The Alliance Trilogy

by Michael Wallace

  The Slave Master waited.

  “It wasn’t the solar storm that did it.” Nils Oolmena pointed to the pile of dead Hroom. He twinged with pain to see his companion lying there, broken and crumpled among the others. “The tall, pale female did it. Her name was Lum Gee, and she treacherously brought down the defense perimeter and left the camp. She went into the grasslands and started a fire that drove the creatures through the breach and into the camp.”

  Entirely true, and yet so many missing details.

  “How did this slave defy her implant?”

  “Her name was Lum Gee, and she was a sugar eater.”

  “You said these Hroom needed sugar to keep them alive.”

  He barely managed to avoid whistling his relief at the nature of the statement. “That is true. It is also true that the sugar kept them from being entirely loyal to the Lords of Life.”

  “Are you a sugar eater?”

  “No, I am not.”

  I have a faulty implant. That is how I defy you.

  “Are there other sugar eaters?”

  “Yes, three sugar addicted Hroom survived the incident.”

  “Which ones?”

  “They’ve lost their natural coloring, and their skins are light pink, not purple.”

  “I will find them and destroy them myself. We cannot risk another act of sabotage.”

  Another act? Fear clenched Nils Oolmena’s gut.

  “We’ve contaminated this planet,” Nils Oolmena said. “And contaminated the Dweller, in turn. It must be purified, yes?”

  The Slave Master ignored him and turned to study the work site. A number of insectoids scuttled up the ramp dragging baskets full of offal from the dead trumpeter. There was a buzzing in Nils Oolmena’s head, something of communication meant only for the insectoids that his implant picked up like interference. He couldn’t understand, but the command carried a current of violence.

  The insectoids dropped their burdens and scurried over to where Nils Oolmena had been gathering the injured. As soon as the critical work of clearing the work site had been accomplished, he meant to bind light wounds and give water to the heat exhausted.

  The creatures opened their claw-like hands, and there was a snicking sound. Serrated, chitinous appendages slid from apertures, turning the hands into sharp pincers. While Nils Oolmena watched, horrified, they scrambled like giant spiders over the wounded, cutting and slicing at throats and abdomens. A human feebly lifted her hand, which was shoved out of the way. A snick on the woman’s throat sent blood spattering onto the insectoid’s carapace. A Hroom tried to crawl free. He, too, died, neck severed from behind.

  A Cavlee lifted its head and released a long, moaning “Cavleee!” as two insectoids opened already gaping wounds at its belly and tore out its organs.

  In a matter of a few minutes, the gore-splattered insectoids had finished and scurried back to the Slave Master. One of them had a crushed claw where a human had fought back with a rock. The Adjudicator gave a command, and its companions turned on the wounded creature with sudden savagery, tearing off its limbs and clipping off its eye stalks. It convulsed and flipped on its back to die.

  “Why?” Nils Oolmena asked. “Why are you doing this?”

  “We must cull the workforce. Press on harder and faster.” The Adjudicator cocked its head at one of the four remaining insectoids. “That creature is missing a back leg at the second joint.”

  “It can still work. A missing leg is nothing.”

  But the command had already been given, and it too was torn apart by its fellows. Now there were three.

  “Where are the sugar eaters?” the Slave Master asked.

  Nils Oolmena pointed a long finger at the pit. “Working at the bottom.”

  Another buzz in his implant, and the three insectoids hurried off for the ramp. Seconds later, a whistled cry from the work site indicated that they’d already found one of the condemned.

  Nils Oolmena forced himself to turn back to the Slave Master. “I don’t understand. The site is contaminated. Shouldn’t the Dweller be covered, the area sterilized? Our presence removed from the planet to allow this world to heal?”

  The Adjudicator cocked its head skyward. Lights flashed briefly in the midst of the diamond of star fortresses in orbit. Explosions? Nils Oolmena’s stomach lurched with sudden hope. An attack; the human and Hroom fleet must have arrived in this desolate system, must even now be fighting to destroy the huge alien carriers.

