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

dusty, brush-lined road. Camels grazed the thorny bushes along the road. Others rested in the shade of an abandoned lorry, its tires hauled off, the windshield smashed, and the paint scoured by the blowing sand.
    Why that name again? They’d fought the elder Captain Vargus twice: once, defeating his ship, Captain Kidd , and a second time, when the pirate captain attacked them in the San Pablo yards. And then Captain Drake had become entangled with the man’s daughter, Catarina Vargus. Tolvern had bumbled into Drake’s quarters thinking she’d seduce him, only to find him naked in the shower with Catarina.
    The crappy thing about an embarrassing memory—the most shameful part of shame, so to speak—was how it could spring forth in full glory at any moment. It was hard to stay angry forever, or envious, or any other negative emotion. But recall an embarrassing incident, and there it was, leering, until you were blushing all over again.
    Now she was remembering the look on Catarina Vargus’s face when the woman stepped out of the shower, naked and beautiful, to see Tolvern struggling to button up after having stripped down. What a nightmare. Thank God, Vargus had covered for her. If the captain had found out, she’d have never been able to face him again.
    Catarina Vargus must be in Brinetown with a new ship, and from the anticipation on the Captain’s face as the jitney rumbled among the red mud brick buildings, he was anxious to see her again. Tolvern was not.
    Capp sat in the back of the open jitney with Tolvern, while the captain sat up front with the driver. She studied Tolvern. “Something the matter?”
    “No, nothing.”
    “You ain’t happy to see Vargus again, are you?”
    “I haven’t given her a moment’s thought,” Tolvern lied. She pulled the computer out of her hip pocket, and brought up an info sheet about Brinetown.
    Drake glanced back. “Anyway, we don’t know that it’s her. Probably not, in fact. Catarina has other ships, and I don’t imagine she’d leave Orient Tiger unless she’d found something better. Outlaw is an inferior vessel.”
    “That lady is a pirate,” Capp said. “And when you’re a pirate, sometimes you don’t got no choice in the matter. Coulda been the navy roughed her up, and she had to find something else.”
    Tolvern scrolled through until she found something useful. “We’re looking for a place called The Apple Pie Trading Company.”
    Capp snorted. “What the—? Did you say ‘apple pie’?”
    “It’s just a name,” Tolvern said. “A place where people meet to do business. They’re not actually bartering baked goods.” She scrolled again. “They offer food and drink, though.”
    Capp looked suspicious. “What kind of drink?”
    “Don’t worry, Capp, it’s the usual libations, I’m sure—grog, hooch, fire water, demon rum, gin.”
    “Whew, you had me worried there, for a minute. ‘Apple Pie Trading Company.’ King’s balls, what a name.”
    Brinetown wasn’t a big place, maybe five or six thousand people from the looks of it, and the jitney driver dropped them in front of The Apple Pie Trading Company a few minutes later. The establishment was a restaurant on the edge of the sea, with most of the patrons sitting on a patio beneath a big sun awning, looking down at the bay. Outside and below, scrawny dogs trotted along the shoreline, fighting with crabs over dead fish that had washed up. The smell of brine and rotting seaweed wafted in.
    The patrons were mostly disreputable sorts, as expected. They drank tankards of grog and cracked the claws of some strange, lobster-like crustacean, sucking out the meat and tossing the empty shells and the legs over the railing. Tolvern’s eyes were drawn to one table in particular. There she was, Catarina Vargus, her shoulder thrown back to show her neck, a drink in one hand. She’d cut her black curls to a bob, like Tolvern’s, but the curve of her chin was the same, the lines of her neck. A wiry,