Книга: Sun King
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Sun King
by Michael Wallace
Click here to sign up for Michael Wallace’s new release list and receive a free copy of his fantasy novel, The Dark Citadel. This list is used only to announce new releases and not for any other purpose.
The Void Queen Trilogy
Book #1 – Queen of the Void
Book #2 – Star Wolf
Book #3 – Sun King
copyright 2017 by Michael Wallace
Cover art by Lorenz Hideyoshi Ruwwe
Chapter One
Captain Jess Tolvern studied the body lying on the operating table in front of her. The man’s belly lay open, and many of his internal organs had been removed, leaving a gruesome empty cavity.
Tolvern forced down the bile that clawed up from her belly. A memory bubbled to the surface. She was back in Blackbeard’s loading bay, with Apex drones breaking in, tearing open and devouring her crew and marines.
But this man had not been ripped open by beaks and claws, but by a scalpel. And he was still very much alive.
In fact, he was trying to peer around the curtain that the surgeon had draped above his chest to keep the patient from seeing what had been done to him. Internal organs—kidneys, liver, stomach, intestines—sat in clear plastic containers filled with bubbling nutrients, and were connected to leads wired to a complex piece of medical equipment.
Another piece of equipment sat on the opposite side of the operating table, where the patient’s blood flowed through clear tubing and into a gray, rectangular box that contained all of the devices performing the man’s regular bodily functions while his natural organs remained outside of his body.
“How are you feeling, Stratsky?” Tolvern asked.
“Hollow.”
“It doesn’t hurt?”
Stratsky gave a non-nonchalant shrug that brought scolding from the nurse who’d been checking the numbers on the organ-maintaining device. The nurse actually wagged her finger as she ordered him not to move.
“It don’t feel great, no. But I’ve had worse.”
“You’ve had worse?” Tolvern raised an eyebrow. “Worse than having all your guts pulled out?”
“I once took a bullet up the bunghole that came out again through my left nut. Where my left nut used to be, I mean.”
“You’re right, that’s worse.”
Science Officer Brockett had been consulting with the surgeon, and now bent over the wing commander of Blackbeard’s striker force, currently eviscerated on the operating table, waiting to be restuffed and stitched up.
“We had to get into his brain to root out the parasite,” Brockett said with a glance at Tolvern, “so it was no trouble temporarily short-circuiting his pain centers. He shouldn’t feel anything other than a strange empty sensation in his midsection.”
“Think you could keep me that way, mate?” Stratsky said.
“You will eventually need your body organs,” Brockett said.
Stratsky snorted. “That no-pain thing, I mean. Could come in handy, you know. Six hours shoved into the cockpit of a falcon, for one. You never felt muscle cramps until you’ve done that. Then there are the fistfights in the mess. That scar on my leg—that didn’t feel good neither. Never healed properly.”
“I suppose we could permanently short-circuit your pain centers,” Brockett said, “but you’d also lose the capacity to feel the effects of alcohol.”
“That don’t sound so good.”
“And he can say goodbye to sexual arousal,” the surgeon put in.
“Good point,” Brockett said.
“Huh? Forever?”
“Forever,” Brockett said.
Stratsky’s language grew a good deal more colorful, until he seemed to remember the captain standing over the operating table with the science officer. He felt silent.
“Brockett tells me you’ll be down for thirty-two hours after the surgery,” Tolvern said. “Fully unconscious while your body heals.”
“Long as you get me back in my falcon by the end of the week.”
The nurse, the science officer, and the surgeon all laughed at this. Brockett had told Tolvern that Stratsky would need two weeks to recuperate. Probably longer.
“Never mind your recovery time,” Tolvern said. “I need information before they put you under. We need to know how they got to you.”
Stratsky frowned. “Don’t know. Never seen a buzzard before.”
“Exactly right. I thought at first that you picked it up at Singapore. We had a lot of contact with Apex in hand-to-hand combat. Ships boarded, sailors rescued, that sort of thing. But I had Manx pull up your record. You were still in striker training in Albion when we freed Singapore. Never saw combat with Apex until we came out to the frontier, and then it’s been ship-on-ship action.”
“That’s right. I’ve fought their ships, but never seen one in person.”
“So how did they get to you?”
“I told the science guy everything I know. Felt this whispering in my head, you know? Scratching or something. Remembered what they told us, the signs to look for, and came right down here to let them have a look at my brain.”
Tolvern studied his face, unsure what level of suspicion was appropriate. “You’re pretty mellow. Most of us would be in a sweaty panic if we had an alien parasite in our head.”
“Yeah, there was a moment or two,” Stratsky said after a slight hesitation. “But Brockett says he dug it all out, and I figure with what they did to that Hroom general—he was all the way gone, yeah?—that I’d be all right.”
“That’s accurate enough,” Brockett said. “We caught it early. My confidence level is ninety-nine percent.”
“That’s not a hundred,” Tolvern pointed out.
“Can’t worry about that, Captain,” Stratsky said. “Figure on any given day of this damn war I’ve got some decent chance of dying. One percent ain’t bad.”
These falcon pilots had nerves, you had to give them that. One had to be gutsy to launch a direct assault on an Apex harvester ship from a single-man fighter, knowing that one shot would kill you, that if you got caught in the enemy’s paralyzing beam, they’d sweep you in and eat you alive.
“Anyway, it don’t really matter how I got it, so long as we caught it in time, right?”
Now the pilot was just being naive. Or willfully blind. Tolvern pulled out her hand computer and studied his flights of the past two months, all those since the last major battle. Since then, they’d been holding position in the Nebuchadnezzar System with the battered remnants of the fleet. Keeping the enemy holed up in their cul-de-sac system while awaiting reinforcements.
“The tech officers and your fellow pilots went over every mission and battle, and there’s never a time when you came into direct contact with the enemy,” she told him. “What’s more, you’ve been recorded on multiple instrument sets during every moment of those battles. Your every move recorded and scrutinized.”
“That’s not always the case, though,” Stratsky said. “We fall out of sight of the fleet on some of our patrols.”
“Right, and that’s where the focus is. Specifically, eleven extended missions in Nebuchadnezzar where your range exceeded eight million miles from the launch platform.”
“I was never out there on my own, though. Always had mates with me on patrol.”
The nurse wheeled up a cart containing surgical instruments. The surgeon and the science officer retreated to the corner to scrub up, and a second nurse entered the operating room to help them with gowns and masks.
The pilot glanced at the activity, and a flicker of uncertainty and worry passed over his face. The reality of having those helpful life-preserving machines disconnected and his old organs stuffed back up inside him like he was a Christmas goose seemed to be getting to him.
“Hey, Doc, what’s that little saw thing for?”
“Look at me, Stratsky,” Tolvern said. “They’ll do their work without you. I need you paying attention.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“In seven of these missions you were always within a few thousand miles of one of your wing mates, usually multiple companions. We’ve scanned the others’ brains, and found nothing, and none of them remember anything funny.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “Don’t you think I’d remember?”
Time was running out, and the captain was growing impatient with his interrupting, so she kept talking over his objection.
“Two other times, you were out of contact with the other strikers for fifteen, twenty minutes, at most. No time for the enemy to haul you in, crack your canopy, and spit their brain-control stuff in your mouth. Which leaves two missions where you were both a good distance from the fleet and out of contact with your fellow pilots for an extended period of time. Do you remember?”
“Sure, I remember. First time we were out in the belt, scanning old mining colonies to make sure nobody was hunkered down there, waiting for a rescue. I was out of contact for a few hours.
“Second time wasn’t so long. I went dark when I was skimming the ring on that gas giant—what’s the name of that planet?—and I had a funny instrument malfunction.” He knotted his brow. “You figure that was it? Has to be, right?”
That was what Tolvern had initially focused on, but she’d studied the incident at greater length and was no longer satisfied.
“Except less than a day later the whole fleet showed up,” she reminded him. “We had our war junks with their wings spread, listening hard, and twenty-six warships running in formations around the planet. If there was an enemy there, how did it stay hidden?”
Tolvern held up her hand to stop his objection. The others were scrubbed and in gowns, ready to operate, with one of the nurses standing by to adjust Stratsky’s IV and pump drugs into his vein to knock him out.
“How long did you say you were out of contact with the striker wing when your instruments went down?”
“An hour. Maybe hour and a half on my own, tops.”
She thumbed the report on her hand computer. “I’m reading Crispin’s mission report. He has you out of contact for nearly three hours. You were off in your falcon doing God knows what.”
“Crispin? I wouldn’t trust that bloke. He can’t remember his own bunk number. Probably forgot to make his report and wrote up a bunch of rubbish the next morning after he’d been drinking all night.”
“This is a direct reading of his instruments, Stratsky, not Crispin’s say-so. Two hours and fifty-seven minutes where his falcon couldn’t detect yours.”
“That can’t be right. I cut through the ice rings and dipped into the outer atmosphere to take a sample. I remember there was a bit of turbulence—I came in above a storm and there was an electrical . . .” A frown crossed his face, and he stared up at the ceiling.
“What is it?” Tolvern pressed. “Did something happen?”
“No, I’m just trying to remember. I took over on manual while I reset the computer because of the electrical storm, but then . . . I can’t remember bringing the computer back up. Then I was talking to Crispin, and he was bugging out because he thought I’d gone down. Couldn’t figure out why he was so worked up when it hadn’t been that long. Only by then I was outside the ring.”
“Looks like we have our answer,” Tolvern said grimly. She nodded at the others. “Take him under.”
#
Twenty minutes later, Tolvern stood on the bridge, admiring her fleet on the viewscreen.
A pair of Punisher-class cruisers lurked above her on the Z-axis, while two corvettes hovered off starboard. A trio of Singaporean war junks formed a triangle around Blackbeard, their ears turned out to search for enemies in the system.
Six torpedo boats swept in from port, guarded by a pair of destroyers and a corvette as they continued in wide orbit around the jump point from the Persia System into Nebuchadnezzar. They were the first line of defense if an Apex fleet popped through, and would do as much damage as possible before the enemy could recover from the jump.
Tolvern’s other ships maintained a looser formation to Blackbeard’s rear: two missile frigates, six more destroyers, another cruiser, and several of Mose Dryz’s sloops of war; the Hroom general himself was back at the Viborg base repairing damaged ships, and would be shipping out with either McGowan or Vargus, so far as she understood it.
The fleet contained thirty-one warships in all, anchored by Blackbeard herself, an Ironside-class battle cruiser with a ten-falcon striker wing, twenty-two guns in the main battery, and seven in the secondary battery, along with powerful torpedo and missile capability.
Tolvern was confident that a fleet of this size and power could handle a force of Scandian star wolves, destroy a pirate base in Ladino territory, or maul a fleet of Hroom sloops. Unfortunately, she was not facing these lesser enemies.
Instead, there was at least one Apex harvester ship on the other side of that jump, along with numerous hunter-killer packs. They’d made several attempts to break out, but so far had not made an all-out push. Perhaps the aliens were content to remain in the system building strength as they massacred the population of Persia and stripped the planet of its mineral wealth.
“Clyde,” Tolvern said to her pilot. “How long would it take a corvette to make a round trip to the second gas giant in the system?”
“I’ll run the numbers through the nav computer, sir.”
“I need an estimate, not an exact itinerary. What have you got off the top of your head?”
The young man plunged his fingers into his curly hair and peered at her through a pair of round eyeglasses. He muttered numbers.
“Maybe twenty-something hours there and twenty-something back, assuming you count in deceleration on the other end and reacceleration. Shorter if you slingshot around, of course, instead of slowing.”
“The ship would need to decelerate. To be safe, let’s count a day there inspecting. So, three days, total?”
“Sounds about right, sir.”
Tolvern glanced at her first mate. Manx had looked up from his own console when she asked Clyde the question, and was studying her with a questioning expression.
“I hate to lose a corvette, Captain,” Manx said.
“Three corvettes,” she corrected. “If there’s an enemy lance or spear hiding down out there by the gas giant, a single corvette can’t run it down, not with the way the smaller Apex ships can pull those short-range jumps.”
“And you really think there’s an enemy out there?” he asked.
“It makes sense. After what happened at the Singaporean battle station, the enemy learned that a gas giant with rings is a good place to hide. Must have been lurking there all this time. When Stratsky came by, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. They thought they’d slip a mole into our ranks.”
Manx let out a low whistle. “A falcon pilot could have blown up the whole ship. He’d go into the hangar and set off munitions, and that would be it. We’re lucky we caught it.”
“You can thank the science guys for that,” Oglethorpe said from the tech console.
Brockett especially. He’d been the one to identify the mind-burning chemicals in the first place and come up with a test for infection, and he’d cured several infected Hroom and humans so far. Hopefully, all of them.
“We can’t risk sending a transmission,” Tolvern told Manx. “Not if the enemies are in the system listening. So we’ll have to send away pods to the corvettes and let their captains know what is going on. Clyde, get started on a course while we ready the pods.”
“Are you sure about this?” Manx asked. “What if hunter-killers jump in here from Persia while they’re gone? We need those corvettes to pin the enemy and make him fight. There’s nobody else fast enough out of the blocks to stop them if they make a run for it.”
“The enemy has pushed through that jump point every fourth or fifth week for months now. Not exactly clockwork, but fairly predictable. We’re three weeks since the last battle, which gives us at least another week.”
“Unless they know somehow that we sent a third of our fleet back to Viborg after the last fight,” he said. “Or if they’ve got a reserve force of hunter-killer packs they’ve been saving for a big surprise breakout attempt. Captain, with all due respect, if their movements were so predictable, we wouldn’t need to stay camped at the jump point.”
“I’m not an idiot, Manx,” Tolvern said.
“Sorry, sir. Of course you aren’t.”
She took a breath. “No, I’m sorry. You’re right to question. Here’s the problem, Lieutenant. The only advantage we have right now is that the Apex base is in a cul-de-sac system. There’s one exit from Persia, and we’ve got it stopped up. We have to hold them in there until Drake and Vargus and the rest of them return.”
“Only now you’re worried that they’ve already escaped? Is that it, sir?”
“It’s probably nothing. Probably just a lone spear or lance that we thought gutted in the last battle that has been hiding at the gas giant ever since. But what if it has a princess on it? If she escapes, runs off to some quiet sector to rebuild, it will start all over again.”
Tolvern tapped her console to bring up a calendar, and was surprised to see that tomorrow was All Fool’s Day. She may have been counting days between Apex attacks, but the passage of time was otherwise a blur, and several weeks seemed to have slipped away from her. Surely the admiral’s fleet couldn’t be far out now. If not him, then Vargus or Broderick. Would help arrive before the next breakout attempt? It had better; she was only holding on by her fingernails here.
Manx still looked worried. “It’s just those corvettes. I hate to lose them.”
“So do I. But we’re only talking about three days. We’ll survive. We have to.”
Chapter Two
Catarina Vargus was surprised to come onto the bridge of Void Queen at the beginning of her watch and discover Lieutenant Capp at the helm. Capp hunched over the console, muttering to herself. She spotted the captain and looked up, blinking.
“The watch schedule says that Paulson is at the helm,” Catarina said. “And yet here you are, Lieutenant.”
“What time is it?”
“Time for my first mate to get some sleep so she’s well rested before the jump.”
Capp rose to surrender the seat to Catarina. “Them wolves is up to something, Cap’n.”
“Something new, or is it the blackfish fleet again?”
“Yeah, the smaller warships. They been sending blackfish out, and they didn’t bring none of the star wolves with ’em.”
“Olafsen is probably running tests, seeing how the blackfish operate.”
“He didn’t say nothing about that before we left Viborg.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, the Scandians like to do their own thing. Anyway, I can’t send Olafsen a message asking what he’s up to—even if I wanted to micromanage him, which I don’t—because there will be no communications until we’re out of the Damascus System. We’re traveling silently.”
Capp grunted. “Maybe we are, but they ain’t.”
“Lieutenant, what are you talking about?”
“Bloodaxe launched something—that’s Olafsen’s wolf, Cap’n.”
“I know that, Capp. What do you mean, Bloodaxe launched something? Mines, countermeasures?”
“More like a probe. It flew off on its own power, then it sent a signal.”
“We’re well into the inner frontier. He’s doing his part to scan for enemies. Not keen about a probe talking back to him—Apex might intercept the signal—but like I said, the Scandians are hard to stage manage. And they’re always worried about ambush.”
“I wish your explanation made sense, but it don’t. It wasn’t the probe talking back to the Viking fleet. The blasted thing is sending signals out front.” Capp rubbed a hand over her buzzed scalp, nodding vigorously. “That’s right, Cap’n. That probe, or whatever it was, sent a radio signal into the asteroid belt. It’s talking to someone else, someone out front of us already.”
Catarina wasn’t yet willing to accept that Olafsen was up to something treacherous, but she was irritated by the news that he was breaking radio silence so blatantly, and wanted to know why.
“Pilot, does our course take us through the asteroid belt?” Catarina asked.
Nyb Pim looked up from his work and met her gaze with his big, liquid eyes. “No, sir. Our target jump point is on this side of the belt.”
“That’s what I thought.”
The Hroom pilot tapped at his console, and a chart of the system appeared on the main screen, with the trajectory of Catarina’s mixed Albion, mercenary, and Scandian fleet marked as a blue streak from one jump point to another. The course took it through the exterior portions of the uninhabited system, well outside the asteroid belt.
“It appears as though we approach within seven million miles of the asteroid belt, and no closer,” Nyb Pim said.
“Smythe, has Bloodaxe or any of the other star wolves altered course?”
The tech officer consulted his workstation. “Negative, sir. They’re maintaining position relative to the rest of the fleet.”
“So why the devil is he messing around with probes?” Catarina said. She shook her head. “Whatever it is, it won’t affect us.”
“What about them blackfish?” Capp asked. “They’re out on patrol, ain’t they?”
“And have been flying routine maneuvers so far.” Catarina hesitated. “Let’s run the numbers just in case.”
She said this mainly for Capp’s benefit. The first mate was going to stay suspicious no matter what. Could anyone blame her? At this point in the war, the bulk of Void Queen’s combat experience came from fighting Scandian star wolves, not Apex warships.
So, no, Catarina didn’t exactly trust the Scandian marauder captains, either, even though the current alliance gave every sign of holding. There was something opportunistic in the way Olafsen and his brother Longshanks, had thrown in their lot with Albion after the fighting in the Odense System. Yes, they were anxious to defeat Apex and eager to rebuild Scandian civilization from a collection of warlords and fractious marauder captains into something unified and strong. But she had no doubt that when those two objectives were realized, they’d try to throw off Albion domination.
Let them. Catarina was no patriot herself, and had her own schemes for grabbing independence from the crown. Meanwhile, she thought she understood the Scandians, and it was hard to imagine them pulling a treacherous move out here. Void Queen was at full strength and traveling with a powerful collection of Albion, Singaporean, and mercenary ships that would tear Olafsen’s fleet apart if he tried anything.
The main viewscreen showed HMS Repulse. A small tech ship was hovering behind the cruiser, trying to seal a cracked outer containment shell on one of the engines while cruising along at three percent the speed of light. Catarina shunted her view to the side, moved past the powerful flotilla of warships stretching behind Void Queen, and brought up the star wolves.
Led by the two brothers on Bloodaxe and Thor’s Hammer, the wolves jostled for position at the vanguard of the combined fleet. Five smaller Scandian ships—the so-called blackfish—had veered off at an angle. These newer ships had not yet seen action in battle, and it seemed reasonable that they would take advantage of the delay caused by Repulse’s repairs to run maneuvers.
But any maneuvers would be short, given the course set by the fleet. If the blackfish veered too far afield, they’d be left behind, and Catarina would be irritated if she had to hold up the jump while she waited for them. In fact, she wouldn’t do it; she’d jump anyway and force them to catch up with her in the next system.
“Captain?” Nyb Pim said. “I have some preliminaries on the course set by the Scandian blackfish.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Yes, sir. It would appear that they are following the probe Lieutenant Capp detected earlier.” The Hroom hummed deep in his throat. “They are turning toward the asteroid belt.”
#
Catarina retreated to her war room and called Olafsen to demand an explanation. The marauder captain appeared after two or three long minutes. He gazed back at her with an insolent expression. He’d been growing out his beard for months, and it gleamed, freshly brushed and oiled. He wore a heavy silver chain with a silver rune hammer pendant and a cloak swept over one shoulder. It was a dignified look, and the scar crossing from his forehead to his upper cheek only made the marauder captain look more impressive.
Yet his expression made Catarina bristle, especially in light of how long she’d waited for him to take the video call. She let the displeasure show on her face.
“Well? What have you to say for yourself?”
“Nothing, Vargus.”
“You must think I’m an idiot.”
“Not really, no. You are clever enough for an Albion captain. I knew you’d figure out sooner or later that I was mounting a side expedition.”
“Oh, is that what you call it? A side expedition? And how do you explain why you’re not at the helm of Bloodaxe?”
Something flickered across his face—a hint of surprise, perhaps—but he recovered quickly.
“That’s right,” she continued, “I know you’re on one of these blackfish ships yourself. My tech officers are not idiots, either. Whatever you’re doing out there, it requires your personal attention. Well, are you going to explain yourself, or not?”
“There’s something I need to examine in the asteroid belt. What does it matter to you the reasons?”
“Because you’re dividing our forces. Because we’ve got a rendezvous to keep, and I can’t both follow you and meet McGowan at the prearranged time. And because I’m in command of this fleet, not you. Are you suggesting I follow you into the belt?”
“Absolutely not. It is, as I said, a side expedition. As for breaking up the fleet, you’ll have plenty of firepower when you meet up with McGowan. Now, I know it’s important for you to have a bigger fleet than your old lover”—Olafsen chuckled, as if he’d been especially witty passing along navy gossip—“but you’ve still got him beat even without my blackfish.”
Catarina voiced the suspicion that had been growing in her. “This had better not be personal, Olafsen. If you’ve found holdouts from Viborg in some secret base and want to teach them a lesson, you’d better tell me now.”
“I will do what it takes to consolidate my command over the rebellious Scandian warlords and marauder captains. I’ve never made a secret of that.”
“So it is personal.”
“Those are your words, not mine.” Olafsen raised an eyebrow, making his scar uncoil across his face. “I will catch up before the rendezvous if I can. If not, I will meet you in the Persia System.”
He cut the line, leaving Catarina alone in the empty war room, fuming.
#
She kept a wary eye on Olafsen’s five blackfish as his ships approached the asteroid belt, even as she maintained her course across the system toward the entry into the Zoroaster System with the rest of her large fleet.
They’d begun their final approach to the jump point when Olafsen’s small force arrived at the asteroid belt. She thought she’d have two or three hours to watch and see what he was up to before Void Queen exited the system, but he decelerated until he was at a complete stop just outside the belt, where he entered into a slow orbit around the sun.
Catarina’s curiosity grew with every passing minute, but to bring a halt to the fleet now would force a lengthy delay. In addition to Void Queen, the flagship of her fleet, she had twenty-three Scandian star wolves, six mercenary ships, eight Hroom sloops of war, and seventeen other Royal Navy warships under her command. Fifty-five craft in all to shuttle through the jump point and into the uncertainty that lay beyond. Reluctantly, she ordered the jump to proceed as planned.
She came to on the other side with a mild headache and Void Queen drifting away from the jump point. The rest of the crew on the bridge shook themselves from their lethargy with the groans and muttered curses of the hungover. Smythe and Lomelí got instruments up and running as HMS Fierce, one of the other two cruisers, flashed through the jump point to join the battle cruiser.
Next came a pair of destroyers, followed by one of the war junks. It spread its wings and hit the system with active sensors. The second war junk appeared, followed in quick succession by a corvette, four Hroom sloops, and Catarina’s old pirate frigate, Orient Tiger.
She was still fuzzy headed, and had to glance at the star chart on her console to remember the name of this godforsaken wilderness. Zoroaster. A binary system with so much radiation pulsing off one of the two stars that it messed with the sensors and made detection difficult. No habitable planets, but numerous planetoid objects loaded with fissionables and other valuable ores. A lot of territory to search.
Wonderful. Well, that was why Drake was sending her through here, wasn’t it? It was a good place for a beleaguered fleet to hide and rebuild strength, and she had to make sure the enemy hadn’t done just that.
Earlier, a pair of Apex spears had broken through Drake’s quarantine of the Persia System and fled into deep space before they could be hunted down and destroyed. You could hardly blame Drake; his forces had been fighting for their lives at the time, during that final battle when Dreadnought had taken so much damage that the admiral was forced to bring his battleship back to Viborg for repairs.
Since then, Tolvern had successfully bottled up the enemy, but Drake worried that the escaping spears had been carrying princesses or queens. If so, they could give rise to new flocks, which made it imperative that they be tracked down before that could happen.
The admiral had given Catarina a circuitous route to the front lines to make sure the system was clear, which was how she’d ended up first in Damascus, and now in Zoroaster. And so, as her ships kept coming through, her pilot and tech officer were working out various courses through the system that would allow them to hit the major hiding places in case the war junks couldn’t find anything with their sensors.
That meant dividing up the fleet, which was another reason she was unhappy to see Olafsen take off with his blackfish. It looked like she’d need three separate forces. Put Void Queen with the star wolves so Catarina could keep an eye on the Scandians, set Fierce and Repulse at the head of two other forces, and forget about the blackfish for now.
Catarina was transmitting fleet orders when a subspace came through from Olafsen, still presumably messing around in the asteroid belt of the previous system. She knew even before reading it that the subspace would contain all sorts of valuable intelligence for Apex, should the enemy intercept it, but little new information for herself. A quick glance confirmed her assumption.
Am engaging the enemy and cannot make rendezvous. I will meet you at Nebuchadnezzar if I survive.
Olafsen
Chapter Three
Tolvern stood on the bridge of Blackbeard, anxiously watching the viewscreen as her three corvettes nudged through the icy ring around the gas giant planet the crew was calling Big Greasy, for lack of an official name. The cloud banding around the planet looked like streaks of burned oil left across a gray metal frying grill, which had given rise to the informal name.
The jump point where Blackbeard remained with the bulk of the fleet remained quiet, and Tolvern was second-guessing her decision. Not second-guessing the corvette mission to look for Stratsky’s captors, but that she should have sent more ships in case something turned up.
“I’ve been reading Drake’s logs,” Manx said. The first mate was three hours over shift, but remained at his station. “The two enemy spears most definitely jumped clear of the Nebuchadnezzar System, and we’ve been watching the jump points, so it’s not like they could have slipped back in.”
“Understood.”
“But I’ve figured out how there might be something else out there,” Manx said. “That last battle was a mess. Full-on chaos. Drake had half his force in Persia at one point, including Dreadnought, and the ships he left behind got mauled. Half the task force was destroyed in the battle, and most of the rest were shipped back to Viborg and Fort Alliance for repair as soon as the battle was won.”
“Your point?”
“My point is that plenty of stuff happened that didn’t make the logs because nobody saw it.”
“You think another ship or two escaped the battle besides the ones noted?”
Manx looked uncertain. “I’m not saying that, not necessarily. Nothing was noted, and those jump points were watched. But there were five ships—a spear and four lances—that disappear from the record at some point. All five suffered heavy damage, and were deemed too crippled to jump. They were presumed destroyed, the wreckage joining the derelicts and random bits of flotsam cluttering the system.”
“But nobody has tracked down or verified the wreckage, am I right?” Tolvern asked.
“No. There’s too much of it, and we’ve been too busy to send patrols.”
Tolvern rubbed her hands together and looked up at the screen to watch the corvettes at work.
“So what we’re talking about,” she said, “is at least one lance or spear that survived the battle, was too damaged to jump, and has been hiding out by Big Greasy ever since. The enemy spotted Stratsky’s falcon on patrol and grabbed him without thinking twice.”
HMS Streak pulled away from the other two corvettes and dipped into the upper atmosphere of the gas giant. Her companions lurked within striking range, engines hot, active sensors hammering. Millions of miles away at the jump point, Tolvern’s war junks were listening with equal attention.
Without warning, one of the two corvettes outside the ring let loose a pair of torpedoes. Streak burst out of the atmosphere, plasma engines flaring as she shot away from the planet. Following closely behind was an Apex warship.
“A spear!” Oglethorpe shouted from the tech console, quite unnecessarily, Tolvern thought.
“Yes, Lieutenant,” she said dryly. “So it would appear.”
“Not that one, Captain! Look.”
Bayard joined the cry from the defense grid station, and Tolvern paid more attention to what the two men were going on about.
The two officers had maintained a watch of the jump point on a side screen, and it was here that the more important action was taking place. An Apex spear had materialized nearby, drifting on auxiliary power away from the jump point, and was sliding helplessly right toward Blackbeard.
Tolvern instantly forgot about the action taking place at Big Greasy and got on the com to the gunnery. Gunnery Chief Finch was already preparing to launch torpedoes, but Tolvern ordered her to hold torpedoes and ready a broadside instead.
“We’re still retracting shields, Captain. They won’t be ready in time.”
“Hold your nerve, Finch.” Tolvern glanced at her console. “There’s plenty of time.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tolvern cut the call and ordered Manx to bring them closer. The spear was still drifting, its Apex crew as vulnerable to the disorientating effects of a jump as any human or Hroom.
Other ships of the alliance fleet were moving to attack, but none were as well positioned as the battle cruiser. It was fantastic luck that the enemy ship had come through drifting in just this precise direction, and luck had been hard to come by in the war. Tolvern could crush the spear with a broadside from close quarters and still have her torpedoes hot in the tubes for anything else that might come through.
The spear’s engines sputtered and flared to life. It began to move. But Manx had brought Blackbeard straight in line with the spear’s drift from the jump point, and the enemy accelerated right toward the Albion battle cruiser. Finch messaged from the gunnery that the main battery was ready.
“Fire!” Tolvern ordered.
She gripped the edge of her console as tons of kinetic shot blasted from twenty-two cannons in a full broadside. The spear tried to maneuver away, but the bulk of the shot smashed into its upper decks and left a series of smoking holes. Plasma bled from damaged engines where more shot had cracked the containment field.
Two navy destroyers had been screening Blackbeard and pounced on the injured spear, firing missiles and kinetic shot. Tolvern didn’t pursue the fleeing enemy ship, because at that moment a second ship jumped into Nebuchadnezzar. This one was a smaller lance, also drifting in nearly the same direction.
Another great opportunity.
“Pull us around, fire secondary battery.”
“Hold on,” Oglethorpe said. His hands were moving over his console, and he was going back and forth between multiple conversations. “We’re trying to get our striker wing into the fight.”
“Make it fast,” Manx said. “The captain needs those guns.”
Falcons came shooting out of Blackbeard’s starboard flank one after another. Tolvern watched in frustration as the lance slid past them off port. Helpless, begging to be destroyed.
“Striker wing in the air,” Oglethorpe announced.
Tolvern ordered a roll, and a near simultaneous firing of the secondary cannon. The cannon fire from close range left the upper armor of the enemy ship riddled with shot and near the breaking point. The spear had already stopped struggling, gutted and dead, and the destroyers now savaged the wounded lance instead.
Two more lances jumped through, followed by a spear. Finch reported that the main cannon were ready again, and Tolvern ordered another broadside, this time joined by the torpedoes she’d held in reserve. Her missile frigates launched a barrage. A pair of sloops arrived in time to fire their serpentine batteries, with more Albion warships eagerly pressing in for an attack.
Soon, Tolvern had wiped out three lances and a spear, and had the second spear on the ropes. She was almost jubilant. Let the enemy queen commander send in her forces piecemeal; the allied human-Hroom fleet would wipe them out and suffer no losses in return.
And then it came.
A harvester ship, the most massive that Tolvern had ever seen. With a fat, bulbous rear, and five hooking, bulwark-chewing appendages up front, it looked like some monster of the deep. The harvester turned, drifting slowly away from the jump point for several seconds before the green eye came on and swept out to look for victims.
Several of Tolvern’s ships had been charging in to cover the jump point, including four more destroyers and a pair of torpedo boats. They were in close range of the harvester, and the boats immediately dropped torpedoes, while the destroyers let loose with their guns.
The harvester’s eye swept its green ray across one of the destroyers, and her guns fell silent. Now the Albion ship was the one drifting helplessly, while the harvester moved in, arms opening. The destroyer fell out from underneath the paralyzing beam and began to move, but not quickly enough. The harvester’s grasping arms closed around the smaller ship and pulled her up toward its bridge.
Tolvern bit down on her lip and looked away. The harvester was tearing into the destroyer, she knew, dropping in armed drones to paralyze marines and sailors and take them prisoner, and she couldn’t watch. David Hales—that was the captain’s name. Out on his first tour of duty in command of his own ship. His life would end in a queen commander’s ritual slaughter.
The harvester spit out the ship. A second destroyer fell under the green eye. Tolvern saw with horror that it was Nineveh, the ship she’d commanded while Blackbeard was in the spaceyards being converted into a battle cruiser. Captain Fox was in charge now, also on his first tour as captain, and the crew on Blackbeard’s bridge fell silent as they waited for the harvester to tear his ship apart, too.
But the harvester pulled away without snaring Nineveh, accelerating from the jump point and relying on conventional weapons to knock aside its challengers. Torpedoes and missiles slammed into its hull, but the enemy suffered little damage. Less effective still were the energy pulses and small missiles of Blackbeard’s striker wing, now entering the fray. Tolvern recalled them before they got themselves killed.
She could have used her corvettes to get out in front of the harvester to force it to engage, but they were way out by the gas giant in their own fight, and so she had to rely on her destroyers and long-range armaments to slow it.
“More ships coming through,” Oglethorpe announced. “We don’t deal with them now and we’re going to be in serious trouble.”
Tolvern had been concentrating on engaging with the harvester for the past half hour, while being vaguely aware that lances and spears continued to pop through the jump point, unopposed. Two hunter-killer packs arranged themselves—each with four lances and a spear—and another spear entered Nebuchadnezzar, promising more enemies to come.
The lead hunter-killer pack was well contained, facing attack from torpedo boats, cruisers, and war junks, who stood back a pace and focused beams against the spear, throwing so much energy into its armor that it turned soft and vulnerable to kinetic fire.
But the second pack was left unopposed, and charged a small force of sloops that guarded Tolvern’s missile frigates. If they got through, her frigates were done for, and the cordon around the jump point smashed.
“Bring us around,” she ordered. “We’ve got to save those frigates.”
“What about the harvester?” Manx said. “It’s getting away.”
A quick glance. “Not yet. Bring Triumph up to hit it from the rear. Get the destroyers out front and drop mines, torpedoes—anything to slow it down. And what’s happening with those blasted corvettes? Will someone put them up on the screen?”
She had a few minutes by the gas giant before Blackbeard reentered combat, and used it to take in the battle taking place outside Big Greasy. The three corvettes had successfully flushed an Apex spear from its hiding place, that had chased after the lead ship, Streak, but a counterattack had chased it off. The corvettes had pursued and disabled the spear’s short-range jump capabilities, and were hammering it with a relentless attack. It was already gutted, and now broke into pieces. Their mission accomplished, the three corvettes accelerated toward the main battlefield.
A mere twenty-five hours out from reinforcing her position, Tolvern thought grimly. She’d have to do without.
“Warning, class-two detonation expected,” Jane, the computer’s AI, announced.
The ship shuddered from the impact, and the lights flickered, but remained on.
“Next time, a little more notice would be nice,” Tolvern said.
She thumbed her console to bring up the shield report rather than wait for Jane’s assessment. Moderate damage to the number three shield.
Blackbeard took another blow, but landed several of her own. She hit a wounded lance with missiles and blew it apart with cannon fire. The spear was already taking heavy fire from the sloops and Blackbeard’s striker wing, and Tolvern added torpedoes and the deck gun. One of the other lances fell to enfilading fire.
Unfortunately, the other hunter-killer pack was giving a better accounting of itself. What had looked like a quick fight was turning into a real brawl, with both sides landing blows. One of Tolvern’s cruisers had taken significant damage and was withdrawing. A torpedo boat charged in, dropped its load, and made to withdraw as its Mark-IVs lumbered toward a lance.
Energy pulses caught the torpedo boat before it could make its escape. It twisted and tried to dive, but couldn’t break free, as a pair of lances savaged it from above and below. Moments later, explosions burst out the torpedo boat’s hull, venting its gasses to the void.
Even worse, a third hunter-killer pack was assembling outside the jump point, this one totally unopposed. The Blackbeard crew could only watch helplessly as it charted a course away from the battlefield, accelerating toward jump velocity. More enemy ships kept popping through. There would soon be a fourth hunter-killer pack to deal with.
“How many ships do the buzzards have?” she said, frustrated.
That third pack vanished and reappeared moments later alongside the fleeing harvester ship, while the fourth pack moved to join the battle near the jump point. Tolvern ordered another barrage from her frigates, and missiles thundered down on the newly arriving enemy ships.
HMS Triumph had been leading the effort to pin down the harvester with some success. The sudden appearance of four lances and a spear in the fight threw these efforts into chaos. Soon, Triumph was flailing backward from the fight, while the harvester lunged to get the cruiser in its jaws. The green light swept over a pair of destroyers. Their guns fell silent.
Two more lances jumped to the harvester ship’s defense, survivors of the battle at the jump point, and now expendable from that fight as Apex forces kept entering the Nebuchadnezzar System. The lances attacked the destroyer still caught in the paralyzing ray, while the harvester itself battered the destroyer’s companion. The two Albion warships blew apart within seconds of each other.
“Call the rest of them back,” Tolvern said.
Manx stared at her. “The harvester will escape.”
“Nothing can stop that now. Quickly, we can still win this fight here.”
Triumph and the remaining destroyers retreated toward the jump point. The harvester and its escorts let them go and continued their flight across Nebuchadnezzar. The surviving Albion warships arrived at the rear of the battlefield just in time, as a spear and three lances had broken through to get at Tolvern’s missile frigates.
Blackbeard had been under continual fire for almost four hours, and the strain was showing in the damage reports pouring in from across the ship. Enemy ships kept charging in, trying to take her out, but the battle cruiser’s guns, missiles, and torpedoes punished every attempt.
Another hunter-killer pack escaped to join the harvester, plus a stray lance. The others couldn’t get up to speed, and several ships—mostly enemies, but some her own—were drifting crippled from the battlefield, adding to the confusion. A sloop detonated, and the resulting explosion took out one of Blackbeard’s falcons, which had been trying to defend the Hroom ship from attack.
“No more ships are coming through,” Oglethorpe said from the tech console.
“It’s about bloody time,” Manx said through clenched teeth.
At almost the same moment, the remaining enemy ships at the jump point made a break for it. Three hung behind, too damaged to keep up, and fell to Tolvern’s torpedo boats and a harassing fire from the remaining falcons.
The other five Apex ships jumped to safety. They reappeared next to the harvester, which was now protected by more than a dozen support vessels. The alien queen commander took this force and set an immediate course in the direction of a trio of jump points farther out in the system.
There was mop-up action remaining near the jump point into Persia, including the rescue of escape pods from destroyed Albion warships. Wrecked lances and spears were everywhere, but these individual victories did not hide the magnitude of their defeat.
In concrete terms, Tolvern had lost eight ships: three destroyers, two sloops, a war junk, a torpedo boat, and a falcon. Her remaining forces were battered and in no shape to fight, and she was still missing the three corvettes, who were more than fourteen hours from the battlefield.
“Clyde, get me information,” she said to her pilot. “Figure out which jump that harvester is taking out of here. Manx, I want an assessment of fleet strength—who can fight right now, and who will be ready in forty-eight hours.”
“So we’re going after them?” Manx sounded doubtful.
“We can’t. We’re not strong enough to hunt them down, and we couldn’t catch them in time anyway. They broke the quarantine, and it will be up to someone else to stop them.”
Clyde looked up from his pilot’s console. “Looks like they’re headed toward the Xerxes System.”
“McGowan is off in that direction. He can cut them off, hold them long enough for Drake and Vargus to join him.”
“I thought they’re supposed to be joining us,” Manx said.
“Nothing else matters if that harvester ship disappears across the inner frontier and finds a new human planet to terrorize.” Tolvern chewed her lip. “I’ll have to risk a subspace—much as McGowan deserves to get his nose bloodied, I can’t have him caught unaware when a harvester comes blasting in.”
“And if the enemy tries a second jailbreak?” her first mate pressed.
“What do you think? We’ll all die. Which means we can’t sit here waiting to find out.”
Manx let out a harsh laugh. “Captain, what choice do we have? You’re saying we can’t stop them, but we can’t run away from the fight, either.”
“That’s why I’m giving the fleet forty-eight hours for repairs. Not three days, not a week. Apex just broke a harvester ship free from the Persia System along with a couple of dozen lances and spears. Whatever enemy forces remain inside, they’re weaker than they were yesterday. Possibly a lot weaker. And after a victory, they aren’t expecting a counterattack.”
Manx only stared. They were all staring at her now. Clyde blinked behind his glasses, and Bayard slowly and audibly let out his breath. Oglethorpe had been on the com with engineering, but now fell silent.
“A counterattack?” Manx finally managed.
“There’s a human planet in the Persia System, and its population is threatened with extermination. This might be our chance to put an end to it.”
Chapter Four
Olafsen stood with his helmet in hand so the others in the launch bay could see his glare. Otherwise, he was fully suited up and ready for combat. The blackfish was shaking as if buffeted by atmospheric winds, but that was really incoming fire thumping against the hull of the ship.
“Listen to me, men. You are Scandians. Fearless warriors—raiders and marauders all of you. The blood of Vikings flows in your veins as pure as it was fifteen hundred years ago when your ancestors terrorized Old Earth.”
The men had been chanting over the com: war cries, taunts, and jeers. Anything to get them riled up for the battle, but now they fell silent, as if sensing that this was important. He spotted familiar helmets, and he thought of them not by their names, but by their mech suits: Demon Grin, with his blood-like slash across a black faceplate. Bug, in a glossy metallic green helmet. Blood Fury, in a singular red mech suit with a huge lobsterlike claw on one arm and a tri-barreled gun attachment on the other. Then there was Giant, who was so tall he was practically Hroom-like, and forced to duck in the low-ceilinged room.
“No,” Olafsen corrected. “Your blood is more pure. It has been distilled to its Viking essence. Other men, other weaker men have died, leaving only the strongest to propagate the Scandian race. If we returned to Old Earth in the days of our ancestors, wearing these mech suits, they would see us as gods.”
“And the buzzards?” a voice asked quietly. It was Demon Grin. “How will they see us?”
“As victims, as food. As easy prey. They’ve killed millions of humans, and why should we be any different?” Olafsen narrowed his eyes. “But they’ve never faced us before, have they? Not in our full armored fury, mounting an assault.
“Whatever you see down there, whatever enemies you face, remember this. We win or lose today with glory. Each and every one of you will either stand in triumph on a heap of dead aliens or you will dine in Valhalla.”
A cheer rose up at this, and men shook their armored fists in the air or waved gun attachments. Yet there was a current of fear in their bravado, crackling like electricity. They were men with machinery, after all, not gods.
He understood their fears, and shared them himself. He’d faced brutal men like Ragnar Forkbeard, knowing that if the enemy captured him, he’d have his chest cavity peeled open, his lungs removed, and his heart torn out. The infamous blood eagle. An honor, supposedly, a sacrifice to the gods, but a dubious one.
But the thought of being eaten alive by an Apex queen commander was even more horrific. Her beak tearing out his eyeballs, her talons shredding his belly and groin.
The blackfish was shuddering in earnest, but all the incoming fire was directed on the bow of this and the other ships, and that was what Olafsen had built these ships to resist. They were overhauled star wolves, gutted ships left from the battle with Forkbeard last year. He’d hacked out damaged portions, reinforced the front with extra armor until each ship could survive a direct ramming, and taken out some of the armaments to further increase hull strength.
The result was five ships that could survive a terrible beating at close range, close enough to strike the enemy and send in raiders, but had limited fighting ability otherwise. He’d hidden this purpose from Drake, Vargus, Tolvern, and McGowan, deciding that the Albion commanders didn’t need to know what he intended until he’d proven the concept.
A voice came from the bridge as Olafsen put on his helmet and clamped it into place.
“Marauder Captain, this Jarn reporting.”
“Go ahead.”
“Based on a subsurface scan, we estimate there are as many as ten thousand birds in the mining base.”
Ten thousand. By the gods.
“Most of them will be drones,” Olafsen said. “How many from the warrior castes? That’s the only thing that matters.”
“I have no idea.”
“Never mind that. How long until impact?”
“Ninety seconds. I’ll shift extra power to the anti-grav, but you’re going to feel rapid deceleration.”
“Keep me from splattering against the inside of my mech suit, that’s all I ask.”
The blackfish was shaking hard enough that deceleration was the least of his worries. Could the ships take the pounding? Olafsen had decided to mount an attack without the support of Vargus’s fleet in part because he’d estimated that the enemy, hidden as it was, wouldn’t have enough external guns to cut him down in time.
Don’t lie to yourself. That isn’t the reason, and you know it.
The men started up their chant again:
Blood, spoil, plunder, death.
Valhalla!
Olafsen was thrown forward in his harness. The jolt was so violent that even between the anti-grav, the momentum-dampening harness, and the protection of his suit, he nearly blacked out. He opened his eyes and shook his head to clear it. Fire burned ahead of him, jetting into the launch bay from some external source.
