Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) (24 page)

“You are not in any danger from
us
, Your Majesty, I promise you. And surely St. George won’t fire on the schooner or the palace while you are still in it.”

“Be quiet, Drake. I have orders for you.”

“Your Majesty?”

“When this battle is over—if, by the grace of God, we should survive as a people—you will present yourself to the palace for a new trial. It will be a fair one, I guarantee you. Your commander, your pilot, Captain Rutherford, and anyone else you choose will be allowed to testify on your behalf. If you are found innocent, you will be fully restored.” The king stopped, and his face turned even more grave. “Or, you can flee and return to a life of piracy. Those are your choices.”

Elation rose in Drake’s chest. This was it, his chance to prove his innocence, to clear his name. It was all he had ever wanted.

“I will come, Your Majesty.”

#

“You look more like your mother every time I see you,” Baron Drake said. “She was a very pretty young woman, you know.” The baron studied Tolvern with a smile as she gaped back at him. “But all the same, I’d rather not have your gun pointed at my chest.”

Tolvern hastily lowered the weapon. “I am sorry, Your Lordship.”

And then she blushed at the compliment, suddenly feeling like the shy child who had hidden behind her mother’s skirts and gawked at the tall, proud lord who had come to see her father, the steward of the estate.

The baron gestured behind him, and his wife came around the corner. She, too, looked none the worse for wear, dressed in a fine gown with velvet sleeves and a cinched waist. Like her husband, she was still attractive for her age. Captain Drake was of good breeding, as evidenced by his parents.

“Have you been mistreated?” Tolvern asked.

The baron shook his head. “Not yet. But they meant to hang us, so I suppose the mistreatment was coming. Is my son . . . ?”

“Is he alive and well? He was last time I saw him. We’d better get out of here and make sure he stays that way.”

Tolvern collected the rest of her people on the way down, and when she reached the bottom level, she found Capp by herself, pacing the entryway to the tower with a strange mixture of elation and fear on her face.

“Where are the rest?” Tolvern asked, frowning. She remembered the explosion and gunshots she’d heard from below. “Where did they go?”

“I couldn’t control those blokes. Tried to, but they wouldn’t leave it be, so we went down to the treasury.”

“What is this?” the baron asked. He studied Tolvern’s companions. “They said you had turned pirate, but I cannot believe my son would do such a thing.”

Tolvern had no time for this, either the nonsense in the vaults or explaining the whole mess to the baron. “Oglethorpe, the rest of you, escort Baron and Lady Drake to the ship. Capp, you stay with me.”

While Oglethorpe and the rest led the baron and his wife out of the tower, Capp and Tolvern hurried down the hallway toward the vaults. They passed several dead guards and crew members, cut down by gunfire. They rounded a corner and found another dead guard and two more dead crew. This had better be worth it; it had been a costly battle.

The vault entrance was a ruin of twisted bars with a mangled metal door blown off its hinges. Capp and Tolvern passed through it and into a concrete chamber with no windows and no exit, about twenty feet by twenty feet in dimension and a dozen feet high. This was the vault Tolvern had glimpsed during her visit as a cadet, only now she was inside, and her people had captured it. Shouts, cheers, and toasts echoed across the room. Men and women were slapping each other on the back, sharing flasks of whiskey, and dancing around. Someone handed a paper sack of sugar to the Hroom, who poured it into their mouths, hooting with excitement. There were about twenty people crammed into the room, and not one of them was holding his weapon at the ready.

All in all, their behavior displayed a disgusting lack of discipline, but when Tolvern saw what had them so worked up, she didn’t think there would have been any way to prevent the celebration. There was no gold bullion in the room, but what the pirates had discovered was nearly as good.

A huge pile of silver ingots, each one roughly a foot across and two feet long, lay stacked on one side of the room. They were stamped with the lions rampant of Albion and marked
H.M. Mint – Sidney - .999 – 1,000 lbs.
One thousand pounds! Each was a half-ton of silver. Formed in ingots in the Sidney mint and brought here to stamp out silver shillings.

