“The leviathans are holy and pure,” Fontaine said. “Someday the old race will return, set the creatures loose, and cleanse the entire galaxy. Both sides believe it, but the older faction was willing to put the monsters to their own use. The younger faction believe that is an abomination.”
“So, a civil war of sorts,” Tolvern said. “Each side wants to impose its will on the other.”
Fontaine shook his head. “The Adjudicators do not fight wars as we know them. They don’t conquer for territory, financial gain, or domination. The more pure faction intend to kill the Lord of Lords and any minions who stand by its side, then take its factories, plants, and devotees as their own. The Lord of Lords will do the same to them if it can.”
The barbarian-looking one grunted. “So let them do it. What’s it to us? We’ll build up our fleets while they fight it out. Then, when the dust settles, and there is one survivor, we bring the fury of the gods on their heads and destroy them all.”
“Sure, Svensen,” McGowan said. “Like they’ve been fighting it out all along. No bother to us at all.”
There was sarcasm in McGowan’s voice, and Svensen growled deep in his throat, looking like he would issue a challenge. Vargus gave him a sharp look, and he kept his mouth shut. Drake, who remained the only one standing, watched them both, the Albion officer and the barbarian, his expression serious until the moment seemed to have passed.
Fontaine sensed the challenges going around the room and knew he was missing as much as he was seeing. The Adjudicators weren’t the only ones with internal conflict. The differences among the Alliance must surely start with the Hroom; hadn’t Albion been at war with them in the not-so-distant past?
There were further divisions among the humans. McGowan and Drake were aristocrats. Tolvern wasn’t, but she possessed a professional bearing that reminded him a little of Al-Harthi. Catarina Vargus and the one they called Svensen carried something of the lawless frontier in their posture. And what about the Asian woman? She surely had a different story altogether.
What about you? Where do you fit in this strange alliance of human and alien interests?
The answer was, defending the homeland. The mother planet. The one who’d given birth to humanity and nurtured it for thousands of years. Even if the rest of the universe turned against humanity, it would provide a last refuge. The planet Earth.
“Go on,” Drake urged him.
“Both factions are implacable to the human race,” Fontaine said. “You cannot negotiate with them. The best any human has done is fight them to a stalemate and drive them off. They’ll wait a few years, decades, even centuries or longer, while they build up their war machine. And they’ll have learned from their mistakes here and come back with new forces, new tactics, new ships. Maybe we’ll defeat them again, but maybe they’ll catch us while we’re in some other war. We need to finish them off now, while they’re wounded.”
“Let’s say I agree with you,” Drake said. “That still doesn’t answer one important question. Why not trap the original faction in Heaven’s Gate while we can? Eliminate the Lord of Lords and then go after his enemy?”
“We all know the reason to that,” McGowan said dismissively. “Fontaine wants to protect his own people, nothing more.”
“No,” Fontaine said. “Well, yes, I do. It’s Earth, for God’s sake. It’s the home planet for us all—it’s your homeland as much as it is mine. Wouldn’t you save Earth if you could?”
“Not before Albion, I wouldn’t,” McGowan said. “That is my homeland, sir.”
Fontaine found he didn’t care much for this McGowan fellow, and addressed the admiral directly. “The Lord of Lords is crippled. You’ve destroyed two of his fleets and taken away his principal weapon in the leviathan. He can’t attack you at the moment, but his defenses in Heaven’s Gate are strong enough to resist, and you could very well lose more ships. If that happens, it will take time to rebuild your fleet to fight the other faction, and by then the enemy might slip away.”
“Destroying this self-appointed alien lord won’t take as long as you think,” Svensen said. “If the enemy has no more star fortresses, we’ll smash their defenses from a distance and land raiders and marines to burn the ghouls out of their holes.”
“Those holes are full of slaves,” Tolvern said. “They can be freed, can’t they? If we go into the bases with the idea of exterminating whatever we find, millions of innocents will be killed.”
