The Alliance Trilogy

by Michael Wallace

  A few escape pods blasted out—desperate men hoping they’d be picked up instead of drifting into the void forever and ever—only seconds before heavy fire broke Anvil in two. The engine half exploded, and the other spun end over end, spewing debris.

  The final star wolf, Hellhound, looked like she would suffer the same fate, but help arrived in the form of the hard charging Apollo. The corvette executed a perfect barrel roll, hit one dragoon with cannon and another with torpedoes, and then accelerated away as only a corvette could. Dragoons were left flailing in its wake. Hellhound struck home and disgorged raiders and marines.

  The dragoons surrounding Delta were still regrouping when Bailyna Tyn’s sloops of war came in with an aggressive move—the old Hroom formation known as the Claw. Tolvern had faced that same charge and knew how to break it, but the dragoons were caught unprepared. One of the dragoons fell into its grasp. The Hroom serpentines, previously just an annoyance on the battlefield, now had an Adjudicator ship trapped in a devastating crossfire. Bomblets smashed it from all sides.

  The dragoon’s plasma ring blew. The shields failed. Hroom guns tore holes in the armor, and as Bailyna Tyn broke formation to face new threats, the dragoon was left gutted, a lifeless wreck. Tolvern’s surviving destroyer, HMS Crown, slipped in behind the sloops, spitting countermeasures and laying down a quick and dirty minefield in a ring around the star fortress.

  Delta was now isolated, her dragoons driven off, five sloops of war and an Albion destroyer shielding the five star wolves rammed into her hull. A minefield was also in place to slow down dragoons as they tried to relieve the carrier.

  It was as much as Tolvern could hope for.

  Meanwhile, she had three star fortresses and more than a dozen dragoons bearing down on her. Bravo and Charlie were in the lead, supporting the wounded Alpha, whose guns seemed to be online, but with sluggish rate of fire. Damage to fire control, then.

  Positioned behind the battlefield, Catapult hurled a devastating rain of missiles into the enemy forces, supported by missiles from the three larger ships. The war junk stayed silent, and Warthog concentrated its efforts on countermeasures.

  “Are we in torpedo range?” Tolvern asked.

  “The gunnery wants five more minutes to let the big carriers come into range,” Smythe said.

  “No, I want the Hunter-IIs. Pick a dragoon—any dragoon—and chase it from the battlefield.”

  Moments later, five Hunter-IIs rumbled out of the tubes. Engine bursts, rapid acceleration. They didn’t pack the same punch as a Mark-IV, but were harder to bring down and would pursue an enemy relentlessly. The targeted dragoon made an evasive maneuver, took a hit, and fled, hunted by the remaining four torpedoes.

  “Give me another victim. Then I want a pair of Mark-IV nukes.”

  This time, Tolvern’s torpedoes hit a dragoon twice, inflicting heavy damage, but the enemy countermeasures were more on target, and the ship remained in the battle.

  “Warning,” Jane said. “Number five shield at forty-one percent.”

  That was the armor guarding the main battery bombproofs. Lose that and Blackbeard wouldn’t be able to fight at close range. Tolvern hadn’t been paying much attention to the number five, since it had only been taking smaller hits, but damage had accumulated.

  She waited until Catapult launched a fresh barrage and her missiles were arcing above the three cruisers. “Mark-IV nukes. Chase them with everything you’ve got. Capp, coordinate with the fleet.”

  Missiles, torpedoes, and cannon fire roared from Blackbeard. Peerless and Triumph struck hard, too. There was incoming fire, growing hotter by the second, and Tolvern lost track of the outgoing attack for a couple of minutes.

  Smythe announced the unfortunate result. Enemy scans had picked the nuclear-armed torpedoes out from the conventional explosives and taken them out.

  “It’s all right,” Tolvern said, voice calm to conceal her disappointment. “It was nothing but a chance—enemy armor is still strong, and their tyrillium would have absorbed most of the blast anyway.”

