“Route me to our lead lander,” Santani snapped.
COMOP stepped back to his station and patched her through. “Channel open, Captain.”
“Lieutenant Eilentes, I’m sending you the current tactical situation. If you want to make the surface you will have to be quick. We will get as close as we can and try to stay between you and the enemy. Be advised that the Imperial ships at this location appear to be hostile.”
“Acknowledged, Captain. Just give us the word.”
Santani nodded to COMOP, and he suspended the channel.
“Databurst to Kosling, Fort Herses, and the Laeara system. Send them this battle map along with our sensor logs, and advise that we are engaging the enemy. Request immediate reinforcement.”
“At once.”
“Helm, ahead full. Give me a hard burn for the planet.”
“Aye Captain, ahead full.”
“Captain,” Tactical said. “That will cut down time to weapons range. Estimating… two minutes to contact.”
“Understood. Let me know when we reach a safe insertion point.”
“Enemy carrier group has split off from the main force, moving to outflank us.”
“Correcting course,” Helm said immediately, without being ordered. The ship swung slightly to port, but continued towards the planet. “Ninety seconds.”
“They’re all launching drones. I read two carriers, probably full complements. No fighter wings in the air as yet.”
“They won’t send fighters at us while we have working turrets,” Santani predicted. “Not if they have any sense.”
Klade leaned across to the tactical station. “Launch our own drones, and decoys too. Any of their drones get too close, chew them up.”
“Aye, Commander.” Tactical said. “Captain, I think this is the best insertion point we’re going to get. If we leave it much longer our landers will be de-orbiting under fire.”
Santani nodded to Klade, and he in turn used his holo to send word to the hangar bay: launch.
On the main battle map, green dots appeared next to the blob representing Hammer, one for each of the MAGA landers that carried the four platoons of Bravo Company, 951st Battalion. The dots sped away from the battleship and her pursuers, and accelerated towards the planet.
“All stop,” the captain said. “This is where we make our stand. Bring us about, Helm, and let’s show these fuckers who we are.”
• • •
Every time the lander jolted, Eilentes was sure they had been hit. She kept having to remind herself; it’s not enemy fire, it’s just the atmosphere.
Woe Tantalum was a resentful, brooding world, its chaotic atmosphere rent in purples and browns and the darkest of the greys. From orbit, there were only brief, fleeting signs of the surface. Boiling, billowing storm clouds wreathed the whole planet in a violent, electrically charged cloak.
Within seconds of passing into the upper atmosphere Eilentes found herself relying entirely on the automatic navigation systems. Visibility dropped to zero so quickly she would have become disoriented immediately had it not been for the holographic overlays on her view port. All she could do now was trust that her flight holos had enough data about the planet to ensure they properly tracked the lander’s descent. The other three landers were completely dependent on Eilentes, not just her own crew. Where her transponder went, they would follow.
The sky opened out into a wide vista, huge banks of cloud separated by an empty gulf that was bridged occasionally by the sudden sharp crack of electrical arcs. The lander dropped from the paler brown cloud above, and plunged headlong into the swirling surface of the purple layer below. Eilentes was blind again.
Lightning forked and reached out at them, arcing across the sky in a network of splintery fingers that were gone the moment they appeared. Dull flashes receded into the distance on all sides, electrical discharges reflected and diffused through sheets of vapour.
More flashes, in series this time. Smaller and more coherent than the lightning, trailing across her field of view. Enemy fire!
The noisome descent through the storm drowned out the sound of whatever kind of ordnance the anti-drop batteries were firing from the surface. Those that detonated were just small bursts of light, dulled and muffled by the thick banks of vapour.
Eilentes was not fool enough to ignore them though. As pitiful as they looked, it might only take one lucky shot to disable — or perhaps entirely destroy — a lander. She hoped to whatever greater powers might listen that there were only the guns on the surface, and no missile pods waiting with them.
“Fire from the surface,” she snapped into the comm. “Take evasive action.”
On her tactical holo, she saw the other landers reacting. One nose-dived past her, another braked hard and veered off to the side. The last began to spiral, cork-screwing around her descent trajectory.
She gave the batteries on the ground a few seconds to register their evasion, to resume firing. Tracers again sliced up through the banks of cloud, and she waited until they arced close before pulling a manoeuvre of her own.
She veered off to one side, then braked hard to slow their descent temporarily. The lander’s nose lifted against the descent, and she felt herself squashed down against the padding of her chair. The cabin rattled and reverberated in protest, and over the rushing, bellowing din of the air outside she could hear the engines making their thunderous objections.
Dive!
Gratefully, the lander tipped forward once more, rolling in its axis as it did so, easily avoiding the streams of fire that tried so persistently to pluck it from the sky. Eilentes barrelled downwards, following a curving path that she tightened and loosened randomly, swinging left and right when the mood took her. The batteries spewed uselessly into the space where they calculated the landing craft would probably be.
