“Useful to know the age thing,” Tolvern said, “but I assume there’s something else or you wouldn’t have called me here. Otherwise, you’d have come to me on the bridge, right?”
The other two shifted uncomfortably, and she realized they’d called her down without thinking, anxious not to leave their work. Typical tech and science officers. No doubt they had roped Ping and Lomelí into their project as well.
Smythe took control of Brockett’s console and tapped at the screen. He swiveled it around to show a rough image of the star leviathan and the diamond shape of star fortresses surrounding it. A tap at the screen turned one of the enemy carriers red.
“Look at this ship here,” Smythe said. “Analyzing the battle, all the scans from the fleet since the moment the leviathan jumped into Lenin, it’s always this particular place where the creature tries to break free.”
“The fortress or the position on the leviathan?”
“An astute question, sir,” Brockett said. “That’s what I wanted to know, too.”
“It’s the position,” Smythe said. “Three different ships came into place there, and they all struggled.”
One of Brockett’s machines stopped moving, and he pressed a couple of buttons in an almost automatic gesture to start it up again. “A star leviathan has six main nerve clusters. Huge things, each roughly the size of a destroyer, and they’re distributed throughout the body. When a leviathan goes through its dormant state, or when it has been starved for lack of food, it can consume part of its own body. So long as at least one nerve cluster remains, it can regenerate the whole, not so different from how it regrows any other appendage.”
“As if they weren’t hard enough to kill already,” Tolvern said. “Go on.”
Brockett walked over to a drawer and slid it open to a blast of cold air. He lifted out a severed human head, and Tolvern suppressed a shudder. Brockett shifted the grisly souvenir to show a metallic structure the width of Tolvern’s thumb emerging from the skull.
“The Adjudicators put brain implants into their captives,” he said. “We have them in both human and Hroom samples.”
“Also those gray troglodyte creatures that threw themselves against the marines and raiders,” Smythe said. “It’s how they control their slaves, turn them into devoted followers.”
“And you think they do the same thing with the leviathans,” Tolvern guessed. “An implant for each of the six nerve clusters. Six star fortresses, each one to control a nerve cluster.” She tapped the red star fortress on the screen. “Only one of them is not working properly, here, on this side.”
“Right, Captain,” Smythe said. He sounded excited. “Maybe they installed it wrong, or maybe it’s just old and faulty.”
“Or maybe something happened down on the planet,” Tolvern said. “The planet must be where they were enslaving the thing or where they put it to sleep.”
She remembered entering Heaven’s Gate to see six carriers orbiting the system’s single living world. At the time it had seemed bizarre that the enemy ships hadn’t tried to kill her, but she understood now. They’d been raising a monster into orbit.
“Whatever happened back there,” Smythe said, “one faulty implant has given away the ghouls’ method of controlling the leviathan. We know what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. We even know what those energy bursts were.”
“Do we?” she asked.
“The ghouls were sending massive jolts to the leviathan’s nerve clusters,” Brockett said. “Compensating for whatever isn’t working properly in the faulty implant. Whenever the independent nerve cluster tried to assert control over the others, they had to shut down the connections.”
“If all of that is true,” Tolvern said, “then we know how to defeat this thing. We only have to knock out one carrier, not six. Kill one and they lose control. Or better yet, find some way to get at that damaged implant and destroy it. Free one nerve cluster and watch the fireworks when the monster goes on a rampage. Good work, men.”
Smythe and Brockett looked self-satisfied, and she puffed them up more by heaping on further praise before leaving them to their work and making her way back to the bridge, anxious to report their findings to Drake, Vargus, and the rest.
A free leviathan was a grave danger, but less so out here in uninhabited systems than near Persia, Odense, Albion, or any of the other dozens of human and Hroom worlds. Could they turn around and intercept the enemy?
If only they’d had this information in Lenin. Drake could have found that weakness and attacked it directly. They’d have suffered losses, of course, but they might have saved General Mose Dryz and Dreadnought.
