“Thank God for that,” Tolvern said. “I thought I was a goner.”
“Almost didn’t make it myself. But we’re here now. Down one harvester, ready to kill a second.”
Tolvern glanced at the main screen, where the harvester was still firing away. It mangled a pair of Albion warships with a bombardment from below, but the upper weapon systems remained untargeted, flailing about.
“What is wrong with that thing?”
“Donkey died, too,” Vargus said, which wasn’t an answer to Tolvern’s question. An eyebrow rose. “Apparently, Manta Ray is worried that it’s next.”
“Ah, got it.”
The Singaporeans. They must have entered close range and were boiling a soft spot in the enemy ship’s armor. Their work was detected, but their location remained a secret. Could they possibly take out a second harvester with the same gambit?
“Every minute is a danger,” Vargus said. “Let’s make it count.” The call ended.
A wrecked destroyer drifted past Blackbeard, completely gutted, and Tolvern swung about and shoved it out of the way with a flare from the plasma engines. She brought Blackbeard up next to Void Queen as the two battle cruisers swung about to present broadsides.
“Find me that soft spot,” she ordered her tech people.
It was Bayard, at the defense grid computer, who found it first. “Underbelly. Right where we tried to hit the harvester earlier.”
Manta Ray stopped moving about and directed fire on one spot a few hundred miles away on the Z-axis. Something exploded. It had found Cheng’s ships.
The remaining eight war junks were instantly visible as they turned to flee with ordnance and countermeasures flashing all around them. Too late. The entire surface of the harvester lit up with outgoing fire.
The surviving enemy strikers and lances had been swirling around, looking for the Singaporeans, and they rushed straight into the teeth of the massive harvester bombardment, seeming not to care whether they were caught in the crossfire.
A pair of destroyers and three sloops—recent arrivals from the Donkey fight—swooped in to assist the war junks, but they, too, fell under attack. A second war junk died, then a third and a fourth. Two more went off. A sloop exploded, and the two destroyers suffered heavy damage. Only three war junks and a pair of sloops escaped the carnage.
“And Cheng?” Tolvern asked.
Oglethorpe tapped his screen, and his face darkened. “He’s gone, sir.”
First Broderick, now Cheng. And no time to mourn the death of the captains and their heroic crews. The two battle cruisers were now in perfect position to strike the weakened armor. Void Queen fired a broadside in a huge wave of fire like the breath of a dragon. Blackbeard followed an instant later. The ships rolled backward as tons of explosive shot hurtled at the enemy.
Fierce and Triumph pulled in below, together with a trio of Broderick’s surviving cruisers: Revenge, Night, and Lancashire. The five cruisers joined the two battle cruisers in firing a rolling wave of cannon fire. Manta Ray lit up with explosions.
It launched a massive volley of missiles, even as it tried to roll away to protect its damaged underbelly.
Vargus, now the ranking officer with Broderick’s death, gave a command to the fleet: all other ships would target the enemy’s lower decks while the seven cruisers and battle cruisers hammered away at whatever side presented itself.
Destroyers, torpedo boats, and corvettes came from below. Another cruiser joined the attack, then another. Soon, the entirety of Broderick’s old fleet and Vargus’s were together, hitting Manta Ray from all sides. No lances, spears, or enemy strikers remained on the battlefield.
And still the harvester fought on. The underside guns and missiles fell silent first, followed by its aft cannon and a big gun that had been hurling out bombs. The green eye caught one final victim—a torpedo boat—but a fierce stab from Vargus’s falcons finally took out the eye, and the torpedo boat recovered and slipped away through a gauntlet of exploding ordnance. With so many dead, the boat crew must be counting their escape as almost miraculous.
Manta Ray’s underside bled burning gas as weapon systems exploded on its surface. The engines were crippled, and it could no longer twist away from incoming fire. Blackbeard and Void Queen dove down and rolled onto their side to hit the gaping wound. Torpedoes thrust into the holes in the armor.