And then they broke the cloud cover again, swept into the dismal gloom below, and a desolate wasteland was hurtling towards them. She continued almost straight down, waiting for the last minute to pull up hard and scream low across the twisted nightmare that was Woe Tantalum’s scorched surface.
A heavy jolt pushed them to one side, accompanied by a great booming clang. For a split-second Eilentes thought they were being knocked out of the air. Through the thick port-side canopy she caught a glimpse of something sailing past them, tumbling away and towards the ground, twisted metal leaving a trail of thick black smoke and wisps of flame that struggled for life in the wet air. They had lost one of their companion landers.
Orange sparks flashed in her face, scattering outwards, and she realised she was flying straight towards a battery. It was the only way the defences would be able to lock on to a craft moving this quickly so close to the ground, and she was handing it right to them. Before she could change course, the first hits bit into the canopy, chewing out a series of opaque spider-webs that stretched out cracks and splinters threateningly.
The canopy was somehow holding, for that she was glad, but even slamming on the air brakes and dipping perilously close to the ground was not enough now. There had been a rapid series of hollow-sounding hits that immediately followed the line across the canopy, and the port-side intra-atmospheric engine was already coughing and rattling alternately. Her systems holo registered a hull breach, intermittent power, multiple failures in the cooling jacket… the engine was about to die.
She punched the comm. “Everyone back there hold on to something solid. We’re about to go down hard.”
• • •
Wind swept across the tortured rock where nothing ever grew, changing direction quickly and without warning, tirelessly vindictive as it plucked and tore at everything it touched.
He pulled his face plate down and clipped it into the jaw mount, shielding his face from the vicious, clawing shrike that was the air itself. Bracing his body against the winds, he leaned first one way and then the other, managing to remain upright as the force of the gale randomly shifted direction. It was simple enough, once one
learned to anticipate the wind. He felt as though he had been here many times before.
As far as the eye could see, there was only scarred crust; a desolate wasteland of charred shapes and melted rock, scoured of all life and littered with the twisted statues of melted buildings. The surface of Woe Tantalum was entirely ruined.
The sky above was a nauseating patchwork of purple bruises set against a festering brown, blotched with sickly orange where light struggled feebly to penetrate layer upon layer of cloying, odious cloud.
This was a place that wanted living things to die.
He could hear a ringing sound, almost painful to listen to, and struggled to remember precisely when it had begun. It was at such a high pitch, and descending so slowly, that for all he knew it might have started either seconds or minutes ago. He could not seem to work out where it was coming from.
The sound dropped lower, lower still, descending in pitch until it reached a sonorous rumble that seemed to dissolve into the general chaos of the wind and dust, lending its own strength to theirs. The ground itself trembled.
With an ear-splitting crack, the air tore open some ten metres away. Blackness boiled out into the world, a vertical spill towering over him, reflecting nothing. Wispy tendrils lashed and curled from the fringes, the main body tapering to nothing at top and base, wider in the middle, a rip in the world into which light could enter, but never leave.
There was no pain.
Ever-shifting gales began to fall into order, whipping around, becoming cyclonic. Fragments of charred debris skittered over his boots, bullied across the punished surface by the raging air.
Yet around the deep blackness was absolute calm. Stretching out from it, and almost reaching him, was a region in which no wind blew. It was only in this protected area where wisps of black ash drifted lazily back to the ground, and the cold, dead embers were as still as the gnarled and glassy boulders.
He took a step forward, into the calm.
All at once it was as if the chaos belonged to a world he had simply left behind. An invisible boundary held back the swirling vapour and airborne litter of the planet’s tortured surface, and outside in the seething maelstrom he thought he could see blurred figures moving slowly against the wind. In the centre of the silent zone though, eternally patient, waited only the dark formless nothing that was the Emptiness.
You could never have escaped this.
He had already known as he stepped into the calm that this moment would come, that the Emptiness would have its precious gloating. It had been stalking him for so many years, through so many trials and tragedies, that it had become almost like a toxic old friend.
No! Not a friend, not ever like a friend in any way.
But the only one you will ever be able to rely on, it oozed its poison inside his head.
The shadowy crack in the world seemed to contract, and for a moment he thought it was drawing back into the nothingness it came from. But it was not; instead, it shrank and receded, moving closer to the ground.
He wondered why he had stepped forwards this time.
It was inevitable. It happened because you are weak.
The Emptiness was condensing, its outer edges rolling in on themselves, tendrils shrinking back along their own lengths to become nothing. Vague shapes began to coalesce from its smoky, impenetrable depths.
But now it is time to accept your nature.
The edgeless shape became a coherent form, and he found himself transfixed. Immobile, aghast, he could not move or turn away.
All of it was wrong, different in some way or another. The limbs were elongated and spindly, the teeth needle-like and fringed with crimson stains. The skin was too pale, sallow and without life; the hands were slender with discoloured, horny nails. Worst of all, the eyes were narrow and pale and cruel.
