Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3)

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Book: Read Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) for Free Online
Authors: Michael Wallace
would move to intercept the enemy while waiting for Harbrake’s forces to arrive. But Rutherford was low on fuel, and he had disregarded orders for long enough already. Let him make the rendezvous first, find out what Malthorne was up to, and then worry about six stray sloops of war.
     
     

Chapter Four
    As soon as he left the Hroom, Drake felt the stress and pressure lifting from his shoulders. Ever since seizing the sugar antidote from Lord Malthorne, he’d felt as though he’d been carrying sandbags on his shoulders. He’d been torn between the moral imperative of freeing the Hroom from their sugar enslavement and the need to protect Albion from a rejuvenated empire. Drake had made his choice, and now General Mose Dryz had the antidote.
    Drake now had two things on his mind: freeing his parents from York Tower and punishing Malthorne for killing his sister Helen. Malthorne was a slaver, a warmonger, and a murderer, and somehow, Drake would bring him to justice. But first, free his parents, get them to safety.
    He led Blackbeard carefully through the Hroom systems, wary of running into the death cult faction the general had warned him about, but when the ship reached the frontier systems, he stopped taking unusual precautions and made his way directly toward the New Dutch world of Leopold. Catarina Vargus had recommended Leopold, claiming that there were always freebooters, mercenaries, and other adventurers lurking about its spaceports, looking for work. Pirates and smugglers brought their ships to Leopold’s yards for repair and supplies.
    By the time Blackbeard came into orbit around Leopold, nearly five weeks had passed since they’d left Catarina and Orient Tiger . The planet stretched dry and hazy below them, the surface cut by massive brown ranges and dotted with small, salty seas—more like large lakes, really. A few patches of green-and-gold vegetation stood out here and there, marking the limits of human settlement. Only a few million humans and Hroom lived on the whole planet.
    It may have been a hot, dusty rock, but Drake’s crew was anxious for landfall, from Commander Tolvern down to the lowest deckhand. The enlisted sorts had blown through much of their earnings from the tyrillium barge before leaving the last port, and what money had remained seemed to have found its way into the hands of people like Carvalho and Lutz, who had an uncanny way of winning at cards and dice. The two men were willing to loan back their winnings, of course, so that the crew could enjoy shore leave. Drake didn’t care who owed what to whom, so long as the peace was held.
    He had no need to land Blackbeard , and it was safer to keep her in orbit. Instead, a shuttle service carried people and goods back and forth to the surface. Tolvern organized a lottery to distribute the twenty-four-hour passes evenly over the four days the ship was to remain in orbit.
    Drake ordered Tolvern to rig the lottery. He didn’t want Capp and Carvalho on the ship together when he and Tolvern were on the surface. He trusted them more than he used to, but not fully. Capp complained about this. Couldn’t she swap with someone else and go down at the same time as her lover?
    “I need you with me,” Drake told her. “You’ve got an eye for recruiting—you can tell me who to trust and who not to trust.”
    “That’s true, yeah. But Cap’n, me and Carvalho was thinking—”
    “There’s a bonus in it for you.”
    Her eyebrows went up. “Bonus?”
    “Money. Fifty guineas, to be precise.”
    That settled it.
    #
    There was a fuzzy line between pirate, smuggler, freebooter, and general adventurer here on the frontier, but as was usually the case, the ones who made a killing were the ones who kept their heads down and supplied the rowdier sorts. Most of the money on Leopold seemed to be flowing into two ports on opposite hemispheres, one high in the northern latitudes, and the other on a peninsular continent in the south, surrounded on three

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