“Is there?” She raised an eyebrow. No response. “I thought not.”
“Our circumstances are desperate. I’ll admit that without hesitation. There’s no way to hide it even if I wanted to—I imagine it was obvious enough from the condition of my ship.”
“Yes, it was.”
“But that little skirmish you won . . . that was nothing. Your fleet wouldn’t stand a chance against a pair of star fortresses and their dragoons.”
Catarina suppressed a smile as she thought of the massive battles in Heaven’s Gate, Lenin, Castillo, and other systems. There was a blasted star leviathan one system away, together with six star fortresses and their rider ships. Clearly, Fontaine had no idea what the Alliance was capable of, what they’d faced already.
“This isn’t my fleet,” she told him. “This is one of three task forces fighting a delaying action while we ready a counterattack. There, that’s the information you were looking for, isn’t it?”
“Counterattack? What happened?”
“No, you first. You crossed a lot of space to get here. You must have heard about Albion, the Alliance. What happened to Old Earth? You give me that information, and I might cough up some more of my own.”
The sour look on Fontaine’s face told her he didn’t like being ordered about. A typical starship captain, then. And his ship was the sole survivor of whatever fleet had set out from Earth, so he was either very good or very lucky. Maybe both.
Unless he’s an enemy spy. Don’t forget that.
And yet, she didn’t think so, for all of her precautions. She thought he was clean, that he’d been fighting for his life.
Lieutenant Snood, Catarina’s chief tech officer, had inspected the largest of Scorpion’s railguns and determined that it was in working order, yet it hadn’t fired in the battle. Snood thought they’d run out of ammo before the fight. The other two guns had been awfully conservative with their firing, as well. That, combined with the general poor condition of the ship, indicated that Fontaine and his crew were resourceful, as well.
She expected him to push back, or to try to dole out his information as she doled out hers. Catarina was prepared to do just that; she wasn’t some paranoid Albion officer, after all, but an accidental commander in this war. Instead, Fontaine began to lay it out from the beginning.
“It’s been over thirty years since the Adjudicators first attacked. There was some sort of civil war in the Merchanting Federation at the time. The Merchers used to control the spacelanes this direction.”
“I know the history.”
“We didn’t realize who we were fighting at first. Thought it was the Cavlee—a squat, gray troglodyte-looking creature that the Merchers had traded with before. That’s what we found on the bridge when we boarded a captured ship. The enemy had insectoids on their ships, too, like an enslaved worker class. Both races were slaves of the Adjudicators, of course, but we didn’t understand at first.”
Fontaine continued. The first raid on the Earth System happened when he was a boy, living in the mountains of Suiss-Italia, one of the nation-like confederations in old Europe. A fleet of star fortresses and dragoons had nuked Titan, Mars, and the Earth moon bases, battered past the orbital fortresses above Earth, and attacked the home planet.
The terrestrial climate was warmer than when humans had migrated outward during the Great Migration some five hundred years earlier, and the centers of human civilization had shifted toward the poles. The attack was concentrated on the northern Eurasian and American continents. The metropolis of Great Greenland fell under nuclear bombardment, as well as Moscow, Petraburg, Anchorage, and the Newfoundland spaceyards.
A half billion people died in the first raid, nearly equal to the entire population of Albion. Four subsequent attacks over the following decades, combined with radioactive fallout, killed another billion. The population had been crashing ever since, not only on Earth, but throughout the home system. Famine, disease, internal strife.
“We’d been raising a fleet to defend the Barnard System or we’d have probably lost everything in the first raids,” Fontaine said. “Nobody thought the Adjudicators would attack so deep into human space so quickly. As it was, we only barely managed to fight off the assault. The enemy collapsed our jump points when it was clear we’d keep fighting.”
“They don’t actually collapse them,” Catarina said. “Only hide them from sensors.”
“We figured that out . . . eventually. What we can’t figure out is why they left us alone so long.”