  She checked the channel for news from the Scandian assault. Nothing. Outgoing transmissions must be jammed. She didn’t think Delta had fought off the attack. Not yet, anyway. The star fortress was still floundering, her dragoons trying to force their way through to shake off the wolves biting its flanks. Crown and the Hroom sloops held their own against the dragoon assault.

  The bad news was that none of the other Adjudicator star fortresses were coming to Delta’s aid. Surely they wouldn’t give up one of their capital ships for dead so quickly. That must mean they thought it could fight off the assault.

  “McGowan is on the line,” Capp said.

  Tolvern took a quick look at their own situation before taking the call. The two sides were still trading blows at a distance, but it looked like the three star fortresses were trying to gather their scattered dragoons for another push. She had a few minutes.

  “Put him on.”

  “I’ve taken heavy damage,” McGowan said. He looked grim, and the scar on his forehead from his earlier injury flushed pink. “Most serious is above the bridge—we never did get that armor fully repaired, and it’s cracking. I lost two of the main guns, knocked off their carriages. Triumph is in better shape, but only just.”

  “It will get worse before it gets better.”

  “We’ve damaged Alpha, we’ve damaged Delta—even if they throw Svensen off they won’t be in any shape to rejoin the fight. If we fall back to Mathilde, let her guns support us, we can inflict pain on either Charlie or Bravo.”

  “If we do that,” she said, “the Scandians never make it out alive.”

  “They probably won’t anyway,” McGowan said. “May as well be honest about that. It was a suicide charge. How would they even get out of there with all those dragoons swarming?”

  “When we come to the rescue, of course.”

  He gave a harsh laugh. “With three star fortresses battering us to hell? Look, we pull back, we hit Charlie and Bravo. Now all four of them are mangled, and they still haven’t so much as landed their decimators on the fortress. They’ll have to withdraw. We’ve earned a stalemate.”

  “I don’t want a stalemate.”

  “Listen to me! I talked to Zenger. We both agree. We can’t possibly destroy four star fortresses.”

  “We don’t need to destroy the enemy to win, but we do need a big enough victory that there’s no question who carried the day. Otherwise, we’ve bought nothing. Is that understood?”

  McGowan was quiet for several seconds. A glance to his side, at his officers who were no doubt listening in. “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m glad that’s settled.” Tolvern kept her voice neutral. No anger or gloating.

  “Give me orders,” he said.

  “They expect us to go for Alpha. Or maybe Bravo. It’s Alpha’s primary defense at the moment, positioned as they are, and they must know humans are vengeful. Bravo is the one that hurt me before, and hurt me badly. I want to destroy it.” Tolvern nodded. “Therefore, we’re going after Charlie.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Svensen entered the alien ship surrounded by dozens of mech raiders. Shooting as a matter of course, even before seeing if enemies were waiting to great them. They were in a long, curving corridor with a cool blue light. Temperature cold, almost chill. Oxygen at eighty-three percent standard. Gravity, 1.08 G.

  He took all this in even as he was arranging his men into assault formations. He had maybe ten seconds of peace before the attack came. A poisonous gas spewed through vents at his feet. Gun turrets fired from positions overhead. A bulkhead door swung shut to lock them in.

  Gravity vanished. Then flipped, leaving them falling to what had previously been the ceiling. Then it flipped again and hurled them in the other direction, where they slammed into the floor again.

  None of this caused more than temporary problems. The suits filtered the air, and the gunfire was light caliber, albeit heavy in volume. The gravity
flips were an annoyance, and if it continued, raiders would start puking, but it wasn’t going to destroy a mech suit. Neither was the flamethrower that suddenly spouted from the wall and ignited the poisonous gas.

  What it did tell him was that Adjudicator ships were built with precautions against boarding parties. Probably by their own kind, which made them no different from anyone else, didn’t it? How could you pass judgment on other species and civilizations when you couldn’t stop fighting each other?

  He left others to deal with the annoyances while he and Kelly joined Lund in attaching a shaped charge to the inner wall of the corridor. He wasn’t going to bother fighting his way through airlocks, sticking to corridors and ambushes all the way in. Not when he could blast new passageways.

  Lund wore a glossy black mech suit with the helmet made to look like a viper head. A forked tongue had been painted onto the faceplate as if it were dangling from a fanged mouth.

