Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) by Michael Wallace

taking the whole chair with him, as he was handcuffed to it. Catarina’s man knocked him on the head with his gun barrel, and he fell on his back with a groan. Drake lifted the chair up and waited for the man to stop wincing from the blow.
    “Catarina, enough of that. Capp, put away the knife. We’re not going to emasculate you, Van Gelder. I don’t have any use for torture.”
    “Thank you, sir,” the man said weakly.
    “But I do not have much use for the uncooperative, either. If you don’t tell me what I need to know, I will set a fire on my way out and burn out all of the oxygen, and that will be the end of the lot of you.”
    “How do I know you won’t anyway?”
    “I am not that sort of man. Do I look like that sort, or sound like it? No, I am not. I keep the agreements that I make. Where is your ship?”
    “Ship?”
    “I am losing patience, Mr. Van Gelder,” Drake warned.
    Van Gelder furrowed his brow and seemed to come to a decision. “There’s an underground launch pad on the other side of the asteroid. We have two short-range scrapers armed with five-inchers. We can’t jump—neither ship has a warp-point engine.”
    “Then how are you resupplied?”
    “We aren’t. We’ve been hiding here for fifteen months. No ships coming and going—that would have risked the whole thing. We have a pair of heavy freighters on retainer. Soon as things turned hot, we were going to call them in to haul us out, together with all our goods. That was the plan, anyway.”
    “They got hot, all right,” Catarina said.
    Nix chuckled, and grinned at Capp with his gold teeth gleaming. Capp winked at him.
    Isabel Vargus entered the room. She was beaming with excitement. “We found the big payload. Dad would have been proud, Cat. We’re going to be rich.”
    The older sister explained. Interrogations had turned up the motherload: seventy thousand tons of partly refined platinum ore stuffed into one of the tunnels. The pirates had captured a freighter from a different operation that had stolen the ore and was making off with it, before they in turn stole it for themselves. Isabel’s man was still assaying the haul, but the best guess was that the platinum, when refined, was worth fifty thousand or more.
    “We cannot take it,” Drake said. “It’s too big, there’s no way to move it.”
    “Speak for yourself,” Isabel said. “I’m sure as hell not leaving it behind.”
    “You can come back for it if you want to, but we’re going to complete the mission as planned. We’re not hauling around a bunch of dirt, and we’re not waiting here while we try to locate a freighter to haul it away for us, either.”
    “Does that mean you’ll kill the prisoners?” Isabel asked. She stared at him, her mechanical eye dilating. “Because otherwise, it will be gone by the time we get back, and I’m not giving it up.”
    “What if I let you keep it?” Drake asked Van Gelder. He lifted a hand to stop Isabel’s angry protests. “You stole it, it’s yours fair and square.”
    Isabel was still sputtering. “No way. That ore alone is worth more than your whole mission, and we didn’t have to face the bloody navy to get our hands on it.”
    “Let’s say it’s worth fifty thousand pounds,” Drake told her. “For the sake of argument. That’s after it’s refined. It’s not worth a fraction of that now. It’s ore, you need to get it out of here and keep from getting robbed yourself. If you break our contract, you can bet that I’ll spread the word about what you’ve got. Then we’ll see if you can keep it.”
    “You’re a bastard, Drake,” Isabel said. She turned to Catarina. “Is he always like this?”
    “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” Catarina seemed amused by her sister’s anger. “Come on, James, tell us what you propose as an alternative. Look at your woman here. She’s no more happy about it than we are.”
    Capp had taken on a greedy, scheming look when Isabel mentioned the ore,