by Jay Allan
Lille…and Andi.
The idea of the Sector Nine assassin falling to his death was an entirely pleasant one, and doing it while his latest victim, Van Striker, still lay dead in the street, seemed like a certain kind of justice. But the thought of watching Andi die, just minutes after he’d seen Striker slip away, cut through him like a hot knife.
He hoped against hope, wished with all his heart his initial impression was wrong…but he knew with a grim certainty he was right. Andi was one of the figures falling.
He watched, forcing his eyes to remain focused, as the two bodies dropped. At the last instant, he realized what was happening, a desperate struggle, each trying to position themselves on top, trying to use their opponent to absorb the impact.
Then, they hit the ground. Holsten had closed his eyes and looked away, his natural instincts winning out over his will. He turned back almost immediately, and he saw Ricard Lille, sprawled out on the street, covered in blood, his head split open like an overripe melon. There wasn’t a question in his mind, not the slightest doubt.
Ricard Lille was dead.
He rushed over, looking past the dead assassin, to the smaller figure that lay just beyond. Andi had won the struggle on the way down, and she’d landed more or less on top of her enemy, bouncing off and rolling hard across the street when they hit the hard street.
There was blood everywhere around her, and as Holsten raced over he saw her wounds, the gaping puncture in her side, the cuts and scrapes, the swollen bruises…and then, he saw her chest move up, slowly, as she drew a shallow and ragged breath.
She was still alive!
He turned and shouted to the med team, the ones he’d called to help Van Striker. They couldn’t do anything for the admiral now, but Holsten let himself hope against hope they could for Andi. She was badly battered, grievously wounded, and even though Lille had broken her fall to an extent, he could only imagine the internal injuries she’d suffered.
“Help her…now.” He waved, and he repeated the command, even as the team raced over to her. “Save her…whatever it takes.” He knew his words were valueless. The team would save her if they could…though his rational mind tried to prepare him, telling him she was too badly injured. His thoughts moved to remorse, to the nightmare of having to tell Tyler Barron she was gone, that he had watched her die…a job he knew would be his, for more reasons than he could easily count.
He stared straight at her, as the team working frantically, but he could hardly see any of it. His mind filled with other thoughts…with regrets. It was his fault, he knew that still. He’d lured her out of safe retirement, brought her to Dannith. He hadn’t known Lille had been active on the frontier world, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d put Andi in the monster’s grasp. And, he’d failed her again when he’d let himself be blinded by his need to get back to Megara, and he’d ignored the signs of what she’d intended.
He’d liked Andi since the moment he’d met her. If she hadn’t been so clearly in love with one of his closest friends, he might have thought something more of her. She’d long ago won his deep respect, and his admiration. But, she’d still stunned him with what she had just done. She’d killed Ricard Lille, a man who had left a trail of blood across a hundred systems, a killer who’d cut through a number of victims Holsten couldn’t even begin to guess at. She’d defeated one of the most dangerous men on the Rim, very possibly the most dangerous. Amid the pain, the fear, the sorrow, the biting guilt, he felt raw admiration for his friend. She was a hero, in every sense of the word, in ways her brushes with outlawry and petty crime could never erase. She couldn’t die. She just couldn’t. Not now, not right after Striker.
Holsten had a grim view of humanity, of life. He’d seen ugliness, misery, combat, and death. But, even with his pessimism, forged through a tour of horrors that would turn most men insane, he couldn’t believe fate would be so cruel, so indescribably unfair, as to take Andi now.
The senior tech was saying something, but Holsten couldn’t hear it at first. He struggled to clear his mind to focus, even as two of the crew slid a hard board under her and lifted her up onto a gurney.
“…sir, can you hear me?” Holsten had missed the man’s first words.
He turned and nodded. “I hear you…”
“She’s critically injured, sir, and she’s lost an enormous amount of blood. She’s still alive, now. I don’t know if we can save her, but we’ve got to get her to the med center. Now.”
Holsten nodded again. “Go…do whatever you have to, whatever it takes.”
He stood where he was as the man raced away, jogging alongside the gurney as his team pushed it onto the airship...and as the craft lifted off into the sky, carrying Andromeda Lafarge, or what was left of her, up into the brilliant blue sky.
He stood where he was, and looked up into the dazzling sunshine of an almost perfect day, and he sank into a pit of gloom and despair.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
CFS Repulse
260,000,000 Miles from Planet Ulion
Venga System
Year 317 AC
The Battle of Ulion – Final Phase: “The Retreat”
Barron watched as the Palatian squadrons raced toward the Hegemony formations, right behind Timmons and his rookies and garrison pilots. Warrior had put his recalled veterans, in every way the cream of his force, in the front, likely in the hopes they would set the example, and provide a last-minute education for their more junior comrades.
And, so it had been. The old salts had closed with abandon, ignoring the enemy defensive fire—and the losses it inflicted—and taking their fighters to within spitting distance before letting their torpedoes fly. The veterans hadn’t faced Hegemony ships before, and their hit ratios didn’t quite match those of Stockton’s squadrons—and Barron’s old wings especially—but they cut into a line of enemy battleships that had already been savaged by repeated sorties, and by an extended firefight with Winters’s battle line.