But still, as she walked onto the bridge to see Capp, Lomelí, Ping, Nyb Pim, and the rest quietly at work, her spirits lifted for the first time since the appearance of the star leviathan.
We’re not defeated yet, she thought. We can win this war.
#
Book Three: Alliance Insurgent
Chapter One
Only two ships from the Earth fleet survived long enough to make the jump.
Scorpion came through first, bleeding from a dozen wounds where dragoons had mauled her with kinetic fire. The captain, Pierre Fontaine, emerged from his jump concussion to find his bridge leaking atmosphere to the void, his damaged engines about to blow the ship to kingdom come, and his railguns offline.
Two flipped switches sealed an emergency bulkhead. That ended the threat of explosive decompression. A plasma burp saved the engines. The railguns were balkier, and the gunnery officer remained slumped over his console. Fontaine needed those guns to protect his sister ships as they entered.
Sister ship, he corrected himself grimly. Singular. The third craft in their dying flotilla had shared the fate of five other Stinger-class warships and two gorgons who had left the Earth System 147 days earlier.
Bisset suddenly lifted his head from his console. His eyes were dilated, his face pale. “My God, did you see Medusa? Jesus Christ.”
Bisset was a devout Catholic, and the words didn’t come out like an oath, rather a prayer for the souls of the doomed ship.
“Is the tertiary gun online?” Fontaine asked him.
“I’ve got . . . two minutes and . . . they hit her, Captain. And she just kept going. Just laid out along the Y-axis like . . . fourteen days of . . .”
Bisset was pale, and gave a little cough in the back of his throat as he strung together a seemingly unrelated series of words.
“Get the bag, you fool,” Fontaine said.
He added a curse when the gunnery officer didn’t get his sick bag in time and half the vomit spilled down his uniform and onto the old carpet, so worn that you could see the plastic flooring below it in the places of heaviest foot traffic. Scorpion, like all the other ships in the fleet, had been cobbled together in the Martian yards from the wreckage of a dozen other vessels.
Gauthier called over from instruments. Like Bisset, he seemed hungover from the jump and shocked by the violence in those final, turbulent hours of combat after the enemy sprang the ambush. But unlike the gunnery officer, the captain’s second seemed to have kept his nerve.
“Unknown contacts at thirty-two degrees on the Z-axis,” Gauthier said. “Range nine hours and closing. Seven ships—one large vessel and six smaller ones.”
Fontaine clenched his jaw and closed his eyes briefly. That would be an Adjudicator carrier and six rider ships. The numbers matched perfectly. But Gauthier wasn’t done.
“Five more dragoons at four hours,” the second continued. “In orbit around a small moon near the third planet from the star. Beginning their acceleration—they’re out of position and must have been alerted by the larger force.”
“Then there must be two star fortresses in the system,” Fontaine said. “Blast you, Al-Harthi. Where are you?”
Left unspoken was the thought that the last time he’d seen Zakiya Al-Harthi, she’d been dodging two dragoons while trying to bring Black Widow into support of Medusa,
who was streaking toward the jump point in an attempt to catch up with the other two ships. The three Earth ships had gone several weeks since their last enemy encounter as they reached across the old frontier, only to fall into an ambush just when it seemed they’d escaped the enemy’s attention.
Fontaine closed his eyes again, and saw Medusa’s final, doomed moments as she ran a gauntlet of dragoon fire. Her armor shredded, trying to get through on sheer speed, 7.8 percent light, she’d made a desperate dive at the jump point.
Medusa had cleared the path with a final emptying of the railguns. If she’d had one more primary attack—three, four seconds max—she’d have torn through one of the dragoons, which presented an enticing target. Fontaine had thought she would, had only realized too late that his counterpart had exhausted all ammunition.
And then pulse weapons caught Medusa in enfilading fire, a final, devastating attack that tore through already weakened armor. It was over in an instant. The human ship continued, but in pieces.
Fontaine shook his head to clear it of the violent image. Word soon came from below, from engineering, defense systems, and engines. Good news for once. Fires out, airlocks sealed. The containment field on the engines had held following the forced plasma release. All guns online.
