Rebellion of Stars (Starship Blackbeard Book 4) (16 page)

She was tempted. “No, better not. We should close this channel. Tell Drake we’ve made successful contact with rebellious Hroom. There aren’t many—it’s really just one small village of survivors—but we’re about to change that.”

“Aye.” Capp scratched at her head. “Hey, Tolvern. That boy of mine try anything?”

“What do you mean?”

Capp winked. “You know.”

Tolvern thought of Carvalho’s innuendo that first night. And how she’d fallen on top of him in the mud wearing only her underwear. Then there was the bet Capp and Carvalho had about whether he’d bed Tolvern.

“No, not really.”

“Ah, I thought he would. You know, he was telling me he could get inside your pants the first night on the ground.”

“We were kind of trying to stay alive. No time for that sort of thing.”

“Not that I think you will, luv—you’re only hot for the cap’n, as anyone but Drake can see—but you got my blessing if you’re keen. Long time down there alone, and me and Carvalho ain’t got the sort of relationship where we get all jealous-like. Anyway, there’s this bloke in the gunnery what was showing me his tools, and I been thinking . . . anyway, you want to take my fellow out for a ride, you got my blessing.”

“That’s good to know, Capp,” Tolvern said dryly. “If I feel the need for a man’s body, it’s nice to know that you will lend me one to ravage.”

“That’s what I’m saying!”

“It will be strictly professional, I assure you. Now get a message to Drake to tell him what’s going on. And send me word if anything changes up there. I intend to stir up some trouble, and it would be helpful to know if
Dreadnought
is about to drop a thousand marines on my head.”

“You got it, Tolvern. Keep ’em all alive down there.”

The line went dead. Carvalho was sawing with his knife at their dinner, while the Hroom showed Brockett how they lit a small cookfire in the damp conditions. Others cut dead fronds to feed the blaze. The Hroom were armed now with assault rifles, shotguns, and small hand cannons, courtesy of the goods salvaged from the rescue pod.

Tolvern eyed Carvalho again, now heaving up a massive haunch of meat to skewer it on a long pole held by Nyb Pim. He’d stripped off his shirt, and his bronzed muscles rippled, sweat running down them from the unrelenting heat. He was a fine specimen of masculinity, that was for sure. And Capp had offered. Hell, she’d practically begged Tolvern to do something with her man.

Nah. Put that thought out of your mind.
 

Tolvern didn’t have time for that kind of nonsense. She had an attack to plan.

#

They crept onto the perimeter of the sugar plantation early the next morning, when it was still more black than gray. The trees gave way to sharp grass and creeping vines, and then they hit a green wall.

One moment, the red Hroom jungle. Then a narrow burned strip to divide the incompatible human and Hroom vegetation, followed by tall, grass-like sugar cane. Tolvern filled her lungs as they pushed into the woody stalks. It was still so hot that each breath felt like steam, but the cane smelled green. A familiar smell. Comforting. There was a slight sweetness in the air. It wasn’t coming from the cane, though, but from smoke. Cane fields being scorched in preparation for harvest.

Pez Rykan’s Hroom had all taken the antidote yesterday, but at the moment, it would only be partially effective. They wouldn’t gain anything by hacking off cane and sucking out the juice; only in its purest white form did it have an effect. But still, from the way their breathing quickened around her, at least some of them were thinking of how to raid the sugar stores. Maybe even whether to surrender to the first humans they found.

The sound of singing reached her ears. No, not singing so much as full-throated humming. Pez Rykan stopped and tilted his head to listen. He gestured to their right. They pushed through the cane and into a clearing. It was the edge of a vast gash of severed cane stalks that stretched toward some hills on the horizon. Sugar cane stalks by the tens of millions, with just the cut part that she could see representing thousands of tons of sugar. Smoke trailed from a pair of distant refineries.

The humming came from roughly forty Hroom cutting and stacking sugarcane nearby. Working with machetes, the stronger ones cut it, while others tied it into huge bundles to be carried off by still more slaves toward a muddy plantation road. These hefted the bundles onto their backs, with straps around their foreheads to stabilize and distribute the weight. When they reached the road, they loaded the bundles onto one of several lorries. Other teams worked nearby, with several hundred slaves visible from where the rebels stood.

