Miraculously, the ensnared raider was still alive when they cut him out. Neither the harpoon nor the gunfire had pierced his armor. They stood him upright, and one of his fellow raiders burned off the slime. But both he and his two companions were unresponsive, like they’d been drugged, stunned in some way by the snail to keep them placid while it consumed them. How was that possible through their mech suits?
Svensen ordered the men hauled along, and the entire force of raiders and marines from three star wolves made their way to the top of the spiny ridge. The surface demagnetized where it lifted above the surface of the leviathan, and with only the microgravity of the monster to hold them down, they traveled to the top with short bursts from their rocket packs instead. As they approached the crest, Svensen put himself on the private channel with Kelly.
“Should we gain some elevation before we go over the top?” he asked.
“Use the rockets, you mean? Why, do you think those spines are going to eat us?”
“Who knows—they might try.”
“Sure, why not?” she said. “We’ve got plenty of fuel. What’s the downside?”
“If we get too high above the surface, it will make it easier for the ghouls to track us.”
Her helmet bobbed with a nod of understanding. “At which point they drop a couple of missiles on our heads—if they think they can do it without harming the implant. And without the leviathan eating them for their trouble.”
“Seems we’d better keep our heads down and risk the spines,” he decided. He toggled the general com. “Use your rockets to get over the top, but do not climb above five meters in elevation.”
Mech units had been hauling the three stunned raiders along like shambling corpses, and finally the men began to regain their senses. What the devil had happened to them? Two of them couldn’t remember anything, but the man who’d gone down the snail’s throat said he’d heard music—an Old Earth rock ballad—and then had no other memory until he woke up. Weird. And unsettling.
The “ridge” turned out to be a creature, with the spines piercing the leviathan’s skin and the rest submerged. It was maybe 250 or 300 yards long, surely a monstrous creature in and of itself, but barely amounting to a tick or a flea when compared to the leviathan’s bulk.
The spines quivered as they came over the top, as if sensing their passage. There were panicky requests to shoot at the thing before it burst free and made a lunge, but Svensen ordered them to stand down. The lot of them rocketed over the top and came down the other side, unmolested.
There, in a small, bowl-like valley, Helsingor’s forces had gathered around an object protruding from the surface. Svensen amplified to confirm. The implant was a shiny, silver-white color, like aged tyrillium plate, and stood about eight feet high and three or four feet in diameter. The Adjudicators had apparently placed six of the objects across the skin of the leviathan, each one connected to one of the monster’s nerve clusters. A corresponding star fortress in orbit around the leviathan controlled each implant, and together the Adjudicators forced it to do their bidding.
Helsingor wasn’t cutting at the implant however. Instead, he was fighting several monstrous, leafless trees, with rubbery limbs that swept down and plucked humans off the ground. One of the trees already had three raiders and marines caught in its branches.
It flexed a limb and sent a marine flying end over end into space. Chatter came over the com as the woman regained control, ignited her rocket pack, and returned with her twin assault rifles blazing. They sliced through the branch that had been holding her, and the limb floated away, twitching violently.
Helsingor had only noted one attacker, yet there were four that Svenson could see, with two more of the rubbery, tree-like creatures shambling across the valley to join the fight. They marched on root-like limbs that pulled in and out of the skin of the leviathan. Heavier, grasping limbs flexed, while long, slender appendages waved at the air like a lobster’s feelers.
Svensen was nearly down from the ridge—or rather, the spine of the creature sleeping under the skin of the leviathan—and lifted his assault rifle, ready to join the fight. He shoved a grenade into the launcher. Others from his group were already firing.
Kelly took his arm. “The trees aren’t eating them. Look.”
She was right. Instead, the things grabbed humans and either hurled them into the air or slammed them onto the ground. One tree caught a raider in the root-like appendages it used for shambling over the surface and pushed the man underground. The “trees,” in fact, seemed semi-rooted, now that he gave them a closer look.
