The Queen's Pardon (Alexis Carew Book 6) Read online

  The Queen's Pardon

  J.A. Sutherland

  Darkspace Press

  THE QUEEN’S PARDON

  Alexis Carew #6

  by J.A. Sutherland

  © Copyright 2018 Sutherland. All rights reserved.

  Created with Vellum

  Allies and enemies are not always what they seem.

  Trapped on a hostile world and abandoned by her fellow captains, Alexis Carew must lead her small band to safety, even though it seems every hand is set against her. Stalked by pirates in the skies above and shadowy, alien figures on the planet below, Alexis must convince former enemies to trust her even as she discovers where the tendrils of her true enemies lead.

  One

  O’, pull me hearties, pull me mates,

  And listen to the tale,

  O’ when that bastard Chipley

  From fair Giron did sail.

  “Down!”

  Alexis Arleen Carew — once lieutenant in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, once privateer captain of the private ship Mongoose, and now more than a bit unsure of what she was, save in dire straits — obeyed her own order along with the nearly thirty men behind her.

  The floor of the planet Erzurum’s forest was dirt, turned to mud by a constant drizzle of rain, and with trees of a sort of branching needle, not unlike pine, but with long, brittle spikes off the main bit. The mud coated her as she flung herself to the ground and pulled a survival blanket over herself.

  In fact, she thought, as some of the cold mud oozed around the collar of her vacsuit liner when she ducked a bit too low, I’d call it a swamp if the planetary survey didn’t insist this was a temperate forest.

  More mud oozed inside her boots, cold and squishy in a way that made her grimace at memories of unexpected things left in those boots by the Vile Creature.

  Bugger the surveyors, it’s a bloody swamp.

  The blanket was part of their gear from Mongoose’s crashed boat — with a mottled color pattern to hide the wearer and designed not to radiate the heat of anything inside it. The outer coating tried to match the temperature of the surroundings, rendering anything under it mostly invisible.

  Alexis couldn’t tell if the ship’s boats that her tablet had detected coming overhead had anything in the way of gear for searching planetside at all — she thought it unlikely, as most ship’s boats wouldn’t — but didn’t like to take the chance, no matter how much the lads might grumble at having to hunker down in the mud.

  Mongoose’s boat had come down away from the few parts of Erzurum controlled by the other privateers in the ad-hoc fleet she’d put together to attack the pirate stronghold here, so she knew whoever was approaching was not friendly. It would do neither her nor the other private ships’ crews any good for her and her men to be captured now.

  Overall, the fight for Erzurum was not going so well for her side that it could take such a blow, at least based on what few transmissions she’d had the time to listen to since leaving the crash site.

  Standoff more than fight, really, for the time since her boat crashed had seen the raging battle slow, then stop entirely, settling into an uneasy quiet with both sides not moving their ships or men outside the areas they already controlled.

  Those privateer ships controlled the Erzurum orbital space, with no doubt — of the six to attack the planet, only Mongoose had suffered major damage. The others, Captain Pennywell’s Gallion, the injured Spensley’s Oriana, under command of his first officer Wakeling after Alexis had run Spensley’s face through in a duel over his accusations she was in league with the pirates —

  And I wonder if he still believes that now I’ve lost my own ship and crashed outside our lines, Alexis thought, huddled under the survival blanket and hoping her men were doing the same.

  — Captain Lawson’s Scorpion, and even Kingston’s little Osprey, which he’d done his best to keep near Scorpion once the fight started.

  All of them were in orbit, busily repairing what damage they’d taken in the approach, and were more than enough to hold off any attack from the pirate ships holding position at Erzurum’s Lagrangian points — even without the threat of their landing forces destroying what little infrastructure the pirate planet had.

  Erzurum was not a wealthy world, being, first, a part of the Barbary, a stretch of space mostly barren of planets. It was hardly worth anyone’s time to visit, save as a quicker route across Hanoverese space — the dearth of normal-space mass made for quick transit times between New London and Hso-hsi, but to achieve those times meant merchants must avoid what few planets there were, avoiding the normal-space masses that seemed to expand darkspace.

  And, second, Erzurum was distinctly separated from other systems, even by Barbary standards. The buildup of darkspace shoals, an accumulation of dark matter in the space that allowed ships to travel between systems, caused these worlds in it to be left off most trade routes entirely.

  Trade routes, rarely visited worlds, and governments with other battles to fight — a perfect situation for these pirates.

  A check of her tablet showed the approaching ship’s boats had come and gone. There were three of them up there, likely all the pirates could spare from their other efforts — the rest were busy keeping the private ships’ boats penned in where they’d landed, neither side with enough force to best the other and not wanting to deplete what they had. Those three, though, were quartering and circling the space around where Mongoose’s boat crashed, searching for Alexis’ band.

  Alexis pulled her blanket back and stood.

  “All right, lads,” she called. “They’re gone and we’ve some time to move on.”

  The groans that met her words told her the lads were as tired as she was.