But despite all the differences, despite the part of him that only wanted to deny this abomination, there was no escaping the simple fact that had stepped defiantly into the world before his very eyes.
Starting at the boots, and moving up past the combat pants and the webbing and the base layers and the flexible armour, and ending at the face, which parodied awkwardly a grin of genial triumph, there was no denying that the Emptiness had manifested in the image of its maker.
Make us whole again.
• • •
The passages and compartments rang with the near-constant vibrations of Hammer‘s turrets, and with the repetitive clacking of lasers flashing enemy sensors as quickly as they could. The noise was deafening.
On the command deck, Santani snapped brief, concise orders whenever she felt the need to supplement the orderly and efficient battle recipe which Klade and the tactical officer had devised. She was transfixed by the master battle map, totally bemused by what it showed her: whoever commanded the hostile fleet was behaving like an imbecile.
Contrary to her earlier assertion, the turncoat carriers had launched their fighter wings almost immediately, before Hammer was even in range. Not only were the Imperial battleship’s defences operating at full capacity, but the fighters also had to cross the wide empty space between their parent vessels and their target before there was even any point in opening fire. Hammer had torn them to shreds.
There seemed to be no order to the assault that the other ships made, no real coordination between them. Individually they were making Tactical’s life slightly difficult, but they were no more threatening as a whole than they were separately.
What are they doing? Santani wondered. This fight should have been over almost as soon as it began. They started with fifteen ships, and we stand alone. We ought to be dust.
Instead, the lone battleship was putting up quite the fight.
“Turret sync failure: forward port quarter,”
“Compensating,”
“Torpedo incoming: aft one-oh-five degrees, firing countermeasures…”
“Hull damage amidships, decks twelve and thirteen. Control teams on standby. Life support assessment?”
“Life support compromised. I’m sealing those compartments.”
“Destroyer on intercept, forward three-one degrees—”
“We just lost auxiliary fire control.”
Santani’s crew were proving themselves more than capable of holding things together in battle, despite the worries she had had.
Hammer released a rapid burst of laser flashes against the exposed broad side of a Viskr cruiser, and followed those up immediately with a volley from her ventral gauss guns. The enemy hull buckled and split, venting gas, flames, people. She began to pull away from the damaged vessel, and when the gap was wide enough she fired again, this time directly at the engine blocks. The cruiser went up like a nova.
She released a swarm of decoys into the path of a torpedo strike, harmlessly detonating the missiles far from her hull. Her forward gun mounts reoriented, and fired on the torpedo boats that had tried to ambush her, tearing easily through their undefended hulls.
Enemy drones streaked beneath her flak curtain, harrying her defence turrets and trying to knock out their control systems. She had sent her own autonomous drones to worry the largest of the Viskr cruisers, to attack its defences in the same way. With enough turrets taken out of action, even a mighty leviathan would be vulnerable to a concerted, focused strike. Fortunately for Hammer, the hostile drones were much less sophisticated than her turrets, and were gradually picked off until none remained.
Santani began to allow herself to acknowledge hope. There might be a chance they would get through this battle. Oh, the great ship would be beaten out of shape, but she would survive. They might all survive.
She was still holding on to this thought when a klaxon blared its warning. She had no idea what the noise was.
“Mister Klade, what was that?”
He consulted his holo quickly. “The alarm you requested, Captain.”
“What alarm?”
“You asked for a prompt for those sensor readings. From Herros. The vast myste
ry object—”
“Oh, by the worlds,” she said.
They both turned as one, and looked at the battle map.
There at the edge of the cloud of ships was a new shape, a craft unlike anything she had seen before, the remnants of an enormous wormhole dissipating around it. The ship was massive, brutally inaesthetic, and it lumbered slowly into the fray, making a direct line for Hammer. The other ships scattered like fleas, those too slow to move aside were simply smashed across its already scarred and pitted hull.
“Open a wormhole, Captain?” Klade asked.
“And leave our people vulnerable down there? No, we stay here. We stand together, we will fall together.”
“Tactical,” Klade barked. “Assessment?”
“Hull configuration is unknown, they aren’t transmitting any known Friend or Foe identifiers. Hold on… their weapons have gone hot. They’re locking on.”
“Lock our own weapons, and fire.”
“Sir. Firing now.”
Tactical’s hands skipped across her holo, and Hammer unleashed her full fury on the hulk that bore down on her.
She might as well have been a child throwing acorns at a bull.
The dreadnought was almost upon them when it started to slow and released a volley of its own. Dozens of ship-to-ship missiles erupted from their launch tubes, diverging and winding around each other as they tried to outsmart Hammer‘s defences. None made it past the barrage of the flak curtain, but another salvo was launching even before the first would have hit. The dreadnought’s lasers lashed furiously across Hammer‘s offensive targeting sensors, stopping her from returning fire.
“We can’t win like this,” Santani said. Her voice was as grim as her expression. “We either retreat, or we die. Helm, take us down.”
Books One to Three Omnibus (Armada Wars) Page 22