She understood what he meant. It was like the Sevastapol and Novosibirsk civilization. The aliens reduced one planet, left the smaller, poorer neighbor alone for a number of years, then returned to destroy it, too. Or nearly destroy it.
The Adjudicators first brought a civilization to its knees, then carted away millions of survivors to slavery, and finally left a handful in a reduced state. Always an impoverished, stone age remnant. But why? She wondered about the implant removed from Fontaine’s head, and guessed that he carried answers. She’d love to know what they were, but first, had more practical questions.
“You don’t have a fleet,” she said. “That much is obvious from the state of your ship. But neither has Earth been fully reduced.”
“So far as I know.” Fontaine’s grim expression indicated some doubt on that score. “It has been five months since I left the Earth System for the final time. Who knows what has happened since then?”
“What was it like when you left?”
“Grim.”
“Can you build more ships?”
He made a face. “Of a sort. We have the facilities to make arms and ordnance. A ship’s hull, yes. Engines and armor, no. We have to scavenge those from old wrecks, reforge damaged armor rather than refine new tyrillium. I imagine we’ll have put together a few new ships, but a whole fleet? No, you were right about that.”
“So you’re stuck in the home system. The ghouls have you bottled up.”
“More or less. It’s an effective quarantine, and the enemy has smashed all the nearby systems. We’ve sent subspaces as far as we can. The best bet was the China Star civilization toward the inner rim—we thought maybe the Adjudicators hadn’t got that far, but they had.”
“And that’s when you concocted a scheme to make a break for it.”
“Our best bet was Albion. Much farther away, but rumor had it you still had a navy. From what I see, that’s true. But how strong is it, anyway? A few ships?”
Catarina ignored the question. “Tell me about these stingers and gorgons. How do they stand up against the ghouls?”
He gave her what sounded like an honest assessment. The home system’s fleet in the early years hadn’t been able to withstand Adjudicator attacks, as witnessed by the nuclear bombardments suffered by Earth and its near colony. During the reprieve years, as Fontaine’s people called them, they’d designed two new classes of warships. The first were called stingers, armed with railguns to destroy torus ring shield generators and with enough kinetic power to pierce bulkheads and bombproofs in dragoons. A second weapon, called a cataclysm burst, could tear gaping holes in star fortresses.
Accompanying the stingers were heavily armored gorgon ships, capable of absorbing enemy firepower as well as serving as floating factories to produce ordnance for the stingers. The combination proved effective. If only the Earth System’s economy hadn’t suffered near collapse in the war, they could have produced the ships in greater number and perhaps turned the tide.
Catarina thought about their own experiences, how the Alliance fleets had been built for a variety of other purposes: Hroom wars, fights against Apex, anti-piracy patrols, and even Viking-style raids in the case of the star wolves. They’d cobbled together tactics for fighting the enemy, mostly through the sheer muscle of the Royal Navy’s capital ships, but how much better to have warships designed specifically for fighting the Adjudicators?
“And assuming your people kept laying down new hulls for these stinger
s and gorgons, how many new ships would they have by now?”
“Maybe a dozen stingers, a gorgon or two. We’re poor and starving, and the best yards are on Mars, which can’t even feed itself without food shipments from Earth, so there’s no chance of ramping up production. And we have to scavenge gear from derelicts and obsolete warships, as I mentioned, to get the armor and engines we need. My people will keep building as fast as they can, but there’s no hope of building a fleet big enough to defeat the enemy.”
“No,” she said, disappointed. “It doesn’t sound like there is.”
He finished with a shrug. “That is all. We’ve heard about Albion—we thought you might join us in an alliance to defeat the . . . what did you call them? The ghouls.”
“We already have an alliance. It usually involves some independent system or civilization giving up sovereignty in exchange for having their stones pulled out of the fire.”
“You don’t sound happy about that.”
“The kingdom gave me a battle cruiser, a planet to colonize, and have named me duchess. So at least I’ve been compensated.”