He stared at the display for a while, and then he almost activated his comm. Every fiber of his body wanted to fight to the end, to throw everything he had at the enemy…but as soon as he’d transited in and seen the size and scope of the enemy forces, he’d known immediately, that was not a road his duty would allow. All he could hope to do was extricate Winters’s and Eaton’s forces…and pull the entire combined fleet back to Megara.
Van Striker had been clear—as had been the Senate, for all Barron ultimately decided he cared what they thought—he simply could not bet the fleet on a battle at Ulion, especially one he couldn’t win. Barron believed in his people, and he knew the ferocity the Palatians would show in battle…but the math was unassailable. He could hurt the Hegemony, destroy dozens of their ships, hundreds even…but in the end, his fleet would be gone, nothing but dust and twisted wreckage. And, the Hegemony forces would still have enough power to take Megara, especially with no fleet units left to defend the capital.
Barron felt bitterness at the supposed importance of Megara, and he bristled at the notion of twisting his plans, and sacrificing his people, to defend a place full of corrupt politicians, and bloated bureaucracies. But he knew there was more to it than that. Megara was the center of the Confederation, the first world to pull itself from the disarray of the Cataclysm and reach back out into space. It was more than some arbitrary capital, some location chosen just to house politicians and government paper-pushers. If it had decayed into the mire of grotesque politics and pointless, ostentatious luxury, it had once been a vibrant world, its people hanging on to the technology lost in so many places, and placing the first bricks of a revived civilization in place.
It was the heart of the Confederation, and its system housed the greatest research facilities and stores of scientific knowledge anywhere on the Rim. Barron didn’t know if Megara could be saved, or if the Hegemony could be stopped at all…but he was sure if there was to be a final battle, a place where he sent the fleet in for a fight to the death, it woul
d be at Megara.
As much as he wanted to fight where he was, with all he had, he accepted his mission now was to rescue Winters’s fleet, to pull back all he could from Ulion and mass every scrap of Confederation and Alliance strength under the guns of the capital’s massive fortifications. He didn’t take lightly the idea of abandoning ten billion Confederation citizens to the enemy, but if the navy couldn’t maintain a force in being, every one of the more than one hundred inhabited worlds flying the Confederation flag would fall.
“All ships…charge main weapons. Prepare to engage.” Barron’s plan was slightly different from those Winters had followed. He had his battleships right behind the masses of fighters, ready to hit the enemy line hard, one punch right after another. It was a luxury he knew had been bought with Winters’s relentless attacks, the waves of bombers that had battered those forward battleships, knocked out most of their main guns. Barron knew the fight would still be a nasty one, and that it would get worse when the enemy second line closed, and the railguns on those untouched ships opened fire…but it was the only way to buy enough time to extricate the rest of the fleet.
“Admiral, I have a communique from the Ulion Council Chairman .” Atara’s tone suggested she felt about that much like Barron did himself. He sympathized with the plight of Ulion’s people, even with the politicians if he was being charitable…but there was simply nothing he could do. There was no way to hold the system, and any chance he might try had long ago been lost by the planet’s Peace Party, and its decades of diversion of funding from building and maintaining defenses to a plethora of other programs that had likely amounted to nothing useful at all, save for filling the coffers of politically connected contractors.
There were reasons besides pure defensive power to choose Megara over Ulion for a desperate final battle, but the fact that the capital was surrounded by a deadly necklace of forts and orbital defense platforms made the choice an easy one.
“We don’t have time for that now, Captain. Just ignore it.” In normal times, he’d have expected repercussions, some kind of complaint lodged against him for lack of respect to lawful authorities, or something of the sort. But, he suspected the ‘Chairman’ of Ulion’s Council would soon have more to worry about than lashing out at one disrespectful admiral.
Probably figuring out how he can collaborate to hang onto some remnant of his power and luxury…
“The squadrons are engaging, Admiral.” Atara turned and looked over toward Barron’s station, and the two exchanged glances. The massive bombing runs would almost certainly inflict enormous damage on the battered enemy line…but the mostly inexperienced pilots would just as surely pay a terrible price.
* * *
“Get those fighters back now, Commander. I’m transmitting a course to you…follow it exactly.” Stara Sinclair’s voice was heavy with the stress the flight control officer was feeling. Federov could only imagine the complexity of the effort to coordinate returning fighter wings with the retreating battleships.
Admiral Barron’s arrival had sent the flagging morale of the fleet soaring to new heights, but spirits had quickly plunged again as it became clear that even the combined force, the massive conglomeration of Confederation and Alliance fleets, was still too weak to fight it out, at least in a system as lightly defended by fixed fortifications as Ulion.
“Understood, Commander…I’m receiving your signal now. Will execute immediately.”
“Stay on it closely, Olya…it’s going to be tight getting your people onboard, and we’re going to need every second.”