“They’re macrophages,” she said. “The leviathan’s antibodies, do you understand?”
He got on the general com. “Stop shooting. All of you. It’s attracting more of the creatures.”
“What in the icy hells are we supposed to do, let them eat us?” It was Helsingor’s voice.
“It’s an immune response from the monster. They’re not trying to eat anything, just attacking anyone who shoots. Look behind you—none of the creatures are attacking from the rear because nobody is shooting in that direction.”
The marines ceased firing at once. The raiders, being less disciplined, took several moments longer before they were convinced. A couple of stubborn fools had nearly destroyed one of the creatures—or thought they had—and kept fighting. But as they glanced around and saw the others backing away, no longer under attack, they too made a retreat. Two trees were stomping a pair of humans, one a marine and the other a raider. A group of marines headed toward them, but the waving mass of limbs cut their rescue attempt short.
As the assault teams backed away, the trees hunkered down on the ground, and the leviathan skin began to reabsorb their roots and trunks. A handful of rubbery branches waved at the air, as if suspicious that the enemy had vanished.
“Keep retreating,” Svensen ordered. “Let the area calm down. We’ll see if they disappear.”
Helsingor led his forces away from the implant toward Svensen, where he’d remained with the assault companies from Wasteland, Blood Eagle, and Boghammer at the base of the ridge. With the smiley face balloon helmet and the way his mag grips worked, Helsingor seemed to be bobbing along cheerfully as he approached.
The helmet had changed. It looked at first like the man had painted ears onto the side of the pink balloon, but as he drew nearer, Svensen saw they were small drawings of star leviathans.
“Those blasted things killed four guys,” Helsingor said.
“We’ll lose more before this is over,” Svensen said. “Has anyone heard from Firestorm? Did we lose the entire ship?”
The balloon head shook back and forth. “Not a word. Bet they’re dead. For that matter, there are a bunch of other troops missing.”
Kelly stomped over on her mag boots. “Three more assault teams are converging on our position,” she said. “And some others, a bit farther away. Ten, fifteen minutes, if they can avoid getting caught up and eaten.”
Helsingor gave a throaty chuckle. “Svensen, you old dog. You brought your girlfriend.”
Svensen snorted. “I told her I had plenty of mech units already, but she pointed out that if a bum like you could horn in on the action, how could I tell her no?”
“Ha!”
The ground shuddered. Far ahead of them, at the front of the leviathan, the monster had stretched its arms around the orbital fort and was tearing at the surface to get to nuclear power plants and ammo dumps. The fort kept firing, as did the planetary base and the rest of the Alliance armada, but none of it seemed to trouble the leviathan.
The tree-like creatures continued to sink into the ground, until they were nothing but lumps, with a few waving strands still above the surface that dropped lower moment by moment.
Svensen made his plans to get at the implant, which gleamed on a flat stretch of leviathan skin ahead of them. The surface around it was smooth for ten or fifteen yards in every direction, as if kept clear of parasites and other creatures so as to
protect the device.
“Kelly, get the marines positioned around the perimeter in the direction of the planet. Helsingor, take the raiders space-side, and let the troops from Hellhound and Loki fill the gaps toward the orbital fort when they arrive.”
“What about Frost Lion and Mead Horn?” Kelly asked. “Their assault teams are coming in fast—five minutes, tops, if they can avoid danger. Couple of others out there, too.”
“We can’t afford to wait,” Svensen said. “They plug holes in our lines when they arrive. Get everyone with a plasma torch out front—we’ll get them in there cutting.”
He checked the time on the inside of his faceplate. Only eleven minutes had passed since he’d first jumped onto the surface of the leviathan. Seemed like an hour on the one hand, and on the other, time was racing by impossibly fast. The danger increased with every minute they spent down here.
They warily approached the implant, watching for the creatures that had signaled the leviathan’s immune response. Nothing but slight bumps, and their approach was unchallenged.
