“Fire!” Catarina said.
Void Queen shuddered as it hurled hundreds of tons of explosive shot against the harvester. Then, a crunch, alarms sounding.
“Warning,” Jane said. “Hull breaches in the number three and number four—”
The AI fell silent before she could complete her assessment. Catarina lurched from her seat, suddenly weightless. Gravity came back on, and she fell to the floor. She reached for her sidearm and turned toward the lift, ready to defend the bridge.
“Bring ’em on,” Capp growled. She rolled up her sleeves to show the Albion lions tattooed across one forearm, and drew her pistol. “I’m gonna slaughter them chickens. Gonna eat their gizzards. They’ll regret the day—”
“We’re clear,” Smythe said. His voice was shaking. “Someone knocked us loose.”
Capp’s bravado vanished in an instant, and she slumped. “Thank God!” Her hand was trembling as she put away her pistol.
As Void Queen withdrew, Catarina got word of fighting in the lower decks. Several dozen battle drones had entered the ship in the few seconds of engagement, and were fighting marines and sailors down by the armory and near the engine room.
The harvester ship reemerged on the viewscreen. It bled gas and plasma from a dozen wounds, and its grasping appendages dangled limp and broken. Catarina’s fleet was hammering it from all sides, and it seemed incapable of fighting back or even launching countermeasures. Catarina ordered torpedoes, unsure if the gunnery could respond, or if Barker was even alive down there. To her relief, torpedoes squirted out moments later.
“It’s not firing,” Smythe said. “Nothing. All it had was countermeasures.”
“And the boarding attempt,” Catarina reminded him.
They’d found a crippled harvester, and it couldn’t fight. They were going to win this, and win it easily.
But the harvester didn’t break apart, even as the pounding continued. The engines bled out, and it could no longer maneuver. Now safe from the alien attack, Catarina began to worry about preserving ordnance. She ordered her forces to withdraw to a safe distance, then directed energy weapons only so as to save her powder for another fight.
At last, six hours after the harvester emerged from its hiding place, the alien ship finally broke apart and exploded.
Chapter Six
Catarina counted herself fortunate as she retreated to her quarters to study the damage report. Void Queen had been in the enemy’s grasp for roughly a minute, during which time more than fifty birds entered the ship.
Even knowing that their ship was on the verge of destruction, the aliens had been intent on taking prisoners. The battle drones fired paralyzing beams, which they used to incapacitate marines. Had the biting appendages not been damaged, had not the combined firepower of Catarina’s fleet driven the enemy off, Void Queen would no doubt have been overrun, the crew hauled back to the Apex queen commander for her gory feast.
Other than countermeasures, the enemy weapons had not fired once in the engagement; the only damage Void Queen had suffered came from the boarding attempt itself. That was not insignificant; those things could have torn the battle cruiser to pieces given enough time, but no critical systems had been destroyed, and engineering assured Catarina that they could patch up the wounds without returning to port.
Apart from that, three star wolves had been damaged in collisions while their crews were incapacitated, and multiple ships had taken light damage from friendly fire during the frenzied, chaotic attempt to halt the enemy charge.
Against that, Catarina Vargus had bagged a harvester.
So why did she feel so unsettled?
You didn’t earn the victory, that’s why.
She dismissed that thought as ridiculous. What, was she supposed to have invited the harvester to emerge on its own terms, fully repaired and with a half-dozen hunter-killer packs in support? Should she have allowed them to board her ship by the hundreds to test the prowess of her marines? Mano-a-mano—was that the idea?
You took a victory however it came, and thank God this one had come without significant cost.
Yet even though she’d attacked the harvester before it could launch, even though it had been crippled and unable to return fire, and even though it had no escorting spears and lances, Catarina had needed fifty-five warships and hours of bombardment to destroy it.
“I even softened the blasted thing up with a nuclear torpedo first,” she said aloud. “Lot of good that did me.”
