”
“What do you—” Isabel’s voice interrupted.
“Listen to me! Guard the jump point, as if we have a capital ship coming through that we need to protect. Catarina, move forward as if you’re going to spearhead another wedge.”
They got it now and
moved to obey. Perhaps chastened by Dunkley’s demise, even Paredes and Aguilar obeyed without comment, and soon they were in a passable example of the throwing-star-breaking formation that Drake had been thinking of before, or at least the first two-thirds of it. If he’d been able to add another cruiser or two, he’d be ready to face the Hroom.
“Debris,” Jane warned. “Impact in three seconds.”
A bit of Dunkley’s wreckage spiraled across the viewscreen. They braced themselves, and the deck shuddered as the debris slammed into them.
“Thanks for the warning, Jane,” Tolvern said sarcastically. “Really helpful timing.”
Warnings came through about shield damage from the hit, but Drake could tell from the strength of the impact, and from how long it had taken Jane to identify the threat, that it hadn’t been serious. He kept his attention glued to the evolving position of the enemy fleet.
The sloops pulled up when they were still eighty thousand miles distant, and there they seemed to hesitate. A human commander surely would have known Drake was bluffing. With the possible exception of Blackbeard, these were obviously pirate ships and freebooters, not any official navy. Why should the Hroom expect another cruiser to come through and not a frigate, or nothing? They must suspect as much.
But if this were really a suicide fleet, the Hroom couldn’t risk mixing it up and losing some of their firepower. A victory here would be as good as a loss unless they emerged unscathed. Drake was sure he could take out at least one of the sloops before they got him, and if he really had been counting on more ships to emerge from the jump point, the Hroom would have left the encounter well bloodied.
The sloops kept their formation, but turned in a wide arc and flew away from Drake and the jump point. They came out of the formation to spread into a long line as they accelerated toward the inner system and the several jump points through which they might escape. Drake let them go. The only thing to do was chart their exit from the system and pass this information along to Rutherford while he proceeded on his own course toward Albion. No word yet from his friend in the fleet, but Drake assumed that Rutherford was taking his warnings seriously.
Drake got the other captains on the viewscreen and chewed them out. This was why. Why he was in command, and the others subordinate at all times. Why they were to obey his commands without question, whether they were in battle or not. Why they should never interrupt or contradict when he was giving orders under fire. And why he would blow a hole in the next ship who defied him. If Dunkley had obeyed orders, he and his crew would still be alive. They listened, duly chastened, but Drake wasn’t done.
“This is a military mission, and it will be treated as such. It is why I have paid for all this firepower, and why, if you think you know better than I do, you are undoubtedly wrong. I am a military commander, and none of you, for all of your skills, can say the same thing. In battle, my word is law. And so is Commander Tolvern’s. If you hear it from the mouth of my commander, it is as good as if you’ve heard it from my own. Is that clear?”
They said it was.
“Good. Stand by and await my orders.” He ended the call and settled into his chair, deflated. Numbers and memos flashed across his console as reports poured in from his ship and elsewhere in the fleet. They blurred past his vision. He could only think of the destroyed schooner. The image of it bursting apart was seared into his mind.
“A costly lesson, sir,” Tolvern said. “But perhaps necessary.”
“Perhaps.”
“Let us hope,” Nyb Pim said, “that future lessons do not require the destruction of one of our warships and the death of the sixteen crew members on board.”
Capp slumped in her chair and rubbed at her buzzed scalp. “Dunkley, you are a bloody fool. You threw your life away, mate.” Capp had tried to pummel the man when they encountered him on Leopold, but she didn’t sound like an enemy now.
It was hard to see a silver lining in the literal cloud of debris left by Dunkley’s obliterated ship, but one thing did occur to Drake. “How much did I promise the sloop captains?” he asked Tolvern.
“Three thousand, sir. We’d already paid him fifteen hundred of it.”
“Then I suppose that’s fifteen hundred more pounds with which to bribe Catarina Vargus.”
With Dunkley’s death and the destruction of his schooner, Drake needed Orient Tiger more than ever.
Chapter Eleven
The day after the brawl with the death fleet, the captain sent Tolvern and Capp to the lab, where Noah Brockett said he had something to share. Tolvern had nearly forgotten about the Apex tissue samples given them by what she’d begun to think of as the friendly Hroom faction. Not that General Mose Dryz wouldn’t happily thrash Albion in battle if he could. But he wasn’t trying to extirpate the human race from this sector, either. Not like the suicidal followers of the Hroom god of death.