Pez Rykan’s forces came to a complete stop as they took in the scene. To a person, Hroom and human alike gaped at the size and scope of even this tiniest part of Lord Malthorne’s estate.

At the same time, the humming died. The nearest group of slaves looked at them. One, Tolvern noted, was taller than the others, and his skin was purple, unlike the pinks and pale, mottled reds of the others.

“Move!” Tolvern said.

She unslung her rifle and broke into a run, charging the small pack of slaves. Carvalho came after her. Pez Rykan and the Hroom followed, their guns and energy weapons at the ready.

Tolvern lowered her shoulder to knock aside a slave who impeded her path. Most of them had the glazed expression of those who’d recently taken their sugar and would have practically let you saw off a limb without complaint. Others moved to block her, but she and Carvalho smashed them out of the way with rifle butts when they didn’t move fast enough.

They reached the tall, purple Hroom. He wore a belt on his worksuit, with a whip on one side and a handheld stun gun on the other. He fished a computer from a hip pocket and lifted it to his mouth, as if only now recognizing the threat and calling for help.

This was the overseer. Not an eater, and in communication with the humans of the plantation. He would understand English.

Tolvern lifted her gun. “Put it down!”

The overseer lowered the computer. She barked at him to drop it, and he did. Carvalho forced him to his knees, and Tolvern turned to help Pez Rykan.

The rebels quickly herded the slaves into a small cluster. Pez Rykan spoke to them in a hooting, jeering tone, meant, Tolvern thought, to intimidate them. Several tried to edge away, but Tolvern caught them before they could break free, and drove them back in with the others.

Brockett and Nyb Pim moved through the captives, with Pez Rykan’s Hroom forcing the slaves to bend with mouths open, and Brockett and Nyb Pim sticking a caplet in their mouths. He was unarmed, but carried a sling pack from the pod holding several thousand doses in small boxes. A few slaves balked, either in the taking or swallowing of the caplet, but the rebels forced compliance at gunpoint. Soon, they had given a dose to every slave and forced him or her to swallow it down.

“That’s done,” Pez Rykan said. “Bring them with us, and they’ll join our rebellion.”

Brockett snapped together the sling pack. “I told you yesterday it doesn’t work that quickly,” Brockett said. “First, it has to bind to the receptors in the brain. Then, they have to suffer withdrawal like any other Hroom when he’s cut off from his sugar.”

“You remember,” Nyb Pim said to Pez Rykan. Both Hroom had recovered from addiction. “When the sugar is taken away, you go crazy for it. That will happen to these over the next few days and weeks. Their minds will clear. They will forget all desire for sugar. But not quickly.”

“If we take some of them with us—” the Hroom chief said.

“No,” Tolvern said. “If we do our job, they’ll find us soon enough. For now, our job is to disrupt the camp.”

Nyb Pim and Carvalho hauled the overseer to his feet and dragged him to Tolvern and Pez Rykan. Tolvern cast a glance at one of the other work crews, some hundred yards distant, but the slaves continued their labors. No shots had been fired; nobody seemed to have noticed the attack.

Brockett opened his pack again, as if to remove another caplet, but Pez Rykan stopped him. “We will not waste antidote. This one is not an eater.”

“But he’s still susceptible.”

The Hroom chief stared down at the science officer with such intensity that Brockett took a step back. “He made his choice,” Pez Rykan said.

“What will you do with me?” the overseer asked. It was directed to Tolvern, and in English, but it was Pez Rykan who answered.

The chief said something in Hroom, and the overseer’s legs buckled.

“But I surrendered!”

“You’ll kill him,” Tolvern said. It was not a question.

Pez Rykan cast a narrow-eyed gaze down at her. “Our god must have his sacrifice.”

#

They worked their way around the edge of the plantation, which stretched for tens of miles ahead of them. Perhaps
hundreds
of miles. Tolvern directed the attacks, leading the small band along the edge of the harvest, stepping out, taking the overseer at gunpoint, then fading back into the uncut cane. The slaves were so placid that most of the time, they resumed their labors the instant the rebels stepped away.

Soon, they had taken nine prisoners from the overseer class and had inoculated several hundred slaves. And all without firing a shot.

“Wait until afternoon,” Pez Rykan told her. “As the sugar wears off, they work faster, but more restlessly. They will fight over rations, resist when pushed. We will not find it so easy.”