Vargus’s voice came over the com. “Time to finish it. Hit that ugly thing and hit it hard.”
The battle cruisers fired their broadsides. Tolvern could see right into the enemy ship every time the vacuum sucked away more burning debris, and the incoming fire lit up the vast interior space and exploded.
“It’s breaking apart!” Oglethorpe cried.
The two battle cruisers were only a few hundred yards from the dying enemy ship, and they reversed thrust to back away, even as explosions deep within Manta Ray continued to tear it apart. Tolvern braced herself for a massive final destruction of the enemy ship.
In that, she was disappointed. The fires and explosions gradually ripped the harvester into smaller pieces, some of them flaming or bleeding green trails of plasma, while others drifted away harmlessly. Hroom sloops and the three surviving war junks swept in to puncture holes in the wreckage with energy pulses to make sure there were no surviving pockets of enemies, but Tolvern had already turned her attention elsewhere.
First, a glimpse at the McGowan and Olafsen fight. To her surprise, McGowan had Peerless right in the thick of the action, where he was suffering a terrific bombardment from Hammerhead. The harvester looked barely damaged, while the battlefield was littered with the carcasses of dozens of allied ships. Cruisers, smashed in two. Star wolves, gutted. Destroyers and torpedo boats that were nothing but debris. The harvester held a star wolf in its jaws, and Tolvern caught her breath when Oglethorpe announced that it was Bloodaxe, Lars Olafsen’s own ship.
It all looked lost—the harvester would smash McGowan and escape from the Persia System with no way to run it down—but then she spotted their salvation. Five Scandian blackfish had attached themselves to various parts of the enormous enemy ship and were sending in raiders.
And what about Bloodaxe? Why was it still in the harvester’s jaws instead of already devoured and spat out? Could it be that Olafsen had survived and was joining a large raider assault on the interior of the ship?
The battle above Sheol was more straightforward. Dreadnought was still fighting, thank God. A quick scan of the channels showed that James himself was still in command, giving orders, moving his pieces back and forth to attack the two harvesters that kept it pinned against the planet.
The admiral’s battleship, the cream of the Royal Navy, was the equal of an Apex harvester. Until it had met the harvesters, Dreadnought had been unmatched by any force short of a star leviathan. So although it wasn’t strong enough to defeat Rhino and Tiger on its own, neither had they managed to knock it out yet.
Unfortunately, the rest of his task force was in worse shape. James had entered battle with fifty-two ships. He was down to fewer than twenty. Most of his seven cruisers were dead or crippled. His massive force of nineteen destroyers had lost three fourths of its fighting ability. Not one of his three missile frigates was still in the fight, with all but one of them destroyed entirely. The survivors—sloops, cruisers, corvettes, and torpedo boats—were forced to huddle behind Dreadnought for protection lest they be torn apart. Thankfully, they’d managed to clear the battlefield of lances and spears before losing effectiveness as a fighting force.
Vargus called once again as soon as she got the fleet into some rough semblance of order. She still looked calm and collected. How did she manage?
“The time has come to turn over command,” Vargus said.
Tolvern was surprised. “Oh?”
“Broderick is dead, may he rest in peace, which leaves the two of us. Smythe ran the numbers, and Blackbeard is in better shape than Void Queen. That makes yours the more powerful ship and the more like
ly flagship of our new fleet, such as it is.”
Tolvern had seen her own damage assessment. “If that’s true, you must be in bad shape.”
A slight shrug. “Void Queen is still in the fight—that counts for something. Anyway, you know that’s not the real reason.”
“James.”
“He’s your husband,” Vargus said. “I don’t give a damn about navy regulations—fraternization and all that rubbish—I know something about loyalty. So lead us in, Captain Tolvern . . . Jess. Friend. Let’s bring this victory home.”
#
The interior passages of the harvester ship twisted and turned as the raiders fought their way in, not like human corridors that were straight angles with up and down lifts or stairways, but bending in any given direction like an undulating snake.