Drake had seemed keen to personally follow up on Brockett’s findings. But he’d finally heard from Rutherford, and Smythe had intercepted a mass of fleet communications, and these things demanded the captain’s attention. Drake had also decided that the six sloops lurking outside the jump point had constituted a new death fleet, as there was no way the other one could have been in that exact spot at that time. That warranted additional thought, and he wanted to discuss it with Nyb Pim, who had a better knowledge of the jump points in the surrounding systems.
So he sent Capp and Tolvern to see Brockett.
“I been wondering something,” Capp said as the two women took the winding corridor that led to the labs. “Do you think this science bloke is good looking?”
Tolvern had grown used to Capp’s ribbing and learned that the best way to deal with it was to shrug it off. Still, with the former marine always on her about being ‘sweet on the captain,’ as Capp put it, this new angle was a fresh annoyance.
“No, not really. Anyway, I haven’t thought of it much. I never see Brockett outside the lab.”
“I didn’t neither, not at first. He’s the geeky sort, and I ain’t usually interested in them. Nose in books all the time, and he probably smells like them chemicals they use down there. You know that stuff they pump into dead bodies so they don’t stink or nothing before you’re done with ’em?”
“Formaldehyde?”
“Yeah.”
Tolvern stopped. They were almost to the lab. “Wait, you’re asking for yourself? Are you interested, Capp?” Tolvern grinned.
The other woman blushed and rubbed her arms, where she’d rolled up her sleeves to show off the lion tattoos she was so proud of. “I don’t know. He looked like a ponce when we took him on.”
“A ponce? You mean gay?”
“You know, not manly or nothing.”
“Manly?” Tolvern smiled. “You’re not an anti-intellectual, are you?”
“I ain’t anti-nothing. And I know he ain’t gay, ’cause I caught him checking me out in the mess the other day. You know the way blokes do when they fancy you? And that got me thinking maybe he weren’t so bad after all. And maybe he weren’t a ponce, neither.”
“Brockett would be a big change from Carvalho,” Tolvern said.
Carvalho was almost a caricature of masculinity, with pirate swagger thrown in for good measure. Tolvern had stumbled into Capp’s room once while Carvalho was lounging on the bed, barely covered, and she’d had to drag her eyes away from his muscular body. He had a smug look that was both maddening and sexy, and he and Capp could scarcely keep their hands off each other.
“Yeah, he ain’t happy with me at the moment.”
“He’s not?” Tolvern frowned. “I’m sorry, did something happen?”
“You know when we was in that pirate base, collecting loot? There was this fellow, see, real handsome. Dutch bloke. I told him I’d shoot his stones off if he didn’t show me where the treasure chest was. And he smirked at me like this.” Capp made a face. “And he said he’d show me the treasure all right. Well, what was I to do? Carvalho was all busy looting, and
it had been three days! I was ready for some. What was I supposed to do?”
She sounded so earnest, but Tolvern couldn’t help the laugh that burst out. “Wait, so you’re down there looting, and you somehow end up sleeping with one of the people we’re supposed to be robbing?”
Capp looked glum. “Yeah, and Carvalho stumbled through while we was groping each other. He didn’t like that none. So now it has been a week since he’s come to my room, and I didn’t even get to finish with that Dutch bloke, neither.”
Brockett poked his head out the door of the science lab. “I thought I heard someone out here. Are you two coming in, or what?”
“’Course we are, luv,” Capp said. Give us a sec, will you?”
Tolvern waited until Brockett had retreated to his lab. “But when we were on Leopold, you told me Carvalho didn’t care, so long as you—how did you put it?—didn’t run out of it.”
“Yeah, but he ain’t too keen on catching me in the act, neither. Know what I mean? He’ll come around eventually, but now I’m wondering, what about Brockett?”
Tolvern laughed. “I won’t tell you no.”
“Unless you want him for yourself. I’ll step out of the way and let you have him.”
“No, not at all. Come on.”
Brockett was staring into a microscope when they entered and didn’t look up right away. His left hand fiddled with the diopter adjustment, while his right hand worked at a keypad, where he was typing notes by touch. Tolvern and Capp glanced at each other, then seemed to come to an agreement by mutual consent to wait until he was finished, not wanting to interrupt him. Whatever it was, Brockett was very intense about it. He removed a slide and clamped down another, all without looking away from his equipment.
Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) Page 10