  He imagined warships in the hundreds. Hroom sloops of war, led by General Mose Dryz, his ships blessed by the empress herself. Albion warships, maybe even the mighty Dreadnought herself. Others, an alliance of Ladinos and Scandians and Singaporeans and Persians. Maybe they’d been joined by some long-forgotten remnant of Cavlee, their squat crew members ululating that strange cry as they drove their ships into battle.

  But no, it was too much to hope for. There were only two flashes of light, followed by nothing. The same array of star fortresses remained against a backdrop of the heavens, with the aurora bending and glowing along the horizon.

  The Slave Master turned its lidded, lizard-like gaze toward Nils Oolmena. “This world will be purified later. We must awaken the Dweller first. Lesser beings have defied our judgment and must know its holy presence.”

  “Then the work continues as before?”

  “We double the effort. We work the devotees day and night. More shuttles are inbound, and the fallen will be easily replaced. Only technicians, equipment operators, and other critical workers will be fed and rested. The rest will work until they die with no rest or respite.”

  The last of the decimator units were on board, and the shuttle doors closed. Engines flared to life, and it began to lift, even as workers scrambled out of the way to keep from being cooked alive.

  “Those were warrior units,” Nils Oolmena said. “Who is flying the shuttle?”

  “It is on a programmed trajectory—it needs no pilot.”

  “And you’re staying here?”

  “You are weak, Hroom. Your mind is soft, like all of the judged. Only I can inspire the proper dedication in the devotees. They will feel no hunger, only duty. No exhaustion until their limbs collapse. Instead of pain, their implants will feed them pleasure until they shudder with it.”

  Nils Oolmena stared. The thing was insane.

  “We will work until the Dweller is uncovered and awake,” it continued. “And then I will die here, along with the rest of you. We will all die in holy, purified ecstasy.”

  The Adjudicator stared up at the shuttle burning through the night sky on its way to meet with the star fortresses overhead. The three remaining insectoids stared in turn at the Slave Master. Their limbs trembled with anticipation, and the look on their primitive faces was ecstatic.

  They, and all the rest, would die in the glorious service of their own destruction.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Admiral Drake had barely retrieved his forces from Persia when Adjudicator fleets attacked the Fortaleza and Castillo Systems. A single star fortress with six dragoons hit the new marine supply depot and lunar fortress in orbit around the gas giant at Fortaleza. There were only three destroyers in the system, and Drake ordered a hasty evacuation.

  Castillo was a bigger issue. On the one hand, now that Persia had reopened to the space lanes, Castillo was redundant. Persia boasted more than three million inhabitants and a pair of orbital fortresses, and General Mose Dryz had used his long isolation to harden the system’s defenses. The lanes from Persia, through Scandian systems and back to Albion, were relatively secure.

  Castillo, on the other hand, possessed a shattered population of perhaps a million people, all of them rustics. Lieutenant commander Kelly’s base and yards at Fort Mathilde were fully operational, and she had several thousand people dug into an asteroid base and fortress. It lay across the inner frontier, and the crown wanted the planet resettled and brought under Albion control.

  Eventually.

  Hol
ding it in the short term was problematic, especially with a Blackbeard-Void Queen led fleet raiding enemy territory, and Drake preparing an even bigger fleet to land the hammer blow. He didn’t want to get sidetracked by defending the indefensible.

  And so when Kelly sent a subspace saying that two star fortresses were in the system, Drake composed a message telling her to evacuate her ships to Nebuchadnezzar while she and her garrison hunkered down behind Fort Mathilde’s guns. Keep her marines on the ready to repel decimators. Drake would make a flashy show of rolling through Fortaleza on his way toward the heart of alien activity in Heaven’s Gate. In theory, that would force the Castillo invaders to fall back and chase him across the inner frontier.

  Drake hesitated, doubting, before he sent the message. What if the enemy didn’t take the bait? What if they continued on their quest to destroy Fort Mathilde, making an emotional decision to win a victory at the site of their biggest defeat? That was possible, maybe even probable.