Lights flashed overhead, a recognizable plasma burn of a ship decelerating to land. Multiple ships, it seemed. Who? Couldn’t be star wolves, which meant they were incoming ships from one of the Adjudicator carriers. Shuttles of some kind.
“The ghouls are onto us,” Helsingor said. His voice was grim. “Bringing in the decimators.”
“We’re lucky it took so long,” Svensen said. “Come on everyone, move!”
Chapter Sixteen
Tolvern was down eleven ships already. The most recent losses were a pair of torpedo boats, knocked out by a star fortress as they charged in to draw fire away from Second and Fourth Wolves. The Scandians had successfully landed their troops on the surface and were fleeing for their lives.
Well, most of them had fled. Two wolves were lost of the twelve, one eaten by the leviathan, the other obliterated by concentrated enemy fire shortly after it disgorged its marines and raiders. At least the mech units had survived. For now. The Third and Fifth gave their comrades fire support as the undermanned crews of the Second and Fourth made their escape.
The leviathan had Persia’s orbital fort in its grasp. The fort was fighting back, its guns blasting away, and it had severed two tentacles, which floated away, squirming, flexing, and still grabbing for nearby ships. Other appendages dug into the asteroid as if it were a dried husk of bread and tossed away chunks of rock the size of destroyers as it searched for food.
Tolvern hadn’t counted on the fort to do anything but fight for a spell, drawing the enemy’s attention while the garrison retreated into the bowels of the asteroid. Hope the enemy tried to land decimators to dig them out. Still, it was a horrifying spectacle, and the gun crews fell silent one after another.
As soon as the leviathan had engaged with the fort, Tolvern brought her fleet into range to attack the star fortresses in an attempt to keep fire off Svensen’s assault team. The enemy carriers, even unsupported by the mass of dragoons trying to blast their way into the fight, launched a withering counterattack, and Tolvern had only two of her three battle cruisers available to withstand it.
Citadel was out of the fight. First, she had nearly been snared by the goo-spewing tube fired from the leviathan. The battle cruiser had burned off the substance and evaded a tentacle as Adjudicators drove the monster against the fortress. But as Citadel struggled to regain friendly lines, a barrage from the enemy carriers had struck her several punishing blows, and she’d absorbed damage along multiple shields before Blackbeard and Void Queen could rescue her. Citadel’s crew performed emergency repairs to seal breaches and get cannon back on their carriages, but she was sluggish.
Citadel was drifting backward toward the destroyers and missile frigates at the rear. Tolvern couldn’t spare her, damaged or not.
“Capp, get Fox, and find out why the devil he’s retreating. I need him back in the fight.”
Moments later, the first mate turned to the captain with her face gray. “He’s gone, Cap’n.”
“Who is?”
“It’s Fox, he didn’t make it.”
Tolvern stared. Her response was hollow. “He’s dead?”
“Aye, and the rest of them what was on the bridge. The ghouls broke through. Decompression—them blokes on the bridge were sucked into the void before the rest of ’em got it sealed.”
That explained everything. Citadel’s surviving crew must have regained control once they’d sealed the bridge, but some second lieutenant or ensign was in charge. The battle cruiser could hardly be expected to fight under those circumstances. A cluster of dragoons charged the wounded battle cruiser, like sharks sensing blood in the water. Blackbeard and Void Queen were out of position to fight them off.
Tolvern had no time to mourn Fox’s loss, as she was about to lose the entire ship if she couldn’t relieve it from attack. “Smythe, who do we have back there?”
“Vigilant is the strongest nearby ship, sir. She arrived in support of the missile frigates when the destroyers took damage.”
Vigilant was Captain Pearson, back in command of her Punisher-class cruiser. She’d been court-martialed and stripped of rank after a debacle earlier in the war, but Drake had reinstated her. Tolvern hadn’t liked it—still didn’t like it—but the Royal Navy was critically short of experienced officers, and many of the commanders were even greener than Pearson.
