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

but now she was scowling.
    “It’s worth fifteen thousand,” Drake said. “That’s what I figure we would have left after we paid to haul it out of here, refined it, and sold it. A nice payday for our fleet, but it won’t go very far once you start divvying it up. And if we get attacked while shipping it, repairs could easily eat that up.”
    He’d pulled the fifteen thousand pounds figure out of thin air. He hadn’t even seen the hypothetical platinum ore, and he had no idea how much it might cost to get it shipped and refined. But his confident tone seemed to give the others pause.
    “Van Gelder,” Drake said. “If you give me fifteen thousand worth of bullion, supplies, and weaponry, I’ll let you keep your ore, your base, and whichever of your people wish to stay behind.”
    “You’ve done fifteen thousand pounds of damage already,” he grumbled, “and killed twenty people, at least. That’s half my crew.”
    “And you fired the first shot.” Drake shrugged. “But bygones will be bygones. Give the word, and the looting stops now. We’ll make an assessment, and you can help us load our ship with what we select.”
    He turned to Isabel and Catarina. “Does this sound reasonable? You keep our contract, you get your share of the fifteen thousand, and everybody leaves happy.”
    Isabel was still grumpy, but Catarina reminded her that the whole operation had only worked because Blackbeard and Orient Tiger were there to pound the pirate redoubt. She’d have never done it alone.
    As for Van Gelder, he was not in the best negotiating position. Compared to Drake setting the base on fire on his way out, he seemed to think it was a good offer.
    “Good,” Drake said, once all parties were agreed. “We’re four hours into this operation. That leaves us two hours to get the loot and go.”
    #
    The agreement didn’t mean that Drake needed to offer the best rates to Van Gelder and the surly people under his command. The man’s surviving crew kept hauling out various stolen goods, which Van Gelder then placed an absurdly high value on. Drake nodded seriously, listened to Capp, Carvalho, and the Vargus sisters estimate its true worth, and then took a fifty percent discount on top of that.
    “Don’t try to con me, Mr. Van Gelder,” Drake said, when the man grew angry and threatened to stop cooperating. “You would never be able to sell these goods for their full value anyway.”
    “This is robbery.”
    “No, it’s retribution. Robbery is what you attempted when you fired those torpedoes unprovoked. Time is running out, so get moving.”
    During all of this, Catarina’s crew had located the fortress’s safe; her people seemed to have a nose for sniffing out bullion. Drake only took a ten percent discount on gold and silver coins against the fifteen thousand Van Gelder owed. That seemed fair.
    They ended up with sixty-five hundred pounds worth of guineas, guilders, and doubloons, plus a bunch of goods. These included the easily transportable, like liquor and foodstuffs, to the bulky: torpedoes, a hundred-kilowatt laser (Drake was thinking of Apex and the aliens’ energy weapons), spare tyrillium plating, and a six-inch cannon that Paredes took as partial payment at Drake’s encouragement. Paredes’s schooner could use an upgrade to her weak offensive capabilities. Aguilar, whose ship was already bristling with weapons, took another cannon, although when and where he would install it, Drake couldn’t imagine.
    They also took on a dozen new crew members, some of Van Gelder’s more reliable-seeming people, spread among the various ships. Eleven men and women stayed behind, including Van Gelder, gloomily settling in with what remained of their base and their diminished pile of loot.
    Six hours. Minor damage, one dead, and two wounded. Fifteen thousand pounds worth of bullion and goods. The Vargus sisters had been right, after all. The little pirate fleet was in a jubilant mood as it approached the next