Once she had those two forces positioned, she organized the muscle of her fleet in orbit around the planet, starting with Blackbeard. The other two battle cruisers, Citadel and Void Queen, joined her on either side. Brawlers in front, with several light cruisers above and below. Missile frigates to the rear. Two additional war junks orbited between the frigates and the battle cruiser-led force.
Four packs of star wolves took position in a diamond shape around the fringes. Two of these—the Fourth and Second Wolves—would charge the leviathan, attempt to slip past the enemy carriers, and land raiders and mechanized marines on the surface of the monster. The other two wolf packs would try to keep them from dying while their companions disgorged troops.
Word that the enemy was warming decimator units had thrown a wrinkle into Tolvern’s plans. If the Adjudicators had guessed at her plan to land raiders and marines on the leviathan, she was doomed; the whole plan needed surprise to work. If the enemy meant to assault the orbital fortress, on the other hand, then she should let them so as to get them out of the fight before they could change their plans. Either way, she’d consented to Svensen’s request/demand that she give him another hundred Scandian raiders, and acquiesced to his suggestion that Jan Helsingor’s forces should get the honor as recompense for discovering the alien decimator units coming out of stasis.
Tolvern’s fleet was largely commanded by veteran captains like Vargus, Fox, Dwiggins, Svensen, and McGowan. The crews were battle tested. Fleet com and chain of command both worked flawlessly. Shuttles hauled ordnance from the orbital fort to replenish depleted stores, but otherwise, the ships remained in position, awaiting the oncoming onslaught.
The leviathan was decelerating, now an hour from making contact with the planet, the orbital fort, or her fleet. Perhaps all three at once.
Surrounding it, star fortresses warmed their batteries, each one with a massive array of explosive, energy, and kinetic firepower to bring to the fight. The dragoons organized into three powerful forces of ships. Tolvern nervously eyed her reserves at the moon.
Smythe announced activity on the far side of the system. It was HMS Inferno, with Drake in command, entering Persia. The general with her sloops came through next, and there would be another dozen or so Royal Navy warships as well. Reinforcements, if they could arrive in time.
The commander of Tolvern’s missile frigate squadron called. The enemy was in range. Should he hold fire or begin the attack? It was not a question of ordnance; they had plenty. The real question was whether the Alliance was absolutely fighting this battle here and now. Once committed, it would be nearly impossible to disengage.
“We’re fully committed,” she told him. “Let loose the fire.”
Chapter Fourteen
Catarina had agreed with Tolvern’s battle plan, but was not surprised to see it fall apart at first contact with the enemy. That was the way of war. The dragoons refused to take the bait around the moon. Instead of charging the softer target of sloops and destroyers, they rushed at the main fleet in orbit around the planet. Pulse fire and kinetic shot filled the air while the star fortresses launched a massive barrage of missiles.
Even though they were firing in support of the dragoons, the star fortresses continued their own way, guiding the leviathan toward the orbital fortress. The monster uncoiled its tentacles, but didn’t yet fire its spore cannons.
Navy frigates were throwing out a missile barrage of their own, and this was soon supported by outgoing fire from the rest of the fleet. It was long-range action at first, with bursts, flashes, charges, and chaff of various kinds as countermeasures worked to take down the incoming fire on both sides.
Azavedo made worried noises as the dragoons slipped in front of the leviathan, as if to come at the battle cruisers.
“They’re going to attack the main fleet with nothing but dragoons and long-range fire?” Burris asked. Both he and Snood had been confident and smooth at tech and defense grid since the battle started. “We can handle that easily enough.”
“I’m not worried about us,” Azavedo said. “We’ll be fine. Too much so, in fact.”
Burris frowned. “I don’t follow.”
“He means we’ll be kept out of the action while the leviathan mauls the orbital fort,” Catarina said.
“It’s going to get mauled anyway,” Burris said. “Isn’t Tolvern accounting for that? But we’ll keep our fleet alive if all we have to face is dragoons.”