  Lieutenant Lucy Pearson—the former Captain Pearson—found him in the war room, puzzling over charts and parsing the bare bones messages coming out of Heaven’s Gate from Tolvern and Vargus. He didn’t have much time to make a decision; his fleet was nearly assembled, with a final, motley squadron of fourteen star wolves, destroyers, and torpedo boats currently traversing Damascus on their way to his position.

  He looked up warily as she entered. Everyone expected him to return to Dreadnought soon, and Pearson no doubt wanted her command back. He wasn’t ready to give it to her, but expected her to ask. She was no idiot; she knew he was testing her, knew he was giving her the opportunity. And knew that the fleet was too short of seasoned officers to deny her a chance forever.

  She looked down her sharp nose at where he sat. With the serious set to her eyes and the gray at her temples, she certainly looked experienced. Which was part of the problem. If she had been younger, he’d have felt more sanguine about her chances at rehabilitation. Never mind what he’d told Tolvern; he didn’t think Pearson had the imagination to be an effective commanding officer over a ship of Vigilant’s importance.

  “Yes, Pearson?”

  “I passed orders to the general, sir. McGowan, too.”

  “There’s nothing more required under the circumstances. They will spread word down the line. Prepare Vigilant for the jump.”

  “So we’re abandoning Kelly?”

  “You read the briefing, yes?”

  “I did. What if the enemy doesn’t take the bait?”

  “Then I expect the base commander and her sailors, marines, and civilian crew to give as good an accounting as possible.”

  “That seems . . . hard.”

  “It is.” Drake softened his tone. “It’s bloody hard, Pearson. But Kelly is dug in, and she’s got guns and ammo enough to make a good fight of it. Even against two fortresses, I expect she could hold out for a good long time. We might be able to reinforce her by then.”

  “Nine days is the most we could hope for, sir. In my opinion. Three days for the enemy to reduce Kelly’s missile batteries, three to finish off the cannon. Another day to soften bombproofs. Then two days to land decimators and overrun the lowest reaches of the base. 200-230 hours, from the moment combat begins.”

  “Not bad. I came to a similar assessment.” Drake leaned back and tented his hands in front of his nose. “How does Kelly buy more time?”

  “If you let her keep the destroyers and sloops, she might get another day. Dragoons will make short work of them. A few tricks might buy her a final day or so, if she’s lucky, and the enemy commander is cautious. But that only gets you to two weeks, tops.”

  “Let’s stick to nine days,” he said. “Frankly, I could use a nine-day advantage in Heaven’s Gate before those carriers join the action.”

  “Or they might not join the action at all if we destroy them first,” she said. “Look at this, sir.”

  Pearson sat next to him and tapped the console to shift his view of the charts out across the frontier. A lattice of jump points appeared, a mix of those charted by Blackbeard’s initial expedition and those from old, sometimes ancient charts. Pearson highlighted the outward path of the Tolvern-Vargus task force, now fighting in Heaven’s Gate, at the edge of the red carrot of unexplored systems that blocked their path toward Old Earth.

  She zoomed in on a system two jumps short of Moscow. “Look at this jump point, Admiral. Blue, ninety-one percent stable.”

  “Nobody has taken that jump, Pearson. We don’t know where it goes, we only studied it from a distance on our way through.”

  “No, but look at the characteristics of this other one.”

  She pulled up the Moscow system and highlighted a jump on the far edge of the system. This was one from the old charts, seventy or eighty years out of date, during the brief reign of Queen Maud, when there was still regular transport from Old Earth to the farthest human colonies.

  “Looks like a match for the first one,” Drake said.

  “These two are paired—they have to be. That means we can jump directly from here to here and cut seven, eight days off our voyage. We’d have time to swing through Castillo, fight off the enemy carriers, and still arrive in time to reinforce Tolvern and Vargus.”

  “Or we could take the shortcut anyway and get into the fight all that much quicker.” He studied Pearson. “You served with Kelly at one point, didn’t you?”

  “She was an ensign on Catapult when I was second mate. Back in the final Hroom war. But that’s beside the point. We can take out those carriers while they’re isolated. Look, send Citadel ahead, together with whatever you need to support her. Once she arrives, you’ll have three battle cruisers and several dozen other warships—that’s enough to hold the line.”