Competing anti-grav systems pulled him in two different directions. The first, from the ship, made it look as though he was staring straight out into an alien corridor, round and twisting snakelike up and away. Then, when he took two steps forward, suddenly he was looking down into the thing from above. He slid forward and fell in a heap of men in mech suits. He tried to stand up, but men were falling on top of him, and he had to shove them aside before he could rise.
There were so many men in the pile that the ones at the bottom would have been in danger of getting crushed down there, if not for the lower gravity inside the corridors. No more than fifty percent, he thought, based on the ease with which his mech suit moved his fellow raiders.
The air was damp and warm, and, according to his sensors, filled with volatile organics, a nearly toxic brew that indicated that the aliens were barely attempting to filter the air from their factories and mines. Who had time for such niceties when you were in a furious race to build up your forces before you were either discovered by enemies or you’d consumed all the human bodies in your larder?
Olafsen got clear of the mass of men still tumbling out of the blackfish where it had rammed through—a hundred mech raiders in all—only to see birds come screaming down the hallway, flapping their wings as they half-flew, half-ran toward him. Only drones with drab feathers and no weapons strapped across their chests. Olafsen and two others, including Demon Grin, lifted guns and fired as they approached.
Too late, he saw that one of them clutched something metallic and egg-shaped in its beak. A raider shot the buzzard through the breast, but it continued on momentum and slammed into the man, where it exploded.
When the air cleared, there was little left of the drone but feathers. The raider lay on his back, screaming. His faceplate was cracked open, his face covered in blood.
Olafsen didn’t have a chance to look to the injured man, because more birds came swooping in from his rear. These ones wore harnesses that hooked over wings and held guns at either chest or shoulder level, which they controlled with their beaks. They fired into the pile of raiders still trying to get disentangled from where they’d fallen in a heap. Other birds howled in from the other side, but these were more worker drones, and few were armed.
The tight spaces filled with gunfire and carnage, the fight growing hotter by the minute. Men fell here and there, but the raiders slaughtered so many birds that the corridor was soon clogged in either direction. The opposition died as quickly as it had begun. Olafsen breathed heavily, his heart pounding. He reloaded and turned on the com.
“Platoon One, hold the launch site. The rest of you follow me.”
About twenty men peeled off from the others and took position in the corridor. Plates of tyrillium scale dropped from the ceiling on chains. The ship remained above them, still attached to the base walls, and was now feeding in supplies. The men of Platoon One began to assemble the plate into gun shields.
Olafsen led the rest of his raiders down the corridor toward where the feed on the inside of his faceplate indicated another blackfish had broken through. All four of the other ships had penetrated the enemy base within a few hundred yards of his position, and two of the assault teams were still under fire from the initial entry, but close to breaking out.
A third assault team had discovered a room filled with eggs and was torching it. The final group of raiders was pushing into what the commanding marauder captain said were dorms for workers, with drones huddled together like a flock of roosting starlings. An easy slaughter.
Olafsen angrily ordered these last two marauder captains to resume their attack. The fools. They could deal with eggs and drones later. First, they had to find the warrior caste of this huge base and eliminate them.
“Stay on your original objectives,” he growled. “Do not deviate from the plan or you’ll answer to me.”
Olafsen’s men joined up with a second group of raiders—the egg smashers—and continued for several minutes with little opposition. They got lost in a mazelike structure of snaking, tubelike tunnels that widened or narrowed with little rhyme or reason and opened into small rooms stuffed with equipment and big ones that were nothing but empty warehouse space.
According to their locators, another assault team was only twenty or thirty feet away, below and to the rear, but whenever Olafsen tried to meet up, he found himself hooking back around or lost in a maze of side chambers.
Dead drones filled one of these rooms, stacked like firewood. They looked haggard in death, their plumage plucked, their bodies bony and starving. Mounds of bird excrement filled another room to the height of several feet, and it smelled so strongly of ammonia that the men were gagging through the filters of their suits before they could stumble back into the corridor.
They fought another short, sharp engagement before finally connecting with the other raiders.
A few minutes later, Olafsen and the front elements of his small army, now grown to nearly 250 men, crashed into a huge, warehouse-like space, large enough to swallow his whole blackfish fleet. It was a hive of Apex industry, if not the overall center of enemy activity.
Machinery clanked and whirred, fires glowed from open forges, and plasma torches sparked. There were hundreds of drones working assembly lines, operating machinery, and flying about, as well as keeping busy at a myriad of other small tasks. Others, their plumage spotted with green, gold, or scarlet feathers, rode carriages suspended on wires above the work floor, screaming and squawking at the drones below. Foremen of some kind.
Two drones flew overhead, and some idiot in Olafsen’s company, apparently not thinking of the consequences, lifted his assault rifle and gunned them down. Olafsen braced himself for a fierce response from the enemy as the pair spiraled down, screaming as they died, but none of the workers seemed to notice.
“By the gods,” he said. “They’re carrying on as if nothing is happening.”
Or was it possible they hadn’t heard above the din of the factory floor?
Demon Grin stood by Olafsen’s side. He waved his guns. “We’ll make quick work of them. Give the command, Marauder Captain. We’re ready.”
Olafsen turned on the general channel and ordered his forces to sweep across the factory floor, shooting everything in sight. Raiders leaped eagerly into the fray, unleashing hell with rifles and hand cannons. They blasted birds above and below, and smashed equipment with a hail of outgoing fire.
There was so much movement, so much shooting from his own men, that Olafsen was slow to notice the huge overhead crane swinging toward them. It was two stories high, with chains holding a chunk of what looked like the inner hull of a warship.
“Look out!” he yelled as it swept toward them.
His men scattered as the chains unhooked, and the huge piece of machinery fell. Most got out of the way, but several didn’t react quickly enough. The piece of equipment slammed into the ground, crushing some and pinning others in place.
Buzzards hurtled down from above. Others dropped from openings in the ceiling and landed on the crane, where they cocked their heads as if sizing up prey, then dove toward the factory floor. They slammed into raiders, knocking them from their feet.
Gunfire exploded from overhead catwalks, from birds remaining on top of the crane, and from fortified positions with birds protected behind crates of supplies, giant ingots of iron, vat-like crucibles, and assembly lines. Airlocks opened along the walls some fifty yards ahead of them, spitting more birds into the mix, these ones brightly colored members of the warrior caste.
A terrible squawk pierced the air, rising above the clank of machinery and the rattle of gunfire. A giant bird, thirty feet tall, came striding across the factory floor. Its beak and claws were of metal, and a series of weird harnesses strung across its wings and looped around its neck, holding guns.
A handful of raiders had pushed eagerly toward the center of the factory floor, leaving a trail of slaughtered drones in their wake. They moved swiftly into a phalanx-like formation at the approach of the battle strider, with those carrying assault rifles positioned in front, kneeling, and heavier weaponry firing over their shoulders. Gunfire from above pinged off their mech suits with little effect.
The strider initially paid little attention to this forward group of raiders, moving toward Olafsen’s main force instead, until gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades struck it across the chest, and it cocked its head. Green light flashed from its eyes, and the raider phalanx collapsed in a heap. The giant bird straddled them, and long, snaking appendages dropped from its chest. They coiled around raiders and hoisted them from the ground.
The raiders regained use of their suits as the strider lifted them. They thrashed and bucked, and some of them pried with clamp-like hands in an attempt to free themselves. One nearly hacked his way free with a cutting attachment on one hand. The battle strider, screaming in rage and pain, flung the captured men across the factory floor. They landed hard, and were immediately beset by enemies swooping in from above. The birds tore off faceplates and pecked at joints in the armor. Men screamed as birds got through and tore them apart.
Olafsen might have died if not for the advance team of raiders. He’d been out in the open with several other men when the battle strider came stalking toward them. The bulk of his forces would have been caught in the paralyzing ray and finished off. Instead, the strider had stopped to destroy the phalanx, which let Olafsen and the others duck for cover. Other men dug in behind wrecked equipment or crates of supplies along the flanks. They exchanged fire with the birds threatening to overwhelm them from above.
A diving bird struck Olafsen from behind, and he went down. He rolled onto his back, guns at the ready, only to find Demon Grin and Bug standing over him, tearing apart the bird with their mechanized arms.
“Get the strider,” he ordered over the com. “We have to bring it down.”
All available weapons aimed now at the giant bird resuming its march toward the Scandian lines. Bullets and grenades slammed into it, but seemed to have little effect. It lifted its wings, and fire squirted from nozzles held in place by harnesses. It opened its mouth and spewed gunfire. Three raiders fell. Another ran screaming, the paint boiling off his suit as the flames stuck like jelly to its surface.
The strider turned its green ray on four more raiders and dropped them in their tracks. The cursed thing looked like a monster and fought like a machine. It had already stopped their advance, and threatened to destroy the entire assault. They had to bring it down, and quickly.
Two men ran forward holding a large-caliber gun and tripod, and Olafsen spotted his opportunity.
Ducking another swooping attack, and with bullets zinging past him and dinging his breastplate, Olafsen darted out from his hiding place, shouting for others to follow. Mech raiders clanked from behind machinery and piles of dead enemies and fired up at the strider, which had stopped to tear the head off one of its victims.
This fresh gunfire drew its attention, and brought relief to the forward elements being shredded by the strider attack. The rifled cannon was nearly ready. Olafsen order his men to fall back as one of the raiders shoved shells into its breech.
The second raider aimed the gun and fired. It recoiled sharply. The battle strider fell back with a cry. Its wing hung loose, and an oily, reddish-black liquid fell from its breast. It cocked its head, searching for the source of its torment. It spotted the men at the cannon and flashed green light from its eye at the same moment the shooter pulled the trigger. The shell slammed into the strider, and it staggered backward and collapsed.
Raiders now concentrated on bringing down the birds that had continued to torment them while they’d battled the strider. The enemy mounted vicious attacks from perches above and from the air, but died quickly when shot.
Olafsen ordered fragmentation grenades, timed to burst overhead. Birds came spiraling down, screaming. The enemy counterattack was fading quickly.
More information scrolled across the inside of Olafsen’s faceplate, and he studied it even as his men hunted down the last factory drones and killed them. An advance team had located a nesting chamber filled with hundreds of eggs. Thousands. What’s more, the air was purer there—the platoon leader thought they must be close to the oxygen plant. Maybe the power plant, too.
“I’m on my way,” Olafsen said.
Björnman called over the com.
“I’m in the command center. At least I think that’s what it is.” Björnman stopped to gasp for air, as if he’d been running. “Weird computers and stuff, and a lot of technical geegaws. We’ve placed charges. I lost about twenty men, but it could have been worse. I thought there would be more fighting.”
Olafsen thought of the battle strider. “There was fighting enough. We’re lucky the aliens threw their effort into rapid expansion and not more fighters. Otherwise, we’d be in trouble.”
Assuming the enemy wasn’t holding a large force in reserve. Except he was on the verge of penetrating the very heart of their operations, and surely, if they had more defenders, now was the time to use them.
He got on the general com. “This is it, men. Time to gut these buzzards and win the fight.”
#
Olafsen fought another battle when he reached the oxygen plant, and the enemy mounted a counterattack when his forces had smashed it and were moving on toward the power plant, where Scandian engineers put their minds to work figuring out how to push it critical so it would enter a meltdown state.
With the exception of that lone battle strider, his raiders were stronger than the buzzards, and cut down ten for every man who fell. But he’d still suffered losses, losses that would have been worse still had the enemy not stopped to consume injured and captured Scandians.
By the end of the first day, the enemy’s fighting force was gone, and all that remained was to smash what was left of the base, melt down the power plant, and get out of there. The engineers finally figured out the plant, and they made a run for it before it reached critical. Once Olafsen was airborne with his blackfish, he hung around, pulverizing the surface structures with pummel guns.
Björnman called over from his blackfish when the small fleet had pulled away to slip free from the asteroid belt.
“Victory, but by the gods, am I glad to get out of there. The stench of those things.”
“I’ll be happier still when we’re back on board Bloodaxe,” Olafsen said. “These blackfish are fine little ships, and they can take a hell of a beating, but it’s the hitting back part they’re not so good at.”
“Good to stretch our legs, though,” Björnman said. “Too long stuck on a ship, if you ask me. How are we going to let Vargus and the rest know what happened here?”
“I’m going to send a subspace. Who is closest? McGowan? I think it’s McGowan.”
“A subspace is dangerous.”
Olafsen laughed. “We just invaded an Apex base with five hundred mech raiders. And now you’re scared?”
“Ha!”
“You all right?”
“Sure, fine.”
“Come on, Björnman. What’s going on behind that big forehead of yours? I can hear the wheels creaking from here.”
“Vargus will be mad, you know,” he said at last. “You lied to her.”
“You’re worried about a lie?” He laughed.
“I like that woman. She tells it to us straight. And we lied.”
“We had to test it out. Had to know how our mech units would do in face-to-face combat against the buzzards. And we needed to do it without letting Vargus know or she’d have insisted on sending in her Royal Marines.”
“Who would have stolen some of the glory?” Björnman said. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
“No,” he said, feeling a little peevish. “Who would have left us with more questions than answers.”
“I still have questions.”
“So do I. We won, but at a cost.”
“Forty-eight raiders killed,” Björnman said. “Nearly ten percent of our force. And the enemy was undermanned, mostly worker drones. Maybe a hundred that could fight. And only one battle strider.”
“We might not be so lucky next time,” Olafsen agreed. “They’ll be on a war footing, ready to repel boarders.”
“And we won’t be able to sit there with our blackfish, unloading men.”
“They’ll try to capture or destroy our ships when they go in,” Olafsen said.
Björnman fell silent again, until Olafsen had to check to make sure the com link hadn’t been lost.
“So . . . do you think we can take one of the big ones?” Björnman said at last. “That’s where you’re going with this, right? A direct assault on an Apex harvester ship?”
“With five blackfish and a few hundred raiders? While the harvester hits us with that green eye and the claws start grabbing our ships?” Olafsen let out his breath. “No, not a chance. We’ll need some sort of trick, or we’ll never even make it inside.”
Chapter Five
Carvalho had the small moon in his sights. It looked like a lumpy potato, with an especially ugly wartlike protuberance on one end. It kept one face toward the red planet below, which the briefings called New Mars, after a similar planet back in the original Terran system.
The readings were more clear now. There was definitely radiation emanating from the moon. Something artificial.
“You seeing this, mates?” he asked on the com, as he kept a few thousand miles behind the small moon, which swung in orbit around the planet.
“Looks like a good anchor for a space elevator, eh?” Greeves said.
A glint of flaring plasma showed Greeves’s ship off starboard, with a swath of stars in a creamy white glow behind her. Somewhere to his right, but only visible through the instrument panels, were four other falcons.
“Sure, if the navy wanted to put a base down in the gravity well of a dead planet,” Carvalho told her. “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”
“You mean ’cause it’s running hot?”
“Right. I figure there’s a ship there, or an old mine, or something. Maybe just wreckage.”
“Most likely just wreckage,” Greeves agreed. “Wasn’t it around here somewhere that Drake whacked that harvester last year? Could be that, right?”
Bailes piped up. “Or it could be one of ours. Drake lost a bunch of ships in that fight.”
“I’d better call it in,” Carvalho decided.
He got the bridge of Void Queen a few seconds later. Capp answered after only a brief delay.
“You fall asleep out there, luv?” she asked. “’Cause you been tracking that big ol’ baked potato for twenty minutes now. Time to get in there and check it out up close.”
“It’s hot—you see that, right?”
“What?” she said. “No, I . . . hold on. Right, Smythe has picked up a bunch of stuff in orbit. There was a battle here, remember?”
“I’m not talking about the orbiting wreckage, Capp,” he told her impatiently. “I’ve filtered all that stuff, and there’s something stuck on the back of this moon. There’s a hill or something on one end—looks like a big nose. You see that?”
“Yeah, I see it.”
“It’s near there. Might be an enemy ship sitting behind that hill and using it to shield itself. Either that, or it’s just wreckage,” he added. “I’m hoping the junks can spread their wings and take a closer look.”
“Cap’n is off duty, but . . . let me think. Hold position there. I’m going to get the rest of your falcons in the air.”
Carvalho didn’t think it was so serious as to get the entire striker wing out. They’d been running patrols for the past thirty-two hours, ever since coming into the Zoroaster System, changing out every six hours. Those six hours back in the ship were critical rest time. But he heard a hint of concern in Capp’s voice, and wondered if Smythe was picking up something on the tech console that he couldn’t see from this vantage point.
The five falcons already out held position above New Mars, with the small moon in front of them. The planet rotated below, streaks of brown spreading across red wasteland like a giant’s grasping fingers. Ancient waterways. That meant it had once been warmer, with an atmosphere, seas, and rivers. Probably half a billion years ago, but the universe was old, and derelict spacecraft had been discovered after floating through space for millions of years. Perhaps the planet below had once been the home world for some ancient civilization.
A huge mountain rolled beneath, a near continent-sized volcano, so tall that the crown was covered with dirty white. Ice or frozen carbon dioxide, he supposed. Was there enough water left on the planet to turn it green once again with the right combination of engineering?
Five more falcons launched from Void Queen, which sat with the rest of the fleet a few tens of thousands of miles away. A war junk had been in low orbit around New Mars’s southern hemisphere, but pulled back out so it could search the moon instead. Capp came back on a few minutes later as the five new falcons joined the rest of Carvalho’s patrol.
“You still there, luv?”
“Aye.”
“We can’t see clearly from here—that rock overhang is doing a trick—but it’s hot all right. Smythe thinks it’s something live and that it ain’t one of ours. Hold on.”
Capp’s muffled voice conferred with someone else on the bridge.
“Smythe says it’s big,” she said when she’d returned. “Go in there, but be careful, yeah? I’m gonna call Vargus back to the bridge just in case.”
Carvalho passed along the information to his fellow pilots. “You see anything funny, you bug out of there. We are not here to fight, only to scout. We have got the whole fleet back there to do our fighting for us.”
How much was known about the Zoroaster System anyway? Drake had come through here twice, as had other ships in the fleet. Zoroaster had good access from Scandian systems into the inner frontier, and it was only a couple of systems further on where the admiral had discovered the main Apex base terrorizing the small human colony of Persia. There had once been two harvesters in the area. One had been destroyed here, in Zoroaster, and the other driven into Persia, where its forces had apparently been absorbed into the master flock.
A couple of spears and lances had broken free in one of the many battles at the jump point where Persia and Nebuchadnezzar met, and they’d last been spotted entering Zoroaster. Why here? Had they been trying to rescue Apex forces left stranded when their harvester was destroyed? Surely that small moon was not an attempt to build a new base? It was mostly rock—not enough of the important resources to bother with.
Carvalho nudged toward the asteroid with little bursts on his engines. The others pulled in next to him, but not so near as to present a single target. Greeves continued along starboard, while Stephenson moved into position off Carvalho’s port side. Manríquez came in below, King above, and the rest brought up the rear.
Viewed from a distance, the moon had been a tiny speck above the planet, but up close it took on mountain-sized proportions: three miles from the front of the potato-shaped object to the rear, and about half that in width. The rocky protrusion at the far end was curved, unnatural looking, and it was only as he came in closer, hitting it with his active sensors, that he saw how strange it really was.
It was a massive hook of rock with a cave beneath. The gravity of the moon was negligible—the structure would have collapsed otherwise. That didn’t answer how it had developed like that in the first place. Looked artificial, and Carvalho didn’t like where that train of thought took him.
“Pull back, the lot of you,” he said. “I’m going in closer. Got to get right under that rock if I am going to see what’s in there kicking off radiation.”
“I say we toss some missiles in there,” Stephenson said.
Greeves brayed with laughter. “You’re nuts.”
“Why not?” Stephenson insisted. “We’ll see what comes out.”
“And when we find out we blew up a crippled torpedo boat that’s been hiding in there, unable to move?” Carvalho asked. “No, I’m going in for a good look. Then, if it isn’t one of ours, I’ll throw in some firecrackers and wake them up.”
“More likely a bloody star leviathan digesting its meal,” Greeves said. “But go right ahead, mate, shine a big light and wake him up if you want.”
“Thanks, Greeves,” Carvalho said lightly. “I wasn’t even worried about star leviathans until you mentioned it. But don’t worry, I’m sure it’s just our friendly neighborhood buzzards. Get ready for some action, all of you.”
He peeled away from the other falcons, tapping at the thrusters as he approached the small moon. Straight ahead, there was the yawning mouth of a cave, three hundred yards across and completely black inside. He hit the interior with active sounding. The data went back to Void Queen, but he didn’t need a response from the main tech console to see that there was something inside. Something big.
Not one of theirs, and not a torpedo boat, that was for sure. He drifted backward while he waited for Void Queen to analyze the data.
Capp shouted over the com. “It’s Apex! Get out of there!”
Carvalho’s heart skipped, and he reversed thrust. But he couldn’t resist thumbing open the panel to the launch button and letting loose. A pair of small missiles raced into the cave and detonated.
If the enemy had been asleep before, they weren’t now. He fled from the moon, even as the enemy turned on its engines, prepared to leap after him.
#
Roused from her quarters midway through her sleep cycle, Catarina had been watching with the rest of the crew on the bridge as Carvalho nudged his falcon closer to the far end of the small moon, with the other falcons waiting behind to cover his retreat. There was no question now, based on the magnitude of radiation emissions and the unnatural topography of the moon, that something was hiding down there.
She was ninety percent sure it was Apex, even before Carvalho got up close and hit the interior with active sounding. But as others had pointed out, Drake had lost ships in the chaos of battle—some lost lost, rather than simply destroyed—and it was possible that one of their own vessels had taken refuge inside, holding on with crippled life support systems while awaiting rescue.
And then Carvalho hit the interior with active sounding. A big signal returned. A ship so large that it could only be . . .
Capp cried over the com for Carvalho to get out of there. He turned away, firing a pair of missiles as a parting shot. They detonated in the interior, and the resulting echo eliminated any final doubt.
There was a harvester ship in there.
Fortunately, Catarina had been maneuvering her fleet into battle formation ever since Capp sent out the second wave of falcons. The battle cruiser sat out front—the point of the spear—with a half-moon of destroyers and Hroom sloops above, ready to swing into formation to block any breakout attempt.
She called the captains of her missile frigates first.
“Full barrage on that moon,” she said. “Knock that cave to rubble. Bury these vermin before they get into the open.”
Next, she called the barracks to tell the marine commander to bring Royal Marines out of stasis as quickly as he could and get them armed and ready to repel boarders.
“It ain’t gonna come to that, right?” Capp asked. “Carvalho is saying that—”
“Quit messing around with your boyfriend,” Catarina told her. “I need the torpedo boat captains on the line.”
“Aye, Cap’n.”
The three missile frigates—HMS Catapult, HMS Firebolt, and HMS Sling—had their missiles in the air even before Capp connected her to the torpedo boats.
“I want these buzzards under ten thousand tons of rock,” she told the five captains. “Who has the nuclear-tipped torpedo—that’s you, right Dickens? Drop it in there. The striker wing will draw fire.”
It was a hard command to send in the torpedo boats nearly unescorted. A harvester ship could tear the small ships to pieces, and probably maul the striker wing as well, but if she could hit the thing before it brought up countermeasures, a single, massive blow might cripple or destroy it before it could get in among her ships.
Determined not to leave the torpedo boats dangling out front, Catarina ordered the rest of the fleet to follow them toward the small moon. The first of the long-range ordnance began to strike the rocky promontory above the cave hiding the harvester ship.
Rock and dust exploded from the end with every blow, shooting off into space. Shooting at a stationary object was easy, and every missile hit, so many fiery explosions lighting up the far end of the moon that it seemed hard to believe anything would survive the initial bombardment. The nuclear torpedo would settle matters—but she had to get that boat forward, first, before it could launch.
Smythe cursed. “It got out, Captain.”
It took a moment before the chaos of exploding missiles and debris cleared enough to show what the sensors had already detected. A massive Apex warship emerged from the cloud of dust and rock and rumbled toward the fleet. The thing was twice as long as Void Queen, yet somehow looked squat, like a sea turtle with a green eye and an insect-like mouth of grasping mandibles.
The harvester’s carapace was battered and pitted with the scars of an old battle, with one large hole the size of a navy destroyer that had been patched over, but not fully rebuilt.
“That thing absorbed a lot of punishment,” Catarina said. “No wonder Drake thought it had been destroyed.”
Lomelí looked up from the defense grid computer. “The logs say he chased a harvester and several hunter-killer packs into this system, sir, and fought a battle somewhere around here.”
“I remember hearing about that,” Catarina said, “but wasn’t the harvester destroyed?”
“That’s what they thought,” Lomelí said, “but nobody witnessed the destruction. They found a radiation trail down to New Mars and an impact crater on the surface. It seemed as though the harvester had gone into the gravity well.”
“It apparently staged its death and has been hiding here all along.”
Catarina couldn’t blame Drake for moving on. The battle with the hunter-killers had cost him ships, and Dreadnought had been so battered after all the fighting across multiple systems that he’d been forced to retreat from the frontier all the way to Viborg for repair.
The harvester and her outer fleet elements were rapidly approaching a closer engagement, with only Carvalho’s striker wing between them. The falcons swooped in to harass it with pulse fire and undersized missiles, which brought return fire. But the harvester soon grew tired of swatting at these distractions and resumed course to engage the main fleet.
“It’s coming right at us, Cap’n,” Capp said.
“Good. It’s injured and we’ve got an entire fleet to back us up. Lieutenant, order the boats to hit that damaged section with everything they’ve got. Get that nuke through, by God.”
The torpedo boats had cut high on the Z-axis while Carvalho created his distraction, and now dove at the harvester. Catarina’s frigates launched a second barrage, this time supported by missiles from other ships across the fleet, including from Void Queen.
Meanwhile, to Catarina’s starboard flank, twenty-three Scandian star wolves strained forward, anxious to press the attack. She called Longshanks and told him to hold until the torpedo boats had dropped their loads. Then he was off the leash.
The torpedo boats fired and peeled away. Ten Mark-IVs rolled out from the boats, slow and with poor maneuverability, but packing more than the usual punch. One of them packing an atomic punch, in fact. All she needed was for it to get through.
For one brief moment, it looked as though the Apex queen or princess commanding the harvester was so intent on attacking Void Queen directly that it would ignore the torpedoes as yet another nuisance. It was not to be.
Bursts of fire launched from the back of the turtle shell. One torpedo after another detonated before it could get close. Then, seeming to realize that it was in mortal danger, the harvester tried to roll away, even as it continued to fire countermeasures.
Three of the Mark-IVs got through and slammed into the patched-over hole on the side of the massive enemy ship. Catarina caught her breath, then joined the cheers as a massive explosion engulfed the harvester ship. More cheers came across the general com from across the fleet.
The screen cleared, and Catarina was stunned to see the harvester still coming right at them. Gasses leaked out of a smoking hole in its side, but the ship was still intact, its grasping appendages opening. Green light flared from the eye.
“I don’t understand,” Capp said. “We hit them buzzards right up under the shell. Shoulda been atomized. How’s it still coming at us?”
“Smythe, give me info,” Catarina said. “What just happened?”
“It’s extra shielding, sir,” Smythe said. “Looks like they took a couple of spears and patched their armor onto that wounded section. It wasn’t as weak as it looked.”
“They must have known we’d hit that spot,” Catarina said. “And we just wasted our nuclear torpedo.”
Destroyers and sloops fell on the enemy ship from above, while her mercenary ships and war junks came up from below. Longshanks charged with nearly two dozen star wolves.
“Capp, call in the reserve. And tell Carvalho to keep hitting that damaged section.”
The reserve was two cruisers and two corvettes. She’d intended to use them to stop any attempted escape attempt, but it was clear that the enemy had no intention of escaping. Probably, it couldn’t. Its engines were accelerating so sluggishly that it would never reach jump speed, and it had no hunter-killer packs to escort it.
Catarina fought down a rising sense of panic. Missiles and torpedoes were striking the harvester along both flanks, and Longshanks had fearlessly charged into pummel gun range, and was blasting away with everything he had. Yet there seemed to be no stopping the enemy ship, which had yet to fire its weapons as it muscled its way through the human and Hroom ships to get at Void Queen.
It doesn’t intend to fire. It intends to take us alive.
“Enough with the torpedoes. Bring us about. Full broadside. And make it count, people. We get one shot before it’s on us.”
The battle cruiser only took seconds to get into position, and the gunnery was at the ready with explosive shot loaded. That left retracting the shields to expose the main battery, which was executed perfectly and with time to spare.
The harvester absorbed blow after blow. Carvalho had tried to blind the paralyzing eye, as he’d pulled off in the battle of the Odense System, but this harvester had better shielding in that part of the ship, and his shots had little effect.
The eye cast its paralyzing beam, but not at the battle cruiser. Instead, it hit the destroyers and sloops of war that were smashing into the wounded section of the armor. Their guns fell silent, one after another, and the harvester rolled to use the eye against the star wolves. One of them careened into another, which then smashed against a third.
Still approaching Void Queen, the harvester now dominated the viewscreen, its mandible-like appendages reaching eagerly to grab the battle cruiser.
“Fire!” Catarina said.
Void Queen shuddered as it hurled hundreds of tons of explosive shot against the harvester. Then, a crunch, alarms sounding.
“Warning,” Jane said. “Hull breaches in the number three and number four—”
The AI fell silent before she could complete her assessment. Catarina lurched from her seat, suddenly weightless. Gravity came back on, and she fell to the floor. She reached for her sidearm and turned toward the lift, ready to defend the bridge.
“Bring ’em on,” Capp growled. She rolled up her sleeves to show the Albion lions tattooed across one forearm, and drew her pistol. “I’m gonna slaughter them chickens. Gonna eat their gizzards. They’ll regret the day—”
“We’re clear,” Smythe said. His voice was shaking. “Someone knocked us loose.”
Capp’s bravado vanished in an instant, and she slumped. “Thank God!” Her hand was trembling as she put away her pistol.
As Void Queen withdrew, Catarina got word of fighting in the lower decks. Several dozen battle drones had entered the ship in the few seconds of engagement, and were fighting marines and sailors down by the armory and near the engine room.
The harvester ship reemerged on the viewscreen. It bled gas and plasma from a dozen wounds, and its grasping appendages dangled limp and broken. Catarina’s fleet was hammering it from all sides, and it seemed incapable of fighting back or even launching countermeasures. Catarina ordered torpedoes, unsure if the gunnery could respond, or if Barker was even alive down there. To her relief, torpedoes squirted out moments later.
“It’s not firing,” Smythe said. “Nothing. All it had was countermeasures.”
“And the boarding attempt,” Catarina reminded him.
They’d found a crippled harvester, and it couldn’t fight. They were going to win this, and win it easily.
But the harvester didn’t break apart, even as the pounding continued. The engines bled out, and it could no longer maneuver. Now safe from the alien attack, Catarina began to worry about preserving ordnance. She ordered her forces to withdraw to a safe distance, then directed energy weapons only so as to save her powder for another fight.
At last, six hours after the harvester emerged from its hiding place, the alien ship finally broke apart and exploded.
Chapter Six
Catarina counted herself fortunate as she retreated to her quarters to study the damage report. Void Queen had been in the enemy’s grasp for roughly a minute, during which time more than fifty birds entered the ship.
Even knowing that their ship was on the verge of destruction, the aliens had been intent on taking prisoners. The battle drones fired paralyzing beams, which they used to incapacitate marines. Had the biting appendages not been damaged, had not the combined firepower of Catarina’s fleet driven the enemy off, Void Queen would no doubt have been overrun, the crew hauled back to the Apex queen commander for her gory feast.
Other than countermeasures, the enemy weapons had not fired once in the engagement; the only damage Void Queen had suffered came from the boarding attempt itself. That was not insignificant; those things could have torn the battle cruiser to pieces given enough time, but no critical systems had been destroyed, and engineering assured Catarina that they could patch up the wounds without returning to port.
Apart from that, three star wolves had been damaged in collisions while their crews were incapacitated, and multiple ships had taken light damage from friendly fire during the frenzied, chaotic attempt to halt the enemy charge.
Against that, Catarina Vargus had bagged a harvester.
So why did she feel so unsettled?
You didn’t earn the victory, that’s why.
She dismissed that thought as ridiculous. What, was she supposed to have invited the harvester to emerge on its own terms, fully repaired and with a half-dozen hunter-killer packs in support? Should she have allowed them to board her ship by the hundreds to test the prowess of her marines? Mano-a-mano—was that the idea?
You took a victory however it came, and thank God this one had come without significant cost.
Yet even though she’d attacked the harvester before it could launch, even though it had been crippled and unable to return fire, and even though it had no escorting spears and lances, Catarina had needed fifty-five warships and hours of bombardment to destroy it.
“I even softened the blasted thing up with a nuclear torpedo first,” she said aloud. “Lot of good that did me.”
Catarina glanced out the small viewport of her office nook. New Mars turned slowly below, with the small moon a brown smudge above the planet’s thin, shimmering atmosphere. Crew were out on the hull in pressure suits, welding tyrillium scale to repair the gashes where the harvester ship had hooked them. Void Queen would be ready to depart in a few hours, continuing the journey toward a rendezvous with Blackbeard and the rest of Tolvern’s fleet.
Assuming Tolvern was still alive. Catarina dearly hoped she was. The two women were very different, Catarina Vargus the daughter of a pirate captain, and Jess Tolvern the daughter of a baron’s steward and a graduate, with honors, of the Academy.
Yet they’d bonded after the Viborg battle, the two highest-ranking female officers in the Royal Navy, and each in command of a battle cruiser and a fleet of warships. Oh, and the shared dislike of Captain Edward McGowan, Catarina thought, a smile coming to her lips. Best not to discount that.
She plugged in the teakettle, and was debating whether to call Sven Longshanks to see if he had insights about his brother’s expedition with the blackfish, or if she should go down to engineering to question Barker about the progress of the hull repairs, when Smythe called from the bridge.
“Multiple incoming subspace messages, sir.”
“Let me guess, Olafsen? Where the devil is he? These Vikings can’t maintain discipline for two minutes.”
“Messages from Olafsen, from Tolvern, from Drake. McGowan and Broderick, too. Pretty much everyone is talking, and Drake saw fit to pass everything in our direction.”
“Why am I only hearing about this now?”
“We lost some sensors after the harvester grabbed us, and none of the other ships were listening. It was Longshanks who picked them up and sent them our way.”
“Five messages? What is going on out there?”
“You know how it is—details are sketchy. I’ll give them to you in the order I think they were sent, and you can piece it together.”
The first subspace was from Tolvern. Details were scant, but Blackbeard’s fleet had come under attack as Apex attempted a jailbreak from the Persia System. Tolvern had failed to keep the enemy bottled up, and a harvester and its escorts had escaped, headed toward Xerxes. Someone else would have to stop them. McGowan?
McGowan in turn passed a message to Drake, requesting assistance. He was still patching up from a skirmish with a rogue fleet of Scandian star wolves that had been harassing his supply frigates, and didn’t have the firepower to tackle a harvester on his own.
It was then that Drake decided that intercepting the escaped Apex fleet was more important than maintaining radio silence. He ordered Broderick to rush forward to reinforce Tolvern, who must have been left battered by the fight in Nebuchadnezzar, and tried to send Catarina to the Xerxes System to rendezvous with McGowan, but when he couldn’t reach her, found Olafsen’s blackfish fleet. Olafsen contacted his brother in turn, and it was Longshanks who sent along the bundle of messages.
As for Olafsen, he’d apparently landed raiders on an untidy Apex base in the asteroid belt and wiped them out. Or so claimed the subspace:
We have won a great victory. Our raiders are prepared to take the assault to an enemy harvester ship. We will slaughter them in their nests and die for the glory of our gods.
No much information there, only bravado. Every letter of every word used in a subspace message burned a fantastic amount of energy, and Olafsen had wasted all of it.
Or maybe not. Catarina ran her fingers through her hair, reconsidering her first impression. Maybe the marauder captain and would-be Grand Duke of Viborg was more clever than she gave him credit for.
Could it be the information in the message was meant not for her eyes, but for Apex, who would have surely intercepted the subspace and deciphered it? They would learn about the Scandian ground assault and victory, if they hadn’t already. Coupled with their memory of previous fights against the Scandians, they would be forced to change tactics in upcoming battles.
Apex was used to boarding enemy craft, but were they prepared to be boarded? An assault by mech raiders was no easy thing to repel, as Albion ships had learned on several occasions. Not that the Scandians could manage it. How would they get past the enemy defenses in sufficient numbers?
Catarina opened a star chart, with the Persia System on the left side. That was the main Apex base, trapped in a cul-de-sac system with one entry and one exit. To the right was Nebuchadnezzar and Tolvern’s fleet trying to bottle them up. Beyond that lay a trio of systems all connected to each other and to Nebuchadnezzar: Euphrates, Xerxes, and Zoroaster. Each of these held an Albion fleet—Broderick, McGowan, and Catarina’s forces respectively. Admiral Drake’s force, led by HMS Dreadnought, was two systems behind McGowan’s fleet.
Yes, Drake’s plan made sense. Catarina and McGowan would catch the escaping Apex force in Xerxes and defeat it. Broderick would reinforce Tolvern, and they would try to hold the enemy in Persia until the rest of the human and Hroom forces could converge on their position. Meanwhile, if Catarina and McGowan struggled with the jailbreakers, Drake would come through in the same direction to add his firepower.
Catarina composed a trio of subspace messages of her own. The first was to McGowan, a short confirmation that she’d meet him in Xerxes to tackle the escaping harvester.
“But I’ll be damned if I’m going to do all the fighting,” she said aloud as she passed the message to Smythe so he could prepare a subspace. “You’re going to get Peerless scuffed up if I have to shoot her full of holes myself.”
If McGowan stood back guarding a jump point or some other such nonsense, she swore she’d sock him in the nose the next time she saw him.
The second subspace was to Olafsen. He still hadn’t jumped into Zoroaster, which meant he’d have to hurry to reach Xerxes in time for the fight. If he couldn’t arrive fast enough, she’d pass him along to Nebuchadnezzar to join Broderick in reinforcing Tolvern’s fleet.
There wasn’t enough information in Tolvern’s initial message to answer the question of how badly she’d been bloodied, but it couldn’t be good. No way would Tolvern let a harvester and its hunter-killer packs skip merrily past without a fight. She’d have done everything possible to throw them back into Persia. That Tolvern hadn’t succeeded meant that her fleet had been battered in the exchange.
What if instead of obeying Drake to the letter, Catarina sent Tolvern a small task force—say, a cruiser, a corvette, and a dozen star wolves? That would give Tolvern’s beleaguered fleet more firepower. Add in Broderick’s force, and they’d put a cork on any further breakout attempts.
What stopped Catarina was the memory of her own fight here at New Mars against a crippled harvester ship. She had struck first. The enemy was crippled. She had fifty-five warships in her fleet, and had struck it with a nuclear torpedo. The best the harvester could manage was a single attempt to close ranks and board the Albion flagship while suffering blow after blow.
“And the battle still lasted six hours.”
Now there was another harvester, and if Catarina was reading Tolvern’s subspace correctly, it was largely undamaged and probably escorted by hunter-killer packs. If Tolvern couldn’t stop them, McGowan certainly wouldn’t either. Catarina needed to bring everything she had to the fight.
Frustrated, her thoughts turned toward Jess Tolvern and HMS Blackbeard, knowing that she could send the woman nothing more than hopeful thoughts and a prayer to the universe.
No, there was a final something she could do. She composed a third subspace message, this one so long that the energy required to send it would mean shutting down Void Queen’s plasma engines while it went through, unless Smythe could help her trim it to size without sacrificing critical details.
In the message, she gave an overview of her fight with the harvester ship, including the failed strike with the nuclear torpedoes.
It wasn’t much, and what information it contained was largely negative. But maybe it would help Tolvern in her own fight.
Chapter Seven
Tolvern’s head felt like it had been stuffed full of soggy cotton balls that were now being removed, one by one. First, she remembered that she’d jumped, and that the jump had carried her into danger. Then she remembered she’d been entering a hostile system, where the Apex queen commander had built a base to rebuild her fleet. As more wet cotton balls came out, she remembered there had been a battle before the jump, a fight she’d lost.
She was already speaking, giving orders to her crew on the bridge before she finally became fully aware of her surroundings. Manx was on the com, speaking in a calm, but insistent tone to someone.
“Where are we?” Tolvern asked. “Is this Persia?”
“Welcome back, Captain,” Manx said. He raised an eyebrow.
“Have I been out long?” Tolvern frowned. “I feel fine.”
“Oh, you weren’t out,” Manx said, “only out of it. Going on about leviathans and Hroom death fleets and Malthorne’s sugar plantations on Hot Barsa—you told me to watch out for giant crocodiles.” He grinned. “Reminds me of my gran in the year before she died. She sounded perfectly lucid, but boy could she go on some wild crazy rants.”
Tolvern put her fingers to her temples. No pain, no confusion.
“I feel fine, though.” She looked up at the viewscreen, which showed ships coming through the jump point. “We’re all clear? Nothing lurking in ambush when we came through?”
This last bit was directed to Oglethorpe, who was working at the tech console with Bayard and Simmons. He was rotating the shoulder of his bad arm as he worked, but seemed calm and without panic.
“Nothing yet, sir,” Oglethorpe said. “But we’ve only got passive on. There are ships in orbit around Persia, all right, but nothing turns up out here. Nothing we’ve spotted, anyway.”
“We’ll hit the system with active sensors once we get closer.”
“So you still mean to approach the planet?” Manx said, a bit of tension in his voice. “This isn’t just reconnaissance?”
It was tempting to fall back to Nebuchadnezzar. Tolvern was battered from the fight, down three destroyers, two sloops of war, a war junk, and a torpedo boat, plus one of her falcons. That left her Blackbeard, three cruisers, two missile frigates, five destroyers, five torpedo boats, three sloops of war, two war junks, and the three late-arriving corvettes, plus the remaining falcons of her striker wing.
It was a powerful force, but not strong enough to stand toe-to-toe with a harvester ship. Not by a long shot.
“That is, if they have one.”
“Sir?” Manx said.
“Talking to myself, Lieutenant—running mental calculations. Do they have another harvester ship in the Persia System or not? That’s what I want to know. I say no. I say that if the buzzards had a second harvester, they’d have sent it out with the first. I’ll bet there’s another one under construction on the planet or at an orbital port, but it’s not battleworthy or it would be out here already trying to break our quarantine.”
“And so then what do we do?”
“We charge Persia, knock down whatever defenses these dumb turkeys have in orbit, and bombard the surface installations. There are millions of humans still alive on Persia, and we could save a lot of them. If the enemy has enough strength to force us back, we return to Nebuchadnezzar to wait for Drake, Vargus, and the rest. If they don’t, we set up in orbit and keep up the orbital attack until we get enough marines and mech raiders to mount a ground assault.”
“Okay,” Manx said, sounding doubtful. “Hey, Captain. We got a subspace from Vargus. Long one, too. She fought it out with a harvester. And won!”
Clyde, Oglethorpe, and the rest clamored for information, but Tolvern told them to settle down.
“I know Drake dropped the subspace blackout,” she said, “but it wasn’t so we could brag about our victories. Wait, what harvester? The one that busted out of Persia? Already?”
Tolvern took a look and quickly realized she’d been wrong in assigning Vargus motives for sending the subspace.
Wounded harvester found in Z. Survivor of earlier battle, crippled.
We attacked it in cave on New Mars’s moon. Emerged, could not fire. Fleet engaged, hit it with one nuclear torpedo on already-damaged hull, but did not destroy. Extra plating attached to damaged section.
Enemy closed on VQ while attacked by 55 ships. No support vessels, no ability to fire. Briefly grasped VQ and boarded. Attempted to take prisoners. Boarders repelled. Harvester destroyed after six-hour bombardment. Fleet suffered no significant losses. Proceeding to Xerxes.
There was an entire battle elided in those short sentences. Attacks, torpedo boat charges to try to blow the harvester apart by striking it on a supposedly vulnerable place in the hull that turned out to have been reinforced. How many nuclear torpedoes had been fired to get one through? They were rare in the fleet, and Vargus couldn’t have more than two or three in her entire arsenal.
And how disheartening to hit the enemy with one, and not destroy it.
Vargus and the rest of the crew—many of them old mates of Tolvern’s—must have been terrified when the harvester seized Void Queen. And then pure relief when Void Queen broke free. Then the frustration of hitting again and again at a ship that could not fight back, yet endured six hours of attack before it broke apart.
Catarina hadn’t been bragging about her victory. If anything, it was a message of sympathy for Tolvern, who’d fought a harvester of her own and failed to hold it back, plus information about the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses.
“Manx, send the subspace to the crew and the other captains. Don’t want to scare anyone, but there might be useful information to parse out.”
“The last of our ships just jumped through,” Oglethorpe announced. “Waiting for confirmation that her crew is ready to fly.”
“Is that Cheng’s junk?”
“Aye. Looks like they’re already spreading their wings.”
Not surprising. Captain Cheng was an old Singaporean veteran who’d survived the slaughter on his home world. Made of stern stuff—the sort of man you’d want at your side in a back-alley brawl.
“The problem is, the birds are aliens,” Tolvern continued. “I don’t mean like the Hroom, I mean true aliens.”
“Sir?” Manx said.
“I’m trying to read their minds, and I really have no idea. There might be three harvesters at Persia, for all we know. Or maybe there’s an Apex civil war—they eat each other sometimes, for reasons we can’t quite figure out. Like an ant colony that splits apart with two or three queens all fighting for dominance or independence. Who knows?”
