Rebellion of Stars (Starship Blackbeard Book 4) (20 page)

Chapter Twenty

The second time into the star’s fiery embrace was worse, somehow. This time, Drake was bracing for the heat, and he was already exhausted. They chilled
Blackbeard
as much as possible before descending toward the sun, but the air, the floor, even the water coming out of the taps was soon scalding.

Dreadnought
followed them down. She gained as
Blackbeard
was forced to slow dramatically, and nearly had the smaller ship in range of her guns before they fell into pace at nearly the same speed. They circled twice around the vast diameter of the sun, baking. He needed
Dreadnought
to pull away, then he’d make a run for it.

“It isn’t working,” Capp said. She’d stripped to a sweat-soaked tank top and had a collection of empty and partially consumed jugs of water at her feet. “We can’t shake them.”

“One more pass,” he said. “
Dreadnought
will be forced to retreat. She can’t take the heat.”

“In case you haven’t noticed,” Smythe said, “we’re not doing so well ourselves. One more pass, and we’ll be cooked alive.”

“We only need a few hours more than Malthorne,” Drake said.

“It’s almost one hundred and ten degrees in here!” Smythe exclaimed.

Drake fixed him with a hard stare. “I am well aware of that, lieutenant.”

“Sorry, sir.” He dropped his gaze to his console.

Yet Smythe was right. They couldn’t stand this much longer. And
Dreadnought
? Was Malthorne weak and feverish, yet stubbornly refusing to call off the attack? He was an older man, in his fifties, but rigid and unyielding, like a piece of rope hardened with frozen salt water. No, Drake couldn’t count on the man’s physical limitations to win this particular struggle. His battle was with the battleship itself, her physical limitations.

“Slow us down another five percent,” he told Oglethorpe.

“That will bring us in range of them guns,” Capp said. She looked at Manx, who was at the defense grid. “Right, Manx?”

“And you,” Drake told her. “Bring us in closer. I want us on the edge of the transition zone. I’ll warn engineering. We’ll need to catch that extra radiation. We’ll need
Dreadnought
to catch it, too.”

There were more worried noises from the bridge at this, and engineering didn’t like it, either. They were in a relatively cool band just below the chromosphere, and Drake meant to take them into hotter space. Let them figure it out. Drake was tired of explaining, and simply tired. His own collection of water jugs was nearly emptied, yet after drinking and drinking, he still didn’t need to urinate. It was all coming out his pores. Probably, they were all getting dangerously dehydrated and suffering heat exhaustion.

As expected,
Dreadnought
began to pull in closer as
Blackbeard
slowed and descended closer to the star. Jane, her voice the calmest on board, warned that they’d fallen within range of the enemy guns, and that
Dreadnought
’s silos were opening. Two missiles flashed out. With plenty of advance warning,
Blackbeard
brought them down with countermeasures.
Dreadnought
drew closer still.

This time, she let loose with a heavy barrage. Missiles, followed by torpedoes. Countermeasures brought down the missiles. The torpedoes locked in and closed. Three of them, all targeting the rear shields protecting the engines. One they could take. Maybe two, accepting heavy damage. The third would finish them off.

“Give them a flash,” he told Smythe.

“They’re Hunter-IIs, sir,” he said. “Hardened against that tactic.”

“Do it. Capp, prepare evasive maneuvers.”

The crew braced themselves as the torpedoes closed. When they were a few hundred miles out, Smythe pulled the trigger. A pulse of radiation burst toward the enemy weapons. At the same moment, Capp shimmied
Blackbeard
like a fish squirming from the jaws of a shark. The torpedoes soared harmlessly by and were soon caught in the star’s gravity well and dragged down to a fiery death.

“What’s that, then?” Capp asked. “How did we—?”

“Smythe, explain,” Drake said.

“Oh, of course,” the tech officer said. “They were already taking a beating from the energy coming off that star. A bit of extra radiation overwhelmed the shielding. How did you know that would happen, sir?”

“Catarina Vargus taught me that one,” he admitted. “I told her the Hunter-IIs couldn’t be defeated by flash-style countermeasures like the old Mark-style torpedoes. She informed me otherwise.”

