Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) (11 page)

And a good thing, too. There, lurking on the other side, was a Hroom fleet, six mighty sloops of war, their serpentine batteries hot and already firing on Dunkley’s schooner.

Chapter Nine

HMS
Dreadnought
filled the port window of Captain Rutherford’s away pod, long and black and bristling with guns. The bridge on the foredeck was a blue light that looked like a single, unblinking eye. From this angle,
Dreadnought
looked more like a monster, some creature of the deep, than a battleship. And Rutherford was hurtling toward its mouth.

There were eight molded seats in the pod, but the only other occupant was Catherine Caites, who sat to one side, hands on the straps of her restraints, staring at the blinking instrument panel opposite, her jaw clenched. For a woman who had raced through the void in a little tin can of a torpedo boat, she’d seemed surprisingly anxious about climbing into the pod, and her anxiety had not abated since
Vigilant
launched her at
Dreadnought
.

She turned and seemed to notice Rutherford studying her. “It’s not claustrophobia, sir.”

“No?”

“No, sir. There’s no engine on this thing—that’s what scares me. I don’t like being fired off like we were a cannonball.”

“We have been launched on a preprogrammed trajectory.
Dreadnought
already has the net out for us.” He pointed to the schematic on the pod console showing the battleship’s space hook.

“Ninety seconds to docking,” the computer said.

It was the sophisticated male baritone chosen by Rutherford for
Vigilant
’s computer. The crew called him Simon. Rutherford found Simon’s voice calming at a time like this, but Caites didn’t unclench her jaw.

“What if we miss?” she asked.

“Impossible.”

“It’s not impossible, it happens. Someone isn’t paying attention, or there’s an emergency.”

“Yes, I understand. I spent seventeen hours in a misfired away pod only a few months ago.”

“Yes, sir. During the Ajax mutiny. Wearing nothing but your bathrobe, sir. Everybody knows that.”

Rutherford scowled at the thought of fleet gossips laughing over his humiliating capture at the hands of Jess Tolvern. Dragged naked from the shower, tossed a bathrobe, and shoved in an away pod with several other prisoners of the mutiny.

“Then you know what happened,” he said. “I sent a distress signal, and eventually someone tracked me down and rescued me. It was an annoyance, nothing more.”

“Yes, but imagine if you’d called for help and there had been a malfunction in the computer. The call doesn’t go out. You’re in a six-by-eight egg with no engines, no way for anyone to find you as you keep flying and flying until the heat death of the universe.”

Rutherford scoffed. “Has that ever happened in the history of the fleet? I don’t mean an escape pod of a fighter or a torpedo boat, but an actual away pod.”

“It has, sir. There were several pods lost in the Third Hroom War, including one carrying a destroyer captain after his ship was crippled and he had to eject. They never found him. Wherever he went, he’s
still
going. Long dead, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less horrifying.”

“Escape pods. In battle. This is not either of those things.” Rutherford gave her a sharp look. “I thought you said you weren’t a military historian. How do you know this?”

“I don’t like this feeling where I’m not in control. I want something with an engine, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Are you worried about the admiral? Don’t be. I will make the proposal, but if he doesn’t accept it, you’ll be back on my bridge, no harm done.”

“Ten seconds to docking,” Simon said.

The net caught them and hauled them in. But it was only when the two officers were welcomed through the airlocks by a pair of young ensigns that Caites seemed to relax. Rutherford glanced at her, and he could see her smoothing her face, calming herself like a woman about to enter battle. By the time they entered the lift and she turned to face the doors, all sign of her jitters was gone. Rutherford nodded to himself, satisfied, and turned toward the doors opening onto the upper deck.

Dreadnought
’s enormous bridge could have held Caites’s old torpedo boat, and Rutherford caught her eyes widening in surprise. There were three subpilots to assist the master pilot, a separate science station with the bank of consoles and arrays for the tech officers, and six communications specialists. Then there were liaisons for the gunnery, engineering, and the hospital, plus a separate station for the Royal Marine commander.