“Which is why I’d just as soon stay back by the jump point,” Manx said.
“Which is why we have to seize opportunities when they present themselves,” Tolvern corrected.
She scrolled through the rest of her messages, these ones internal to the ship. Engineering didn’t like how the warp point engine had handled the jump. And Gunnery Chief Finch had some thoughts about the use of explosive shot from the last battle she wanted to discuss. There was a question about installing tyrillium scale on an inner bulkhead as additional defense against Apex boarding attempts.
Tolvern had plenty to keep her occupied on the bridge, and thought about summoning the relevant parties to the war room, but she’d learned from Drake that it was useful to make regular visits to all parts of the ship. Sometimes you noticed things that you’d miss if you only completed the bridge-quarters-mess hall circuit.
“Clyde, plot a course to Persia that takes us past an outer planet or two—we’ll be harder to spot that way. Manx, position the fleet and get us in motion. We’re mounting an attack on the enemy forces holding Persia.”
#
Tolvern was in the engineering bay about an hour later, talking to a pair of technicians who were trying to resolve a problem with the missile-loading conveyor belt on one of the falcons, when a thin, pale figure shuffled across the floor from the lift. He wore a hospital gown and dragged a pole with wheels and a dangling IV bag, which was attached to his arm.
“Does the doctor know you’re out of bed, Stratsky?” Tolvern asked.
“Doc said I could leave the infirmary as soon as I pooped on my own. It all came out fine about an hour ago. Weirdest looking stuff. You want to know the funny thing, though?”
“Thank you, Sub-lieutenant, but I’ve got enough going on without analyzing the activity of your digestive system.”
“Yeah, I don’t blame you. It’s kind of gross. But interesting!” Stratsky shrugged. “Anyway, I didn’t care if Doc told me to stay put, I was going nuts down there. I feel fine now—appetite’s back and everything.”
“You don’t look fine, you look like you’re going to faint.”
“That’s only ’cause they won’t give me any meat. Who can survive on protein paste and kale soup?”
“A few days ago they took out your guts and put them in a big jar. Not exactly the time to be eating kidney pie. You don’t want to . . . how is it we’re still talking about your bodily functions, Sub-lieutenant?”
He grinned, which brought a little color to his face. “Hey, that time it was all you, Captain.”
“Go back to bed, Stratsky. I need you healthy and flying. Crispin is a fine pilot, but he’s not much of a wing commander.”
Stratsky’s face darkened at mention of his fellow pilot, then brightened again. “Hey, I heard you was down here, and I wanted to talk to you about this idea I had.”
Tolvern glanced toward the lift. This tour of the ship was taking longer than she’d planned, and she was anxious to return to the bridge and study the scans to see if they had new data about Apex forces in the system. Depending on what turned up, she’d decide whether this was a mere raid or if she could take control of the space around the planet until the other fleets arrived.
“I’m wanted in the gunnery, Sub-lieutenant. Why don’t you accompany me and tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I saw the subspace from Vargus,” Stratsky said as they entered the lift. “Grim stuff, Captain. Grim stuff. The bloody thing couldn’t even fight back, and it still took ’em six hours.”
“I’m hoping we won’t be facing a harvester. Most likely, a lot of spears and lances.” Tolvern pushed the button to take them down to the gunnery. “They only have to get loose with one harvester, and it all starts over again.”
“That’s exactly what got me thinking, Captain. It’s how they pull their ships out of a gravity well. They build most of them planetside where they can feed their workers, then haul ’em into orbit.”
“I’ve known that since before you joined my ship, Stratsky. We found Apex yards on Tyn, and General Mose Dryz saw another operation when the buzzards dragged him planetside. He’d taken the buzzard spit in his face, just like you.”
She slapped him on the shoulder as the lift doors opened.
“Too bad we dug it out of you, eh? Maybe you’d have got a chance to say hello up close and personal to your own queen commander.”
Stratsky winced and followed her into the gunnery. “But I got to thinking about the little moon where they found the broken-down ship, Captain, and something else came to me.”
“Hold that thought, Sub-lieutenant,” Tolvern said as the gunnery chief approached, wiping her hands on her overalls.
Finch may have been a woman, and Tolvern’s old chief, Barker, a man, but they were built almost like the same person. Finch was stout, with heavy forearms developed from years of wrestling with heavy tools and muscling munitions into place. She had the same heavy brow and the same way of gesturing at her workers as they scurried alongside the cannon, some of which were getting cleaned from the inside, while others had their electronic fire control boxes open.
The only thing missing was Barker’s walrus mustache.
“You have some thoughts on explosive shot?” Tolvern asked.
“Aye, Captain, I think I got a way to put more punch into our broadsides.”
Even the accent and gruff way of speaking was the same. Tolvern was tempted to ask if Finch and Barker were cousins.
Instead, she nodded and told the chief to go on. Finch told how she’d been thinking about that subspace from Catarina Vargus, and how the torpedo hadn’t broken through. What they needed was more destructive power in close combat, which Finch could provide by shortening the effective range of the explosive shot.
“You’re assuming we’ll be facing another harvester,” Tolvern said. “What about spears and lances?”
“I’m only proposing to alter explosive shot, not the heavier kinetic stuff,” Finch said. “Maybe if Vargus had her cannon loaded that way, she’d have thrown the enemy back before it could board her. I need to clear all that rubbish from the loading bay—”
“By rubbish, you mean the spare falcons and stacks of tyrillium plate?”
“—and get full use of engineering to get those shells reworked.”
Tolvern nodded. “All right. But don’t convert it all. I don’t want to try it mid-battle, find out it doesn’t work, and we’ve thrown out our ability to fire anything else.”
Finch grunted. “Of course. I won’t have time to do it all, anyway, not before we reach Persia.”
Tolvern listened as Finch voiced a few more minor concerns, then made her way back to the lift. She’d almost forgotten about the falcon pilot, who was still following with his IV bag in tow.
“You look wobbly, Stratsky. Why don’t you get some rest and come talk to me tomorrow when we get closer?”
“But my idea changes things, Captain.”
She suppressed a sigh. “This had better not be a backdoor way of requesting your flight privileges before the medical staff gives you clearance.”
“Why were they on that moon, anyhow? That’s what I was asking myself. Why didn’t the harvester land on New Mars? A lot easier to hide on the planet than that little piece of rock.”
“They probably didn’t have the capability to lift from the planet’s surface until they’d repaired their engine.”
“It was repaired enough that they went chasing after Vargus and tried to eat her.” The lift opened, and he followed Tolvern onto the bridge. “Anyway, I pulled up all the info on that moon I could find—Drake put together a nice little chart when he was in there fighting the buzzards the first time—and it’s a useless hunk of rock. There’s nothing good there, no resources, nothing that could help the Apex commander repair her ship or start a new colony.”
Tolvern had been on the verge of dismissing Stratsky, but now reconsidered.
Falcon pilots weren’t chosen for their intelligence so much as for their reflexes, their cool under fire, and their guts in charging into deadly situations. But it was clear that this one had a mind working away behind the typical pilot swagger.
“Hold that thought, Sub-lieutenant,” she said.
Stratsky looked exasperated. “You told me that already.”
“This time I mean it.”
She stopped at her console long enough to check to see if any new information about enemy forces had come through, then led her falcon pilot to the war room and gestured for him to sit. She took a seat on the opposite side of the table.
“My point is that the harvester could fly all along,” Stratsky said. “Or else the damage to its engines wasn’t that great to begin with. It came out of the cave to fight, didn’t it? So why did it hide out on the moon and not the planet?”
“What’s the gravity on New Mars?” Tolvern asked.
“Point nine two,” he said without hesitation.
“So not really a Mars-like planet after all. An Earth-like planet, at least in terms of gravity. Like Albion without the atmosphere and oceans.
“The birds come from lower gravity planets,” Tolvern continued. “That’s what they look for, about point four to point six. They’ll land on heavier planets to fight, or to build a base if there are humans or Hroom to feed on. But if they’re on their own, they choose something smaller.”
“Makes sense though, don’t it? They’re birds. They can fly when the gravity is to their liking.”
Tolvern had a new thought. “So maybe the harvester ships can’t get themselves out of a gravity well the size of New Mars’s. Not unassisted. But the moon had no resources, so they’d have had to figure out a way to do it sooner or later. Were the buzzards hoping to dangle a rudimentary space elevator from that moon to get themselves down and back up again?”
“I don’t know about New Mars, but I’ve been looking in here, and Persia has its own space elevator.”
“Does it?” Tolvern asked. “I knew it had a couple of orbital fortresses built by the human population before the aliens came.”
“One of them fortresses is the counterweight for an elevator,” Stratsky said. “That’s what Drake reported, anyway. What do you bet the buzzards got it fixed up again after they took the planet so they can get new ships into orbit?”
“And if we smash it, we’ll trap any new harvesters on the surface.” Tolvern rotated her chair, thinking. “Problem is getting in there. I can’t just cut the line, I’ve got to wreck the elevator apparatus entirely, and it’s a fortress as well, so it’s dug into the rock, and it can defend itself.”
“Nukes could do it, sir. We’ve still got ’em, right?”
“I have one,” she admitted, “sitting in the nose of a Mark-IV torpedo. But I can’t use it from a distance—the aliens have good countermeasures—and they’d tear our torpedo boats to shreds if we send them that way. That means bringing the fleet into close range. We’d take a lot of blows when we’re already weakened, and that’s without accounting for any enemy ships floating around in the area.”
“You don’t need the whole fleet to close ranks with the fort,” Stratsky said. “You only need to deliver the nuke to the alien fort. Doesn’t matter much how you do it, right?”
“I told you already—I won’t send torpedo boats to charge an orbital fortress. It’s a suicide mission. They’re too small to trade blows and too big for evasive maneuvers.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, either.”
Tolvern leaned back in her chair. “I’m listening.”
“A falcon can get in there close, right up under their guns. I checked with engineering, and they say it’s no problem attaching a Mark-IV to the undercarriage and rigging up an electronic firing system. You’d need to take out the missiles to get it balanced, of course.”
“That’s a lot of extra weight whether you could balance it or not.”
“So you strip out the pulse guns, too—that will even you up. All you need is a superior pilot to get close enough to drop the torpedo and run.”
“A superior pilot. Do we have one of those? Oh, I almost forgot about Crispin. He’s pretty good, isn’t he?”
“Bloody Crispin? That stupid bloke is . . . sorry, sir. No, I was thinking about me.”
Tolvern smiled at his response. He looked flustered, and she reined in her amusement.
“Of course you were, Sub-lieutenant. All right, you, then. You’re the best pilot—that’s why you’re wing commander, isn’t it? But good hell, man, how many days has it been since you had your guts stuffed back inside? You’re so pale, if you were a Hroom, I’d think you’d been hitting the sugar.”
“I’ll be fine with a little rest.” He held out a hand, palm down. “And look, I’m steady enough. I could do it now if I needed to.”
Tolvern studied him. Stratsky still had that lounging, casual swagger of a pilot, but his eyes were hard and serious. And he’d given her a beautiful strategy for victory beyond her vague ideas of an opportunistic raid. That deserved something in return.
“Well done, Stratsky. You’re exactly the sort of man the Royal Navy needs if we’re going to win this thing.”
“You mean you’ll let me do it?”
She nodded. “You will personally lead the attack. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about rewarding you for your initiative.”
He perked up. “Yeah? I like the sound of that. What are we talking?”
“I think the salary increase is only about fifteen shillings a week, but it comes with additional privileges and responsibilities.”
“Huh, what? You mean—”
“That’s right, I’m giving you a brevet to full lieutenant. Congratulations.”
He shifted in his seat. “You know I wasn’t really an officer to begin with. The admiral bumped me up after flight training. Never been to officer school—only had a few weeks on Albion when—”
He must have noticed the frown she was allowing across her face, because he straightened.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Good. Now get back to the infirmary before you faint or throw up all over my beautiful war room table.”
Chapter Eight
It didn’t take long for Olafsen to grow tired of his cramped quarters on the blackfish. Even putting the majority of his raiders into stasis chambers, there were too many people on the bridge and in the narrow corridors, and he was forced to hot bunk like a common raider. As often as not, he had to kick someone out of his cot before bedding down for the night, and the collective snoring of twenty men made the walls rumble.
“By the gods, I can’t wait to be back on Bloodaxe,” he confided to Björnman one day when they were alone on the bridge. “I haven’t slept well in a week.”
“Me, either,” Björnman said, “but that’s because I keep seeing dead turkeys every time I close my eyes.”
“I’ll tell you what. It’s not just the cramped quarters. It’s that I can’t fight in this thing.”
“We just obliterated an Apex colony with these blackfish.”
“You know what I mean. Each ship has one pummel gun. We can take a beating, but if we want to deliver a beating of our own, we have to board the enemy.”
The chief mate jutted out his chin. “That’s the way the gods meant us to fight. I’d rather look my enemy in the eye than shoot him from a thousand miles away. Rather die that way, too.”
“Any true man would,” Olafsen agreed. “But tell me, what do we do if we run into a big enemy force? Say a hunter-killer pack or two? We can’t fight it out—we’ll have to run like cowards.”
A blip on his console drew the marauder captain’s attention. An unknown ship had been detected. He scrolled through the data, trying to make sense of it. That was one other disadvantage of this ship. Unlike a star wolf, a blackfish didn’t have a dedicated tech officer, so the captain, chief mate, and gunnery officer—the latter currently off shift—had to assume those duties as needed.
“That’s not one of ours,” Björnman said.
“Doesn’t look like Albion, either. Anyway, there shouldn’t be anyone out here. We cleared the way behind us, and the only thing ahead is Xerxes.”
A flurry of subspace messages had passed between the various components of the allied fleet a few days earlier, and Olafsen was now cutting to rendezvous with a joint force commanded by McGowan on Peerless and Vargus on Void Queen. His brother Sven would be there, too, commanding the star wolf fleet under Vargus’s command. They meant to hunt down the escaped harvester and destroy it before it could slip off to Odin knew where. Olafsen only hoped he’d arrive in time to share in the glory.
The two men studied the unknown ship in silence for several minutes.
“It’s not very big, whatever it is,” Olafsen decided at last. “About the size of an Albion torpedo boat. No, not even that big. Half the mass, maybe.”
“Could be nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. Whatever it is, we can’t let it jump out of here. We’ve got to investigate.”
“No problem,” Björnman said. “We’ll cut it off before it escapes. Knock it out and be on our way.”
“Something that small, probably alien . . . we should catch it, not kill it.”
“We’ll lose time—a day or two, probably. No way around it.”
Björnman was right. The problem was not in the catching; the small unidentified ship would very nearly cross their path. But they’d have to decelerate, board it, and then reaccelerate to jump speed.
“Where did it come from?” Olafsen asked. “Where are the jump points behind it?”
“I can’t run those calculations,” Björnman said. “We’d need a full pilot for that, and I only rate subpilot.”
“Eyeballing it, I’d say back from the inner frontier. I’ll bet you anything that it’s part of this same jailbreak from Persia. Bet that harvester threw it off before it jumped toward Xerxes, and whatever it is wants to escape this way.”
“You don’t suppose there’s another Apex base out there, and they’ve sent a ship to get help?”
“Doubtful. We’d have found it by now. But whatever it wants, we can’t let it happen.” Olafsen rubbed at the thick, ropey scar that ran down his forehead, bypassed his eye, and reemerged on his cheek. “Give orders to the other blackfish—we’re going after it.”
#
Olafsen brought his ships in alongside the small, unknown craft a few hours later. It was egg-shaped, roughly twenty-five feet long and fifteen feet wide in the middle. Reading the reports of the Albion battle at Singapore, it reminded him of the small craft spit out by one of the harvester ships, except this one had jump capabilities.
Olafsen suited up and waited in the hold with ten other raiders, including Björnman. Star wolves typically harpooned enemy craft and sent over boarding rockets, but the blackfish had the ability to affix themselves to an enemy craft, smash through the hull, and offload raiders directly, much as they’d done when assaulting the Apex base.
He kept the raiders harnessed in case the small ship made a violent evasive maneuver at the last minute, but the enemy made no such attempt. The blackfish bumped the hull of the smaller ship, and a metallic screech indicated they were tearing their way through the other ship’s hull and making an air seal for safe transit from one ship to the next.
Word came from the bridge that the enemy hadn’t fired, hadn’t made even the most basic attempts at evasion. Someone at the tech console thought maybe it was on a preprogrammed course toward an unknown location. Maybe it didn’t even have a crew, but was carrying something else of value.
The other men were getting the same information, and he sensed them relaxing around him.
“Stay alert if you want to keep your guts inside you,” he growled.
An airlock dilated on the side of the bay, and suddenly he was looking into the dark, steamy interior of the enemy ship. He unharnessed and clomped forward, with a dozen other raiders following behind.
He fought a strange swimming sensation as he crossed the threshold and opposing anti-grav systems tugged him in opposite directions. He was upside down suddenly, then, staggering forward with the suit trying to stabilize him, right-side up again. They were in a round room, so warm that moisture began to condense on his faceplate and drizzle down as if he’d stepped into a jungle. Sickly yellow lights blinked slowly on opposite sides of the room, but they weren’t enough to cut the gloom and illuminate the interior.
Lights flared from his left and right. One came from the helmet of his old friend, Demon Grin, and the others from Bug, with his glossy green helmet shining twin lights that turned independently to illuminate the edges of the small chamber.
Five large drones sat in a tight cluster in the center of the room. Their feathers were drab, and they wore no weapon harnesses. The birds kept their heads down, and didn’t look up even when the lights illuminated their eyes and beaks.
Björnman joined Olafsen. He was several inches taller than the marauder captain, and had to stand in a wide stance to stay low enough not to scrape his head on the low ceiling.
“What the devil is this?”
“Damned if I know,” Olafsen said.
The huddled drones had drawn Olafsen’s attention, but maybe a more careful inspection of the chamber would turn up answers. Nozzles and hoses emerged from the walls in several places around the room, and a grill ringed the edge, where it appeared the aliens washed their waste to keep the room relatively clean. Relatively being the operative word. Bird droppings lay on the floor, mingled with broken eggshells and scraps of rotting meat.
“Look at that,” Bug said. “Bones.”
“Human bones,” Demon Grin said.
Femurs, ribs, a pair of skulls. Strips of bloody clothing. A severed hand, most of the flesh still attached, with the fingers clutching the drainage grill.
Olafsen pictured the horrifying vision of a man thrown to the floor trying to drag himself away from the birds tearing flesh from his back. They’d devoured him alive right here in this room.
The same realization seemed to hit the other men. There were shouts and curses. Bug clomped forward with his armored hand forming a fist to pulverize the knot of drones still huddled in the middle of the room. Demon Grin sparked his flamethrower.
It was the spark of flame that snapped Olafsen out of his own red fury.
“Stop, you fool!”
He shoved past Bug and Björnman and knocked down Demon Grin’s arm as he let loose with his flamethrower. The fire hit the floor and ignited a stream of flammable filth, which flared up, illuminating the room. Firelight reflected off Bug’s gleaming faceplate, and the others staggered back.
Olafsen stomped the fire, afraid the whole room would go up in flames, but it was already dying down on its own. He turned on Demon Grin.
“You idiot, can’t you smell the methane through your blasted filter? You could have blown us all up.” He turned about. “As for the rest of you, move back. Anyone touches those birds and they answer to me.”
“They ate those people alive,” Björnman said, voice grim. “They deserve to die.”
“And they will die. All of them. We’re going to wipe out every last queen, princess, commander, and drone before they do the same to us. But these ones are no immediate threat.” He swept his arm at the birds, who, if not for the occasional flicker of feathers, may as well have been dead. “I’m still trying to decide if we’ll kill them here or haul them to the ship and put them in stasis. Maybe the Albion science officers can figure out something.
“Take a look around, see if you spot anything else that can be pried or chiseled off. Just remember, anything you take needs to be sterilized before it enters the ship—it might be contaminated.”
Björnman led several men to the far wall to investigate, while Olafsen remained to keep an eye on the five drones in case they received orders from some unknown source and flew into a murderous rage.
He was puzzled. What was this small ship doing out here in the middle of nowhere? The thing was too small to be a warship, so he’d supposed a mission to enlist help from a hidden Apex force. Yet if that were the case, there would be more than five helpless drones. All drab—not a bright feather among them.
“Hey, boss,” Björnman said. “What do you suppose this does?”
He took hold of a hook with a tiny yellow light on the end. Like a knob or lever, but built to be pulled by a beak.
Lights suddenly gleamed on panels on the wall. No, behind the panels, illuminating another chamber on the other side. Björnman released a blistering salvo of curses and took two steps back. Olafsen approached, eyes widening as he realized what he was looking at. There, floating in stasis behind the wall, was a naked tumble of men and women.
“By the gods,” someone said. “It’s their bloody larder.”
Something good would come of the mission. These people—Persians, no doubt—would be surprised to find themselves waking not as an Apex meal, but to a miraculous rescue. Olafsen pushed forward, searching the wall for a way to empty the stasis chamber.
I’m a reformed man, he thought with a grin. I won’t even sell them as thralls in the Viborg slave markets.
He cast his eyes back to the panel and recoiled in horror. A woman pressed up to the transparent surface. Her face was in tatters, one eye torn out and the other dangling. Her hands were frozen in an outstretched position, as if she’d been fighting attackers when they put her under.
Other men and women had kept their faces, which were clenched in pain, but were torn open at the belly or groin. Buzzards had shredded one man’s pectoral muscles, and a woman clutched an arm with its bones poking out.
“I don’t understand,” Björnman said. “Why mutilate them before putting them in stasis?”
“Tenderizing the meat.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know that Albion scientist on Void Queen? What’s his name—Brockett? He has this theory about how they raise a drone to battle status, then convert princesses to be fertile and command starships.”
“But what does that have to do with these poor fools in stasis?” Björnman asked.
A groan and disgusted-sounding noises drew Olafsen’s attention before he could answer. Bug had popped loose his helmet and taken it off. He spat on the ground.
“By the gods, that will make your eyes water.”
“What are you doing?” Olafsen snapped. “Put that back on.”
“You said to look around and figure stuff out. I’m gonna sniff for the fresh air intake. Gotta be in here somewhere.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? We have to decontaminate everything we bring back, and now we have to decontaminate you, too.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
“Oh, gods. Can you possibly be serious? Hope you enjoy quarantine. Now stay back from those drones!”
Still grumbling, Olafsen turned back to his chief mate.
“They get status by feeding on the pain and fear of their victims,” he said. “It brightens their plumage and makes them fertile. I think you’ve got to start with a princess already—wouldn’t work on a drone. They come from the gray eggs.”
“So there is another Apex force out here,” Björnman said.
“They must be carrying victims to a princess so she can lay eggs. This is a delivery pod, and these drones are technicians needed to haul the shipment through to the other side.”
Something about the scene was still bugging Olafsen, something he was missing, but he’d seen enough. His disgust was too much to ignore.
“Let’s kill these drones and get out of here,” he said.
“What about hauling them back for study?” Björnman asked.
“I’ve changed my mind. We don’t study vermin. We’ll kill them and blow up the ship and all the filth on it. As for these poor people,” he said with a glance at the transparent panel, “there’s no saving them. If we wake them, they’ll only suffer and then die anyway, and we don’t have the stasis chambers to haul them out of here so they can see Albion surgeons.”
His calm words belied his mood. Inside, he was churning with righteous anger, with hatred, with a stew of ugly emotions. What a fool he’d been all these years, raiding and slaving and smuggling, thinking other Scandians were his enemies.
This here, this was the enemy. Not Scandians, not Albionish, not Hroom, but Apex. Their entire existence was an abomination. An alien malice so deep, so poisonous, so genocidal that there could be no compromise.
He approached the drones with his gun aimed. “You think you are the apex predator of this sector? You’re nothing but filthy parasites.”
The drones didn’t move until he shot the first one. Then the survivors launched into the air, screaming and flapping and pecking. Gunfire exploded in the enclosed space. One of the drones spotted Bug, still standing with his helmet under his arm, head exposed, and launched itself at him. He screamed as it clamped its beak on his face and tore away a huge chunk of flesh.
Olafsen couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting the man, and so went in with his rifle butt swinging. It struck a wing with a satisfying crunch. The drone fell flapping to the floor, where he crushed its bones under his boots.
Soon the slaughter was over. Bug sat clutching his face, moaning, and when someone pulled his hands away, a lip and half his cheek were missing, a bloody mess left behind.
“Get him back to the ship,” Olafsen ordered, then remembered that the man had been exposed to the atmosphere of the alien ship. He cursed. They’d have to bring a medic into quarantine.
“Boss!” someone shouted.
There, amid the carnage, was another bird. Smaller than the drones, it must have hidden in the midst of the others all that time, undetected. Its feathers were a mixture of red and gold and green, unlike the drab plumage of the others. Like a four-foot-tall parrot. Some of the feathers were still downy, and there was something immature about its posture.
A young bird, still a chick. Nothing immature in the malice of its gaze, though, as it cocked its head and looked at Bug, who was still bleeding copiously, as if it wanted to eat him.
“Now I understand,” Olafsen said. He kicked at the eggshells and bones he’d ignored earlier. “It’s a seed ship, with an egg that hatched into a chick, and slaves to feed and care for it. If this had landed somewhere hidden and secure, it would have started all over again.”
“Is this the only one?” Björnman asked. “Or are there more of these things out here?”
“If there are more, we’d better find them. I’ll message ahead to McGowan and see if he can spare a few ships to help us look.”
He groaned internally, thinking of the ramifications. So much for getting back to Vargus and reclaiming Bloodaxe. Reclaiming his star wolf fleet. It would fall on his brother to seize any glory from the upcoming fight with the harvester ship.
“Meanwhile, we’ve got a young princess,” Björnman said. “That definitely has value for the scientists.”
But Olafsen had changed his mind entirely about the scientific value of this find. He no longer cared, and was repulsed by the whole thing. He turned toward the opening back into the blackfish, anxious to get out of this ugly place and begin the search.
“Kill it,” he said.
Chapter Nine
Tech Officer Smythe located the escaped harvester four hours after Catarina’s fleet arrived in the system. The enemy ship was cruising across Xerxes, accompanied by a pair of hunter-killer packs, and had dropped cloaks to allow smaller craft to crawl over its hull like crabs, doing repair or maintenance of some kind.
In spite of the ongoing work, this harvester appeared fully intact, and with its escort of lances and spears, any hope of repeating the easy victory of the Zoroaster System faded.
Catarina hadn’t been keen on joining forces with McGowan, who would no doubt start ordering her around, but was relieved to see his fleet on the opposite side of the system, on a course to intercept the alien ships from the other direction.
Nyb Pim ran calculations and announced that Void Queen and her fleet could cut off the enemy well short of its target jump point. Once engaged with the enemy, they’d need to face it alone for eight to ten hours before McGowan’s reinforcements arrived.
As for McGowan’s fleet, it numbered forty-seven ships, including his flagship. HMS Peerless was a Punisher-class cruiser. It was weaker than an Ironside-class battle cruiser like Void Queen or Blackbeard, but boasted plenty of firepower, multiplied by the seven additional cruisers in McGowan’s fleet. An assortment of thirty-nine other warships made up the rest of the fleet, including a dozen Hroom sloops of war, led by General Mose Dryz.
Catarina gave it some thought and told Smythe she’d send McGowan a video message. She stood, straightened her uniform, and told him to start the recording.
“Captain McGowan,” she said with a nod. “As you’ve heard, we have already destroyed a harvester in the Zoroaster System. I expect our outcome in Xerxes to be equally successful. The enemy is no doubt listening, so I will be brief. I am going to slow my acceleration to delay intercepting the enemy as long as possible.
“When I do engage, I intend to hold the enemy in place while you bring up reinforcements from the rear. By the time you arrive, we should have destroyed the hunter-killer packs and disabled the harvester. I will give you further instructions when you are three hours from the battlefield. Godspeed, and God save the king.”
She stopped the recording.
Capp raised an eyebrow. “God save the king? That’s a little patriotic for you, ain’t it, Cap’n?”
“Exactly right. It tells McGowan not to take everything I say literally. Assuming he’s not an idiot, which is not a given.”
“So we ain’t gonna do all that stuff you said?”
“We’ll do enough of it.”
“That piss nozzle’s gonna argue,” Capp said. “He’ll tell us to follow him or to attack the harvester head-on, or something.”
“Naturally. Something that will give him maximum glory at minimum risk.” Catarina settled back into the captain’s chair. “It’s not McGowan’s call, though, is it? That’s for us to decide. I’ll gather a battle council before we engage the enemy and come up with our tactics then.” Catarina turned to Smythe. “Send the message.”
McGowan was out near a gas giant on the far side of the sun, and it would take time to cross that distance.
“How long until we can expect a response?”
“About two hours,” Smythe said.
“Good. I’m taking supper in my quarters. I’ll sketch out a plan and come back with something to show the battle council. Capp, you have the helm.”
Catarina set out for the lift. There was no rush, and so nearly three hours passed by the time she returned to the bridge. A message had gone out for those she was inviting to the war council, and their away pods were in transit already.
“Play McGowan’s message,” Catarina said as she took her seat.
“No response yet, sir,” Smythe said. “We got a subspace from Olafsen, though. Looks like he snagged an attempted runaway.”
The tech officer sent across Olafsen’s subspace, and Catarina read it with growing concern. There wasn’t a huge amount of info in the short message, but it appeared that he’d caught a small ship carrying an Apex princess and had reason to believe there might be more. He was requesting assistance in searching the Damascus System to verify that it was clear of enemies.
McGowan’s video message finally arrived. The other captain stood stiffly and, Catarina thought, a little shiftily, as he wasn’t making direct eye contact with the camera. Guilty of something. She wasn’t going to like what he had to say.
“With apologies, Vargus, I’m afraid the news from this Viking fellow has thrown our battle plans into disarray. We must not allow any of these small Apex ships to escape. I’ll send you what I can, but some of my swiftest ships are needed in Damascus.”
“Oh yeah?” Capp said. “And what would that be? Let me guess, it ain’t gonna be Peerless coming to our aid, is it?”
Catarina paused the recording during Capp’s outburst, then started it up again with a sigh.
“That means my corvettes and cruisers, Vargus. Plus a couple of war junks for their searching capabilities. You’ll have to make do with support vessels and the general’s sloops. I’m fortunate to find myself close to a jump point into Damascus, so with any luck, I will return for mop-up action.” He cleared his throat. “Oh, and I share your sentiment. Um, Godspeed, Captain Vargus.”
Catarina didn’t stop the muttered curses and other rude remarks directed at McGowan as the video message ended. Lomelí, normally quietly about her job at the defense grid computer, seemed especially enraged, and spat out a string of angry words in Ladino. Science Officer Brockett was on the bridge, and he merely stood in place, shaking his head in obvious disgust.
“If you will allow me to make an observation,” Nyb Pim said when the hubbub had died down. “Captain McGowan at least appears to feel guilty about his cowardice.”
This brought a fresh round of shouting and recriminations.
Catarina raised her voice. “Enough. Everyone settle down. Please. Back to your stations.”
She checked her console. Longshanks had docked and was being escorted from his away pod toward the lift. He’d be here shortly.
“I’m inclined to give McGowan a pass this time.”
“You can’t be serious, Cap’n,” Capp said. “He’s running from the battlefield again. We’re gonna be slaughtered.”
“That’s enough of that sort of talk, Lieutenant,” Catarina said sharply. “We are not going to be slaughtered. And Olafsen is right, and so is McGowan. If there are more runaways, we’ve got to stop them. Otherwise, we’ve accomplished nothing. An escaping princess is dangerous, whether she’s on a harvester ship, a spear, or even an escape pod.”
“Yeah, but look,” Capp said, pointing to the main screen, which was showing McGowan’s forces reorganizing. “How we gonna win without all them ships?”
A full third of McGowan’s force was peeling away, and it was the most powerful third, too. Two war junks, plus eight cruisers and seven corvettes—the muscle of his fleet—abandoning Catarina on the eve of battle. What was left was hardly insignificant, but without the heavier warships, looked more like a task force without a flagship than a fleet. The harvester could plow through them if it decided to retreat.
The door to the lift opened, and Longshanks ducked to get through the doorway and onto the bridge, followed by a second Scandian, whom Catarina didn’t recognize.
Longshanks wore his eye patch, and swiveled his head to meet Catarina’s gaze with his good eye. “This McGowan,” he began haltingly, his accent as thick as ever. “He not fight? Olafsen not fight, too?”
“Bad news travels fast,” Catarina said.
“Olafsen is Longshanks’s half-brother,” the other Scandian said. His English was accented, but clear. “Longshanks knew there was bad news even before your man here told him.”
This last bit came with a hooked thumb toward Barker, who had joined the two Scandians on the lift and emerged behind the others, scowling until his bushy eyebrows came nearly together.
“How did you know already?” Catarina asked Barker.
“Someone shared the video down to the gunnery, and then it took about two seconds to run the length of the ship and probably the fleet. You know how people are.”
The door to the lift opened again, and Enrique Da Rosa stepped out. Da Rosa was Catarina’s former first mate, and the acting captain of Orient Tiger, her old ship. They communicated with some frequency, but she hadn’t seen him face-to-face in months. His bald patch had grown, and he’d thickened more around the middle; apparently navy food agreed with him.
Da Rosa was frowning, as if he, too, had heard the bad news, but he brightened when he saw her and let out an appreciative whistle as he took in the bridge.
“So this is it, eh? No wonder you abandoned your old friends for these Albion scoundrels.”
She gave him a half-smile in acknowledgment, then turned serious again.
“All right, the lot of you, into the war room. Capp, Nyb Pim, you’ll join us.”
#
Longshanks’s translator was another of the Knutesen brothers, or maybe it was a cousin, of which there were apparently an endless supply. No hard feelings, apparently, even after what Olafsen and Longshanks had done to one of his relatives in the Viborg battle.
Knutesen was smaller than most Scandians, and clean shaven. He carried that same meat, onions, beer, and cigar smell as Longshanks, though, and the two of them lent a pungent odor to the war room as the council settled into place.
To add to the smell, Da Rosa pulled out a pipe and lit it, which drew envious looks from Olafsen and Knutesen. Da Rosa pulled out a tobacco pouch, but neither of the Scandians had thought to bring pipes, and he seemed disinclined to share his. Catarina called for an ensign to fetch two pipes, figuring that happy Vikings were more likely to be compliant Vikings. They were soon swimming in a haze of pipe smoke as all three men puffed away.
Catarina brought up a stylized vision of a battlefield on the war room viewscreen, with her ships clustered according to type, and the harvester and its hunter-killer packs off to one side.
“I’m not going to talk about McGowan, so forget that he and his missing ships even exist. We’re going to figure out how to win this battle with the forces we’ve already got, and those we’re likely to get later.”
She tapped the console to manipulate the ships, bringing the harvester to the center, but leaving its support ships behind. Then she ringed the enemy battleship with cruisers, corvettes, and destroyers, placed the star wolves to one side, and put her three missile frigates to the rear, protected by an assortment of other navy, Hroom, and mercenary ships.
“This is what I’d do without the hunter-killer packs. We could hammer the harvester from a distance, and more than match its long-range firepower, but we’ve seen how it can absorb blows. So I’d bring the fleet muscle up front, then charge in with the star wolves once we’d engaged the guns. Longshanks would find one soft spot—well, as soft as can be found—and tear a hole in it.”
Knutesen translated this for Longshanks, who slammed a fist on the table. “Yes!”
“Once we had battered the harvester enough, I’d send in the torpedo boats with the last of our nuclear torpedoes, and hopefully finish the job. The star wolves would protect the boats from fire.”
Knutesen translated this, too, and nodded at Longshanks’s response.
“We like this plan,” Knutesen said. “It gives us plenty of danger and glory.”
“That’s what I would do. But the harvester isn’t alone. Look what happens if we try this.” She moved the ten lances and spears to the rear of the allied fleet. “We can’t hold back the hunter-killer packs because they can jump right into our formation. They’ll maul our frigates, and then come up on the rest of us from behind.”
“What about me?” Da Rosa said, pointing to Orient Tiger’s position on the screen. “I am not just sitting here doing nothing, I am ready to defend the missile ships, yes? Pussycat, too, and the schooners.”
“You think you can hold off eight lances and two spears with your mercenary force?”
“There are Hroom and war junks, too.”
“Not enough of them. A lance is at least as powerful as a destroyer, and a spear is the match of an Aggressor-class cruiser.”
Longshanks said something to his companion, who nodded.
“So send back your cruisers and destroyers to guard the frigates,” Knutesen said. “We have enough star wolves to settle the score, and we Scandians are not afraid to die.”
No, they were not afraid to die, and they were not afraid to venture off on their own, either, when they thought another fight looked more enticing. She couldn’t simply place them at the back of the battlefield and expect them to maintain discipline.
“Are you thirsty?” she asked the two Scandians. “How would you like a drink?”
She got on the com to the young ensign who’d brought in the pipes. “Bring up a couple of tankards of ale, will you? The good stuff for the officers, not that swill they serve in the mess. And be quick about it—these Vikings are thirsty.”
Knutesen translated, and Longshanks licked his lips.
“I need something up front that can fire torpedoes and missiles,” Catarina said. “But I also need to protect my missile frigates.”
Longshanks flipped up his eye patch to expose his empty eye socket. It was rather gruesome looking, but she refused to look away.
“You have . . . eh . . . problem with pummel guns?” he asked in his broken English. “They smash harvester. Smash him good.”
“Problem? Who said I have a problem? Your pummel guns are going to rip our enemies to shreds. Just that some of the enemies will be spears and lances.”
The two Scandians grunted. It was out in the open now. She was going to send some of them back to guard the rear of the fleet, and it was dawning on them that this was a secondary fight. They began to argue in Scandian.
Capp leaned over and whispered in Catarina’s ear. “You know, Cap’n, if only we could cross McGowan with these Viking blokes, we’d have a hell of a warrior, wouldn’t we? Instead, we got someone who wants his ship all spotless-like, and another sort who smell like they been sleeping in the skins of their enemies.”
Catarina couldn’t stop the laugh before it came out in an embarrassing snort. Longshanks and Knutesen glared, but she was saved by the arrival of an ensign carrying two large tankards of ale, which he set in front of the two men. That settled them right down.
Capp and Barker eyed the tankards with thirsty expressions of their own.
“Only for the guests?” Capp asked.
“Stay sharp, Lieutenant.”
“I know, I know.”
Longshanks set down his tankard and wiped foam from his beard with the back of his hand. He said something to Knutesen.
“All right, we’re agreed,” Knutesen said. “But if the chance comes, we will find our glory.”
“You’ll have all the glory of the fleet once we destroy the harvester,” Catarina said. “It will be a shared victory no matter who fights and who waits in reserve.”
“That is the sort of thing a marauder captain says to the boy working in waste disposal who never fires a gun,” Knutesen said. “And every young fool knows that glory only comes to those who fight and die.”
“But you’ll obey orders? That’s all I need to know.”
“Yes,” Longshanks said with a grunt. “Orders, yes. Fight if can.”
Was that an affirmative? Or was he still hedging? Probably the best she was going to get.
Da Rosa had been following this exchange with a half-smirk as he puffed away, clearly enjoying seeing his old comrade in arms struggle to pin down the Scandians.
“I’m a mercenary at heart,” Da Rosa said, “and more than happy to sit back and let other people suffer the blows while I share in the loot.”
“Words of a coward,” Knutesen growled.
Da Rosa gave the Scandian a dismissive flick of the hand. “Words of a man who should have died five times over, but is still alive.” He nodded at Catarina. “Move the star wolves back to guard the frigates, Vargus, and you’ll see my concern,” Da Rosa said.
Catarina manipulated her map to place half of the star wolves up against the missile frigates, and slid the two Apex hunter-killer packs back, as well.
“That’s what? Ten star wolves still up front?” Da Rosa asked. “Too weak to help us stop the harvester.”
Knutesen, surprisingly, didn’t find this statement offensive. He consulted with Longshanks, who grumbled his agreement.
“The mercenary is right,” Knutesen declared. “You’ll never stop the harvester with only ten wolves.”
“After the beating that other harvester absorbed at New Mars,” Da Rosa said, “we must assume it will take everything we’ve got to knock this one out. If we suffer heavy losses, not even the arrival of McGowan’s rump fleet will be deciding.”
Catarina asked for opinions from the others at the table. Nyb Pim declined to weigh in, but Capp and Barker both agreed with Da Rosa and the Scandians. The only way to defeat the harvester was to concentrate the fleet’s firepower and ignore the spears and lances.
“This is the same harvester that broke out of Persia,” Barker added. “Smashed right through Tolvern’s fleet and escaped. But when I asked Smythe to send me an assessment of the ship’s weaknesses, the places in the hull that had suffered serious damage, so that I could target those areas, he couldn’t find anything worth mentioning.”
“Tolvern must’ve hit him somewhere,” Capp protested. “That’s Blackbeard we’re talking about. And a whole bloody fleet, too.”
“I’m only saying what the scans show,” Barker said.
Catarina didn’t need to hear any more. She was convinced.
“Forget everything I said before. New plan. We’re going to surprise the hunter-killer packs and wipe them out first. Then, when they’re gone, a full-scale assault on the harvester ship.”
Knutesen and Longshanks leaped to their feet, shouting and pumping fists. The others only shared worried looks. Anyway, the Scandians were bluffing; as Catarina studied them, she swore she saw a note of tension in their expressions, heard tightness in their shouts.
They may be aggressive and eager, may express confidence, but there was another emotion barely concealed beneath the surface. Fear. The very same emotion that gripped the others sitting at the war room table.
And in less than three hours, they would face those fears head-on.
Chapter Ten
HMS Blackbeard was only twenty million miles from the planet when the enemy began to move. Tolvern’s invasion of the Persia System had been so audacious, charging in for an attack so soon after the Apex harvester broke out of quarantine, that the aliens had apparently been caught unprepared.
But that wasn’t the same thing as saying the planet was unprotected. Spears and lances began to lift up from the surface or peel away from the orbital fortress attached to the space elevator. More enemy warships came into focus patrolling near Persia’s single large moon.
Tolvern paced the bridge, looking up as the data appeared and was represented visually on the screen.
“What about harvesters?”
“None that I can see, Captain,” Oglethorpe said.
He tapped at the console, and the viewscreen shifted about, showing first the moon, and then the orbital fortress attached to the space elevator. The fortress was blurry, its resolution imprecise at this distance.
“Pieces of a ship. Anything being constructed atop the elevator?”
“Nope, nothing.”
“Surely, we can’t be that lucky,” she said. “But if we’re right that a harvester can’t lift itself out of the gravity well, and it’s too big to be hauled up on the elevator except in pieces, that means that the buzzards aren’t even midway through construction of a new ship.”
“We got a chance, don’t we?” Manx said.
“More than a chance. We can win this thing.”
The enemy ships arrayed against them were strong enough to mount a challenge, and she still had to slip Stratsky through and smash the lifting capability of the space elevator, but once she did, the enemy fleet was grounded. No more harvesters would rise from the surface to terrorize them. Ever.
Then what? Hold her fleet in orbit until the rest of the allied fleets arrived to join her in bombarding the alien facilities on the surface. When they arrived, they’d land marines and raiders to finish the job.
“Beginning initial deceleration,” Clyde announced.
“Give orders to the fleet,” Tolvern said. “I want the destroyers out front. None of them held back.”
Manx made the call. The fleet had been traveling in a defensive formation designed to protect the most vulnerable ships from the sudden appearance of enemies in their midst, but now began to break into two separate elements.
The first, smaller force, held the swiftest ships in her fleet, the fastest out of the blocks. Her five remaining destroyers and three corvettes would travel as a single force, a counterpart to the hunter-killer packs gathering to oppose them. They were tasked with chasing after and engaging the enemy ships, and charging back into the fight if those ships tried to jump in and fight Blackbeard or the frigates.
The second force had everything else: Blackbeard and the two smaller cruisers, Champion and Triumph, plus five torpedo boats, two missile frigates, three sloops of war, and two Singaporean war junks. Finally, the striker wing, with falcons now launching from Blackbeard. The torpedo boats and falcons would mount the final attack that would take Stratsky’s nuclear-tipped payload and blast it into the orbital fortress.
“Four hunter-killer packs,” Oglethorpe announced.
“Is that the final count?”
“So far as I can tell. Two of them are missing spears.”
“So we’re facing sixteen lances and two spears,” Tolvern said. “We can take them. Call Fox, I want Nineveh in the lead.”
Moments later, the corvettes and destroyers broke free and advanced on the nearest hunter-killer pack, which had already begun to swing toward them. The enemy had been accelerating, probably intending to appear suddenly in the midst of Tolvern’s fleet, but Fox’s task force pressed the attack before they could jump.
The two sides exchanged blows, with Tolvern’s destroyers and corvettes rapidly gaining the upper hand. A second hunter-killer pack raced to join the fight, which would even the odds.
Tolvern ordered her frigates to fire missiles in support, but didn’t otherwise move to reinforce Captain Fox. They were on their own as Blackbeard led the charge toward Persia.
The other two hunter-killer packs—the ones with spears in command—had been accelerating on the opposite side of Persia, and now vanished.
“Here they come,” Tolvern said. She made a guess. “They’ll hit the frigates.”
Manx made a call. Triumph and Champion fell in on either side of the two missile platforms, which were vulnerable to close-in attack.