He hadn’t been entirely sure it would work. The Vargus sisters were not opposed to a little boasting. After surviving several scrapes with the Royal Navy, they were entitled. Still, what was fact, and what was bluster?

Dreadnought
didn’t waste more ammunition, but kept closing. Any closer, and the cannons would come into play. That was an attack for which Drake had no ideas. Simple kinetic force would pound them into submission. He told Capp to accelerate again. They were swinging around the star again and still no sign that the enemy was giving up the chase.

Good lord, it was hot. “Jane, what’s the temp?”

“One hundred twelve point two.”

“Don’t sound so cheerful about it,” he grumbled. “How are the crew holding up?”

It was a rhetorical question, and pretty vague for Jane, but the computer had an answer, nonetheless. “Two crew in the gunnery have fainted from heat exhaustion. Medical reports indicate severe heat stress.”

Capp frowned. “We got to get out of here. Tell him, Lieutenant,” she said to Oglethorpe.

“We do, and we’re all dead,” Drake said.

So what? He’d push them until they all fell, one by one. How would that help? Could he have been wrong about
Dreadnought
? How did she keep up the pursuit, hour after hour?
“There she goes!” Smythe shouted.

The tech officer threw the enemy ship onto the viewscreen.
Dreadnought
was pulling out of the chase, running for cooler air.

“Capp, get us around that other hemisphere and then take us for the Fantalus jump,” Drake said.

“Fantalus, sir?” Oglethorpe said.

“Look at
Dreadnought
. Malthorne can block our way to Hot Barsa. We can’t go back directly. We’ll have to go around.”

“That will cost us valuable time,” the lieutenant said. “If Malthorne turns toward Hot Barsa, he’ll arrive before us.”

“That is unavoidable,” Drake admitted.

Still, they were alive. He imagined Malthorne cursing and raging as his adjutants mopped at his brow with damp cloths. The admiral would want to continue the pursuit. At the same time, there was no longer any hope of catching
Blackbeard
before it jumped out of the system. Meanwhile, his sugar plantations on Hot Barsa were in flames, and Rutherford had shut down all shipping to and from the planet.

In the end, Malthorne did as he must. He turned his battleship toward the jump point to the Barsa system, and let
Blackbeard
escape.

Drake had achieved some important objectives, even while conceding the battlefield to the enemy. The admiral would reach Hot Barsa, but without Lindsell, who was off chasing Drake’s support craft toward San Pablo.

Once in the Barsa system,
Dreadnought
was nearly invulnerable from ambush and could roam around as Malthorne wished. But the admiral wouldn’t attack Rutherford and the forts without the full weight of his fleet. That bought Drake valuable time.

Drake didn’t say this aloud. The others would figure it out soon enough.

“As I commanded,” he told them. Then he picked up the last full water jug at his feet, drained it dry, and waited for the air to cool.

#

A large fleet was crossing the Fantalus system when
Blackbeard
arrived. More than seventy vessels strong, it held merchant frigates, converted liners, lumbering barges, and all manner of mining and salvage craft. They were mostly New Dutch, but also Ladino and even Hroom, and appeared to be a refugee fleet from Jericho, now under attack by Apex.

Drake ordered Capp to continue toward the next jump point, even as he performed full scans of the refugees. Let’s see what they were carrying. Some of them might be roped into assisting his fight against Malthorne. He’d offer refuge on Saxony in return.

But there was something strange about the refugee ships. The entire flotilla was completely silent, flying along at cruising speed toward the inner worlds of the system. No engines; it was traveling only on momentum. The reality soon became apparent.

It was a ghost fleet.

Scans of the largest vessels showed that their hulls had been pierced in multiple locations. Someone had come in, cut holes in each of the ships to vent out the atmosphere, and left them to continue. Dead. No survivors that they could detect. And at their current trajectory, they would eventually pass out of the system to drift forever through the endless void.

“Wait, here’s a live ship,” Smythe said. “Look.”

There it was. A long, slender, needle-like craft like the one Drake and Rutherford fought. It dipped in and out of the ghost fleet.

“Looking for some tasty bits, I should imagine,” Capp said. “They eat their victims, right? Bloody apex predators.”

