by Jay Allan
“Yes, Admiral.”
Barron figured most people would think he was overreacting. The readings were low powered, and that likely meant something mundane was coming through, a small asteroid or some similar chunk of celestial debris. Even if there were ships coming through, the readings didn’t indicate more than a few moderate sized vessels. Nothing that threatened the fleet. At least so far. But Barron was already on edge, and he’d been reminding himself constantly since the fleet had left Striker not to be careless, to take everything seriously.
There was no indication in Atara’s voice that she disagreed with anything he’d said. That was another reason he was glad to have her back…really back. She was even more paranoid than he was. Barron was old enough a veteran to not really care what anyone else thought of his decisions, but he was human, too. It always felt good to have someone else confirm that you weren’t crazy.
Or that both of you were crazy. He wasn’t sure which.
“All orders sent and acknowledged, Admiral.”
“Very well.” Barron leaned back in his chair, sinking deep into thought. The fleet had encountered a number of enemy armadas, but none large enough to seriously threaten the forces he commanded. He’d expected—feared—that the enemy had been outproducing even the shipyards of the Iron Belt. The enemy had added half the Hegemony—and the more industrialized half—to whatever it had started with. But he hadn’t seen any indications of those force levels, not so far. Barron couldn’t escape the thought that there should be more enemy forces out there. Why had they come at him with such small fleets? Were they testing him, trying to evaluate any advances the Pact forces had made? Or were they trying to see how their fighters performed? If that was their intent, Barron acknowledged with considerable regret that they had much with which to be pleased. He still couldn’t explain how the Highborn had so quickly brought their wings up to such a high degree of proficiency.
But where are the rest of their forces? What are they planning?
“Admiral, Captain Jeffries reports contacts from the forward transit point. Enemy ships coming through. He confirms forty vessels transited, and more coming.”
Barron turned to respond, but before he could, Atara spun around and met his gaze. “Energy levels have spiked from preliminary levels at the lateral point as well. Triumphant reports enemy ships coming through there as well. No estimates yet on numbers or classes.”
Barron took a deep breath. Was the enemy finally striking? Were they making a stand?
He didn’t know, but he damned sure wasn’t taking any chances. “Fleet order…all squadrons are to prepare for launch. All ships to red alert. All formations are to stand ready to receive redeployment orders.” He was ready to respond, to send his fleet against the enemy. But he couldn’t make any real decisions, not yet. Not until he had more data. He needed to know the sizes and compositions of the forces coming through the two points.
“Yes, Admiral.”
He needed to make a choice, and the one his gut was urging ran against every bit of tactical instinct he had. Should he divide his fleet, advance against both enemy forces? Or pull back, order the advance guard to retire toward the main force, even at the cost of taking heavy losses?
“Atara, I need every bit of data we’ve got on the incoming forces, the instant we get it.”
“Yes, Admiral. We should have updated information in one to two minutes.”
The firmness of her voice felt both familiar and unfamiliar. He hadn’t heard it in quite some time, and he’d missed it. He didn’t know what his fleet was moving into, another skirmish, or a decisive battle. Or the overwhelming enemy assault he’d feared since he’d left Striker. But he knew one thing with reassuring comfort.
Atara Travis was back…and she had a fire burning inside her. He knew her well enough to realize she was battling her demons, that she had something to prove, if only to herself. He was still edgy, paranoid, grim about the fleet’s prospects. But for an instant, the sound of his friend’s voice almost filled him with sympathy for the enemy.
* * *
“Wing Seven command, watch it. They’re extending their line, trying again to outflank our formation. You’re what we’ve got out there, so you’ve got to stay on them.” Reg Griffin’s voice was raw, coarse. Her people had come a long way in learning fighter versus fighter tactics, but they were far from proficient. She was losing patience with them, not because they hadn’t worked hard or done their best…but because they were all going to die if they couldn’t outfly the enemy. The Highborn were hitting the fleet again, this time from two points. The coordinated attacks indicated a high level of planning and a lot of skill at timing. It all added up to trouble in Reg’s mind, both in front of her at that moment, and even worse, in her expectations of what lay ahead.
It certainly suggested the Highborn were getting more serious about stopping the Pact fleet. And that had her insides tight. She’d lost enough people in the recent battles, but she believed deep down that they had only seen the tip of the iceberg, that a truly massive fight was coming. The Pact fleet was the largest formation to exist since the empire’s fall, and whatever small forces had come at her people so far, she didn’t doubt the enemy would eventually deploy its own massive armada. The battle she could feel out there was going to be truly immense…and it was going to be bloody. And as much progress as they had made, her people weren’t ready for it. Not yet.
She stared at the screen watching the enemy outflanking efforts…and wondering for what had to be the thousandth time how the Highborn had become so adept at fighter tactics. The moves were perfectly timed, and more than once, they’d been so abrupt, and so perfectly positioned, they’d caught her by surprise. It had been all she could do to keep up, to shift her units in response. She’d managed to hold her own, barely, but she couldn’t ignore the fact that she’d clearly yielded the initiative. Whatever Highborn, or perhaps one of their minions—Thralls, she remembered they were called—was commanding the force in front of her, he knew what he was doing. Far better than any of the enemy should after so short a time deploying fighters.
