In later years, so many stories would be told about the Battle of Castle Nebula that the clash would take on the proportions of a legend. But the stories still weren’t as amazing as the actual event. One moment the Sovereign was there in front of them, large as life—larger, really, with her silvery white hull and lines like a bird photographed in the instant of flight, dwarfing the Demesne ships as she flew in between two positioned close together. She unfurled her space sails like giant wings.
Humphreys gasped, horrified. “What is she doing? They’ll shred her sails in minutes.”
As they watched, the Sovereign’s sails were edged with silver, then with white, then the glare made them all avert their eyes—and the next moment, the Sovereign was gone, and with her the two Demesne ships closest to her. The frigate vanished as if she had never been there.
Silence fell like a rock into a pool.
Predictably, Humphreys was the first to break it. “By the stars, what has he done?”
Volkova’s face twisted in rage. “Left us to fend for ourselves, evidently,” she said. “At least the Sovereign took two of them with her.” Even as she spoke, the remaining Demesne ships rounded on the poor Laika. Volkova laughed, a bitter sound. “Shield status?”
Humphreys just grimaced and shook his head.
Bruno stared through the forward viewscreen, watching the Demesne ships draw closer. They were wary, unsure of what had just happened to their companions, but the obviously damaged Laika was still a tempting target.
“Firing what’s left of the cannons,” Volkova warned. The Laika spit what fire she still possessed, which was sufficient to damage one of the oncoming ships enough to force it to break off and peel away from the group. The rest kept coming.
Humphreys screwed his eyes shut, but Bruno watched his own death approaching, transfixed. He didn’t know what to feel. Had Katrin survived? If she had not, he couldn’t bring himself to regret his own demise. But if she had, and he was leaving her alone…
Suddenly the Laika was practically tipped over on her stern as something massive rose up from beneath her, knocking against her forecastle shields as the object blew upwards past the ship’s bow. Proximity alarms squealed as the ship tried to right herself.
Volkova spat out a string of foreign words that were probably unsuitable for polite company. “Blast it all, now what?” she growled.
Bruno had just enough time to realize that what he was seeing was the dorsal side of the Sovereign before the Laika’s viewscreen lit up with blinding white light. The ship shrieked and rumbled like a dying animal.
This was it, Bruno thought. They’d been hit, and the ship was breaking apart. In a second, the vacuum of space would kill them, or the explosion would consume them, or—
Or the viewscreen in front of him would be filled with grey clouds, faint stars just visible through the pearly sheen.
Bruno blinked. “The hell?”
Humphreys opened an eye. “We’re not dead?”
“Don’t you worry, it’ll probably still happen,” Volkova said dryly. “Where are we, Lieutenant?” She walked forward towards the screen, gazing out at the strange sight. Atthis was nowhere to be seen. No Demesne ships, no Sovereign, nothing familiar.
“Spaced if I know, Captain,” said Anfortas, checking his readouts. “Navigation is scrambled, what was left of it.”
Something about the lieutenant’s turn of phrase clicked in Bruno’s head. “We’re in Castle Nebula,” he said suddenly.
Volkova tilted her head skeptically. “How?”
Bruno shrugged. The cavalier gesture mirrored his benumbed state. He had been sure he would die. Now that he hadn’t, he felt almost disinterested in their situation. None of this seemed to matter. “Where else could we be? Navigation’s a mess.”
“Are sensors working?” Volkova turned to the lieutenant, her face ashen in the muddy grey light. “Can you tell if the Sovereign or the Demesne ships are here?”
“Um,” Bruno said. “Ma’am?” He pointed at the viewscreen.
Volkova turned on her heel, and her coat flared with the movement. The Sovereign was surfacing underneath them like a breaching whale, her brilliant hull looking faded and dingy through the clouds.
The commline activated. “I apologize, Laika,” said Tsarevich. “We didn’t mean to bring you along too.”
“Please explain, Sovereign,” said Volkova, her voice clipped.
“We dropped the aft shields as we drew ahead of the Demesne ship, and our backwash from the Casimir sails caught them and carried them in our wake. We raised the shields again as soon as we hit the nebula.”
