The spear’s engines sputtered and flared to life. It began to move. But Manx had brought Blackbeard straight in line with the spear’s drift from the jump point, and the enemy accelerated right toward the Albion battle cruiser. Finch messaged from the gunnery that the main battery was ready.
“Fire!” Tolvern ordered.
She gripped the edge of her console as tons of kinetic shot blasted from twenty-two cannons in a full broadside. The spear tried to maneuver away, but the bulk of the shot smashed into its upper decks and left a series of smoking holes. Plasma bled from damaged engines where more shot had cracked the containment field.
Two navy destroyers had been screening Blackbeard and pounced on the injured spear, firing missiles and kinetic shot. Tolvern didn’t pursue the fleeing enemy ship, because at that moment a second ship jumped into Nebuchadnezzar. This one was a smaller lance, also drifting in nearly the same direction.
Another great opportunity.
“Pull us around, fire secondary battery.”
“Hold on,” Oglethorpe said. His hands were moving over his console, and he was going back and forth between multiple conversations. “We’re trying to get our striker wing into the fight.”
“Make it fast,” Manx said. “The captain needs those guns.”
Falcons came shooting out of Blackbeard’s starboard flank one after another. Tolvern watched in frustration as the lance slid past them off port. Helpless, begging to be destroyed.
“Striker wing in the air,” Oglethorpe announced.
Tolvern ordered a roll, and a near simultaneous firing of the secondary cannon. The cannon fire from close range left the upper armor of the enemy ship riddled with shot and near the breaking point. The spear had already stopped struggling, gutted and dead, and the destroyers now savaged the wounded lance instead.
Two more lances jumped through, followed by a spear. Finch reported that the main cannon were ready again, and Tolvern ordered another broadside, this time joined by the torpedoes she’d held in reserve. Her missile frigates launched a barrage. A pair of sloops arrived in time to fire their serpentine batteries, with more Albion warships eagerly pressing in for an attack.
Soon, Tolvern had wiped out three lances and a spear, and had the second spear on the ropes. She was almost jubilant. Let the enemy queen commander send in her forces piecemeal; the allied human-Hroom fleet would wipe them out and suffer no losses in return.
And then it came.
A harvester ship, the most massive that Tolvern had ever seen. With a fat, bulbous rear, and five hooking, bulwark-chewing appendages up front, it looked like some monster of the deep. The harvester turned, drifting slowly away from the jump point for several seconds before the green eye came on and swept out to look for victims.
Several of Tolvern’s ships had been charging in to cover the jump point, including four more destroyers and a pair of torpedo boats. They were in close range of the harvester, and the boats immediately dropped torpedoes, while the destroyers let loose with their guns.
The harvester’s eye swept its green ray across one of the destroyers, and her guns fell silent. Now the Albion ship was the one drifting helplessly, while the harvester moved in, arms opening. The destroyer fell out from underneath the paralyzing beam and began to move, but not quickly enough. The harvester’s grasping arms closed around the smaller ship and pulled her up toward its bridge.
Tolvern bit down on her lip and looked away. The harvester was tearing into the destroyer, she knew, dropping in armed drones to paralyze marines and sailors and take them prisoner, and she couldn’t watch. David Hales—that was the captain’s name. Out on his first tour of duty in command of his own ship. His life would end in a queen commander’s ritual slaughter.
The harvester spit out the ship. A second destroyer fell under the green eye. Tolvern saw with horror that it was Nineveh, the ship she’d commanded while Blackbeard was in the spaceyards being converted into a battle cruiser. Captain Fox was in charge now, also on his first tour as captain, and the crew on Blackbeard’s bridge fell silent as they waited for the harvester to tear his ship apart, too.
But the harvester pulled away without snaring Nineveh, accelerating from the jump point and relying on conventional weapons to knock aside its challengers. Torpedoes and missiles slammed into its hull, but the enemy suffered little damage. Less effective still were the energy pulses and small missiles of Blackbeard’s striker wing, now entering the fray. Tolvern recalled them before they got themselves killed.
She could have used her corvettes to get out in front of the harvester to force it to engage, but they were way out by the gas giant in their own fight, and so she had to rely on her destroyers and long-range armaments to slow it.
“More ships coming through,” Oglethorpe announced. “We don’t deal with them now and we’re going to be in serious trouble.”
Tolvern had been concentrating on engaging with the harvester for the past half hour, while being vaguely aware that lances and spears continued to pop through the jump point, unopposed. Two hunter-killer packs arranged themselves—each with four lances and a spear—and another spear entered Nebuchadnezzar, promising more enemies to come.
The lead hunter-killer pack was well contained, facing attack from torpedo boats, cruisers, and war junks, who stood back a pace and focused beams against the spear, throwing so much energy into its armor that it turned soft and vulnerable to kinetic fire.
But the second pack was left unopposed, and charged a small force of sloops that guarded Tolvern’s missile frigates. If they got through, her frigates were done for, and the cordon around the jump point smashed.
“Bring us around,” she ordered. “We’ve got to save those frigates.”
“What about the harvester?” Manx said. “It’s getting away.”