Catarina glanced out the small viewport of her office nook. New Mars turned slowly below, with the small moon a brown smudge above the planet’s thin, shimmering atmosphere. Crew were out on the hull in pressure suits, welding tyrillium scale to repair the gashes where the harvester ship had hooked them. Void Queen would be ready to depart in a few hours, continuing the journey toward a rendezvous with Blackbeard and the rest of Tolvern’s fleet.
Assuming Tolvern was still alive. Catarina dearly hoped she was. The two women were very different, Catarina Vargus the daughter of a pirate captain, and Jess Tolvern the daughter of a baron’s steward and a graduate, with honors, of the Academy.
Yet they’d bonded after the Viborg battle, the two highest-ranking female officers in the Royal Navy, and each in command of a battle cruiser and a fleet of warships. Oh, and the shared dislike of Captain Edward McGowan, Catarina thought, a smile coming to her lips. Best not to discount that.
She plugged in the teakettle, and was debating whether to call Sven Longshanks to see if he had insights about his brother’s expedition with the blackfish, or if she should go down to engineering to question Barker about the progress of the hull repairs, when Smythe called from the bridge.
“Multiple incoming subspace messages, sir.”
“Let me guess, Olafsen? Where the devil is he? These Vikings can’t maintain discipline for two minutes.”
“Messages from Olafsen, from Tolvern, from Drake. McGowan and Broderick, too. Pretty much everyone is talking, and Drake saw fit to pass everything in our direction.”
“Why am I only hearing about this now?”
“We lost some sensors after the harvester grabbed us, and none of the other ships were listening. It was Longshanks who picked them up and sent them our way.”
“Five messages? What is going on out there?”
“You know how it is—details are sketchy. I’ll give them to you in the order I think they were sent, and you can piece it together.”
The first subspace was from Tolvern. Details were scant, but Blackbeard’s fleet had come under attack as Apex attempted a jailbreak from the Persia System. Tolvern had failed to keep the enemy bottled up, and a harvester and its escorts had escaped, headed toward Xerxes. Someone else would have to stop them. McGowan?
McGowan in turn passed a message to Drake, requesting assistance. He was still patching up from a skirmish with a rogue fleet of Scandian star wolves that had been harassing his supply frigates, and didn’t have the firepower to tackle a harvester on his own.
It was then that Drake decided that intercepting the escaped Apex fleet was more important than maintaining radio silence. He ordered Broderick to rush forward to reinforce Tolvern, who must have been left battered by the fight in Nebuchadnezzar, and tried to send Catarina to the Xerxes System to rendezvous with McGowan, but when he couldn’t reach her, found Olafsen’s blackfish fleet. Olafsen contacted his brother in turn, and it was Longshanks who sent along the bundle of messages.
As for Olafsen, he’d apparently landed raiders on an untidy Apex base in the asteroid belt and wiped them out. Or so claimed the subspace:
We have won a great victory. Our raiders are prepared to take the assault to an enemy harvester ship. We will slaughter them in their nests and die for the glory of our gods.
No much information there, only bravado. Every letter of every word used in a subspace message burned a fantastic amount of energy, and Olafsen had wasted all of it.
Or maybe not. Catarina ran her fingers throug
h her hair, reconsidering her first impression. Maybe the marauder captain and would-be Grand Duke of Viborg was more clever than she gave him credit for.
Could it be the information in the message was meant not for her eyes, but for Apex, who would have surely intercepted the subspace and deciphered it? They would learn about the Scandian ground assault and victory, if they hadn’t already. Coupled with their memory of previous fights against the Scandians, they would be forced to change tactics in upcoming battles.
Apex was used to boarding enemy craft, but were they prepared to be boarded? An assault by mech raiders was no easy thing to repel, as Albion ships had learned on several occasions. Not that the Scandians could manage it. How would they get past the enemy defenses in sufficient numbers?
Catarina opened a star chart, with the Persia System on the left side. That was the main Apex base, trapped in a cul-de-sac system with one entry and one exit. To the right was Nebuchadnezzar and Tolvern’s fleet trying to bottle them up. Beyond that lay a trio of systems all connected to each other and to Nebuchadnezzar: Euphrates, Xerxes, and Zoroaster. Each of these held an Albion fleet—Broderick, McGowan, and Catarina’s forces respectively. Admiral Drake’s force, led by HMS Dreadnought, was two systems behind McGowan’s fleet.