There was no choice at the moment. “Get Vigilant in there for support. Order Badger into close shielding range. I want two destroyers in front of Citadel laying a minefield. And find out who’s in command over there. Oh, and Capp, get Wang online and see if she’s got officers with cruiser or battle cruiser experience. Engineers, gunnery crew, too—whatever Citadel needs.”
“Wang won’t be happy,” Capp said. “You know that cold look she has.”
“I don’t expect her to dance with joy, I expect her to send over crew so we can get Citadel back in the fight.”
Wang’s war junks were ninety percent reconnaissance at this point in the battle, anyway. Their main use in battle was with their armor-softening energy beams, and there was no way Tolvern would bring them into close range against so many star fortresses. She wasn’t trying to destroy the enemy carriers, anyway, only harry them, keep them distracted from the important fight on the surface of the star leviathan.
Tolvern wanted to reach out to the four packs of star wolves, two in tight support, and two more that had landed their mech units and were running a gantlet of murderous fire, to see if they had word of Svensen’s assault. Had he landed his forces close to the damaged implant?
But she had bigger worries close at hand. With Citadel battered out of the way, that left Blackbeard and Void Queen to bear the brunt of the enemy attack. She had a force of three light cruisers at hand, and shifted them in front to snare incoming missiles with additional countermeasures.
The star wolves had moved away from the enemy formation and into the planet’s mesosphere, as if to keep the ground base’s missiles at their back for protection, but really to be on hand for Svensen’s eventual evacuation and to help lure the leviathan to the surface. The enemy was ignoring them for now, and Tolvern recalled the Second Wolves, led by a powerful ship named Dreki.
Finally, she called McGowan and had him bring in Peerless and his small group of cruisers and corvettes. This gave her serious firepower to launch against the star fortresses, and perhaps even something of an advantage, given how the enemy carriers were forced to maintain position around the leviathan. Add in the missile frigates, and she had greater long-range attack capability, as well.
Unfortunately, to both protect her forward ships and to shield Citadel from further damage, she’d just gutted defenses to the rear. As soon as the cruisers and corvettes abandoned that fight to join Blackbeard and Void Queen, the dragoons swiftly organized into a dangerous force that was positioned to menace either the frigates or Citadel, or perhaps both.
To counter this threat, Tolvern reinforced the
handful of ships in that direction with what was left of her reserve—a collection of destroyers, sloops, and torpedo boats. They outnumbered the dragoons by more than a dozen ships, but without the support of a capital ship, struggled to hold the line. What she really needed back there was McGowan, but she was barely suppressing incoming star fortress fire as it was.
“Carvalho and them other blokes is ready for launch,” Capp said. “Want to send the falcons to back ’em up?”
It was tempting. Get the battle cruisers to launch their striker wings, and it would give more flexibility in the fight against the dragoons. But the small craft were vulnerable in the air—probably more so than any other ship in the fleet—and if she committed them so early in the battle, with the lines so chaotic, she’d suffer losses.
“Hold the launch.”
While Lomelí focused on the defense grid computer, Smythe had been keeping an eye on the leviathan. Not much to see from this distance with all the interference. Even the war junks were having a hard time penetrating to see what was going on down at the surface, if Svensen’s troops were advancing against whatever strange creatures and immunological response was down there. But now he spotted something.
“A shuttle just dropped from the number three star fortress,” he said.
She was suddenly glad she’d kept her falcons in the launch bay instead of throwing them into the fight. “The number three—that’s Romeo, right?”
“Yes, sir. There goes Sierra, too. Four more shuttles.”
To keep with their naming convention, they’d used the old alphabet designation on the six star fortresses controlling the leviathan: Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, and Uniform. Of these, Sierra was the one that scared her. Its engine configuration, weapons, and armor were a close match for her old nemesis, Bravo. She’d destroyed Bravo in the Battle of Lenin, but only after the same carrier had killed several of Blackbeard’s officers, and nearly Drake, as well.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 65