Fontaine seized on this angle. “The Cavlee only exist as devotees to the Adjudicators. If you kill all the ones in Heaven’s Gate, you will exterminate their entire species.”
The Hroom gave a lengthy preamble of hums and whistles, then spoke for the first time. “The empress would never agree to the extermination of another race—the god of mercy teaches that genocide is an abomination above all others.”
“There’s no call for genocide,” Drake said. “Nor a final struggle in Heaven’s Gate. We could certainly attack the system, destroy any and all shipping, and then leave a dozen warships to maintain exactly the sort of quarantine the enemy itself would impose on us. We’d then move on with the rest of the fleet and fight this other faction.”
“But what about Earth?” Fontaine insisted. “There are several Adjudicator star fortresses hovering outside the home system. They’re building up a fleet and plan to invade and finish what they started.”
“We are building a fleet, too,” Drake said. “Every shipyard from Odense to Singapore is devoted to the war effort, and the Hroom are constructing sloops at a rapid and growing pace.”
“You can’t guarantee that your shipyards will outproduce theirs,” Fontaine said. “And even if you could, how many ships have you lost already? How many thousands of crew? How many fine officers? How many millions of civilians? I saw what you suffered here. The wrecked ships, the mangled orbital fortress. The longer you wait, the greater the cost of victory.”
This argument seemed to hit the admiral, who wore a thoughtful expression and glanced back at the map of star systems.
Fontaine pressed on. “Listen to me, sir. You saw Scorpion in action. There’s a new fleet in the Earth System—there must be by now. As many as twelve more Stinger-class ships and a couple of gorgons. You think our railguns are powerful? You’ve never seen our cataclysm bursts. Hit the Gateway System, free the jump point into Earth. I’ll go through in Scorpion and raise reinforcements. Together, we’ll destroy the stronger enemy faction, then return to Heaven’s Gate and smash the Lord of Lords and what’s left of his forces.”
“There’s one problem with your plan,” Tolvern said. “I’ve been across the Inner Frontier. It’s a long, hard slog of jump points. By the time you get to Heaven’s Gate, you’re too far to even send a subspace back to friendly territory. We’ll need to leave a trailing force of ships to pass word by relay. There are bound to be lawless systems, stray Adjudicator forces, and the constant risk of ambush. And that only takes us to Heaven’s Gate.” She tossed her head at the star map. “It’s six months to Earth from here.”
Fontaine let out a short, barking laugh that caught even him by surprise. He rose to his feet and made his way to the screen.
“That is an Adjudicator lie. It isn’t six months. It never was.”
Drake’s tone was sharp. “What do you mean?”
He touched a jump point, a point in a cul-de-sac system that he guessed was Persia. “This is us, right? Two jumps beyond, right here—this point here is not a red. It never was. It’s a blue point, it’s how the Adjudicators were attacking you.”
“How would you possibly know that?” McGowan said.
“They can hide their jump points, disguise them.”
“We know that already, we’ve known for a long time,” the man said. “But how do you know about that particular point?”
“I was operating with the ghouls’ own charts for several weeks. And I had another look as the Terran Arms fleet came sneaking back through Adjudicator systems. I’ve learned thi
ngs. Look. You jump from here, to here, then to here.” He tapped the screen. “Al-Harthi figured that one out.”
“Your point?” McGowan said.
“It’s right in front of your face. Look! Tunisia is only four jumps from Earth.”
This quieted them. Even McGowan sharpened his gaze and rubbed his chin while staring at the star chart.
“Six weeks, not six months,” Fontaine continued. “And you’d come back to Heaven’s Gate even faster once you’ve freed Earth. Meet your new reinforcements in Heaven’s Gate, then end this thing. The whole war is finished by the end of the year.”
It assumed throwing caution to the wind. A full-scale charge, none of this fleet relay, careful probing nonsense. But he could see looks passing around the room, and knew he had them.
