Of Lieutenant Pearson’s suggested fleet division, Drake had accepted nearly all of her suggestions, except he wanted to conceal his hand as far as the corvettes were concerned, and sent most of them on with Captain Fox, while adding two missile frigates to the pair she’d suggested. He also held back a larger reserve than she’d recommended, comprising nearly thirty warships that could hold the line in the home systems should the Adjudicators attempt to turn the tables with an invasion of their own.
Whatever damaged vessels Drake suffered in Castillo would either remain with Lieutenant commander Kelly or return to Persia for repair, further augmenting the reserve fleet. And with the Alliance yards on a full war footing, a new warship of some kind could join the fight every five to seven days, plus however long it took to fly them securely to the frontier.
Drake felt confident as he watched Dreadnought make the jump, and even better when he came through on Vigilant to see his fleet assembling near the wreckage of a pair of enemy dragoons from an earlier fight. A reminder that they’d already inflicted losses on the alien invaders.
He pushed into motion, crossed the system without incident, and jumped into Castillo. This time he was more cautious; among Kelly’s subspace messages was a hint that dragoons had mined the jump point.
He sent through Six Tiger to scan, and it went dark and did a passive scan of the area. There were both mines and dragoons lurking. The mines would pin Alliance ships in place as they emerged, but with some careful maneuvering, the Singaporean commander thought they could squeeze through a pair of ships to hold the dragoons at bay while they cleared the minefield.
That meant Vigilant and Dreadnought. Drake jumped first, shook off the jump to find four dragoons blasting him with missiles, and returned fire while holding position for Dreadnought. Six Tiger dropped her cloaks and hit with pulse fire, a risky maneuver given the war junk’s light armor.
Then the general arrived. Within minutes of arrival, Dreadnought released a mighty roar of missiles, as much firepower with its batteries as two missile frigates. The dragoons made a hasty retreat.
The battleship carried eighteen falcons in its striker wing, and they were soon in the air, pulsing mines to clear a path. By the time the dragoons regrouped to make another charge, McGowan had Peerless through the jump, and the enemy ships seemed to change their mind. They turned and accelerated toward the inner system.
It had been a brief skirmish, easily won by the Alliance forces, albeit with little damage inflicted. If only the rest of it could be as simple. Down toward the inner part of the system, two star fortresses had taken up position beyond the reach of Fort Mathilde’s guns, and were giving Kelly a beating.
As for the forces Kelly had begun the fight with, the war junk had gone dark. The five destroyers and pair of sloops that had remained to augment Castillo’s defenses were scattered. Dragoons had them on the run, at least two enemy ships for every allied vessel. One destroyer was partially disabled on the opposite side of the system, far from help, her crew about to meet their maker as the enemy closed in.
Drysdale finished his scan of the system. “Seventeen dragoons, Admiral, counting the four we just ran off.”
“So there must be a third star fortress lurking,” Pearson said from the first mate’s station. “Two more wolves through—Longboat and Mead Horn.” She raised an eyebrow. “Mead Horn? Who thinks up these Scandian names, anyway?”
“Someone who likes to drink,” Drake said. “As for the star fortress, we had a pretty good idea. Tell the Singaporeans to find the cursed thing.”
The departing dragoons shortly gave them a clue, as they slid around to hook up with a smallish blue-green gas planet and its moons. It was a good place to lurk while waiting to see what the approaching Alliance fleet had in mind, but also seemed a likely place for the missing carrier to hide—equidistant from the incoming jump point, Fort Mathilde, and the planet itself. The war junk commanders concentrated their search in that direction.
The wounded destroyer died a fiery death, and the two dragoons that had killed it swung about to join the hunt for a sloop of war. The sloop twisted about in an attempt to lose pursuit and make its way to the outer reaches of the system and the armada piling up there—its salvation. The dragoons were faster, more maneuverable, and had better long-range armaments.
They knocked out the Hroom serpentine batteries and closed for the kill. Within another hour, the sloop was a gutted, drifting wreck. Engine blown, escape pods destroyed as they exited the ship.