“Is this king a tyrant?”
“No. But he’s still a king, if you understand my meaning.”
“Listen, we’re desperate. At this point, anything sounds better than extermination.”
“I’ll be honest with you. So are we. What you see here is only a small part of a vast armada, but the enemy still has our backs against the wall. And your home fleet, even if it were a hundred ships, is too far away to help us. I can patch you up, possibly even manufacture ammo for your railguns, but the way you can help me is with information about the enemy.”
“I can give more details about the home systems, but you’ve already got the bones of it.”
“Oh, really? What about your brain implant? Where did that come from?”
He touched his skull above and behind his right ear. A cloud fell over his pinched features. “I can’t tell you that.”
Catarina felt a tickle of suspicion. “You understand how that might concern me.”
“Yes.”
“You had an enemy brain implant, which means you were one of their slaves, right?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“So why should I trust you about any of this? You had alien tech in your head—maybe you still do, for all I know—but it’s something you won’t talk about?”
“I didn’t say I won’t . . . God knows I would if I could. What I said is that I can’t. I . . .” His lips thinned and his eyebrows bunched in frustration. “I just . . . can’t. Don’t you understand?” He rubbed furiously against the knob of bone. “There’s a . . . in my brain. They . . .”
His voice trailed off helplessly. He opened his mouth and tried to say something else, but it was like he’d had a stroke that had destroyed the language producing part of his brain. All he could manage was a bewildered shake of the head.
Catarina touched her ear to activate the com and called the first mate. “Azavedo, do we still have that fellow Tolvern hauled out of the derelict, or did she take him back? What was his name, Joneson?”
“Claro,” he said. A word of Ladino from her mixed crew. “We’ve been keeping him on ice since Heaven’s Gate.”
“I want him pulled out of stasis and brought to me on the bridge. Also, tell Nash I want his doctor sent over unless you can find a better brain guy in the fleet.”
When that was done, she glanced at Fontaine. “Your first mate—Bisset, isn’t it? Can he take Scorpion through the jump without you?”
The man nodded.
“Good, because you’re not going back to your ship. We’re going to have a look inside your skull and see what we can dig out.”
Chapter Six
The survivor from the derelict was named Joneson, and he must have been relieved when they brought him out of stasis. Last time he’d gone down, he’d stayed under for decades, until Blackbeard rescued him. He’d awakened to discover that his legs were gone, his civilization destroyed, and his people nearly exterminated. A few hundred thousand primitives survived on the shattered remnants of the planet Albion now called Castillo. Even the name of the place had been erased.
Joneson confirmed to Catarina that the Adjudicators had most likely changed Fontaine’s internal brain structure to suppress knowledge of his former masters. You could remove the implant, eliminate the enemy’s ability to control his brain, but you couldn’t very easily dig up his memories of his time in captivity. Or at least, Scorpion’s captain seemed incapable of discussing it.
“Probably can’t do it without killing him,” Joneson said. “At least we couldn’t do it on Novosibirsk when we recovered former slaves.”
“We’ll see about that.” She gave Joneson a once over. He was in a wheelchair, legs missing where they’d died in a stale stasis chamber. The ends of his fingers were gone, too. “Might be a while until we can get you back to the proper facilities on Albion to do something about the legs. You want us to put you under again until we can?”
“If it’s all the same, I’d rather be in a mech suit, working. Anything like that you can find for me?”
She turned this over and settled on a possibility. “Do you know how to weld tyrillium plate under zero-g conditions?”
“Of course.”
“I need to fix a segment of armor before we go through the jump, and I need three crew on the hull of the ship to get it done. Engineering is holding off on the repair job until the third person comes off her sleep shift in a couple of hours. But if you’re game, the work could start right away with you taking her place.”
“That’s something I can do, no problem.”
