Blackbeard Superbox, page 10
This was a bit of hyperbole; there were safeguards against random mental breakdowns and general dumbfoolery. But he had their attention now.
“And if that isn’t enough,” he continued, “the might of the Royal Navy has turned its attention to us. They will blow us straight to hell if they can. One careless subspace message, and we might pop out of a jump point to find Dreadnought herself waiting to devour us.”
He gestured at the viewscreen, and all eyes went to it. “That’s the void. There’s nothing out there but empty space. People seem to forget that. Carelessness, lack of discipline—we’re one false move from dying at any moment.” He nodded at Tolvern.
On his insistence, she’d gone back to her room to change her jacket and brush her hair and had come back gulping hot tea. She hardly looked fresh or well rested, but she’d managed to feign something approaching alertness. Now she cast a glare across the room.
“Some of you don’t seem to know your positions,” Tolvern said. “And circumstances have forced changes in other areas. So that there can be no doubt, let us review them now.” She glanced at her hand computer. “Chief Gunner Barker, you are now head of engineering as well. Oglethorpe has a brevet to sublieutenant, and you may assign him duties as you see fit. Manx . . .”
She went through the list. The cook was now alone, as was Doc in medical. Nurses and assistant cooks were placed, temporarily at least, in more critical roles. Carvalho went to engineering, something mechanical that kept him away from critical systems. His fellow schemer Lutz would work with the boatswains on a shift schedule that kept the two men from overlapping their down time. Carvalho’s lover, Corporal Capp, would stay on the bridge where the officers could keep an eye on her. Drake had more information on that score, but Tolvern didn’t reveal that yet.
“Are there any questions?” Drake asked.
Capp waved her hand. “Yeah, Cap’n. I got one.”
“Stand up when you address your captain,” Tolvern snapped.
Capp rose from the chair. “Excuse me, Commander Tolvern.” Too much emphasis on that last part to be sincere. Capp looked back to the captain. “Do we have any sort of plan, Captain? Or are we just playing at navy discipline here? They ain’t gonna let us back in because we start salutin’ and wearing our uniforms all pressed and nice.”
“I’m glad you asked that,” Drake said. “We need repairs beyond what we can manage in transit. That means putting into a yard. Ideally, this would be a naval yard, but since that is impossible, it means going to one of the Ladino worlds or maybe a New Dutch port, outside the control of the kingdom. It’s likely to mean some nonstandard tech.”
Some of the more alert sorts, including both Capp and Carvalho, but also Barker, Smythe, and several others of the original crew, passed looks among themselves. How would they pay for such a thing? And why would they be cobbling on foreign tech if they didn’t mean to keep flying around the sector away from the fleet? No doubt many of them had already discussed these doubts privately.
He didn’t have answers yet, so before anyone could voice these questions, he pressed on.
“Corporal Capp, you’ve done well navigating us this far,” he said. “I see no reason why the navy refused your attempts to become a pilot.”
Capp’s eyes widened, and for the first time the slouch left her posture.
“But you have a good deal to learn. You’re being promoted to subpilot and brevetted to an officer—ensign, level two. You will train under Nyb Pim when he returns to the bridge.”
“But he’s an eater. How am I supposed to—?”
“He’s not an eater. Someone trapped him, and I’m going to find out who. Meanwhile, he’s going through detox. Commander?” Drake nodded at Tolvern again.
She opened the cart and took out several sacks of sugar, containing about ten pounds each, together with a box containing sugar packets. The cook said this was all he had in the kitchen. It had been under lock and key; there were Hroom in the fleet, after all, and plenty of sugar smuggling.
Tolvern carried the sugar to the incinerator. The sacks were too big for the little chute on the bridge, so she tore them open and poured the sugar down it. Then she emptied the packets into the incinerator as well.
“Naval regs prevent sugar being held privately,” Drake said as she worked, “but I’m declaring an amnesty through the end of today. Turn it in to Commander Tolvern, and there will be no consequences.”
“No sugar at all?” someone grumbled. “Not even in the kitchen?”