The other five Alliance ships were more fortunate. As the last of Drake’s fleet arrived in the system, someone on the enemy side ran the numbers and realized they had a desperate struggle on their hands. The pursuing dragoons gave up the chase and fell back toward Fort Mathilde to join their carriers.
Drake set the fleet in motion, then left the deck to get some rest. Twenty hours on shift—he was dead on his feet, and would need his strength, both mental and physical, for the coming fight.
When he came back on the bridge eight hours later, they were already decelerating to join the fight at Fort Mathilde. Kelly’s return fire was greatly diminished, and the star fortresses had closed range and were pummeling the asteroid.
“We’ve found the third carrier, sir,” said a young ensign named Hashemi who’d been manning the tech console while Drysdale was off shift.
Hashemi was from Persia, one of the new crop of officers from across the allied worlds to join the Royal Navy. A Singaporean implant allowed him to speak English.
“Give me designations.”
“Echo and Juliett at the fortress, sir. India closing with four dragoons.”
“All identified carriers, then. That’s good. We don’t need any more than we already have.”
He kept his fleet in close formation, but they were still numerous enough to range across several thousand miles. Dreadnought was in the vanguard, shadowed by destroyers, wolves, and a war junk. A strong, but somewhat vulnerable collection of other ships comprised the middle portion of the oncoming fleet, with the four cruisers—Vigilant, Peerless, Alacrity, and Savage—at the rear.
Other pieces were in motion. India’s course led it in a path around the rim of the asteroid belt. Those dragoons that had been chasing Kelly’s rump fleet had fallen back to join the assault on the fortress, with most having already arrived. That allowed Kelly’s four destroyers and the sloop to circle back around, where they would soon augment Drake’s forces.
“Incoming message from Fort Mathilde,” Hashemi said.
Lieutenant commander Elizabeth Kelly stared across the viewscreen, her gaze shifting, unfocused. Bags beneath her eyes. Her short hair looked like it had been combed with her fingers.
“Admiral Drake, it’s good to see you. Is this an evacuation mission, or do you need me to hold position?”
There would be a delay of more than a minute for his response to reach her, so she kept talking, to expedite the transmission of information.
“We’ve taken three nukes, sir. The first two didn’t penetrate the bombproofs—we’ve had plenty of time to dig in down here, and it was already a well-excavated mine complex from the Novosibirsk days—but the third shattered our targeting control. We’ve still got most of our guns, but can’t target the enemy with any effectiveness.
“Nothing to do but sit here and take a pounding. Antigrav is active, life support, stable, at least in the lower reaches. I have five hundred marines thawed and ready to defend the base. Only two hundred are mech units, though. We lost one of our main armories.”
“Could be worse,” Lieutenant Pearson said. “Do you want to send a return message?”
Drake gave her the affirmative. “Hold tight,” he told Kelly. “We’re less than an hour out, counting deceleration. They won’t be landing decimators after that. I can’t pull the colony, anyway. We’ve got to hit hard and move across the frontier—a full evacuation would cost us days we don’t have. But we won’t leave you to die, either. Once we clear the attackers
, get that fire control back online.”
It wouldn’t be easy for Kelly with the surface glowing with radiation, but fully shielded mech units could do the job, and there was enough area up top to shift the targeting sensors away from the blast zone. Kelly couldn’t do a thing, however, until he got those star fortresses off her back.
The base commander returned one more message. “We’re operating nearly blind here, but I see you’ve got star wolves. Is it the Fourth Wolves, by any chance?”
The Fourth was Ulfgar Svensen. Drake was going to pretend he didn’t know why she was asking. “Negative. It’s the Second Wolves.”
By now, the message only took a few seconds to cross the distance. They were shedding speed rapidly, Dreadnought already in the fray, with incoming missiles targeting the battleship, and her batteries warming in return. Dozens of other Alliance warships maneuvered into position to support her.
Meanwhile, Star Fortress Echo turned away from Fort Mathilde, even as Juliett fired a last salvo at the base. A big flash as another nuclear device struck the asteroid. Coming from an oblique angle, Star Fortress India steaked in with her dragoons, ready to savage Drake’s Y-axis flank.