It was a gamble on Tolvern’s part. If the enemy had identified Tolvern’s target as the orbital fortress, they could come in from below on the Z-axis instead, and hammer her torpedo boats and falcons. If they wanted the Albion flagship, Tolvern might suddenly find herself surrounded by ten Apex warships tearing into her from all sides. Or maybe they were rushing to knock out Nineveh and the corvette-destroyer task force instead.
The enemy reappeared, and right where Tolvern had guessed. They began firing energy pulses on one of the two frigates, but the attack only lasted seconds before Triumph and Champion roared into the fight. They were Punisher-class cruisers, of the same kind that Blackbeard had been before her overhaul and upgrade, and Tolvern knew full well the hell they could unleash. Torpedoes and missiles slammed into the enemy ships, even as the cruisers wheeled about to present broadsides against the two spears.
The hunter-killer packs fell back, but this brought them into range of the sloops and war junks approaching from the rear. A lance burst apart under sustained fire, and a spear, leaking gasses from its punishment at Triumph’s guns, stumbled into their midst moments later. The war junks softened its armor with concentrated energy fire, while Hroom serpentines launched a devastating wave of bomblets. The spear cracked down the middle and broke apart like two halves of a clam.
A second lance tried to fight clear, passed the two cruisers, and came within range of Blackbeard. The enemy’s engine sputtered, but it still had use of its weapons, and the battle cruiser’s shields lit up with incoming fire.
Tolvern watched the lance glide past just off port. “Finish it.”
Her gunnery let loose a pair of torpedoes, which smacked into the enemy ship one after another. They detonated, and took the lance with them. Nothing was left but residual radiation.
The rest of the enemy ships fought their way clear. Meanwhile, in the other battle, one of the destroyers had lost her upper deck shields, but Fox had taken out a lance and crippled a second, which limped toward Persia and descended into the atmosphere to safety. The others retreated as well.
Fox had fought an opposing force of equally matched ships and won a quick, decisive victory. He called Tolvern for orders, eager to chase them down and force another engagement, but she told him to return to the fleet instead. The swift, medium-powered warships had proven themselves capable of disrupting Apex’s charges into her midst, and there was no reason to surrender that advantage.
Everything had gone right so far. Between the two battles, they’d destroyed the equivalent of an entire hunter-killer pack at the cost of shield damage to a handful of ships. What a contrast with the disastrous battle in Nebuchadnezzar, where Tolvern had lost seven warships and a falcon.
Persia loomed ahead of them. The planet was on the small side for human settlement, about eighty percent standard gravity, which was no doubt why the birds had chosen it as a target to rebuild their fleet. The records from Drake’s earlier expedition indicated that the planet was of average temperature variation between equatorial and polar regions, but there were no ice caps because the poles were dominated by large open oceans, whose mixing waters moderated the polar climates.
In contrast, the oceans at the equators were long and slender, wedged between equally elongated continents. Millions of people lived down there, or had lived there, as the Apex slaughter was no doubt well advanced. The first of the planet’s two orbital fortresses came swinging around the planet, and Tolvern braced for long-range attack.
“Ready countermeasures for incoming missiles.”
But the fortress didn’t fire on them, and the reason became apparent as the tech officers completed their scans.
“It’s in ruins,” Oglethorpe said. “A Persian base, smashed up in the alien invasion and never rebuilt.”
“The queen commander is in too much of a rush,” Tolvern said. “All she wants is to strip the planet, exterminate the population, and move on with a bigger, nastier fleet. With any luck, they won’t have bothered reinforcing the second fortress, either.”
That last part was mostly wishful thinking, and contradicted minutes later when the second fortress swung around the planet. This fortress was the site of the space elevator they were trying to destroy, and the Apex flock hadn’t been so foolish as to leave it unguarded. The first missiles launched from the surface and sped toward Fox’s destroyers and corvettes. A second wave launched, this one targeting Blackbeard.
The incoming missiles weren’t yet a serious concern, and Tolvern was more worried about the spear and lances, which had formed a single large force of thirteen ships that was reorganizing into three hunter-killer packs. They began to accelerate in preparation for another short-range jump.
“Orders, Captain?” Manx asked.
It was do or die time. Fall back to fight the remaining lances and spear and she could probably wipe them out entirely or force them, damaged and defenseless, to take refuge on the surface. With that accomplished, nobody would blame Tolvern for declaring victory and retreating to Nebuchadnezzar to wait for reinforcements.
The alternative was to attack the orbital fortress in an attempt to ground the harvesters for good. She might lose, and lose badly, but how could she resist that opportunity?
“Ready the charge on my mark. We’re going to pulverize that space elevator.”
The first wave of enemy missiles was approaching, and out went countermeasures to bring them down. Stratsky’s striker wing hung back in the company of the torpedo boats. As soon as the missiles were taken care of, Tolvern gave the orders, and five torpedo boats and nine falcons streaked away from the fleet toward the fortress.
Blackbeard, Triumph, and Champion followed, firing missiles and readying a full barrage of torpedoes. They had to draw its fire.
Meanwhile, the spear and lances were nearing jump speed. Tolvern called Nineveh, which had rejoined the main fleet along with the rest of Fox’s task force.
“Protect the frigates,” she told Fox. “Soon as those hunter-killers jump, they’re going to be all over us.”
His voice was steely resolve. “Aye, Captain. The buzzards won’t get through.”
Fox’s destroyers and corvettes swept past the Hroom sloops and came in against the two frigates, which were firing waves of missiles toward the orbital fortress.
Meanwhile, enemy fire was getting past Blackbeard’s countermeasures. One missile hit her on the number four shield, and another struck the number three. Damage was limited, but more enemy fire was incoming.
“Bayard, keep those missiles off us.”
The lances and spear jumped, ready to reenter the battle. Let them come. Fox had his five destroyers and three corvettes in perfect position. The enemy would emerge battered and bloodied, if not wiped out entirely as an effective fighting force.
To Tolvern’s shock , the enemy ships flashed back into place not near the frigates, nor even in against the battle cruiser and two smaller cruisers, but next to the orbital fortress. That would put them in the line of fire of Blackbeard, Triumph, and Champion, where they would surely be mauled, while providing little protection for the fortress.
But it wasn’t to fight the trio of powerful warships bearing down on them that the lances and spear had moved into that position, as became quickly evident. Instead, they seemed to have recognized the threat of the charging torpedo boats and falcons.
They moved first on the five boats. Energy beams lit up the Albion ships.
“Drop your load and get out of range,” Tolvern ordered the commander of the boat force. “That fort will tear you up.”
Mark-IVs and Hunter-IIs rumbled away from the torpedo boats. The two lead boats were close enough to target the fortress, while the others fired at the enemy force bearing down on them. A pair of torpedoes hit the first lance, which fell back as if stunned, engine leaking plasma. A second lance fled the battlefield, pursued by a pair of Hunter-IIs.
Other torpedoes fell short of their mark or were taken down by countermeasures, including all four launched at the orbital fortress.
The torpedo boats had meant to flash past the planet and come back around for a second assault, but came under a withering counterattack before they could slip by. Energy beams and missiles hit them from all sides, with the first two boats under attack by four ships each.
One of the lead ships burst apart like a melon struck by a sledgehammer. The second vented burning gasses and went spiraling into the atmosphere, where it burned up as it went down. The other three fled, pursued by more than a dozen enemy ships. The boats would have been destroyed entirely if not for Stratsky’s striker wing, which came screaming in from behind. The nimble falcons danced through the enemy ships, firing small missiles at some enemies and targeting others with energy pulses.
The falcons wreaked enough havoc to draw enemy fire, and the three remaining torpedo boats took advantage of the chaos and escaped. The falcons now found themselves alone and undefended. One took a missile and vanished in a terrific explosion. The others began to fall back.
Blackbeard, Triumph, and Champion pulled up short and unloaded everything they had at the spear and lances.
Stratsky called. The shouted orders of other falcon pilots bled over onto the channel, and his ship computer warned of incoming fire.
“Now or never,” he said. “I’m going in.”
“The devil you are,” Tolvern said. “You’ll be killed.”
“I’m gonna shove this nuke down their gullet, gonna to take it out, Captain.”
“You can’t take it out, Stratsky. You’ll never get close enough to drop your torpedo. Soon as you slow down to fire, they’ll annihilate you.”
“Tell Oggs to check the elevator, Captain. Look what it’s hauling up.”
Tolvern snapped her fingers at Oglethorpe, then returned to the com. “Whatever it is, we’ll handle it. You get your butt back here—I’m not in the business of sending out suicide missions.”
“King’s balls,” Oglethorpe swore.
The tech officer switched out the main viewscreen to show the elevator. It was moving, all right, and hauling an entire harvester ship through the atmosphere.
How was that possible? A harvester must weigh 200,000 tons, which was far too heavy to be pulled all the way from the surface, even on a low-gravity world like Persia. This must be only the hull, like a crab shell without the crab inside, in which case they had nothing to worry about.
But as it came bursting through the cloud cover, she got her answer. It was blasting plasma downward, assisting the lifting power of the space elevator. No, the elevator wasn’t strong enough to lift a harvester into orbit, and neither could a harvester launch itself from the planet’s surface. Working together, however, they were managing the task.
Tolvern’s mouth felt dry. The ship was almost up; all it had to do was climb the last few miles and break its tether, and it could rumble straight into the battle.
“There’s more, Captain,” Oglethorpe said. His voice sounded hollow. “I’m looking through the cloud cover down at the enemy yards on the surface and . . . see for yourself.”
The view changed to show the surface of the planet, as pieced together by Blackbeard’s suite of sensors and compiled into a composite image. It showed a massive clearing in the middle of a mountain range, where entire mountaintops had been sheared away as the enemy devoured them for their mineral resources.
The surrounding landscape was a blasted, withered surface cleared of trees and vegetation for fifty miles in every direction, and the smoke of thousands of fires blocked sunlight from reaching the surface. Blackbeard’s instruments peered through the smoke and zoomed in on the yards at the bottom of the elevator.
There, spread out on the surface, were the shells of seven more harvester ships in various stages of construction. Seven! If they got into orbit, the war was over.
“You see, Captain,” Stratsky said. Tolvern had forgotten he was still on the com. “I’ve got to take out that elevator. If I don’t, if more of those ugly things get up here . . .”
“But you’ll never get your torpedo off in time. Soon as you pull short to fire, you’re dead.”
“I got a plan for that.”
She told him to hold as Blackbeard fell under renewed attack. The lances and spear had thrashed the torpedo boats and sent the falcons running, and now slammed into her fleet.
Fox charged up from the rear with his corvettes and destroyers, which blasted at the enemy formation, trying to knock it apart. The spear and lances weren’t so easily scattered anymore, however, not standing, as they were, in the shadow of the orbital fortress’ guns.
One of the corvettes, HMS Race, drifted too far forward in her eagerness to get off a shot from the main guns, and the enemy’s fire suddenly concentrated on taking her out. Missiles sped toward Race, and energy pulses stabbed from above and below.
Too late, the corvette’s captain realized his danger and tried to retreat. Other ships from the fleet tried to guard Race’s retreat, but she couldn’t fall back in time. Missiles punctured holes in her damaged armor. An emergency signal. Two escape pods launched, but couldn’t get free of Persia’s gravity and went down. More holes burst holes through Race’s armor, and the emergency signal died. The corvette drifted away, dead.
It looked as though the rest of Fox’s ships would escape, but a lucky shot from the fortress hit a destroyer’s engine as she was still accelerating. The containment field ruptured, her engine died in a long stream of bleeding plasma, and she drifted away from the protection of the fleet. Three lances pounced and savaged the ship until they’d torn through her armor. She broke into three separate pieces, one of which exploded.
And here came the harvester. It was up now, next to the orbital fortress, and trying to work its way clear of the tether, which still held it in place.
Finch called up from the gunnery, saying she had the main battery ready to go. Blackbeard unloaded on the harvester with twenty-two cannon. The enemy ship absorbed the blow without returning fire. The orbital fortress, on the other hand, was hurling missiles at the battle cruiser as fast as it could launch them, and all the cruisers were taking blows, even as Fox tried to get his surviving corvettes and destroyers out of harm’s way.
“Captain!” Stratsky said.
Again, she’d forgotten he was on the line, as his falcons were engaged in a fight to one side, pursued by a lance, which they drew farther away from the battle with each skirmish.
“What’s your plan?”
“I’m going in solo. Going to charge in as fast as I can.”
Manx was listening in on the conversation, and scoffed. “What, did you discover some new way to fire a Mark-IV?”
“I’m not going to fire, sir.”
Tolvern stopped, realizing what he meant. The warnings from Jane, the shouted action from the defense grid computer, the battle playing out on the viewscreen—it all faded into the background.
“A few days ago, they had me ripped open and my guts on the operating table,” Stratsky said. “That thing was in my head, Captain. Would have made me its slave. I know more than anyone here what they’re like, and I’ve got to do what it takes to stop them.”
“He’s right, if he can pull it off,” Manx said slowly. “We can still win this war with one harvester in orbit. We’ll fall back to Nebuchadnezzar and wait for reinforcements. But if the buzzards get seven more off the surface, we’re doomed.”
“We have to take out that elevator,” Tolvern agreed. “One way or another, we have to do it. But like this?”
“Give me the order,” Stratsky said.
Tolvern couldn’t wait any longer. “Do it.”
Then she cut the line, unable to speak to him any longer. The harvester was free of the fortress and coming at her.
Chapter Eleven
The first step in springing Catarina’s battle plan involved tricking the Apex commander. She pulled her three missile frigates into a tight position behind Void Queen, guarded them with Longshanks’s twenty-three star wolves, and ordered them to fire a few exploratory shots at the harvester, as if testing range.
At the same time, Void Queen edged forward with the two smaller Punisher-class cruisers and a screen of corvettes and destroyers, as well as the pirate frigates, Orient Tiger and Pussycat. Five torpedo boats lurked behind this force, ready to charge.
In response to this threat, the two hunter-killer packs sliced up on the Z-axis and accelerated, priming for a jump, while the harvester changed course to meet the oncoming fleet head-on.
“That sets the trap,” Catarina told her first mate. “Let’s see if the enemy steps into it.”
Capp rubbed her buzzed scalp. “Hell of a risk, ain’t it?”
“The birds must have a good handle on Albion tactics by now. We protect our missile frigates so they can soften the enemy from range. That forces Apex to jump in and try to knock the frigates out of the fight, with varying degrees of success. That’s how it has played out in the past, anyway.” She nodded. “So this time we’re protecting them with a stronger force.”
“I’d say you got ’em protected. Twenty-three star wolves.”
“Too many for a pair of hunter-killer packs to defeat,” Catarina agreed. “So the buzzards look, and what do they see us doing? I’ve positioned our most powerful ships up front to tackle the harvester, backed by enough forces to deliver a beating and survive the battle. If the enemy buys, if they take the bait, they should ignore the frigates and come right at the vanguard instead.”
“I get that, it makes sense. They manage to knock out our big ships up front, then the rest of ’em don’t matter much. But won’t they just be saving us for the end, Cap’n? Cripple us up so they can eat us later?”
“That’s what I expect. They’ll take what human and Hroom prisoners they can, but they really want us personally.”
And that was the key part of Catarina’s strategy, right there. The queen commander wanted Void Queen and craved the officers especially, with Catarina served up as the queen commander’s personal feast.
Catarina had to make it look like that were possible, then deliver a vicious counterattack before the enemy realized its mistake. And if she’d guessed wrong, then the battle was lost before it had even started.
General Mose Dryz and the rest of McGowan’s rump fleet were racing toward the battlefield and should arrive in about eight hours, assuming Catarina and her fleet were still on the battlefield at that point, and not destroyed, devoured, or scattered to the cosmos.
The eight lances and two spears waited until the allied fleet was almost within range of the harvester ship’s guns, and then vanished. The instant they disappeared, Thor’s Hammer and the rest of the Scandian fleet abandoned the missile frigates and accelerated toward the front of the fleet.
That left the three frigates guarded by a handful of war junks, sloops, and mercenary schooners. If Catarina had guessed wrong, those frigates were doomed, her long-range advantage would be obliterated, and she’d have ten hostile ships at her rear.
She had not guessed wrong. The hunter-killer packs reappeared a few miles from Void Queen. They threw explosive shot against her hull and blasted her with energy weapons. The battle cruiser rolled into a dive, like a harpooned whale fleeing for the watery depths.
The computer’s AI came on with a dire warning. “Shields number three and four nearing critical temperatures. Shield number five at eighty-two percent.”
The first star wolves arrived on the scene, led by Thor’s Hammer and Pestilence. Hellfire, Bloodaxe, and Frost Giant roared in after them, followed by the rest of the Scandian fleet, their pummel guns snarling. The wolves caught one of the spears in a devastating crossfire and quickly tore holes in its armor. Three lances attempted to relieve it, only to find themselves under attack, as well. Void Queen fired her main guns, which savaged the armor of one lance and struck a glancing blow to another. The three lances fled, chased by torpedoes and star wolves.
Catarina took advantage of a brief lull to order her striker wing into the air. Carvalho’s falcons shot from the launch bay, one after the other, and joined the fight.
Meanwhile, the harvester ship had closed with the rest of Catarina’s vanguard. The cruisers, Repulse and Fierce, fired torpedoes, while the corvettes, Dart and Arrow, raced in, fired their cannon, and danced away. Three destroyers streaked in front of the harvester, dropping mines to slow its approach.
The last of these ships, a warship named HMS Herald, a survivor of the civil wars, the battle at Singapore, and two tours of duty on the inner frontier with Admiral Drake, was too sluggish in dropping its mines, and the harvester caught it with the green eye.
Tracked by the paralyzing beam, Herald flew past the harvester on pure momentum, unable to maneuver. The harvester fired a harpoon, opened its biting arms, and hauled it in. As the officers on Void Queen’s bridge watched in horror, the arms closed around Herald and tore into its hull.
“Send in the wolves,” Catarina said. “We’ll finish the hunter-killers ourselves.”
Capp made the call to Longshanks, and Catarina ordered Carvalho to target a damaged lance, before calling back to her missile frigates to attack any of the smaller enemy ships trying to escape the battlefield.
Already, a spear and three lances were gone, and Void Queen had closed with another spear, and was trading blows. There were still too many enemy ships for the battle cruiser to handle all by herself, but missiles from the frigates were hitting home. Sloops, war junks, and mercenary schooners abandoned their positions to the rear and raced into the action.
The second spear died in a fiery explosion, then another lance went down. Two other lances caught one of the small schooners as it approached at an ill-advised angle, and Catarina was soon down another ship herself, although the crew had escaped in a pair of escape pods, which came soaring toward Void Queen for a rescue. The battle cruiser swung around to catch them with her nets, while at the same time firing Mark-IVs from the port-side tubes.
The harvester plowed through the minefield dropped by the navy destroyers. A few explosions splattered like bursting blisters on its hull, but with little apparent damage. The enemy fired a massive barrage that chased off a pair of harassing corvettes, then turned its attention on the two cruisers, which were hammering away, but unable to break through the combination of burst-countermeasures and a thick, impenetrable hide.
What a monster. Could anything stop it?
Longshanks and his star wolves attacked the harvester. Unlike the cruisers, happy to stay at arm’s length, or the corvettes and destroyers, which had danced in and out of the fight, the Scandian warships showed little fear. Some twenty ships charged, fired guns, and fell back in waves, while the three biggest Scandian warships—Bloodaxe, Thor’s Hammer, and Pestilence—approached from below, then rolled into position to target the enemy ship’s underbelly with sustained fire.
The harvester brushed off the initial attacks as it continued firing on Repulse and Fierce, but the attack from beneath was too savage to ignore. It turned and hit Pestilence with its paralyzing beam. The other two forced their way in and struck at the eye. It exploded, a small victory that must have had the Scandians cheering.
Too late for Pestilence, though. Before it could get away, the harvester ship cast aside the shattered pieces of Herald and seized the star wolf in its jaws. The arms moved, and Catarina imagined drones dropping into Pestilence by the dozens. Murdering, taking prisoners for the harvester’s larder.
The star wolf flared its engines in an attempt to break away, and a pair of smaller deck guns kept firing at the harvester, which held it in place.
“Them Vikings are putting up a fight,” Capp said. “Maybe they’ll get inside the ship, and then we’ll see.”
Seconds later, the star wolf’s deck guns fell silent, and within a minute Pestilence’s engine died, too. The arms moved about, tearing deeper, until it was casting aside bits of wreckage.
Even while destroying Pestilence, the harvester had kept firing at the star wolves attacking from all sides, and these attacks had inflicted damage. Two marauder captains lost their nerve as their ships came under fire, and fled. A third attempted to flee, as well, but enemy missiles chased it down and left it a gutted wreck.
The result of the star wolf charge was disappointing, as the harvester had yet to suffer significant damage by the time it broke free of the Scandians. The ferocity of the assault did, however, delay the enemy battleship from attacking Repulse and Fierce, and most likely saved them from a similar fate as had befallen Pestilence and Herald.
And the delay gave Void Queen a chance to finish off the hunter-killer packs as the entire battle drifted forward toward the harvester. Orient Tiger and Pussycat fell back from the vanguard to tear apart one of the last two lances, while Catarina caught the other and mauled it with her cannon. Schooners sniped from the sides, and sloops threw their serpentines into the mix. Both enemy ships broke apart within seconds of each other.
By the time Catarina forced Void Queen through the shattered wreckage of the Apex assault, she’d destroyed eight lances and spears and sent the last two wounded ships back to huddle next to the harvester. It had cost her a schooner, a pair of star wolves, and a destroyer, but most of her fleet remained intact, while she’d shorn the enemy flagship of its protective shield.
The harvester gave Void Queen its full attention as Catarina ordered a charge. One Apex harvester against fifty-one Albion, Singaporean, Hroom, and Scandian warships.
The odds looked about even.
#
Tolvern was in no condition to fight the harvester ship breaking its tether above Persia. An allied fleet that had numbered thirty-one warships just a few days earlier was down to twenty-one vessels, and all the ships, Blackbeard included, had suffered damage to shields, engines, and weapon systems. She only had eight falcons left in her striker wing, and if she didn’t pull them out of there, she might lose them all.
The officers on the bridge and throughout the fleet were crying for her to fall back, to flee for the jump point and get the devil out of Persia and pray that the enemy didn’t follow them through the jump into Nebuchadnezzar.
“Not yet,” she said grimly. “We have to get Stratsky through. He has to take out that elevator before any more harvesters get up.”
Meanwhile, the first harvester was bearing down on them. The green eye swept back and forth, looking for a target in range, while the ship threw missiles and explosive shot ahead from numerous batteries across its broad back.
Stratsky and the other falcons had reentered the battle after Tolvern gave her orders. They exchanged shots with a pair of lances, keeping a low profile until the harvester was past, when they’d have a clear path to the orbital fortress. The torpedo boats returned to join the falcons, and the whole formation looked ready to crumble as a third lance entered the fray.
“Clyde, minimize our profile,” Tolvern said. “Oglethorpe, Bayard, it’s all on your countermeasures. We’ve got to absorb a blow or two, so you’d better find a way to lessen the impact. Manx, open a channel to the fleet—I need to give orders. But not a word about Stratsky—Apex might be listening.”
“Aye, Captain.”
The mood turned to grim determination as they took in the monstrous ship bearing down on them. The enemy battleships weren’t built to a standard appearance, and each harvester had a unique profile. This one had the flattened appearance of a giant manta ray covered in wartlike protrusions—the harvester’s larder. Three grasping appendages out front for hauling in new victims. A lance flanked the ship like a remora, waiting for scraps.
“It’s going after the boats,” Manx warned.
Tolvern held her breath as the harvester veered toward the torpedo boats and the falcons, sure that the gig was up, their secret exposed. It would tear through the boats and falcons, and that would be it. But this was just a feint, an attempt to scatter the small force, as the Albion ships were getting the upper hand on the damaged lances. Stratsky and the rest of the pilots and boat commanders held their nerve, and the harvester resumed its flight toward Blackbeard.
“They bought it,” Manx said. “Lucky us.”
Tolvern took advantage of the brief respite to reposition Triumph and Champion to absorb more punishment from the oncoming harvester. Farming out some of the pain was the only way for Blackbeard to survive the encounter. Explosive shot slammed into all three ships, who fought off some of it with countermeasures and evasive maneuvers. A fresh wave of missiles rained down on the enemy from behind, while the destroyers, corvettes, and sloops pushed forward to join the battle.
Nothing slowed the harvester. Its eye searched for a target and finally caught a sloop, whose serpentine batteries fell silent. The harvester targeted it casually, almost disdainfully, with a few side guns, and blasted it to pieces. Then it fixed its sights on a corvette, which had rushed forward in an attempt to save the sloop. Caught in the paralyzing beam, the corvette kept flying in a straight line, raced past the harvester, and plunged into Persia’s atmosphere, where it went down.
Oglethorpe reported the final result. “Explosion detected on the surface. She was going four hundred miles a second when she hit.”
The harvester looked for a new victim, seemingly eager to demolish the destroyers, corvettes, and other ships harassing it from all sides, while Blackbeard, Triumph, and Champion edged backward to draw it farther from the planet and orbital fortress. Tolvern got her two cruiser captains on the line.
“No more running. Maneuver into position to fire your main batteries and await my orders.”
Back near the orbital fortress, Tolvern’s torpedo boats and falcons finally got the upper hand in their battle. They destroyed one lance and concentrated fire on the second, which was still fighting back. Three of the falcons slipped quietly from the battle and charged toward the fortress. Two of the lances damaged in the initial fight were lingering nearby, apparently attempting emergency repairs, and belatedly moved to intercept the small striker ships. They wouldn’t reach them in time.
The harvester hurled a few shots backward, and guns started up from the fortress itself.
Still on the com with the two cruiser captains, Tolvern gave her orders. “Fire at will.”
Blackbeard rolled backward as her cannons unloaded on the enemy. Triumph and Champion erupted with fire of their own. Explosions ripped into the side of the harvester. This got its attention. Its engine flared, it turned slowly, and it came at the three Albion warships arrayed against it. Torpedoes, missiles, and secondary batteries lashed at the oncoming harvester.
Meanwhile, the orbital fortress was firing on the three charging falcons in earnest, and one of them exploded. Tolvern held her breath, waiting to hear who had died. It wasn’t Stratsky, but one of his companions. The other ship fired missiles and veered away, which left Stratsky alone, trying to slip in under the enemy guns. He was still accelerating, going too fast now to fire his torpedo. His ship aimed straight for the space elevator counterweight.
“There he goes,” Oglethorpe said. “May God have mercy on his soul.”
Incoming fire was penetrating Blackbeard’s countermeasures and slamming into her portside armor, but Tolvern could only stare at the side viewscreen as Stratsky’s ship slammed into the orbital platform and detonated. A massive explosion blanked the sensors, and they could see nothing from that direction. Whatever had happened, whatever the results, it was over now.
“Pull back,” she ordered. “We’re not going to beat this harvester.”
The battle cruiser and the two smaller cruisers fell away, while the rest of the fleet kept in position until the trio could escape. The harvester had been attacking all three cruisers indiscriminately, no doubt intent on taking them all, one after another. As the ships attempted an orderly retreat, it tried to catch the nearest ship—HMS Champion—in its paralyzing ray. The cruiser’s thick armor attenuated the effects, and she began to slip away.
Where the paralyzing beam had failed, however, conventional weapons had more success. The harvester hurled bombs against Champion’s rear armor as she passed. Repeated blows crippled one of the cruiser’s engines, and the harvester overtook it from behind, its three arms reaching out to grab its next meal. While Tolvern and her crew watched in horror, the harvester seized the struggling cruiser and tore through her armor and bulkheads. Screams for help came over the com from Champion’s bridge, with sounds of gunfire and explosions in the background.
Torn between making an attempt to free Champion and preserving what was left of her fleet, Tolvern made the only rational decision.
“All forces retreat. We’ll regroup beyond the moon.”
It was the right call. Distress signals from Champion fell silent minutes later, long before any rescue attempt would have arrived. While the harvester was distracted, feeding on its prey, Tolvern’s ships fought off a few last attempts from lances to pin them in and got clear.
And then the real blow fell. The radiation cleared from around the orbital fortress, and the sensors detected the results of Stratsky’s suicide charge. The explosion had smashed one end of the orbital fortress, and the tether to the surface of the planet had been severed, but the elevator apparatus itself seemed to be intact. The whole operation had grounded the remaining harvesters on Persia only so long as it took Apex to drop new cables.
Despair clutched Tolvern as she gathered the battered remnants of her fleet and fled for the jump point out of Persia. She’d lost a cruiser, two torpedo boats, a sloop of war, a corvette, and three more falcons, including Stratsky’s. In addition, two destroyers had suffered such extensive engine damage that they had to be scuttled, their crews flung across in away pods to other ships before they were abandoned. That left her with a small, heavily damaged fleet of ships.
Behind them, in hot pursuit, came a harvester ship and five lances. Clyde and Oglethorpe shortly determined that the long chase to the jump point would see Tolvern escape into Nebuchadnezzar, but what then? She had no ability to keep the harvester quarantined in Persia. It would jump through roughly two hours after she did, and easily fight its way clear as it escaped in God-knew what direction.
Meanwhile, there were seven more harvester ships on the surface of Persia, built from the blood and treasure of the shattered planet, and they would soon be joining the pair already roaming free in the space lanes. The whole war effort was on the verge of collapse.
Tolvern had gone forty-four hours without sleep, and dragged herself to her quarters, where she pulled off her boots and collapsed into bed. She’d been asleep for some indeterminate amount of time when an urgent call from the bridge woke her. A young, excitable ensign was midway through his report before she realized she was even awake and listening to him.
“Stop,” she said firmly. “Now start over.”
“I said they’re here,” he said. “We’re trapped in Persia, blocked from escape.”
“What do you mean? How are we blocked?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Captain. My God, what do we do now? There’s a fleet of ships between us and the jump point. We can’t get out!”
Chapter Twelve
Catarina’s initial engagement with the harvester in the Xerxes System was indecisive. She’d assigned it almost supernatural powers in her head, ever since hearing of its jailbreak from Persia, and even after destroying the pair of hunter-killer packs escorting it, she’d imagined it to be indestructible, almost godlike in its ability to deliver and absorb punishment.
Yet in the first attacks, the sheer overwhelming firepower of her fleet of fifty-one warships had held it at bay. One of her war junks, pushed forward to soften the harvester’s armor with a concentrated energy beam, took a beating, then an unfortunate shot into the engines, and had to be rescued and escorted to the back of the fleet. After that initial loss, the allied forces fought for more than three hours without losing another ship. Save for needing to preserve ordnance, Catarina could have fought indefinitely.
General Mose Dryz and the task force sent along by McGowan continued to rush to her aid, and if she could hold on for five more hours, she’d welcome considerable firepower to the battle, but McGowan himself was long gone from the system. He’d jumped into Damascus to join Olafsen’s blackfish in searching for Apex escapees. A couple of brief subspace messages gave Catarina hints about their progress. As far as she could piece it together, McGowan’s war junks had discovered two more pods making for jump points that would carry them across the inner frontier toward Old Earth. McGowan split his forces to guard the jump points, while Olafsen hunted down and destroyed the pods.
“Hey, Captain,” Smythe said from the tech console. “What’s the harvester up to now?”
The enemy ship had withdrawn from close-range combat, and seemed content to throw missiles from a distance, a game that Catarina was happy to play. Keep them at arm’s length, keep Longshanks from slipping his leash and pressing the attack, and hold out for the general.
But the enemy ship was doing something with its arms, opening and closing them.
“We must have hit it, Cap’n,” Capp said. “Damaged its arms. No arms, no green eye—maybe them Vikings are right, and we should go in and finish it while we have the chance.”
“That’s not what we’re looking at,” Smythe said insistently. “Something else is going on. Look!”
The tech officer brought the front of the harvester into sharper focus. Small ships were popping out of a mouthlike aperture behind the arms, each about the size of a navy falcon. As the ships emerged, they slid back along the harvester’s hull until they blended in among the bumps and protrusions of the larger ship’s hull. Catarina tried to puzzle it out.
“They’re not escape pods, are they?” she asked. “Like the ones Olafsen and McGowan are hunting?”
“I’m pretty sure we’re looking at short-range fighters, like what we saw at Singapore,” Smythe said.
“I forgot they could do that,” she admitted. “How many are we talking about?”
Smythe consulted with Lomelí. “Fifteen or twenty so far. Hard to say for sure. They’re almost indistinguishable once they get back along the hull, and we didn’t spot them right away.”
“Capp, call Carvalho and tell him to bring in the striker wing.”
“Why we bringing ’em back in now?” Capp said. “That’s our defense.”
“Only to refuel and rearm, then we’ll get them back in the fight.” Catarina studied the screen. “We took out the hunter-killer packs, and we can take these out, too. Any little delay helps.”
The harvester had been firing casually, just enough long-range ordnance to disrupt allied fleet movements, but began to pick up the pace. Soon, the space between the two forces filled with a massive incoming wave of missiles. The enemy ship advanced behind it, with the small fighters still hugging close.
Catarina called Orient Tiger. Da Rosa answered.
“Hey there, old friend. Are you seeing what we’re seeing?”
“Aye, Vargus,” her former first mate responded. “Fighters. It is just the sort of thing my deck guns can handle.” She couldn’t see his toothy grin, but imagined it easily enough from his tone. “Like hunting rogue smugglers back in Peruano.”
“The same smugglers who begged us to take all their silver and their ships, too, only don’t kill them? The stakes are just a little higher than that.”
“Same size ships, same size explosions when you kill them.”
She turned serious. “Don’t get cocky,” she warned. “Stay behind Pussycat—use your guns and Pussycat’s armor. I’ll get my falcons back up, and they’ll come around to help.”
The two pirate frigates maneuvered into position while she called Longshanks and Knutesen. The Scandians were guarded, perhaps thinking she was going to hold them in reserve for mop-up duty. She had something else in mind, and the two men shouted their approval when she shared her battle plans.
Catarina still believed that what the enemy really wanted was to get its claws on Void Queen. Next to Dreadnought herself, Catarina’s battle cruiser had more experience and success against Apex harvesters than any other human or Hroom ship. She’d fought successfully at Odense, had destroyed a harvester in Zoroaster, and had already knocked this one’s escorting hunter-killer packs out of the fight. The princess or queen commander inside would be ravenous for Catarina’s flesh and eager to feed Void Queen’s crew to her lieutenants.
And so Catarina retreated into the protective embrace of her fleet as the enemy approached. Repulse and Fierce fired torpedoes, then fell back to guard Void Queen. Other ships in the fleet stayed clear, while firing to slow the enemy’s approach.
As expected, the fighter craft peeled off from the harvester and leaped ahead to force Void Queen to respond. Orient Tiger and Pussycat cut short their advance. At the same time, twenty-one star wolves peeled away from the fleet and sliced between the advancing enemy fighters and their mother ship, where they came under immediate attack from the harvester. Pummel guns exchanged fire with missiles and kinetic shot. Catarina’s three missile frigates hurled explosives onto the battlefield to support the wolves.
Catarina waited until the harvester slowed to fight the Scandians, then ordered Void Queen, Repulse, and Fierce to come about and mount a swift counterattack. The gunnery swatted away several fighters that had broken past the pirate frigates, opening enough space for Carvalho to relaunch his falcons, now rearmed and refueled.
Catarina had successfully surrounded the enemy ship by luring it into their midst with a fake retreat. Missiles and torpedoes and pummel guns slammed it from every side. War junks and sloops of war added firepower to the attack.
“Time to finish the job,” she said. “Capp, where are the nukes?”
“Two on Void Queen, one in a Mark-IV and the other in a Hunter-II. One each on Repulse and Dart. Mark-IVs. Don’t do us no good until we break through the tyrillium, though.”
“Then it’s up to the fleet to open some holes.” Catarina called the gunnery. “How you holding up down there?”
“All good,” Barker said in his scratchy grumble. “Guns on carriages, targeting computers getting through the enemy baffles.”
“Load the nukes in the number four and five tubes.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“And ready the main battery. We need to soften up that armor first.”
Void Queen and the two smaller cruisers muscled in past the smaller navy ships. They arrived just in time to relieve Longshanks, who was taking a beating. A pair of wolves had already fled the battlefield with armor shredded, making for deep space.
Two more wolves had broken through the harvester’s defenses and taken position a few miles below the enemy ship, where they concentrated fire on the hull. One of these, Snakebite, got a little too close, and a harpoon shot out and impaled the ship. It struggled to free itself, while its companion, a smaller wolf named Venom, rushed in to free it. Another harpoon shot out and impaled Venom in turn.
The harvester was fighting dozens of enemies, but seemed almost casual as it hauled in the harpooned star wolves, which fought and struggled to get free, but with no success. One ship after another disappeared into the biting arms, while Longshanks charged and retreated, furiously trying to mount a rescue operation. The harvester cast aside the wreckage of the two ships and looked about for new victims.
The once-mighty Scandian fleet of twenty-three star wolves had lost six ships in total, and only the arrival of the three big Albion warships absorbed enough of the enemy’s attention to allow Longshanks to withdraw to a safer distance.
Catarina sent in her remaining torpedo boats, supported by Hroom sloops. The harvester fired missiles and twisting bombs in what was almost a casual attempt to knock them out while concentrating its firepower on the star wolves.
A torpedo boat exploded before it could drop its load. A sloop took a blow on the weak part of its armor, then detonated as shot penetrated the ship’s armory. The resulting debris struck one of the other sloops, which sent it careening away. Two more sloops fell back, damaged, before they could close.
The final four torpedo boats dropped their Mark-IVs, and what was left of the sortie retreated under heavy fire. Two of the torpedoes got through, and smashed one after another into a segment of armor behind the enemy ship’s bridge. Several of the bulbous protuberances burst like blisters, spilling their contents into the void.
“Full broadside,” Catarina ordered Barker. The ship rocked as the cannon fired.
The shot struck the enemy another blow behind the bridge. More of the bulbous sections burst. Gasses flamed into space for several seconds before ceasing.
“There goes their bloody larder,” Capp said.
The words were grim. Everyone knew that hundreds of Persians had been frozen in stasis in those chambers, carried off to be devoured at a later date.
“That got their attention,” Smythe said. “It’s coming about again.”
Void Queen, Repulse, and Fierce had taken up position above the harvester, and were taking limited incoming fire while the harvester used the bulk of its weaponry against the Scandians. Now it rolled and sent missiles and energy pulses toward them.
Catarina called the other two cruisers and ordered them to target the harvester’s damaged armor with everything they had. That was code for Repulse to fire her nuclear torpedo. Catarina called the four remaining corvettes and destroyers, and gave them the same order. That was a similar message for Dart. The two corvettes and two destroyers had come in with the war junks to reinforce Longshanks’s faltering attack, but now charged to mount a direct assault.
The cruisers and corvette-destroyer force dropped thirteen torpedoes between them.
“Fire Mark-IVs,” Catarina said. She hesitated. “But not the nukes.”
Void Queen fired three torpedoes of her own—conventional only—to chase the other thirteen and further confuse the battlefield.
Catarina held her breath as they accelerated toward the enemy ship. Countermeasures burst from the side of the harvester and exploded. Torpedoes faltered, spun out of control, or detonated prematurely. A torpedo got through and slammed into the side of the ship and exploded. Not a nuke.
Another torpedo got through and struck the same spot. Again, not what she needed. A final torpedo penetrated the screen. Again, nothing. In all, only three of the sixteen hit their target, and all three carried conventional explosives.
“King’s balls,” Capp said. “It’s like the bloody universe hates us.”
Catarina let out her breath and released her grip on her seat. “Capp, confirm that Dart and Repulse fired their nukes.”
“Aye, Cap’n,” Capp said a minute later. “They been used up.”
Meanwhile, the harvester had picked up the pace, and was plowing through the rest of her fleet as it resumed its move toward the jump point that would carry it out of Xerxes. Catarina was so bloodied by the encounter that she didn’t see how she could stop it.
“Three hours until reinforcements arrive,” Smythe said.
“And the jump point?” Catarina directed this to her pilot.
Nyb Pim came back with an answer moments later. “The enemy reaches it in five.”
“If we wait for reinforcements, we’ll have two hours to bring it down before it escapes. No way that happens. We’ve got to slow it down and buy more time.”
Catarina rose from her seat and paced the bridge as Capp called Repulse and Dart with orders to get out ahead of the enemy. That was a stopgap, but it wouldn’t hold Apex for long.
And why should it? Everything she’d tried so far had failed. The harvester absorbed blow after blow, and Catarina had spent two of her four nuclear torpedoes and lost numerous ships as the enemy mauled her fleet with every encounter. Already, sustained fire was forcing Fierce to retreat, and her destroyers and corvettes had fallen back to rejoin Longshanks, where they gained a brief reprieve.
“It’s got to be the nukes or nothing.” She called Orient Tiger. “Da Rosa, get around and help Longshanks. Take Pussycat and the schooners with you. I need those guns off me so I can get inside their countermeasures.”
“Consider it done, Vargus.”
At least the enemy fighter threat had nearly been eliminated. That gave Catarina breathing room to the rear, so she ordered the missile frigates to approach the battlefield, where they could get more ordnance through the enemy countermeasures.
Void Queen fired another broadside, followed by two powerful blows struck by her companion cruisers. The cruisers were taking heavier fire now, especially Void Queen, fighting off explosive shot, concentrated energy fire, and a steady hail of small missiles.
“Warning,” Jane said. “Shield number two at twenty-four percent. Shield number one at fifty-four percent. Shield number six . . .”
As the litany continued, more worrying news came in from several ships in the fleet. Between this battle and the fight in Zoroaster, they’d expended vast quantities of missiles, cannon shot, and torpedoes. Forget carrying the fight all the way to Persia; they were running dangerously low on the armaments needed to finish this battle here.
“By my calculations,” Smythe said, “we’re inside the primary ring of enemy countermeasures.”
“Make sure. Get us closer.” Catarina returned to her console to check on the shields. Number two had dropped to sixteen percent. “Roll us over first. We can’t take any more hits on the upper port shields.”
The Scandians renewed their attack from the opposite side with such ferocity that the harvester once again turned its attention in that direction. And not a moment too soon, as Fierce was falling back, shields in tatters, weakening Catarina’s flank.
The two pirate frigates had hung back, waiting for an opening. Now, accompanied by the remaining mercenary schooners and a handful of sloops, they peeled away from their position of relative safety above the battle cruiser and flew in front of the harvester, as if trying to reinforce the Scandians on the far side.
The harvester spotted them. It sent out a hail of missiles, which blasted a schooner apart and crippled a sloop. It fired at the two pirate frigates, but without enough strength to bring them down in time. They were about to slip past.
“Capp, get the gunnery. Fire both nukes on my mark.”
Even as the words came out of her mouth, a harpoon shot out of the harvester’s prow and snared Orient Tiger. Catarina watched in horror as it dragged her former ship in.
“Vargus!” Da Rosa screamed over the com. “They’ve got us. Help me, for God’s sake!”
The arms opened to embrace the pirate frigate. Pussycat pulled up and fired desperately at the arms to free her companion, but then a second harpoon fired out, and only a quick maneuver kept Pussycat from being hooked as well. The arms crunched down on Orient Tiger.
“They’re on the ship!” Da Rosa cried. “Taking prisoners. Here they come.” Screams and birdlike shrieks.
“Cap’n, what do I do?” Capp said desperately. “Them nukes is ready. Barker wants go or no go. Cap’n!”
Catarina steeled herself. “Fire!”
The nuclear-tipped torpedoes launched from the side of Void Queen, together with four conventional torpedoes. Their engines ignited, and they raced toward the enemy ship. Catarina watched, hoping that the buzzards were too occupied with devouring their meal and fighting off the assault from the allied forces on the opposite side to notice the incoming torpedoes.
No such luck. Countermeasures flared once more. A torpedo detonated, then a second. Four more closed on the enemy ship and broke through the last defenses. She held her breath. Had the nukes survived the countermeasures?
Four torpedoes slammed into the enemy battleship. Two bright nuclear flashes blanked the screen. The officers on the bridge cheered, except for Catarina. All she could think about was Orient Tiger, Da Rosa, and the rest of her former crew.
And even before the sensors cleared, she knew that the harvester had survived, because incoming fire kept hitting Void Queen, hitting Fierce, and striking at the Scandians.
But when they finally got the harvester back on the screen, her hopes lifted. Two massive black scars gouged the armor behind the enemy bridge, where earlier fire had torn through the protective tyrillium. The weapon systems on that side of the ship had melted to slag, and the grasping arms were broken and dangling.
The wreckage of Orient Tiger drifted clear, a blackened, gutted, radioactive wreck. Catarina stared, her throat tight.
“Poor bastards,” Capp said. “May God have mercy on their souls.” She glanced at Catarina. “You did what you needed to, Cap’n. Saved ’em from worse.”
Catarina didn’t have an answer for that, and no time to grieve, either. She ordered Longshanks to pull out of range before he suffered more losses, and fell back with Repulse to draw fire from the battered HMS Fierce. The enemy ship stopped attacking, apparently needing to lick its own wounds for a spell.
A video message came through from the relief forces, which had continued charging toward the fight and were beginning a deceleration to combat speed.
It was General Mose Dryz, supreme commander of the Hroom military forces. He stared through the viewscreen with his large, liquid eyes, his features drawn and haughty in appearance.