She looked down at her port display, at the running casualty figures. There was a certain amount of guesswork involved, but for the most part, the AI kept pretty accurate track of the loss totals. Her people still had the edge there, though not by the margin she would have liked. The enemy had lost just over a hundred ships so far, to her seventy-four. That was better than the reverse, of course, but despite the fact that she was currently facing fewer than six hundred enemy ships, she knew very well that the Highborn possessed, less recent casualties, of course, an absolute minimum of ten thousand. That was roughly equal to the Pact’s entire strength, including bomber squadrons and forces left at Striker. The current fleet had just over eight thousand, and barely five hundred of those were in her advance force. The lead units had done most of the fighting so far, but both her scanners and her comm alerts had confirmed that there were enemy forces attacking from the system’s second transit point as well. She had no idea of the size of the attacking formation there, nor the state of the fighting. That data would trickle in, though she would have to listen and follow it on delayed comm reports. Dauntless and the rest of the primary battleline were almost a light hour behind, and that meant they were nearly two days from the forward forces. The enemy might be coming into the system from two directions, but the battles fought would be separate affairs.
Her eyes moved over the display, checking on the positions and statuses of her various units…and then they stopped, fixed to a single dot on the screen.
It was an enemy fighter, a single one, not looking as though it was part of any unit. And its movement filled her with an icy cold. For an instant, she thought she was watching Jake Stockton, as though somehow his ghost had come to fly across the battlefield. She closed her eyes for a moment, but when she looked again, the contact was still there, flying with a skill she could hardly comprehend. She pulled up the AI’s stored results and
confirmed that the ship she was watching had taken down four of hers so far in the battle.
Whoever was flying that ship was an accomplished ace. That was clear. What she couldn’t prove, but suddenly believed without doubt, was that she was staring at a large part of the explanation for the proficiency of the enemy forces. Did they find a prodigy of some kind? Some human with a natural affinity for fighter ops? That explained some of it, but still not all. Not even Jake Stockton himself had been that good in his first battles. Experience was the missing link. No one could be that capable without a lot of combats under his belt. And yet, it was clear the Highborn hadn’t utilized small craft before the current war.
Whatever…you know what you have to do…
She angled her ship’s thrust, altering her vector toward the enemy contact. Whoever was flying that ship, he was clearly superior to the others. Eliminating him would hurt the enemy’s combat strength, seriously if that pilot had something to do with their training and organization.
Reg felt something strange. Fear, yes. The pilot she was targeting was good, and she knew a victory against him was far from assured. But something else, too. A hesitation. Was it some kind of respect toward another pilot, one of clearly great skill? That seemed unlikely. She despised the Highborn, and perhaps even more the pathetic humans who served them. But there was something about that ship, that pilot.
It didn’t matter. There was no time for such foolishness. She’d found one of the enemy’s leaders, she was sure of that. And he was too good for any of her people to handle, perhaps for most of them. Timmons and Federov might have a chance, but they were back with the main fleet. That made this target, pilot zero, she dubbed him in her mind, her responsibility.
She pushed her thrust up to full, moving straight toward her target…and then she saw the enemy formation begin to decelerate. The Highborn force was breaking off, and her target altered his own thrust vector. She pulled the throttle harder, as if pressure on the control unit would somehow draw more power from the engines. Her ship continued forward, accelerating, but not with enough power. She wasn’t going to catch the enemy before he withdrew, not this time.
She stared, watching the Highborn squadrons break off, and her people followed, taking a heavy toll on their fleeing enemies. And she watched that single ship, that pilot, moving back toward the Highborn carriers. No, she wasn’t going to catch him, not then and there. But she’d marked him, branded his ship and his flying style in her brain. She punched at the keys on her control panel, saving the contact, instructing her AI to scan for the specified flying style in any future battles.
Next time…next time I will get you…
* * *
Barron looked across Dauntless’s bridge, toward Atara. The unspoken communication the two had often shared in battle and other difficult situations was back. Though, this time it was telling him they were both uncertain, that neither of them had any idea what was happening.
The lateral attack had been spirited and aggressive, but no match for the main body of his fleet. The enemy forces had withdrawn and transited out of the system after suffering heavy casualties. The forward forces under Garrison Jeffries had also repelled the enemy assault from the forward point. For a few hours, the system seemed free of Highborn forces, something that Jeffries scouts had virtually confirmed through systematic search patrols.
Barron had almost been ready to relax, or at least what passed for relaxing since the fleet had crossed into Occupied Space, and then the communique arrived. Jeffries forces had encountered a fresh enemy force coming through the point. Thirty vessels had transited when the message was sent, and two fresh updates had brought that total over one hundred, with more still coming.
