Shit, Victor thought. He hoped Loris wasn’t expecting the Darius to return very soon.
One of the frigates guarding the jump point, presumably the Darius, burned for the jump point at full acceleration.
Much farther away, the three thousand drives of the First Imperial Battlefleet lit up like a constellation of stars, and the fleet accelerated toward the Mustang jump point. Or, more accurately, they had begun accelerating an hour ago. It would be another sixteen hours before they arrived.
There was no question the Darius wouldn’t be coming back; it would be vaporized within seconds by the Alliance fleet which loitered near the jump point awaiting Victor’s signal.
The question was, did Loris expect the Darius to come back, and, if so, how long would she wait before her alarm bells rang in her head?
Victor sighed. He could do nothing about it other than wait and hope.
“Everyone, feel free to rotate to your bunks and get some rest,” Victor said into the intercom, broadcasting throughout the Alexander. “If things go according to plan, we’ll have a while.”
Fara got up from the pilot’s seat and walked over to him. “What about you, Captain?”
“I can sleep in my seat,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”
“Suit yourself, Captain,” Fara said. “I’ll be in my bunk. Wake me if anything happens.”
“You’ll be the first I’ll wake,” Victor said. “You’re the one who has to fly us out if we get into trouble.”
“You mean, we aren’t already in trouble?” she said, then departed the bridge.
***
Victor remained awake for almost ten hours, waiting for the Lysandrans to become suspicious about the disappearance of the frigate they sent to Mustang. But apparently they weren’t expecting it to come back because, even as the hours passed, they just continued to accelerate toward the Mustang jump point and into the jaws of the trap Victor had baited for them.
As the hours passed, tension gave way to boredom, and soon sleep overtook Victor. He found himself back on Savannah, feeling the familiar cool breeze on his face while he looked over the paradoxically smooth water of the lake. Only in a dream could he have both wind and glass-smooth water.
“I was hoping I was done with these,” Victor said.
“No you weren’t,” said his wife.
Victor turned around to see Gina, her yellow dress flapping in the breeze. His heart ached at the sight of her. “Hi, Gina.”
“Hi, Victor.”
“Where’s Alex?”
“You’ll have to answer that yourself. This is your dream, after all,” Gina said.
“Fair enough.”
“I like the beard,” Gina said.
Victor rubbed his face, feeling the coarse hair under his hand—his prosthetic hand. He looked like the man he was now, not the man his wife had known.
“Hrmm. This is odd,” Victor said, looking himself up and down. “I wonder what this means.”
Gina shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe you’ve become comfortable with who you are now.”
He shook his head at the idea that he was more comfortable as Victor Blackhand than as Victor Selan. “I really hope that isn’t true.”
“Why shouldn’t it be?” Gina asked.
“Because this”—he held up his prosthetic hand for emphasis—“this is not the man I want to be.”
“But it is the man you chose to be, isn’t it?” Gina asked.
“It was who I had to become, to avenge our world, to avenge you and Alex,” Victor said.
Gina grimaced. “You didn’t have to become what you are now. You had a choice, remember?”
“I remember,” Victor said. “I was offered the chance to save the galaxy.” He stepped close to Gina and brushed his artificial fingers through her brown hair. “But I don’t care about saving a galaxy that doesn’t have the people I love in it.”
Gina gave him a sad look and took his prosthetic hand in hers. “You’ve been looking at this from the wrong angle, Victor. Have you ever once considered what Alex and I would’ve wanted you to do?” she said.
Suddenly Alex was here, with his toy, the Guardian. He held up the figure to his father.
Victor reached for it…
***
“Captain?”
Victor jerked awake. He was back on the Alexander’s bridge.
“Victor!” Fara said, leaning over his seat.
“I’m awake! I’m awake! What is it?”
“It’s almost go-time, Captain,” Fara said.
He checked his screen. The Imperial Battlefleet was almost finished with its braking burn. It was less than an hour away, only a few light minutes out. Close enough for the Alexander’s sensors to resolve individual ships.
Victor quickly found the Spear of Lacano deep within the fleet. He highlighted it. “That’s the Imperial flagship, Fara. Move us along their expected path to lay out our mines.”
“This isn’t a suicide run, right?” Fara asked.
He shook his head. “No, it’s not. I promise.”
Fara nodded. “I’ll get us moving then.” She walked to her station at the front of the bridge.
He began arming the warheads, inputting the Imperial flagship’s unique signature and programming the warheads to ignore everything else.
A vector appeared on Victor's screen—a point near the end of the Spear’s expected path toward the jump point, near its braking burn.
“How does this look, Captain?” Fara asked.
Fara intended to drop the mines near where the Spear would be moving the slowest, relative to the mines. It also kept the Alexander a healthy distance from the Lysandran fleet. She had chosen well.
Victor nodded. “This looks good, Fara. Take us there, nice and easy.”
