King rubbed the arm she’d slammed into her work station when a rogue rock hit the Fist. “Orders, captain?”
Crap! He had nothing. He couldn’t retreat now; his ships would be run down one by one. That left one choice. “All ships, use your cover. Fire at the closest enemy vessel.” The tactic wasn’t exactly taken from the Art of War but it would get everything he had into the fight. Maybe they could give the enemy too many targets to deal with effectively.
The three dreadnoughts advanced toward the Siege of Tokyo, which was isolated on the far left flank. Using the remaining rocks as cover, he rearranged his ships as best he could so as to bring force to bear. Continuous fire from the enemy’s longer range x-ray laser cannons complicated the maneuvers, though, and help arrived too late.
The brave cruiser went down swinging. Sticking its head out to take potshots at the overwhelming foe, it made its defiance known on their hulls. In the end, a well-timed laser blast caught it in the open. Stunned and exposed, she took two more hits before wilting under the heat.
“Damn it!” DeWalt watched with burning eyes as the pack of wolves turned and advanced on their next target, the Cannae. “Commander King, can we support the Cannae?”
“I’m afraid not, sir, not without running across open space right into their cannons.”
“Good men are dying, for Christ’s sake. There must be something we can do.” Rattled, his eyes darted randomly around the holo display. Movement in the corner of his vision pulled his attention to the edge of the battle space. A lone asteroid was leaving the displayed area. Charred blotches on its surface spoke to the nuclear kiss that pushed it. “That’s it!” He snapped his fingers, not saying another word as he frantically ran simulations.
“Sir?” King stepped into the cloak.
“It’ll work! We can advance on the enemy and stay behind cover.”
“How?”
“Those bastards showed us how. They used nukes to rip away our cover, we’ll use nukes to take what cover we have left with us.”
“But aren’t we hiding behind the ones their nukes couldn’t move?”
He grinned. “Oh, they can be moved. The enemy’s detonations were deployed to clear a broad area in a hurry. We’re focused on nudging a few specific rocks.”
“Brilliant, sir.”
“The battle computer has run the calculations. Send them to the fleet. We must hurry!”
As the Cannae fought to the death, the rest of the task force rushed to medium-sized asteroids and detonated a series of nuclear warheads at precise distances and angles. The floating mountains were sluggish at first but built up momentum.
The United States and China Sea were the first to lay down fire on the enemy’s flank. The Israel, Jutland, and Bull Run shifted and applied pressure head-on. The dreadnoughts sent volleys of missiles to try to catch their tormentors with a lucky shot while they were taking cover, but escorting fighters took care of those.
Hit after hit scored on the dreadnoughts, whose own counter-fire lacked focus as it shifted from target to target. Their outer hulls were gored and would soon take serious damage.
Desperate, the enemy fighters massed and charged the nearest target. The understrength squadron guarding the China Sea was overrun. The cruiser’s point defenses hammered the swarm. Missiles launched from a fighter using the ragged rocks to conceal its approach slipped through. They ignited into fiery hell, consuming the cruiser.
***
Susan aimed her Avenger at the enemy swarm and accelerated. “Ok, Dark Knights. They left their mommies and hurt us bad. Now it’s our turn. None of those bastards gets out of here alive!”
Similar calls to action from pilots filled the command channel. They wanted blood. Charging like the Mongol Golden Horde of old, the formation of twenty-one fighters and drones blended with their twenty-three opponents.
Releasing a burst of KKC rounds, Susan pulled back hard into a steep climb. She had her eye on a pair of juicy targets aiming to escape the dogfight and attack from outside. That wasn’t going to happen as long as she had something to say about it.
Valkyrie took over the firing as Susan concentrated on pursuit. She and her wingmen followed the slippery pair through a dizzying array of twists and sharp turns. One of her comrades was unable to keep up and fell out of the chase.
She closed rapidly, suddenly. Her instincts flared. Braking hard left, she gained a fraction of a second lead over her foe, who flipped end over end and fired streams of lasers. One of them passed through the point of space she would’ve been occupying had she not maneuvered. The other slammed into her remaining wingman with devastating effect, sending him into a death tumble.
Flipping her own Avenger, she aimed her nose at the enemy and smote them. A double K burst tore one apart while a laser blast burned through the cockpit glass to incinerate the occupant of the other.
“Good shooting, Val.”
“My pleasure.”
Her surviving squadron-mate took position beside her and the two hurried back to the fight. Unmolested, they danced on the perimeter of the battle and sniped enemy craft that were consumed with slaughtering her people. She executed them with ruthless efficiency.
The tactic turned the evenly-matched contest into a clear victory for the pilots of Earth’s Fist. The last enemy fighters were overwhelmed and disappeared from the void.
The victory was costly. Only seven Avengers still flew.
***
The Alexander the Great was a scrapyard, a free-floating husk all but devoid of energy or life. The sliver of protection it gave the Genghis Khan and Napoleon was also the only thing keeping them alive for now.
Four enemy capital ships advanced from behind secure cover. They’d arranged themselves so as to support each other’s position with interlocking fields of fire. If the Genghis Khan ran, they’d charge and disable his engines.