She did some quick counting of the stack of silver. It was fifteen ingots wide, fifteen deep, and ten high. Each one a thousand pounds. There was more than a thousand tons of silver in the room. A fortune.

But how big a fortune? Tolvern closed her eyes to do the math, since all those gleaming ingots were an impossible distraction. An ounce of gold was worth fifty ounces of silver, which meant that each ingot would be worth 320 ounces of gold. The entire pile was worth more than 600,000 Albion pounds. No wonder they were dancing around like idiots. Even Tolvern’s fraction of a fraction would make her rich.

Capp spotted Carvalho and let out a whoop of delight. He caught her in his arms and swept her in a circle, and then they were dancing around, hollering like fools. Someone handed Capp a hip flask, and she took a long, sputtering chug.

The com link sounded. It was Drake. “I understand you have rescued my parents.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well done. Very well done, indeed. I knew I could count on you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now grab your people and get out of there.”

“Sir, we’re in the vault. We’ll need time to get the goods out.”

“How much is there?”

“A thousand tons of silver. I figure it’s worth six hundred thousand pounds, more or less.”

Drake let out a low whistle, then stopped. “Silver, you say?” There was something in his voice.

Tolvern eyed the pile of ingots, and a twinge of worry settled in her gut. They should probably get a forklift. Where would that come from?

“It’s going to take some time, sir.”

“We don’t have time.”

“I thought there was a truce.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re going to let us loot the royal treasury. Fort William has sent messages wondering what you’re still doing down there. What’s more, Fort St. George is refusing to obey the king’s command. It has engines and is moving itself into geosynch over York Town. Once that happens, we’re in trouble. And the Royal Marines are growing restless. The king himself sent a message to warn me they’d be moving soon.”

“But, sir. It’s a fortune. We need time to move it.”

“Grab what you can and get airborne. I told Paredes already. Ten minutes, and you’re in the air. If not, you will be destroyed by Fort St. George. It’s that simple.”

Tolvern checked the time and ended the call. She didn’t relish sharing the bad news. It was the situation with the platinum ore all over again. They were sitting on a fortune, with no way to move it.

“Ten minutes,” she told the company. “That’s all we have. Then we’re dead. One of the forts will start shooting at us.”

This provoked angry cries and arguments among the various crews. Fists flew, and knives came out. Tolvern took her gun and fired it into the air. The shot was deafening in the enclosed vault.

“Knock it off!” she said angrily. “You’re wasting time. Let’s get what we can and get out.”

Some of the crew were already working at it, multiple hands grabbing the topmost of the ingots and struggling to lift it. They weren’t going to be able to get it all, not even close, but if ten people could manage an ingot a piece, they might get twenty or thirty out of here. That was something.

But that was easier said than done. The ingots were hard to grip, and it proved impossible to get ten people around any single bar. The best they managed was to knock two of them on the floor. The second ingot landed on someone’s foot and crushed it. He lay screaming, foot still pinned, while his companions worked at the silver, trying to wrestle it up.

Someone said there was a wheeled handcart on the schooner and ran to get it. Others went with him, and they came back with the cart and bunch of blankets. Paredes was suiting up two men in powersuits, the kind with clamp hands for manipulating large, heavy objects, but that would take a few minutes. They managed to get one ingot into the wheelbarrow and another onto each of the blankets, which they dragged, grunting and cursing, toward the ship.

By the time the two men from the schooner came clanking down the hallway in their powersuits, Tolvern had three minutes to get them to the ship and airborne. All in all, they managed to haul out eleven ingots, less than 10,000 pounds worth of the massive fortune. Tolvern was the last into the hold of the ship, and its engines began to rumble the instant the doors came up. She checked her computer as she strapped herself in. It had been ten minutes and forty-seven seconds since Drake’s call.

The other members of the assault team were looking forlornly at the handful of silver ingots dumped into the hold. There were mutters and groans, and more than a few sniffles. Tolvern turned with disbelief to see tears welled up in Carvalho’s eyes.

“After all this time, this was my chance,” he said. “All that treasure, right in front of me. And we left it behind.”