A quick glance. “Not yet. Bring Triumph up to hit it from the rear. Get the destroyers out front and drop mines, torpedoes—anything to slow it down. And what’s happening with those blasted corvettes? Will someone put them up on the screen?”
She had a few minutes by the gas giant before Blackbeard reentered combat, and used it to take in the battle taking place outside Big Greasy. The three corvettes had successfully flushed an Apex spear from its hiding place, that had chased after the lead ship, Streak, but a counterattack had chased it off. The corvettes had pursued and disabled the spear’s short-range jump capabilities, and were hammering it with a relentless attack. It was already gutted, and now broke into pieces. Their mission accomplished, the three corvettes accelerated toward the main battlefield.
A mere twenty-five hours out from reinforcing her position, Tolvern thought grimly. She’d have to do without.
“Warning, class-two detonation expected,” Jane, the computer’s AI, announced.
The ship shuddered from the impact, and the lights flickered, but remained on.
“Next time, a little more notice would be nice,” Tolvern said.
She thumbed her console to bring up the shield report rather than wait for Jane’s assessment. Moderate damage to the number three shield.
Blackbeard took another blow, but landed several of her own. She hit a wounded lance with missiles and blew it apart with cannon fire. The spear was already taking heavy fire from the sloops and Blackbeard’s striker wing, and Tolvern added torpedoes and the deck gun. One of the other lances fell to enfilading fire.
Unfortunately, the other hunter-killer pack was giving a better accounting of itself. What had looked like a quick fight was turning into a real brawl, with both sides landing blows. One of Tolvern’s cruisers had taken significant damage and was withdrawing. A torpedo boat charged in, dropped its load, and made to withdraw as its Mark-IVs lumbered toward a lance.
Energy pulses caught the torpedo boat before it could make its escape. It twisted and tried to dive, but couldn’t break free, as a pair of lances savaged it from above and below. Moments later, explosions burst out the torpedo boat’s hull, venting its gasses to the void.
“How many ships do the buzzards have?” she said, frustrated.
That third pack vanished and reappeared moments later alongside the fleeing harvester ship, while the fourth pack moved to join the battle near the jump point. Tolvern ordered another barrage from her frigates, and missiles thundered down on the newly arriving enemy ships.
HMS Triumph had been leading the effort to pin down the harvester with some success. The sudden appearance of four lances and a spear in the fight threw these efforts into chaos. Soon, Triumph was flailing backward from the fight, while the harvester lunged to get the cruiser in its jaws. The green light swept over a pair of destroyers. Their guns fell silent.
Two more lances jumped to the harvester ship’s defense, survivors of the battle at the jump point, and now expendable from that fight as Apex forces kept entering the Nebuchadnezzar System. The lances attacked the destroyer still caught in the paralyzing ray, while the harvester itself battered the destroyer’s companion. The two Albion warships blew apart within seconds of each other.
“Call the rest of them back,” Tolvern said.
Manx stared at her. “The harvester will escape.”
“Nothing can stop that now. Quickly, we can still win this fight here.”
Triumph and the remaining destroyers retreated toward the jump point. The harvester and its escorts let them go and continued their flight across Nebuchadnezzar. The surviving Albion warships arrived at the rear of the battlefield just in time, as a spear and three lances had broken through to get at Tolvern’s missile frigates.
Blackbeard had been under continual fire for almost four hours, and the strain was showing in the damage reports pouring in from across the ship. Enemy ships kept charging in, trying to take her out, but the battle cruiser’s guns, missiles, and torpedoes punished every attempt.
Another hunter-killer pack escaped to join the harvester, plus a stray lance. The others couldn’t get up to speed, and several ships—mostly enemies, but some her own—were drifting crippled from the battlefield, adding to the confusion. A sloop detonated, and the resulting explosion took out one of Blackbeard’s falcons, which had been trying to defend the Hroom ship from attack.
“No more ships are coming through,” Oglethorpe said from the tech console.
“It’s about bloody time,” Manx said through clenched teeth.
At almost the same moment, the remaining enemy ships at the jump point made a break for it. Three hung behind, too damaged to keep up, and fell to Tolvern’s torpedo boats and a harassing fire from the remaining falcons.
The other five Apex ships jumped to safety. They reappeared next to the harvester, which was now protected by more than a dozen support vessels. The alien queen commander took this force and set an immediate course in the direction of a trio of jump points farther out in the system.
There was mop-up action remaining near the jump point into Persia, including the rescue of escape pods from destroyed Albion warships. Wrecked lances and spears were everywhere, but these individual victories did not hide the magnitude of their defeat.
In concrete terms, Tolvern had lost eight ships: three destroyers, two sloops, a war junk, a torpedo boat, and a falcon. Her remaining forces were battered and in no shape to fight, and she was still missing the three corvettes, who were more than fourteen hours from the battlefield.
“Clyde, get me information,” she said to her pilot. “Figure out which jump that harvester is taking out of here. Manx, I want an assessment of fleet strength—who can fight right now, and who will be ready in forty-eight hours.”
“So we’re going after them?” Manx sounded doubtful.