“Greetings, Catarina Vargus. With the departure of Captain McGowan, I have been left in charge of the remaining allied forces. Congratulations, you have slowed the harvester ship and, I have been told, disabled its warp point engine. It is now trapped in the Xerxes System.
“Your forces have fought with great bravery and suffered terrible losses. I beg you to stand down until we arrive with reinforcements, and together we will finish what you have so nobly begun.”
#
The general’s assessment was soon confirmed as the harvester ship slowed and veered away from the jump point and toward a gas giant, as if hoping to hide in its thick atmosphere. The gas giant was ten hours away, Nyb Pim informed the captain, and there would be plenty of time to catch the enemy before it arrived.
Catarina had been on her feet for several hours, and she staggered to her seat in relief.
“Pull back, disengage. We’ll follow from a distance.”
The relief force joined them about ninety minutes later. Even without McGowan’s cruisers and corvettes, it was still a powerful addition to her fleet, which had lost fourteen warships in crippling the harvester. Mose Dryz brought nearly thirty ships to the fight, mostly sloops and destroyers, and Catarina kept them as a unified force, while she gathered her own ships together with the Scandians into a second.
Together, the two fleets took turns charging and retreating as they harried the harvester, absorbing as few blows as possible in return. The enemy ship finally turned around to face them head-on, and here the missiles and torpedoes from the combined fleet began to overwhelm its defenses.
Mose Dryz lost a pair of sloops and a destroyer, and Catarina lost one more star wolf, an already damaged ship that she’d ordered to stay out of the fight with the other crippled warships, but whose marauder captain hadn’t obeyed.
It took two more hours of combat, but the enemy weapons fell silent one by one. Finally, the harvester was nothing but a wreck, bleeding gasses from a hundred wounds. Longshanks wanted to send in raiders to be sure, but Catarina thought that was insane.
Instead, she set her war junks to melting holes through the armor until they could find no more air pockets to release into the void, then allowed Longshanks and his boys to enter the ship.
To the Scandians’ disappointment, they found no living enemies on board. It had come at great cost, but their victory was complete.
Chapter Thirteen
Tolvern returned to the bridge of Blackbeard to find the other officers dragging themselves in, as she’d left a skeleton crew in command so the rest could sleep. Oglethorpe gestured impatiently for an ensign to move out of his position at the tech console. Clyde eased into his seat with a groan.
The harvester was still pursuing them from Persia, joined by several lances. The lances were damaged and few in number, and didn’t concern her, but the harvester was more than she could handle. Not with the remnants of her fleet, battered after so many encounters with the enemy.
Memories from the most recent battle hung over her like a bad dream. Chief among them was the image of Stratsky making a suicide charge with his atomic payload.
You did that. You authorized that mission and sent Stratsky in to die.
Tolvern had had no choice. It was the only way to get through with a nuclear torpedo, her one hope of bringing down the space elevator. But it had failed. The elevator was damaged, but not destroyed, and more harvesters would soon rise into orbit.
Even more harrowing was the memory of HMS Champion caught in the jaws of the harvester while screams for help came over the com. Tolvern had made the call to abandon Champion and her crew to their fate. Again, what else could she have done?
Tolvern had lost so many warships in the battle that to attempt to free the cruiser would have been futile, would have led to the deaths of hundreds more men and women. She’d used Champion’s death as a distraction to make her escape.
Only now, waiting for information about the new ships reported by the excitable young ensign, she worried that it would all amount to nothing. She’d be caught and killed anyway, long before she could escape the death trap known as the Persia System.
Manx entered the bridge carrying two huge mugs of steaming tea, one of which he gave to Tolvern, who took it gratefully.
“Thought you could use some waking up, Captain.”
“Thanks, it’s a start.”
“I’m afraid this will wake you up more,” Oglethorpe said from the tech console.
He cleared the viewscreen of the harvester, and showed a number of shadowy forms approaching from the outer rim of the system.
“They’re still cloaked,” Tolvern said. “What are we looking at?”
“Can’t see what they are, sir, not unless we stop the junks and let them spread their wings.” Oglethorpe paused. “But I count twenty ships, sir.”
Tolvern licked her lips. Twenty. The math was almost too simple.
“Four hunter-killer packs, is that what you’re saying?”
“Sixteen smaller ships and four larger ones. It matches. Sixteen lances and four spears.”
Four hunter-killers, blast it. One pack she could sweep through with no problem. Two, probably. Three would force her to slow and fight. Four hunter-killer packs was a match for her weakened fleet. And while she fought them, the harvester would close and finish matters.
“How long have we got?” This question was directed to Clyde, the pilot.
“About an hour.”
Tolvern cursed.
“And the harvester is only ninety-eight minutes behind us,” he added.
“An hour and a half to defeat the hunter-killers, and then we fight the harvester, too.” She turned to her first mate. “Manx, I want a strategy for dropping a minefield.”
“To slow the harvester, sir?”
“We need to buy some time. Even an hour would help, two is better.” She took a deep breath. “Get with the gunnery, and run the numbers with the rest of the fleet. The destroyers should still have a fair number of mines. I’m giving you half an hour to start the drop.”
Manx’s expression was dark as he moved to obey, and Tolvern didn’t attempt to cheer him. No sense pretending—this wasn’t much of a chance. But they had to try to survive, and if not, to sell their lives dearly.
She kept thinking aloud. “There are no other jump points into Persia, so we’ll have to get through the hunter-killers somehow.”
“If we had some star wolves, we could do one of their decoy runs,” Oglethorpe said. “See if we could lure the buzzards away from the jump point.”
“The enemy wouldn’t bite anyway. There’s nowhere else we can run, so no feints and decoys are likely to work.” Another glance at the screen. “Makes me wonder why they’re not simply guarding the jump point.”
Manx looked up from his work. “Could be navy forces are on the other side and chased them through.”
Tolvern cheered slightly. That was a possibility she hadn’t considered.
Lieutenant Manx was on top of his work. Twenty minutes later the two remaining destroyers joined with a corvette and began dropping mines. They were Youd mines, capable of tracking enemies, so the harvester would be forced to either maneuver around or plow through and take damage.
“Well done,” she told Manx. “One way or another, that should help. Keep them coming.”
Oglethorpe called over. “Communication coming through on navy channels. From outside our fleet.”
“Send it through to my console. I’ll read it in a minute.”
“Not a subspace, sir, a video call. It’s coming from within the system.”
Tolvern shot to her feet. “Put it up.”
A heavyset man with an ill-fitting uniform filled the screen. He had meaty jowls and heavy bags under his eyes. Harold Broderick, Captain of HMS Sledge, and the second-highest ranking officer in the Albion fleet.
“My God, am I glad to see you,” she said. “Is that you that scared the spit out of us just now? Please tell me it is, and there’s not four hunter-killer packs bearing down on us.”
There was a delay as the transmission crossed the distance between them and came back.
“As a matter of fact, it is. Let me give you an ironic salute for your bravery.” He lifted his stump where he’d lost his right hand and saluted. “I still owe the buzzards for that one. Today looks like a good time for payback, don’t you think?”
She started to give her answer, but stopped when she realized he wasn’t finished.
“Sorry about scaring you just now, but I was pretty sure the enemy hadn’t detected us yet, and I wanted to keep my cloaks up until the last possible minute. When I saw you dropping mines, I guessed that you’d spotted us and thought I’d better save you the ordnance. Youds can be helpful in many situations.”
“My God, the mines,” she said to Manx. “Put a stop to that.”
“Already done, sir.”
To Broderick, she said, “Can you blame me? You’ve got twenty ships there. It’s a nice round number.”
“Understood. I’ve got a strategy, but since feathered ears are listening, let me just tell you to think about the numbers some more. Can you see what I’m bringing to the fight, or are you just seeing shadows?”
“Mostly shadows.”
“Good, then hopefully that’s all the enemy sees, too.” Broderick raised his eyebrows. “I haven’t enjoyed a real fight since I returned from Fort Alliance—I’m looking forward to plucking a few turkeys. Call me back when you’ve got it figured out.”
With that cryptic remark, he cut the channel.
Manx threw up his hands. “How are we supposed to figure out a strategy from that?”
“It’s something more than simply turning around and attacking,” she said.
“Twenty more ships will make a big difference.”
“Those four big ones that I thought were spears must be Sledge and three more cruisers,” Oglethorpe said. “The rest are most likely a mix of destroyers and corvettes.”
“Add them to our fleet, and we could probably win a straight-out fight,” Manx said.
“Maybe,” Tolvern said doubtfully, “but he sees we’re battered, and knows about the fight back in Nebuchadnezzar, too. He’s guessing that we’d lose a bunch more ships in a straight-up fight, and he’d be right.”
“What was the comment about numbers, anyway?” Manx asked.
“What was Broderick’s fleet strength? Get me that, will you.”
Manx typed on his console. “Assuming Admiral Drake didn’t change up the composition of Broderick’s force—always a possibility—we’re looking at eight cruisers, fourteen destroyers, and seven corvettes.”
“Right,” she said, remembering now. “It was a fast attack task force. For hunting rogue Apex ships as it crossed the inner frontier, then using Sledge and the rest to smash into battle as reinforcements.”
“That’s what he set out with,” Manx added. “No idea that’s what he’s left with. There’s been a lot of fighting out there, and Drake sent people to track down the harvester that made the jailbreak from Persia.”
“Except that Broderick made a point of saying he hadn’t had a good fight since his repair and resupply in the Fort Alliance yards,” Tolvern said, growing excited as it started to come together. “Are you sure about those scans, Oglethorpe?”
“Aye, Captain. Twenty ships. Four big ones, sixteen smaller ships.”
“Four cruisers here,” she said, “which means there are four cruisers back in Nebuchadnezzar, together with—what would it be?—five destroyers and corvettes left behind, too?”
Manx looked excited. “He said ‘Youds can be helpful in many situations.’”
“Which means his reserve force is laying down a minefield,” Tolvern said. “Youds. They’ll get our signal when we jump through, know we’re friendlies, and then slam into the harvester as it comes in after us.”
“Except that Broderick is continuing on his present course,” Oglethorpe said. “He’s not turning around to jump through. He’s going to go right past us and right past the harvester, too.”
“That’s because he wants to come in behind. The Youds won’t destroy that monster—not enough explosive power for that—so we’ll need to pin the enemy against the jump point before it make another jailbreak.”
It was still chancy, but Tolvern liked her odds a lot better. The force bearing down on them was a fleet of friendlies, not four hunter-killer packs bent on extermination, and there were more friendlies on the other side of the jump.
Tolvern carefully worded her response before she called Broderick back. Again, she had to operate with the assumption that Apex would be listening and formulating their own battle plans.
“Sorry for snapping at you a little bit earlier, sir. As you can imagine, I was on edge. You made the right call, though, dropping radio silence so I wouldn’t waste any more mines. They were Youds, and I’d just as soon hold on to them for the next time I return to the Persia System.”
The last part contained redundant information, and hopefully Broderick would pick up on it. There was less of a delay now, and his answer returned shortly, accompanied by a bit of a smile.
“Yes, it’s not like they grow on trees. Glad I could save the trouble. I’m going to pull around now to guard your escape. With any luck, that ugly thing will stay in Persia. Looks like you could use some patching up before your next fight.”
Misdirection from Broderick, now, since that wasn’t their intention at all. Tolvern studied the viewscreen as the call ended. He’d begun to swing his fleet wide so as not to tangle with the harvester. Bayard joined in from the defense grid computer to help Clyde calculate courses and determine how much of a delay Tolvern would face on the other side of the jump between when the harvester came through and when Broderick joined from behind.
The harvester reached the mines that Tolvern had stopped dropping when the call came from Sledge. She’d been wondering if it would try to maneuver around or plow straight through. There weren’t many, so she guessed it would take the hits instead of delaying.
If so, the encounter would give a good indication of the effectiveness of Youd mines. If, after it had passed through, Oglethorpe could detect damage to the enemy hull, he could calculate the likely effects of a full minefield on the other side of the jump, and they’d know how much of a fight would be left in the harvester.
So even though her original intention had been to slow the harvester, Tolvern wasn’t happy to see it swing wide to avoid the mines. Even more surprisingly, it shortly increased the angle of its deviation from course, looking first like it would try to cut off Broderick’s force streaking by a few hundred thousand miles away, and then slicing up on the Z-axis to avoid his fast attack fleet altogether.
“I don’t believe it,” she said when she could no longer deny the obvious. “It’s giving up the fight. It’s running back to Persia.”
Broderick called back about twenty minutes later. His face was flushed, and he spoke with uncharacteristic enthusiasm.
“Slow your fleet, let me catch up. We’ll go through together.”
About an hour later, when his fleet had rejoined hers, he pulled Sledge right up next to Blackbeard and called when the likelihood of intercepted communication was low. She took the call alone in the war room, putting him up on the screen over the table.
“Thank God,” he said. “That was a close call.”
“Yes. Yes, it was.”
“You sound glum, Tolvern.”
“The enemy figured us out before we could spring the trap. I thought we’d finish it off on the other side.”
“Or be finished off ourselves. Even with the trap, that was a distinct possibility.” His eyes narrowed. “You do realize that without my arrival, you were most likely dead, all of you. Possibly captured and eaten, for that matter.”
“I know,” she said, feeling like an ingrate. “I’m incredibly grateful—we all are. It’s just that . . . well, I’ve suffered two bad losses—you can see the state of my fleet—and I could have used a win. Also, we made a bad discovery in the Persia raid.”
“About that. I’m curious what you were hoping to accomplish, what you discovered.” He glanced to one side. “We’re close enough, and I’ve installed one of the new Singaporean jammers. I think we’re safe to talk.”
Tolvern first briefed him on the battle in Nebuchadnezzar, where she’d fought hard, inflicted plenty of damage, but lost several ships and failed to prevent a jailbreak. A harvester had broken quarantine and fled for safety.
“Don’t worry, Vargus and McGowan have plenty of firepower to bring it down. By now, it will have been destroyed.”
“It was still my loss.”
“Understood. But yours was a desperate stopgap until reinforcements arrived. I’ll review your logs, but based on your past service record, I’m sure it will show that you fought well with what ships you had available.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And so, assuming that the enemy had expended a good deal of its resources in the breakout attempt, you thought to mount a raid on their base. Is that right?”
She nodded. Broderick was a shrewd tactician.
“Tell me what happened.”
She explained how when she’d arrived at Persia she thought she could trap any harvesters on the surface by destroying the space elevator. Maybe she could have. . . if she’d managed to pull it off. Instead, she’d only inflicted temporary damage while failing to keep another harvester from rising to join the battle. That was the ship now returning to Persia.
“Champion was taken in, the crew presumably captured,” she said. “We lost a corvette, too. HMS Race.”
“Good ships, good crews.”
“Yes, sir. Plus boats, sloops . . . you can see.”
“And enemy losses?”
“We destroyed a bunch of lances and spears.” Tolvern shrugged. “Not enough.”
“You survived, you inflicted damage. You turned back the harvester before it broke out of Persia.”
She wanted to point out that no, it was Broderick’s arriving fleet that turned it back. But he was right, to a certain extent. She didn’t see errors in her command decisions, so much as losses suffered against a superior opponent.
“You fought two engagements, Tolvern, and the way I see it, they were both tactical victories.”
“That’s a generous assessment, sir.”
“Assuming Vargus and McGowan have done their jobs, the enemy remains bottled up in Persia thanks to you. There are more harvesters in construction on the planet, but we don’t know how many will be ready to fight in time. Meanwhile, Drake is only a few days out from Nebuchadnezzar, McGowan and Vargus have fleets of their own, and my forces are intact.”
He gave a confident nod. “We’re ready to take the fight to the enemy and finish them off once and for all. HMS Blackbeard and her captain and crew will be an integral part of that fight.”
Chapter Fourteen
Nine days later, Tolvern stood in front of the viewscreen with her hands behind her back, staring as HMS Dreadnought arrived at the front after an absence of several months. The battleship looked like a monster of the deep—a hunter, a predator—surrounded by other long, lethal shapes that gathered like swarming fish hoping to collect scraps.
A massive fleet accompanied Admiral Drake’s flagship, including three Punisher-class and three Aggressor-class cruisers. Five swift, powerful corvettes. Six sloops of war and a handful of star wolves to reinforce the Hroom and Scandian forces already gathered. A pair of war junks. Eleven torpedo boats and three missile frigates. And a whopping nineteen destroyers.
Drake had firepower from distance and close range. He had fast-attack capabilities. And then there was HMS Dreadnought herself, a battleship that had once been the flagship of that old traitor, Admiral Malthorne, and a symbol of vainglorious ambitions. Blackbeard and Void Queen’s experiences notwithstanding, Dreadnought was only ship in the navy capable of standing up to an Apex harvester ship on its own.
The combined Blackbeard-Sledge fleet sent out a host of small shuttles, frigates, destroyers, and torpedo boats to claim desperately needed supplies from Dreadnought’s massive hold and crammed storage rooms. Dreadnought had arrived at the front without expending any ordnance, and no doubt the crew was happy to empty some of it out so that they could walk the corridors without bumping into it all. And how desperately did Tolvern’s forces need what the battleship was carrying? Tolvern would have said that she was most anxious to get tyrillium scale to repair damaged armor, except that there was one small piece of cargo on board that she was more anxious to get her hands on than anything else.
James. You don’t just want him on your ship, you want him on your bed.
“Might be better to take it over there,” she said in a low voice.
She was standing near the tech console, and Oglethorpe looked up from his work. “Sir?”
Tolvern looked at him, blinking. “Once Vargus, McGowan, Mose Dryz, and Olafsen arrive, we’ll have a war council. Makes sense to take it to Dreadnought, but James—that is, Admiral Drake—might choose another location. Maybe even Blackbeard. We’d better get cleaned up—this ship is a mess.”
“Engineering is asking if we have enough time to strip off the number three shield.”
“Probably not. The number three needs reforging, and we’re certainly not going back to Viborg any time soon. She’ll have to make do with plate repairs.”
“When is the plate coming over?”
Tolvern eyed the screen. “Soon as that logjam clears around Dreadnought. I figure a few hours.”
“The sooner the better,” Oglethorpe said. “Finch needs all the time she can get.”
Tolvern had been watching Dreadnought with a little too much interest, and no doubt the others were thinking of the marriage between the admiral and the one-time Singaporean governor, now a less-than-legitimate match between two of the highest-ranking officers in the fleet. She returned to her console with an air of nonchalance, though inside she was churning with emotions.
Catarina Vargus and Mose Dryz had arrived on the far side of Nebuchadnezzar about twenty hours earlier, and were racing toward the rendezvous near the Persia jump point. McGowan’s ships were popping into Nebuchadnezzar through a separate jump point that led from Euphrates, and he’d already sent word that Olafsen’s small blackfish fleet was with him.
Drake sent a general message. He had scheduled a time for the war council shortly after McGowan and Olafsen arrived. And he had a location for the meeting that, to Tolvern’s surprise, was not Dreadnought. It wasn’t Blackbeard, Void Queen, or any other Albion, Scandian, or Singaporean ship, either.
The meeting would be held on the bridge of General Mose Dryz’s sloop of war.
#
Catarina took a curious look at her surroundings as she climbed out of the away pod and into the Hroom sloop. The walls were smooth around the curved bay, with geometric designs high on the walls that reminded her of the ruined Hroom temples on Peruano or San Pablo, former Hroom planets where she’d spent a good deal of time as a mercenary and pirate. The air was as warm and humid as a tropical port.
Two Hroom guards in flowing robes stood to one side with shock spears clenched in their long hands. They hummed softly to themselves, but made no attempt to greet Catarina or Capp. No sign of the general or the other invitees.
Capp came up next to Catarina and rubbed her hands together.
“I’m gonna feel out of place in there, Cap’n. All them others is captains and the like.”
“You seemed pretty puffed up when you found out you’d been invited.”
“Yeah, but now I ain’t so sure.”
“Scandians will be there. They’re even more uncouth than you are.”
Capp brightened. “Aye, that’s right.”
“And besides, I’m half-pirate myself. I’ll keep you company.”
Capp put her hand over her mouth. “This air’s like breathing soup, ain’t it?”
“I thought this wasn’t your first time on a Hroom ship.”
“Yeah, but I forget after a while. Why them Hroom need to live in a steam room, I can never figure.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” Catarina said. “I always thought the air on a navy ship was too cool and dry.”
“That’s ’cause you’re part Ladino, right? Your people was tropical back on Earth, right?”
Catarina laughed. “My people?”
“We cold-blooded Albion types, on the other hand . . .” Capp rubbed a hand over her scalp, which was already glistening with sweat. “And you ain’t even seen the steam rooms they got.”
A strange, vibrating whistle sounded, a door opened on the outer wall, and another pod slid through an airlock and into the bay. This one was smaller than Catarina’s, and it didn’t have the same ovaloid, functional appearance as the standard Albion away pod. Instead, paintings of Old Earth longboats decorated the surface, together with runes and a horned figure that looked like a god or demon.
“The Vikings have arrived,” Catarina said.
Olafsen and Longshanks stepped out of the capsule. They wrinkled their faces at their first breath of the thick Hroom atmosphere, unclasped their cloaks, and stripped out of their jackets until they stood in linen undershirts that showed their bulging muscles.
The brothers spotted the navy officers and came striding over. Longshanks growled something in Scandian, and Olafsen offered a curt nod.
“It’s a bloody swamp in here,” Olafsen said.
“That’s exactly what I been saying,” Capp said. “And you lot live in the ice and snow, right? So it must be doubly bad for the likes of you.”
“The ice and snow?” Olafsen said with a puzzled expression. “By the gods, why would you think that?”
“You know, Vikings in the far north. Like Greenland and fjords and all that rubbish from Old Earth.”
Olafsen shared this with his brother, who threw back his head and laughed until tears ran from his good eye. Olafsen grinned. Capp harrumphed, crossed her arms, and looked away, muttering about barbarians.
A door opened on the far side of the loading bay, and a tall, almost gaunt figure with flushed purple skin stepped through. In contrast with the mottled green robes of the guards, this Hroom wore a white toga with a sunburst on the chest and an iron circlet around his bald head.
Between the clothing, his regal bearing, and the way the guards stiffened and stopped leaning on their shock spears, Catarina guessed that this was the Hroom general even before she got a good look at him. He made an impressive noble figure as he took long strides toward them.
“Clasp your hands like this,” Capp said, showing the others. “It lets the Hroom know you’re peaceful and all that.”
The general clasped his own hands as he approached. “I apologize for my tardy arrival. I was sharing a welcome meal with my old friend, Jess Tolvern, who arrived before you.” He whistled through his nose slits, sounding pleased. “Captain Broderick has arrived as well. We are only awaiting the arrival of the king of suns.”
“King of suns?” Catarina raised an eyebrow. “You mean Admiral Drake?”
The general hummed deep in his throat. “He is the master of this fleet.”
“I thought the Albion crown was touchy about the use of king and queen.”
“It is not a human term,” Mose Dryz said, “but an old Hroom title, and perhaps does not translate well into your language. Perhaps the master of suns would be better, a warlord who straddles star systems. The one who will bring us a final victory.”
“What about McGowan?” Capp said. “Has that bloke show up yet?”
“Ah, yes. I had almost forgotten about Edward McGowan,” the general said. “He has also arrived for the war council.”
“I can see why you might have forgotten,” Olafsen said, “given that McGowan has yet to see combat.”
Catarina smiled appreciatively, but Capp only grumbled some more.
“We got the king of suns on the one side,” Capp said, “and the prince of piss nozzles on the other side.”
“Remember what you were worried about just now?” Catarina said. “You might keep that in mind before you sit down with Drake, Broderick, and McGowan. They like their deference and protocol.”
“Yeah, right. Sorry, Cap’n.”
“Just saving you another court-martial,” Catarina said.
Olafsen studied Capp. “I like this woman,” he announced. “She would make a good wife.”
“That’s what you think.” Capp jabbed her finger at him. “I ain’t the sort to fetch your beer and make your bed in the morning, you know. Anyhow, I already got me a pirate, see? Carvalho’s twice the man you are.”
“I’ve never met your man,” Olafsen said, “but I am guessing he’s a pretty boy with no scars and not enough muscle.”
“He’s got more muscle than you do, mate. Especially the one muscle that matters.”
Olafsen shared this with his brother, and the two men roared with more laughter, but it was good-natured, and Capp was grinning, too. Maybe not a wife, but Capp would make a good navy liaison to the Scandians, Catarina thought. She wouldn’t take their garbage, and they wouldn’t take hers. She made a mental note to mention the idea to Drake if they ever won this war.
There you go, thinking like an Albion naval officer.
Once this was over, she reminded herself, she was collecting her ships, her people, and her reward, and setting off for the Omega Cluster. Well, those who had survived. Not Orient Tiger. Not Da Rosa and the rest of the poor slaughtered crew of her old pirate frigate.
The general let out an impatient-sounding whistle. “If you are finished with your human banter, I would like to clear you out of the loading bay so that James Drake may dock in peace.”
“Ah, yes, the sun king,” Catarina said dryly. “We wouldn’t want to get in the way of his glorious arrival, would we?”
The general nodded solemnly. “That is precisely my thinking, Catarina Vargus. Follow my guards to the prayer room, if you please.”
#
The prayer room was a strange place for a war council, Catarina thought as she took in her new surroundings. The round room was about fifteen feet across, lit with dim red lights, and contained a stone altar at the center decorated with geometric designs and carved figures of strange beasts. There must be a way of bringing in data if they intended to hold the council here, but there were no visible consoles or viewscreens.
McGowan and Broderick sat on saucer-shaped seats behind the altar. They nodded as the newcomers entered, though McGowan turned away quickly, with no warmth in his expression.
No other seats were visible, and Olafsen looked around.
“Where the blazes are we supposed to—”
He didn’t complete the words before four more saucer-shaped seats rose from the floor at elevations that seemed perfectly tailored for the height of the respective occupants. The seat changed shape to conform to Catarina’s body as she sat, and was surprisingly soft and comfortable, but it left her feeling constrained.
“You know what this feels like?” Catarina said to Capp. “Like a baby cradle. Like my mother has swaddled me in blankets and is standing over me with a warm bottle.”
“We didn’t have nothing like that. My mama had me sleeping in an empty whiskey crate with a bunch of old diapers for blankets.”
“Please tell me they were old, clean diapers, at least.”
“Well, yeah. We was poor, Cap’n, not barbarians.”
Olafsen turned toward them. “My cradle was a shell casing, cut in half, and my blanket was an animal skin. I had a toy in my crib made from my great-grandfather’s skull, filled with dried pig knuckles to make a rattling noise.”
“All right,” McGowan said peevishly from the other side of the room. “That’s enough complaining about whose childhood was the most miserable.”
The marauder captain blinked. “I wasn’t complaining. I was boasting.”
The door swung open, and Mose Dryz and Admiral Drake entered. Catarina and the others climbed to their feet, struggling to get out of the strangely grabby chairs.
There were salutations, with Capp so pleased to see her former captain that she slapped Drake on the back like he was an old drinking buddy. Catarina winced, and McGowan gave a disgusted shake of the head, but the admiral only looked pleased, and slapped Capp back, twice as hard.
“Ow!”
“That’s what you get for striking a superior officer.” Drake grinned. “After all these years, you still haven’t learned your lesson?”
“Ha!”
Mose Dryz looked around the room. “I do not spot Jess Tolvern. Yet I told her specifically to come to the war room. Perhaps she is still in the feasting chamber.”
“Yes, I’m sure she couldn’t tear herself away,” Drake said. “Gobbling down raw snails and those spicy fruit that make flames shoot out your nose—who could resist?”
“I am intrigued!” Olafsen said. “And do the Hroom brew any beverages?”
The door slid open before the general could answer, and Tolvern came staggering in, looking flustered and unkempt.
“Well, then,” McGowan said with a snort, “can we start this meeting now?”
#
Tolvern had been skeptical when Mose Dryz offered her a “feast.” She’d eaten Hroom food before. Some was palatable enough—especially a type of farm-raised crocodilian that tasted vaguely beef-like—but other foods were nasty or bitter, or some other flavor or texture that didn’t agree with the human palate.
But he’d apparently asked her old pilot, Nyb Pim, for advice, and served a variety of Hroom foods that were all tasty, albeit unusual: a dish with a paste-like consistency that reminded her of ground pecans or walnuts, a dish from alien eggs that was almost custard-like in its consistency, although not sweet, and a vegetable that tasted like eating beer in its solid form. There was a beverage that was fluorescent purple and seemed to be either milk of some kind or a juice. She asked, but the general offered that it was better she not know its origins.
No desserts, of course—the aliens had never had sugars before humans introduced them to the Hroom civilization with disastrous results.
When word reached the general that his other guests were arriving, he left her in the feasting chamber with instructions on how to get to the prayer room once she’d finished. She’d already eaten all that she could handle, and moments after he left her, felt an ominous gurgling in her stomach that strongly suggested the imprudence of continuing the feast.
Tolvern set out for the prayer room, but the journey quickly turned into a desperate search for a bathroom. A Hroom crew member seemed to understand her urgent pleas, and pointed her toward what looked like a bathroom, in that there were showers and sinks. But no toilets.
Tolvern had her hand clamped over her belly and was heading back for the door to continue her desperate search, when a Hroom entered, dropped his robe, and stuck his rear end up to the wall. To her astonishment, the wall opened and enveloped his backside.
The Hroom studied her with a curious expression, spoke/hummed/whistled something, and pointed to a blank spot on the wall.
“Oh, please, no. You’ve got to be kidding.”
An urgent abdominal gurgle cured her squeamishness. She dropped her pants and stuck her butt up to the wall.
It was best not to think too hard about what happened next, but the Hroom technology was made to facilitate the process, and didn’t merely wait for it to happen. Her stomach was still unsettled and threatening mutiny, so she sat there with her backside enveloped in the wall as Hroom of both genders came and went.
By the time she hurried into the prayer room twenty minutes later, she was sure the others would have all been kept waiting, but they were still standing, saluting and the like.
James came up to her, and she started to salute her husband awkwardly, but he grabbed her in an embrace, then kissed her hard on the mouth. She responded in kind, but pulled back when McGowan cleared his throat.
“Some of the people in this room might die before this war ends,” James whispered in her ear, “and if I’m one of them, I’m not going down regretting that I didn’t take every chance to kiss my wife while I still had the chance.”
She kissed him again, this time with a promise of more to come. When she pulled away, McGowan was scowling, but Broderick didn’t look perturbed, and neither did anyone else. The Scandians smirked, Capp was all toothy grin, and Catarina winked when Tolvern looked her way.
There was another awkward moment as the rest of them settled onto saucer-like chairs, and Tolvern stood looking around, wondering if she was supposed to stand throughout it all, but then a seat rose to the perfect height. She gave thought to her intestinal fortitude before she sat down. The gurgling had stopped, thank God.
“Now,” Drake said, “we come to it at last.”
His voice held a solemnity, almost a reverence, in keeping with the Hroom prayer room.
“A harvester ship is waiting in Persia,” Drake continued, “and seven more under construction on the surface. There’s an excellent chance that another harvester has already entered orbit—perhaps more than one. I don’t need to tell you what it means if they all get up.”
Murmurs at this. Dark looks, worried expressions.
“We have all of our forces here, gathered and ready to attack,” Drake said. “This is our big chance, our only chance. If we don’t stop the enemy here, if we don’t utterly destroy them, there will be eight harvester ships in orbit. Too many for us, too many to stop them from breaking out of Persia and shattering our fleet in the process.”
A hollow feeling ate at Tolvern’s gut, and this time the sensation couldn’t be attributed to strange Hroom cuisine.
“And if that happens,” Drake said, “all civilized people, humans and Hroom alike, will face certain extermination.”
Chapter Fifteen
A chill trickled down Catarina’s spine as she listened to the admiral’s pronouncement. Horror and fear mixed with a stirring resolve, a righteous anger that rose in her breast. And it was at that moment that she knew she had changed. Somehow, at some point, she had become a part of this.
There was a time when Albion’s wars had seemed distant, abstract. Let them fight, let them win or lose, kill or be killed—she hadn’t cared. She was the queen of the void, on her way to settle her own planet far from the control of the kingdom.
But the word “extermination” brought the hammer down on the last of those feelings, what hadn’t been wiped out by the past year of warfare at the helm of Void Queen. The Scandians had thrown their lot in, the Singaporeans, the Hroom.
Is that why Drake brought you onto the general’s sloop? To show you that even the Hroom are fully committed, so you should be, too?
No, she thought. There was some other reason. Or at least, that wasn’t the only reason.
“I wish we had more time,” Drake continued. “We could send damaged ships to the Viborg yards, or at least complete emergency repairs here, if we had a few weeks, but every moment we delay increases the likelihood of more harvesters reaching orbit. I’m giving you all twenty-four hours to complete repairs, and then we jump into Persia. One ship after another, as fast as we can get them through.”
“Whoever jumps first had better be ready for a fight,” Olafsen said. Longshanks said something that made Olafsen grunt and nod. “Bloodaxe will be the first through, the first to fight.”
“I have no doubt you’d inflict some blows,” Drake said, “but I need you at full strength for what comes next.”
A diplomatic answer, Catarina thought, although the Scandians didn’t look satisfied.
“I gave Captain McGowan certain parameters and asked him to draw up a plan for our jump into Persia,” Drake continued. “He’ll present it now.”
McGowan rose stiffly to his feet, straightened his uniform, and turned to the Hroom general. “You claimed there was a viewscreen in this room, but I see nothing of the kind.”
Catarina fought down her irritation. “Can’t you just tell us? Do you really need visual aids?”
McGowan returned a look of lofty disdain. “There are scores of ships—can you hold all of that in your head?”
She stared back. “Yes, probably.”
“Well, then. Why don’t you come and make the presentation, Vargus?”
“Why not?” Catarina started to her feet. “I’ll put you right in the thick of the action, just as you like it.”
Capp snorted, and Olafsen grinned. Tolvern raised an eyebrow.
“Captains, please,” Drake said. “General, the screen?”
Mose Dryz reached into his robe and pulled out a hand computer the shape of an elongated egg. He stroked a long, slender finger over its surface. The shrine folded into the wall, leaving a smooth surface that suddenly showed a visual representation of the various ships spread out around the jump point.
“Your own computer can now interface with it,” the general told McGowan.
Maybe in theory, but it took McGowan an awkward few minutes until he could get it to work, and he muttered something about needing a good tech officer. When Capp asked if she could help, however, McGowan waved her away.
“Dreadnought goes through first,” he said, “followed by Void Queen and Blackbeard. Then the mercenary frigate Pussycat, followed by the five Scandian blackfish.”
“About time,” Olafsen said, “but I hate to send other men in my place. I’ll be on Bloodaxe—when does she jump?”
“We’re sending across a small force of ships that can take abuse,” McGowan said. “The thickest shields, but not always the biggest guns. Once we have these through, we’ll bring through missile frigates, followed by another force of cruisers. And then we’ll start with your star wolves.”
McGowan continued his presentation until he had all of the ships through. Typically, his own ship, HMS Peerless, came through at the end. It wasn’t a bad strategy to guard the departure jump point, as well as the arrival, and Peerless was probably the strongest ship in the fleet after Dreadnought and the two battle cruisers. Yet surely it was obvious to one and all that McGowan would be the last to jump into danger.
“At that point, we’ll divide into four task forces,” McGowan continued. “The two women—that is, the captains of Void Queen and Blackbeard—will head up one force. Dreadnought will anchor the second. I will lead a third group of ships from the helm of HMS Peerless, together with a powerful collection of warships, including the Scandians.”
“To be held in reserve, naturally,” Tolvern said. Her tone was innocent. “To throw into the fray when and where you’re needed.”
McGowan nodded. “Precisely.”
Olafsen turned to the admiral. “I thought you said you needed us held for a bigger fight. Something like that. By the gods, I don’t want to be held in reserve.”
“Believe me, you’ll be fighting,” Drake said. “If I’m right, and there are multiple harvesters aloft, plenty of Scandians will fight and die.”
“Yes, yes, I like that,” Olafsen said. “Glory to one and all. Someday children will learn of our heroism at their fathers’ knees.”
“If there are any children left to hear the tale,” Catarina said. “Winning the fight is a prerequisite to any tales of blood and glory.”
“You do your part, Vargus, and by the gods, we will do ours. Even if we have to serve under this one.” Olafsen hooked his thumb at McGowan. “Will he do his part? That’s what I want to know.”
McGowan huffed. “Will I do my part? What if you or your friends pull another incident like what happened at Merkur? Slip your leash and attack too early?”
“That will never happen.”
Catarina thought McGowan was onto something. She’d seen the Scandian lack of discipline on multiple occasions.
“Can you guarantee that no ships will run from the battlefield?” she asked. “Like Son of Odin did during the battle for the Odense orbital platform?”
“We’re more disciplined than that now,” the marauder captain said with a thrust of the chin. “You can count on us not to do anything stupid.”
“You’re more disciplined because you’ve been flying under Albion command,” Drake said. “Nobody respects your fighting prowess more than I do, your bravery in battle, and the overall contributions of the Scandian fleet to this war. We can’t win this fight without you, but let my officers do what they do best, and that is command.”
Olafsen consulted with Longshanks. There was passion in the words, but no slamming fists or shouting, which was a good sign.
“I would rather fight under this one,” Olafsen said with a nod in Catarina’s direction. “She’s a woman, it is true, but she’s brave enough, clever enough, and I know she wouldn’t leave us aside or sacrifice us unnecessarily, either.”
“Thanks,” Catarina said. “I think.”
“No,” Drake said. “You will fight under McGowan’s command. When the time comes to call in the reserves, I need your wolves on hand.”
Olafsen grunted and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his stubbly beard. It seemed like acquiescence, although who could be sure?
“What about me?” Broderick asked. “Where is Sledge in this fight?”
McGowan zoomed in on the final task force. “Here, leading a fleet of cruisers, destroyers, and corvettes. A fast attack force to hunt down escapees, to throw into battle when one of the other fleets is about to be overwhelmed.”
“Another reserve force?” Broderick asked, tone doubtful.
“They’re all reserve forces,” Drake said. “Damaging a harvester is one thing, but destroying it another thing entirely. Good ships and crew will die in this fight. The fleets will need to concentrate and disperse as needed.”
Broderick gave a curt nod. “Understood.”
“I brought a handful of nuclear torpedoes,” Drake added, “which I’ll share out. But they’ve been of limited effectiveness so far, and they’re few in number. This battle will be won with conventional firepower, if it’s to be won at all. We’ll need to hit, hit hard, and hit repeatedly.”
“James?” Tolvern said. “Um, sir, I mean. Once Blackbeard and Void Queen form a joint task force, which one of us will be the commanding officer?”
“You are the ranking officer, but Vargus’s ship is in better condition at the moment.” Drake hesitated. “Why don’t you make that decision by consensus? But decide before you leave the ship.” He glanced around. “That is all. Dismissed.”
#
Catarina and Tolvern lifted the hems of their long, drape-like robes as they stepped into the sweating room. A platform jutted from the other side of the room, and a pair of Hroom sat on it with their legs tucked underneath themselves.
Catarina might have felt self-conscious about undressing in front of strangers—Hroom or not—but Tolvern had just shared a hilarious story of sticking her backside into the wall of the ship’s bathroom. She suppressed a laugh at the thought, and began to shrug out of the robe.
“Wait,” Tolvern said, stopping her. “We’re supposed to say a prayer to the god of higher consciousness before we enter.”
“I’m not particularly religious,” Catarina said with a smile. “Baptized in the Albion Church, of course, but it’s been fifteen years since I attended services.”
“Perfect, then you won’t be offended if I pray to a Hroom god.”
“Does this have anything to do with the time you were almost sacrificed to the Hroom god of death?”
“It never hurts to hedge one’s bets. Not to mention offending the religious is often a bad idea.” Tolvern said this last bit with the barest of nods toward the pair of Hroom relaxing in the heat.
Tolvern took a ladle of water from a bucket next to the door and poured it over the brazier of hot coals, which steamed and hissed and sent clouds billowing into the air.
“Take a deep breath,” she instructed.
Catarina obeyed, and Tolvern started the prayer.
“Glorious being of higher thought. With gratitude, we thank thee for the gift of sentience. To be aware, to think and dream. To sense the old gods. To rise above the beasts and partake of the feast of consciousness. To recognize beauty, to feel love, and to share compassion with all living things.”
“That’s not so bad,” Catarina said. “Seems like a god I could get behind.”
“Most Hroom deities are not so warm and fuzzy. And their followers are fanatics. The only good thing that came out of our attack on Soltum is that we broke the power of the priests. Hopefully, those dumb cultists will let the Hroom people breathe and live again. But it was ugly business from beginning to end.”
Tolvern had been speaking lightly, but her tone took a dark turn at the end, and something twisted on her face. A flicker of pain and doubt. Catarina put a hand on the other woman’s arm.
“War is always ugly business, Jess. You did what you had to.”
The women shed the robes and stuck them on hooks before climbing to the opposite end of the platform from the two Hroom, who were meditating or relaxing, or whatever it was they did in this place.
“I’ll be honest,” Catarina said as the two women took their seats, “I don’t much like taking orders, not even from Drake.”
“Starship captains don’t rise to command because they lack confidence in their leadership ability.”
“I suffer an especially bad case of . . . whatever it is,” Catarina admitted, “and it has got me into trouble in the past.”
“How so?”
“For one, if I hadn’t been so blasted ambitious, hadn’t assembled all those ships and colonists, I’d have never been roped into this war in the first place.”
“Whatever brought you into the ranks, you’re good at it. Can you really just leave it all behind?”
“I can and I will. Once this war is over, I’m on my way, and I’m taking my goods with me. I’ve got a planet to settle and a grand duchy to establish.” Catarina hesitated. “You know I respect you, but I don’t want to step into your shadow. We both have experience in this war, and our ships are equal.”
“But I’m a true navy captain,” Tolvern said, “and you’re a recent recruit who just told me she wants to . . . well, jump ship. I should be in charge of our joint fleet.”
“That sounds like McGowan logic to me, only he’d find a way to throw in a lot more insults.”
“He’s a jerk, but he’s not an idiot. In this case, he would be right. Minus the insults, that is. The command should be mine, and Blackbeard the flagship.” Tolvern shrugged. “It should be. But I’m inclined to hand you command.”
“This isn’t about the battles in Nebuchadnezzar and Persia, is it? I read the logs—you made bold strategic decisions, and your fleet fought hard and well.”
“No, it’s not that. My confidence was shaken by so many losses, of course it was, but I’ve had a chance to think it through, and I’m at peace with my decisions.”
“In that case?”
“It’s McGowan.” A half-smile crept over Tolvern’s face.
“McGowan? What’s he got to do with it? He’s going to find a way to stay out of the fight until the last minute, then charge in and claim victory.”
“Or flee for his life when the battle is lost.”
“Exactly.”
“And are we going to let him get away with it?” Tolvern asked.
Catarina started to respond, but her mind quickly found the devious path that Tolvern had already forged.
“You mean to bait him into fighting,” Catarina said. It was not a question.
Tolvern got up and poured another ladle of water on the hot coals, which brought approving hums from the Hroom. She settled back onto the platform and wiped sweat from her face and neck.
“He’s not fond of either of us, but he especially doesn’t like you,” Tolvern said. “You were his fiancée, after all, and—well, this is his spin on it, anyway—you did it under false pretenses.” She nodded. “Putting you in charge will spur him into action.”
“If only it were that easy. Don’t underestimate McGowan’s desire to keep his hands clean and his ship spotless. And there’s also the matter of Drake holding him back. So long as McGowan’s in the reserve fleet, he has an excuse.”
“You may know McGowan better than I do,” Tolvern said, “but I know my husband. James will give McGowan autonomy, the same as he’s giving us. A general strategy, and then we’re on our own. If McGowan wants to fight, he’ll find a way to make it happen.”
“We’re still back to my first point,” Catarina said. “Seeing me in command isn’t going to do it. Not by itself. We need something more.”
“I’ve got an idea for that, too. McGowan and I have a video conference scheduled as soon as I’m back on Blackbeard. I lost falcons in the battle, and he’s carrying their replacements in his hold—we need to arrange a shipment. Also, we have an engineering discussion about plasma containment fields where my chief engineer needs advice from McGowan’s. Somewhere in all of that, I’m going to plant a seed.”
Catarina was intrigued. “Go on.”
“During the call, I’m going to mention the king of Albion. Casually, offhanded, but in a way that will get McGowan thinking.”
“What does the king have to do with anything?”
“The king’s wife died, you know,” Tolvern said. “He’s a widower, and not an unattractive man. He’s only got two children so far, and there’s pressure from the nobles to marry and do his duty.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying? That I . . .? That’s not my game at all!”
“I’m not suggesting you actually marry the king. Heavens, no. But McGowan won’t know that. Isn’t that pretty much what he thought you were all along? A social climber?”
Catarina thought it over, and believed that Tolvern was onto something. In fact, Catarina had been a climber, at least while she was under her mother’s tutelage. Her mother had concocted a family history and maneuvered Catarina into a betrothal with Edward McGowan, which collapsed when he found out the truth about her pirate father.
“So I’ll drop a rumor that the king is intrigued by you,” Tolvern said.
“And how would you know that? You just happened to be talking to the king? McGowan will never believe that.”
“Not from the king, from one of his relatives. His Majesty has several cousins who are naval officers, and one mentioned to me that you’d make a fine wife for the king.”
