Horns of the Ram (Dominion Book 2)

by Austin Rogers

Emma shrugged. “Sure. I’d like to see what all the fuss is about.”

  Mitchell scrunched his eyebrows. “You sure it’s safe down there? I’ve heard some stories.”

  Heydar took in another breath and considered his words. “There are safe areas and less safe areas, but I’ll make sure we stick to the safe areas.” He smiled with a wink.

  “‘Preciate the offer,” Mitchell said. “But I’ve heard the gravity’s a bitch for us luners, so I’ll hang back, enjoy the view from above.”

  Heydar nodded. “Fair enough. And, uh—” He shifted to look over his shoulder. “What about Miss Patty?”

  Emma let out a laugh as she eyed her chief of operations’ schmoozing. “I don’t think I could tear her away if I tried. Looks like it’ll just be me.”

  Heydar gave a sincere smile that put a twinkle in his eyes. “I think you’ll be glad you visited.”

  Emma hesitantly agreed. “I think so, too. As long as we’re sticking to the safe areas.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Sagittarius Arm, near the Orionite border, on the spaceship Cygnus . . .

  Battle across spacebend gates was a bit like playing a card game: once a card was played, it could not be unplayed. Once a ship went through the gate, it could not be withdrawn, at least not easily. Even traveling inside a warp bubble at many times the speed of light, the thirty-lightyear trip still took twenty-two minutes, which, in turn, meant a forty-four minute information lag on status reports send back through the gates. That made the situation before Freyz immensely tricky.

  Their alliance had tricked the Confed into defending three adjacent gates across the border from Trifid. At one border gate waited Trifid’s own armada, at another the combined fleets of Owl and the Wings, and at the third, the glorious armada of Swan. Their recon probes had gone through every Sagittarian gate touching the border with the Confed, but apparently the Confed also had clandestine probes as their fleets had, for the last few days, slid back and forth along the border corresponding to the placement of their counterparts’ fleets. The “trick” had been to split the Confed’s defenses, force them to prepare for a simultaneous, three-pronged invasion.

  No such attack would come. Freyz had spread his enemy’s defenses thin and would penetrate them at one point like a spearhead through stretched chainmail.

  The vast and varied Swan fleet hovered in the crowded space of Targus’s system, swirling in two eccentric eddies to pick up speed and then burn through the border gate, one by one. The invasion plan had been pored over again and again for days, honed like a sharp-edged blade by the military masterminds of four great manors. Now forty-one minutes had passed since the first titan ship disappeared into that invisible portal. Freyz forced himself to breathe slow and steady as he watched the large holodisplay before him. For now, it only showed the portion of their fleet that had not yet gone through the portal, as they’d gotten no statreps back.

  Over the epaulette-clad shoulder of Velasco, who stood across the display table, a flat, ring-shaped screen hung from the ceiling, showing a timer counting up at multiple angles. Forty-one minutes and fifty-six seconds. Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight. Velasco watched quietly and solemnly. Freyz dare not interrupt his thoughts—no point to it. The ships that had gone through were in the hands of fate now.

  All across the bridge, staffers wearing HUD goggles monitored data and coordinated with the rest of the fleet. Naturally, such a high stakes invasion put Freyz’s space navalmen on edge, but they would perform well for their lord. This was what they trained for. This was what they pined for.

  Freyz worked his fingertips over a keyboard on the edge of the holodisplay table to open a comm link to all bridges, command decks, and cockpits throughout the fleet.

  “This is Lord General Freyz,” he said once he saw the green light flick on. “I have one last reminder for all of his lordship’s warriors, and that is to remember the greater cause. We must destroy in order to build. We must make war in order to make peace. We must shed blood in order to gain glory. May our lord’s favor be on you all, sons and daughters of Swan.”

  As Freyz closed the comm link, he spotted Velasco spare him a meager glance before returning his attention to the holodisplay. Freyz began to feel jitters.

  “Commodore,” he called across the bridge. “Has the statrep come in yet?”