Yes, Drake’s plan made sense. Catarina and McGowan would catch the escaping Apex force in Xerxes and defeat it. Broderick would reinforce Tolvern, and they would try to hold the enemy in Persia until the rest of the human and Hroom forces could converge on their position. Meanwhile, if Catarina and McGowan struggled with the jailbreakers, Drake would come through in the same direction to add his firepower.
Catarina composed a trio of subspace messages of her own. The first was to McGowan, a short confirmation that she’d meet him in Xerxes to tackle the escaping harvester.
“But I’ll be damned if I’m going to do all the fighting,” she said aloud as she passed the message to Smythe so he could prepare a subspace. “You’re going to get Peerless scuffed up if I have to shoot her full of holes myself.”
If McGowan stood back guarding a jump point or some other such nonsense, she swore she’d sock him in the nose the next time she saw him.
The second subspace was to Olafsen. He still hadn’t jumped into Zoroaster, which meant he’d have to hurry to reach Xerxes in time for the fight. If he couldn’t arrive fast enough, she’d pass him along to Nebuchadnezzar to join Broderick in reinforcing Tolvern’s fleet.
There wasn’t enough information in Tolvern’s initial message to answer the question of how badly she’d been bloodied, but it couldn’t be good. No way would Tolvern let a harvester and its hunter-killer packs skip merrily past without a fight. She’d have done everything possible to throw them back into Persia. That Tolvern hadn’t succeeded meant that her fleet had been battered in the exchange.
What if instead of obeying Drake to the letter, Catarina sent Tolvern a small task force—say, a cruiser, a corvette, and a dozen star wolves? That would give Tolvern’s beleaguered fleet more firepower. Add in Broderick’s force, and they’d put a cork on any further breakout attempts.
What stopped Catarina was the memory of her own fight here at New Mars against a crippled harvester ship. She had struck first. The enemy was crippled. She had fifty-five warships in her fleet, and had struck it with a nuclear torpedo. The best the harvester could manage was a single attempt to close ranks and board the Albion flagship while suffering blow after blow.
“And the battle still lasted six hours.”
Now there was another harvester, and if Catarina was reading Tolvern’s subspace correctly, it was largely undamaged and probably escorted by hunter-killer packs. If Tolvern couldn’t stop them, McGowan certainly wouldn’t either. Catarina needed to bring everything she had to the fight.
Frustrated, her thoughts turned toward Jess Tolvern and HMS Blackbeard, knowing that she could send the woman nothing more than hopeful thoughts and a prayer to the universe.
No, there was a final something she could do. She composed a third subspace message, this one so long that the energy required to send it would mean shutting down Void Queen’s plasma engines while it went through, unless Smythe could help her trim it to size without sacrificing critical details.
In the message, she gave an overview of her fight with the harvester ship, including the failed strike with the nuclear torpedoes.
It wasn’t much, and what information it contained was largely negative. But maybe it would help Tolvern in her own fight.
Chapter Seven
Tolvern’s head felt like it had been stuffed full of soggy cotton balls that were now being removed, one by one. First, she remembered that she’d jumped, and that the jump had carried her into danger. Then she remembered she’d been entering a hostile system, where the Apex queen commander had built a base to rebuild her fleet. As more wet cotton balls came out, she remembered there had been a battle before the jump, a fight she’d lost.
She was already speaking, giving orders to her crew on the bridge before she finally became fully aware of her surroundings. Manx was on the com, speaking in a calm, but insistent tone to someone.
“Where are we?” Tolvern asked. “Is this Persia?”
“Welcome back, Captain,” Manx said. He raised an eyebrow.
“Have I been out long?” Tolvern frowned. “I feel fine.”
“Oh, you weren’t out,” Manx said, “only out of it. Going on about leviathans and Hroom death fleets and Malthorne’s sugar plantations on Hot Barsa—you told me to watch out for giant crocodiles.” He grinned. “Reminds me of my gran in the year before she died. She sounded perfectly lucid, but boy could she go on some wild crazy rants.”