The battle for control of space around P-1425X was over. Umair knew that, and he’d accepted it to a large degree. This brought a sense of internal peace, which allowed him to see that not all was lost. Forces loyal to his cause controlled the surface of the planet and the secrets it held. If he could destroy his enemy’s land units, he would ensure IS’ retention of the ancient alien facility for the time being. A measure of hope could be restored for the creation of a stable human empire.
There was only one way to achieve this goal—he had to destroy the sole battlecarrier in the system. The critical vessel was well to the rear of the field but still within his reach if he wanted it bad enough, and he wanted it bad.
Oily smoke grew thicker by the second on the bridge. More alarms than could be attended to sounded. It was now or never.
He turned off the holo. “Captain Gore.”
“Yes, sir.” He looked eager as ever to serve despite the burns on a hand caught too close to a station panel that overloaded.
His heart ached. Such a fine officer. It’s a shame his career will end here. “Plot a direct course for the enemy battlecarrier. Notify the Napoleon we are making a run for it and we’re not stopping until it or we are dead.”
Gore was silent for long seconds. “Aye aye, sir.”
The Napoleon led the doomed charge. She took an ungodly amount of punishment but shielded her sister ship from much of the harm. In her death throes, she scored a fatal hit upon a damaged battleship. By the time they reached the asteroid line, the lead vessel was a dead ship. Genghis Khan took several blows on her sides as she accelerated past the enemy position.
Atmosphere bled through dozens of breaches and fires raged across the ship. Despite the mortal wounds, the dreadnought and her crew found the will to press the attack.
For a brief respite she was free of danger. It would take time for the enemy to turn and catch up. By then it would be over, he hoped.
He thought their crusade cursed when seven fighters appeared on the cracked screen. They gained rapidly and Genghis Khan didn’t have the point defenses to defend against them or their missiles.
The battlecarrier moved to escape the crazed ship. It hurried for shelter behind an asteroid. Genghis Khan would get one shot. Umair selected the exact coordinates for the weapons officer to target. He was familiar with this particular class of Fleet vessel and knew how to do the most damage.
With a nod the officer signaled he was ready.
“Fire!”
The true shot plowed into the battlecarrier right where he wanted just before it disappeared behind cover.
“We’ve lost engines!” Gore announced.
Genghis Khan’s momentum carried her deeper into the asteroid belt. Umair dutifully watched the flickering screen as a rust-colored mountain grew larger and larger until he saw nothing at all.
Chapter Eight
Survival
Jones thought it felt like an earthquake. She’d half fallen asleep in the shuttle awaiting the drop with over half of what remained of the First Legion. The shaking had awakened her with a jolt. Sitting straight upright, she waited for the other shoe to drop. It did, in the form of alarms and an explosion of traffic on the command channel.
Earth’s Fist had been hit bad. Requests for legionnaires to assist in damage control flooded in.
She opened a private link with Trent. “General, where do you want me?”
“I need you to head toward engineering. I’m sending people there now. Take command and do whatever the crew needs.”
“What about my troops loaded up already?”
“We’ve got enough out here. Keep ‘em where they are. They’re out of the way, and the shuttles are the safest place for them to be right now. In fact, we’ll likely launch them and pick ‘em up again once we’ve taken care of damage control.”
“How bad is it, sir?”
“It’s bad, colonel.”
Jones weaved through the busy corridors, making her way to the auxiliary engineering control room near the aft of the ship. Walking wounded and mangled bodies being carried to the nearest med bay were the hardest to get around.
A sickening smell, one she couldn’t place, grew heavy the further she traveled. It was like burnt hair, but far worse and greasier.
The dim room was frantic with officers shouting orders and crewmen hurrying to complete tasks. She found the highest-ranking person, Lt. Commander Cortez. “What’s the situation? What do you need us to do?”
Cortez stared at Jones for a few seconds as if confused by her presence. Cortez looked overwhelmed with responsibility but kept it together. She waved Jones over to study her screen. It had a diagram of the ship zoomed in on engineering. The anti-matter reactor was obvious to anyone.
“Colonel,” Cortez’s voice was cold and emotionless, “we might loss the Fist.”
“Understood.” She nodded, noticing Cortez was watching to see her reaction. This wasn’t Jones’ first life-and-death situation. So far, she wouldn’t even put it in her top three.
Cortez continued, “Magnetic containment in the reactor is breaking down.” She ran her finger along lines of the diagram. “The hit we took passed clean through. It took out the primary containment module and damaged the backups. They hit us in the worst possible place. We’re lucky we didn’t lose them all in an instant.”
“How is this even possible?” Jones shook her head. “Why are the secondaries so close to the primary?”
She sighed. “Earth’s Fist was the first battlecarrier ever built. She was rushed into production and cuts were made. We planned for this scenario. We have emergency magnetic modules we can slide into ports on the shielding to stabilize the containment field. We keep them outside engineering. They’d have been fried by the radiation burst if we’d already had them installed.”
“Radiation burst?”