  Lund made calculations as to air pressure, thickness of the walls, and volume of air in the corridor, then set the charge to go off. They fell back around the curving corridor to wait.

  The charge exploded with a boom. Svensen brought the others back around to see a gaping hole on the inner wall. They’d ruptured a line of some kind, which spewed a thick, viscous liquid.

  Kelly made a gagging noise. “God, we hit their septic line.”

  “Filter the smell. Won’t even bother you.”

  Not that anyone wanted to be covered with raw sewage, alien or otherwise, and there was a good deal of cursing as the sixty raiders and mech suit marines pushed through the hole while the sludge kept burbling out. Svensen put out a call when he was between walls, trying to reach Jan Helsingor of Icefall.

  All he got was static. Communication via the ship com was jammed. Inconvenient, but not a surprise.

  They dropped into some sort of barracks, with long, sling-like beds hanging on cords from the walls. The beds hung in a ten-by-ten matrix, with rope ladders leading to each one. Cubbyholes held what could only be personal belongings, glowing cubes and some sort of stone totems, together with objects that were obviously hand computers and the like.

  No time to look closely, but Svensen saw enough to tell him that the room had been occupied recently. Some of the beds were twisted about, and clothing and blankets were scattered around, made of some shiny fabric laced with glowing LEDs.

  It was as if the enemy fleet was still on normal rotation when Svensen rammed their ship, and only then did they hurl everyone out of bed for all hands.

  “Going about their business like there was nothing here but a mop up,” he told Kelly. “They didn’t take us seriously.”

  Her response was grim. “Last time they make that mistake.”

  Svensen had them all in the room now, and they swung down from the hammocks like monkeys. The door out of the room seemed to be code locked. Another shaped charge dealt with that.

  Once it had blown, he pushed into the corridor, and here they faced their first enemies. Several mech units, their armor similar enough that at first glance he thought he’d met up with Icefall or Hellhound. But it was all the same, metallic-green and heavy about the shoulders and midsection. Helms that sloped forward, containing sloping alien faces.

  Decimators. Svensen imagined them inside, staring back implacably with those dead eyes, and a shudder ran down his spine.

  The aliens lifted guns, and it wasn’t the light projectiles of the automatic turrets in the outer corridor that had attacked Svensen’s raiders and marines. Instead, the decimators carried a variety of machine-gun-like assault rifles, energy pulse weapons, and grenade launchers. They let loose with a ferocious barrage of fire.

  Lund and another raider tore out the blast-damaged door and held it out as a shield while more Alliance troops entered the corridor. A trio of marines swung around the temporary shield and fired hand cannons. As soon as their projectiles exploded, Svensen and several others ducked around the door-turned-shield and came up firing.

  One of the decimators went down. One of the marines fell, too, faceplate smashed open, smoke pouring out where his face had been. He clawed at his helmet as if trying to get it off out of pure reflex, then went still. Gunfire roared over the top of the two still mech suits.

  A raider got a mounted gun in place and drove their enemies back, but moments later the decimators came charging back in. One of them had a hose-like contraption attached to a tank on his back and blasted liquid fire. It struck a pair of raiders and engulfed them in some sort of burning jelly.

  Grenades and assault rifle fire hurled the enemies back again. Another decimator went down. Raiders suppressed the jellied fire, but the two affected men had suffered fried servos and gutted weapon attachments. Not dead, but knocked out of the fight.

  And decimators were attacking from the other side, too. The marines set off a bomb and temporarily stopped the newcomers in their tracks. Renewed gunfire started up almost at once from that direction.

  “Blast it, these guys are hard to bring down,” Kelly said, voice strained.

  They were, Svensen thought with a mixture of respect and frustration. He needed to keep going, sweeping through the enemy ship, killing, blasting through airlocks, and finding the command center. Not be pinned down in an extended firefight.

  A brief surge in gunfire from the two armies, then it slowed as both sides took stock. Svensen got his troops working to lay another charge. He glanced at his mech suit. It was dinged up already, dimpled from incoming fire, with a blackened streak on the thigh where something bigger had struck him and gone off. He was lucky it hadn’t hit a joint.