It was ingenious, Bruno had to admit. Also horrifically risky.
“So we are in Castle Nebula?” Volkova asked.
“Correct,” Tsarevich replied.
“You know, you’re not the best communicator,” Volkova said with some asperity. “You could’ve told us what you had in mind.”
“Didn’t know if it would work,” Tsarevich said. “Although I figured that if we made it here, their navigational difficulties should keep them here long enough for us to deal with them. Speaking of which…”
The Sovereign fired its cannons, and the discharge lit up the cloudy vista in front of them.
“You still have cannons, yes? Fire on those same coordinates,” Tsarevich told the Laika, “and you’ll hit one of the Demesne ships. We have to go back for the others before they catch on to what we’re doing. Keep moving or they’ll use the same trick to nail you.”
“What if they fire on you after you drop the aft shields, while you’re in hyperspace?” Bruno couldn’t help but ask. The scenario seemed to him to be deadly.
He could almost hear the shrug in Tsarevich’s voice. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who didn’t really care anymore; after so much emotional turbulence, one had to switch off to act effectively. “Then we’re in trouble. Pray they don’t.” The Sovereign winked out again, leaving the Laika alone in the nebula. Alone with three prowling, wounded Demesne ships.
“Keep us in motion, Ensign,” Volkova ordered. “I don’t care where you go so long as you move.”
“Aye, ma’am.” Bruno manhandled the controls, wrestling the ship around to a new heading.
Volkova fired again and again into the ship with a confirmed location, nodding in satisfaction when it stopped returning its erratic fire.
Dead or disabled, then. “One down, two to go,” Bruno murmured.
The Sovereign winked into the nebula again, towing one more Demesne ship in its wake.
“These shields are fantastic,” they all heard Tsarevich mutter over the comm. Humphreys looked offended. “Laika, I don’t think that’s going to work again. They’re purposely avoiding coming into proximity with us, and we almost lost this one.” The Sovereign rounded on the vessel she had just dragged into the nebula, blasting it with cannons. Without a pause, she whirled on another vessel, taking out its propulsion systems in one shot. She looped up and over the Laika, catching a stray shot on her own bows so the sloop wouldn’t be hit, and diving down again to come up underneath a Demesne ship and punch its way through the enemy’s shields. The Demesne ships were all but disabled, and the grey-filtered light gave their hulls a corpselike hue.
Whatever happened on Atthis, the battle was truly won in the nebula, Bruno thought. The Demesne would need time to build up their ships after a defeat like this. Tsarevich had bought the Common Union breathing room and time to lick its wounds. But the war would not be short. Two such forces, with so much to lose, would not be likely to surrender, no matter what damage they dealt each other. Bruno felt a twinge of foreboding: he had a feeling he was witnessing the first of many battles.
As her crew watched the Sovereign’s acrobatics, the crippled Laika seemed particularly useless. “All right,” Volkova muttered, shifting her feet uncomfortably, “no need to show off. You’re already king of the castle.”
“How many ships are left at Atthis?” Humphreys asked Tsarevich.
&
nbsp; “Come about,” Tsarevich ordered his pilot before answering. “Two, although one seemed to be badly damaged and was no longer attacking.”
“Can you give us a tow home?” Volkova asked. “I say we leave what’s left of these here to blunder their way out. We can deal with them later. Right now we need to get back and help Atthis. Or you do, anyway,” she amended, looking at her panel. “I’m hemorrhaging atmosphere and God only knows what else into space. We need to get out of here.”
“Understood. Hold on.”
Once more the Sovereign flew dangerously near to the Laika. Bruno was going to be hearing proximity alarms in his nightmares for weeks, he thought. The frigate picked up the smaller ship in its wake as its sails flared to life, taking the two Galactic Fleet ships back to Atthis.
Bruno hadn’t thought that they were in the nebula long enough for the scene above Atthis to have changed so dramatically, but he realized he had been so preoccupied with the needs of the moment that he hadn’t really registered the state of the drydocks before the Laika’s unforeseen departure. They were nonexistent. So much rubble drifted in the vicinity of the shipyards that it was difficult to see past it to the planet.