  A hulking figure turned away from a display panel, his gossamer cape dancing behind him with the movement. “Nothing yet, m’lord,” the commodore rumbled in his menacingly deep voice. “It will be at least forty-six minutes in. The titans are programed to send statreps every ninety seconds. We’ll have a steady stream of information to recreate the battle move by move.” He wheeled his bulk back around at the data streams on the long display panel.

  Freyz planted his hands on the table edge and closed his eyes. It would be his last opportunity to rest in relative silence for many hours, perhaps even days. Two galactic powerhouses were about to hurl their hardest punches at each other, and the result would change the course of history. If any moment warranted silent contemplation, Freyz reckoned this was it . . .

  #

  The air over the holo table lit up in a brilliant, three-dimensional spectacle—a recreation of the battle that began forty-five minutes before. Freyz’s mind narrowed in on it, blocking out all else but the visual display and the data streams rushing by around the bottom of the holo field.

  Swan’s titan ships—unmanned, partially hollowed asteroids outfitted on all sides with missile ports and thrusters—emerged one by one from the spacebend gate barely wide enough to fit them, their hulking bodies rendered a neon blue color by the holo’s projectors. The Confed’s fleet—too vast and spread out to take in—wasted no time responding. A triad of self-propelled rockets, railgun-fired projectiles, and high-powered lasers bore down on the titans from the fleet’s concave positioning in front of the gate’s exit. The forward titan fired its rear thrusters to brace itself for a beating. Missiles slammed into the rocky exterior. Tungsten rods bored holes into it. Lasers burned lines across it. But the rugged behemoth pushed on toward its designated position. The second and third titans did the same, beginning to take hits themselves. The rockships’ thrusters fought hard to compensate for the massive force of the hits threatening to push them off course.

  Fissures formed in the forward titan from the sheer pounding it took from multiple angles. Guided rockets curled around and impacted it from behind, trying to destroy its rear thrusters. Lasers slashed across its face in an attempt to melt the missile ports closed. The rock wouldn’t last long.

  Analysts pored over data from the statrep’s data streams. “First titan’s about to go,” one of them announced, divining it from the data.

  Sure enough, a Confed salvo impacted and broke off a third of the rockship and then a few more large chunks on the opposite side, triggering the ship to machine gun out its payload of fireworks. Tiny rockets blasted out of all its functional portholes at nine per second and spread out in all directions. They exploded simultaneously to form a giant ball of sparks and smoke. Thermite burned slowly along tight, fuse-like coils, creating a sphere of heat and flickering light.

  The other five titans followed suit shortly after. Each fired their forward thrusters to halt themselves once they’d reached their pre-programmed position, then blasted out their fireworks. The combined effect was a huge curtain of flaring light that the Confed’s naked-eye and thermal optics could scarcely penetrate.

  Next came the lancer carriers—cone-shaped vessels with dozens of lancer drones moored to the exterior like scales. They emerged one at a time from different points of the gate, one every two seconds. As soon as each came through, the lancers detached from their skeletal bays on the carrier hull and boosted themselves toward the heat veil. The Terrans could apparently see through it well enough to detect incoming craft, so they moved their gunships up to the front of their fleet and started filing out their SCDs—standard combat drones. More and more and more of them, until
they formed clouds of blue light speckles in the holo field. Gangly and flimsy, the Confed’s SCDs sacrificed firepower, speed, and resilience for the sake of numbers.

  Swan’s swarm of lancers flowed in multiple columns toward the bright, hot veil acting as their shield. The Confed SCDs, buzzing around their capital ships like bees around a hive, outnumbered them at least four to one. Freyz would not claim victory today from superiority of small craft. Battleships would be the key.

  The streams of lancers pierced the veil, and immediately, the forward wall of Confed gunships ignited with a simultaneous volley of fire. Each stream split, lancers darting off in all directions to avoid the hail of ballistic rounds. Laser streaks—showing up in the holodisplay as tiny strands of red light but invisible to the naked eye—flashed across the gap like momentary camera flashes. They went off in sequence like a strobe, only some connecting with their lancer targets. In the frenzy, lancers began firing off their sole smart rockets, which twirled and zigzagged through the no man’s land toward the Confed fleet. Some got caught by laser flashes, detonating their powerful payloads early. Most made it through the fray and forced clusters of SCDs to move up and absorb the hits in place of the gunships. Still, the explosive shockwaves did some damage and distracted long enough to let the lancers close the gap.