Fontaine cut the line and stopped staring at the viewscreen long enough to glance at Bisset, who was breathing heavily, but didn’t seem like he was going to throw up again.
“I am sorry, sir.” Bisset glanced around, as if looking for a towel or something to get the mess off his uniform.
“You can clean up later. I need status on the ammo stores.”
Bisset managed a nod. “The tertiary rail has eleven seconds left at max burst. The secondary has thirty-seven seconds. The primary is empty.”
“Empty, empty?”
“Yes, sir. We fired the last primary ordnance in an attempt to shake Black Widow clear.”
“Black Widow had extra primary last time I checked,” Fontaine said. “We’ll equalize stores when she arrives.”
“She should be here by now,” Gauthier said.
Al-Harthi, Fontaine thought, sending her a silent plea. Come through. Just come.
His hand went to his skull before he recognized the gesture, and he probed at a lump of bone above and behind his right ear. The scars ran in grooves where the medical facilities on Titan had regrown portions of his skull, transplanted hair, and stripped out alien neural networks. An inadvertent shudder worked through him.
How was it that he and Al-Harthi were the only captains to survive? The only ones who’d carried the enemy’s implants in their skulls. Could it be . . .? No, impossible. Scorpion and Black Widow had been attacked just as savagely as any other.
It was the universe’s idea of a cruel joke.
The three men stared at the main viewscreen in silence. There had once been five men and women on the bridge, plus relief officers, but three months ago, the humans on their sister ship, Centipede, had been killed in a boarding action by enemy decimator units. When Centipede was recaptured, the Terrans were forced to share out crew from other surviving ships to keep her in the fight.
Scorpion had been operating short-handed ever since, and worse still, Centipede was long gone. Those crew who’d gone over, dead.
Two secondary screens showed shadowy figures gathering into formation in open space near the system’s gas giants, and a second, smaller force emerging from the moon of the rocky planet closer to the star. Both forces were heavily cloaked, and Fontaine couldn’t hit them with active sensors or they’d track him too easily.
They were far enough away, and he had other worries closer at hand. Specifically, what about the enemy carrier and dragoons from the last system? Would they chase Black Widow through, and if so, how much distance could the humans gain before the enemy materialized?
But first, he needed Zakiya Al-Harthi and Black Widow. Then, when he knew his strength, he could plan to survive another day. He’d been doing that ever since leaving on this desperate mission. Survive one more system, then figure out what to do next. Always one more system.
“Come on,” he said, this time aloud. “Come through, you idiot. I need you here.”
Nothing.
And then, when he thought it was over, when he’d given Black Widow up for dead, she materialized. Long, hungry, and lethal looking, she hung above Scorpion and off port. The three men on the bridge let out their breaths in a collective rush of air.
The Stinger-class warships had all been named after venomous creatures on Earth—Scorpion, Black Widow, Medusa, Centipede, Diamondback, Fer-de-Lance, Tarantula, and Copper Head—but Fontaine always thought they looked more like predator fish. Barracudas, to be precise, with the railguns as spines on the back and a toothy, mouth-like weapon system up front to discharge cataclysm bursts against Adjudicator carriers.
Together with the two Gorgon-class warships, this small squadron had defied the quarantine and burst into the Gateway System, where they found an enemy star fortress and its dragoons. The enemy was caught by surprise, unprepared and out of position.
The Terran fleet had gutted the enemy carrier, savaged its dragoons, and fled. The next encounter, they knew, would be another matter entirely, and they hoped to escape notice altogether while they fled for safer systems. Rumor held that some of the old colonies on the far side of the Merchanting Federation were putting up a fight. The Terrans would beg for help in freeing Earth.
But the enemy had soon found them. A second battle raged above the glowing ruins of New California, Earth’s oldest colony, with hundreds of millions of humans presumed dead. Fontaine’s fleet mauled two more carriers and escaped once again.