“You know what?” Capp said from Tolvern’s other side. “Maybe we should strap those things down better, know what I mean?”

Tolvern eyed the silver blocks. They seemed solid and immovable at the moment, but wait until the schooner started jumping around to avoid incoming fire.

“Are you listening to me, Commander?” Carvalho said. The plasma engines roared. “Why? It isn’t fair.”

The ship lifted out of the courtyard. The silver ingots slid to the end, where they piled against the cargo doors and stayed there. And then they came under fire, and Tolvern had other things to worry about.

Chapter Twenty-one

Paredes’s schooner came racing out of the atmosphere of Albion at escape velocity. The baron and his wife were on board. Even so, Drake didn’t allow himself to relax as he studied it on the viewscreen. The schooner still had to get clear of Fort St. George, now maneuvering itself into place. The fort readied torpedo tubes, prepared to blast the small ship apart. Drake could only hope that Paredes discovered his best evasive moves, because he was going to need them.

Meanwhile,
Blackbeard
,
Outlaw
, and
Pussycat
came charging in, but the fort had enough weaponry to hold them off with cannon and missiles while hunting the schooner with torpedoes.

Things were looking grim until Fort William and Fort Ellen entered the fray. Apparently deciding that St. George was in rebellion against the Crown, they fired on it as they came in range. St. George was smaller, but able to maneuver under her own power, and she was forced to move out of geosynchronous orbit. Paredes’s schooner slid past unscathed, and Drake led his task force beyond the moon while the forts settled their conflict.

The schooner came into range of
Blackbeard
and flung across away pods. They carried Tolvern and the surviving members of the away team, plus Drake’s parents. While he waited, he considered the developments of the past few hours.  

Five Hroom fleets were now in the system. The pair of navy frigates pursuing the remaining sloops of the first fleet had managed to disable another Hroom warship, but the last three ships had turned on them and destroyed one and crippled the other, then returned to their suicide mission.

Malthorne had divided his forces a second time. One portion of this latest split was locked in a struggle with the larger of the Hroom fleets. The navy had already lost a corvette, two destroyers, and several torpedo boats, but had wiped out four of the nine sloops, and were fully engaged with the other five. Even better, the four navy cruisers in the fight had suffered little damage and had pinned the enemy ninety million miles from Albion.

Dreadnought
led a smaller force to engage the newest fleet to enter the system. Malthorne would catch it several hours from Albion. That would be another fierce battle, but no doubt
Dreadnought
would prevail.

But then there were the two remaining alien fleets. The first of these was eight sloops of war, untouched by combat. Rutherford was pursuing them with a small flotilla, led by HMS
Vigilant
, but he could only harass them from a distance. It would fall to Drake and the orbital forts to hold them at bay until Rutherford arrived.

The final Hroom fleet had fought off Potterman’s small force, destroying a corvette and destroyer. HMS
Philistine
maintained pursuit, together with Catarina on
Orient Tiger
. One destroyer and one pirate frigate were no match for six Hroom sloops of war. They could only follow and nip at their heels. This force of Hroom would arrive an hour or two behind the one Rutherford was pursuing.

The away pods arrived on
Blackbeard
. Tolvern and Capp came onto the bridge moments later, grinning. They shook hands all around.

“My parents?” Drake asked.

“They’re looking good,” Tolvern said. “I sent them to your quarters and told them you’d come down. Shall I take the helm, sir?”

“In a few minutes. I’ve got to organize things here before we are in battle again. What did you loot from the treasury?”

She sighed. “Not much.”

Capp’s cheer vanished into a scowl, and she flopped into her seat. “Don’t know why they bothered with a safe. Just put them silver bricks on the floor and dare people to take ’em.”

Tolvern explained about the huge silver ingots, and how they’d only managed to haul away a handful before they’d been forced to run for it. It was probably for the best. The situation was fluid, and emerging from this battle with Drake’s honor restored might be easier without a thousand tons of royal bullion stuffed into his cargo bay.

Manx moved back to the defense grid station, leaving Tolvern to settle into her seat. The commander seemed mostly relieved, the disappointment fading quickly from her features.