The Alliance Trilogy

by Michael Wallace

  “Wasn’t it a few weeks ago the lot of you were calling our ship HMS Battered?”

  Smythe spoke up from the tech console. “It wasn’t just us, sir, that’s what everyone in the fleet was calling Blackbeard. We weren’t complaining, really. Just making note of it.”

  Capp nodded vigorously. “Yeah!”

  Tolvern hid her smile. “Not complaining? What was it I heard? Can’t we have a few days to fly around before we get all shot up again? Who said that? Someone did. Capp, was it you?”

  “All I was saying was that we needed a break,” Capp said. “Not that we wanted out of the fight altogether.”

  “Apparently the universe heard your heartfelt pleas and answered your prayers.”

  “I do not think that is actual Albion theology,” Nyb Pim said solemnly. “The universe is not a sentient being in your belief system. And they weren’t actual prayers, anyway, more like Henny Capp’s sincere desires.”

  “It’s a metaphor, mate,” Capp told the Hroom pilot. “Or is it a synopsis? A syno—you know, one of them literary things.”

  “Dragoons are rider ships,” Tolvern said. “They can’t jump on their own. So there’s either a base in this system, or at least one carrier.”

  “Aye, that’s true,” Capp said, brightening. “So we’re gonna get some action soon enough.” She touched her ear. “Got that Chinese lady on the line for you, Cap’n.”

  “Patch her through.”

  Wang’s voice was cool. “I am not ‘that Chinese lady,’ for one. For another, you might tell your first mate to cut the general com when she’s holding for someone. I heard all of that chatter.”

  “My crew are fighters,” Tolvern said. “As am I. These endless crawls through space tax our patience.”

  “No criticism of your command intended, Captain.”

  “None taken. How long until the solar storm clears?”

  “Solar storm? That chaos you see is to a solar storm what a hurricane is to a light breeze. It won’t ever clear, not until the star is gone.”

  “I need better data, Wang. Can you get it for me?”

  “The big blast of radiation we’re fighting should pass in a few hours, but I’d suggest if you want better scans, you figure a way to maneuver us through the system. The closer we get to an object, the better.”

  “Understood. Do what you can for now.”

  Tolvern leaned back in her chair and studied the main viewscreen. The dying star was an awesome sight, even from the perspective of fuzzy data scraped across millions of miles of space. And what about that ocean-covered planet? A bit of water was a great radiation shield, which should protect marine life, but could animals survive on the surface when the star gave off a big burp like that? Maybe if they got underground.

  She needed a closer look, not only to study the planet and figure out if the Adjudicators had a base on it or nearby, but to search for jump points in the system. There was an asteroid belt beyond the planet, but it was similarly obscured. Based on trajectories, that had been the destination of the surviving dragoons from Void Queen’s fight.

  Tolvern was tempted to leave one of the war junks here to observe, then withdraw the rest of her ships to rendezvous with Drake’s forces departing Persia and Nebuchadnezzar. Once they had the whole fleet, corvettes included, they could return and stir up a fight with whatever ghouls were in the system.

  Except she had no idea if there was anything significant to stir up. Maybe the dragoons had been stranded, nothing more. Or maybe it was a minor base, and the real enemy presence lay deeper inside the unexplored zone.

  “We’ll make a reconnaissance in force,” she decided. “Place the task force into battle position, swing past the asteroid belt, the planet, and as close to those two stars as we dare.”

  “Blackbeard is hardened against radiation,” Smythe said. “We can get as close as you want, so long as we stay clear of that neutron star’s gravity well. We get caught in that and there will be no getting out again.”

  “The closer we get, the closer we need to get to see a blasted thing,” she said. “All that radiation will blind our sensors.”

  “Not to mention the effect on torpedo and missile guidance systems,” Smythe said.

  A good point. Torpedoes and missiles had neither the shielding of a ship, nor the precision of its sensors. Remote guidance systems might fail.

  “That could be an advantage,” she decided. “If we lose our missiles, and they lose theirs, what does that leave us? Cannon. We’ve got better kinetic firepower than the enemy.”

