Blackbeard Superbox, page 9
“Where do you want to go, anyway?” Capp asked. “Back to the jump we came in on?”
“No, that’s where they’ll look for us.”
“I could take us to Fantalus. It’s closer.”
“Hmm.” As far as Tolvern could remember, the Fantalus system was the gateway to nowhere useful. “And where do we go from Fantalus?”
Capp looked sheepish. “Back to Gryphon Shoals.”
“Do you know any other jumps from this system?”
“No, just those two.”
“Well, then. Fantalus, I suppose. It’s a different route, so there is that much.”
“Guess it’s better than sitting around scratching our balls,” Capp said.
Not that either woman possessed such a thing, but why speak properly when a vulgarity was at hand? Again, Tolvern was counting the hours until they could dump Capp, Carvalho, and the lot of them.
She thought briefly about calling the sick bay to see if she could get advice from the captain, but she knew what he would tell her. Until they had Nyb Pim back in the pilot’s chair, they didn’t have much choice but to backtrack toward the Gryphon Shoals. Seemed to be the only place Capp could reliably get them that wasn’t swarming with Royal Navy.
About an hour later, Tolvern got word from medical that Drake was under light sedation in his own quarters, sleeping off his concussion. Tolvern had been awake for almost twenty hours now. Under normal rotation, she’d be midway through her sleep shift. In fact, getting herself some rest would be not only desirable, but expedient. Hard to say how long until the captain returned, and they needed someone fresh at the helm. Maybe she could grab a few hours as they made a straight line toward the jump point.
But who could she leave the bridge to? Smythe was fresher, only midway into his shift, but he was a tech officer in every sense of the word; if it wasn’t computer related, he didn’t know what to make of it. She could call Barker again, see if he had anyone else to spare, but she could only imagine his tone of voice.
She turned her gaze to Capp, who had picked up the cigar and was chewing on the end while she thumbed through the nav computer with her eyes half-closed. No, don’t even think of it.
So Tolvern settled into the captain’s chair with a suppressed sigh. Nothing was happening on the viewscreen, so she queried Jane to ask about the shields. The answer was not pretty.
She was running through scenarios in her head of what they would do if they approached the jump point to find a couple of navy corvettes lurking, when Jane picked up a message sent via the coded Royal Navy subspace channel.
Supposedly, Jane always spoke in the same tone whether she was relaying what was for supper in the mess or warning of pending core meltdown, but Tolvern swore she could hear all manner of emotions in the computer’s voice. This time, Jane sounded skeptical as she relayed the message.
“Captain and crew of HMS Ajax, return to Albion and surrender and you will be granted a full pardon.”
Chapter Nine
Drake woke to his com link chiming from the bedside table. At first, it seemed like a part of his dream, in which he was on the deck of Ajax, giving battle orders. Only at the same time, in that strange way of dreams, the ship wasn’t Ajax, it was a seagoing vessel, a quaint Old Earth-style aircraft carrier. They were being attacked by war planes of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and Jane’s computerized voice kept warning him that a wave of kamikazes was inbound.
“Captain? Are you there? Captain?”
Only gradually did he come awake, and even more gradually did he realize it wasn’t Jane’s voice he was hearing, but Commander Tolvern’s. Why was he so groggy? Oh, yes. The concussion, the sedation.
He reached for the com link. “Yeah, what is it?”
“Can I come in?”
As soon as he sat up, the room sensed his movement, and a cool blue light suffused his cabin, just bright enough to see its general outlines. During the bombardment, the doors to his cupboards had been knocked open, and his books had come spilling out. He hadn’t bothered to pick them up; he’d barely managed to strip out of his clothes and toss them to the floor as he collapsed into bed.
“Open,” he said.
The door to his room slid open, and a blinding light came in from the hall. He squinted until the door had closed. Tolvern stood silhouetted near the doorway.
“Problem?”
“Many problems,” she said. “But mainly, you’d been asleep for some time, and Doc told me to check on you.”