Catarina couldn’t help but laugh. It did sound like the sort of rumor that spread around the fleet, but it was preposterous on the face of it. Which was why McGowan would likely believe it; he was looking for the worst in her, and this would be confirmation.
“McGowan will swell up and burst like an angry tick,” she said.
“That’s my hope. He’ll think you’re going to steal his glory, fly in triumph to Albion, and marry the king. If he doesn’t like you now, imagine when you’re his queen.”
“I don’t know. McGowan probably thinks I’m going to be killed in the battle. I probably will be. Then he’ll sit back and smirk.” Catarina shook her head. “It’s not enough. He needs some other prod. Maybe your husband—”
“He’s not my husband out here,” Tolvern said quickly. “He’s the admiral of the fleet, and he will do what’s best for the fleet, for Albion, and for the survival of the sentient races of the sector.”
“This is what’s best.”
“That’s what you and I think, but as soon as we start arguing it to James, he’s going to see right through us. Let me try this rumor thing—it might work.”
“It’s a good plan,” Catarina said, “but it’s just not enough. We still need something else.”
The women fell silent. The two Hroom in the sweating room had been murmuring their own conversation, but now got up, took their robes, and left Catarina and Tolvern alone.
“Why did we hold the war council here, anyway?” Catarina asked. “Why a Hroom sloop?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too. James is sending a signal, I think. He wants to show the other races that he has no intention of dominating from Albion when the war is over.”
“Not sure I believe it. Albion is turning into an empire, almost without trying.”
“But it doesn’t have to be an autocratic empire,” Tolvern said. “If the Scandians and Hroom think Drake is going to dominate, they’re likely to turn on us as soon as we defeat Apex.”
“I hope you’re right,” Catarina said. “I hope the admiral can make it happen. We’ll see. Anyway, we first have to pull off a miracle in the Persia System.”
She stopped. Mention of the other components of the alliance had given her an idea. Tolvern studied her face.
“What? What is it?”
“About your plan to get McGowan into the fight. It’s good, but it needs a push to make it happen. And it occurs to me that there’s someone else who doesn’t like McGowan, either. Someone who thinks he’s a coward.”
Tolvern looked puzzled for a moment. “Ah, you mean the Scandian. Lars Olafsen.”
“What if we tell Olafsen our plan, and he gives McGowan that little nudge to push him over the top? Get him into the fight like a good little soldier.”
“You mean taunting him?”
“Exactly. The right words at the right moment, and on top of everything else—McGowan won’t be able to resist.”
A smile spread across Tolvern’s face. “Perfect.”
“Then it’s a plan. You put a bug in McGowan’s ear, and I’ll speak to Olafsen.”
“Excellent tactics, sir,” Tolvern said, with an edge of sarcasm that made Catarina smile. “Lead us into battle and bring us victory.”
Tolvern rose to her feet, wiped off more sweat, and lowered herself from the platform. She took her robe from its hook.
“So soon?” Catarina said, reluctant to quit the soothing steam and heat to return to the bridge. “Aren’t we taking our last break before the end of the human race?”
A curious sort of half-smile crossed the other woman’s face. “It was just that thought that got me to my feet. This might be my last chance to . . . well, ostensibly, I need to visit Dreadnought to be briefed on a minor change to her cannon configuration since the last time we fought together.”
“Oh, yes, very important,” Catarina said innocently. “I’ve heard Dreadnought’s guns pack a hell of a punch. Is that true?”
“Drake knows how to fire them.” Something mischievous came over Tolvern’s face. “He gave you a personal demonstration once, didn’t he? A full broadside, if I remember right.”
Catarina laughed. “Now you sound like Capp!”
“Her York Town humor rubs off after a while.” Tolvern’s expression turned grim, and she straightened her posture. “If we never meet again in person, it is an honor to fight at your side, Catarina Vargus. Godspeed and good luck.”
Chapter Sixteen
It was one thing to scheme with Tolvern in a steam room, and another to contemplate the enormity of their challenge from the bridge of Void Queen as the ship accelerated toward the jump point. Dreadnought hit the point and vanished, and Void Queen would soon follow, with Blackbeard coming quickly behind.
After that, more than two hundred warships, the entire fighting force of the Albion, Hroom, Scandian, and Singaporean civilizations. Tens of thousands of crew, marines, and raiders. If they lost this fight, there would be nothing to stop Apex harvester ships from fanning out across the systems, slaughtering at will as their numbers grew and grew and grew.
“Two minutes to jump,” Jane announced.
The crew braced themselves across the bridge, returning to seats and strapping themselves in. Capp grabbed for her barf bag with a grimace.
“Better not all come up,” she said. “Cook made me turkey dumplings, and I won’t be able to eat ’em for a month if I sick up all over.”
Catarina raised an eyebrow. “Turkey? Doesn’t he usually use canned beef?”
“Aye, Cap’n,” the first mate said with a grin, “but I was in the mood for poultry, know what I mean?”
“I hope that’s a metaphor, and you’re not planning to eat the aliens we kill in combat.”
“Why not? They’re just big turkeys, ain’t they, and that’s good eating. Besides, they eat us, don’t they?”
“Yeah, Capp. They eat us, and then we eat them. Sounds like secondhand cannibalism, like you’re eating your old mates.”
Capp opened her mouth, but they hit the jump point before she could respond. Catarina woke up groggy, trying to remember where she was. Talking to that Viking, wasn’t it? Goading Olafsen to goad McGowan. It hadn’t taken much to convince the marauder captain. Olafsen and McGowan had fought each other at Merkur, and Olafsen claimed that McGowan knew how to fight, all right. He just didn’t care for it much, and wasn’t it about time that he got his scrawny backside into the war?
No, that was wrong. Catarina had ended the call with Olafsen and then . . . there was something about a turkey dinner. She sat up straight, remembering where she was.
She must have only blanked out for a few moments, as she was already tapping the console to get the sensors to display on the viewscreen, while others were still shaking their heads and groaning. Smythe came around next—he usually did—followed by Nyb Pim, Lomelí, Capp, and a handful of ensigns working at the defense grid and other stations on the bridge.
By the time Catarina got them straightened out and the barf bags put away, her headache had faded, and it was clear that they’d come through the jump point unopposed. The harvester that had chased Tolvern out of the system nearly two weeks earlier was nowhere to be seen, at least not with short-range scans.
Catarina had just enough time to get Void Queen safely away from the jump point on auxiliary power before Blackbeard made her appearance. Blackbeard drifted, not yet restarting the engines or showing any other sign of life.
“Come on, move,” Smythe said, watching the screen.
“Give her time,” Catarina said. “We’ve got enough going on here without you worrying about other ships.”
Dreadnought had come through first, and the massive battleship was already in motion, tossing out mines in case Apex ships remained hidden in the moons of a nearby gas giant. The mines could be recalled later if no enemy appeared. Catarina launched a striker patrol as further insurance against ambush.
Blackbeard finally set in motion just as Pussycat jumped through, followed by Scandian blackfish, one after another. The last of the five blackfish was nearly run down by a Punisher-class cruiser, which in turn had to make way for another cruiser. After that, warships jumped through at a furious pace for the next hour, until at last there was enough of a force assembled to bring them into the system at a more relaxed pace.
But not too slowly. No time for dawdling, and when the crew of one destroyer suffered a harder jump than most, Void Queen hooked the sluggish ship and towed it away from the jump point before it was rammed by the next incoming destroyer.
It would take nearly two days to get all the ships through, but already Drake was organizing the core components of the four fleets. The smallest of these would be organized around Void Queen and Blackbeard, some forty-one ships, but between the two battle cruisers and the other cruisers and corvettes, Catarina would have matched it against any of the other three, except perhaps Drake’s, with fifty-plus ships, led by Dreadnought and seven Punisher- and Aggressor-class cruisers.
To be honest, McGowan’s reserve, which would contain more than eighty ships, including all those cruisers and star wolves, looked formidable as well. No doubt McGowan was strutting about as he considered the size and strength of his fleet, even as he reassured himself it would only be used for mop-up action.
Finally, there was Broderick’s fast-attack fleet. Ten cruisers, fourteen corvettes, and a dozen destroyers, along with a handful of support craft. It was smaller in number than the other forces, but all of those cruisers and corvettes packed a punch.
“Anything from the inner worlds?” Catarina asked Smythe.
“I’ve found Tolvern’s old friend. Big, ugly manta-ray-looking thing. It’s in a wide orbit around Persia.” Smythe tapped at his console. “But I don’t make out anything else down there. Probably some spears and lances, but I can’t see if any of the other harvesters have reached orbit.”
“Hit them with all active sensors. There’s only one way in and out of this system, and nobody is going to have any more secrets.”
“Aye, Captain.” He looked up. “You don’t suppose it’s going to be just that one harvester, do you?”
“King’s balls, Smythe,” Capp said. “It ain’t gonna be that easy, and you know it. Tolvern said she spotted seven more of them big ugly ships down there waiting to be hauled into orbit.”
“I’m only reporting what I’ve found,” Smythe said with a shrug. “And nobody else has spotted them, either. We’ll get more data when the junks spread their wings.”
“They’re out there,” Capp insisted. “You know they are.”
Catarina wished she could feel excited at the prospect of taking the entire fleet against a single harvester ship. Maybe Blackbeard’s nuclear attack on the space elevator had done more damage than Tolvern thought. But in her heart, she knew that Capp was right.
Still, it was doubtful all of those harvesters had come into orbit in the last ten days. Most of them probably remained on the surface under construction. No doubt there was at least one more ship either up or preparing to lift, but maybe that was it.
We can take out two ships. Maybe even three. Four, if Tolvern inflicted some pain on that first one.
Still, the thought of facing four harvester ships was breathtaking. She’d destroyed two piecemeal, but in the first battle, the enemy was crippled, unable to fight. In the second, she’d lost a third of her fleet, hit the harvester with a nuclear torpedo, and welcomed powerful reinforcements midway through the battle.
A war junk came through the jump and drifted toward the two battle cruisers, where it came to a halt and spread its large, insect-like wings.
“That’s Hao Cheng’s ship,” Smythe said. “Best sensors in the fleet. If there’s anything down there, he’s the one to find it.”
Cheng was a veteran warrior, now reduced to a subsidiary role. When Drake assigned him to the Void Queen-Blackbeard fleet, he’d sent Catarina a message. She’d only glanced over it before the jump, and brought it up to revisit while she waited for more data.
The note was informal and chatty. Cheng spoke English through his brain implant, but that didn’t mean he could always understand the language’s nuances.
Captain Vargus,
I know what Albion thinks of the Singaporeans. We’re good for our sensors, maybe to soften armor with energy pulses so real weapons can break through. Other than that, you hold your war junks back with the missile frigates so they won’t be shredded in the first enemy attack. We’re certainly no good in a straight-up fight.
If that’s your assumption, you’re wrong. I know our numbers are few, but I beg you to use us in the battle. There’s nobody in the fleet with the same experience fighting the buzzards as the Singaporean crews. I was fighting Apex before the kingdom of Albion even knew the enemy existed. I have men and women on this ship who survived the destruction of the Sentinel battle stations, others who fought a years-long guerrilla campaign, and I personally fought (and survived!) eleven engagements with harvester ships before Tolvern rebuilt the Singapore yards and put me back at the helm of a war junk.
I know we don’t have an eliminon battery on board, but these ships do have more than just our energy pulses when it comes to offensive engagements. We have superior cloaking technology. Hiding in the wake of your battle cruiser, we can sneak right up into the action.
I only beg the chance to do some real fighting.
Hao Cheng
Oh, come on, Catarina thought when she’d finished reading. What did it matter how many engagements he’d fought? A war junk was slow to accelerate, vulnerable to enemy fire, and with weapons roughly equal to those of a Hroom sloop of war.
But unlike the sloops, the war junks had superior sensor technology, and that must be preserved at all costs. Also, unlike the sloops, they weren’t numerous enough to fight in concert, so they’d been divided among the admiral’s four fleets. So what exactly was Cheng hoping to accomplish?
On the other hand, eleven battles against harvesters. And that was before the current war. Singaporeans could fight, had fought, alone and with some success for years. If not for that resistance, the entire sector would have been overrun, its civilized peoples exterminated.
Didn’t that earn Cheng and his compatriots the right to join the fight? Besides, why hold them back now? One way or another, the war would end here in Persia, and if a few odd ships ran for their lives, it wouldn’t much matter if they carried sensor technology or not if the rest of the fleet had been wiped out.
Two more war junks jumped through and moved into a triangle formation with Cheng’s. Three more war junks took position above Dreadnought, which sat at the front of a cluster of cruisers, corvettes, and destroyers. The whole collection of warships was drifting along with the jump point toward a blue-green gas giant encircled with a delicate, almost gauzy-looking ring of ice.
On a lark, Catarina called Drake. He appeared on the viewscreen moments later, hands behind his back as he stood straight and noble-looking in front of his console.
“I want your war junks,” she said.
“You have three of your own, Vargus. Some problem with their sensors?”
“I need them for the fight.”
He raised an eyebrow. “There’s something you can do with six war junks that you can’t do with three?”
“Maybe. We’ll see. Any data from the sensors can be sent over for your techs to analyze. Our two forces will be in contact throughout the battle, reinforcing each other from either side. If you need them, I can send them back.”
“In the confusion of battle, a whole lot of things will go wrong. We might lose the ability to reinforce each other.”
“Can I have the war junks, please?”
Drake stood quietly for a moment. “Very well, I’ll send them over as soon as we ship out. In fact, I’ll give you Broderick’s three war junks as well. McGowan can keep his. You’ll have nine in total—do with them what you will.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He glanced to one side. “Meanwhile, we’re getting data from the junks. You might want to take a look at it.” The link closed.
His tone had turned dark at the end, and even before Smythe started sharing, Catarina was bracing herself for bad news. It appeared the enemy had raised more harvesters into orbit. At least two additional ships, maybe more.
Cheng called moments later. His face was flushed, his voice tight.
“Blast them all, how are we going to do it?”
Catarina glanced down. “Four harvesters. It’s bad, but not worst-case.”
“Check again, Vargus. There’s a fifth coming into orbit, and they’re running engine tests on a sixth. It’ll be up before we arrive, you can count on it.”
Catarina caught her breath. Six blasted harvesters. Six! Cold fingers seemed to tug at her intestines. And according to Tolvern’s report, there were still two more on the surface if they couldn’t defeat the first half-dozen.
“Do you see the hunter-killer packs?” Cheng asked.
“No, where are they?”
Smythe spoke up from the tech console, where he’d been poring over the data. “They’re on the moon, ready for a quick liftoff.”
“There’s something happening on Persia,” Capp announced.
She swung the monitor around on her console to show Catarina, who peered at the numbers and data, trying to make sense of it.
“Yes, that,” Cheng said, his voice calmer now. “Maybe some hope for us, maybe not.”
Catarina began to piece it together. Radiation and dust entering the atmosphere, heat signatures in multiple locations.
“Looks like explosions, some sort of fighting going on,” Catarina said. “Does that mean the birds are fighting each other? Is there a battle for control of the flock?”
Cheng shook his head. “I wish that were it, but no. Based on the pattern of explosions and the fires we’ve detected near the enemy factory-mine complexes, it looks like sabotage to me.”
“And you think . . . could it be that the human population is fighting back?” she asked. “How is that possible? I thought they were nearly exterminated.”
“Not yet they’re not. And whoever is left is putting up a fight. I was in the same situation—I get it. Maybe it was Blackbeard’s attack on the elevator, or maybe it’s the frantic pace of war preparations on the surface, but somehow the Persians have discovered that someone is attempting a rescue, and they’re trying to help us.”
Catarina turned this over, considering the possibilities. It was too late for the Persians to win a war—not with their civilization in ruins, their people scattered and hunted—but their resistance might give the allied fleet a fighting chance.
“Call the admiral and share what you just told me. Oh, and Cheng?”
“Yes, Captain Vargus?”
“I’ve found you six more war junks. You have your Singaporean fleet, just like you asked. It doesn’t sound like much to me, given what we’re facing, but they’re all yours. Only promise me one thing. Whatever you have in mind, make it count.”
Chapter Seventeen
Olafsen studied McGowan through the viewscreen, wishing he could see the man in person, study his features more closely, instead of across several thousand miles of space, the distance between Bloodaxe and HMS Peerless.
“I don’t have time for a meeting,” McGowan said. “The other fleets are in motion already, and I have thirty minutes to get our ships aligned before we move out.”
“What do you think?” Olafsen asked Björnman in Scandian. “Does this fellow sound more aggravated than usual?”
The chief mate grunted. “He should be. We’re going into battle against multiple harvester ships. By the gods, if that doesn’t get a man’s blood pounding, I don’t know what will.”
“But maybe McGowan isn’t thinking that. Maybe Vargus is right, and he—”
“I don’t know what the devil you’re babbling about, Olafsen,” McGowan snapped, “but if you intend to jabber on in your barbarian tongue, let me repeat, I am far too busy for this nonsense.”
“We’re wondering what kind of a man you are, McGowan. My brother said, and Björnman here agrees with him, that you’d rather sit back and watch others take the glory.”
“We’re a reserve force, as you damn well know. We’ll fight when we’re called on.”
“We’ll fight when you make the call,” Olafsen corrected. “When you think the others need reinforcing. A small difference, but an important one, don’t you agree?”
“What are you getting at?”
“You make the call, McGowan. Not Drake, not Broderick . . . not even Vargus.”
“Not even Vargus! Hah. That woman . . . who does she think she is?”
“He seems more agitated than normal,” Olafsen told Björnman in Scandian. “Tolvern must have goaded him about Vargus. And he bought it. He thinks the Albion king has his eye on her.”
“Maybe the king does,” Björnman said. “She is a warrior beauty, a true shield maiden.”
Olafsen scoffed. “She’s no maiden. Anyway, when did you get sweet on her? I thought a woman had no place on a starship—isn’t that what you’re always telling me?”
“This one is different.”
“Listen, Olafsen,” McGowan said. “I’ve been told to listen to your crazy ideas—God knows if I don’t, you’ll set off on your own and wreck the whole operation. But if you don’t tell me what this is about, so help me—”
“Push him,” Björnman urged. “He’ll take the bait.”
“I’ll tell you in plain words,” Olafsen told McGowan. “I have rivals for power. There’s always a Knutesen brother or cousin around, for one, and then there’s my brother. That one-eyed fool thinks he should be master of the Scandian people, not me, and he has allies on Viborg and Roskilde who believe the same rubbish.”
“That’s nothing to me. Work it out yourself. After the battle.”
“But I’m not the only one with rivals. One of your commanding officers was telling me about the reconstituted admiralty—that’s what they call it, isn’t it? Never mind what it’s called, the point is, they need four lords. Drake and Broderick make two. The third will be Tolvern, and the fourth either you or Catarina Vargus.”
McGowan had been pacing, but now stopped in front of the viewscreen. He glanced to one side, as if thinking of the others on his bridge who might be listening.
“Hold there. I’m taking this call in the war room.”
The screen went blank. Olafsen and Björnman shared grins. Moments later, McGowan reappeared on the screen, this time from his war room. Olafsen wiped away his smile.
“Who told you that?” McGowan demanded.
“One of your superiors.”
“Which one?”
“There are only two—Broderick and Drake—so take your pick. Only two for now, that is. You’re soon to have two more, from what I understand.”
“That’s nonsense about Tolvern. She’s married to the admiral. She can’t serve by his side on the admiralty. And who was her father? An earl, a baron? No, a steward on the Drake estate. And as for Vargus . . .” He spat her name. “It’s rubbish. She’s a bloody pirate.”
But if Tolvern had indeed warned McGowan that the king of Albion was thinking of taking Vargus as his bride, what would her background matter? Nothing. She’d be on the admiralty whether McGowan liked it or not, and he would spend the rest of his navy days taking orders. A queen and an admiral—what kind of power was that, wielded by one woman? Oh, and if McGowan sat back while others did the fighting, she’d be a war hero, as well.
“I don’t know if it’s rubbish or not. All I know is what I heard.” The other man fell silent, and Olafsen continued after a brief pause. “So we both have reasons to get into this fight.”
“We need a reserve,” McGowan said through clenched teeth. “That’s not cowardice, no matter what you think, that’s a necessity of battle.”
“Why?”
“So that when a harvester breaks through, it doesn’t simply escape Persia, cross Nebuchadnezzar, and vanish, only to pop up two years later at the head of a massive new fleet.”
“But if it doesn’t happen, if the other three forces stop the harvesters, we could be left out of the battle entirely. Neither one of us will hold power, if that’s the case.”
McGowan had nothing to say to this.
“It’s going to get ugly in there,” Olafsen continued. “By the gods, there are five harvesters up there already. One of those beasts is going to get free, going to get the upper hand, going to take the fight into the heart of a fleet and smash it to pieces. All I’m saying is that we don’t wait. As soon as we spot our opportunity, we throw ourselves into the fight and make it count.”
“And you? What is your place in the battle? You have some scheme, don’t you?”
Olafsen smiled, but didn’t respond. He wasn’t ready to put out his own plans. Inside, however, he could feel the knots of excitement and nerves squirming in his belly like a nest of snakes.
“And how do I know you won’t run?” McGowan asked. “Like that star wolf did at Odense.”
“If anyone runs from the battle, it won’t be me. I swear that before my gods and yours alike.”
McGowan stared for a long time without answering. Olafsen could see something passing over the man’s face, something unpleasant. He must be thinking about Vargus and Tolvern, wondering if he was being manipulated by the two women, and perhaps by Olafsen, as well. At last he nodded.
“Very well, we’re in the fight. But let’s be honest about one thing, shall we?” McGowan added coldly. “You’re not worried about rivals for the nonexistent throne. This is all about your bloodlust, your need to be in the thick of the battle. You want to fight. Very well, you Viking bastard, if fighting is what you want, fighting is what you’ll get.”
#
The mood turned somber across Void Queen as the three advance fleets approached Persia. Catarina felt it in the gunnery, in the engine room, in the armory, heard it in the measured, determined tones of marines as they were brought out of stasis and briefed on the situation.
Capp met Catarina in the hall coming out of the mess on the morning after the jump and stopped her.
“This is it, ain’t it, Cap’n? The big one. The last one.”
“More or less, Lieutenant. Either you return a conquering hero or you die on the inner frontier, a hundred trillion miles from home. If you’re given a choice, I’d suggest the hero part.”
“I don’t care about none of that stuff. I only want to return and see the green hills again, see mountains, breathe the Albion air, know what I mean? And I want Carvalho along with me—he better not die, neither, hear me?”
Catarina tugged the other woman’s arm. “Come on, I understand there’s more news from the planet. That will get your mind off it.”
When they came onto the bridge, Smythe brought up a viewscreen of Persia, now less than two hundred million miles away and closing fast as they crossed the system’s asteroid belt and approached the outermost of its rocky worlds.
A large, reddish-brown landmass stretched across Persia’s equator. The continent looked like a single massive desert, apart from green fringes on the coasts like tufts of hair above the ears of a bald man. With all the planets to colonize, Catarina wondered why the Persians had settled such a wasteland.
Smythe spotted the captain and first mate. “These Singaporean sensors are fantastic. Look at the resolution on this.”
He changed the screen from a current view to one earlier in the planet’s rotation. Here, on the opposite side of the world, were three long, slender continents that stretched from pole to pole, and they presented a stark contrast with the desert continent. Smythe zoomed in to show forests and grasslands and a patchwork quilt of abandoned farmland returning to the wild. The unmistakable sign of cities dotted the plains, and while Smythe couldn’t get right down to look at them from up close, it was hard to imagine they were still inhabited, except for perhaps a handful of refugees hiding like rats in sewers and bombed-out basements.
“Where are those last three harvesters?” she asked. “Did any of them get into orbit?”
“Hold on. Take a look at the elevator site, and then I’ll show you the harvesters.”
He zoomed in on a spot at the equator, which sat directly below the orbital counterweight and fortress that Tolvern had assaulted in an attempt to knock out the enemy’s ability to bring more harvester ships into orbit. Peeling back the dense cloud cover obscuring the surface revealed a city set in a massive bowl between two mountain ranges that ran north-south along the spine of the narrow continent.
The landscape was a wasteland, with the city pocked by blackened spots where fires must have burned out of control. Two of the surrounding mountains had been leveled and turned into massive piles of poisonous-looking orange tailings, presumably the result of Apex mining as they gutted the landscape in search of minerals.
“Now let me put back one of the filters,” Smythe said.
The sky over the city was suddenly hazy, as if a massive dust cloud had blown over it. Plumes of smoke rose from the surface. There was, or recently had been, some sort of battle for the old city.
“This is the Persian counterattack we heard about?”
“A nuclear counterattack,” Smythe said. “Seems that they managed to smuggle several weapons into the city and detonate them.”
“King’s balls,” Capp said.
“More like balls of tyrillium,” Smythe said, “getting into the heart of the buzzard operation like that. Look.” He shifted the viewscreen. “The Persians wrecked the ground-based portion of the space elevator and destroyed two of the yards building harvester ships. Turned them into radioactive slag. The third harvester apparently got halfway up, and crashed to the ground. It won’t be flying, either.”
“The Persians musta seen Blackbeard’s attack and figured out what we was up to,” Capp said.
Catarina had never met the Persians, none of them had. The closest anyone had come was Olafsen, who’d captured an Apex seed pod with dozens of mutilated Persians frozen in stasis.
Yet a fierce pride rose in her breast to think of a band of desperate survivors, on the run for the past year as battle striders stalked them with their paralyzing rays, still fighting on. The Persians must have guarded a cache of nuclear weapons since the alien invasion for just such an opportunity. And then perfectly executed an attack on the Apex facilities. It was a heroic effort, however they’d managed.
Catarina almost choked up at the thought of it, and could only imagine what the men and women of Hao Cheng’s small fleet must be feeling. Most of them had fought just such a guerrilla campaign on Singapore as Apex systematically exterminated the population. No wonder Cheng was so desperate to get into the action.
“So there are at least three harvesters grounded for the duration,” Catarina said. “If not destroyed outright. Plus any spears and lances being built in those yards.”
“Not that we’re in the clear,” Lomelí piped up from the defense grid computer. “Show her the harvesters.”
Smythe touched his console, and the screen pulled back to an orbital view, now unfiltered. A fleet of five harvester ships, sounded by several hunter-killer packs, had begun to accelerate away from the planet.
Capp glanced down at her console. “Message from Drake. Dreadnought is beginning initial deceleration. He’s handing over autonomy to the sub-fleet commanders.”
The pilot’s chair was empty, as Nyb Pim was off shift. Other key parts of the bridge were without their crew, and Catarina knew that Barker was currently absent from the gunnery, as she’d sent as many personnel off shift as possible to give them rest time ahead of what would no doubt prove a grueling battle. Time to get them back to work.
Catarina opened a channel on the general com. “This is Captain Vargus. Striker wing on standby. All other hands to battle stations.”
She sent a message to the other ships of her fleet, starting with Tolvern on Blackbeard. Ten minutes later, she had Nyb Pim in his place, and all stations on the bridge were manned.
“The hunter-killer packs are breaking away,” Smythe said. “Looks like they’re getting ready to jump at us.”
“Good,” Catarina said. “We’re the tip of the spear. We’ll hit first and hit hard.”
“There they go!” Lomelí said a few minutes later.
“Lower shields. Ready the main cannon.” Catarina took a deep, even breath. “It’s time to win the war.”
Chapter Eighteen
Tolvern paced the bridge of Blackbeard, rearranging ships in her mind, giving imaginary orders to move the various pieces around the chessboard. Catarina had moved the joint Void Queen-Blackbeard fleet out front, and Drake and Broderick’s forces formed a pair of massive sledgehammers above and below, lurking several million miles behind. McGowan was still way behind, but instead of hanging out by the jump point, he was on the move toward the system’s inner worlds.
Manx watched her pace for a while, then cleared his throat. “It all looks good to me. The missile frigates are well protected, Vargus put a screen of destroyers on our flank to throw down mines if we need to trap enemies, and the three smaller cruisers are positioned to charge wherever they’re needed.”
“I see that.”
“I might have placed the corvettes up front,” Manx said. “But other than that—”
Tolvern turned to face him. “Vargus put the corvettes in the rear because she expects our initial encounter will wreck the formations of the hunter-killer packs, and they’ll try to escape out the back side. The corvettes will hunt down stragglers. It’s exactly what I would have done in her position.”
“Then what’s got you worried?”
She laughed. “You’re not worried?”
“That isn’t what I mean, Captain. We’ve served together a long time—I can read it on your face. You don’t like something Vargus is doing.”
“Something, yes. What is she doing with the war junks? Why put them all together, where they’re vulnerable? Why not spread them out?”
“They’re cloaked. Doubtful the enemy can see them.”
“That’s exactly right. None of the rest of us are cloaked. We’re charging in for a head-to-head battle. So why hide the war junks? And why do we have nine of them, anyway? They should be divided evenly.” Tolvern shook her head. “She’s got something planned. Almost like she’s going to try to use Cheng for some diversionary attack.”
“I’m sure he wants to fight, too.”
“But not a diversion. Not a suicide charge to gain a moment of distraction. Manx, she doesn’t know the Singaporeans like we do. She didn’t see Sentinel Three destroyed, or the carnage on Singapore. They’re not cannon fodder.”
“Could be it’s Cheng pushing for action,” Manx said.
“There go the hunter-killers,” Oglethorpe announced from the tech console.
The five hunter-killer packs jumped within seconds of each other, and Tolvern braced herself.
At the same moment, Broderick’s fleet cut down from the Y-axis, making a guess as to the destination of the jumping enemy forces. Almost as soon as it began to move, Oglethorpe announced a subtle change in the flight path of the five harvesters.
The hunter-killer packs appeared in their midst. Spears and lances surrounded Blackbeard, stabbing her from all sides, hitting all shields with energy pulses. Warning lights flashed on Tolvern’s console as shields took damage up and down the battle cruiser.
“Main battery at the ready,” Manx said, his voice tight and anxious. “All torpedo tubes loaded. Awaiting orders.”
“Hold fire,” Tolvern commanded. “Roll us into a dive.”
Manx gave orders, while Clyde worked furiously with the nav computer to thread a course through the fleet, which was rushing to Blackbeard’s defense.
The ship’s artificial gravity shifted slightly, and there was a moment where Tolvern felt almost out of her body as they made a violent course correction, and then she was looking up at the viewscreen, where all of the other ships seemed to be suddenly upside down.
Her reason for holding fire quickly became apparent. Instead of engaging with twenty different enemy ships, Blackbeard had bought herself a few moments of breathing room, and that was all the time needed for other ships to come to her aid. Void Queen fired a volley of missiles that rained down on the battlefield, while Pussycat clawed in from behind with guns blazing. Of the cruisers, Triumph was the first to arrive, followed in quick succession by Repulse and Fierce. Several Hroom sloops fired serpentine batteries, along with energy pulses.
By the time Tolvern pulled them out of their roll, the battle was already even, with more allied ships arriving every minute.
In earlier battles, Apex had proven willing, if not eager, to sacrifice entire formations of warships in order to gain a small advantage. If the battlefield were a chessboard, they would count every lance and spear as a pawn to be thrown away if it could bring down an enemy rook or bishop.
Tolvern had expected the entire force of hunter-killer packs to expend itself in the fight. No doubt they would lose, but leave the battle-cruiser-led fleet weakened ahead of the struggle with the harvesters.
And so she was surprised when they broke off before they could be encircled—before they’d even inflicted any damage—and raced for freedom. Vargus must have given orders to the corvettes, because they came streaking in from behind, but they weren’t quick enough to block the entire enemy force. They caught one lance, already struck by Void Queen’s missiles, and forced it back against the fleet. There, Blackbeard joined in battering the Apex ship until it exploded.
The rest of the enemy ships escaped. Broderick had brought his fleet forward to join the fight, and his ships began to arrive just as the enemy reached jump speed and vanished. The spears and lances reappeared alongside the harvester ships, still accelerating toward the allied fleets.
“What the devil was that about?” Tolvern asked.
“Maybe just testing us out,” Manx said. “Seeing how we respond when they jump in.”
“You’d think they’d know that by now. Anyway, it wrecked their initiative. Don’t know why they’d throw that away with a feint.”
“A message?” he offered. “A warning?”
“A warning about what?” she asked. “That they intend to annihilate our fleet and devour the survivors? That’s hardly a secret.” Something occurred to her. “What about that course correction? Clyde, run the numbers. Where the devil are those harvesters going?”
They soon had their answer. The five harvesters, which had been barreling in a straight line toward the jump into Nebuchadnezzar, had altered course and were charging at Dreadnought. Clyde calculated that the harvesters would have the admiral’s fleet at their mercy for nearly two hours before reinforcements arrived.
Catarina Vargus called. She clenched her jaw, and determination glinted in her eyes. Capp was cursing somewhere in the background, her usual mix of blasphemy and scatological references.
“It was a good trick,” Vargus said. “Threw us off the trail.”
“It buys them two hours,” Tolvern said. “No more. Then we’ll be on the battlefield. Broderick shortly after. Dreadnought can hold out that long, don’t you think?”
“Five harvesters! They’ll smash his fleet, smash us, smash Broderick, and break through for the jump point.”
“We don’t have to stop them all,” Tolvern said. “If one gets through, McGowan and Olafsen are there to stop it.”
“In theory, yes.”
Could they count on McGowan to fight? That was the question. His fleet was pulling in closer than if he expected to sit out the battle, and he’d be in perfect position to hold the line against . . . well, whatever got through. But only if McGowan took a stand.
“We could let Broderick join the battle while we make for McGowan’s position instead,” Vargas said.
“To what end?”
“Drake and Broderick hold as many harvesters near Persia as possible. We fall back and reinforce McGowan. That way there’s no temptation to fall back.”
“You’re in command. Is that your order?”
“No. It’s a request for your advice.”
“Drake and Broderick together—not enough. Not enough by a long shot. The harvesters win that battle, and maybe then all of them make a break for it, not just one or two.” Tolvern took a deep breath. “We have to count on McGowan . . . and Olafsen.”
“Yes, especially Olafsen.”
The two women couldn’t be explicit, not on the open channel. Not with the crew on the bridges of both ships listening in. Tolvern and Vargus had kept the others in the dark about their attempts to manipulate McGowan into taking action.
“Agreed,” Vargas said at last. “We’re joining Drake and Broderick. An all-out push to stop the enemy before they break free.”
#
The die had been cast, Catarina thought. The pieces positioned. Watching it develop was witnessing slaughter and destruction in slow motion as the various fleets crossed millions of miles of empty space to reach the battlefield.
And as it happened, Admiral Drake was able to choose the setting of that battle.
He pulled the bulk of his forces into place near the outermost of the rocky inner worlds, a cold gray planet that the charts called Sheol. The planet was about one-third standard gravity according to mass, and had a small oblong moon that orbited in a short eleven hours.
Drake positioned Dreadnought and his cruisers about sixty thousand miles above Sheol, while he sent his destroyers streaking out at an angle, where they dropped dozens of mines in a massive screen, like a net that would funnel enemies toward the clear spot next to the planet. As an added deterrent to flanking maneuvers, he shielded his three missile frigates behind the minefield, where they hemmed themselves in with more mines.
Drake was taking a gamble, based on the same assumptions Catarina and Tolvern had already made, that the enemy was attempting a final massive breakout attempt, rather than trying to defeat the allied fleet down to the last ship. If they were wrong, the harvesters and their accompanying lances and spears might ignore the funnel altogether and do something else, thus wasting dozens of mines, and leaving Drake’s forces spread out.
On the other hand, Catarina realized, the sight of the human flagship sitting there, inviting battle, must be a great temptation. The queen commander fed on high-ranking prisoners, and there was no prize greater than Admiral Drake himself.
“Looks like they’re taking the bait,” Smythe announced as the harvesters made a clear decision to avoid the minefield and the missile frigates and charge at Dreadnought.
“Lucky us,” Catarina said.
The harvesters were decelerating, the hunter-killer packs alongside them. No short-range jump for the hunter-killers; the enemy commander was clearly too wary of the battleship and the powerful forces arrayed nearby to divide her forces.
Dreadnought and her cruisers launched a volley of missiles, as did the frigates standing to one side. The missiles were at the edge of their range—the frigates soon to be out of range entirely as the harvester fleet bypassed them—and enemy countermeasures brought them down immediately.
But that signaled the beginning of the fight, and soon long-range ordnance was flying back and forth between the two opposing forces. Countermeasures knocked down most of it, but the harvesters drew first blood, slamming a pair of missiles against a destroyer as it returned from laying mines. So much firepower from those harvesters. It wouldn’t be long now until the enemy was inflicting a good deal more damage than a few pinpricks.
Hold on, Catarina thought. Help is on the way.
“We’re now only fifteen minutes behind Broderick,” Smythe announced.
“Only fifteen minutes?” Catarina said. “I thought it was thirty.”
“Aye, but we got a better pilot than Broderick,” Capp said, puffing out her chest, “and the rest of our blokes are following his course.”
Nyb Pim let out a modest-sounding hum. “It was a straightforward calculation.”
Smythe and Lomelí suddenly cried out in alarm, and Catarina looked up at the screen to see an unknown fleet racing in from her fleet’s starboard, midway between the harvester ships and the arriving reinforcements.
“Twenty ships!” Smythe said.
“What are they?” she demanded.
“They’re still cloaked—can’t exactly tell yet. Only picked them up at all because of reflections bounced off Broderick’s ships.”
“Aye, mate,” Capp said, “but you got their numbers, yeah? So make a bloody guess.”
The tech officer nodded. “Got to be spears and lances. Nothing big enough in there to be a harvester.”
Small comfort. And blast it all, where had they come from?
The fleet had been scanning the system hard, hitting everywhere with active sensors, and it beggared the imagination that a fresh force of hunter-killer packs had crept onto the battlefield undetected. Terrible timing, too. Broderick’s fleet and the joint Void Queen-Blackbeard force would come under fire far short of the main battlefield, potentially delaying them by hours.
And then two things happened almost simultaneously. First, the harvesters and their accompanying forces changed course again, as if turning about to take the battle to Catarina, Tolvern, and Broderick, instead of the admiral. Then, the newcomers dropped their cloaks.
Star wolves. Twenty of them. For a moment, Catarina allowed a wild hope to rise in her breast. And then, even as Capp cheered and pumped her fist, she realized what they were seeing.
“No, Lieutenant. It’s that old Viking trick.”
“Huh? What? Oh. Dammit.”
“Will someone please explain?” Nyb Pim asked. “I do not exactly understand.”
“They’re Olafsen’s ships, all right,” Catarina said. “But he’s not here. He’s projecting their signals to make it look like his fleet—or rather, that a second fleet—is swooping in to attack the enemy.”
“Then there are no ships?” the Hroom said. “I had hoped for unexpected reinforcement.”
“Afraid not, mate,” Capp said. “It’s nothing.”
“I thought there was something funny about the signal,” Smythe said.
“You didn’t say nothing of the sort,” Capp grumbled. “You was fooled like the rest of us. Bet if the Cap’n hadn’t—”
“Look at that,” Smythe interrupted. “We weren’t the only ones fooled.”
The harvesters had been changing course, all right, but it was to meet the phantom fleet of star wolves, who rushed them as if they were going to throw themselves against the enemy in a suicide charge.
“It’s perfect,” Catarina said. “Remember how Broderick pulled Tolvern out of the fire? Must look just like that to the buzzards.”
The supposed star wolves were even firing their pummel guns, or so it appeared. The enemy ships responded with their own kinetic fire and energy pulses. And then . . . nothing. The pummel gun shot vanished like water drops on a hot skittle at the moment they were to have hit. Moments later, the phantom ships flashed through the enemy fleet and vanished.
The harvesters resumed course, apparently realizing they’d been duped. Too late. They’d lost valuable time.
“I wonder if that was McGowan’s idea,” Catarina said.
“Captain Piss Nozzle?” Capp said.
“It’s not his imagination that’s lacking.”
Instead of closing with Drake outside Sheol, the Apex ships pulled up short, within missile range, but not yet close enough to hit back with heavier firepower. The delay was crucial. Broderick’s forces were already arriving at the edge of the battlefield, and his cruisers threw out a few missiles to test range.
“Signal the fleet,” Catarina said. “I want our own missiles in the air the instant we’re in range.”
“We’re still way out there,” Capp said. “We’ll be wasting ammo.”
“Those harvesters are near indestructible, but there are only five of them. We need to flood the battlefield—that’s our big advantage.”
Of the five, one of them stood out from the others. It was a long, roughly rectangular shape, with a flattened tail, five large grasping arms up front, serrated with thousands of bulkhead-chewing teeth, and a pair of eyes on either side. Twin paralyzing rays.
“That big one,” Catarina said. “I’m guessing that’s the flagship. The queen commander’s.”
“You mean the shark-looking one?” Capp asked.
“Looks more like a squid to me.”
“Nah, look at the way the eyes stick out on them stalks, like a hammerhead, yeah?”
“Fine, we’ll call it Hammerhead,” Catarina said. “The smaller one flying next to it we’ll call Tiger, because of the stripes.”
“That’s an artifact of the sensors,” Smythe said. “It doesn’t really have stripes. We’re detecting different armor bands.”
“Tiger it is, mate,” Capp told him.
In quick succession, they named the other ones Rhino, a big, bulky one without arms at all; Donkey, for its ear-like protrusions; and Manta Ray, which had a generally flattened appearance, a bulbous center, and three grasping appendages up front. Manta Ray was the harvester that had chased Tolvern out of the system two weeks earlier.
“Send those names out to the fleet,” Catarina ordered Capp. “They’ll be easy enough to identify, and we’ll be better able to coordinate our attacks.”
Rhino, Manta Ray, and Tiger had resumed closing ranks with Dreadnought, while Hammerhead and Donkey turned about to face the two reinforcing fleets.
“Incoming missiles,” Smythe said. “They’re targeting us. And Blackbeard. And Repulse, and Arrow, and . . . pretty much everyone.”
Countermeasures went out, but there were so many missiles that she couldn’t bring them all down. Jane warned of a pair of class-one detonations, and soon they were absorbing multiple blows.
The smaller harvester—small being a relative term—ignored the allied ships swarming around it and made straight for Void Queen. It was Donkey. The ears seemed to widen, spreading somehow, and a barrage of kinetic fire burst out of them. Cannon arrays. Catarina forced herself to remain calm.
“Pilot, bring us about. Capp, I want those falcons in the air. Smythe, get me the gunnery. I need a full broadside on my mark.”
The ship shuddered, and the shield display lit up with damage reports. The enemy ship was looming now, a monster, with those ears firing bursts of ordnance. Racing in from behind was a hunter-killer pack, energy weapons pulsing.
Barker got on the line and awaited orders.
“Target the right ear,” she said.
“The what?”
“The starboard cannon array,” she said. A glance to her console—the range was closing rapidly. “Ready? Fire!”
Chapter Nineteen
“Vargus is all alone,” Tolvern said sharply. “I want us in there, by God, and I want us in there now.”
The harvester Vargus had named Donkey let loose a barrage of explosive shot from a pair of huge protruding ear-like appendages on either side of the ship. Rumbling in behind was a second harvester, the largest of the five, which had a pair of paralyzing beams on either side. Hammerhead.
Tolvern stared at the screen with alarm as Blackbeard’s sister ship fell under attack. Void Queen, rather than firing off missiles and torpedoes, rolled to present a broadside, even as she absorbed blows up and down her upper decks.
Blackbeard, together with dozens of other ships, was closing fast. Cruisers and destroyers fired torpedoes and cannon, while corvettes streaked in ahead of torpedo boats. The heavily armored mercenary frigate Pussycat waded into the fight, trying to draw some of the fire.
Void Queen fired a broadside. It smashed into Donkey’s starboard cannon batteries. Explosions burst like a dozen tiny suns along the inner wall of the ear-like array.
Blackbeard swung up alongside her sister ship. Tolvern called Finch to confirm that the main battery was ready to go.
“Target starboard cannons,” Tolvern told her. She studied the console, waiting as Donkey continued forward. “Fire!”
More explosions burst along the cannon array. That got Donkey’s attention, and its port cannon array rotated to target the second battle cruiser. Meanwhile, an impossible number of missiles were racing out from along its spine, battering any and all ships that fell within its range.
Blackbeard fired at the secondary cannon array. After that, it was a melee. Clyde and Manx worked to stay clear of Donkey’s sweeping green eye, while Oglethorpe and Bayard fought off enemy fire with physical and electronic countermeasures.
Donkey caught a torpedo boat with the eye. It spiraled out of control, chased by missiles. One of them smashed through the boat’s deck, and it exploded.
To Tolvern’s alarm, three more torpedo boats were drifting, listless, caught in the paralyzing eye while Donkey targeted other enemies. A hunter-killer pack leaped into the fray and began to savage the helpless ships.
One of the fleet elements Vargus had left under Tolvern’s command was the force of six destroyers, with Captain Fox in the lead aboard Ninevah. Tolvern ordered him in to relieve the stranded boats.
Crispin’s falcons were in the air, and went racing in alongside the Carvalho-led striker wing from Void Queen. They cut up along the Z-axis, then dove back down to get behind the harvester’s paralyzing beam. The falcons struck with a barrage of small missiles and pulse fire as they went past in an attempt to blind the eye. Minimal damage, but they did manage to distract the lances and the spear, who moved to cut off the falcons’ escape instead of finishing the helpless torpedo boats.
Void Queen launched a second broadside. Blackbeard followed moments later.