Tolvern glanced at the prisoners, tied together with their hands behind their backs and leaves stuffed in their mouths to keep them quiet. “What about these ones?”

“There is nothing to discuss,” he said.

“You don’t have to murder them.”

“It is not murder. It is a holy sacrifice to Lyam Kar.”

“Sacrifice, murder—looks the same from my point of view. That first one was right—he surrendered. They all did. Why kill them?” She waved her hand as he began to object. “Forget that religious rubbish, I am talking about simple decency. Keep them prisoner if you want, but don’t hack them apart.”

“You are not the commander here, Jess Tolvern. I am.”

With that, Pez Rykan pushed through the cane until he was at the front of the formation. Her three companions edged past the prisoners to Tolvern’s side as soon as he was gone.

“I say we call it a day,” Carvalho said.

“He’s right,” Brockett said. “We’re dehydrated, exhausted. We can’t keep going hour after hour in this heat.”

“This will be the easiest day we have,” she told them. “It will only get harder.”

“How is this easy?” Brockett said. “Even the Hroom are dragging. Look at them.”

“Once the immunity shows, the enemy will be on to us. Then there will be resistance. For now, it’s nothing. We come, we do our business, and we leave unmolested. They’re confused when they see us, not alarmed. Not yet.”

Nyb Pim spoke up. “Not for much longer. We are taking the overseers, and most of them are not eaters.”

Carvalho nodded. “I don’t much care. Let the Hroom have their prisoners—these overseers would rat us out if we left them. But our Hroom friend is right. Sooner or later, someone will notice they are missing. They probably have already.”

“So they ran off,” Tolvern said. “That must happen all the time.”

“Once or twice, maybe,” Carvalho said. “Not nine times. They must have noticed by now. They will be looking for us.”

“Good point. Wouldn’t hurt us to stop for the day while we figure stuff out. You guys stay here, I’m talking to the chief.”

She pushed ahead to catch up with Pez Rykan, thinking about what the others had said. Probably time to change their strategy. Scope out an area first. Come in quickly, get the job done, and fade away to reappear at a different part of Malthorne’s estate. It would be slower, and sooner or later, they’d still face resistance, but it would be less risky than working all day along the same side of the plantation.

But as she reached the chief, he came to a stop at the edge of the cane. His body went rigid. Tolvern came beside him and looked out to see what had him alarmed.

They’d hooked several miles northeast alongside the plantation as the day passed, crossing several dirt roads and ignoring the tempting target of a sugar mill. The mill would be well guarded, most likely by humans, to make sure slaves didn’t charge the sugar silos. There would be plenty of time to destroy the sugar stores once their rebellion had grown.

They’d come through the cane looking for another clearing where they could force the antidote on a work crew, but instead, they’d stumbled upon a slave village. There were slave quarters, a company store to provide food and clothing to the workers, and guard posts at either entrance. A lorry idled in front of the rear guard post.

Tolvern caught her breath when she saw what had made Pez Rykan stiffen in alarm. A human guard and two Hroom lined up some fifty or sixty slaves, who knelt in front of a long, freshly dug trench. Most of the slaves were old, their skin tanned to leather by decades of exposure to the sun, but there were a handful of younger Hroom. One was missing a leg at the knee, the wound covered with a dirty bandage. Another slave’s shoulder hung funny, as if it had been hit by a piece of machinery and badly broken. Another wore a bandage over one eye.

This was a culling. The old, the injured. Those whose value was lost and could not be recovered. There was no gentle retirement on Lord Malthorne’s plantations, where toothless old Hroom sat in rocking chairs and reminisced about their days as Hroomlings. No food or shelter for the idle. Work or die.

The human guard stood with his hands on his hips, watching with a slack, emotionless expression. One of the Hroom overseers walked to the end of the row, gun at the ready. It would begin now.

Even as this realization hit Tolvern like a fist to the gut, Pez Rykan was lifting his rifle and signaling for the others to follow him. He bent in a crouch, body tensed as his fighters hurried up beside him.

The Hroom guard fired. The first victim slumped and fell into the trench.

Tolvern grabbed Pez Rykan. “No!”

“Let go of me, human.” He was too strong, and shrugged her off.