The Sovereign blew by them in hot pursuit of the remaining Demesne ships, which had scattered as soon as the frigate came back into view. They had reason to fear the silvery white ship now. Even as Bruno watched, the Sovereign ran down one of the ships with dogged determination, zigzagged around the debris, and blew the smaller vessel to pieces. The frigate immediately turned her attention to the remaining Demesne ship, like a falcon on the hunt. Bruno was glad Tsarevich was on their side. The man was fearsome.
“Sensors show a handful of Galactic Fleet ships proceeding slowly out of the system,” Anfortas said.
“So we bought enough time for a few to escape,” Volkova said, sounding as though she were reassuring herself. Then she asked the question Bruno couldn’t bring himself to voice. “What about the surface? Any word from the planetside facilities?”
“Nothing from the yards,” the lieutenant said, “but officials on the other islands are reporting in. They all appear to be intact, for the most part. Judging by sensors, the yards are almost completely destroyed, but some of the population centers nearby remain relatively untouched. ”
Bruno had told himself he felt nothing. He realized now how untrue that was. Some part of him still hoped that Katrin had landed and had time to get out of the yards. For a brief moment, he allowed himself to imagine she had made it home and was waiting there for news, just as worried about him as he was about her.
“We need to patch this ship together,” Volkova said thoughtfully. “We’re a mess, and I don’t like the look of these numbers. Power levels are dropping.” She turned to Humphreys. “Do you think we can handle entering the atmosphere? It’s that or evacuate to the Sovereign and leave the Laika here for now. I hate to delay the Sovereign, though; she should head for Anser as soon as she’s eliminated the threats here.”
Humphreys took one look at the panels and shook his head. “No way. She’d break apart before we made it halfway to the surface of Atthis.”
“Can we hitchhike with the Sovereign again?”
Humphreys winced. “It’s not recommended, but she might hold together.”
“Give me more than that to go on,” Volkova demanded.
“What do you want me to say? She’ll probably be fine. I’ve helped the lieutenant stitch the shields back together for the moment. I can’t guarantee anything, though.”
Volkova watched as the last Demesne ship was blasted out of the sky. “Good enough for me,” she said abruptly. She turned from the designer and activated the commline. “Sovereign, could we prevail upon you to take us with you to Anser? We think we can handle another piggyback ride.”
“Aye, I think we could give you a lift. Hold on.”
Bruno forced himself not to flinch this time as the Sovereign scraped by the Laika, looking close enough to reach out and touch. Whoever was piloting the frigate was certainly bold and undeniably skillful, if also a hair wild. The viewscreen flared white again, much briefer this time as the Sovereign dragged her burden a lesser distance to Anser.
With a rush, Anser hove into view. But Bruno didn’t recognize what he was seeing. If the destruction at Atthis had been extensive, the destruction at Anser had been total.
The Laika limped into orbit, and as she traversed the planet’s skies, her crew looked on in silence. There was nothing of the drydocks to be seen other than slowly drifting slag. The fragments were unidentifiable. Some must have been pieces of ships under construction, but it was impossible to tell.
The viewscreen zoomed in on the planet’s surface, and Bruno heard a gasp from behind him. The planetside yards had been wiped from the face of the planet. Only craters remained, and the city of Cygnus had been almost entirely obliterated. Miles away, the Wilhelm lay crushed on the snowfields, smoke rising from her broken body.
Lieutenant Anfortas walked slowly forward, stopping near Bruno’s station. Bruno looked up at him and saw such anguish on his face, he had to look away. He felt like a voyeur. “Sir?” he said, hesitantly. “Are you all right?”
Anfortas didn’t reply for a long moment. “I was born in Cygnus,” he said finally, his voice almost unrecognizable.
“I’m sorry,” Bruno stammered. “I didn’t know.”
Anfortas lifted a shoulder in what might have been a shrug. “Nobody asked.”
Bruno didn’t know what to say. A sound made him glance at Humphreys, grateful for the excuse to look away. The designer was crying. Volkova put a hand on his shoulder awkwardly. “I am sorry, Isambard.” She looked at Humphreys with a sympathy that surprised Bruno, as he suddenly caught a glimpse of the true friendship between two complicated, often unlikeable people.