The lord admiral had vacated the helm and sat at a small table with several adjutants. He dismissed them as Rutherford and Caites approached. The two officers from
Vigilant
remained standing while Malthorne scrolled through some report or memo, rubbing at his bushy sideburns with his free hand. At last, he gestured for them to sit.

He studied Caites, and to her credit, she didn’t flinch or look away, but met his gaze coolly. During that business on the away pod, Rutherford had begun to question his decision, but he had been regaining his confidence in her since arriving on the battleship.

“You have read my report, sir?” Rutherford asked.

Malthorne turned his lizard-like gaze in Rutherford’s direction. “Yes. You have sent a number of them. I must confess to being baffled by your behavior.”

“Sir?”

“Starting with your refusal to obey my orders to return to Gryphon Shoals to pursue the traitor. An act of insubordination.”

Rutherford bit back an angry retort. He had disobeyed orders because he had discovered a new and hostile alien race. And Drake had not been where the admiral thought he was, anyway. If Rutherford had raced back with Harbrake and the rest of the task force, he wouldn’t have found
Blackbeard
, as Malthorne well knew by now.

“With all due respect,” Rutherford began, though he felt no respect at the moment. “I had information to which the Admiralty was not yet privy.”

“And then you met Drake. In person. You didn’t capture or kill him, but let him go on his merry way.” A touch of anger clouded Malthorne’s voice.

“He had just saved my life, and there was a pirate frigate guarding his flank. I decided that gaining information was more important than bringing him to justice.”

“Did you make an attempt, at least?”

“No attempt was possible.”

“So you say.” Malthorne grabbed a file of papers and took out a sheet, which he slapped on the table. “Now you offer
this
claim. What am I to make of it?”

He’d thrown down the lengthy memo Rutherford had written in response to the subspace from Drake about the Hroom death fleet. Rutherford didn’t need to read it; he’d carefully composed it before sending and had studied the words for the past few days until he’d memorized them in preparation for this meeting.

“You have not yet shared your intentions for this fleet,” Rutherford began carefully, “but there are at least two suicide task forces from the Hroom navy approaching the home worlds. We must assume that they are going directly to Albion.”

“Why? Why must we assume any such thing? Maybe they are on a reconnaissance mission, or maybe Drake is lying. Maybe he met the Hroom and has thrown in with them. This could be a feint to force us to retreat from the frontier.”

Now why would Malthorne think Drake had met the Hroom? Rutherford hadn’t breathed a word about the sugar antidote that his old friend had liberated from Malthorne’s estate.

“I do not agree, Admiral,” Rutherford said. “Drake is a traitor, and of course we will eventually bring him to justice.”

Drake is not the traitor.
 

No, the traitor was right in front of Rutherford, wearing the crown-and-star insignia of Vice Admiral on his shoulder and a sneer on his face.

“But Drake is telling the truth about the death fleet,” Rutherford continued. “I saw a second fleet, which confirmed it. There is no other reason for them to be so far from their defensive positions.”

“You would stake your career on it?” Malthorne demanded.

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. Then if you say it, it must be true. Let us suppose, for the moment, that you are correct. There are a pair of death fleets. Why target Albion, why not Saxony or Mercia? They are less well protected, they would be more easily destroyed.”

The answer was so obvious as to be self-evident, and Rutherford only just managed not to snarl the answer. He kept his tone measured. “There are twenty million people on Saxony, and less than thirty million on Mercia. Destroy them, and you destroy nothing. Destroy Albion, and the war is over.”

Malthorne removed a pipe from his coat pocket. He packed it with tobacco from a tin, lit it, and puffed in silence for several seconds, a thoughtful expression on his face. Rutherford took that to mean that the danger had passed, that the lord admiral was no longer going to crush him for insubordination.

“I do not like a defensive war,” the admiral said at last. “Do you know how we lost Wessex in the Third Hroom War?”

Rutherford didn’t, or rather, he had a vague knowledge that the Hroom had landed ground troops and burned the cities of the colony planet to the ground. The planet of Wessex was still there, waiting to be recolonized, but there were too many jump points into the system, making it difficult to defend, and since there were still millions of square miles of fertile land on Albion, Saxony, and Mercia to settle, the colonization effort would have to wait for a future, more peaceful time.

