Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) by Michael Wallace Read Free Book Online

wonder if that’s Robertson’s old ship,” Drake said.
    “Who?” Capp asked.
    “Edward Robertson,” Tolvern filled in. “Got rammed by a sloop a couple of years ago, and the crew abandoned ship. Captain sent around a salvage operation after we’d driven off the Hroom, but someone had already snagged the wreckage and made off with it. We always wondered if it was pirates.”
    Capp grinned. “Good for them. Royal Navy don’t need it half so bad.”
    “I could use a corvette,” Drake said. “Or a half-corvette. Let’s see who owns her.”
    But when they approached, men with shotguns and hand cannons moved quickly to block them.
    “Who is the captain of this ship?” Drake asked.
    “What’s it to you?” one of the men asked. He was broad shouldered, with a square jaw and a mustache with waxed ends. He wore leather bracers on his arms and a saber in a sheath at his side instead of a firearm.
    “I would rather speak to your captain. Is he available for inquiries?”
    “Well listen to you, talking all posh like,” the man said, and his companions laughed. “Now get the hell out of here.”
    “Shut your gob,” Capp said. She put a hand on her sidearm. “Nobody talks to the cap’n like that, you hear?”
    The men tensed, and Drake pulled Capp back. There were six armed men guarding the frigate, and he hadn’t come to fight, anyway.
    Capp removed her hand from her weapon, scowling. “Wouldn’t hurt him none to be civil, anyhow.”
    “That goes for all of us,” Drake told her. He turned back to the fellow who seemed to be the leader of the guard detail. “I’m looking to hire a couple of ships, and I have ready money to spend.”
    At the mention of money, the men looked less eager to fight and more intrigued. “When?” the leader asked.
    “Immediately.”
    “Ah, then nope, we’re already hired on for some business or other,” the man said. “Don’t know what, you’ll have to ask the captain.”
    “May I speak with him?”
    “Not now, you can’t. The officers went into town to buy provisions. Won’t be back until tomorrow, I figure. If you’re looking to hire someone, you could talk to Pete Paredes, I know he’s looking for work for his crew. Just got back off salvage, and his gear was wrecked up good. That business in Hades Gulch, you hear about it?”
    “No,” Drake said. “We were beyond the frontier.”
    “Bloody leviathan. Figure Paredes will tell you about it. That’s his ship over there.” The man hooked his thumb at a lanky schooner sitting on the tarmac, where two men were scraping barnacles while two others worked on deck plating with blow torches. The schooner was half the size of Outlaw , which in turn wasn’t as big as Catarina Vargus’s Orient Tiger . Twelve crew, max, not much larger than a navy torpedo boat. Drake would need twenty ships that size to do any good.
    “I suppose we should talk to this Paredes fellow,” Drake told his companions, when the men had returned to guarding the frigate, still inching its way across the tarmac. “But let’s see if we can hire Outlaw first. Wouldn’t do us any good to land Paredes, only to find out the two captains are enemies and we’re stuck with the lesser ship.”
    “I suppose we’ll have to go into town after all,” Tolvern said.
    Capp rubbed her hands together. “Now we’re talking.”
    “I forgot to get the name of Outlaw ’s captain,” Drake said. “It will be easier to find out now, rather than ask around town like idiots.” He made to approach the frigate, but Tolvern put a hand on his forearm and stopped him.
    “I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said. “Look.”
    The rear of the frigate was now visible as the lorry turned toward a gaping hangar to the left. The name of the ship had been painted again above the plasma engines, but this time, below “OUTLAW” was a smaller word:
    Vargus.
     
     

Chapter Five
    Vargus , Jess Tolvern thought bitterly, as a jitney carried them toward town on a