“That blasted cannon array,” Manx said. “We can’t take it down.”
“It’s only firing at thirty percent of its initial strength,” Oglethorpe said.
“Thirty is not enough,” Tolvern said. “Get the gunnery. I want all firepower on that array.”
Even knocking it out entirely would still leave the port cannon array, which had been blasting away all this time, to say nothing of the other missiles emerging from launch bays along its spine.
Nineveh swept past, leading a string of destroyers and torpedo boats to safety. The rear destroyer, a veteran ship named HMS Warrior, lost one of her engines and fell behind. Donkey spotted the opportunity, hit it with the green ray, and closed with its arms grasping.
The pair of battle cruisers fired waves of missiles and torpedoes at the enemy in an attempt to drive it back. They might have succeeded with the assistance of the other six cruisers in their fleet, but those ships had moved to block Hammerhead’s entry onto the battlefield. With little success. Already, the larger harvester’s missiles came raining down on the fleet. Repulse took heavy damage, and Fierce and Triumph were forced to give way as well.
Donkey caught Warrior in its jaws. Tolvern clenched her jaw in frustration as the bulkhead-crushing arms came down on the destroyer.
“Poor bastards,” Manx said in a low voice.
Donkey fell back to join Hammerhead while it swallowed its meal and spit out the broken carapace. The allied fleet was no more able to stop it from falling back than they’d been able to halt its advance.
Vargus called. Her face split the side screen with Broderick’s. He was joining the call from HMS Sledge.
“They’re pushing us out,” Vargus said. “They want to break free.”
“We can stop them,” Tolvern said. “Get Broderick in here, and we’ll pin them in place.”
“I’m almost there,” he said. “Just hold on a few more minutes.”
Indeed, he was already contributing to the fight, with missiles flying in to join the chaos. Broderick’s frigates pulled up short, protected by a mass of cruisers and corvettes pushing eagerly forward.
“It’s not holding these harvesters in place that has me worried,” Vargus said. “We’ve left the admiral alone. He’s already taking a beating.”
Alarmed, Tolvern tapped her console to bring up a small display of the overall battlefield. James had fallen back toward Sheol, using the planet to protect his rear. It kept him safe from flanking maneuvers, but he’d been unable to stop a charge from three harvester ships and a pair of hunter-killer packs. Dreadnought was exchanging blows with the heavily armored Rhino, neither side getting the upper hand, while Tiger and Manta Ray mauled the other ships of his fleet.
“He’s lost a cruiser, a corvette, two destroyers, and a missile frigate already,” Vargus said. “Three of them eaten. Two more destroyers are virtually disabled.”
Tolvern’s mouth went dry.
James, get out of there.
Except he couldn’t. The same planet that protected his rear kept him pinned and unable to escape.
“He needs reinforcements,” she said.
“Incoming fire,” Broderick said. “Brace yourselves.”
Sledge soon pulled in next to the two battle cruisers. With their communications now shielded by Singaporean jammers, Tolvern felt comfortable pressing the issue with her counterparts on Void Queen and Sledge.
“Drake needs reinforcements,” she repeated. “He can’t face three harvesters on his own. McGowan is too far out—it’s got to be one of us.”
“Broderick?” Catarina said.
“I know, I know. I’m thinking!”
The screen lit up with incoming and outgoing fire. One of Broderick’s cruisers was already suffering a vicious assault from Hammerhead’s main guns. The harvester turned greedily toward the ship and caught it with one of its eyes, while the other disabled the ships attempting to relieve it.
Broderick glanced to the side, no doubt taking in this ugly turn of events. His expression remained calm, though he must be seething with conflicting emotions, as were they all.
“Give me a quick estimate,” he said. “What does Drake need, and what can we spare?”
“He needs a battle cruiser,” Tolvern said. “Other cruisers and corvettes, too. I’d say at least twenty ships, bare minimum.”
“That will hold the line. It won’t win the battle. And if I send all those ships, we’ll never hold these two harvesters. Vargus, do you have anything better?”
Hammerhead caught the stricken cruiser in its jaws and tore it apart. Donkey snared another cruiser. This checked their advance, as the harvesters took time to devour their meals. Tolvern had to look away—the final destruction of the ships was too terrible to watch.
“Here’s what we do,” Catarina said. “We send a battle cruiser and thirty ships to Drake—that should be enough. The rest of us hold Donkey here and let Hammerhead through.”
“That’s the biggest Apex ship,” Tolvern said.
“And McGowan is approaching with a huge fleet, anxious to engage.”
“McGowan,” Broderick said. “You think he’s got it in him to handle that monster?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Catarina said. There was something in her eyes, a glance that looked like it was meant for Tolvern only. “But he’ll fight, that’s for sure.”
“You think?” Broderick grunted. “Tolvern?”
“Yes, sir. I’m agreed. He’ll fight.”
“He doesn’t just have to fight,” Broderick said. “He has to win.”
Yes, that was the point, wasn’t it? The inner fleets could reinforce each other, keep fighting against the four remaining harvesters, but if Hammerhead escaped, the war was lost. McGowan had a powerful fleet at his command, but he’d shown himself skittish to engage the enemy. They’d be counting on Tolvern and Vargus’s gambit to work, goading him into action.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. A score of star wolves and their aggressive marauder captains were on hand to make sure the enemy was engaged. Olafsen and Longshanks surely knew that if Hammerhead broke through, there was nothing standing between it and their home systems. No Albion fleet, no Hroom ships, no star wolves—nothing but total extermination of the Scandian people.
Broderick let out his breath with an air of resignation. He lifted a hand to his forehead in an unconscious gesture, only to glance and realize the buzzards had left him wielding a stump on that side.
“All right, let’s see if we can coax these two ships into following our preferred battle plan.” He nodded. “I shall lead the reinforcements. Vargus, you’ll take command of whatever ships I leave behind. Tolvern, you’ll be accompanying me with Blackbeard.”
Tolvern’s stomach lurched. It was just what she’d hoped, to come to James’s aid herself, but she’d been reluctant to make the suggestion.
“Hold position until I divide the fleet.” Broderick killed the connection.
The battle had raged on during the brief conversation. A pair of lances broke apart under heavy fire, and Broderick lost a destroyer. The two harvester ships spit out the shattered husks of the two cruisers and looked about for more victims.
Donkey’s starboard cannon array was finally damaged enough to make an obvious difference, but the other ear kept roaring with outgoing fire, and missiles burst from launch tubes along its spine like a porcupine hurling its quills. Hammerhead’s main guns came into play as it rumbled toward where the two battle cruisers had staked out a defensive position, surrounded by a small flotilla of support vessels.
The orders to ship out came through just as Blackbeard and Void Queen came under fire.
Manx cursed. “We can’t abandon Vargus now.”
Tolvern’s gut churned with emotions. She steeled herself.
“You have your orders, Lieutenant. Carry them out.”
Blackbeard fell back to join Broderick’s rapidly reorganizing fleet, which left Void Queen to stand face-to-face with two harvester ships. Their jaws were already opening in anticipation.
#
Catarina watched as Hammerhead swung its eyes toward Void Queen. The green beam fell on their hull, and mutters of alarm rippled across the bridge.
“Hold your nerve,” she instructed. “It couldn’t get through before, and we have eight more inches of tyrillium up there since last time.”
It felt as though her ship stood alone, awaiting the onslaught as Broderick led Tolvern away from the battlefield and toward the even more desperate struggle playing out above the planet Sheol. In reality, dozens of allied warships were firing in her defense from all sides. The harvesters were powerful, but not invincible, and the ongoing bombardment would do damage. It had to.
Catarina had passed along Broderick’s orders as soon as the conference call ended, or at least as much as she dared to share across open channels. The majority of the firepower targeted Donkey, leaving the larger Hammerhead with just enough incoming fire to keep it honest. With any luck, the enemy would think her plan was to knock Donkey out first. Not to let Hammerhead escape.
She got Barker back on the com. The gunnery chief was calm, and gave a positive assessment of the readiness of their weapon systems.
“Is the Mark-IV loaded in its tube?”
“The special one?” He sounded skeptical. “No, I didn’t think it was time. We’ve got to crack the armor first or it will just splatter against the blasted hull.”
Drake had only given her one nuclear-tipped torpedo to replace the ones she’d expended in the Zoroaster battle. There had only been a handful to distribute across the fleet.
“The enemy doesn’t know our limitations,” Catarina told Barker. “If we throw one against that cannon array, they’ll think we can expend them on tactical maneuvers, and that will make them worry we have more to use down the line. Meanwhile, we knock out that blasted array, which is murdering us.”
“Aye, Captain. Makes sense. I’ll load it up, but you got to get me an opening, first.”
“Warning,” Jane announced. “Class-three explosion expected.”
Catarina braced herself for the big one. Void Queen shuddered. Lights flashed across her console. A burp in the gravity lifted her from her seat and threw her back down. She was stunned and relieved when Jane reported only moderate damage to the number one shield.
“Lomelí,” Catarina snapped. “What the devil is going on over there? Keep those bombs off us.”
“It was a broken spear, sir,” the young woman said.
Catarina had been distracted by her conversation with Barker, but as she looked down at the battle report, she saw what the defense grid specialist was talking about. A spear had been breaking apart under heavy fire, and the burning wreckage had rammed into the battle cruiser in a final suicide charge. It was a wonder Void Queen hadn’t taken more damage.
Donkey and Hammerhead had fought through the cruisers and corvettes standing in their way, and began swatting aside destroyers as they resumed their charge at Void Queen. Catarina felt suddenly weak, and grabbed her armrests to keep from sliding out of her seat.
“Them eyes are getting through, Cap’n,” Capp said. “We can’t block ’em both.”
Both harvesters were targeting the battle cruiser with paralyzing beams, and some of it was penetrating the bridge. The enemy ships jostled each other, grasping arms opening, each one eager to take the battle cruiser as a prize.
Catarina strapped herself into the jump harness. Her hands were numb and her arms heavy, but she could still work the console, and she could still give orders over the com. Barker reported grimly that the gunnery was still online, and further reports indicated that marines were standing by for a final attempt to repel boarders.
Allied warships clawed their way through the outgoing fire to hammer at the two ships and try to drive them off. Cruisers pulled in close, launched broadsides, and retreated. Destroyers, Hroom sloops, and torpedo boats all got dangerously close to the action, even while lances and spears added their firepower to the battlefield.
The harvesters fired on them all. A sloop broke apart. A torpedo boat exploded. A destroyer retreated, engines bleeding plasma and gasses venting along the hull while a pair of lances ripped it open.
Carvalho’s striker wing came screaming in, targeting one of Hammerhead’s eyes. The falcons fired a bevy of missiles and followed up with energy pulses before spears and outgoing kinetic fire drove them off.
None of the relief attempts delayed the two monsters for long, and all the while, Catarina was growing weaker. The harvesters were no longer targeting Void Queen with anything but the paralyzing rays. They had another fate in mind for the battle cruiser, and their weapon systems were free to annihilate other allied ships. A corvette lost an engine and retreated with her armor shredded. Even Pussycat fell back at last, unable to absorb any more damage to her turtle-like shell.
An incoming message from Hao Cheng. Catarina had almost forgotten about him and his plan to lead his small fleet of war junks on some sort of mission. If he wanted to do it, now was his opportunity, and he certainly didn’t need her permission. She had no time for his call now, and didn’t answer it.
Void Queen fired another broadside. It struck Donkey across the snout, and the enemy ship seemed to hesitate, but only for a moment. It was looming, arms opening, even as Hammerhead held back a pace to keep firing on the other ships. The conflict over who got to devour the battle cruiser had apparently been settled.
“Fire the nuclear torpedo,” Catarina ordered.
Six torpedoes rumbled away from the ship, all Mark-IVs. One of them packed a bigger punch than the others. The crew braced themselves, waiting for Donkey to knock the torpedoes down with countermeasures, but the enemy ship was busy fighting through a final, desperate charge by a mixed force of destroyers, corvettes, and cruisers, and it ignored the torpedoes.
Another destroyer exploded. Then Catarina lost a corvette, HMS Arrow, which was breaking apart with explosions. As it went down, Arrow tried to ram Donkey. That effort failed, and Arrow detonated a few miles short of its target.
Catarina slumped, barely able to hold her head upright. Her torpedoes had almost arrived, but so had the harvester.
“Come on,” Capp muttered next to her. She stared, bleary-eyed, at the viewscreen. “Get through, blast it.”
Torpedoes struck Donkey on its starboard ear. The first two were barely pinpricks, but the third went off in a flash of light. It overwhelmed the sensors for a long moment, and when they came back online, Donkey was reeling. The starboard cannon array was gone, nothing but a smoking ruin.
Catarina felt stronger, and Smythe shouted that one of the harvester’s eyes had gone out as well.
“Cap’n, that Chinese bloke wants to talk to you,” Capp said.
“I know that, Lieutenant. But we’re a little busy here.”
With the starboard ear obliterated, she ordered all forces to target Donkey’s port-side cannon array. There was already a noticeable decrease of outgoing missile fire from the smaller of the two harvesters, and if only she could knock down that second array, she’d be halfway to winning the fight. Well, maybe a third.
Hammerhead began to withdraw. No, that wasn’t right. Not withdrawing so much as fighting its way through Catarina’s forces along the Y-axis, trying to break free for . . . where?
“It’s taking the bait,” Smythe said from the tech console. “Going to make a run for it.”
“Give me specifics.”
“There’s only one way out of this dead-end system, Captain.”
“I know that, Lieutenant. But is it headed toward the minefield, at McGowan, back to Persia . . .what?”
Smythe couldn’t answer this question, so Catarina set Nyb Pim to plotting the enemy’s likely course through the nav computer.
Catarina sent Repulse out as if to try to delay Hammerhead. The cruiser had fallen back after taking heavy damage, but her weapon systems were back online. Repulse lined up for a broadside, firing off missiles and torpedoes. It was little more than a feint, an attempt to make it less obvious to the enemy that Catarina wanted Hammerhead to escape. To add to the effect, Catarina threw a trio of destroyers and four sloops into the mix, with orders to fall back as soon as they came under heavy fire.
The enemy took the threat seriously. Hammerhead launched a massive barrage of missiles that swept the destroyers and sloops clear, then lunged at Repulse. The cruiser got off a broadside and two more torpedoes. But her shields were already damaged, and kinetic fire pulverized her engines.
While Catarina watched in horror, Hammerhead disabled the cruiser with paralyzing rays, harpooned it, and hauled it toward the bulkhead-tearing appendages up front. A pair of escape pods jettisoned from Repulse at the last moment. The rest of the crew was caught on board as the larger of the two harvesters escaped the battlefield with a prize in its jaws.
She forced herself to turn away. Capp was on the com, speaking to Broderick and Tolvern, who had engaged with the enemy near Drake’s fleet. Capp shook her head grimly at whatever they were telling her.
“It’s getting ugly down there, Cap’n.”
“Then we’d better finish things here so we can lend them a hand.”
Donkey was still fighting on, as were several spears and lances, although the bulk of the hunter-killer threat had been neutralized. The smaller harvester, which had successfully helped its larger companion break out, but failed to seize Void Queen, might be trying to fall back toward Sheol to join forces with the three harvesters outside the planet. Hard to say.
Either way, she had to destroy the thing. But how? The allied forces had already lost numerous ships, thousands of crew, and had their carefully planned formations broken apart. And what did they have to show for it? A few spears and lances and a single large cannon array on the weaker of the harvesters. The cursed thing still matched the firepower of her weakened fleet.
“It’s that Chinese fellow again,” Capp said. “He says he’s got to talk to you.”
Catarina groaned. “Fine, put him up. Side screen so I don’t lose track of the battle.”
Captain Cheng appeared. He maintained his trim, neat bearing, the calm that he carried at all times—impressive, given that Catarina was sure she looked ragged herself, a ball of nervous energy—and there was something else glinting in his eyes. The steely gaze of a hunter pursuing his kill.
“Yes, you have my permission,” she said impatiently. “I’ve already given it. Fire away, Cheng.”
“I’ve done that. Now I need you to act.”
“You need me to act?” she said. “What do you think I’m doing here?”
A glance at the main screen. Donkey was slugging it out with a dozen Albion warships targeting its port cannon array. Yet another destroyer was falling back, armor shattered and torpedo tubes obliterated.
“I need you to support my operations,” he said. Again, she noted that glint in his eyes.
“Cheng, what are you babbling about? You’ve got nine bloody war junks, and they’re nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, I’m losing ships right and left, Hammerhead escaped, and Donkey tried to eat my ship and spit out the bones. And that’s barely a metaphor. Get in the action if you want, but stop wasting my time.”
“I’m in the action now,” he said, his voice even more forceful. “Figure that out and you’ll know exactly what to do.”
With that, he cut the line.
“Smythe, find those war junks and figure out what Cheng is going on about,” Catarina said. “Use active sensors, whatever we’ve got.”
The alien commander had apparently found her nerve again after the nuclear strike, and Donkey was closing again, rather than retreating to Sheol. A wave of allied warships came up from below, while destroyers continued to pound the harvester from above. Little was getting through the enemy countermeasures and armor.
“Captain!” Smythe shouted. “I found Cheng. Look!”
He rotated the view of the battlefield to show Donkey from a different angle, with the harvester no longer shown as a purely visual representation, but as a thermal image. A white-hot spot glowed on its underbelly, in front of the engines and behind one of the bubble-like protrusions that contained the ship’s larder: thousands of Persians in stasis, awaiting their slaughter.
Smythe was working furiously at his console, and soon brought up another visual representation. There, a collection of gray blobs, which had to be the heavily cloaked Singaporean vessels, concentrated in a mass, so close to the harvester ship that it could have harpooned every last one of them with little effort. If only it knew where they were.
“I don’t understand,” Capp said. “What are they doing?”
“I believe Cheng has softened up a large patch of the enemy ship for us,” Catarina said.
Capp touched her ear. “I’ll tell the fleet!”
“No! Stop! You tell them and the buzzards hear. Then Cheng is dead and the advantage gone. We’ve got to charge forward on our own and hope the rest are smart enough to follow. Nyb Pim, bring us in. Capp, get me the gunnery.”
Moments later, they had Void Queen underway, flying straight at the harvester ship and its grasping arms, which opened wide in an eager embrace.
Chapter Twenty
Olafsen cut off two separate attempts by his crew to start the Scandian war chant.
“Too soon,” he told them. “Not until we’re in combat.”
Let them chant. It may be the last time. Maybe for us all.
No, not yet.
His men were eager. Down in the launch bays, not only on Bloodaxe, but across the Scandian fleet, raiders were out of stasis, loaded in mech suits. Ready to board or be boarded. The men running the engines had them hot, just at the edge of the containment fields’ capacity. Gunnery crew had stockpiled pummel gun ammo and double-checked missile batteries. Everywhere, men were ready to fight, to kill, to die.
Here, on the bridge of Bloodaxe, Björnman, Jarn, and the others kept shouting their orders, punctuating everything with curses and pleas to the gods.
Olafsen had been growing increasingly uneasy as he watched the twin battles play out near the planet Sheol. So far, the allied fleet had yet to destroy a single harvester, while losing more than twenty ships between Drake’s battle and Vargus’s. True, they’d taken out more than a dozen lances and spears, but what did that matter if they couldn’t bring down the main enemy battleships?
The only real victory had been Vargus’s successful destruction of Donkey’s cannon array. But in the meantime, the largest of the five harvesters, Hammerhead, had slipped loose and was now barreling down on the only remaining force capable of stopping its escape into Nebuchadnezzar: Olafsen and McGowan.
“Maybe the minefield will hold them a while,” Björnman said.
Olafsen grunted. “Doubtful. But even a few minutes would help. The closer we take this fight to the main battlefield the better.”
“Main battlefield? We’ve got eighty ships right here! This is the main battlefield, Marauder Captain.”
Not with four harvesters battering the allied forces outside of Sheol, it wasn’t. But his chief mate was right in one regard. This would be the battle on which it all turned, with Olafsen, Longshanks, and McGowan earning either a glorious victory or a defeat so profound that no human or Hroom would live to tell it.
Hammerhead stumbled into the Albion minefield, laid down earlier to turn it and Donkey away from a straight flight toward the Nebuchadnezzar jump point. While mines exploded off its hull, Drake’s three frigates, kept out of the fight so far by distance from the battlefield, let loose a firestorm of missiles.
The ferocity of the frigate attack forced the harvester and its escorting hunter-killer pack to slow and fight them. Missiles flashed out from the harvester. A few more precious minutes, Olafsen thought with grim satisfaction. But may the gods protect those frigates.
The three ships turned to flee. Two frigates got away, making for McGowan’s force, but the third took a hit to an engine, and began to falter. A pair of lances trailed it, blasting with energy pulses. The poor fools were soon dead, their ship gutted, their life-sustaining atmosphere vented into the void.
“Twenty minutes,” Jarn announced.
“I want every man on this bridge in his mech suit,” Olafsen said. “Tech officers first, then chief mate, then I’ll fetch my own.”
“By the gods,” Björnman said, “how will we fly the ship suited up?”
“We’ll sync with the onboard computer and give our commands by voice.”
“There will be a delay running it through our suits,” Björnman said. “That could prove critical. If you’re afraid about being boarded . . .”
His voice trailed off, and he joined the others in staring at the marauder captain. Olafsen took the rune hammer pendant hanging around his neck and rubbed its cool silver surface between his thumb and forefinger, suddenly consumed by doubt.
Olafsen closed his eyes and offered a prayer to the gods. A plea. If this were to be the end, let it be a glorious one. He tucked the rune hammer inside his shirt and let it rest against his breastbone, then turned to the others, who remained silent.
“I’m not afraid of being boarded. I’m embracing it, in fact.”
Björnman’s eyes widened. “We can defeat this monster in open battle. We have eighty ships!”
“Smaller harvesters than this one are chewing through destroyers and cruisers like a bear snatching salmon from a stream,” Olafsen said. “There is no battleship here, no battle cruiser. Nothing to stop it.”
“Twenty star wolves!” Björnman protested. “And cruisers. Missile frigates. Such firepower! I’ve never flown in such a fleet.”
“And neither have I. But it won’t be enough.” Olafsen took in a breath and let it out slowly. “Five blackfish are ready, packed with mech raiders. If they can get inside that harvester, then we’ll see, won’t we? Our mech suits will tear those buzzards apart from inside while the rest of the fleet keeps up its bombardment.”
There were skeptical looks at this. How many thousands of drones on that big harvester? What chance was there the blackfish could survive the harvester’s weapons and ram its hull?
“But only if we guard the blackfish approach,” he continued. “Create a distraction, an opening for them. I shared my plan with Longshanks already, and my brother spread it to the other captains. They will charge the paralyzing eyes and attack with all pummel guns to draw fire. Meanwhile, we’ll approach the monster’s jaws.”
Curses and shouts of disbelief greeted this pronouncement, and Olafsen growled at them to shut up and listen.
“It wants McGowan—Peerless is the main prize from this fleet—but a good second choice is Bloodaxe. Us. The enemy commander wants to eat the men on this ship. We’re going to let it grab us.”
“We are?” Björnman asked.
“That’s why we’re suiting up. When those arms rip open Bloodaxe, they will find us in our mech suits. And then, my friends, we will bring down the wrath of the gods.”
#
Twenty minutes later, they were in combat. The two escaping missile frigates blew past the Scandian forces, looking for refuge, even as McGowan threw his ships out in a defensive formation. Cruisers up front, screened by destroyers. Corvettes and destroyers ready to lead a torpedo boat charge. Missile frigates to the rear, protected from short-range jumps by General Mose Dryz and fifteen Hroom sloops of war.
Peerless hung back from the main cruiser force in the vanguard. McGowan was directing the battle from the rear and ostensibly holding a reserve force of two other cruisers and a pair of corvettes, ready to charge in as a relief force.
No surprise there. McGowan may have thrown his fleet into the battle, but his own ship remained well protected. A few stray missiles harried the small knot of ships, but McGowan brought them down with countermeasures.
Hammerhead launched a long-range barrage. McGowan responded in kind. The void between them filled with dozens of crossing missiles. Countermeasures flashing, exploding.
Olafsen nudged his star wolves and blackfish forward, waiting for a lull in the long-range fighting so he could make his charge. His brother’s ship, Thor’s Hammer, lurked off port, with Frost Giant, Hellfire, Firebolt, and Devil’s Tooth sweeping behind them, followed by the five blackfish and numerous other star wolves in the rear.
A trio of lances approached, trying to lure the Scandians toward the harvester. Withering pummel gun fire drove them back again. A few minutes later, the enemy made another attempt, this time with six lances and a pair of spears. The two sides traded blows, until again, the Scandians threw back the attack. Again, Olafsen declined to pursue.
The harvester fired long-range projectiles at the Scandians throughout this exchange, but directed the bulk of its attack against a wave of Albion warships that swooped in to batter its shields with torpedoes and cannon.
“Now?” Björnman said.
His voice was tinny through his helmet and across the com. The men on the bridge had suited up, together with every other crew member on board. A hundred more raiders were out of stasis and packed the hold, to go along with the hundreds of raiders on board the blackfish, waiting for their chance to take the fight to the enemy.
The harvester rolled toward the oncoming force of Albion ships. The eyes flashed green. A destroyer’s guns fell silent, but the harvester ignored it as it swept past. It paralyzed a corvette next, and left it to drift back alongside the harvester’s rear guns. The corvette was a gutted wreck before its crew could recover.
The fleet lost a destroyer minutes later, followed by a charging torpedo boat, which detonated before it could fire its weapons. Other torpedoes, missiles, and cannon fire struck the harvester, but none inflicted significant damage.
And then Hammerhead spotted a prize. This was HMS Zealand, an Aggressor-class cruiser that had approached to fire a broadside. She got off her guns, but couldn’t fall back before the harvester caught her with the paralyzing ray. The grasping appendages opened wide.
“Now!” Olafsen said.
Bloodaxe leaped forward. Two dozen other Scandian warships followed. They let loose a massive blast of concentrated pummel gun fire that struck the harvester on its upper decks as it caught hold of Zealand with its arms. They came down, serrated edges biting into the cruiser’s hull.
Wolves attacked from all sides. The blackfish came, too, sidling up to the enemy ship, but drifting back under pressure of enemy fire, unable to close for their main mission.
All of Olafsen’s attention was focused on trying to free that cruiser. To knock out the arms, to force the enemy to respond. Anything to get the enemy’s attention. Albion warships joined the assault, and now, to Olafsen’s astonishment, McGowan’s small reserve force made its move.
Throughout the initial stages of battle, Peerless had reminded Olafsen of a powerful mastiff, calm and aloof, sleepy even, as she surveyed the battlefield. Now aroused to battle, she came roaring into the fight. All guns blazing.
“He’s no coward after all,” Olafsen muttered.
Hammerhead could no longer ignore the attack. It spat out Zealand, which bled plasma and flaming gasses from a dozen wounds. Men and women were still alive in there, trying to get the engines moving, firing as the cruiser limped away.
The harvester, now fighting back in earnest, shortly obliterated another cruiser and two destroyers. The Scandians were taking devastating fire, as well. Devil’s Tooth exploded, followed by the death of two more wolves in quick succession.
Hammerhead made a lunge for Peerless, which danced out of the way and took shelter behind a barricade of Albion warships. In frustration, the harvester lashed out with a battering ram of outgoing missiles and other exploding ordnance, which cleaved a path right to McGowan’s cruiser. Explosions burst along the cruiser’s spine, and it seemed as though the man and his ship would die right then and there.
But a fresh push of star wolves forced the enemy’s attention. Bloodaxe, Thor’s Hammer, and Firebolt took position in front of the enemy bridge, where they pumped in pummel gun fire. Other wolves bit and snarled along the enemy’s flanks.
Hammerhead turned toward Bloodaxe, which inched out alone. The green eye swept toward them. Olafsen’s knees buckled, but the mech suit attenuated the paralyzing beam. He didn’t need full strength from his muscles; the suit would do it for him.
“Don’t pull back,” he ordered Jarn.
Bloodaxe drifted toward the harvester. Blackfish scooted in to one side, ready to hurl themselves against the enemy hull. The grasping arms reached for Olafsen’s ship.
This time it was the marauder captain himself who started the chant:
Blood, spoil, plunder, death.
Valhalla!
The others shouted along. War cries punctuated each line.
Then Bloodaxe shuddered. Alarms sounded everywhere. The enemy had them in its grasp.
#
Void Queen rolled away from Donkey’s eager embrace. Catarina nearly swooned as a paralyzing eye tried to burn a hole through the ship’s hull and incapacitate the crew, but she still had command of her facilities and fought through it. She ordered torpedoes thrown out the back, and the harvester, already struck by a nuclear torpedo, was forced to respond.
Countermeasures brought down the torpedoes, but Void Queen used the distraction to squirm free. A ferocious bombardment from Triumph and Fierce helped guard her escape. Catarina was trying to get around the back side of the enemy ship, where Cheng’s war junks continued their quiet assault, but smaller Apex craft were making it difficult.
“Get that spear out of there,” she ordered.
“Trying, sir,” Smythe said. “Its energy pulses are lighting us up right where that bomb struck earlier.”
“Warning,” Jane said. “Number five shield at thirty-two percent.”
“That’s the blasted armory,” Capp said. “We lose the number five and we’re done for.”
A pair of sloops came to Void Queen’s aid and swarmed the spear with bomblets from their serpentine batteries. At last the Hroom forced the spear to retreat, where it fell into the waiting clutches of Pussycat and Nineveh, along with the rest of Fox’s destroyer wing. They blasted it apart with a punishing wave of cannon fire.
Catarina’s losses continued to mount as well. Another destroyer lost. A sloop. One of her falcons.
“We’re through!” Smythe said. “There’s the soft spot.”
As seen through the sensors, the weakened portion of tyrillium glowed along a wide swath of the enemy hull. Under the Singaporeans’ concentrated energy beam, it should be as soft as melting glass, but thick. She had to hit it and hit it hard.
“Bring us up from below for a broadside. I want explosive shot in every gun.”
Capp called the gunnery, while Nyb Pim maneuvered them into position. Smythe and Lomelí worked desperately to repel enemy fire, with only limited success at this range.
Void Queen shuddered. Another heavy blow absorbed. The number seven shield this time. It fell to thirty-nine percent.
“Captain?” Capp said.
“Hold your nerve. We’ve got to get closer.”
Catarina clenched her jaw in determination. She ignored blow after blow against her shields. A strike to the engines nearly breached the containment field, but engineering got it under control. Donkey loomed alongside, dwarfing the battle cruiser.
Now!
“Fire main battery.”
Void Queen shuddered. Tons of explosive shot raced out and struck the enemy ship right in the weakened spot. It smashed straight through Donkey’s hull, and a massive secondary explosion sent a jet of flame and debris shooting hundreds of feet into space. The harvester fell back, reeling. Gas kept venting in flaming geysers.
Only now did the enemy seem to understand its risk, twisting like a harpooned whale as it tried to escape its tormentors, now charging from every side. And it had no more allies; the lances and spears had at last been swept from the battlefield.
As Donkey bucked and twisted to protect its shattered underbelly, waves of ships pushed a relentless attack. Cannon, torpedoes, missiles, serpentines, energy pulses. Falcons and torpedoes. Destroyers, cruisers, corvettes. Sloops and mercenary schooners. They struck the damaged, burning section of the enemy ship again and again.
“It’s breaking up,” Smythe shouted. “My God, it’s coming apart.”
Catarina ordered a full retreat. The front of the harvester exploded, and arms shot out like missiles, venting. The engine ruptured next, destroying the rear of the ship. Pieces the size of torpedo boats burst from the midsection and exploded, and finally, the entire central part of the ship broke apart, each large piece flaming, exploding as gasses and bombs and missiles all went off at once.
Shouts of joy and relief sounded across the bridge of Void Queen. They’d destroyed a harvester ship—a bloody harvester ship!—and this time there were no caveats. A complete and total victory.
Catarina permitted herself a moment of celebration, but was already pulling up McGowan’s battle on the main viewscreen while the others were still cheering. He was suffering heavy damage as he tried to stop Hammerhead, losing star wolves, destroyers, and cruisers, either destroyed or crippled and unable to fight. Even Peerless was in the thick of it this time, although it was the Scandian force that was fighting most aggressively, and, to her eyes, fruitlessly.
She caught her breath when she switched to the other battle. Dreadnought was surrounded by all three of the other harvesters, Manta Ray, Tiger, and Rhino, who had forced the admiral up against the planet Sheol and were trying to kill or capture him. Drake’s fleet was trying desperately to break him free, but couldn’t get through the blockade. In rumbled Blackbeard, Sledge, and a host of other ships, but Catarina feared they wouldn’t be able to break through, either. The enemy was too strong.
Capp, Smythe, and the others fell silent as they took it in.
“Send orders,” Catarina said quietly. “All ships to proceed at once to Sheol. I only pray that we arrive in time.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Blackbeard and Sledge roared into the fight like a pair of enraged lions, unleashing a barrage of torpedoes, missiles, and cannon fire at the nearest of the three harvester ships. More than two dozen cruisers, corvettes, and destroyers followed on their heels, and the enemy was soon taking a ferocious beating from the rear.
The targeted harvester was Manta Ray, the same ship that had chased Tolvern’s battered fleet out of Persia, and its wide, flattened shape provided the perfect profile for attacks from above and below. By the time it rolled about to face this new, aggressive threat, Blackbeard had fired all its cannons and was gathering for a second blast. The harvester’s eye swept them with a paralyzing green ray, but it was too distant for the beam to penetrate the battle cruiser’s hull. It fired a harpoon in an attempt to snare a nearby destroyer, but the ship successfully shot down the harpoon with countermeasures before it hit.
“Load the nuke,” Tolvern ordered.
Manx gave her the briefest of looks before passing her orders down to Finch in the gunnery. Blackbeard had one and only one nuclear torpedo. To use it now, when the enemy’s shields were still near maximum strength, was a risk. And only about half of the torpedoes were getting past the enemy’s countermeasures.
But if she could hit it in the mouth, while the grasping appendages were open, she might be able to shove the torpedo right down its gullet.
Meanwhile, Tolvern and Broderick’s counterattack had arrived just in time. Dreadnought’s back was to the planet, and the three harvesters had been bludgeoning her with an overwhelming display of firepower. Closer in, Rhino was taking the bulk of Dreadnought’s counter punches, but Vargus had named the harvester appropriately, and the enemy ship’s thick hide was weathering the storm. Drake’s fleet had shredded the hunter-killer packs arrayed against it, but numerous allied ships had already been destroyed, damaged, or knocked out of the fight.
“Finch says the torpedo is ready,” Manx said. “You’re sure about this, Captain?”
“Yes, Lieutenant. Tell Finch to target that ugly mouth—we’re going to tear it apart.”
Manx gave the orders into the com, while Tolvern drew a deep breath. She was far less certain than she sounded. When Manx looked up again, she gave him a short, sharp nod.
Manx spoke into his com. “Fire at will.”
Another wave of torpedoes rolled out from the battle cruiser to join the mass of ordnance hitting the harvester from above and below. Hidden within that outgoing wave was the nuclear torpedo. Finch had done her work well; there was nothing to make one of the torpedoes stand out from any of the others.
Manta Ray let loose a fireworks display of missiles, rockets, and bomblets that forced the counterattacking ships below it to flee for their lives. Once its belly was clear of enemies, it opened ports and dropped out dozens of small black pod-like ships, each about the size of a falcon from Blackbeard’s striker wing. Good. Anything to keep it distracted.
Tolvern held her breath as the torpedoes closed the distance. Manta Ray brought down some with countermeasures. Others slammed into the harvester, one after another in a series of explosions. None of them were large enough to crack the ship’s armor, and certainly none of them had packed a nuclear punch. Her hopes collapsed.
“Dammit,” she said. “Manx, confirm with the gunnery.”
“Confirmed,” Manx reported glumly. “It fell to countermeasures.”
Tolvern didn’t have time to wallow. The small striker craft disgorging from Manta Ray’s underbelly were organizing into small wings and swarming the battlefield. The largest wing targeted Blackbeard’s falcons, which had been charging in with some of Drake’s torpedo boats to try to disable the harvester’s eyes.
Tolvern had given Crispin command of the striker wing after Stratsky’s death, and his falcons fought back gamely, but were outnumbered nearly two to one, and Crispin couldn’t maintain the same discipline on the battlefield as his predecessor. One falcon fell, then another. A third falcon, then Crispin’s own ship went off like a giant firecracker.
Shaken by the rapid destruction of her striker wing coming on the heels of her failed nuclear strike, Tolvern had no choice but to recall the rest of the falcons. Three more fell before they were clear. She’d lost two thirds of her entire striker wing in a matter of minutes.
Other enemy strikers smashed a torpedo boat, chased off a corvette, and wrecked one of Drake’s supporting destroyers. Freed from their battle with the falcons, the surviving enemy strikers from the first wave came at Sledge and a pair of other cruisers, who finally held the line. Cannon fire shredded one striker wing, and deck guns chased off the others.
Blackbeard fired another broadside. Kinetic shot tore into the harvester’s upper decks, but didn’t break through.
Broderick called from Sledge. His face was grim. “We’ve got its attention, at least. That should buy Drake some time.”
Tolvern cast a doubtful glance at a side screen showing the combat above Sheol. Three of James’s cruisers had fought through the enemy forces to join Dreadnought and form a unified front, but Rhino and Tiger were easily holding off the rest of his fleet while they tried to finish off the battleship.
“We’ve got to take care of Manta Ray,” she said, “and in a hurry.”
Officers across the bridge cheered suddenly, and Tolvern turned to see what had them going.
“It’s Donkey!” Oglethorpe shouted. “They got that son of a bitch.”
Caught in the heat of her own life-and-death struggle, Tolvern had momentarily forgotten the other battles. Vargus, left with only a rump fleet after Blackbeard and Sledge had abandoned her with two harvester ships, seemed to have pulled off an impossible feat. Donkey was breaking apart under sustained fire.
Vargus must have pulled some trick. But what?
“There’s an unusual heat signature on the biggest piece of wreckage,” Oglethorpe said. “Shows up on the sensors like the plasma ejectors we used to see on the Sentinel battle station.”
Singaporean tech. So that was it.
Tolvern turned back to Broderick, careful with her words in case the enemy was listening. “Whatever happened out there, I’ll be glad to get Void Queen back into the fight. Maybe that will turn the tide.”
“If we can hold on that long,” he said grimly.
Manta Ray’s striker attack was faltering, but the gambit had demolished the Albion counterattack. Cruisers and corvettes were out of position, and multiple warships were withdrawing to effect emergency repairs to engines and damaged airlocks, bulkheads, and weapon systems. The harvester seemed to think the threat gone, and wheeled around to rejoin the attack on Dreadnought. It would be back in the fight in a matter of minutes if Tolvern and Broderick didn’t stop it.
Broderick glanced to one side, seemed to notice the same thing, and announced, “We’re going in. All available forces. We’ll find the weakest shielding and hit it with everything we’ve got.” He vanished from the screen.
Tolvern turned to Oglethorpe. “Find me a damaged section of the hull, a weakened shield . . . something.”
He came back with something moments later.
“Here you go, Captain. There’s a piece of cracked armor roughly forty or fifty yards behind the bridge. I’m highlighting it for you now.”
Tolvern didn’t wait for confirmation, but ordered fire directed at the weak spot. Other cruisers, corvettes, and destroyers pressed in on all sides, and a heavy stream of fire was soon blasting up at the targeted piece of armor. Broderick brought Sledge up alongside Blackbeard, then nudged past. Tolvern ordered Clyde to follow Broderick’s lead. Other ships did the same.
Manta Ray had resumed firing long-range missiles at Dreadnought, but couldn’t ignore the renewed attack for long. It released a burst of missiles and self-propelled bombs, which slammed into the joint Blackbeard-Sledge fleet. A cruiser broke apart, and a corvette fell under the harvester’s paralyzing gaze. The harvester snatched the corvette out of the sky with its grasping appendages, ripped it open, and cast it aside. The green ray swept out once more.
And found HMS Sledge.
Too late, Broderick tried to fall back. But he was at such close range that the beam seemed to be penetrating his bridge and engine room. The Punisher-class cruiser drifted, unresponsive. Manta Ray lunged.
“Get us in there!” Tolvern shouted.
She made a desperate call to Broderick’s bridge, but Sledge was nonresponsive. She overrode Broderick’s control of the main fleet com and gave a general order: full-scale assault. Torpedo boats darted in to drop their weapons from close range, while destroyers swept past the harvester’s jaws, now stretching to snare Sledge from the sky. Blackbeard had already fired her broadside, but targeted the grasping appendages with her secondary battery and deck gun. Torpedoes rushed from their tubes.
Even while moving on Sledge, Manta Ray turned its guns on Blackbeard. Explosions smashed into the fore and aft shields, and Jane offered a grim assessment of mounting damage. Tolvern ignored her ominous pronouncements and the worried noises of the crew, and forced Blackbeard closer.
“I need a broadside. Now!”
Too late. Manta Ray stretched its arms and grabbed Sledge.
The captured cruiser seemed to awaken. Her guns went off, and shouts came over the com from Broderick and others on board. The horrific details of the enemy attack came through in the cries for help and the orders to crew and marines. Apex drones were flooding the ship, overwhelming the marines trying to hold them back. The enemy had reached the bridge, Broderick shouted. The sound of gunfire and then . . . nothing.
A single escape pod launched, carrying a couple of techs who’d been fortunate to be near enough to the launch bay to get the hell out before it was too late. And then Manta Ray spit out its victim. Sledge’s gutted, split hull drifted, still sparking and burning with venting gasses. The harvester looked about for its next meal.
Blackbeard had rushed in until it was only a few hundred yards away. The nearest allied warships were falling back, and Tolvern stood alone as the enemy’s paralyzing beam swept toward them, and the arms stretched to grab her ship and devour it.
#
Battle drones burst through the floor and ceiling and came screaming onto the bridge of Bloodaxe. The birds wore bizarre harness-like contraptions with guns, flamethrowers, and tubes from which grenades flew, operated by beaks and talons. Others wore helmets that flashed beams of green light.
Olafsen let out a wild cry and fired a hail of bullets. Blood and feathers and the tang of burning machinery filled the air. A paralyzing beam swept over him, but he fought through it, and his suit was unaffected.
Two birds with green lights caught Jarn in a sort of crossfire, and the young signalman froze in place. Other drones knocked him down. They had hardened metallic-looking beaks and mechanical claws, which they used to tear into the joints of his suit.
Olafsen aimed his guns and let loose a pair of short bursts that shredded the attackers, but Jarn lay on his back, screaming and flailing, with birds still about his face. More birds rushed him and resumed tearing into his suit.
Olafsen, Björnman, and two other raiders formed a knot and fired on the drones that kept pouring onto the bridge, even as they fought toward the flailing signalman. The birds got Jarn out of his suit—or most of him, anyway, as one of his feet had somehow remained behind—and dragged him off, screaming, toward one of the gaping holes on the bridge.
Olafsen cursed and surged forward with his companions following, but a bomb struck one of the others, who fell, and the remaining raiders had to fight desperately to save him from a similar fate. Jarn and his captors disappeared.
“Too many buzzards,” Björnman said. “Too damn many. We’re going to die.”
Olafsen turned and blasted a bird shrieking toward him with wings flapping. “Then I will see you in Valhalla, friend. Today we will drink with our grandfathers.”
“They’ll never take me alive.”
“By the gods, no.”
The shattered bridge was full of dead enemies now, and screams and curses and shouts across the com indicated that there were drones in all parts of the ship, still flooding in from the harvester. The enemy was winning, capturing prisoners and killing those who couldn’t be taken alive.
Just when he thought the battle lost, the flood of incoming drones slowed dramatically, then stopped altogether. Olafsen scarcely dared to hope.
“Lars,” a voice said through his com. “You still there? Lars!”
Olafsen regained his balance. The voice came from his brother, somewhere above on Thor’s Hammer with the rest of the allied fleet.
“Yeah, Sven. I’m alive. Barely. What the devil is going on out there?”
“The blackfish are in place. They’ve broken through the hull and are dropping raiders into the enemy’s nest.”
So that was it. Olafsen’s gambit, sacrificing his ship, had worked after all. Distracted the enemy long enough to let the blackfish slip in under their defenses. And the buzzards’ attempt to take Bloodaxe’s crew alive had failed because they were now fighting off a furious onslaught of Scandian raiders elsewhere in their ship. A fierce pride rose in Olafsen’s breast.
“But you’d better hurry,” Sven said. “Get in there and finish it. This blasted Hammerhead”—the English word sounded strange on Sven’s tongue— “is tearing us apart. By Odin’s beard, we can’t hold them off much longer.”
Olafsen got onto the com. “Take this fight through to the enemy, raiders. Anywhere you find a breach, follow it through onto the enemy ship. Blood and plunder!”
He gestured with his armored hand toward one of the gaps sheared in the bridge. Björnman and the others joined him in tearing apart the mound of dead enemies and the shattered remnants of two mech suits, one of them Jarn’s, to get at the hole. A cool red light glowed through from the other side.
And then Olafsen was pushing through, into the harvester ship and the lair of the queen commander.
Chapter Twenty-two
Tolvern stared at the screen as Manta Ray closed on Blackbeard with its appendages swinging. The arms had serrated edges, and now, at finer resolution, she could see throbbing red lights on the inner surface of each arm, bubble-like objects that must contain drones to be injected into her ship.