Or rather, the intestines of a large animal, Olafsen decided, because they branched off, and later would slope up or down, sometimes so steeply that the raiders had to slide down or crawl their way up. Designed to be followed by birds that could walk or fly as they fancied, it would seem. Gravity was lower on board the ship, though, which meant that sudden drops were more annoying than dangerous.
The walls glistened with almost mucous-like consistency beneath bioluminescent lighting, and here and there they came upon caches of bones, rotting scraps, and other filth.
The fighting was light at first, with armed drones that managed to bring down a raider by hurling bombs from slings attached to their wings, but otherwise gave way before the assault. Olafsen’s men ranged deeper into the ship, slaughtering indiscriminately. They paused to torch nesting chambers, crushing eggs and mowing down huddled chicks.
Something twisted in his gut to commit such slaughter, but he hardened when he saw the human bones, the severed heads with eyes staring blankly ahead. They came into one room where dozens of naked humans hung on meat hooks, writhing and screaming.
The aliens fed on human pain, and these ones had apparently been dragged out of stasis and impaled to soften their flesh before ritual slaughter. Most of them were darker skinned—presumably Persians—but there were lighter skinned Scandians or Albion men and women, as well as children. A few Hroom, too, and, to his shock, two members of some other hominid-like alien race he’d never seen or heard of before. Hairy, with smooth faces and short tails. They, too, were keening in pain. He looked, but there was no sight of Jarn.
Olafsen couldn’t help these people, could only order his men to destroy the room and put the sufferers out of their misery. The next time he found an Apex nesting chamber, he wiped it out without a single twinge of guilt.
They carried the slaughter deeper into the alien ship minute by minute, and at last, they met furious resistance. A mass of battle drones attacked them with guns, grenade-like bombs, and paralyzing green rays. He lost two raiders in a fight to take a corridor that seemed to be branching deeper in, and three more when he came upon a terrific fight that seemed already in progress.
The enemy had set up heavier guns, and one swung back and pounded his forces as they tried to take cover in a small side chamber that opened low on the wall. The gunfire only increased once he got his men protected, and then suddenly a half dozen screaming raiders came bursting through the enemy from beyond. They must be from one of the blackfish assault companies.
“Follow me!” he shouted to his men, and they poured out the side chamber to join the fight.
Olafsen mowed down three birds, grabbed another by the neck in his armored hand as it tried to peck through his shoulder joint, snapped its neck, then charged forward with his men to mop up the last resistance.
“You!” Olafsen said, spotting a familiar gleaming black faceplate with a red grin painted across the front. “Where is your commander?”
“He sent us to find you,” Demon Grin said. “Didn’t know if you were dead or alive—nobody is getting any orders down here.”
“The com system is jammed. Can’t get more than ten yards in any direction. Where are the rest?”
“There are thirty more raiders about fifty feet back. Pinned down by a fixed gun emplacement. Don’t know about anyone else.”
Demon Grin led the raiders to the scene of the other battle, where they approached at an angle to the main fighting. Olafsen, Björnman, and Demon Grin led a charge, followed by the rest, and quickly overran the enemy position. The new, larger group of nearly a hundred raiders pushed deeper into the ship, where they faced increasingly fierce resistance.
And yet not so fierce after all. These buzzards, for all of their battle prowess, for their ability to dominate planets from orbit, destroying armies and navies until they could assault the surface and gather victims, were not so prepared for an attack on their home turf. Olafsen was losing men—several dozen so far—but they had killed hundreds of enemies.
They’re not prepared. They didn’t expect this.
“We can win,” Olafsen told Björnman after yet another battle for control of a tunnel junction. “By the gods, we can do this.”
“Wasn’t that the idea?”
“No, it was to wreak havoc within long enough for the fleet to destroy the ship from without. I never expected to survive.”
“You might have informed us that it was a suicide mission.”
“It’s always in the hands of the gods,” Olafsen said. “And this time the gods have decided to withhold Valhalla for another day.”
“Let it wait!” Björnman said with a hearty laugh. “Even a raider would get tired of the endless drinking and feasting.”