  “By a long shot,” Smythe said.

  “Don’t forget intrafleet com, yeah?” Capp said. “Won’t be able to make calls down there. Not very good anyhow.”

  “I’ll take any defect that hits the ghouls as much as it hits us,” Tolvern said.

  After a brief consultation across the fleet, they set in motion on a course Nyb Pim had charted. It would take them in a wide, elliptical orbit, slice past two gas giants, through the asteroid field and a cluster of small planetoids, and then down toward the water planet, the most likely source of Adjudicator forces.

  “Capp, you get the honors,” Tolvern said as they set in motion. “Name the system.”

  The lieutenant brightened. “Yeah, me?”

  “But nothing funny—it’s going to appear on the charts forever.”

  “I was thinking Henny Capp’s Awesomely Weird Binary Star System. No good?”

  “Something a little more serious, Lieutenant.”

  Capp fell silent on the matter, and they were two hours into an acceleration to eight percent light speed when she brought up the viewscreen to show a better scan of the neutron star sucking plumes of gas from its larger, weaker neighbor. The gas glowed and twisted like ropes between the two stars, as strange and beautiful a celestial display as Tolvern had ever seen.

  “Heaven’s Gate,” Capp announced. “That’s my name.”

  #

  There were dragoons down there. Moving among the asteroid belt, they hit the fleet with sensors, and Tolvern was unable to keep her ships hidden. But the enemy revealed themselves with the scans, in bits and flickers as they slid between bases among all that rock. That gave Wang’s ships a target to search, and they began to get a picture of the Adjudicator activity.

  There was a lot of it. Multiple bases and spaceyards throughout the asteroid belt. Mines, refineries, and other colonies. A giant, donut-shaped object that seemed to be a farm, based on how it was arrayed to collect solar radiation.

  Wang gave Tolvern some of this via a personal report, together with her assessment. “There’s enough activity in the asteroid belt to count as a major colony in and of itself.”

  “Food production is strange, though,” Tolvern said. “That’s always easier planetside. Is it possible the planet is overpopulated and they’ve tapped out food production?”

  “Not that I figure,” Wang said. “Maybe we’re too far away to see it, but there’s not the sort of activity planetside you’d expect. For one, there’s no orbital fortress, which means no space elevator. Have you ever seen a major planetary civilization with no inexpensive way to hoist material out of a gravity well?”

  Tolvern admitted she hadn’t.

  “At the same time,” Wang continued, “the planet has life. There’s the right mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and there’s green—so plenty of plant life.”

  “Meaning that whatever radiation bursts hit from the stars, it’s not so lethal that the ghouls wouldn’t be able to shield themselves with a little effort.”

  Wang shrugged. “That would by my assessment, sir.”

  The Adjudicators had to be using that planet, Tolvern decided, which meant the Alliance fleet was missing something in its scans. She needed a closer look. At the same time, they were coming in hard and fast toward the asteroid belt, and there were so many tempting targets that she could hardly let slip the chance to do a raid.

  After a few minutes thought, she c
alled Vargus and gave her command of the fleet, along with orders. Hit the asteroid colonies, and hit them hard. Blackbeard would make a high-speed charge at the planet and see what she could see.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Catarina stared at the viewscreen and the donut-shaped object stretching across it. She’d never seen anything like it. Forty-five miles in diameter, the inner surface turned like a sunflower toward the solar energy radiating from Heaven’s Gate’s stars. A transparent, glass-like surface allowed light in, and even at several thousand miles, sensors picked up the green and gold of crops.

  The farm floated between two asteroids, each of which seemed to be a hub of mining and production. One held spaceyards, with a partially constructed star fortress and a pair of dragoons under repair—probably the two who’d escaped her charge into the Heaven’s Gate System a couple of days earlier. Void Queen was already at the outer range of the longest-reaching batteries, but the colony wasn’t yet shooting at her, so she held her fire.

