Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) by Michael Wallace Page B

surprise. This was unexpected from his staid, rule-following commander.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I suppose I could. It is not in my nature, of course.” Rutherford felt the need to add that. “But I could concoct a lie about how we captured a Hroom prisoner during this business with Apex, how he told me under duress that there was a suicidal fleet approaching, and how we have twice detected them since.”
    “That would keep Malthorne from suspecting Drake,” Pittsfield said. “A lie, yes, but an honorable one, given the circumstances.”
    “It would also pull the entire Royal Navy to Albion at just the moment when Drake is trying to rescue his parents,” Rutherford said.
    Pittsfield stared at his hands.
    “Commander?” Rutherford prodded.
    Pittsfield looked up. “It is the best way to save Albion. We join Drake in battling the Hroom as soon as they jump into the system, while Malthorne sets up in orbit with his own forces to mop up whatever gets past us. That seems the obvious tactical solution. Morally, I am not so sure.”
    “We can’t save Drake’s parents at the expense of the whole planet,” Caites said, “but we can look for a way to shield his escape, at least. I can imagine several scenarios by which that would be possible.”
    “Can you?” Rutherford asked. “I confess that I am struggling to think of any.”
    “Admittedly, anything that occurs to me would be a long shot.”
    Rutherford turned it over for a long moment, but in the end, there seemed to be no way to do his duty to Albion and fully protect his old friend at the same time. Faced with that conundrum, there was only one possible choice.
    He touched his ear. “Norris, is that subspace channel ready to open?”
    “Almost. Give me five minutes, sir.”
    “Good. I will have the message for you then. Lieutenant,” he said to Caites when he’d ended the call to Norris, “open your computer. I will dictate.”
    She obeyed. “Ready, sir.”
    Rutherford sighed. “One moment, I need to compose it in my head, first. It isn’t easy to gracefully betray a friend.”
    And then he began. A sick feeling had settled into his gut by the time he finished.
     
     

Chapter Eight
    Two jumps after Hades Gulch, Drake was running through the subspace frequencies, hoping for a message from Rutherford, when Blackbeard came under attack. The ship was at the lead of a long column, stretched at intervals of roughly two million miles, to better hide the signature of his fleet. They would only draw together during the final approach to the jump point. After Blackbeard, came Isabel Vargus on Outlaw , followed by Paredes’s and Dunkley’s sloops, Aguilar on Pussycat , and finally, Catarina guarding the rear with Orient Tiger .
    The next jump point was only a few million miles beyond the uninhabited system’s star, and Blackbeard was cutting through the asteroid belt, midway there. Scans had come up clean; they appeared to be alone in the system. So it was a shock when two torpedoes corkscrewed out from a cluster of asteroids a few hundred thousand miles below them and to starboard. Warning lights flashed on the bridge.
    Barker’s people were alert in the gunnery, and they launched countermeasures. Manx followed with two electromagnetic pulses from the defense grid. One of the torpedoes wandered off course, but the other barreled toward Blackbeard .
    Jane helpfully chimed in to state the obvious. “Torpedo impact in four minutes and twenty seconds. Class two detonation expected.”
    “It appears to be a Mark-IV, sir,” Tolvern said. “We can outrun it.”
    Drake studied the data that Smythe was sending across. Mark-IVs were an obsolete design last used in the navy more than three decades ago. About fifteen years ago, the Admiralty had sold several thousand of them to Ladino colonies fighting a frontier brush war against the Hroom. As soon as that conflict cooled down, many of those missiles had made their way into private hands. This pair had been launched