“The only Hroom on board is in the bloody isolation cell,” someone else said.
“We’ve got a little honey on board,” Drake said. “Not much. We’ll save it to sweeten tea. Cook tells me it will last about a week if rationed.” Several people grumbled or scowled at this.
“If I hear so much as a hint that someone has a secret stash, figuring ‘what’s the harm, it’s not like I’m going to do anything bad with the stuff,’ the next step will be to put every last bit of tea on board down the incinerator. I’m as Albionish as anyone here. If I have to give up my tea, I will be very cranky. Heads will roll.
“As for the disgusting idea that someone might be giving sugar to our pilot, let me say this. First, there will be a guard posted at all times. Unauthorized contact with Nyb Pim is prohibited. If anyone is caught trying to pass sugar to Nyb Pim, that person will be summarily executed. Am I understood?”
“Nobody asked to be on this ship,” Carvalho spoke up. “You ever think about that? I wasn’t even in the navy. I was on a trade ship and hauled in because my captain was passing contraband. I didn’t know nothing about it.”
“You are free to leave at any time,” Drake said. “We have an away pod. I can fire you off and you can see if anyone responds to your distress call. You and any other malcontents. I’ll strap you in myself, if that’s what you want.”
“So, death or slavery. That’s the choice you’re offering?”
“Obey orders, and I’ll leave you at the first safe port. It’s likely to be a Ladino world. Then you can do whatever you’d like. Until then, I will have discipline on this ship.”
Tolvern had finished dumping the sugar and now came to confront Carvalho where he stood. “Can you do that, Carvalho, or should I return you to the brig?”
He stared at her a long moment, his expression hard. “Fine.”
“Good,” Drake said. “You’re all dismissed. We have a lot of work to do. Corporal—I mean, Ensign—Capp, we seem to have drifted. Get us back on course.”
“Aye, Captain,” she said, and there was real energy in her voice.
She didn’t look at Carvalho, which was precisely Drake’s intent. He needed her until he had Nyb Pim back. He didn’t have much use for Carvalho.
The rest of them filed out. Drake took Tolvern by the arm as she made her way to her computer. “You, Commander, are off duty.”
“I thought I’d check the security system down by the isolation cells, make sure the cameras are active, and verify that Nyb Pim is still locked up. Then, I told Barker I’d meet with him about the engine. He has a possible fix he wants to run by me.”
“You are off duty.”
“But, Captain—”
“Commander,” he said, voice firm. “I’ll see you again at 1300. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.” In spite of her earlier protest, there was real relief in her voice.
As she disappeared from the bridge, he thought about his crew. All commoners. Even the ship doctor, a profession normally derived from the better sorts of society, was not from Drake’s class. The man hadn’t grown up on Albion but one of the outer colonies.
Never mind the prisoners—even considering what remained of Ajax’s original crew raised questions. Tolvern had sent off anyone who wouldn’t participate in the mutiny. It was no coincidence that the people who’d left were of a generally higher quality than those who had stayed. That was, if one only considered their station in life.
The ones who stayed are the loyal ones.
Drake pushed this thought out of his head and made his way to his captain’s chair. He waited until Capp glanced in his direction.
“Did you say you know a closer jump point than the one that will take us back toward the Shoals?”
“Aye, Cap’n. Fourteen hours closer.”
“Roughly a day’s journey?”
“Twenty-three hours, yeah.” She looked a little nervous. “Can’t say as I’d recommend it.”
“There’s a star, is that right?”
“Aye. You’re in the grav well of a star. You gotta pivot, accelerate, and execute another jump in less than two hours. Tough to do when you’re fighting the trips.”
“I think I’ve done this jump. A red dwarf, isn’t it? It’s murder going through two jumps back to back like that, but the jump itself didn’t seem too technically difficult.”
“Thing is,” she said, swallowing hard, her typical bravado missing, “I only seen it done once, and I wasn’t the pilot.”
“I only saw it done once, too,” he said. “We were jumping to San Pablo. You know the world? Hroom on one continent, humans on the other. Mostly Ladino and Dutch.”