  Catarina checked the side viewscreen. Two companies of star wolves shielded her starboard flank against a collection of dragoons that was gathering from farther around the asteroid belt. Destroyers ringed her other side, ready to throw down mines and torpedoes if an enemy should suddenly materialize. Two of the remaining war junks lingered behind Void Queen, ready to support her with energy beams.

  The third war junk—Wang’s own ship—had followed Blackbeard, which hurtled toward the inner system, ready to do a high-speed flyby of the water planet. Close enough to get a good look, but too fast to engage in combat with whoever was down there.

  The natural maneuver at that point would be to loop around the star and slingshot back in the other direction, but the neutron star part of the binary system was too dangerous for that, so Tolvern and Wang would be taxing their inertialess systems to make a sharper maneuver.

  Tolvern would be back to the asteroid belt in a couple of days, ready to support Catarina in whatever trouble she’d stirred up.

  “Give me a pair of missiles,” Catarina told Azavedo. “But I don’t want them puncturing the membrane and detonating against the surface. It’s so big—that won’t do much good.”

  “The gunnery can set them to detonate as they hit.”

  “Perfect.”

  The missiles launched one after another from their bays. While those were underway, she ordered the ship to swing around and present guns against the dragoons, which were finally making a move.

  There were nine in all, enough to be a threat, but not so powerful that she expected them to overwhelm the twelve star wolves, assuming the wolf commanders held their nerve. The Scandians were more disciplined than they had been a couple of years ago, but there was still jostling for position as the dragoons closed, and some premature firing of missiles and pummel guns.

  A trio of Royal Navy destroyers—Regal, Torrent, and London—moved forward long enough to fire torpedoes, then fell back to safer ground. The dragoons launched countermeasures and divided into three clusters of three ships, each one targeting a star wolf. Void Queen fired a barrage of missiles from her batteries, and they soared over and under the wolves and destroyers to get at the enemy formations.

  Meanwhile, her first two missiles reached their target. Or very nearly did so; at the last moment, bursts of energy flared from hubs around the giant farm and destroyed them.

  “Not so easy as popping a giant water balloon,” she said.

  She hadn’t expected it to be. In fact, even big strikes would only do limited damage against such a large surface area. An object of that size would be vulnerable to everything from incoming fire to the debris common in an asteroid field, and it must have some way of rapidly repairing breaches in its hull. She could come up close and pound it with kinetic fire, and maybe shred it enough to do damage that way, but was there any point to attacking it other than because it presented a fat, inviting target?

  In addition to the nine dragoons fighting her star wolves, four more enemy ships materialized behind her on the Y-axis, where she had less protection. More dragoons.

  “Get Badger back there and protect our rear.”

  Badger was her brawler, so named to keep the crew of the rider ship from being jealous that their counterparts with Blackbeard had given their own ship a name.

  While Azavedo dealt with this new threat, Gomez charted a course that would bring them in against the asteroid yards and the helpless, partially built star fortress.

  “Time to stop messing around with the farms,” she said. “Let’s hit the ghouls where it hurts.”

  Void Queen let loose another barrage of missiles as the fleet moved toward its new target. It was a big asteroid, a good hundred miles across, and the main yards rotated slowly away from them, but there were targets all across the surface, buildings with too much exposure, and she let the gunnery pick targets until they knew where the enemy batteries were located.

  As soon as she’d announced her intentions, the dragoons stopped fighting star wolves and made an attempt to break through to the battle cruiser. One of the enemy ships found itself caught between Bloodaxe and Devil’s Tooth from the First Wolves, while Boghammer from the Fourth came in to support.

  Pummel guns hammered it from three directions. They broke the blue torus and tore gaping holes in its armor. One dragoon down. A second dragoon took blows from Boneless and Loki, and a hard torpedo blow from a destroyer, and fled past Void Queen in an attempt to gain its freedom. Catarina had her striker wing in the air, and they set off in pursuit, harassing with pulse fire and light missiles until it was no longer a threat and she recalled the falcons. Make that two dragoons knocked out of the fight.