“I’m all for fighting dragoons instead of leviathans,” Azavedo said, “but how are we going to get our star wolves in there? That’s what has me worried.”
“We’re not,” Catarina said. “Not unless we get these dragoons out of the way in a hurry.”
Tolvern seemed to recognize the same thing, and orders came through from Blackbeard moments later. McGowan was given orders to charge dragoon formations and scatter them. The secondary fleet would be brought down from the moon to hem in any dragoons that might try to escape. As soon as the dragoons were fully engaged, the battle cruiser-led fleet would deliver the wolf packs to the edge of the leviathan’s attack range.
McGowan quickly set Peerless and her fellow cruisers and corvettes into motion. Meanwhile, the battle cruiser force was ordered to hold position and absorb punishment until he had them out of the way.
Void Queen was the most exposed of the three, positioned on the wing closest to the dragoons. Fourteen of them charged hard. They muscled two destroyers out of the way, pulsed down mines that a third destroyer was tossing into their way as a delaying tactic, and struck Void Queen’s brawler with so much kinetic fire that it fell back before it could be overwhelmed.
Catarina identified two vulnerable enemy ships and pinpointed them on her console for the gunnery. “Mark-IVs on the lead ship. Target the second with the main battery.”
A pair of torpedoes rolled out of their tubes and moved on the first dragoon. The enemy ship knocked down the first torpedo, but the second tore through the countermeasures before they could be activated. The dragoon tried to maneuver out of the way, but the torpedo caught it aft of its torus ring and detonated. The ring broke apart with a spray of plasma, and it fled, weakened, but still alive.
But not for long. The dragoon fell in among a pair of Albion destroyers before it could escape, and they raked it with light cannon fire. Forced to change course a second time, it ran into missiles from other ships, which struck it from above and below. It was soon bleeding from a dozen wounds, helpless as allied warships tore it apart.
Meanwhile, Void Queen rolled to show its main cannon battery in an attempt to tear apart the second of the targeted dragoons. Unfortunately, her brawler was absorbing punishment from dragoon fire across a wide front. Badger (officially known as Badger-II), was about to meet the same fate as its predecessor, which had been destroyed in the Battle of Lenin. Instead of going after the vulnerable dragoon, Catarina ordered the gunnery to divide the guns among the enemy ships attacking the brawler.
Her cannon fired in four different directions. They inflicted minimal damage, but forced the dragoons into evasive maneuvers, and by the time they’d regrouped, Badger was in a safer position. That left Void Queen unshielded. Dragoon fire blasted through her countermeasures and struck blows along the number three and number four shields.
Catarina was tempted to ease her ship toward port, which would bring her into alignment with Citadel and her brawler. Captain Fox had his hands full with several dragoons of his own, and stared down a heavy attack from star fortress missiles, but if the battle cruisers could position themselves side by side, brawlers extended, they’d force the dragoons into a murderous fire from two separate main cannon batteries.
A smaller dragoon force targeted Blackbeard, mainly in an attempt to split her off from contact with her sister ships. For now, Tolvern seemed to be inflicting more damage than she was taking, but she wouldn’t be able to break away to join her fellow battle cruiser captains. Void Queen and Citadel would have to be enough for the moment.
Unfortunately, Catarina was forced to abandon her plan to join forces with Citadel when she realized she was barely maintaining contact with the fleet elements on her flank. Any movement away from them would cut her off from reinforcements in that direction. The enemy strategy seemed to be forcing the three battle cruisers into a series of side engagements so they couldn’t target the incoming star fortresses, which would then face lesser enemies as they drove the leviathan into the orbital fort.
Even without battle cruisers defending it, the fort should have been able to fend off any reasonable attack. Its guns were already firing, and the combined Albion-Persian garrison boasted six missile batteries and thirty heavy and light cannon. Additional batteries fired from the surface of the planet, and additional missiles soon burst from the atmosphere to strike at the enemy fleet.
But this was not a reasonable attack. It was powered by a star leviathan.