“Call the gunnery,” Drake told Pearson. “Cloaks down, all systems ready to fire on my mark.”
Chapter Eighteen
Catarina hit the Lenin jump first. She’d found the system foreboding on her last visit. Everything red and hostile, from the big, fiery star at its heart, to the burnt little worlds on the inner system and the red gas giants on the exterior. A desert, the sort you traversed without setting down roots. And resource poor, too, with little of interest to mine, even had there been nearby inhabited systems.
But she was glad to be out of Heaven’s Gate and the nasty array of star fortresses gathering strength against them. Void Queen and Blackbeard might have held their own against the pair forcing them out of the asteroid belt, but if those six at the planet left orbit, a successful raid could easily have turned into a crushing defeat.
As the jump concussion wore off, and she shifted Void Queen clear to allow star wolves and destroyers to come through, Burris gave his first report of Lenin.
“We’ve got another star fortress,” he said. “It’s Kilo, our friend from Xerxes.”
Catarina groaned. Kilo was a nasty piece of work, carrying eight dragoons, instead of the normal six, and with heavier missile batteries at the expense of short-range kinetic fire. They’d tangled with it shortly after jumping out of the Scandian systems. Kilo and a fellow carrier, Lima, had raided Vest-Agder, Great Bear, and Jutland before falling back toward the inner frontier.
Fortunately, the Adjudicators seemed to have expended most of their ordnance by the time Catarina met them, or Void Queen might have had a rough time of it. Instead, they’d fought a short, five-hour battle before the carriers retreated. Now it seemed she’d have to face them again, only this time they’d be better armed.
“Range?” she asked.
“Thirty-two million and closing. Holding steady at .01.”
Already slowing, then. Assuming additional time for deceleration, that gave her roughly five hours until combat. Two wolves were through already: Olafsen’s own Bloodaxe, plus Thunder. HMS Torrent was next in line for the jump, then Nine Tiger, a war junk. The rest of the fleet would enter Lenin as quickly as they could, but the ships were strung out, and the battle would begin before she had most of her forces at hand.
“We’ve got to fight the ghouls,” she told her worried crew, “but that doesn’t mean we have to sit in position until they arrive.”
She had Gomez maneuver them about seventy thousand miles from the jump point in the direction of a scarlet-colored gas giant roughly two million miles distant. Badger detached, and she shifted the brawler into a shielding position along the Y-axis toward Kilo. Striker wing in the air.
Bloodaxe and Thunder shifted into position above and below her ship. As soon as Torrent came through, she had the destroyer lay mines—just enough to be credible—to block a quick charge toward the jump point. That would allow her forces to enter the system without harassment. Nine Tiger emerged and cloaked itself. Catarina told the Singaporeans to prepare to target the carrier with their armor-softening beam.
Meanwhile, Kilo shed its dragoons. They broke into packs of four and swung ahead of the star fortress with their torus rings glowing blue and their knife-like appendages thrusting forward. Long and lean, like barracudas. And Void Queen was their prey.
Two more ships from the First Wolves entered Lenin, but they were still recovering from the jump when Kilo launched its first missile salvo. Long range still—unlike the skirmish in Xerxes, the enemy carrier clearly had ordnance to spare. Winchester made worried noises from the defense grid.
“Hold your countermeasures,” she told him. “And Burris, put the brakes on the gunnery. I don’t want anything going out until we see what those dragoons are up to.”
Her strategy was to buy time. She was in some difficulty at the moment, but as the battle continued, her advantage would grow and the enemy’s diminish. So she had no desire to mix it up against the powerful enemy ship until she had no other options.
“Push us another eighty thousand miles toward the planet. Tell the wolves to hold position at the jump. Who is next through? A destroyer, right?”
“Aye, it’s Crown,” Azavedo said. “But what about those incoming missiles?”
“We have a few minutes. Hold.”
The brawler and the other three auxiliary ships turned with her and nudged away from the jump point. At last she gave Winchester and Burris the green light on countermeasures, and they worked at taking down the incoming salvo.