The wall display read 0412 hours. Good heavens, how long had he slept? Eleven hours? He hadn’t set an alarm, but couldn’t remember the last time he’d needed to. He kept his body under the same discipline as the ship, and normally found himself waking between six and seven hours after he crawled into bed, regardless of how tired he was. That must have been strong stuff the doctor had given him.
He tossed off the blanket and grabbed for his trousers, which were located at the foot of his bed where he’d tossed them. By the time the lights finished coming up, he had an undershirt on, too.
Tolvern looked around the room, a half smile at her lips. “What a pig sty. How do you live in such filth?”
“Funny girl,” he said, wincing as he bent to grab some headphones and stick them in a drawer.
Together, they picked up the books that had been knocked out of his shelves by Vigilant’s guns. In a moment, they had everything straightened up.
His room was small by land standards, but of course it was still the largest quarters on the ship. He had his own bathroom, a small kitchen so he didn’t have to eat all his meals in the officers’ mess, and a small nook for reading that also boasted a great audio system on which he listened to classical music, Bach and Judas Priest being his favorites of the old masters.
But it was such a small space that even a single item out of place made it feel cluttered and unlivable. It was only a sanctuary from daily life on the ship if he kept it spotless.
He’d been to Tolvern’s room once, and that was two years earlier, during a rare lull in the war, when they’d been able to celebrate Twelfth Night like civilians. Tolvern had acted as captain, and he’d played her cabin boy. He appeared dutifully at her door to escort her to the bridge. She’d cracked the door just enough to slip through sideways. But he’d caught a glimpse inside. Dirty clothes and dishes everywhere. Drawers hung out, the bed was unmade and askew in the room, and pictures of her parents, nieces and nephews, and the family dog had been tacked haphazardly to the walls. Half-read books lay spine up on her little desk.
“Captain Tolvern,” he’d said in a tone of faux concern, “have you called the MP? It seems you were robbed during the night.”
Now he looked her over more closely. Her eyes were red, with bags beneath them, and her hair was mussed, and her uniform crumpled. One of the buttons of her vest was undone, and she had what looked like a grease stain on her pant leg, as if she’d eaten standing at the computer instead of in the mess.
“You should have called me earlier. You must be fifteen hours over your shift.”
“Eighteen and a half,” she said. “I don’t dare leave the bridge for more than twenty minutes. Afraid I’ll come back to find a new regime in place.”
“The problem with mutiny,” Drake said, “is that when you’ve finished you’re left with a crew of mutineers.”
She grimaced. “It’s not the mutineers. Corporal Capp and the other prisoners worry me more. Her lover, that fellow Carvalho—I swear he’s a pirate, or I don’t know the meaning of the word.”
He cast a glance toward the bathroom, needing a hot shower, followed by several cups of even hotter tea. When he glanced back, Tolvern was stifling a huge yawn. The tea could wait, he decided.
“Give me five minutes,” he said. “Then you can brief me in the war room before I send you down. No, better yet. Come talk to me while I get cleaned up.”
He went into the bathroom and turned the water to maximum heat in the hope that it would cut his headache, which was starting to return. Tolvern stood outside the bathroom while he showered, shouting in to him what had occurred since the doctor drugged him up.
While still in the Barsa system, she’d received a message offering amnesty if Drake and his crew would surrender to the Royal Navy. She’d ignored the request, figuring that it was a trick, and continued to the jump point.
They’d jumped to Fantalus, a system whose binary stars left its planets alternately boiling or frigid and which was therefore uninhabited except for a few easily avoided outposts. They were now racing toward the next jump, on their way back to the Gryphon Shoals. Tolvern didn’t know where else to take them. Until they had their pilot back, they were stuck with what Capp could do, which was very little. Tolvern figured that they might be able to find someone to finish their repairs in the shoals.