  A hundred kilometers from where we crashed to a settlement — that’s all well and good, and only a few days if it was in a straight bloody line.

  It wasn’t, though. The searching boats suspected they’d head for the nearest settlement and were searching along that route, and there appeared to be no straight bloody lines in Erzurum’s Dark-buggered swamps.

  The surface here had an odd architecture, with what Alexis would describe as rolling hills if she were a quarter of her scant meter-and-a-half height — for her and her men, it was two steps up, three steps down the entire way, with almost never a level spot more than a stride in length, and for half those strides the solid ground was covered in water and mud, so that one couldn’t even tell if one was going up or down with the next step ahead of time.

  That was where the land didn’t drop away into a ravine or rise as a cliff from nothing — both those had to be gone around. They weren’t wide or long, but they meant detouring a hundred meters, then another hundred as one met another ravine or cliff just past the first.

  Water streamed down some cliffsides in waterfalls and flowed heavily amongst the hummocks of land before picking up speed to rush into a ravine. Too close to either and one was pummeled from above or in danger of having one’s legs swept out from under and over the edge.

  Alexis estimated the distance they’d gained toward the settlement was more than four times as much in actual walking, given their detouring around obstacles.

  The men were tired, being spacers and used to walking no more than the fifty-meter length of Mongoose’s decks. As for climbing, well, the distance of a ladder between those decks was the most they saw — climbing the masts outside Mongoose’s hull was done in zero-g, after all.

  Here they were further loaded down with packs and gear, including their vacsuits which they’d need once they contacted their allies and were back aboard a proper ship again. Some were still wearing those, taking the extra protecti
on against the rain and mud, while others, like Alexis, had stripped out the liners to wear and bundled the bulky suit itself up into their packs.

  All around her, men’s heads hung low from either weariness or despair.

  “Nabb! Mister Dockett!”

  Her coxswain and bosun hurried over. She was glad to have them both — the chaos of abandoning Mongoose had sent men into the boats with little rhyme or reason, and Alexis could just as easily have wound up with no petty officers at all in hers.

  Well, Nabb would always be there, she thought — the young coxswain would be by her side no matter what, having come to the Navy specifically to watch out for her. It had taken some time for her to accept that and she still felt as though she should be the one looking out for him, as she felt responsible for his father’s exile from New London as one of the mutineers on the ill-fated Hermione.

  “Aye, sir?” Mongoose’s bosun, Dockett, asked.

  “Keep an eye out for some clean source of water,” Alexis said. Their supply of that was low, being only what each man could carry — and those who’d carry more had seen to the boat’s spirits rations more than water. In the hurry to pack what supplies they might and be away from the crash site before the pirates came calling, there’d been little time to insist on anything else. At least discipline was still holding and those who carried the spirits weren’t sampling their burdens.

  Yet.

  “This drizzle’s not enough to fill a container and I’ll not trust the groundwater, no matter our filters,” Alexis went on, “but we may find some cleaner runoff on one of these cliff faces where it’s coming down over rock instead of mud.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “And keep a close eye on those carrying the spirits, will you?”

  Mongoose’s crew, while mostly former Navy men, had all signed aboard a private ship, a privateer, and weren’t strictly bound by Naval discipline. In fact, each was free to leave at any time — sacrificing his shares in Mongoose’s endeavors, of course, but with the ship disabled and streaking powerless through Erzurum’s space there might be more than one of them wondering where his next fortune lay. Perhaps even some who wondered if those fortunes might lie with the pirates themselves, and an excess of drink would do nothing to ease those thoughts.

  “I saw to it the spirits were carried by most of your boat crew, sir,” Nabb said, “and made certain they knew how ill it’d go for them if they touched a drop.”

  That eased her mind a bit, as her boat crew were all solid men who’d stayed with her on Dalthus when Nightingale paid off. “Good work. We’ll find a place to rest and have something to eat soon. The men are tired and we’re far enough away from the boat that it should be safe for a time. Their passes overhead are coming scarcer and scarcer as they have to search farther from the crash site.”

  “Them pirates might start searching from the ground,” Dockett said. “Be close behind us if they do — not like this lot could hide a trail.”

  Alexis nodded. She had three of men who’d come from more rural Fringe worlds, and gone to the Navy over … the not entirely clear ownership of some hare or pheasant in their dinner pots, to trailing the group and doing what they might to conceal the trail. It was better than nothing, but not nearly enough if a pirate skilled in tracking were to follow them.

  Or a half-blind deaf man with his head stuffed in a bucket, she mused, wincing at the noise the group was making as they milled about, leaving great tracks and prints in the muddy ground. The three poachers were staring at the space thirty men had just thrown themselves to the ground in with the same look of despair they might give the schuffing snout of some landowner’s mastiff appearing out of the night’s shadows.

  “There’s little more we can do about that,” Alexis said, “though I think they’ll not be in so much of a hurry to confront us on the ground. We’re over two dozen, and they’ll know we’re well-armed.”