Tolvern put her fingers to her temples. No pain, no confusion.
“I feel fine, though.” She looked up at the viewscreen, which showed ships coming through the jump point. “We’re all clear? Nothing lurking in ambush when we came through?”
This last bit was directed to Oglethorpe, who was working at the tech console with Bayard and Simmons. He was rotating the shoulder of his bad arm as he worked, but seemed calm and without panic.
“Nothing yet, sir,” Oglethorpe said. “But we’ve only got passive on. There are ships in orbit around Persia, all right, but nothing turns up out here. Nothing we’ve spotted, anyway.”
“We’ll hit the system with active sensors once we get closer.”
“So you still mean to approach the planet?” Manx said, a bit of tension in his voice. “This isn’t just reconnaissance?”
It was tempting to fall back to Nebuchadnezzar. Tolvern was battered from the fight, down three destroyers, two sloops of war, a war junk, and a torpedo boat, plus one of her falcons. That left her Blackbeard, three cruisers, two missile frigates, five destroyers, five torpedo boats, three sloops of war, two war junks, and the three late-arriving corvettes, plus the remaining falcons of her striker wing.
It was a powerful force, but not strong enough to stand toe-to-toe with a harvester ship. Not by a long shot.
“That is, if they have one.”
“Sir?” Manx said.
“Talking to myself, Lieutenant—running mental calculations. Do they have another harvester ship in the Persia System or not? That’s what I want to know. I say no. I say that if the buzzards had a second harvester, they’d have sent it out with the first. I’ll bet there’s another one under construction on the planet or at an orbital port, but it’s not battleworthy or it would be out here already trying to break our quarantine.”
“And so then what do we do?”
“We charge Persia, knock down whatever defenses these dumb turkeys have in orbit, and bombard the surface installations. There are millions of humans still alive on Persia, and we could save a lot of them. If the enemy has enough strength to force us back, we return to Nebuchadnezzar to wait for Drake, Vargus, and the rest. If they don’t, we set up in orbit and keep up the orbital attack until we get enough marines and mech raiders to mount a ground assault.”
“Okay,” Manx said, sounding doubtful. “Hey, Captain. We got a subspace from Vargus. Long one, too. She fought it out with a harvester. And won!”
Clyde, Oglethorpe, and the rest clamored for information, but Tolvern told them to settle down.
“I know Drake dropped the subspace blackout,” she said, “but it wasn’t so we could brag about our victories. Wait, what harvester? The one that busted out of Persia? Already?”
Tolvern took a look and quickly realized she’d been wrong in assigning Vargus motives for sending the subspace.
Wounded harvester found in Z. Survivor of earlier battle, crippled.
We attacked it in cave on New Mars’s moon. Emerged, could not fire. Fleet engaged, hit it with one nuclear torpedo on already-damaged hull, but did not destroy. Extra plating attached to damaged section.
Enemy closed on VQ while attacked by 55 ships. No support vessels, no ability to fire. Briefly grasped VQ and boarded. Attempted to take prisoners. Boarders repelled. Harvester destroyed after six-hour bombardment. Fleet suffered no significant losses. Proceeding to Xerxes.
There was an entire battle elided in those short sentences. Attacks, torpedo boat charges to try to blow the harvester apart by striking it on a supposedly vulnerable place in the hull that turned out to have been reinforced. How many nuclear torpedoes had been fired to get one through? They were rare in the fleet, and Vargus couldn’t have more than two or three in her entire arsenal.
And how disheartening to hit the enemy with one, and not destroy it.
Vargus and the rest of the crew—many of them old mates of Tolvern’s—must have been terrified when the harvester seized Void Queen. And then pure relief when Void Queen broke free. Then the frustration of hitting again and again at a ship that could not fight back, yet endured six hours of attack before it broke apart.
Catarina hadn’t been bragging about her victory. If anything, it was a message of sympathy for Tolvern, who’d fought a harvester of her own and failed to hold it back, plus information about the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses.
Sun King (The Void Queen Trilogy Book 3) Page 6