“But there’s something else you should know,” Catarina told him. “We’re going through a particle field for the next eight hours that stretches right across our path and can’t be avoided. Think of it like space turbulence.”
A thin shadow crossed Joneson’s face. “What are we talking about?”
“The biggest particles are no larger than a grain of sand, and we’re only getting hit by one or two an hour. Nothing to affect the armor, even the weakened segments. Those out doing a crawl, however, might just find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“A grain of sand stings when it hits you at ten percent the speed of light.”
“Yeah, that’s one way to put it.”
“But someone has to do it, and it sounds like it’s critical to keep us in the fight.” Joneson gave a curt nod. “Put me out there—I’ll do it.”
#
Doctor Willis arrived from HMS Babylon, and they put Fontaine down for study. Catarina’s thoughts turned to other concerns.
She came onto the bridge seven hours before the jump into Fortaleza, just as Joneson and his two companions were finishing their work on the damaged armor segment. Catarina and her fellow captains were approaching the jump with caution, not knowing what they’d find on the other side.
Her squadron had some muscle: Void Queen and the two light cruisers and four corvettes that had rescued Scorpion from the dragoons, plus the six ships of the Second Wolves she’d left behind while freeing the Terran vessel, who’d since rejoined her task force. There had to be an enemy carrier in the system somewhere, she knew—those dragoons couldn’t jump independently—but she couldn’t afford to hunt it down. Her job was to come in from behind and harass the leviathan to delay its attack on Persia.
Harass the leviathan. It sounded so simple when put in those words.
The monster had been through the Fortaleza system before continuing on to Castillo, where it had mauled Fort Mathilde and almost caught Commander Kelly as she evacuated. At the last moment, Captain Fox had arrived with Void Queen’s sister ship, Citadel, and thrown away a pair of torpedo boats to keep the monster occupied.
That had been four days ago, according to the most recent subspace. Not a word from anyone since then. Catarina didn’t know if the evacuees had escaped, if the creature was still in Castillo,
or if it had come back into Fortaleza already, but she wasn’t going to find out hanging out in the deserted system of I.F.-IV.
And then a ship entered from Fortaleza while Catarina’s squadron was already accelerating toward the jump. It was First Dragon, Anna Wang’s war junk.
The Singaporean vessel spread its wings and scanned the system hard before opening a channel to Void Queen.
Wang appeared on the screen, staring back with her stone-like gaze. Many officers found the woman intimidating, ice-cold. The word Catarina thought of was competent. Almost too competent. She made others look bad, even her fellow war junk commanders, who were by and large a steadying force in the fleet.
“Be advised that I’m going dark as soon as this conversation ends,” Wang said. “Fox and Tolvern want a warning system in place in case the enemy sends reinforcements. First Dragon will take position here and watch passively. Several other war junks are infiltrating deeper into enemy space. When we receive word that the leviathan is on target, the war junks will fall back and rejoin the fleet. What is this ship you’ve picked up? It doesn’t look like a lost merchanter.”
Wang stopped to wait for the reply. The conversations at distance were always slow-motion affairs. There were a lot more questions than answers in Wang’s initial transmission. On target for what? That was the big one.
“A warship from Old Earth,” Catarina responded. “Battered and out of ammo, but she’s willing enough. The gunnery is trying to manufacture ammo and cutting tyrillium scale to get her back in the fight. If we get out of this current predicament alive, we might find help back toward Earth.”
She considered the secrets Fontaine carried in his brain, and her doubts as to his trustworthiness. “Or maybe not. Too early to say. And it’s unlikely to be enough to turn the tide of war, anyway, given the battering they’ve taken. I’ll send a data dump of what we know so far. What’s the situation in Castillo? What do you mean, ‘on target?’”
As Catarina waited for her message to cross to First Dragon and for Wang’s response to return, she looked at the new information going up on the bridge’s main screen from the war junk’s hard scans of the system. It was already giving detail that had eluded them during several days of searching on their own.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 56