  “While I take the helm of Dreadnought, you resume command of Vigilant, and we bring the rest of the fleet into Castillo to relieve Kelly?”

  She thrust her chin forward. “Yes.”

  “Did you figure this out on your own, or is this Drysdale’s work?”

  “Drysdale? What does he have to do with anything? He’s a good tech officer, but he doesn’t have either the initiative or the imagination.”

  “I’ll be frank, Pearson, I didn’t think you did, either.”

  “I’ve been working this out for a while. Back when I was holding the line in Nebuchadnezzar, waiting for Vargus and Tolvern, I thought I’d study the jump points across the inner frontier. That’s when I first noticed this.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?” Now Drake grew irritated. “We put together a blasted battle plan—I was open about that—and wasted more than a week getting Tolvern and Vargus from here to here.” He tapped the screen, showing the older, longer route to Moscow.

  “Right,” she said sarcastically, “because immediately following a court-martial is when you stick your neck out. Because you’re not humiliated to be accused of gross incompetence and have your rank stripped. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Lord Malthorne framed me for the destruction of a merchant freighter and sentenced me to hard labor in the helium-3 mines.”

  “And how did you take it?” she asked. “With aplomb, chin up, and all of that?”

  Other than his crew mutinying and mounting a rescue? Then a stint as a rebel, followed by a return to lead the civil war against Malthorne’s attempted coup? Admittedly, if it hadn’t been for Tolvern, Smythe, Barker, and the rest of his crew, he’d have suffered quietly in the mines, his navy career finished. But they hadn’t taken it quietly, and he’d followed them into rebellion.

  “Very well,” he said. “So you’ve shown initiative. I only wish you’d done so earlier, but what’s done is done. As for your plan . . . it has merit.”

  More than merit, it was quite solid. He had enough ships to defeat two carriers, even a third, if the one hammering the marine depot in Fortaleza materialized, while still sending powerful reinforcements to Tolvern and Vargus.

  Pearson w
aited, anticipation on her face. But calmly—this was not an eager young officer, but an experienced salt. She’d known enough to push him, but now knew when to stay silent. Wise on her part; he needed time to let his ego relax its hold. Pride—a known personal defect.

  “Our primary duty is to support the assault on Heaven’s Gate, but I can’t send forward so many ships that we don’t have enough to win a decisive battle in Castillo.”

  “Understood, Admiral.”

  “With those competing needs in mind, draw me two lists of ships. One for Castillo, one to reinforce Tolvern and Vargus.”

  “Yes, sir.” Pearson cleared her throat. “And my command? My rank?”

  “Not yet, Lieutenant.”

  #

  The larger of the two forces, and the first to cross the inner frontier, was Captain Fox’s fleet, led by his battle cruiser, HMS Citadel. Eight Punisher- and Aggressor-class cruisers accompanied him, together with ten corvettes, twenty-two torpedo boats, seventeen destroyers, and a pair of missile frigates. Colonel Bailyna Tyn joined him at the head of a squadron of sixteen Hroom sloops, and the Third and Fifth Wolves, with twelve Scandian warships between them, added to his firepower. Finally, a pair of war junks, inadequate in number, but with most of the Singaporean vessels currently strung out across the inner frontier on silent watch, the best they could manage.

  Fox’s fleet vanished one by one from Nebuchadnezzar while Drake was still organizing his squadron. His forces may have been smaller in number, but they still comprised a massive display of firepower.

  The Castillo task force comprised five ships of the line: the battleship Dreadnought, Mose Dryz commanding, and the cruisers Vigilant—Drake’s ship—Peerless, Alacrity, and Savage, the latter an older, Aggressor-class cruiser. Supporting them were six ships of the Second Wolves, three corvettes, four missile frigates, five sloops of war, two war junks, nine torpedo boats, and fourteen destroyers.

  In addition, Drake would roll up the war junks after he left Castillo, collecting roughly a dozen of the Singaporean ships to further bolster his fighting ability as he approached Lenin and Heaven’s Gate.