  Freyz blinked his dry eyes as he watched two clouds of drones rage toward each other like dueling sandstorms until colliding in chaotic fury. Brief explosions dotted the space around the gunships. Terminally damaged lancers did as they were programed and launched themselves full-tilt at the gunships. Most disintegrated under the burning heat of laser deflectors, but the few that connected with their targets caused quick, hot eruptions as fire consumed all the oxygen onboard with lightning speed before being snuffed out by the vacuum of space. Debris and bodies collected all through the concave area at the front of the Confed fleet.

  Meanwhile, a growing number of Swan corvettes, gunships, and frigates gathered inside the fading brilliance of the heat veil. They swirled in randomized movements: up, down, left, right, circles, loops. What glimpses the Confed optic systems would get of them wouldn’t produce a clear picture of their numbers or placement. Still, Terran capital ships hurled salvoes of tungsten bolts into the veil in hopes of hitting something. Most of the computer-guided ship systems managed to react in the fraction of a second it took to dodge incoming bolts, or else deflect them off course enough to narrowly miss. Corvettes were built with the mobility and swiftness and diminutive size to evade almost anything but the most point blank shot, and gunships had powerful enough deflectors to push projectiles out of their path. But one of the frigates wasn’t so fortunate. A bolt zipped through the heat veil, through the throng of gunships and corvettes, and slammed into the frigate hull, spraying debris out the other side and knocking the ship into a twirl while its thrusters struggled to compensate.

  Freyz flinched and gritted his teeth as if the tungsten bolt had struck his own body. But next came the troop carriers, also cone-shaped with slots covering their exteriors and troop husks lodged in each slot. As soon as the third troop carrier exited the gate, the flurry of movement inside the heat veil ceased. Ships coalesced into groups and moved outward. Troop carriers followed.

  Freyz bit down on the inside of his cheek. They hadn’t sent through enough lancers. The Confed’s guns would scarcely be distracted when Swan’s ships moved into the open. Tension gripped him at his core like a god’s hand wrapped around his rib cage. He brought up the order of ships going through the gate to recall what would come next.

  The last handful of lancers dashed desperately through the fray of gunfire and debris when the Confed apparently decided to send a few detachments of SCDs through the heat veil. Swan’s gunships ensured they didn’t last long, but whatever picture the SCDs sent back to the Confed’s capital ships wouldn’t matter. Only seconds passed before Swan’s ships pierced the dimmed veil and guns blazed from both sides. The initial wave of fire tore into the small Swan vessels—the rain of metal too thick and too fast to escape. Red lasers criss-crossed no man’s land. Guided rockets twirled through the expanse and blew up Confed and Swan ships alike. Crippled vessels fought to turn themselves around, but most wound up being whittled into lifeless wreckage. Lines of machine gun fire swerved about to follow the movement of their targets. Swan gunships spouted clustershot rounds into oncoming SCDs, shattering them by the dozens.

  The level of destruction was impossible to take in. Millions of dicars’ worth of damage every second. Tens of lives shredded by a deluge of metal shards or devoured by the abyss of space. Commoner lives, but lives nonetheless.

  Swan’s speedy corvettes and barrel-spiked gunships plowed into the Confed fleet, taking a brutal pounding from all sides. Streams of bullets poured into them like a river delta into the ocean. Chipping away. The distance tightened between Swan and Confed crafts, leaving too few milliseconds to dodge or deflect. Titanium rods plowed through metallic guts. Bolts blasted debris clusters. Ships eroded down to their cores or split in half or flipped endlessly like chunks of swiss cheese.

  Confed capital ships aimed their menacing railguns at the well-armored Swan frigates still wading into their space. Their cannons recoiled abrasively with the force of each shot. Diamond-tipped projectiles the length of ten men head to heel tore through space almost faster than the eye could detect—or the holodisplay could project. The thick, cannon-lined hulls of the frigates opened as easily as a knife through flesh. The ships’ blood cells—human bodies—spilled out as their guts leaked from the exit wounds. Such great vessels, majestic in their own right, crippled so easily.