“Yeah, I spent a week in the port. Rough place.”
“Good spaceyards though. And it’s on the frontier, which means the Albion fleet can’t enter, according to the treaty. Can you make the jump?”
“I-I don’t know the angle. And that close to the star, there’s some funny gravity effects. The jump point wobbles. If we mess up, if I come out of the first jump in a bad way . . . ”
“I have faith in you, Pilot.”
“Thing is, I’m not really a pilot. You said I could train.”
“Yes, and you will. In fact, I don’t intend for you to execute this jump alone. I’ve got a full day—”
“Technically, twenty-three hours.”
“Plus a couple of hours from the first jump to the second. More than a day, in fact. Nyb Pim hasn’t been an eater for long, so if we can keep him from the sugar . . . What do you know about that? Anyone feeding him?”
“Don’t know what you mean. I didn’t have nothing to do with that.” She seemed to catch herself, and added, belatedly, “I mean, sir.”
“But you might know someone who did. Someone feeding him sugar. Someone who might still do it. Maybe you could put out the word. We’re going to do a jump that might tear us into individual atoms if we don’t get it right. It would be helpful to have our pilot off the sugar by then.”
Barring that, he wondered if he should have kept back a bit of sugar, just in case. The only thing worse than an eater piloting your ship was an eater on withdrawal doing it. Give the Hroom some sugar, wait for the swoon to pass, then sit him in the chair and hope he had enough functioning brain cells to do the job.
No choice now; Drake had made the decision. There might not be another grain left on board. If there were, he hoped it was getting dumped quietly down the incinerator at this very moment.
“I don’t know nobody who gave him sugar,” Capp said. “But just in case, I’ll put out the word. Never hurts for people to know what’s serious, if you know what I mean.”
He’d already declared that anyone passing sugar to Nyb Pim would be summarily executed. Would it really take word from Capp before anyone took that seriously? If so, who was really in charge of this ship?
Chapter Eleven
Ten hours after Drake sent her from the bridge, Tolvern felt almost human again as she joined her captain at the front of the isolation block. The guard shifted his shotgun to one shoulder and saluted with his free hand.
“Any trouble?” Tolvern asked.
“No, ma’am. He was raving pretty good last night, but a few hours ago, we passed in food, and he ate it. Even pushed the bowl and plate back through the chute.”
“That’s good news,” she said. “What did he have?”
“Hot oatmeal, two raw eggs—usual Hroom breakfast.”
“And he ate it all?” she asked, surprised.
“Every last bit. Even asked for more, but Doc said he shouldn’t overdo it since he hasn’t been eating for so long.”
“What do you think about that?” Tolvern said to Drake as the two of them walked to the cell with the green light over the door. “That’s a good sign, right, Captain? I think he’s going to pull out of it.”
“You’re chipper this morning,” he said.
“Feeling great. Nobody is trying to kill me, for one.”
“You just got on shift. Give it a few minutes.”
“Ha!”
It wasn’t the relative safety of their current position that had improved her mood so much as the nine glorious hours of sleep. She’d followed them with a scalding shower and a full breakfast of scrambled eggs, buttered toast, sausage, and fried tomatoes, washed down with an entire pot of tea. Over the past few days she’d been feeling more and more glum, worried that she’d made a terrible, life-ending mistake in seizing Ajax from Rutherford to free her captain. But this morning, she was more convinced than ever that Drake had been innocent all along, that he had enemies who had framed him. He would be exonerated soon enough.
Drake cupped his hands at the window then stepped aside to let her have a look. She peered into the cell.
Nyb Pim sat on the floor facing the corner opposite his cot, his knees tucked to his chest. He’d finally stripped out of the rags they’d found him in on the slave ship and put on the pair of trousers. There was a shirt, too, but it sat on the floor, and the Hroom was bare from the waist up, his back to them.
He didn’t have the faded pink color of a eater, nor that starved, rib-showing look like the Hroom she’d seen on the bridge of Henry Upton. But there was something disturbing about the way he sat there, motionless. While she watched, a shiver worked itself down his spine, and turned into a shudder as it hit his limbs.