“Well?” Malthorne pressed. “Do you? Don’t tell me your education is that deficient.”

“Lieutenant Caites is a better historian,” Rutherford said. “Perhaps she understands what you are searching for.” He nodded at her.

Caites frowned, and for a brief moment, he thought he’d overplayed his hand. If she’d been telling the truth and really did know little of military history, both of them would be left dangling.

“During the Third Hroom War,” Caites began, “the Admiralty ordered a defensive cordon around the home worlds. An alien fleet slipped through and attacked Albion. While we were fighting them in the Albion system, a second fleet attacked Wessex and landed fifty thousand troops while their sloops bombarded the surface from orbit. Queen Ellen ordered the survivors to evacuate.”

“Very good,” the admiral said. “After we lost Wessex, the queen ordered the fleet on the offensive. After that, we never lost another significant battle in the war. Our mistake was being too timid from the first. Never fight a defensive war against the Hroom—that is what we learned. They can attack, but they have no mind for defense.”

The way he spoke, it was as if Malthorne had been leading the fleet himself. But the Third Hroom War had ended decades ago, when the admiral must have been a child.

“
That
is the purpose of my fleet, Rutherford,” Malthorne continued. “I won’t use it to huddle timidly in orbit around Albion and repeat the mistakes that lost us Wessex.”

“So we will penetrate Hroom space again?” Rutherford asked.

“Yes. We’ll bypass the frontier, ignore the outer Hroom systems and seize
this
.”

Malthorne pulled up a map of the sector on the table console. It showed the Albion systems in blue, the Hroom as a much larger swath of red, and the Ladino, New Dutch, and frontier systems as a tranche of yellow separating the two. There was a blue dot deep in Hroom territory, which the admiral pointed to now.

“Our spies say that the local government on this Hroom planet has collapsed,” Malthorne said, “but it still has a functioning space elevator and a relatively temperate climate for human occupation. We will seize the planet, Colonel Fitzgibbons will reinforce it with six hundred thousand marines, and we’ll hold it as a forward operating base until we win the war. Take the fight to the heart of the empire.”

It was a breathtakingly audacious plan, but Rutherford couldn’t see the point. Albion had plenty of land and resources already, and even under optimistic scenarios, it might be centuries before the kingdom needed the territorial gains Malthorne was talking about. The expedition must be about slaving and the sugar trade, but these were weak justifications for another brutal war.

“Look at my fleet,” Malthorne said. “Six cruisers, eighteen corvettes and destroyers, thirty-three torpedo boats and light frigates, plus troop transports. And
Dreadnought
, the mightiest war ship ever built. There’s no need to hide, no need to sneak through. Let them come. Nothing can resist us.”

Rutherford couldn’t hold his tongue any longer. “It is madness.”

“Explain yourself, Captain.”

“We will take this planet, all right. And while we do, the Hroom will turn Albion into a sea of radioactive glass. They are not trying to defeat our navy, Admiral, they are trying to annihilate the Albionish people. Take the fleet, go back and meet them.”

“And if you are wrong? If your traitor friend has lied to you?”

“Then I am wrong and suffer the consequences,” Rutherford said. “Your war is delayed a few months. Is there serious harm in that?”

“A good deal of harm. Do you know how many thousands of pounds have already been spent from the Exchequer to get this fleet assembled and in place?”

“A large sum, I imagine. But it would be rather more expensive to see the Exchequer destroyed by the Hroom.”

“You have made your point,” Malthorne said.

“Yes, sir.” Rutherford sensed an initial victory; he needed to discipline his tongue to see it secured.

“How long until the death fleets arrive in Albion space?” Malthorne asked.

“According to my calculations, at least a fortnight,” Rutherford said, “perhaps longer, depending on how circuitous a route they take. My pilot says that it will take us twelve days to return to Albion by the most direct route. We can beat the Hroom there, but only if we depart shortly.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Malthorne said. “I’ve sent Harbrake to clean up the pirate nests in the Shoals while we’re here, but as soon as he returns, we can set off. Let Drake help us fight the Hroom, then deal with him on our own terms.”