There were eight enemy carriers and dozens of dragoons on the scans. It was the largest force the fleet had ever faced, and could have easily turned into a desperate struggle. No matter how massive the Alliance armada, that many carriers together presented a nearly unstoppable force. Had Tolvern been the enemy commander, she’d have formed them into a single, muscular wedge with the dragoons held at the rear, muscled her way into contact with the Royal Navy’s capital ships, and used her dragoons to hold the other allied vessels at bay until she’d smashed the fighting force of battle cruisers and light cruisers.
Instead, the carriers were spread in a line, attempting to pin Drake’s forces against the jump point to prevent them from maneuvering, while organizing their dragoons as a separate fighting force to one flank.
“I ain’t no military strategist,” Capp said, once she’d calmed down and taken in the situation, “but that don’t seem the best way to fight us, Cap’n.”
“We caught them by surprise. They didn’t know we were coming—no mines around the jump point—and they have no idea how many ships we have or what kind.”
“But they must have got word of what we done back at Persia, yeah? Or are they that much at war with that Heaven’s Gate bloke?”
“Let’s count our blessings and make the most of it,” Tolvern said.
Already, a number of corvettes, destroyers, and star wolves had slipped through the gaps in the enemy’s flank and broken into the clear.
With the star fortresses strung out, Vargus had led Void Queen, Citadel, and more than twenty other ships against a single carrier. A bombardment from missile frigates completed the attack. The enemy ship had already been crippled and was struggling to return fire by the time Drake and Tolvern came through. Citadel unleashed her plasma ejector, which tore gaping holes in already weakened armor.
Tolvern ignored this development and pulled alongside Inferno, which was exchanging fire with a second carrier. Two light cruisers and an entire wing of the general’s sloops supported him, while missile frigates took position to the rear.
First Dragon and Three Tiger crept in behind the ship and bathed it with energy beams to weaken the enemy’s armor. They maintained position, burning away, and the enemy did nothing to search for them.
“They can’t see the war junks,” Smythe said. “They don’t understand what we’re doing to their armor.”
“That confirms,” Tolvern said, pleased. “The head ghoul in Heaven’s Gate didn’t share a thing with these ones.”
Meanwhile, off to their flank, and lower on the Z-axis, Svensen and Olafsen broke open a second breach in the enemy cordon and led a massive wing of star wolves against the massing dragoons, who looked set to menace Vargus and McGowan’s force. When the destroyer-sized enemy ships pulled short to form ranks against this threat, Dwiggins led Apollo and several other corvettes and cruisers in a spear thrust from above that scattered their ranks just as the Scandian warships came in swinging. Pummel guns tore apart dragoons, and enemy ships were soon going off like fireworks over the Thames on Settlement Day.
Blackbeard and Inferno broke through their carrier’s weakened armor. Over more than an hour of fighting, the fool on the other side had never noticed the war junks, or attempted any evasive maneuvers, and the energy beams had left its armor as soft as cardboard. Three broadsides in a row wrecked the weapon systems, destroyed the engines, and gutted the bridge. Missile frigates finished the destruction.
“Two carriers down,” Capp said. “I think we got them ghouls figured out.”
“Hold your enthusiasm,” Tolvern said.
Some excitement was breaking out as several dragoons slipped through on a suicide mission against the fleet’s supply ships, which remained bunched behind the missile frigates near the outgoing jump point. The enemy managed to evade several hastily deployed Youd mines and destroy a small ammo ship before destroyers knocked out two dragoons and drove the other three away from their targets. Here, the attackers fell into a mixed force of Alliance ships, including Scorpion. Fontaine’s railguns shredded two of the three, and the final dragoon died from the attack of a mixed collection of sloops and privateer schooners.
Too late, the Adjudicators seemed to recognize that they should form ranks and conserve their star fortresses as a single fighting force. By now, the four Royal Navy battle cruisers had closed ranks and forced another of the star fortresses off onto its own.