He didn’t want that glimpse; he didn’t want to see Volkova’s human side. There was no room for it amidst his grief, that of Anfortas, that of everyone who had lost someone today. His eyes blazed with newly lit fury as he stared at the devastation. She wasn’t nearly sorry enough.
Katrin was gone. Bruno would not believe it for weeks after the battle. In the chaos that was Atthis after the conflict, he searched hospital records, flight records, anything he could find. The shuttle taking her from the Laika back to Atthis was never found, and Bruno stubbornly dared to hope for much longer than was reasonable. Lots of people had been displaced during the battle; perhaps she had been evacuated to another island and didn’t know how to reach him via communications. Or perhaps she was recovering from an injury in a hospital, unconscious and unidentified.
But when weeks turned to months, he was forced to accept the truth. Katrin was dead. One of the only thoughts that kept the consuming guilt at bay was the knowledge that if he hadn’t tried to bring her aboard, she would still have almost certainly lost her life. Their planetside home was completely destroyed.
Volkova summoned him to the temporary quarters to which she and the rest of the Laika crew had been assigned aboard the transport ships sent to aid the Avis system worlds.
“Ensign Lorengel,” she said with a smile. “It’s good to see you again.”
Bruno saluted but did not respond.
Volkova looked at him almost wistfully for a moment before glancing down at the readout in front of her. The expression was so odd on her that Bruno blinked in surprise. The captain wasn’t what one could call wistful. Among all the things Ruby Volkova had lost in the battle, it astonished him that the loss of his respect for her meant anything to her.
Then again, although she had lost the Laika, rumor had it that she was actually being promoted for her service. The Red Wolf, as she had begun to be called in some circles, was in the running for the captaincy of the next frigate they managed to build. Bruno’s mouth twisted at the thought.
Of all the things she had lost in the battle, his respect for her was among the least likely to return.
“I wanted to commend you for your actions duri
ng the battle, Ensign.” She paused, continuing when again he did not respond. “About the matter of your discharge,” she said, swallowing hard, “I am willing…that is, if you’re amenable…I want to try to get you reinstated. I don’t believe it would be difficult, given all that transpired.”
However unusual it was to see her hem and haw, Bruno was unmoved. He looked at her at last. “No thank you, ma’am,” he said in an expressionless voice.
Volkova stared at him. “You’re rejecting an offer of reinstatement? You’re leaving the Fleet?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She tilted her head, baffled. “May I ask why?”
Bruno regarded her evenly. “If I may speak candidly, I prefer not to accept any favors from you, ma’am. But I don’t think the Fleet is any place for me anyway.”
Anger flared in Volkova’s eyes, a sight that would have intimidated him once. Now he didn’t flinch or look away.
She regained control of her temper, almost visibly checking herself. “Understood, Ensign,” she said coldly. She lifted her chin, once again the steely captain he knew—or at least, the one he had thought he knew. “In that case, you are dismissed.”
Elsa woke with a start, almost falling out of her narrow bunk bed. Completely disoriented, she lay still, trying to remember where she was. Her rapid breathing echoed in the small space, and her heart thumped painfully in her chest as her eyes scanned the darkness for a clue to her whereabouts.
She caught a whiff of brimstone. The ore barge. She was aboard the cendrillon ore barge. Her heartbeat began to slow.
When her cinder training was complete, she had been assigned to Rhodophis. So few cinders were shipping out to the dangerous planet that no standard transports were heading that way. Instead, she and her fellow cinders hitched a ride on a freshly emptied ore barge that was travelling back to Rhodophis to get a new load of cendrillon.
Elsa shifted in the tiny bunk, trying to get comfortable without waking her bunkmate. Accommodations were less than ideal. After only a week into the trip, she was more than ready to be quit of the ore barge. She was used to the seemingly limitless horizons of Anser, not the cramped confines of the tiny barge crew quarters. She missed sky and snow desperately, and she tried very hard not to think about the fact that she would see neither for a long time to come.
The Battle of Castle Nebula (The Cendrillon Cycle Book 1) Page 12