“We can’t. We’re not strong enough to hunt them down, and we couldn’t catch them in time anyway. They broke the quarantine, and it will be up to someone else to stop them.”
Clyde looked up from his pilot’s console. “Looks like they’re headed toward the Xerxes System.”
“McGowan is off in that direction. He can cut them off, hold them long enough for Drake and Vargus to join him.”
“I thought they’re supposed to be joining us,” Manx said.
“Nothing else matters if that harvester ship disappears across the inner frontier and finds a new human planet to terrorize.” Tolvern chewed her lip. “I’ll have to risk a subspace—much as McGowan deserves to get his nose bloodied, I can’t have him caught unaware when a harvester comes blasting in.”
“And if the enemy tries a second jailbreak?” her first mate pressed.
“What do you think? We’ll all die. Which means we can’t sit here waiting to find out.”
Manx let out a harsh laugh. “Captain, what choice do we have? You’re saying we can’t stop them, but we can’t run away from the fight, either.”
“That’s why I’m giving the fleet forty-eight hours for repairs. Not three days, not a week. Apex just broke a harvester ship free from the Persia System along with a couple of dozen lances and spears. Whatever enemy forces remain inside, they’re weaker than they were yesterday. Possibly a lot weaker. And after a victory, they aren’t expecting a counterattack.”
Manx only stared. They were all staring at her now. Clyde blinked behind his glasses, and Bayard slowly and audibly let out his breath. Oglethorpe had been on the com with engineering, but now fell silent.
“A counterattack?” Manx finally managed.
“There’s a human planet in the Persia System, and its population is threatened with extermination. This might be our chance to put an end to it.”
Chapter Four
Olafsen stood with his helmet in hand so the others in the launch bay could see his glare. Otherwise, he was fully suited up and ready for combat. The blackfish was shaking as if buffeted by atmospheric winds, but that was really incoming fire thumping against the hull of the ship.
“Listen to me, men. You are Scandians. Fearless warriors—raiders and marauders all of you. The blood of Vikings flows in your veins as pure as it was fifteen hundred years ago when your ancestors terrorized Old Earth.”
The men had been chanting over the com: war cries, taunts, and jeers. Anything to get them riled up for the battle, but now they fell silent, as if sensing that this was important. He spotted familiar helmets, and he thought of them not by their names, but by their mech suits: Demon Grin, with his blood-like slash across a black faceplate. Bug, in a glossy metallic green helmet. Blood Fury, in a singular red mech suit with a huge lobsterlike claw on one arm and a tri-barreled gun attachment on the other. Then there was Giant, who was so tall he was practically Hroom-like, and forced to duck in the low-ceilinged room.
“No,” Olafsen corrected. “Your blood is more pure. It has been distilled to its Viking essence. Other men, other weaker men have died, leaving only the strongest to propagate the Scandian race. If we returned to Old Earth in the days of our ancestors, wearing these mech suits, they would see us as gods.”
“And the buzzards?” a voice asked quietly. It was Demon Grin. “How will they see us?”
“As victims, as food. As easy prey. They’ve killed millions of humans, and why should we be any different?” Olafsen narrowed his eyes. “But they’ve never faced us before, have they? Not in our full armored fury, mounting an assault.
“Whatever you see down there, whatever enemies you face, remember this. We win or lose today with glory. Each and every one of you will either stand in triumph on a heap of dead aliens or you will dine in Valhalla.”
A cheer rose up at this, and men shook their armored fists in the air or waved gun attachments. Yet there was a current of fear in their bravado, crackling like electricity. They were men with machinery, after all, not gods.
He under
stood their fears, and shared them himself. He’d faced brutal men like Ragnar Forkbeard, knowing that if the enemy captured him, he’d have his chest cavity peeled open, his lungs removed, and his heart torn out. The infamous blood eagle. An honor, supposedly, a sacrifice to the gods, but a dubious one.
But the thought of being eaten alive by an Apex queen commander was even more horrific. Her beak tearing out his eyeballs, her talons shredding his belly and groin.
The blackfish was shuddering in earnest, but all the incoming fire was directed on the bow of this and the other ships, and that was what Olafsen had built these ships to resist. They were overhauled star wolves, gutted ships left from the battle with Forkbeard last year. He’d hacked out damaged portions, reinforced the front with extra armor until each ship could survive a direct ramming, and taken out some of the armaments to further increase hull strength.
The result was five ships that could survive a terrible beating at close range, close enough to strike the enemy and send in raiders, but had limited fighting ability otherwise. He’d hidden this purpose from Drake, Vargus, Tolvern, and McGowan, deciding that the Albion commanders didn’t need to know what he intended until he’d proven the concept.
A voice came from the bridge as Olafsen put on his helmet and clamped it into place.
“Marauder Captain, this Jarn reporting.”
“Go ahead.”
“Based on a subsurface scan, we estimate there are as many as ten thousand birds in the mining base.”
Ten thousand. By the gods.
“Most of them will be drones,” Olafsen said. “How many from the warrior castes? That’s the only thing that matters.”
“I have no idea.”
“Never mind that. How long until impact?”
Sun King (The Void Queen Trilogy Book 3) Page 3