There was a different look on Drake’s face as the admiral rocked back on his heels and glanced off at an angle with a thoughtful, not altogether pleased expression. There was something of caution, of responsibility in that distant gaze, and Fontaine at first took him for a man who wanted to be one hundred percent sure before committing his forces, but knew that such a standard was impossible. It was only when Drake looked at each of his commanding officers in turn that Fontaine realized something.
This would change everything. Not only change the course of the war, but after. Cut the time to cross from Earth to Albion in half, and what did that mean? It meant that the strongest power could dominate, and who was that?
It was Drake’s own fleet. The man had already absorbed the military power of several different human and alien civilizations, all fighting at his command, and no doubt they’d surrendered much of their national sovereignty as well. Albion might call itself a kingdom, but it had become an empire in fact. And that empire’s power was bound to spread, as even Earth would need Albion’s protection to rebuild.
Admiral Drake knew it, and Fontaine saw that it didn’t make him happy.
Chapter Twenty-Five
If there had been any thought in Tolvern’s mind that a settlement might be negotiated with the Adjudicators, she tossed it away as the armada pushed its way across a swath of broken star systems.
They followed Fontaine’s jump path into the heart of the Merchanting Federation’s systems. These had been a loose confederation of colonies and bases that stretched along the lines followed by the Great Migration half a millennium earlier, and had controlled trade from either end of human-organized space for more than two centuries.
She remembered learning about the Federation’s monopolistic powers way back in her school days, and taking with patriotic pride her teacher’s pronouncements about Albion’s liberties and privileges. Let the traders make their demands; the kingdom was free and always would be.
Tolvern had learned much more about the subtleties of the trade situation since then, as well as witnessed firsthand her own people’s flaws. The Albion-Hroom sugar wars alone were enough to instill a healthy cynicism in anyone who was paying attention. Nevertheless, there was no question that the Merchers had choked off continued colonization across the frontier, and for generations, any growth in the original colonies had been organic.
Still, it was humbling to see the destruction in the Merchanting Federation’s systems. The Adjudicators had reduced once proud, wealthy colonies to ruins. Hamburg, gone. Firenze, completely abandoned, her cities radioactive slag heaps.
Chicago-Angeles, blessed with two habitable planets and fourteen different jump points, had been the most prosperous of the Federation’s systems, but the aliens had struck it so hard as to change the climate of both worlds. Ice sheets were advancing from the poles in the colder of the two planets, and acid rains in the second had killed vast continental forests, which raged with forest fires.
“So much for purifying the natural environment,” Tolvern said as they made their way to the next jump point.
Closer to Earth, they entered systems where the job was only half done. Three or four million people were hanging on at Zambia, bracing for the enemy’s return, and several hundred thousand hungry survivors in the system containing the United Bolivarian Mines begged for help when they detected the fleet passing through. The Alliance armada maintained radio silence in case it was a trap. Time enough to return later and put things right.
The last inhabited world before the Gateway System that led to Earth was New California. It was the oldest of Earth’s true colonies, the first planet settled after the moons, asteroids, and harsh worlds in the home system. In the early decades of space exploration, jump technology had been chancy and dangerous, and humans had moved out in small, slow ships.
From Earth, through the Gateway System, and to New California had taken more than three months in those years, and the colony had grown prosperous by resupplying colonists on their outward migration. Many arrived at New California, hungry, their ships struggling, and traveled no further.
After hundreds of years of growth and colonization, there had once been 950 million humans living on the planet, nearly twice the population of Albion. No longer. Her cities were now in ruins, her orbital fortresses and space elevator smashed, the cables to the surface severed. And the slaughter was ongoing. A handful of dragoons orbited the planet, shooting casually at the surface as they picked out surviving colonies of humans and smashed them.
They weren’t expecting Admiral Drake’s forces, that much was clear. The armada was only a few million miles from the planet when the ghouls detected them. All five dragoons made to flee as soon as they recognized the magnitude of the enemy bearing down on them.