The monster uncurled its ropy tentacles. Spore cannons fired in all directions. The allied warships nipping at the star fortresses fell back. Or tried to. Spores struck a torpedo boat and encased it in a gummy, expanding bubble. A tentacle snared it and drew it in.
More spores hit a destroyer and a pair of Hroom sloops. The leviathan reached for them, but then the Adjudicators gave the creature a pair of hard shocks through the implants. The three trapped ships slid past its grasping tentacles on momentum, skipped through the planet’s upper atmosphere, and continued on a straight trajectory out the other side. Tolvern ordered a mixed force of destroyers and sloops to mount a rescue mission before dragoons could hunt them down.
Meanwhile, the dragoons pressing closer at hand had nearly closed the door. Fox bagged a second enemy ship with his cannon, and Catarina drove off two others with serious damage, but more than a dozen dragoons were landing heavy blows, and additional enemy ships continued to arrive and add to the pressure.
Just as the situation was looking grim, McGowan blasted through with his force of cruisers and corvettes. Peerless landed a cracking blow on a dragoon’s hull, and Apollo followed up with cannon fire against the enemy’s damaged torus ring. Meteor, another corvette, penetrated already damaged armor, and her shot blasted out the other side of the dragoon. The enemy ship spun away from the battlefield with her atmosphere bleeding into the void.
Citadel called Void Queen. Catarina took the call on a side screen.
Algernon Fox looked like a young lieutenant, slender and youthful in a way that belied his rapid ascent in the Royal Navy. He seemed impossibly cool as he addressed her, and she wondered if she appeared as calm and collected or if the stress of battle was showing on her face.
“Blackbeard has temporarily lost fleet com,” he said. “The enemy hit her with an EMP-like blast. Tolvern used signaling to get through, and I’m supposed to pass along orders. Under no circumstances are we to enter range of the spore cannons with any capital ship.”
Catarina nodded, remembering the horrifying images of HMS Dreadnought going down the gullet of the leviathan. No more than a few bites. A battle cruiser would vanish even quicker, and a corvette or a Punisher-class cruiser was barely a mouthful.
“We’re out of contact with the star fortresses,” Catarina said. “If we can’t engage them in battle, we’ll never get the wolves in there alive to drop their mech units.”
“And we’ve got all these dragoons behind us, trying to force us into spore range,” Fox said. “We have to keep resisting in that direction.”
“Then what’s Tolvern’s plan?”
Fox explained. McGowan would first break apart the dragoons, then lead the support ships into a secondary force of roughly twenty ships that would form a crescent-like shape behind them, with the twin motives of protecting the vulnerable missile frigates hovering above Persia’s upper atmosphere and creating a defensive flank to prevent the dragoons from attacking the battle cruisers.
The three battle cruisers and their brawlers would then gather into a single, hammer-like force. They’d approach the rear star fortresses and hit them as hard as possible while maintaining distance from the spore cannons and tentacles.
The leviathan, for all its power, didn’t have the same rapid acceleration and deceleration as a warship, which meant that its approach to the orbital fortress was relatively slow. Fox estimated they had thirty minutes before it struck the fort.
Burris spoke up from the tech console when Fox was offline. “McGowan is good when he wants to be.” He ran fingers through his mop of red hair. “He’s already at it. Look!”
McGowan had Peerless and two corvettes in perfect formation, with another corvette and a Punisher-class cruiser drawing in behind. The five ships executed a coordinated, angled attack up along the Y-axis and struck a collection of dragoons that were regrouping to attack Void Queen. Peerless and her companions were like foxes bursting into a coop of terrified chickens, and the enemy scattered.
“Some of that is Dwiggins,” Catarina said, aware that she sounded petulant. “And Maxwell isn’t bad, either.”
The former captain of HMS Fervent, sacrificed in Nebuchadnezzar, had been shifted into command of Meteor, one of the corvettes.
“McGowan is good, though,” Burris said. “Sorry, but he is.”
Everybody on the ship, and no doubt in the entire fleet, knew that Edward McGowan and Catarina Vargus had once been engaged. She acted like it didn’t bother her, that she cared nothing for McGowan’s classist attitudes, but of course she was only hiding her personal anger. Or trying to. Some of that anger came out now, in spite of her efforts to keep it bottled.