  But the frigates’ downfall would be the troops’ gateway. The remaining Swan ships, tattered though they were, blazed a path straight for the Confed battleships. Then, as the last few frigates broke apart and voided the rest of their ammunition into the Confed fleet, the troop carriers blasted their reserve boosters to burn through the hollowed shells of their protector ships, diving at full speed toward the enemy battleships. Troop husks, carrying some of the finest warriors in the galaxy, launched from their berths and fanned out. Rapid-fire clustershots rained out from the battleships and washed against the husks. Some disintegrated against the punishment, but most made it through to punch into the battleships’ hulls. Blazer drills immediately heated to life and bored into Confed steel as the Swan infiltrators prepared to fight.

  All this while another wave of lancer carriers congregated around the spacebend gate and the first Swan battleship—a state-of-the-art Dreadcaster, according to the docket—materialized from the darkness of warped space.

  Freyz couldn’t help but smirk at the display. The first two waves had washed against the Terran seawall, as he’d expected, but the third would be the tsunami to break them.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Orion Arm, on the planet Earth . . .

  Emma paused at a ledge on the Temple Mount and placed her hand on the limestone embrasure. This rough and worn parapet’s better days had been millennia ago. Before mankind even knew other planets like their own existed beyond the sky. As she gazed out over the mottled mix of stucco and stone that made up the Old City of Jerusalem, Emma could hardly fathom the distance humanity had come—from piling stone upon stone to traveling faster than light inside a man-made biosphere through the vacuum of space.

  And yet, the faded black dome over her shoulder and the golden peak reaching above the knot of evergreen trees across the Temple Mount tempered her awe. Masses of people shuffled into the mosque or circled the Dome of the Rock with their tour guides, each speaking a different language. Though she wasn’t terribly familiar with the ins and outs of each religion, Emma could tell the Jews from the Muslims from the Christians. They didn’t mix. And then there were the Carinians with whatever they called their religion. They avoided the Terrans, and the Terrans avoided them. The same millennia-old fears of each other lingered in all of their hearts.

  Some groups wore polished wooden crosses aroun
d their necks—hand carved olive wood mass produced from various orchards around the world and shipped here to the Levant. Others wore satin skullcaps with six-pointed stars at their peaks, obtainable from any of a thousand tourist shops around the city. Still others wore all-white robes and carried mats sold by the same shops. The Carinians were the most obvious, as they each wore some piece of jewelry—a necklace, a bracelet, a pin, a pendant, a belt buckle—bearing the Ringstone symbol, a grid of calligraphy-drawn lines flanked by two small stars. Naturally, such jewelry was for sale everywhere in Jerusalem.

  A pair of Confed security drones whirred by overhead, rippling the air behind their thrusters. It served as a reminder of the authoritarian hand ever present in this city, keeping the peace and facilitating the influx of revenue. The urban landscape extended as far as the eye could see, becoming more glassy and metallic and sleek beyond the quaint but crowded Old City area. Many kilometers of glistening hotels, restaurants, and outdoor malls surrounded the holy sites, each catering to one religious group or another. More than half of Jerusalem’s boroughs clearly pandered to the Carinians, and their rooms or tables or shops were constantly filled, all year round.

  Emma wished she’d invested in some Jerusalem real estate ten years ago. Now would’ve been a hell of a good time to sell.

  Heydar stepped to the parapet beside her and smiled when she met his eyes.

  “You don’t seem terribly impressed by the sacred sites,” he said, only half-jokingly. “The Dome is that way.” He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder.

  Emma let a breathy laugh escape. “No, I’m impressed. Only I’m impressed more by the industry than the shrines. You know I’m not religious, right?”

  His smile only grew wider. “I was aware. But it’s not just our religion. It’s our history. This part of Earth is where our oldest recorded historical documents come from.” He rapped his knuckles against the stone parapet. “This wall was built during the height of the Roman Empire.”