  One thing Mongoose’s boats did not lack in was small arms. Every man — and Davies, her group’s one other woman, Alexis reminded herself — had the short, chopping blade used in darkspace boarding actions, as well as a pistol of some sort, with a few rifles for those at least somewhat skilled in their use.

  Two of those latter were lasers, carried by Alexis and one of the poachers who claimed great skill, while the others were chemical propellants — it was a tossup which type they had less ammunition for, though. The lasers’ capacitors could be recharged with the solar panels they carried — but that required both open space and time, as well as a break in the persistent cloud cover that was sending such a miserable drizzle down on them all.

  “There’s a trickle runs off that cliff there,” Nabb said, pointing to where he’d been walking on the other side of their column. “It’s rocky, so looks clearer than most.”

  “Good,” Alexis said, making the decision — if there was water there, then they’d break and give the men a rest now. “Set up a filter and let the men drink their fill — of the water, mind you. Announce we’ll have a spirits issue after supper — quarter ration. They won’t like that, but we’ve little enough along. And cold rations for a meal — we’ll find a way to heat things when we stop for the night.”

  Alexis looked up at what she could see of the sky through the trees’ canopy. She knew nothing about Erzurum’s orbit or rotation, so couldn’t yet judge how much daylight might be left and didn’t relish sending her group over the edge of a ravine in darkness. The system’s satellite constellation that might have given her some sort of weather report had been destroyed in their attack and she didn’t dare make a transmission to contact the ships in orbit. That would just as likely be picked up by the pirates and give away her group’s position.

  “If we’ve light after all that, we’ll push on a bit, if not we’ll camp here for the night and give the men a rest.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Two

  We skimmed up into Hannie space,

  Ships and men both torn asunder,

  But even with that butcher’s bill,

  Chipley’d never admit his blunder.

  They did not have the daylight. The grey overcast turned gradually darker, and even before the meal was finished the shadows around the cliff’s base were deep enough they were forced to break out portable lights to see to the spirits issue. The drizzle deepened as well, becoming a full rain that struck the upper canopy to rain down on them in a fine mist.

  The men lined up, ankle deep in mud, survival blankets draped over their shoulders and heads, for the spirits issue. Dockett showed them a full water bladder, then measured out a bit of water and replaced it with a measured bit of rum. He shook the bladder back and forth so they could all see it well-mixed, and began portioning it out.

  The issue went along silently, with none of the men bothering to remind others of their debts for sippers or gulpers, as none wanted to be repaid by this weak mix.

  Alexis took none, contenting herself with water that tasted dead and lifeless after passing through her canteen’s filter. It was better than the recycled water aboard ship, but the advantage was not too great.

  Instead, she and Nabb made their way to those too injured to stand in the issue line, bringing each a cup so he’d not have to rise. There were six of those, carried from the boat on stretchers by the others.

  One, Trenten Morgan, was unconscious, which was likely a blessing given the burn across his torso and up his face. He’d been on the gundeck in Mongoose’s approach to Erzurum and been struck down when shot splintered off a gun’s barrel, sending a thin bolt of the laser’s force into his vacsuit. The angle had left him alive, but horribly injured.

  Alexis sat in the mud beside him for a moment and spoke, even though he probably couldn’t hear.

  “We’ll see you to help as soon as we’re able, Morgan,” she said, taking up his uninjured hand in hers. “You hold fast, do you hear?”

  Nabb finished passing out spirits to the other injured and returned to her side.

  �
�He can’t hear, sir,” Nabb said.

  “Of course he can,” she said, smoothing back a bit of Morgan’s hair that the rain plastered to his forehead. “You hold fast, lad.” She rose. “My compliments to Mister Dockett and we’ll camp here overnight. There are too many ravines for us to travel in the dark.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Alexis moved on, visiting each of the wounded in turn. She wondered how many more there were on Mongoose’s other boats, and who’d been left behind on the ship, hopefully dead and not abandoned in the chaos of the ship’s fusion plant shutting down due to damage and the continued pounding by the pirates.

  Nabb returned before she reached the last of the wounded and she was silently grateful for that.

  Isom, her clerk and cabin steward for so long, lay on his stretcher, conscious, but in pain. She had no way of knowing how long he’d been in vacuum after the compartment he and the other servants sheltered in during action had been holed.

  His face was swollen so that his eyes were mere slits, but less so than when she’d first seen it after exiting the boat, and he had a gash on his head that still oozed blood.

  The buffeting that overtook Mongoose’s inertial compensators during the action had thrown him against a bulkhead and knocked him unconscious. When the compartment was holed one of the others had recovered enough to seal his helmet, but only after Isom had been exposed to vacuum for so long that he’d swollen up like a balloon and his skin gone red from burst vessels.

  He’d recover, but it would be a painful time for him with his skin left stretched and sensitive.

  “Should be me getting you your supper, sir,” he whispered, voice hoarse, as she helped him sip his weak grog.

  “What? Do you think I need help unwrapping it?”