This one wasn’t going down easily, but stood and fought like a bull elephant surrounded by lions. It knocked out a sloop and damaged two destroyers, but with four battle cruisers cutting it with enfilading fire, and dozens of other ships lending support, its defense systems were soon overwhelmed.
By the time they finished it off, the remaining five had gathered their surviving dragoons and fallen back a pace. The Gateway System had eight small rocky planets, none with an atmosphere, and two gas giants currently on opposite sides of their orbit from each other. There were three jump points down toward the system’s star, including the one to Old Earth, and the enemy retreated toward them, intentions unknown.
Drake sent orders to the fleet to reorganize them rather than setting off in immediate pursuit. Tolvern wondered about this; move quickly and they could pin the enemy within the system. Move too slowly, and maybe the Adjudicators would reach the home system, where they could wreak maximum havoc on Earth and its defenders.
“I need an assessment of the battlefield,” Tolvern said.
“We caught ’em with their pants down, Cap’n,” Capp said. “It was a smashing victory.”
“Something more than I already know. Smythe?”
The tech officer tapped at his console. “Three star fortresses destroyed. Seventeen dragoons killed or scuttled by the enemy.” His fingers moved some more. “On our side, a schooner lost. Two sloops. A destroyer, two star wolves, and a torpedo boat. A supply ship. Four other warships crippled.”
They’d lost eight ships, with four others effectively knocked out of the fight, but their crews surviving. Against that, twenty enemy vessels obliterated, including three of their most powerful. Capp was right. It was a smashing victory, with the enemy’s fighting power reduced by at least forty percent.
They needed to press the engagement and finish it. So why was Drake holding back?
“Several of our ships are gone from the scans,” Smythe said. He tapped some more. “Can’t see them at all.”
“Wang can make herself scarce when she wants to,” Tolvern said.
“I’m not talking about war junks. It’s Apollo, Swordfish, Peerless . . . and Scorpion.”
“Ah.”
Capp frowned. “What is it? What does that mean?”
“Two corvettes, a cruiser, and the Terran ship,” Tolvern said. “All of them fast ships. Most importantly, Pierre Fontaine. The admiral is sending an emissary to Old Earth.”
#
Tolvern, Drake, Vargus, and McGowan ran down the enemy twenty-one hours after the first battle had ended. In addition to the battle cruisers, six light cruisers, two corvettes, and twenty-two star wolves joined the attack. They savaged a rearguard of dragoons, then fell into the jaws of a punishing counterattack.
The enemy had evidently considered the beating they’d absorbed near the jump point and adjusted tactics accordingly. First, they lit up the area with flash charges and active sounding to search for war junks. Drake hadn’t brought any; they were too slow to keep up with the fast-attack squadron. As soon as the enemy confirmed that the area was clear of Singaporeans, the five carriers charged directly at the battle cruisers.
“They figured it out,” Tolvern said. “Thank God it was too late to hammer us at the jump point.”
The Alliance squadron couldn’t stand up to the carriers, and didn’t try. Instead, they withdrew slowly, happy to draw the enemy toward the rest of the fleet. A handful of star wolf captains proved overeager—there was even foolish talk about landing raiders—but the punishment landed on these few proved a useful lesson
to the others.
Once the enemy had Drake’s forces on the run, it turned about and resumed its flight. This wasn’t in the direction of the Earth jump, but toward a yellow point that led to parts unknown. Smythe queried the AI, and Jane’s calculations made Nyb Pim think that the jump might take them back around toward Heaven’s Gate. Could the enemy be thinking of returning to the Lord of Lords in an attempt to make common cause?
Obviously, the humans and Hroom couldn’t allow this. Drake ordered another charge, this one harder than the first, and eighty minutes later they struck the enemy a second time. This time, the response was even more savage. Dragoons charged at Inferno, and nearly overwhelmed her while Drake was still trying to fight off an incoming missile barrage from the carriers.