After that, the enemy adjusted tactics, and things went to hell.
Now, after so many weeks of combat, Black Widow looked scarred and battered. Long black gashes decorated her flanks as if the so-called barracuda had been caught in the jaws of a shark and given a savage shake. The tertiary railgun mount had been destroyed and the gun itself refit into place at a fixed position; to fire, Al-Harthi’s warship needed to turn fully toward its target and keep the enemy in front of the weapon.
Black Widow’s engines flared. A small plasma burp, but the containment field held. Lights blinked above the bridge, including one large green light that looked like an eye. She began to come around.
Black Widow hailed Scorpion, and Fontaine took the call on the main screen. Zakiya Al-Harthi stood with her arms crossed and her legs slightly spread, staring across at him with what could only be described as an ironic smile.
“So, here we are again,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Only now it’s just the two of us.” A slight nod. “And our loyal crews.”
Al-Harthi had large brown eyes, softened by a subtle darkness around the lids that gave her an expression that reminded Fontaine of the icon-like drawings of Roman-era Egyptians. It gave her a deceptively pleasant, attractive demeanor. Yet from the moment the home defenses declared her clean and trusted her with one of its warships, she’d gained a reputation as the most cold-blooded disciplinarian in the fleet, which was what people said had kept her alive while others had died.
Those same people said that Captain Pierre Fontaine was simply lucky, and his crew doubly so. Maybe it was true. God knew that they’d nearly met their fate in a dozen different systems, but Black Widow had survived plenty of near misses as well. Didn’t that make her equally lucky?
And what about Medusa? Hadn’t she been lucky as well? You were lucky until you weren’t. Then you were dead.
“The enemy carrier is forty-two hours out from the jump,” Al-Harthi said. “So that’s one thing in our favor.”
“You bought us some time. Well done.” Fontaine took a deep breath. “Unfortunately, we’ve got company here.”
“I see that.” She lifted a hand to her mouth and rubbed a forefinger at her lower lip, a gesture that Fontaine took as uncertainty. “And how do we slip the noose?”
&
nbsp; Neither mentioned the destruction of Medusa. No need to, although he wondered if Al-Harthi would be mourning the death of Ahmed Qayyum, the ship’s commanding officer. The two Arab captains hadn’t been particularly close—on the contrary, Qayyum was too hot-blooded, and Al-Harthi ran cool—but they were both survivors of the Tunis holocaust, both former militia from that planet, even if they’d come to the Terran fleet in very different ways.
Tunis was the final system to put up a fight, twelve years earlier, before the Adjudicators smashed the Merchanting Federation and brought the war home to Earth. The population of Tunis had been reduced, perhaps exterminated. Nobody knew.
“Seems our safest bet is to tackle the dragoons coming off that moon,” he said. “We break free, shoot for the jump point on the far side of the star, and get out of here.”
“Where does that take us?”
“From there, only two quick jumps to reach Sevastapol, one of the old Russian colonies. With any luck, there will be something there when we arrive.”
“That still leaves us facing five dragoons,” Al-Harthi said. “And we’re almost out of ammo. Where’s their carrier, anyway?”
It was a good question. Dragoons couldn’t jump solo, and the large warship he had found, out by the gas giants, already had a full component of riders.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it dropped them off and left the system.”
“Did you look with the active sensors or only the passive?”
“Passive,” he admitted. “I’m still hoping we can cloak and slip out of here, and I don’t want to give up our position that easily.”
“Fair enough. What’s your ammo situation?”
“Not good. I’ll have to share your ordnance.”
She gave a bitter laugh. “Share my ordnance? You want to know what I’ve got? Three seconds on the primary. Twelve on the secondary. Nearly eighty on the tertiary—can’t hardly aim the blasted thing, so we’ve got plenty of that. Relatively speaking.”
Fontaine stared in dismay. “But you were up on me before the jump.” He tapped the screen on his console and scrolled until he got the data he need. “You had thirty-eight on the primary before the battle.”
The Alliance Trilogy Page 52