She stepped away from the window and reached out to open the door. “Better stand back, sir. Just in case.”
“You don’t have to tell me. My head is still aching from last time.”
The captain had come armed not with his standard side arm, but with a stun gun at his hip. He now unlatched the holster and flicked on the gun. It whirred to life.
Tolvern put her hand on the pad, and the door slid open. Nyb Pim didn’t turn.
“Pilot,” Drake said. He took the first step into the room, and Tolvern had a hard time not grabbing his shoulder to pull him back to safety. “Lieutenant Nyb Pim, it’s me, your captain.”
The Hroom’s high, melodic voice had a hollow sound to it. “Did you bring sugar?”
“There will be no more sugar, Pilot. We dumped it down the incinerator. There isn’t a grain left on the ship.”
A hoot, which passed for a laugh, came from the Hroom. “Or so you think.”
Tolvern now came in. She’d undone the strap on her own weapon. This one was loaded with bullets, and she was prepared to shoot if necessary.
“We know about Carvalho and Lutz,” she said. “Captain said anyone caught passing you sugar would be killed. Guess that did it for them. Lutz handed over two pounds of the stuff.”
“Two pounds.” There was something sinister in the Hroom’s tone, and his body tensed.
“Don’t even think about it,” she warned. “That crap went down the incinerator with the rest of it. This ship is clean.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Nevertheless, Nyb Pim’s body relaxed. He still had his long legs drawn to his chest, his back turned.
“How are you feeling?” Drake asked. “Can we trust you?”
Another hooting laugh. It shortly died. Nobody spoke for a long moment. Tolvern was beginning to think they should give it another day or so, except Drake had already changed course, and they were going toward the jump point that would bring them out within the gravity well of a red dwarf. They didn’t have time to straighten this out, they needed the pilot to snap out of it in a hurry.
“They always tell you,” Nyb Pim said after a moment, “one taste on the tongue, that’s all it takes. You hear it, you see the fools who’ve sold their souls into slavery, who have degraded our ancient and glorious civilization and everything it stood for. But you tell yourself that this may be true for the weak willed, not for you.”
“So that’s why you did it?” Tolvern asked. How could he have done something so stupid? He’d always been the most sensible person on the ship save the captain. “To prove you were different?”
“I wasn’t so deluded as that. My brother became an eater, together with most of my village. My parents, too. I saw what it could do when I was still a Hroomling. Once my family was destroyed, they shipped me off with human missionaries who never let me near the stuff.”
“That’s exactly what I thought,” Drake said, sounding relieved. “I knew you must have been tricked somehow.”
For her part, Tolvern was more confused than ever. “But how is it that you didn’t recognize what was happening? It’s only pure white sugar that does it. Mix it with something, even dissolve it in water, and sucrose is no more dangerous than any other sweet substance. It’s only the pure stuff that sets you off, so how did you possibly put some in your mouth without knowing?”
“And when you did,” Drake added, “why didn’t you go straight to the sick bay for treatment? You must have recognized what was happening the instant it hit your tongue. You must have known you’d been poisoned.”
“I wasn’t poisoned.”
“You know what he means,” Tolvern said. “Same thing, isn’t it? You were a pilot of a Royal Navy cruiser before you tasted it. A few days later, you were a slave.”
“I wasn’t poisoned,” Nyb Pim insisted, “because I ate the sugar of my own free volition.”
“What?” The word exploded from her mouth. “King’s balls, why would you do such a thing?”
“And I did so knowing slavery would be the result. Indeed, that was my intent all along.”
The captain looked stunned.
“Are you mad?” Tolvern said.
“It’s a curious thing,” Nyb Pim said. “They have slaves to work the sugar worlds. Millions of them, and millions more needed. A place like Hot Barsa is too steamy, too tropical. Riddled with disease. Humans die. Hroom die, too, but we’re expendable. They can always ship in more. They need so many of us because the demand for sugar is endless. The more sugar they ship, the more slaves they need. The more Hroom that become enslaved, the more sugar they need. An endless circle, like a snake biting its own tail.”