He got his brawler detached, and the rider ship absorbed several blows while the other three battle cruisers came to Inferno’s aid. Dragoons separated Inferno’s brawler from the cruisers, and the nearest two carriers ripped it to shreds. All hands lost.
Two star wolves met the same fate, as did the cruiser Trafalgar, who held on only long enough to launch most of her escape pods. Citadel and Void Queen managed to extract Inferno from danger while Blackbeard held off an attack from dragoons diving from above. Missiles from the rest of the armada began to land on the battlefield, which gave them a small measure of breathing space.
“Incoming ships,” Smythe announced. “Jumping from Earth.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The first to arrive was Scorpion, followed by another ship of the same class. This was followed by a strange, bulbous ship that Tolvern could only assume was a gorgon. After this, Apollo, Swordfish, and Peerless. The rest of the Earth fleet followed, freed at last from its quarantine.
The Terrans were only sixteen ships in total by the time they’d all jumped into Gateway, counting Scorpion, with two of them being gorgons and the rest Stinger-class. They were only a few million miles from the battlefield, as Drake’s chase had pushed the enemy into a vulnerable position.
Seeing this new force, and the bulk of Drake’s armada closing in an effort to smother them with shot, the Adjudicators made a final attempt to break free. Star wolves blunted the escape attempt, and General Bailyna Tyn brought in some of her freshly arriving sloops to reinforce them.
The sloops barely held the line.
After that, the enemy was shortly surrounded and had no choice but to fight to the bitter end. Another carrier went down, and took with it several sloops, destroyers, and torpedo boats in its death throes.
The Terrans arrived on the scene and threw themselves into the battle with the savagery of a long-suffering people that has finally spotted its chance at revenge. They hit the rear carrier with railguns and multiple flashes of cataclysm bursts that were like crazed, frantic versions of Hroom serpentine batteries, sending thousands of tiny charges all smashing into the enemy at once.
The star fortress struck back, supported by four dragoons. They took out one of the Stinger-class ships and damaged two others. But with the navy escort on hand to lend the Terrans fire support, the Alliance forces shortly reduced the carrier to a smoking, burning hulk, the flames gradually dying as the last of its gasses vented into the void.
The armada attacked the remaining enemy ships with impunity. They crippled one carrier, reduced another to sporadic fire from kinetic weapons, and hit a third with waves of torpedo boats, destroyer attacks, and cannon fire from larger ships. Terran ships resumed their attack. By the end of the first full day of battle, not a single enemy carrier was able to return fire.
The final mop-up took two more days. First, to gut the star fortresses and eliminate the possibility of surviving Adjudicators. In addition, dragoons had escaped, and while they couldn’t jump clear without their carriers, they’d proven capable of hiding for long stretches if they could get free long enough to throw up their cloaks. Drake organized hunting packs of his fastest ships, including battle cruisers, to hunt them down. Finally, the last dragoon was sent burning into the sun, chased down by pummel gun and cannon fire.
Tolvern was in the war room, trying to look over a damage report from light cruisers under her command, but half-dozing after eleven hours of sleep spread out over three days, when Drake called from Inferno.
“Nine destroyers will remain to mine the Gateway System,” he said. “The rest of us, including most of the Terrans, will return to Heaven’s Gate to finish off the Lord of Lords before he has a chance to rebuild his fleet.”
She cast a long glance at the side viewscreen where scans showed a pair of destroyers mining the jump point that led to Old Earth.
“Did you catch that?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir?” he said. She could almost see Drake’s raised eyebrow. “It’s a closed channel, and Capp said you were alone in the war room.”
“We’re so bloody close to Earth after all these months. Blackbeard is finally here, your true ship—we’re the ones who suffered in the attempt. Can’t we go in and have a quick look around before we head out again?”
“Jess . . .”
She sighed. “Yeah, I know.”
“Fontaine is going back with an envoy to prepare the ground for our arrival. Once we’ve finished off the fool who sent a leviathan against us, then we’ll return to Earth.”