They met more raiders, and then still more, and with their numbers growing, fought down increasingly desperate attempts to hold them back from what had to be the alien command center up ahead. The enemy threw a vicious counterattack from several directions when they reached another juncture, and so many raiders fell to bombs and grenades and heavier-caliber weapons that Olafsen began to think they would need to retreat and regroup.
And then the drones stopped fighting. Simply stopped. They didn’t so much throw down their weapons as lower them and wait for their fate.
And that fate was swift. Wary of another trick, and still thinking of the horror of the impaled humans, as well as the thousands of additional victims in the Apex larders, he ordered the enemy slaughtered without mercy. Some of these birds had colored feathers in their plumage—the commanders—but these, too, fell without resisting.
When the birds were down, he pushed forward to find himself in front of a door leading into a large room. Another nesting chamber? He hesitated, sensing that something was wrong, something waiting for him on the other side that represented danger, or some fresh new horror. He almost sent Björnman and Demon Grin inside in his place.
“No,” he said aloud. “This is my fight. My glory to take or be taken from me.”
Olafsen pushed into the room. The first thing he noticed was the stench, a sharp, acidic smell like paint thinner, that came straight through his helmet’s breather and made his head swim. He’d smelled that before, from the more brightly colored birds, and wondered if they excreted the chemical to control their drones. Only here, it was several times stronger. Overwhelming, even.
The walls of the round chamber were held up with supports that looked like the bones of a rib cage. Strange, scratch-like letters glowed red and orange around the room. Human body parts lay around the room, as did several brightly covered birds. These squawked and flopped on the floor, still in the process of dying.
Standing in the center of the room was a single bird, as tall as a man, its wings spread. It wore no harness or guns, no apparatus to hit him with a paralyzing ray. No metallic claws on its feet or hardened beak for tearing through mech suits. Olafsen was free to take in its dazzling red, gold, green, and blue feathers, which shimmered in the dim light. There was no doubt who he was staring at.
The Apex queen commander.
A voice entered his head, some sort of telepathy that entered like fingernails scratching across the surface of his brain.
>
Enter my banquet chamber, human. Enter, and we will speak together as one apex predator to another.
Olafsen stepped into the room.
Chapter Twenty-three
Dreadnought was burning along its starboard when Blackbeard, Void Queen, and the rest of the reinforcements arrived. Gasses flamed out of gaping holes, only to be sucked into the void. Rhino and Tiger hammered the battleship with wave after wave of cannon and missile fire.
Tolvern, now in command of the combined battle cruiser fleet, sent in her fastest ships first, the corvettes, which divided their attack between the two harvesters in a futile attempt to break off the alien assault. This had no more effect than the continued and ineffective fire from the surviving ships of the admiral’s once overwhelming fleet.
The two battle cruisers entered combat next, swinging into broadside position even as they fired long- and medium-range weaponry. The attack was soon joined by all the other ships arriving with them, more than fifty in all, those who had survived from both Broderick’s fleet and the original Blackbeard-Void Queen force.
This got the enemy’s attention at last. Both Tiger and Rhino were forced to direct most of their firepower into holding off the ferocious counterattack at their rear. Dreadnought, still hovering above the dry brown waste of Sheol, was miraculously still in the fight. Within a few minutes she had sealed off breaches and resumed her attack.
A short audio message came from Tolvern’s husband moments later. James sounded far too calm for the situation. Minutes more of that bombardment, and he’d have been killed. Not even Dreadnought could have stood alone against a pair of harvesters.
“Tiger has taken heavy damage,” he announced. “One of our nuclear torpedoes got through and smashed the rear shield above the engine array. Take it out first, and we’ll worry about Rhino later.”
Tolvern quickly organized her forces. Twenty ships were left fighting Rhino in an attempt to keep its guns off the admiral, while the remainder, including the battle cruisers, went after Tiger. The enemy ships made as if to break off the engagement.
Sun King (The Void Queen Trilogy Book 3) Page 22