“I’m with you, Stara. Trust me, I’m not looking to take on this Hegemony fleet with twenty-seven fighters. We’ll make it back.” Federov knew the difficulties of bringing fighters back to retreating base ships under any circumstances…and with the bays as overloaded as they were on this campaign, a hundred things could go wrong. And, it was an almost certain bet, if it came down to it at the end, a group of fighters would be left behind before the admiral—any admiral—would risk his or her battleships.
“I know you will…” She could hear the tension in Sinclair’s voice, the distraction. She knew her friend was juggling fighters spread out all over the system…and it was a pretty good guess they weren’t all going to make it back before the launch platforms had to bug out.
And, she didn’t intend to make it worse by adding to that load. “Don’t worry about us, Stara…I’ve got it.” She cut the line. Then she called up her wing’s channel. She’d have to play nursemaid on this one, and lead her people—the inexperienced ones at least—back home.
And, that’s just what she intended to do.
* * *
“Get your ships through now, Sara.” Barron was in his chair, his harness pulled tightly across his chest. Dauntless was in the fight now, not only against the enemy first line, but also the forward elements of the second. And, those ships had railguns online…and already firing. The range was still long, and that had kept the hit rate low. Only two of his battleships had been damaged, but one of those was almost crippled. He’d ordered the two stricken vessels out of the line, sent them back toward the transit point, even as Eaton’s ships followed.
“I’ve been damned glad to see you more times than I can count, Admiral, but I don’t think ever more than right now.” She paused. “We did all we could to give them a fight here. We just…” She hesitated, and Barron felt the guilt, in her tone, and even more, in the silence that followed.
“You hit them like death itself, Sara. I couldn’t believe the damage you inflicted. I’d like to keep up the fight here, too, but you and I both know, Megara’s a better place. We’ve got more support there, and assuming we can finish this withdrawal without any last-minute disasters, we’ll have the strongest fleet these guys have faced yet. Admiral Striker’s called back every fleet unit in the Confederation, and Vian Tulus has more ships coming, too. You and Clint Winters have done one hell of a job with your hit and run attacks. Without that campaign, they’d have gotten to Megara already…before we were ready.”
Barron understood how Eaton felt, and he couldn’t imagine the exhaustion his old second-in-command from the White Fleet felt. She’d been fighting almost non-stop since the moment he’d left in Dauntless to return to the Confederation…and she’d play a major role, along with Winters, in filling the gap left when his intention to rally the navy to defend the frontier turned into a fiasco, and almost into civil war. He would see that he told her just how much he admired her, as he intended to do with Winters as well. But, first, he had to get the two officers and their battered ships out of the Venga system, and back to Megara.
“Thank you, sir…that means a lot coming from you.”
Barron nodded, and again, he caught the deep and profound fatigue in her voice. “Go, Sara…get your people out of here. You’ve done enough for now. We’ll hold the line long enough for you to transit.”
Dauntless lurched hard to the side, even as Barron was speaking. You hope you’ll hold the line long enough…
He cut the comm, and then he sent a withdrawal order to Winters’s flagship as well, in the name of Admiral Striker. By most methods of calculation, Barron was the senior of the two—and he didn’t doubt Winters would follow his directives, but it was definitely not the time or place to take any risk of a pissing match between admirals. Every ship that failed to escape now was one less available to defend Megara…and Barron knew that would be the battle that counted, the one that offered the best—maybe the only—chance to stop the Hegemony’s onslaught.
Barron looked over at the display, the calculations running through his head. He needed to hold his position for another forty minutes, maybe an hour. Then Winters’s and Eaton’s ships would all be through…and he could begin to withdraw his own forces. His people had arrived late, but casualties were already high…and the closer the enemy’s second line got, the more ships he knew he’d lose.
The battle had been a near-cataclysm, a bloody disaster, but in his
gut, he knew things were about to get worse, that the losses, the monumental death toll he saw all around him was just the start. He’d viewed the Union War as a nightmare, as a crucible that forged his people—those who survived, at least—into unbreakable iron. But, now he knew, with heartrending clarity, that his people’s greatest trial still lay ahead.
Even in the depths of the war with the Union, or during the desperate fighting in the Alliance Civil War, he’d always believed in victory, that his side would ultimately prevail.
That was gone now, the easy confidence that had sustained him for so long. Now, as he looked out, he saw only darkness, a bloodletting without end…unless that end was total and utter defeat, and subjugation at the hands of the Hegemony’s Masters.
It was a nightmare, but there was no way to escape, to wake up. There was one option…to press on, through the fire, through the losses and devastation that lay ahead. But, this time, Barron didn’t believe in victory. He looked out over the display, at the vast forces of the Hegemony, and for the first time in his life, he didn’t think his people could win.
It was a dark an ominous thought, and for the first time, he imagined what life would be like under Hegemony rule, what brand of ‘Inferiors’ they would use to classify him and the rest of his comrades. He wondered if the Confederation’s billions would fight to the end, if they would resist, or if they would yield, and adjust to life under the Masters.
He didn’t continue the thought. He didn’t think he’d like the answer. But, he could only speak for himself, and he knew one thing with unyielding certainty. He would not survive defeat. He would never bow before those who called themselves Masters, serve under them, almost as a slave. He would die, fighting…and he was pretty sure a lot of his close comrades would do the same.