#
The final battle, when it came, was an anticlimax at the end of a long, bloody war. A war that had lasted decades, in fact, if you counted the planets savaged by the Adjudicators before Albion and her allies joined the fight.
The Lord of Lords had five new star fortresses under construction through its bases in Heaven’s Gate, but only one capital ship that was in service and ready to fight. The rest were grounded on asteroids or in orbital docks, undergoing a final fitting out. Another fifteen dragoons patrolled the asteroid belt and lanes to the jump points.
After taking the lay of the land, Drake divided the fleet into three squadrons of roughly fifty ships each, with Inferno—missing her brawler—and Blackbeard at the head of one force, Citadel leading a second, and Void Queen at the head of the third.
They came in at the asteroid belt from different angles, positioned in such a way to prevent the enemy from making a run for it. The enemy did not flee, but fought for its life.
Citadel and Void Queen pinned the surviving carrier and the dragoons between their forces. While Vargus and McGowan systematically dismantled what was left of the Adjudicator fleet, Tolvern and Drake passed through the enemy bases to bombard the star fortresses under construction before they could be raised from the surface and hastily sent into battle. Any bases that returned fire came under swift and furious attack.
Within five days of entering Heaven’s Gate, the enemy was effectively defeated. All that was left was to go from colony to colony and smash it. Destroy mining operations and shipyards. Smash orbital farms. Nuke the bigger colonies.
But here Drake hesitated. What about all of the slaves in the system? Shouldn’t they attempt a rescue?
He pinpointed one small colony and sent in two hundred raiders and mechanized marines. They swiftly overran an enemy garrison that numbered no more than twenty Adjudicators, with only a handful being armored decimator units.
There were hundreds of so-called devotees below, working in a nuclear waste reprocessing facility—humans, Hroom, and others. With no protection against the radiation, and starvation-level rations, most were near death when the mech units broke in.
Little could be done for them, but what about the thirteen thousand others who were in stasis chambers below the base, awaiting their turn in the cycle of death?
Analysis of the situation was grim, as they looked at dozens of other colonies, many far larger and better defended. The marine commander estimated it would take months to root out the Adjudicators in the system, and a major effort to keep the rescued devotees alive, even something so simple as keeping alien stasis systems functional.
And what about the medical effort of di
gging out millions of implants? A consult with Dr. Willis and Chief Science Officer Brockett suggested years, plus some vast sum from the treasury to rehabilitate them all.
And that was only the humans and Hroom. Little was known about the Cavlee and the insectoids, and God knew what else they might discover. Who were these alien races, and what would they do when freed?
By the time Drake ordered the fleet to break apart on various missions, with a rump fleet of star wolves and navy destroyers left behind to continue the work in Heaven’s Gate, there seemed to be more questions than answers. The only thing he was certain of was that the enemy’s slaves did not deserve to die.
Catarina Vargus and Edward McGowan were ordered back to Albion to report to the king and parliament. Vargus was to be released from service to return to her colony in Segovia, while McGowan would see to the repair and stabilization of the fleet and its bases across the Inner Frontier until the admiral’s return.
Drake and Tolvern would take a small force of seven ships—Blackbeard and Inferno, plus three light cruisers and two corvettes—to escort the Terrans home. On their way to Old Earth, they’d comb nearby systems for residual enemies. Both the Terrans and the Albion forces believed the enemy had been wiped out, but they needed to be sure.
Humanity had clawed its way back from the brink. The universe was a dangerous place, and surely new enemies would be found sooner or later. They owed it to future generations to take care of this threat now, while they had the firepower to finish it off, rather than let some remnant of the enemy escape to fester in a secret corner of the quadrant.
But of course that search of intervening systems meant additional delays before Drake and Tolvern finally completed their mission and visited Old Earth.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Catarina hadn’t set foot on Albion in years, and wasn’t originally from the planet at all, having largely grown up in Ladino territory with her pirate father, yet she felt a strange pull as the massive space elevator descended from Fort Ellen.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 75