Drake ordered the fleet uncloaked and had Wang’s war junks hit the system hard with active sensors to find the dragoons’ carrier ship. While the rest of the fleet continued toward the jump into the Gateway System, Blackbeard, Inferno, and eight corvettes and light cruisers peeled off from the main force to intercept the fleeing dragoons.
The Royal Navy warships had all the advantage in velocity, and caught the dragoons six hours later. The corvettes and cruisers raced ahead of the enemy ships and fired torpedoes to force them to evade. The dragoons hooked away from the incoming fire on the Y-axis in a violent maneuver that shed velocity and strained their inertialess systems.
The enemy ships shortly fell into the jaws of the two battle cruisers. Inferno got the first shot with a broadside that mauled two dragoons, which then streaked into Blackbeard’s line of fire. Tolvern hit the swiftest of the two ships with the secondary battery, left it bleeding from a dozen wounds as it hurtled past, and sent a Hunter-II torpedo chasing the second dragoon. It followed the dragoon as it made another twisting maneuver, struck its engine, and blasted it to pieces.
A third dragoon escaped Inferno with minor damage, but couldn’t slip past Blackbeard. Tolvern had held her main battery in reserve and let it rip. Penetrating shot shredded the shield ring and obliterated the armor around the engines. It bled plasma as it spun away from the battlefield, out of control.
Tolvern told her gunnery to take their time picking a good shot to finish the kill. A single Mark-IV rumbled out of its tube and accelerated toward the enemy ship. She detached Warthog and told the commander to hold position against the dragoon should it somehow survive and rejoin the fight. Meanwhile, Blackbeard and Inferno pulled around to face other enemy ships.
The cruisers and corvettes had already forced these final two dragoons to engage. The enemy ships were making a good showing of it, but by now the striker wings of the two battle cruisers had entered the fray. They pinned the dragoons in place and rocked them with pulse fire and small missiles.
Vigilant and Peerless got beneath one of the dragoons and savaged it with cannon fire. It detonated and broke in two. By the time the two battle cruisers arrived on the scene, there was only one enemy ship still in the fight, and they made short work of it. On the far edge of the battlefield, Tolvern’s torpedo caught the sole surviving dragoon and obliterated it, in turn.
There was no sign of an enemy carrier. Whatever star fortress had car
ried the dragoons through as rider ships had departed for other systems.
Peerless had suffered minor damage in the engagement, with more serious wounds inflicted on a corvette named Fleetfoot, whose defense grid had been knocked out when kinetic fire penetrated its armor. Two men had been killed on the ship, as well.
But against that, they’d bagged five dragoons and freed the survivors of New California from their torment. And for the last time, Tolvern vowed. By the time they returned through this system, she swore that they’d have obliterated enemy forces in the sector.
The chase and battle had taken roughly eleven hours, and by the time the eight ships of their squadron had come about and resumed their flight toward the jump into the Gateway System, the first of the armada was already through, led by Void Queen, three destroyers, and the Scandian warships of the First Wolves. Bailyna Tyn jumped next on her sloop of war, followed by several more Hroom warships.
A Singaporean war junk, two missile frigates, an ammo supply ship, three Punisher-class cruisers. Two corvettes. More sloops and star wolves. A handful of privateer schooners and supply freighters from the Ladino worlds. More destroyers, war junks, frigates, and cruisers. Scorpion, with Fontaine back in command of his own ship. Citadel, commanded by Captain McGowan.
By the time the Inferno- and Blackbeard-led squadron arrived at the ships still queuing at the jump, two-thirds of the 147 warships and support vessels had already made the jump, with a new ship going through every few minutes.
“We’ve got a subspace from the other side,” Smythe announced. “It’s Vargus. She’s found the enemy.” He sent it through, and Tolvern read it with grim satisfaction.
Under attack. Carriers and dragoons. VQ leading defense of jump point.
#
The Adjudicators had a powerful fleet in the Gateway System, and Tolvern’s first awareness as she came out of her jump, her stomach roiling and with a hammer thumping in her skull, was of Lieutenant Capp sending out a barrage of curses.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 74