A dragoon pack broke off the attack and charged the jump point. That was just what Catarina was hoping for. Crown came through, followed minutes later by another star wolf, making four ships in total still lurking at the jump. The newcomers weren’t ready to fight, but the initial two let loose with pummel guns as the dragoons arrived.
There were several anxious moments while the dragoons fired hard, damaged Thunder, and came after Crown and the final star wolf, which remained helpless. But then a dragoon hit one of the mines Torrent had laid down earlier. It fell back with a gash in its armor and its torus ring flickering blue light. Crown got her guns working. The dragoons retreated.
Void Queen fought off the initial wave of missiles, but the enemy was closing fast. Catarina fired a salvo of her own, positioned Badger, Torrent, and Bloodaxe to hold off the other four dragoons, and ordered Nine Tiger to soften Kilo’s armor.
She thought the war junk would slow Kilo’s attack, but the carrier simply rolled over to show its opposite side and continued. Blast it, that was a good adaptation, and meant they’d sensed, or at least guessed, where the attack was coming from.
“Warning,” the AI said. “Class-two detonation expected.” The ship shuddered, absorbing the blow.
“Keep them off us,” she warned.
Two more destroyers entered Lenin, followed by another star wolf. A subspace message crossed from Tolvern. It was a short distance between the two star systems, relatively speaking, and the message had plenty of information.
Enemy carriers at four hours. Blackbeard jumps in nine. Reinforcements in IF-IV. 80+ ships, Citadel.
The bad news was immediate, the good news distant. Not only did Catarina have to hold Kilo at bay, but in four hours—only minutes after the last of her own ships entered Lenin—the two star fortresses that had chased her from Heaven’s Gate would be on top of her: Bravo and Foxtrot.
Stay alive five more hours after that and she’d get Blackbeard. And a massive fleet of eighty ships, led by Algernon Fox on the battle cruiser Citadel was in the system known as IF-IV—the fourth system out from the inner frontier. That was still a few weeks away.
If Catarina and Tolvern had been stringing along a host of slower ships—sloops, torpedo boats, and missile frigates—they’d be doomed against three carriers. But this fleet was built for s
peed. Get their forces organized and they could outrun the enemy. Charge across Lenin, get to Moscow, and from there flee back toward a rendezvous point with Fox’s larger force.
Catarina had her ship concentrating fire on Kilo, and a pair of dragoons slipped past her defenses and surprised her with kinetic fire across the number four and number five shields. Void Queen couldn’t turn her main guns to drive them off, having the battery aimed against the star fortress, and she was forced to enduring a raking before Bloodaxe came in and relieved her. The star wolf should have been positioned there all along.
Catarina exchanged blows with Kilo, then called Olafsen to chew him out for letting the dragoons through. He listened without comment, but his face was glowering by the time she finished.
“Let me off the leash, Vargus. Don’t make me stay here providing cover fire—that’s the problem, you know. We’re made to attack, not defend.”
“You’ll get your chance soon enough. But we can’t win this fight—not yet. Not until we’ve got more ships.”
The damage from the dragoon attack was significant, but not grave. The number five was down to sixty-two percent, and a few sensors had broken free, but that was a double-thick stretch of tyrillium scale. Some of the shot had penetrated. It was probably nothing serious, but they’d sealed an airlock and drained the atmosphere from that section to suffocate a fire. It would be some time until she got a proper damage assessment.
They got their revenge a few minutes later, when Badger hit one of the offending dragoons, Torrent landed cannon fire, and Bloodaxe chased it off with pummel guns roaring. She gave Olafsen his lead, and he chased the dragoon as it tried to retreat to its carrier. A final burst of fire, and the dragoon blew its containment field and vented its plasma engine. Still alive, but out of the fight.
Catarina gathered her forces, docked Badger, and disengaged. By now, there were eight destroyers and star wolves at the jump point, shielded by a shallow minefield, enough to hold their own for a stretch. So Catarina abandoned them and blasted away from the jump on a straight trajectory. Kilo and seven dragoons chased.
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