“That’s why I need your help, colonel.” Her facial muscles tightened. “The laser nicked the shielding, flooding the entire room with a massive surge of gamma radiation. It was so strong it overwhelmed our suits before it could be vented out into space.” She lowered her eyes. “Most of our engineers were killed instantly. Several others were severely burned. They’ll survive, but they can’t help us now. I need you to do the manual labor while the people I have left stay here to keep us from blowing up.”
Jones jabbed her thump into her chest. “I’m a grunt, commander. You sure you’re comfortable with me doing this?”
“Commander,” an ensign called out, “we need you over here.”
She moved toward the officer and spoke over her shoulder. “It isn’t technical work. A trained monkey could do it. We’ll be monitoring your progress and will upload the guide to your CAL. You should take someone to back you up.”
“I can do it,” a voice called out from the door.
Jones turned to find Lieutenant Ander O’Shea standing tall, helmet under an arm.
“Excellent.” Cortez turned away. “Go now and hurry. If we have to dump the core, this mission will get real messy, real fast.”
The floor grating rattled under their boots. Their CALs led them directly to a storage locker, inside which they found six emergency magnetic modules, which were long cylinders seven centimeters in diameter.
O’Shea picked one up. “Christ! These things weigh more than they look. We have to carry three apiece?”
“That going to be a problem, Princess?”
“No, sir.”
She pulled a thick gray pair of overalls off a rack and handed them to him. “Here. Put this on over your combat fatigues.”
“It’s gonna be hard moving around, even if we didn’t have to carry these things.”
She already had the protective layer half on. “It’s either that or we get baked by gamma rays. Even with the venting, levels are too high even for standard legion gear.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice, sir. Radiation poisoning is no way for a soldier to die.”
“There’s no such thing as a good death, lieutenant.” She sealed her suit and squatted to slip three modules onto her back. “But any death a soldier meets on her feet is better than most.”
As they ventured closer to engineering, the ship became eerily quiet. Outside the engine room, only the charred remains of deceased crewmen greeted them. Fine strands of smoke drifted off the corpses.
Her eyes locked onto the floating thin strings. “The smell.” She’d realized the source of the disagreeable scent she detected earlier.
“What did you say, colonel?”
“Nothing. Secure the door behind us. Engineering is in depressurization, so this section is our airlock. Open the door with the override code Cortez sent us.”
A gust of wind washed over them when the doors opened. Engineering was a tomb. The room had an ancient feel to it, like they were the first people to enter in a thousand years. It oozed death and doom. The unfortunate crew were gone. All that remained of them were blackened stains on the floor or wall. They’d been instantly burned into the ship and their ashes sucked out into the vacuum of space.
The reactor tower sat in the middle. It ran top to bottom and was hugged by a spiraling staircase. A gash running across the ceiling spoke to the power of the x-ray laser that carved it. The perfectly straight wound intersected with the tower and had cut a chunk of the shielding away. The core wasn’t exposed, but it was enough to allow awesome amounts of raw power free.
A warning flashed in her mind. “Let’s get this done. We can’t stay here much longer.”
He jerked his head at the missing portion of the shield. “How they gonna run the ship if no one can be in here?”
“They’ll do that from auxiliary control once the containment field is stabilized. They’ll fix the damage to the shield later and reclaim the area after a scrubbing.” She ran her eyes to the top. “I’ll head up and insert my modules. You take the bottom.”
Nodding, he bent down to slid
e the three tubes off his back. They clanked loudly against the hard surface.
“Be bloody careful!”
“Yes, sir.”
Jones sucked in deep breaths as she fought her way up the stairs. The weight of the suit and modules were starting to tell by the time she reached the top. Leaning her cargo against the railing, she did just as Monty, her CAL, named in honor of Field Marshall Sir Bernard Montgomery, outlined.
For all of the power they put out, anti-matter generators are really simple machines. Energy is released when matter and anti-matter collide in the annihilation chamber and that’s it. The magnetic containment fields are there to keep the two separated except for the tiny bits that are allowed to collide at any one microsecond.
A long, narrow vertical slot opened in front of her. The module fit the port perfectly. A green indicator light blinked. That’s not so hard. What are those engineering blokes always complaining about? She glanced down. “How’s it going, lieutenant?”
“Almost done.” He shrugged. “Not sure what the big deal was.”
She twisted her lips. “Well—actually Cortez did say a trained monkey could do it.”
“Oh...hey!”
The two shared a laugh as they worked.
He brushed his palms together. “Done.”
She was raising the final module when the brightest light she’d ever seen consumed her. Then everything went black.
***
Blinding light and a thunderous crackle knocked O’Shea to the ground. It felt like an artillery shell had gone off next to him. Struggling to one knee, his foggy mind cleared enough for him to notice the blizzard of alarms sounding in his mind and on the control panels.
“Lieutenant!” a surreal voice cut in. “The containment field is fluctuating. It caused a power surge. The whole thing is collapsing! You have to get that final module in, now!”
“Whaaa, who is this?” He shook his head, trying to get the cobwebs out.
“It’s Cortez, dammit! Get your head on and get moving! The surge took out the failsafes. We can’t dump the core! You have to stabilize the field or we’re all dead!”
The Last Charge of the 1st Legion (The Last Hero Trilogy Book 3) Page 5