Apex, maybe. Predator, not so much. This wasn’t predator behavior. Predators culled the weak, consuming their prey. This was an entire herd of refugees cut down and slaughtered. Perhaps by this single craft. It seemed to be sport, as much as anything, whether the aliens ate some of their victims or not.

“We’re cloaked, sir,” Oglethorpe said, sounding nervous. “Best be making for the next jump point, don’t you think, before they detect us?”

Drake was inclined to mix it up with the aliens. Destroy or drive off this ship, and it might convince Apex that Albion was not an enemy to be trifled with. Could he scare them away long enough to end the Albion civil war and unite the nation against this new threat? Or might he instead draw Apex ships by the hundreds? Who knew?

But here he faced a single ship, and after his other battle with the aliens, he’d mounted his own hundred-kilowatt laser to fight them. His shields, normally stubbornly resistant against any sort of non-kinetic weaponry, were vulnerable to the aliens in turn, but were they helpless? He didn’t think so. With superior tactics . . .

He shook his head. No. This was not the time. If he didn’t defeat Malthorne first, Apex would rip Albion and her people to shreds.

And so he kept a wary eye on the ghost fleet and its killer as he continued toward the next jump point. They approached it warily, half expecting an ambush either here or on the other side. But when they came through, the space lanes were clear.

Six days later, they jumped into the Barsa system. There they found HMS
Dreadnought
lurking in wait.

Chapter Twenty-one

It was the last night before the assault on the military base, and Tolvern had made her bed in a hammock forty feet above the ground. They were in a transition zone of mixed Hroom and Terran vegetation between the lowlands and highlands, but the forest floor was still infested with pouncers. The army took to the trees.

The Hroom were masters at manufacturing shelter out of what the forest gave them, and they bivouacked on beds made from cut branches and fronds and strung up with vines. Tolvern’s own hammock stretched between the branches of two separate trees. Carvalho’s bed hung to her right, while Brockett and Nyb Pim lay some twenty feet below them. As the sky darkened into a black, starless night, she heard the science officer and the pilot below, discussing what kind of equipment would be needed to manufacture more doses of the sugar antidote.

But soon, a breeze swept down from the mountains, driving away both the heat and the bugs, as well as drowning out their conversation. After weeks in the sweltering lowlands, Tolvern found the cool air a relief beyond words, but it sent her hammock swaying back and forth with every gust.

“Tolvern,” Carvalho said about twenty minutes later. “Are you asleep?”

“How could I be with this wind?”

“Do you still have that vine rope we used to cross the stream?”

“It’s my pillow,” she said.

“Toss the end over here. I have an idea.”

Tolvern didn’t know what he was getting at, but she threw over the end of the vine. He took hold of it and used the vine to lash the two hammocks together.

“Now take the other end and tie it down by your feet,” he told her. “There, isn’t that better?”

It was, she had to admit. Pulling the two hammocks together and tying them off had stabilized them against the wind. It turned the rough rocking into a gentle sway.

“I told you we’d be sharing a bed sooner or later,” he said.

“You’d better not snore.”

“Didn’t Capp tell you? I rumble like a warthog. Why do you think she kicks me out of her bed every night before she goes to sleep?”

“If it gets too bad, I’ll do the same.”

“We’re forty feet up,” he said. “That will hurt.”

“I know.”

“What’s wrong with a sharp elbow to the ribs? That will shut me up.”

“So will pouncers and tigers.”

“I can’t tell if you’re playing,” he said, “or if you still dislike me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You understand me perfectly well,” Carvalho said. “Sometimes, I see you watching, and I think you want to tear off my clothes. Other times, you say these things, and I can never tell if you are serious or not.”

“Why not both? Maybe I want to tear your clothes off first and then push you to the ground anyway.”

Tolvern meant it as a jest, but suddenly, the hammocks heaved, and Carvalho was over on her side. Right up next to her, a solid block of muscle against her lean frame.

“What the blazes are you doing?” she demanded.

“Do you want me to go back?”

“The devil take you, of course I do. Get out of here.”

“My apologies, then. I misunderstood.”