“Is the main battery ready?” she asked. “Good. Fire all available weapons. Drive it off.”
Oglethorpe responded. Manx and Clyde, too. She didn’t hear them, only her own voice. It sounded calm, almost eerily so as it gave an impossible command.
Inside, she was engulfed in turmoil enough to match the flashing lights, the alarms, and Jane’s warning voice running through a litany of shield damage. A marine colonel shouted over the com, something about his men out of stasis needing more time to get armed and in position.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she reached for her sidearm, not yet drawing it, but needing to feel its cool steel in her hand.
Drive it off.
So simple to say. They would be in the monster’s grasp. Only a matter of seconds now, and then the drones would be on top of her. She should use the pistol to shoot herself in the head before they took her alive, but of course she couldn’t do that. She had to keep fighting to the end.
The ship shuddered. Tolvern closed her eyes and drew her gun. When she opened them, the enemy ship was farther away, not closer. Manx was shouting to someone over the com.
“What happened?” Tolvern asked.
“We took a torpedo!” Manx said. “It was from Void Queen.”
“What do you mean? A mercy killing?”
“No, Captain,” Oglethorpe added from the tech console. “Vargus is hitting the enemy with everything she’s got, and we got caught in the crossfire.”
More torpedoes lumbered in, striking the harvester on the grasping arms, and it was retreating. Fresh human and Hroom ships were arriving with every moment, and they joined the remnants of the Tolvern-Broderick force in hammering the massive alien ship.
But that didn’t explain why Manta Ray had fallen back right at the moment it was about to seize the battle cruiser in its jaws. Or why it was turning about, lashing out in all directions with missiles and explosive shot. It was almost as though something had gone wrong on the bridge, she thought at first, as if their systems were malfunctioning, and the enemy commander was trying to fight phantom enemies.
“I don’t understand,” Oglethorpe said as some twenty small missiles launched from the enemy ship’s back and spun off in random directions.
Catarina Vargus called. Tolvern took it on a side screen. The woman looked across with the corner of her mouth turned up in a half-smile. It was a look that had once seemed arrogant, but Tolvern had a different view of it now.
“Thank God for that,” Tolvern said. “I thought I was a goner.”
“Almost didn’t make it myself. But we’re here now. Down one harvester, ready to kill a second.”
Tolvern glanced at the main screen, where the harvester was still firing away. It mangled a pair of Albion warships with a bombardment from below, but the upper weapon systems remained untargeted, flailing about.
“What is wrong with that thing?”
“Donkey died, too,” Vargus said, which wasn’t an answer to Tolvern’s question. An eyebrow rose. “Apparently, Manta Ray is worried that it’s next.”
“Ah, got it.”
The Singaporeans. They must have entered close range and were boiling a soft spot in the enemy ship’s armor. Their work was detected, but their location remained a secret. Could they possibly take out a second harvester with the same gambit?
“Every minute is a danger,” Vargus said. “Let’s make it count.” The call ended.
A wrecked destroyer drifted past Blackbeard, completely gutted, and Tolvern swung about and shoved it out of the way with a flare from the plasma engines. She brought Blackbeard up next to Void Queen as the two battle cruisers swung about to present broadsides.
“Find me that soft spot,” she ordered her tech people.
It was Bayard, at the defense grid computer, who found it first. “Underbelly. Right where we tried to hit the harvester earlier.”
Manta Ray stopped moving about and directed fire on one spot a few hundred miles away on the Z-axis. Something exploded. It had found Cheng’s ships.
The remaining eight war junks were instantly visible as they turned to flee with ordnance and countermeasures flashing all around them. Too late. The entire surface of the harvester lit up with outgoing fire.
The surviving enemy strikers and lances had been swirling around, looking for the Singaporeans, and they rushed straight into the teeth of the massive harvester bombardment, seeming not to care whether they were caught in the crossfire.
A pair of destroyers and three sloops—recent arrivals from the Donkey fight—swooped in to assist the war junks, but they, too, fell under attack. A second war junk died, then a third and a fourth. Two more went off. A sloop exploded, and the two destroyers suffered heavy damage. Only three war junks and a pair of sloops escaped the carnage.
“And Cheng?” Tolvern asked.
Oglethorpe tapped his screen, and his face darkened. “He’s gone, sir.”
First Broderick, now Cheng. And no time to mourn the death of the captains and their heroic crews. The two battle cruisers were now in perfect position to strike the weakened armor. Void Queen fired a broadside in a huge wave of fire like the breath of a dragon. Blackbeard followed an instant later. The ships rolled backward as tons of explosive shot hurtled at the enemy.
Fierce and Triumph pulled in below, together with a trio of Broderick’s surviving cruisers: Revenge, Night, and Lancashire. The five cruisers joined the two battle cruisers in firing a rolling wave of cannon fire. Manta Ray lit up with explosions.
It launched a massive volley of missiles, even as it tried to roll away to protect its damaged underbelly.
Vargus, now the ranking officer with Broderick’s death, gave a command to the fleet: all other ships would target the enemy’s lower decks while the seven cruisers and battle cruisers hammered away at whatever side presented itself.
Destroyers, torpedo boats, and corvettes came from below. Another cruiser joined the attack, then another. Soon, the entirety of Broderick’s old fleet and Vargus’s were together, hitting Manta Ray from all sides. No lances, spears, or enemy strikers remained on the battlefield.
And still the harvester fought on. The underside guns and missiles fell silent first, followed by its aft cannon and a big gun that had been hurling out bombs. The green eye caught one final victim—a torpedo boat—but a fierce stab from Vargus’s falcons finally took out the eye, and the torpedo boat recovered and slipped away through a gauntlet of exploding ordnance. With so many dead, the boat crew must be counting their escape as almost miraculous.
Manta Ray’s underside bled burning gas as weapon systems exploded on its surface. The engines were crippled, and it could no longer twist away from incoming fire. Blackbeard and Void Queen dove down and rolled onto their side to hit the gaping wound. Torpedoes thrust into the holes in the armor.
Vargus’s voice came over the com. “Time to finish it. Hit that ugly thing and hit it hard.”
The battle cruisers fired their broadsides. Tolvern could see right into the enemy ship every time the vacuum sucked away more burning debris, and the incoming fire lit up the vast interior space and exploded.
“It’s breaking apart!” Oglethorpe cried.
The two battle cruisers were only a few hundred yards from the dying enemy ship, and they reversed thrust to back away, even as explosions deep within Manta Ray continued to tear it apart. Tolvern braced herself for a massive final destruction of the enemy ship.
In that, she was disappointed. The fires and explosions gradually ripped the harvester into smaller pieces, some of them flaming or bleeding green trails of plasma, while others drifted away harmlessly. Hroom sloops and the three surviving war junks swept in to puncture holes in the wreckage with energy pulses to make sure there were no surviving pockets of enemies, but Tolvern had already turned her attention elsewhere.
First, a glimpse at the McGowan and Olafsen fight. To her surprise, McGowan had Peerless right in the thick of the action, where he was suffering a terrific bombardment from Hammerhead. The harvester looked barely damaged, while the battlefield was littered with the carcasses of dozens of allied ships. Cruisers, smashed in two. Star wolves, gutted. Destroyers and torpedo boats that were nothing but debris. The harvester held a star wolf in its jaws, and Tolvern caught her breath when Oglethorpe announced that it was Bloodaxe, Lars Olafsen’s own ship.
It all looked lost—the harvester would smash McGowan and escape from the Persia System with no way to run it down—but then she spotted their salvation. Five Scandian blackfish had attached themselves to various parts of the enormous enemy ship and were sending in raiders.
And what about Bloodaxe? Why was it still in the harvester’s jaws instead of already devoured and spat out? Could it be that Olafsen had survived and was joining a large raider assault on the interior of the ship?
The battle above Sheol was more straightforward. Dreadnought was still fighting, thank God. A quick scan of the channels showed that James himself was still in command, giving orders, moving his pieces back and forth to attack the two harvesters that kept it pinned against the planet.
The admiral’s battleship, the cream of the Royal Navy, was the equal of an Apex harvester. Until it had met the harvesters, Dreadnought had been unmatched by any force short of a star leviathan. So although it wasn’t strong enough to defeat Rhino and Tiger on its own, neither had they managed to knock it out yet.
Unfortunately, the rest of his task force was in worse shape. James had entered battle with fifty-two ships. He was down to fewer than twenty. Most of his seven cruisers were dead or crippled. His massive force of nineteen destroyers had lost three fourths of its fighting ability. Not one of his three missile frigates was still in the fight, with all but one of them destroyed entirely. The survivors—sloops, cruisers, corvettes, and torpedo boats—were forced to huddle behind Dreadnought for protection lest they be torn apart. Thankfully, they’d managed to clear the battlefield of lances and spears before losing effectiveness as a fighting force.
Vargus called once again as soon as she got the fleet into some rough semblance of order. She still looked calm and collected. How did she manage?
“The time has come to turn over command,” Vargus said.
Tolvern was surprised. “Oh?”
“Broderick is dead, may he rest in peace, which leaves the two of us. Smythe ran the numbers, and Blackbeard is in better shape than Void Queen. That makes yours the more powerful ship and the more likely flagship of our new fleet, such as it is.”
Tolvern had seen her own damage assessment. “If that’s true, you must be in bad shape.”
A slight shrug. “Void Queen is still in the fight—that counts for something. Anyway, you know that’s not the real reason.”
“James.”
“He’s your husband,” Vargus said. “I don’t give a damn about navy regulations—fraternization and all that rubbish—I know something about loyalty. So lead us in, Captain Tolvern . . . Jess. Friend. Let’s bring this victory home.”
#
The interior passages of the harvester ship twisted and turned as the raiders fought their way in, not like human corridors that were straight angles with up and down lifts or stairways, but bending in any given direction like an undulating snake.
Or rather, the intestines of a large animal, Olafsen decided, because they branched off, and later would slope up or down, sometimes so steeply that the raiders had to slide down or crawl their way up. Designed to be followed by birds that could walk or fly as they fancied, it would seem. Gravity was lower on board the ship, though, which meant that sudden drops were more annoying than dangerous.
The walls glistened with almost mucous-like consistency beneath bioluminescent lighting, and here and there they came upon caches of bones, rotting scraps, and other filth.
The fighting was light at first, with armed drones that managed to bring down a raider by hurling bombs from slings attached to their wings, but otherwise gave way before the assault. Olafsen’s men ranged deeper into the ship, slaughtering indiscriminately. They paused to torch nesting chambers, crushing eggs and mowing down huddled chicks.
Something twisted in his gut to commit such slaughter, but he hardened when he saw the human bones, the severed heads with eyes staring blankly ahead. They came into one room where dozens of naked humans hung on meat hooks, writhing and screaming.
The aliens fed on human pain, and these ones had apparently been dragged out of stasis and impaled to soften their flesh before ritual slaughter. Most of them were darker skinned—presumably Persians—but there were lighter skinned Scandians or Albion men and women, as well as children. A few Hroom, too, and, to his shock, two members of some other hominid-like alien race he’d never seen or heard of before. Hairy, with smooth faces and short tails. They, too, were keening in pain. He looked, but there was no sight of Jarn.
Olafsen couldn’t help these people, could only order his men to destroy the room and put the sufferers out of their misery. The next time he found an Apex nesting chamber, he wiped it out without a single twinge of guilt.
They carried the slaughter deeper into the alien ship minute by minute, and at last, they met furious resistance. A mass of battle drones attacked them with guns, grenade-like bombs, and paralyzing green rays. He lost two raiders in a fight to take a corridor that seemed to be branching deeper in, and three more when he came upon a terrific fight that seemed already in progress.
The enemy had set up heavier guns, and one swung back and pounded his forces as they tried to take cover in a small side chamber that opened low on the wall. The gunfire only increased once he got his men protected, and then suddenly a half dozen screaming raiders came bursting through the enemy from beyond. They must be from one of the blackfish assault companies.
“Follow me!” he shouted to his men, and they poured out the side chamber to join the fight.
Olafsen mowed down three birds, grabbed another by the neck in his armored hand as it tried to peck through his shoulder joint, snapped its neck, then charged forward with his men to mop up the last resistance.
“You!” Olafsen said, spotting a familiar gleaming black faceplate with a red grin painted across the front. “Where is your commander?”
“He sent us to find you,” Demon Grin said. “Didn’t know if you were dead or alive—nobody is getting any orders down here.”
“The com system is jammed. Can’t get more than ten yards in any direction. Where are the rest?”
“There are thirty more raiders about fifty feet back. Pinned down by a fixed gun emplacement. Don’t know about anyone else.”
Demon Grin led the raiders to the scene of the other battle, where they approached at an angle to the main fighting. Olafsen, Björnman, and Demon Grin led a charge, followed by the rest, and quickly overran the enemy position. The new, larger group of nearly a hundred raiders pushed deeper into the ship, where they faced increasingly fierce resistance.
And yet not so fierce after all. These buzzards, for all of their battle prowess, for their ability to dominate planets from orbit, destroying armies and navies until they could assault the surface and gather victims, were not so prepared for an attack on their home turf. Olafsen was losing men—several dozen so far—but they had killed hundreds of enemies.
They’re not prepared. They didn’t expect this.
“We can win,” Olafsen told Björnman after yet another battle for control of a tunnel junction. “By the gods, we can do this.”
“Wasn’t that the idea?”
“No, it was to wreak havoc within long enough for the fleet to destroy the ship from without. I never expected to survive.”
“You might have informed us that it was a suicide mission.”
“It’s always in the hands of the gods,” Olafsen said. “And this time the gods have decided to withhold Valhalla for another day.”
“Let it wait!” Björnman said with a hearty laugh. “Even a raider would get tired of the endless drinking and feasting.”
They met more raiders, and then still more, and with their numbers growing, fought down increasingly desperate attempts to hold them back from what had to be the alien command center up ahead. The enemy threw a vicious counterattack from several directions when they reached another juncture, and so many raiders fell to bombs and grenades and heavier-caliber weapons that Olafsen began to think they would need to retreat and regroup.
And then the drones stopped fighting. Simply stopped. They didn’t so much throw down their weapons as lower them and wait for their fate.
And that fate was swift. Wary of another trick, and still thinking of the horror of the impaled humans, as well as the thousands of additional victims in the Apex larders, he ordered the enemy slaughtered without mercy. Some of these birds had colored feathers in their plumage—the commanders—but these, too, fell without resisting.
When the birds were down, he pushed forward to find himself in front of a door leading into a large room. Another nesting chamber? He hesitated, sensing that something was wrong, something waiting for him on the other side that represented danger, or some fresh new horror. He almost sent Björnman and Demon Grin inside in his place.
“No,” he said aloud. “This is my fight. My glory to take or be taken from me.”
Olafsen pushed into the room. The first thing he noticed was the stench, a sharp, acidic smell like paint thinner, that came straight through his helmet’s breather and made his head swim. He’d smelled that before, from the more brightly colored birds, and wondered if they excreted the chemical to control their drones. Only here, it was several times stronger. Overwhelming, even.
The walls of the round chamber were held up with supports that looked like the bones of a rib cage. Strange, scratch-like letters glowed red and orange around the room. Human body parts lay around the room, as did several brightly covered birds. These squawked and flopped on the floor, still in the process of dying.
Standing in the center of the room was a single bird, as tall as a man, its wings spread. It wore no harness or guns, no apparatus to hit him with a paralyzing ray. No metallic claws on its feet or hardened beak for tearing through mech suits. Olafsen was free to take in its dazzling red, gold, green, and blue feathers, which shimmered in the dim light. There was no doubt who he was staring at.
The Apex queen commander.
A voice entered his head, some sort of telepathy that entered like fingernails scratching across the surface of his brain.
Enter my banquet chamber, human. Enter, and we will speak together as one apex predator to another.
Olafsen stepped into the room.
Chapter Twenty-three
Dreadnought was burning along its starboard when Blackbeard, Void Queen, and the rest of the reinforcements arrived. Gasses flamed out of gaping holes, only to be sucked into the void. Rhino and Tiger hammered the battleship with wave after wave of cannon and missile fire.
Tolvern, now in command of the combined battle cruiser fleet, sent in her fastest ships first, the corvettes, which divided their attack between the two harvesters in a futile attempt to break off the alien assault. This had no more effect than the continued and ineffective fire from the surviving ships of the admiral’s once overwhelming fleet.
The two battle cruisers entered combat next, swinging into broadside position even as they fired long- and medium-range weaponry. The attack was soon joined by all the other ships arriving with them, more than fifty in all, those who had survived from both Broderick’s fleet and the original Blackbeard-Void Queen force.
This got the enemy’s attention at last. Both Tiger and Rhino were forced to direct most of their firepower into holding off the ferocious counterattack at their rear. Dreadnought, still hovering above the dry brown waste of Sheol, was miraculously still in the fight. Within a few minutes she had sealed off breaches and resumed her attack.
A short audio message came from Tolvern’s husband moments later. James sounded far too calm for the situation. Minutes more of that bombardment, and he’d have been killed. Not even Dreadnought could have stood alone against a pair of harvesters.
“Tiger has taken heavy damage,” he announced. “One of our nuclear torpedoes got through and smashed the rear shield above the engine array. Take it out first, and we’ll worry about Rhino later.”
Tolvern quickly organized her forces. Twenty ships were left fighting Rhino in an attempt to keep its guns off the admiral, while the remainder, including the battle cruisers, went after Tiger. The enemy ships made as if to break off the engagement.
“Get Fox,” she ordered. “Lay down his mines.”
“Which ones?” Manx asked.
“Anything. All of them. Just get them down. Don’t let them slip away.”
Led by Nineveh, the destroyers fell back to drop a minefield, scattering them haphazardly, but just in time. Sure enough, the two harvesters battered their way through Tolvern’s forces and fell into the minefield. This, combined with a massive missile barrage, brought them to a halt again.
Tiger was bleeding from a dozen wounds. Tiger was dying.
“Finch?” Tolvern said over the com. “I need a broadside, and I need it now.”
The woman answered in a sharp tone. “Yes, sir. Main cannon battery ready. Awaiting your orders.”
Void Queen swung up alongside her sister ship and maneuvered into position, but this time Blackbeard got off her cannon first. Void Queen followed. Tiger shuddered as it absorbed one blow after another. A gaping hole opened in the alien ship.
Then Dreadnought and a small host of cruisers entered the battle. More cannon fire. More torpedoes. The battle cruisers fired their secondary cannons, reloaded, and unleashed more broadsides.
Tiger was breaking up. A few escape pods drifted out—one no doubt carrying the enemy commander—but there were enough falcons in the air to hunt them down, one by one. The enemy bridge broke apart and exploded, followed by the engine. The remains of the hull took blow after blow. Soon, there was nothing left of the harvester but debris.
Rhino had kept going, and now stumbled through the remainder of Fox’s mines, which were still dropping from destroyers, even as the harvester tried to clear a path in the clumsiest way possible. Yet its tough hide absorbed the damage, and it broke clear, pursued by the rest of the allied fleet. No more nonsense about reaching the jump point to Nebuchadnezzar. This time it was falling back toward Persia.
Admiral James Drake took command of the combined fleet. He ordered all ships capable of fighting to fall in behind Dreadnought and pursue Rhino. They’d overtake it before Persia if possible, but defeat it at the planet, if not.
Either way, once they caught the enemy, they would destroy the harvester and send its crew and commander straight to hell.
#
Olafsen took a tentative step toward the queen commander, who remained with her wings open, beak parted, and tongue sticking partway out in an expression that was vaguely hawk-like. She cocked her head as he moved, and fixed her eye on him. Again, her voice was in his head like a maddening itch.
I submit to your rule, human. You are my queen, and I will be your princess.
He lifted his gun and continued warily forward.
You have proven yourself at the pinnacle, the apex of human, Hroom, and bird kind alike. That makes you Apex, not me.
“You fool, I’m not even the commander of this fleet.”
Yet only you have entered my harvester ship. You and your drones. This ship is your prize, my species is at your mercy, and I crave only to serve. Together with your machine suits and my harvesters, we will rule the galaxy.
It was a lie. She was playing for time, trying to slip away. And even if she had been sincere, what then? Her ruling style was extermination of any lesser life forms. That sort of victory was a feast of ash and bones.
Yet he was curious, and wondering if he should attempt to take her prisoner. The Albion scientists might learn a good deal. Were these alien forces in Persia truly the last Apex in the sector, or were there other queens out there in some as-yet undiscovered system? Did the birds maintain a home world, or were they nothing but wandering exterminators? He suspected the latter, but who could be sure? What else could they learn that would help them defeat future threats?
No. Capturing her would take time, would delay the fleet’s return to the fight outside Sheol, where who knew how many harvesters kept fighting on.
Tell me, human. What is your answer to my offer?
He took two steps toward her, dropped his gun, grabbed her neck with one hand, and put his other hand on her chest. She shrieked and slashed at his helmet with her beak. It did nothing to harm him.
“Among the Vikings, a captured commander is given a great honor,” Olafsen said. “A sacrifice to the gods. You do not merit that, but given the circumstances, I think it appropriate. We call this the blood eagle.”
Olafsen plunged his hand into the queen commander’s chest and grabbed for her heart. She shrieked and flopped and pecked at him with her beak, but he held her in place.
There was no heart, or whatever it was he found was not what he’d have recognized as such. But his clenched fist came out with bone and gore aplenty to do the job. The flopping weakened, the pecks turned feeble. The glittering, deadly eyes of the queen commander went dim and glazed over.
When it was finished, Olafsen cast aside the limp body of his enemy. The Apex queen commander was dead.
#
Rhino never reached Persia. Instead, the combined fleet, now reinforced by most of McGowan’s task force—Peerless herself was lagging behind with a number of other damaged ships—caught the harvester four million miles short of the planet. Only two of Olafsen’s blackfish and roughly a hundred raiders remained behind, gutting Hammerhead from within while holding the ship until science officers could figure out how to thaw the thousands of Persians and other people who remained in stasis in the enemy’s larders.
The rest of the fleet surrounded Rhino and attacked it relentlessly from all sides. Its engines leaking plasma and its surface pitted from dozens of missile and torpedo strikes, the final enemy ship tried to fight its way clear of the human and Hroom ships pursuing it, but the sheer mass of concentrated firepower brought it to a halt.
Catarina pulled Void Queen around in front of Rhino, with Blackbeard and nine smaller Punisher- and Aggressor-class cruisers taking up position alongside. The enemy tried to push through, but they drove it back with rolling waves of cannon fire. Corvettes, destroyers, and torpedo boats nipped its flanks, while Dreadnought battered it from above, and star wolves tore at its flanks. Other ships dove in, fired, and retreated. Again and again and again.
The enemy ship had plenty of firepower left, and destroyed a cruiser and star wolf in short order. Two more wolves, one of the general’s sloops, and a destroyer died in fiery explosions over the next hour. A total of eleven more ships fell back from the battlefield after suffering heavy damage. Dreadnought herself came under heavy attack and had to withdraw for emergency repairs, forced to sit out the next wave of attacks as nothing more than a long-range missile platform.
But slowly, surely, the final harvester ship was losing the battle. Plasma burst from the containment field around the engine, and soon it could no longer move on anything but auxiliary power as it drifted slowly toward Persia. Missile batteries gradually fell silent, until only the upper and port guns could mount an effective counterattack, and it was easy enough to stay clear of the weapons and fire on the unprotected flanks.
And then the enemy just stopped. Stopped firing, stopped trying to escape. Stopped firing countermeasures.
Drake called a council of his top captains. Destroy the enemy, or send in the marines and raiders? Destroy it, Catarina said. They already had a harvester to study in the Hammerhead wreckage.
But what about the prisoners in stasis? Drake wanted to know.
Tolvern pointed out that men and women would die in an invasion of the enemy ship. Another captain reminded them that every hour spent in securing Rhino would lead to more deaths on the surface of the planet. If they wanted to save Persians, they needed to land ground forces as soon as possible and liberate the surviving population.
Other captains concurred, and they maintained the assault. No more nuclear torpedoes in the arsenal, so they had to use the standard variety, plus cannon fire, energy pulses, missiles, serpentine batteries, pummel guns—anything and everything short of direct physical contact with the enemy.
Three hours later, the final enemy ship broke apart in a series of explosions. They continued to pound away on the larger pieces until only scattered debris remained.
McGowan and his small force caught up with the fleet roughly six hours later. Peerless’s shields lay in tatters, and her engines operated at seventy percent power. The bombproofs protecting the main cannon had been melted.
Drake organized his forces and moved on Persia. The allied fleet had lost dozens of ships and thousands of crew and marines, but still contained over a hundred ships. Against that, the enemy had nothing, but still needed to be rooted out of their surface bases. The first step was to silence the guns on the orbital fortress, and Drake ordered a long-range bombardment. The enemy attempted to return fire, but the fortress’s range was shorter than that of the missile frigates, who camped out at a safe distance near the planet’s moon.
Once the enemy guns were silenced, star wolves and destroyers shuttled hundreds of raiders and thousands of marines to the surface of Persia, while other ships bombarded enemy forces from orbit whenever they offered resistance. The orbital domination neutralized the most powerful enemy weapons—the battle striders, monsters of flesh and machinery that had devastated planetary populations across the sector. Without them, Apex facilities and forces had little capability to resist. Whenever drone armies organized, pummel guns and Royal Navy cannon pulverized them from space, while ground forces mopped up the survivors.
Seeing their liberation at hand, the beleaguered, hunted population of Persia rose up from mountain redoubts, from hidden settlements in forests and desert canyons, and joined the fighting. Admiral Drake emptied armories across the fleet to arm the resistors.
Between the newcomers and the desperate inhabitants of the planet, the outnumbered, outgunned Apex forces on the surface collapsed within days into scattered pockets of survivors. Two more weeks of hard fighting followed before the planet was declared liberated.
Navy patrols combed the Persia, Nebuchadnezzar, Xerxes, Euphrates, and Zoroaster System. No enemies were found. No hidden colonies, no escaping seed pods.
Apex had suffered the same fate they’d attempted to inflict upon other civilizations. The ruthless alien race had been utterly vanquished.
Exterminated.
Chapter Twenty-four
Four months after the final battles, Catarina found herself waiting with several others around a conference table in the operations room on Fort William. A viewport window opened on the far side of the room, with the cool blue-and-green sphere of Albion rotating beneath the orbital fortress. Nearly two years had passed since she’d set out at the head of her colonization fleet, and she studied the planet with fresh eyes.
The continent of Britain lay below, moving from day to night, with a brief, shifting band of twilight between. Cities lit up like glowing jewels across the landscape as they fell into darkness, with the largest cluster of lights at the heart of the continent, where York Town was once again rising on the ashes of the atomic bombardment it had suffered at the hands of a Hroom death fleet. Albion was still young and vigorous, still expanding.
Catarina imagined a future where her own planet—New Albion, as they insisted she call it—filled with cities, farms, ports, and mines. A growing, healthy population, which she would guide and direct—the master of the planet, but never a tyrant. Those who came would come willingly, would stay willingly, and help her build.
Her dream was so close now, but would Drake give it to her? He had promised, but now that she’d returned from the inner frontier, maybe he thought of her as an embarrassment, a mercenary at best, a pirate at worst, who had been given promises of future power and wealth only so the kingdom could secure her compliance for the duration of the war.
Admiral Drake entered the operations room, accompanied by Captain Fox, formerly of HMS Nineveh. The others rose around the table: Tolvern, McGowan, Nash, General Mose Dryz, and a handful of other captains Catarina hadn’t known before. Tolvern had whispered their names: McCreery, Gillis, O’Henry, and Harbrake. McCreery looked about eighteen, although he’d apparently been commanding one of Drake’s corvettes, and Tolvern said he was the son of a famous Albion captain.
The officer corps must be thinner than she’d thought, if brevet promotions threw kids and former pirates into commanding roles. From Fox’s wide smile as the admiral led him into the room, he was apparently another beneficiary of the manpower shortage in leadership roles.
Drake took his seat and spoke with little preamble. “With the heroic death of Captain Broderick, the crown has appointed Captain Fox to the admiralty.”
Catarina’s eyebrows went up, and Tolvern shot her a glance. A promotion, indeed. Straight onto the Board of Admiralty. How old was Fox, twenty-five, twenty-six?
The young man sat next to the admiral, and the others in the room returned to their seats.
“Fox will take the helm of HMS Citadel when she leaves the docks at the end of the year,” Drake added. “He’ll patrol the lanes between Odense and Viborg to make sure the Scandians behave themselves.”
“Excellent,” McGowan said dryly. “Commanding a torpedo boat six months ago, promoted to captain and given a destroyer, and now with his own battle cruiser after fighting two or three engagements.”
“At least he fought,” Tolvern said.
Catarina couldn’t resist. “We all fought, Captain Tolvern,” she said. “McGowan, too. It’s not realistic to expect every commander to be a hero in all occasions. Some are needed in the reserve.”
Tolvern nodded. “Good point. McGowan was pretty shot up, anyway, and mostly a decoy so that Olafsen and his men could play the hero against Hammerhead.”
McGowan glared. “I was no bloody decoy. Hundreds of good crew died in the fighting, so if you could show a little respect for the dead—”
“Nobody is impugning your crew,” Catarina said.
Drake winced. “Please, officers. Enough.”
General Mose Dryz turned to the admiral. “I am confused, James Drake. Is this not an accurate statement on behalf of the two female captains? If every soldier could be a hero, the word itself would be devalued. As for Olafsen being the hero of that particular engagement, one might quibble with the use of the word. However, in the case of Edward McGowan—”
“Tolvern and Vargus were being sarcastic,” Drake told the Hroom. “They were baiting McGowan to provoke a reaction.”
The general blinked his large eyes and hummed in the back of his throat. “Yes, I see that now. Suggesting with pointed language that Captain Edward McGowan did not overly distinguish himself in battle. That he has something of a reputation for cowardice.”
McGowan sputtered, face reddening.
Drake lifted a hand. “Of course you aren’t a coward. You did what you needed to do, and you’ll be rewarded for it with a promotion.”
“Oh.” McGowan settled back down. “How so?”
“By His Majesty’s command, and the consensus of this admiralty—consensus being shorthand for the decision I made on all of your behalf, in this particular case—you will take command of the Second Fleet as rear admiral.”
A smug expression crossed McGowan’s face. “Very well, I accept. Peerless should be ready to leave the yards shortly, although I have been thinking that a larger overhaul, such as what was bestowed upon Blackbeard, would be welcomed. Peerless, once upgraded to battle cruiser—”
“Yours will be a stationary command,” Drake interrupted. “Another officer will be given command of Peerless.”
“Wait, what?”
“You will direct the Second Fleet from an orbital fortress above Persia. I need you to remain personally at the planet. The population is starving, the economy in tatters. You will oversee reconstruction, the rebuilding of cities, and the formation of civil administration while the fleet ensures the safety of the surrounding systems.”
“That’s not a rear admiral’s position, that’s a royal governor,” McGowan protested.
“More or less,” Drake said with a nod, “except that the planet will be under naval jurisdiction.”
“I don’t understand. What did I do to deserve this?”
“You have shown yourself excellent in defensive situations,” Drake said, as if it were indeed an honor, and not, as Catarina thought, a bit of a dig. “Adept at directing other forces to the attack while keeping yourself safe from harm.”
“Sir, please. This is not what I want at all.”
“Nevertheless, that is what your king requests of you, and that is the command you are being given.”
McGowan opened his mouth, then shut it again. He shot poisonous glances at Catarina and Tolvern as he slumped back in his chair. As much as Catarina enjoyed watching McGowan squirm, she had other concerns on her mind.
“Excuse me, sir. What will become of Dreadnought? Will you be on the inner frontier, or patrolling the lanes to Singapore?”
“Dreadnought will be in the yards for an extended repair before she is battleworthy again. Six months, maybe longer.”
“That is more or less how much time I need to get my own fleet together and return to the Omega Cluster,” Catarina said. “I’ll have to haul through a bunch of semi-lawless systems to get to the jump, and by now the whole sector knows what I’m up to. Apart from Void Queen and Pussycat, most of my fighting ships have been destroyed or wrecked. I would like to request a military escort to New Albion. You could lead it yourself, if that’s not too presumptuous.”
“I am afraid I’ll be engaged elsewhere,” Drake said, “but you’re on the Board of Admiralty now, Vargus. Make a request for naval resources from your fellows at this table, and I’m sure they will see you escorted safely to the other side.”
McGowan stared. “Wait, you mean you’re really going to pay off Vargus and let her haul away all those goods?”
“Of course. That was the arrangement.”
“That was a stratagem, a trick to ensure Vargus’s compliance for the duration.”
“It was a stratagem. But that’s different from saying it was a lie. I needed her fleet of mercenaries, her prefab manufacturing facilities, her trained colonists, and I was willing to tell her what she wanted to hear.” Drake fixed McGowan with a firm gaze. “But I never lied about it.”
McGowan sputtered. “She’s . . . she’s a bloody pirate! Not a drop of noble blood in her!”
“Of course she’s noble. She’s a duchess.”
“Only because you say so!”
“No, because His Majesty has decreed it.”
McGowan fell silent.
“Thank you, Admiral,” Catarina said.
“You may thank the king at your investiture. Meanwhile, your colony is an important bulwark against whatever surprises might be lurking in the Omega Cluster—there are more than a hundred stars in there, and there might potentially be an alien race or two waiting to break out—so the crown has decided to send you an additional five thousand colonists per year for the next ten years.”
It was a welcome pronouncement . . . so long as it didn’t come with strings.
“So long as it’s not just warm bodies,” Catarina said. “We’ve got to clear land, build farms, dig mines—I won’t take on a bunch of hungry mouths without the resources to support them.”
“Understood. High-quality colonists, food, and equipment. Whatever you need. Correction—whatever you need that’s reasonable.”
Catarina nodded, pleased, but still wary that with more crown resources came more crown control. She had no intention of being a duchess in name only, and would resist any attempts to strip her of the rights that had been promised to her.
“Ah, and another thing,” Drake added. A hint of a smile touched the corners of his mouth. “The king has apparently decided that the name New Albion is a little . . . fusty is the word he used. He asked for alternatives.”
“And?”
“With so many of your colonists being from outside traditional Albion worlds, so many Ladino and New Dutch worlds now under nominal control of the kingdom, I thought a more exotic name might indicate unity. What do you think about Segovia, Your Grace?”
#
Tolvern let herself into her husband’s quarters on Fort Alliance and moved quietly into the sitting room. There, she stood and watched James through the open bathroom door, waiting for him to notice her.
He stepped out of the shower, grabbed a towel, and threw it around his waist. His hair, usually carefully combed, was a wet mop, and he stepped up to the mirror and swiped away the steam with the palm of one hand, reaching for a comb with the other.
Tolvern cleared her throat dramatically. “Admiral, sir?”
James turned quickly, stiffening, then relaxed as he saw who it was. She grinned.
“Unauthorized entry into the admiral’s private chambers,” he said. “I’d have to check naval regulations, but that sounds like a serious offense.”
“Good thing someone gave me authorization, then, isn’t it? Or at least, I put my hand up to the pad, and the door opened right up.” She scratched her head in mock confusion. “I wonder if it would open for any naval officer, or if I’m somehow special.
“You’d better throw on some clothes,” she added, “or I’m going to forget all about why I came to talk to you.”
Tolvern fanned herself with one hand and playfully tugged at her top button, as if it were suddenly stuffy in the room, and she needed to take off her jacket.
“Oh? Tell me more?” He took a step toward her.
“Go on, get dressed. Time for play later.”
She was serious about talking, but couldn’t take her eyes off him as he hung the towel on a hook and put on a bathrobe. When he turned around, she saw the pink scar across his left shoulder where a piece of shrapnel had hit him in the Battle of Persia. Enemy fire had penetrated all the way to his bridge. It was a sobering reminder of how close he’d come to dying. How close all of them, their entire civilization, even, had been pushed to the brink.
“The news has spread through the fleet,” she said. “Or rumors, at least.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“Come on, James. You can’t organize an expedition without advance preparations, especially now that the war is over. People talk.”
“And what do they say?”
“That you’re shipping a lot of ordnance to Fort Alliance, Viborg, and Persia.”
“I need to fortify the inner frontier,” he said. “We have no idea what’s two or three systems beyond Persia other than what the Persians themselves have told us, and their information is at least ten years old. What’s out there, anyway?”
“Forty systems lie between Persia and Old Earth, according to the charts.”
“And those charts are three decades out of date,” he said. “Jump points have changed, systems that were lawless might be organized now, and vice versa. Might not even be a pathway through at all.”
“In other words, you’re planning an expedition to Earth,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“We’re more than a kingdom now, Jess, we’re an empire. If we’re honest, we’ve been an empire since we started picking off Hroom worlds in the sugar wars, and once you walk down that path, you can’t walk it back again. And look how scattered we are—Segovia, Odense, Viborg, Roskilde, Persia.” He ticked them off on his hand, one by one. “Then you’ve got the three core planets, plus sugar colonies like Hot Barsa, Ladino and New Dutch worlds like Peruano and San Pablo—all under Albion control.”
“So, what? Is the plan to keep marching toward Old Earth until we scoop them all up?”
“Heaven help us. But an empire needs stability on its frontiers. We can’t have pirate worlds, Viking raiders, or any other lawless types seeing us as a fat, rich target. And what about the other alien civilizations out there? We only know of two. Our encounter with the Hroom led to a centuries-long conflict, and Apex tried to exterminate us. But we’ve caught hints of others out there. Derelicts, the ancient base in the Fort Alliance crater. And the unknown species Olafsen reported seeing inside the harvester ship.”
“Let me cut to the chase,” Tolvern said. “Barker looked into the manifests of outgoing supply vessels. There’s a hell of a lot of cannon shot on its way to New Persia. The big stuff, the sixty-twos and sixty-fives. That means either a battle cruiser or battleship. Dreadnought is stuck in the yards for six months. Void Queen is headed in the opposite direction, toward Segovia. HMS Citadel is still under construction, and won’t put out to space until the end of the year. There’s only one ship left.”
He nodded. “HMS Blackbeard.”
“You’re sending me to the inner frontier?”
Tolvern’s voice sounded flat in her ears. She hadn’t known what to expect in the aftermath of the war—retirement, maybe, so that she could be with James without violating navy regs?—but being sent off again was the farthest thing from her mind. They’d been apart almost since the moment they got married. She didn’t want to leave the navy, but the thought of another long separation for the sake of propriety made her heart ache.
“We don’t know what’s out there,” he said, “and I won’t send the fleet across the frontier until we know. That could start a war, or provoke a new enemy into sending a fleet to cause trouble while we’re still crippled from fighting Apex.”
“So it’s a solo mission?”
“I’m giving Blackbeard the best of everything. Singaporean cloaking technology, a full complement of strikers. A hold stuffed with every kind of ordnance we can think of. Resupplies stashed at Persia if you need to come back for any reason.”
“And it has to be Blackbeard? It couldn’t be, I don’t know . . . Peerless?”
“Blackbeard is the best ship for the job,” he said. “The most powerful at hand. The most experienced crew—I’m moving Capp, Carvalho, Smythe, Barker, and Nyb Pim back across. Anyone else you need—they’re loyal to Vargus, but they’re more loyal to you. And none of them are colonists, they’re navy officers. It will be like old times, Jess. A solo mission through dangerous territory, the old crew reunited.”
“Not all the old crew though, right?” She pinched her lips together and looked away. “Not all of them.”
He turned her face toward him. “Yes, everyone.”
“What?”
“You don’t think I’m sending the lot of you out there without me, do you? You’d get yourself killed.”
“Hah!” She pushed him away, but couldn’t hold her scowl. “You led me to believe . . . and you . . . is this your way of getting past navy regs about fraternization?”
He grinned at this, but his face turned serious again. “I thought if I came right out and said it, you might balk.”
“Balk at being with you? Why?”
“Balk because of Blackbeard. She’s your ship now, and I’m asking you to step down for the duration.”
“Oh, right.” Tolvern folded her arms and stared in mock indignation. “Are you stripping me of command, Admiral?”
“Captain Tolvern, acting first mate of Blackbeard. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?”
“Better ask Lieutenant Capp, too. She’ll love being demoted.”
“I already told Capp. She wouldn’t stop cursing for ten minutes. I’m pretty sure they were curses of joy, but it’s hard to say. I’ve told all the rest of them, in fact.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me first?”
“I wanted to make sure the others were on board. It’s an easier sell, that way. Now I’m giving you a choice, too. So, here it is. You can stay at Albion and lead the admiralty in my absence. Or, come with me to Old Earth.”
Old Earth. Two centuries had passed since Albion, then a young colony of ten or twenty million, had seen its last visit from the mother planet. Fifty years now since the last goods had slipped across the increasingly chaotic inner frontier, although even in her childhood, she remembered hearing of a man who claimed to have visited the home systems, had heard her father talk about securing a bottle of Old Earth brandy for the baron.
So when had contact truly ceased? And why had it happened? Wars? Shifting jump points? Alien invasion? There were so many possibilities, and she was itching to find out.
That she would do so with James Drake at her side . . . well, that was worth stepping down as captain for a few weeks. Months? A year or more? It didn’t matter, it was worth it.
She kissed him. “Fine, get dressed and come over. I’ve got a lot to show you—Blackbeard has changed since you last flew her—and I can’t be showing you around my ship with you dressed in that ridiculous bathrobe.”
While James was getting dressed, Tolvern opened the viewport to look across from Fort Alliance to Blackbeard. Her ship was a long, dark shadow, lights blinking to mark the edges of its hull, with the planet of Albion below, shrouded by night. Cities and smaller towns stretched across whatever landmass lay below, but much of the continent remained black, covered in forests, mountains, and other wilderness.
It was a reminder that humanity was still young out here on the fringes of the explored systems. Half a billion humans lived on Albion, with seven or eight hundred million more stretching from Singapore to Persia. At the time of the Great Migration, the population of Earth had been nearly ten billion.
What about now? Was Earth still a teeming mass of humanity, or had the home planet and its surrounding systems been devastated by war, plague, and famine? Destroyed entirely, perhaps. Maybe that explained why nothing had come through from the home systems. But somehow, she didn’t think so.
Tolvern didn’t know for sure. But soon, she would step onto the bridge of the starship HMS Blackbeard and sail into her people’s past to find out.
Old Earth awaited.
-end-
Afterword
Thank you for reading The Void Queen Trilogy. If you enjoyed the books, but haven’t read the original Starship Blackbeard series, you can buy them here. Also set in the same universe is The Sentinel trilogy, beginning with the first book, The Sentinel.
When I first introduced James Drake and his crew as they fled bad elements in the Royal Navy, I imagined something along the lines of a sci-fi TV program like Firefly or Battlestar Gallactica. The crew would run through a series of fun, largely standalone adventures in local systems while I maintained a thread of their being pursued by the navy. If you remember Captain Rutherford on Vigilant, he was going to be the main bad guy, while the figure of Lord Admiral Malthorne lurked darkly behind the scenes.
Then Rutherford turned out to be not only stiff and haughty, but honorable. Malthorne became more greedy and vengeful and dangerous than he first appeared. Finally, Drake and his crew proved tenacious in sticking around and making a fight of it.
I’m not one of those writers who say that characters just take over, that they do their own thing and I simply can’t control them, but it is tempting to make that claim here, although I suppose I could have stopped it—I certainly caught what was going on early enough. Once I realized that Drake, Tolvern, Capp, and the rest weren’t going to go quietly to the frontier, but fight to clear their names and attack treasonous elements back home, I could have returned and tweaked those characters to stop that from happening.
I didn’t do that. So instead of pulling them toward adventures on the frontier, the plot kept them in the thick of the action. Next thing I knew they were the establishment, the ones fighting off existential threats from Hroom death cults and Apex attempts to exterminate sentient life in the sector.
And it’s not always a sympathetic establishment to defend. Even some of our good guys are classist, and the civilization we’re rooting for is expanding, turning into more and more of an empire before our eyes. That might go well for a while, but empires often end up ruled by despots, and sooner or later end badly. But our characters are humans (well, most of them), and we want humans to survive and even thrive.
I can hear what some of you are thinking right now:
King’s balls, man! All we bloody well want to know is what happens next. What about Catarina Vargus and her new settlement? How about the expedition to Old Earth with Drake and Tolvern united on a souped-up version of Blackbeard? When do we get to find out about that?
If you think you’re going to get all the answers, all the books, you’ll be disappointed. The human-colonized sectors now stretch across dozens of systems, and it would take several writerly lifetimes to tell all the stories that have already occurred to me. Every time I release a new series in the Blackbeard universe, I seem to raise as many questions as I answer.
Meanwhile, I’ve written ten books in this universe in a period of two and a half years, and will be taking a short breather. If you like my writing here, let me encourage you to pick up some of my other work. The stories are different, but the storytelling is the same style.
Maybe start with the five-book Dark Citadel series, or, if you want something very different, check out the books in the Righteous series, which is where I first gained a little bit of notoriety.
And help me spread the word about the Blackbeard universe. Tell a friend, leave a review to draw attention to the books, or drop me an email. Few things inspire a writer’s enthusiasm like a growing reader base, encouraging emails from readers, and an ability to pay the bills by selling enough copies to make it worthwhile.
You can sign up for my new releases list here, and you’ll get an email when I release a new book. You’ll also get a free copy of the first book of my fantasy series, The Dark Citadel, as a welcome. This mailing list is only used for announcing new releases, and your email will never be sold or distributed.