  A voice came in over the static. “Griz, here. Anyone read? Pinned down at . . .” The voice cut off. Griz was from Boneless. He came back on. “Sending coordinates.”

  The numbers scrolled across Svensen’s display. The man was only about eighty feet away, below and forward somewhat.

  “Got it, Griz. We’re on our way.”

  But how? Someone had drilled at the floor earlier in the fight as they contemplated how to blast their way out of here, but it proved to be a hardened bombproof. He couldn’t go down, not from here.

  “We’re moving forward,” he told the troops. “Big push on my command.”

  He had the marines hurl more grenades, waited for the shock wave of multiple explosions, then gave the orders. They grabbed their bigger guns, picked up the broken door, still using it as a shield, and charged, firing with everything in their arsenal.

  The decimators held for one brief moment, then broke ranks and retreated. Svensen gave an eager shout and turned on the power boost. His legs pumped like pistons, and he overtook the rear decimators. Several other raiders were by his side. They caught several of the enemy mech suits and threw them to the ground. Guns and grenades went off. One blast sent Svensen flying backward, and he landed, still grappling with a decimator mech unit.

  It landed on top of him, pinning him. Others were fighting all around, and he had no help. He lifted his leg to hurl the enemy free, but the Adjudicator braced itself against the wall and pushed back. The alien lifted a hand, and a bright spark lit on the end. A plasma torch. It came toward Svensen’s faceplate.

  Svensen caught the alien’s wrist. Servos strained in each suit. He got his other hand up and groped at the enemy’s waist joints, arms, looking for something to grab and snap off. It was his missing hand, which gave him limited sensation of what he was touching, and he couldn’t seem to get hold of anything.

  The plasma torch touched his helmet. A warning flashed across the inside of his plate. The enemy helmet, with its long snout, leaned in until it was almost touching his. He could hear the thing grunting inside. An inhuman, hog-like sound.

  Suddenly, the decimator flipped over like a giant roach thrown onto its back. Behind, a gray suit, golden rampant lions. Kelly! The decimator seized her in both hands and hoisted her off the ground. It lifted a foot, and there were claw-like attachments that raked at her belly.

 
Svensen leaped to his feet and got his arms around the alien from behind. The decimator threw itself backward and slammed him into the wall, but he didn’t let go. Kelly curled her gauntleted hand into a fist and smashed it in the head. It cracked. She punched again.

  Svensen wrapped one arm around the thing’s helmet and wrenched hard to one side. It kept struggling. While he twisted, Kelly grabbed its head and added torque. The helmet joints snapped, and the alien mech suit was suddenly a deadweight in his arms.

  They’d killed an enemy with nothing but brute force. What a glorious feeling.

  After that, it was still a hard fight to clear the corridor against the enemy, who tried to launch a counterattack. Alliance mech units and decimators went down in nearly equal numbers. But at last Svensen’s troops battered through the enemy defenses and arrived near where Griz had sent his distress signal. It was right below them.

  They placed charges on the floor, still facing fire from behind, then moved clear. An explosion opened a gaping hole at their feet. There was a large bay beneath them, a depot of some kind, with stacked boxes and cranes and conveyors. And in the middle of it, a terrific firefight between Alliance and Adjudicator mech units.

  Griz was more than pinned down, Svensen realized as he dropped into the room and entered the fray. He was nearly overwhelmed, outnumbered two to one, at least. And the enemy had heavier guns and command of the space. They had forced Boneless’s men into a corner, and at least fifteen raiders and marines were down across the depot floor. Griz and his forces had taken refuge behind stacks of plastic crates, which were being chewed up with methodical machine gun fire.

  Boghammer’s force fell into the midst of the enemy and spread immediate chaos as they killed decimator units from behind. If only more decimators hadn’t been following them down from above, continuing the ongoing struggle, the battle might have turned into a rout. Instead, it became a general melee. The noise and smoke and fire were disorienting, and once, Svensen came under attack from three of his own men before they realized who he was.