That was unlikely, Drake thought, though he didn’t say this aloud. From what Tolvern reported about their damage, he figured they’d need at least a week in the yards and about twenty thousand pounds to complete the repairs. This was a military vessel; they had no money on board except what pocket change could be found in possession of the crew. Drake thought he might have a few guineas and a couple of half crowns, and doubted anyone else would do much better.
Anyway, the operations in the Gryphon Shoals were small-time. Ajax needed major shipbuilding prowess. And that meant Nyb Pim in the pilot’s chair.
Unfortunately, the news wasn’t good for the Hroom pilot. He’d only been an eater for a few weeks, and Drake had been under the impression that the relationship between Hroom addiction and detox proceeded in a non-linear fashion. A Hroom who’d been an eater for five years might need a decade to recover, but a Hroom who’d only been on the sugar a few weeks might only need a few days. If that. The pilot should already be pulling out of it.
Drake told her this as he grabbed his towel and climbed out of the shower. He looked up from pulling on his underwear to see Tolvern casting a surreptitious glance at him from where she stood outside the bathroom. She met his gaze and looked away, blushing.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Doc checked me out. Nothing else broken.”
“What? Oh. Well, I was wondering,” she added quickly. “You slept long enough. But now that I’ve had a good look, you seem healthy enough. A few bruises.”
“My apologies, Commander. I meant to get up earlier, I really did.”
“Anyway,” she continued as he came into the front room and grabbed his socks and shoes, “I’m wondering if someone is still feeding him sugar.”
He gave her a sharp look. “What do you mean?”
She told how she’d caught Carvalho and one of the other prisoners, a man she’d since discovered was named Lutz, standing outside the isolation cells, scheming.
“I went back down a couple of hours later to see if Nyb Pim would be more reasonable, or if he’d try to attack me again. He was twitching in the corner. Wouldn’t respond.”
“Sugar swoon?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe that’s a symptom of withdrawal. I asked Doc—he said either was possible.”
“So you’re thinking they got to Nyb Pim, told him they’d bring him sugar if he . . . what, exactly?”
She shrugged. “Nyb Pim might have promised all sorts of stuff to get his fix. Maybe he can deliver, maybe not. Smythe was able to pull up info on Carvalho. He was arrested for selling military supplies to civilians on the black market. This seems like something he’d do.”
“We’ll soon put an end to it.”
“I already did. Lutz and Carvalho are in the brig. Took them at gunpoint myself.”
That was a problem. On the one hand, Drake was furious that the two men would be undermining his attempts to get their pilot out of isolation and back where he belonged. Some captains—Rutherford came to mind—would have grabbed the man, had him whipped and his possessions searched. Then dumped him out the airlock if anything turned up. Maybe in the heat of battle, Drake would have done the same thing. But now was not the heat of battle. Now he was short-handed.
“What about Capp?” he asked.
Tolvern looked proud of herself. “I waited until she was off shift and asleep in her quarters before arresting her friend. She’ll be up soon, though. I imagine we’ll need to massage things. Carvalho is pretty mad. Lutz actually threatened me.”
“We might need to release them.”
“What? No. Captain—”
“It’s a delicate situation. We barely have crew enough to fly. Capp might be Carvalho’s lover. Imagine if she refuses to navigate. We’re suddenly drifting helplessly through space with no way to jump.”
She jutted out her chin. “We’ll find a way.”
“The Fantalus system is as good as uninhabited. The closest settlement is five light years away. The plasma engines top out at twelve percent light speed. I suppose we could send out a subspace distress signal and wait to see who shows up, but I doubt we’d like the result.”
“And you think letting them go is the answer? I know what I saw.”
“Then there are the other prisoners. What are they going to think if we throw their mates in the brig based on a suspicion?”
“The devil take them all. Sooner we dump these villains, the better.”
“Agreed,” he said. “But until then, we’ve got to work with the crew we’ve been given.”
He didn’t point out, though he’d been thinking it more or less continuously since the mutiny, that Tolvern’s rash decision was the cause of this entire mess. If she’d done her duty, obeyed orders no matter where in the fleet they’d sent her, they wouldn’t be running for their lives with a bare-bones crew with poor discipline and suspect loyalties.