“I know he’s good. He’s certainly reminded me enough times.” She grunted. “But I guess I’d rather have a competent piss nozzle than an incompetent gentleman.”
One of the corvettes got in trouble above Badger on the Z-axis when a lucky blow forced a plasma ejection from her engines. Peerless approached, her cannon roaring, but two more dragoons joined the assault, making it five ships eager to finish off the corvette. The cornered ship was Apollo, who had tormented the enemy on several occasions. The fight was drifting toward the assembling battle cruisers. Orders be damned, Catarina wasn’t going to leave Apollo dangling.
“Get us in there, Gómez,” she told her pilot, then turned to Burris. “How long until the primary is back online?”
They’d recently fired the main battery, and a quick report from the gunnery indicated four minutes until another full broadside would be ready. But Gómez found a neat little seam between Badger and Peerless, and they slid through, rolled to show the secondary, and got it off. While dragoons fell back, Apollo reignited her engines and escaped the trap.
McGowan sent a short text message for her eyes only. “Nice work, Catarina. I’ve got your flank secured. Get in there and support Citadel and Blackbeard.”
She raised an eyebrow. A compliment? From McGowan? And he’d used her first name. What the devil was that about? She glanced around in case an ensign was standing over her shoulder, waiting to deliver information from below, and had spotted the message. Relieved that nobody else had seen it, she archived the message.
Citadel, Blackbeard, and Void Queen were soon aligned and moving forward. A host of smaller ships had been suffering under a bombardment from the six star fortresses around the leviathan, and now fell behind the battle cruisers as relief forces allowed their escape. The most damaged of these, amounting to a sloop, a destroyer, and a Scandian ship from the Fifth Wolves, dropped even lower, until they were next to the missile frigates.
Blackbeard’s com was back online, and a message came through. “Ten minutes until the leviathan hits the fort. Time to move.”
The leviathan was in its final deceleration, only a few thousand miles from the orbital fortress, which was still firing away, a massive, seemingly impregnable mountain of rock. But to a leviathan, it would look as enticing as a ripe melon, and no more dangerous. The missiles, torpedoes, and cannon fire that missed the enemy carriers and struck the monster didn’t even amount to pinp
ricks.
Citadel moved in front, with a star fortress falling within her cannon range even as she remained just beyond the range of the leviathan’s spores. Suddenly, a large, tube-like structure erupted from the monster’s skin, detached, and hurtled toward the battle cruiser, with rockets propelling it forward. It exploded a few hundred miles from Citadel. A goopy slop hit the front of Fox’s battle cruiser and expanded rapidly across the upper decks until it reached the edge of the plasma containment field.
The unexpected attack at distance was followed by a huge barrage from the six enemy carriers, all directed against Citadel. The leviathan made a momentary attempt to break free and go after the battle cruiser, but the Adjudicators kept it on track. Fox, keeping his cool, let the containment field slip, did a controlled plasma release, and burned off the material gumming his upper decks.
But the ferocity of the enemy attack shattered the armor on her forward and upper deck shields, and by the time she broke free her crew was venting gasses and trying to seal off bulkheads. Her brawler got into position and absorbed several of the blows while Citadel continued her retreat. Catarina sent Badger to serve as additional reinforcements.
The window to reach the leviathan was closing fast now that only two battle cruisers maintained position along the monster’s flank. And Tolvern ordered them to withdraw further, wary of another long-range attack like the exploding spore lance that had splattered Citadel. Dragoons were beginning to slip through McGowan’s net, as well.
It was then that the Second and Fourth Wolves made their move.
Chapter Fifteen
Svensen was strapping into his harness in preparation for the final charge at the star leviathan, when a marine in light gray armor with a pair of rampant gold lions painted on the breastplate eased in next to him. The marine tapped him on the shoulder and gestured for him to shift over, as if Svensen were crowding the man’s space. He unclipped and reclipped, but not without some annoyance.
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