Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

were no Royal Navy vessels about. Unlikely, as the Hades Gulch system was unpopulated, except for a small mining colony. And since Hades Gulch was on the edge of the Omega Cluster, which had no jump points into it, few ships had cause to pass through. This one space lane led to the Gryphon Shoals, where Vigilant was supposed to rendezvous with Harbrake and the rest of the task force.
    Rutherford leaned over her shoulder and amplified the map. It showed a small, rocky planetoid, unusually positioned between two gas giants. Perhaps an escaped moon, it had a small moon itself, nearly a third as large as the planetoid. Orbiting around them both was a strange double ring of tiny asteroids.
    “That ring isn’t natural,” Caites said, “What you’re looking at is debris from a Hroom fleet.”
    “Debris? There was no battle out here.”
    “Not in the most recent fighting. This is from the Third Hroom War, Queen Ellen’s time.” Caites scrolled her finger across the screen, bringing up text. “An Albion fleet was chasing them, and several sloops smashed into that small moon while the Hroom were performing desperate evasive maneuvers.”
    Rutherford eyed Caites with new appreciation. “How did you know where to look? I’ve never heard of this battle—couldn’t have been a pivotal one. Are you some kind of military historian?”
    “No, not really. I’d heard of the Battle of Hades Gulch, but didn’t know much about it. But there are several ships out there—a salvage operation seems to have taken up position a couple of years ago. Mixed Ladino and New Dutch.”
    “Do any of them have weapons?”
    “Nothing big enough to tangle with a leviathan. Couple of frigates, some unarmed vessels the size of my old torpedo boat. The planetside base has a small cannon and two missile batteries, but still, nothing to speak of. What they do have is a pair of nukes on the surface. Reactors, I mean, the modular stuff. It powers their operations.”
    “Oh,” Rutherford said. Then, with new appreciation. “ Oh. Fissile material.”
    “We’re three hours from the salvage operation,” she said, typing on her keypad. “We’ll need to accelerate to get there before we’re caught, and that means we’re back to the fuel problem.”
    “Yes, but once the leviathan is feeding, it’s no longer our problem. We’ll have time to stretch the ram scoops for a couple of days. Send this to Pittsfield.”
    “I just did, sir.”
    Rutherford turned it over in his head as he returned to his chair. He imagined the panic in the salvagers as he tore past with a ravenous star leviathan in pursuit. Their panic might serve as an additional distraction, but that felt unnecessarily cruel. No sense being brutal about it.
    “Commander Pittsfield,” he said, “contact the salvage operation. Strongly suggest that they run like the devil himself is after them. Warn them we’re about to drop a leviathan in their lap.”
    #
    A few hours later, the leviathan had closed to within a few thousand miles as Vigilant rushed toward the salvage operation. Small mining craft, scout vessels, and box-like asteroid scrapers had been fleeing in all directions like rats boiling out of the hold of a burning ship. One small vessel had been unable to detach itself from a Hroom hulk it had been salvaging, and its workers launched themselves out in an escape pod that was picked up by one of the larger mining ships before it fled.
    By the time Vigilant tore past the planetoid and its small moon, every man and woman had either fled or hunkered in some deep hole to wait out the catastrophe. Rutherford couldn’t just tear through—the leviathan might not notice all the other juicy morsels to feed on—so he hooked his ship in a big arc, just out of reach of the monster’s tentacles—and swooped back toward the planetoid and its moon, shedding speed.
    “It’s spitting spores,” Pittsfield warned, his voice tight and nervous.
    “One more pass,” Rutherford told the