Except Drake was no longer certain the mutiny was a mistake. Well, Tolvern’s motives were certainly mistaken. But some curious things had turned up. What had happened to Nyb Pim was chief among his concerns, but he was also wondering why Rutherford had broken pursuit to go back and rescue the slaver. Drake had made the suggestion himself, but he hadn’t expected the man to take the bait. In fact, he’d been fully prepared to surrender so as to save all those humans and Hroom. Did Rutherford truly break off to rescue the crippled ship, or did he break off out of sympathy for his old friend? Drake couldn’t decide.
And then there was the curious message offering a pardon if Ajax surrendered.
Why would they do that? A trick to recover the cruiser, as Tolvern suggested? Surely Admiral Malthorne would never do such a thing. The man’s pride wouldn’t allow it, for one. For another, both Malthorne and Rutherford would know that Drake would recognize a bluff when he saw it. Discipline was so precarious in the lonely depths of space that mutiny must be put down with all violence. They would never offer amnesty, unless . . .
What if there had been something, or someone, on the slaver of critical importance? And now they thought he had it.
He needed to speak to Nyb Pim. And he couldn’t do that until he had the man detoxed. And that meant imposing discipline on his broken, rebellious crew.
Drake buttoned his jacket and told Jane to open all channels. Tolvern gave him a curious look.
“This is Captain Drake speaking. All hands are to report at once for a ship-wide meeting. If you are currently bleeding from a chest wound or your finger on the button is the only thing preventing an engine meltdown, you may hail me with your excuse. Otherwise, you will appear on the bridge by 0445. Refusal of this order will be considered mutiny and treated accordingly.” He ended the transmission.
To Tolvern, he added, “Release the prisoners.”
Chapter Ten
Drake stood in the center of the bridge with his hands clasped behind his back. The last person in the room was Carvalho, who wore a deep, angry scowl. He shot a poisonous glare at Tolvern, then cast a glance at Capp, who sat at the blacked-out nav computer, rotating her chair on its pivot and scratching idly at her lion tattoos. Barker stood near the door, by one of the boatswains and a young engineer. He had a computer in his palm, and he was surreptitiously glancing at it, seemingly unable to turn away from the repairs for even an instant. Smythe was doing the same over at his console, but for all Drake knew, the tech officer was playing Romans vs. Soviets again. Even the cook wore a sauce-splattered apron and carried a ladle in hand, as if to make his own point about how critical his work was.
Tolvern leaned against a cart she had wheeled in from the mess hall, and a few people pointed at it and whispered. Others were chatting idly amongst themselves, paying no attention to anyone or anything but their own petty concerns.
The lack of discipline had infected the entire crew. That would change now.
Drake pulled up a viewscreen. Nothing but deep space, an unfamiliar swath of bright, cold stars. Red, blue, yellow, orange. A glowing white shroud sliced along the y-axis from their point of view, and to starboard lay the bruised purple smear of a vast nebula, like a royal cloak covered with glowing diamonds and rubies.
“Thirty-seven hours until the next jump,” he said. Most people stopped talking, but a few whispered conversations continued. “In total, we’re three days’ travel from the nearest planet with a breathable atmosphere.”
He drew his gun and pointed it at Corporal Capp. The conversation died. Capp stiffened and stopped swiveling in the pilot’s chair.
“If I shoot the corporal, we won’t be able to find the jump point.” He pointed the gun at Barker. “If I kill the chief engineer, the damaged engines will melt down.”
Drake slid the gun back into its holster. He walked to his chair and sat down, then turned it to face them. He brought up his computer. “If I initiate certain emergency protocols, our atmosphere will vent out. Right there you have three people standing between you and death. But it goes deeper than that. Anyone in this room could kill himself and all of us. Push the wrong button, lean against an armed torpedo tube when it’s closed . . . we’re all gone.”