The data was still incomplete regarding enemy ship classes present, and there was no report yet of fighter activity. But Barron knew the data he was reading was half an hour old. The main fleet had been moving forward, but it was still going to take a day to reach Jeffries’s ships, and that only if he ordered his newest and fastest ships to accelerate at full.
Just the kind of thing an enemy would do to split up our forces, fight us in piecemeal bits…
Barron knew it could be a trap. He knew that because it was precisely the kind of thing he might try in the enemy’s place. He could get up there in a day, with maybe a third of his combat power, but the rest would trickle in over the following thirty-six hours.
And if the enemy comes through the flank transit point again while the fleet is stretched out like that…
The tactical decision seemed a simple one. Keep the fleet in formation, and advance at the speed of the slowest ships. Except that such a course almost guaranteed the destruction of Jeffries’s entire force. There was no way his small flotilla could hold out for that long. Garrison Jeffries was a skilled and veteran officer, and the advance guard had some of his best spacers, but numbers had a way of asserting themselves at a certain point.
And Reg Griffin was up there.
Barron detested deciding who lived or died based on their perceived worth, as though a rookie had less right to live than a seasoned veteran. But war was a cruel mistress, and it rarely left him the luxury of choices based on ethical considerations. He might have been able to abandon Jeffries and his people…but not Griffin. She had done something he’d have believed impossible, or at least she’d come close to doing it. She’d stepped into Stockton’s shoes, and brought his demoralized and despondent wings back. If he lost her—if the wings watched another beloved commander killed—the effects would be devastating.
Spreading the fleet out over a light hour or more of space was dangerous. It practically begged the enemy to spring a trap on him…the trap he’d been expecting since he’d left Striker.
But not doing it would cost him perhaps the one person who could hold the squadrons together, to get from them the maximum effort and sacrifice he knew he’d need. Reg had become a phenomenon, and Barron wasn’t even sure Timmons or Federov could take her place. The pilots who had idolized those two legends from past days were mostly gone, dead or retired. Reg Griffin had become the living heart of the fighter corps, the current, and young, fighter corps…and if she was lost, or worse, if he abandoned her, the consequences could be horrific.
“Atara…” He knew what he had to order, but still he held back for a few seconds. “All ships are to proceed at best possible speed. Send a flash communique to Captain Jeffries. Tell him we are coming to his aid, and he is to pull back and buy as much time as possible.”
“Yes, Admiral.” Atara’s tone spoke volumes to Barron. It was clear she didn’t like it, but she didn’t disagree either. No doubt she’d come to all the same conclusions he had. If the enemy came through the lateral point in force while the fleet was strung out…
Barron shook his head and looked down at the deck. He felt as though he was making a grave error.
But he didn’t have a choice.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ruins of Pintarus City (Former Imperial Capital)
Planet Number Four (Pintarus)
Undesignated Imperial System 12
Year 327 AC (After the Cataclysm)
Andi looked up at the statue, unable to control the amazement she felt. The empire had fallen more than three centuries before, but the monument in front of her, and the others scattered around, were far older. She’d spent most of her time searching for the records she’d come to find, but the statues exerted a strange pull on her, capturing her attention every time she passed them.
This one was particularly compelling. It was the largest of all those she could see, and a quick spectral analysis suggested it was the oldest as well, at more than ten thousand years. That placed it firmly in the earliest days of the empire, a period from which almost no records had survived.
The statue was special in another way as well. The monuments her people had found mostly had plaques on them, but they’d been worn and damaged, unreadable. But this one bore a name. Altharic I.
There was also a date, and while some of that was damaged, she could make out a number…36.
If that is imperial reckoning, this could be the first emperor…
She stepped back, her eyes moving up and down the great monument, almost feeling an ancient and ghostly presence. Andi wasn’t the sentimental sort, but the thought of what she was seeing—at least what she suspected it might be—someone who had lived so many millennia before, who had founded the very empire in whose wake and ruins she and her people lived, was overwhelming. For a moment, she felt the urge to explore, to research, to gather every bit of the vast store of precious historical information that lay all around her.
Then she remembered why she had come. She remembered war and death…and the desperate attempt to save those she cared for.
She turned slowly away, feeling a strange bit of melancholy before the discipline slammed back into place. She was just about to turn and walk over to where her people were searching when she heard a voice, calling to her.
No, screaming.
She turned, pulling the pistol she wore at her side out as she raced down the steep and jagged path toward the main search area. She was unclear for a moment whose voice she’d heard, but after her mind crunched on it for a few seconds, she realized. It was Sy.
Sy Merrick was her computer expert, and one of her oldest friends. Andi’s mind filled with images of Sy, lying dead and bloody on the ground, but then she heard another yell. Whatever had happened, her friend was still alive.
At least at the moment.
She whipped around a corner, and she stumbled to a halt as she saw a flash up ahead. It was a beam, a laser, invisible for most of the distance it covered, but bright and easily detectable where her crew’s excavation efforts had stirred up a large cloud of dust.
The visible part of the laser allowed her to look back, to see where the shooter was situated. She turned, staring over the debris and rubble covering what had clearly once been a great open square…and she saw it.