  Of Catarina’s forces, only Regal, one of her destroyers, had suffered notable damage, when a pair of dragoons hit it hard in passing. Regal withdrew to the protection of the battle cruiser’s guns while her crew worked to seal bulkhead damage and slap down a quick tyrillium patch.

  The asteroid base let off a massive wave of missiles, all directed toward Void Queen. Catarina watched them warily as Winchester and Burris went to work taking them down. Badger’s crew was at it, too, and the missiles had to clear a formation of five destroyers, as well, before they could get at the battle cruiser. One by one they burst apart or spiraled out of control.

  She launched her own wave of missiles. Would have liked to follow up with torpedoes, but she needed to keep tubes hot for the surviving dragoons, who were still causing mischief and disrupting her formations. If she’d had a half dozen corvettes, she thought she could have scattered them. Instead, it took most of her star wolves and destroyers to hold them at bay.

  Even so, nearly a third of her missiles made it through enemy countermeasures and slammed into the asteroid in a series of satisfying explosions. Plumes of dust and rock lifted and hung in space before drifting back to the surface.

  “Another barrage?” Azavedo asked.

  “We need to get closer,” she said.

  “Why? We’re safe out here, and we can keep hitting them from a distance.”

  “Sure, if we had time for a lengthy bombardment. Empty our stores, then send someone to the jump to get more from our merchanters. But you might have noticed that it’s not the most friendly neighborhood to linger in.”

  “Two more dragoons,” Burris warned from the tech console. “Coming in fast at eight degrees on the X-axis.”

  “My point exactly,” Catarina told Azavedo. “The sky is so murky with the solar storms that we’re not going to see the enemy until they’re right on top of us.”

  “They can’t see us, either.”

  “They couldn’t see us. Now they know exactly where we are. I figure every ghoul in the system is charging us right now.”

  Several dragoons made to join the incoming pair. Void Queen fired a shot from her main battery as they massed, and they broke apart to evade. One of the enemy ships fell in against her brawler, which gave it a good mauling before the dragoon could withdraw.

  Regal finish
ed her emergency repairs and swung back into action. Catarina had the destroyer join her companions in shielding Void Queen, set the First Wolves to mixing it up with the dragoons, and brought the Fourth Wolves in close.

  She got Svensen on the line. The one-handed Scandian commander looked eager. “I’ve got my raiders thawing. Give me one hour to get them suited.”

  “Keep them on ice,” she told him. “You’re not landing anyone.”

  “What, why?”

  “Take a look at that thing. When’s the last time you saw an asteroid base with so many different structures? And that’s just what you can see. There might be ten million people living down there.”

  “Ten millions slaves, maybe.”

  “Like those cavlee shriekers you faced? You ready to face ten million suicide charges?”

  He grunted his response.

  “And even if they are mostly slaves,” she added, “there will be plenty of Adjudicators, too. That’s a major colony, factory, and mining complex we’re looking at.”

  He looked sullen. “So what, then? Just hang out here protecting your flank?”

  “Hell, no. That’s what destroyers are for. I want you in there low with your pummel guns. You’re going to give them a taste of Valhalla.”

  His face brightened. “All right!”

  Azavedo shortly sent the man exactly how Catarina wanted the Scandian ships positioned, and Svensen and his fellow commanders moved to comply. With the other wolves still battling dragoons, she brought her destroyers in for closer fire support.

  “War junks are reporting more incoming enemy ships,” Burris warned. “Four million miles out along the orbital plane and closing at .02. Either a star fortress or a good-sized squadron of dragoons.”

  “ETA?” she asked.

  “Assuming velocity shedding, max missile range . . . we’ve got about twenty-five minutes.”

  “Let’s make them count.”

  The enemy colony was unloading with everything they had, with firepower roughly equivalent to one of Albion’s orbital fortresses. For such a big settlement, she’d have expected more, but the Adjudicators must have been holed up in here for decades, and never been attacked. They’d grown lazy and overconfident.