“Nice and easy it is, Captain,” Fara said. The Alexander’s drives came to life, and the frigate accelerated toward the point just a few hundred kilometers distant.
Victor set the mines to automatically drop as soon as Fara hit the target point and then settled in for another, albeit shorter, waiting game. He kept his attention fixed on the nearby Lysandran pickets. They would be the ones most likely to notice what he was doing.
Not so much as a peep came from them as the Alexander cut across the path of the Imperial fleet, and the mines were dropped off the Alexander’s hull.
As Fara flew the Alexander away, the four mines fired their cold-gas thrusters, taking up their preprogrammed positions, forming a vertical square facing the Spear of Lacano.
Victor let out a breath. They had laid mines without alerting the Lysandrans. They were awfully complacent for a fleet so far from home. Was it because of their hard-won victory over his homeworld or of the disastrous peace that followed?
Victor decided he shouldn’t be too critical of the Lysandrans. Their complacency was about to give him what he had been waiting five years for: a shot at Emperor Magnus Lacano.
There was an even chance the powerful mines would destroy the Lysandran flagship outright. If they didn’t destroy the Spear, then they would certainly cripple it, leaving it easy prey for the Alliance fleet when the trap was sprung.
Speaking of which, the time neared when he should signal the hidden courier to jump back to Mustang and summon the fleet.
He busied himself locking a comm laser on the location of the courier and transmitting the Alexander’s sensor data. The Alliance fleet would likely find it useful.
With the data stream running, Victor waited a few minutes before sending the jump command. Adjusting for mutual light-lag, the courier would jump at the same time the Spear hit the mines.
Now it was just a matter of waiting.
Victor leaned forward as the first elements of the Imperial fleet passed the mines. No detonations and no signs that the mines were detected. Good. The mines ignored the other ships and waited for the emperor’s flagship, just as Victor had programmed them to do.
Minutes ticked away on the ETA to detonation while more
and more Lysandran ships passed the mines, oblivious to the hundreds of megatons of explosive yield loitering along the path of their flagship.
And the Spear of Lacano just kept closing on the mines as she slowed, relative to the jump point.
Fara kept the Alexander moving as well, keeping a healthy distance from both the Lysandran pickets and the main fleet. Far enough away that Victor wouldn’t see the detonation happen in real-time but over a minute after the fact. Fine by him, so long as the emperor died.
A ball of fire brighter than any sun appeared inside the Lysandran fleet, the glare blinding the Alexander’s sensors.
Victor’s breath caught in his throat. He had done it. After all these years, after all the fighting, he had finally struck back at Magnus Lacano. Gina’s and Alex’s ghosts could finally rest.
He noted, a few seconds later, the courier jumped out.
Wait, he thought. The mines were supposed to detonate at the same time the courier jumped out. One of the mines must have detonated early. No!
As the glare faded, he saw the Spear of Lacano still intact, in a hard turn as the entire First Imperial Battlefleet scattered.
“No! No! I had him!” Victor said, seething. He played back the sensors and tried to see what had happened.
Then he saw it. A Lysandran cruiser had flown into the minefield the instant the detonation happened. The proximity detonations should have ignored it…unless it had been a contact detonation.
Victor hissed with frustration. “Dammit!”
“Captain!”
A contact detonation—what were the chances of that?
“Captain!” Fara said.
“So close!”
“Victor, snap out of it!” Fara said.
Victor looked up and saw Fara staring at him. Her too-large black eyes were wide with fear. “We’ve got trouble.”
The Lysandrans were shooting at them, he realized. A swarm of missiles flew their way from the pickets. They must have figured out the Alexander was an infiltrator.
“Fly…fly us toward the jump point!” Victor said.
“Already done. Good to see you’ve got your head back in the bridge,” Fara said before returning her attention to flying the ship.
The Alexander was accelerating at 250 gs, well past the point Cormac said they would no longer be emitting a Lysandran drive signature. Not that it mattered now; the premature detonation of the mines gave them away.
A lot of missiles homed in on the Alexander. It was a familiar sight. For the first time in years, Victor remembered how much he hated the Lysandrans’ love of guided missiles.
The Alexander could never, in a million years, turn away so many missiles. Her only hope was to reach the jump point and jump out before they hit.
Fara had taken the initiative and burned for the jump point as soon as the mines blew. However, even with that head start, it was clear the first wave of missiles would reach them before they could jump to safety.
Victor’s artificial hand pounded the armrest almost with a will of its own. He had come so damn close, bare seconds from getting his revenge. And now he was about to be destroyed within sight of the man who had murdered his world! All his efforts wasted…
Well, that wasn’t fair. Judging by the way the Lysandrans scattered every which way, it was clear they thought they had flown into a larger minefield.
The Lysandran formations lost cohesion, leaving them vulnerable to the Alliance ambush on its way. Perhaps the Alexander would be memorialized for that.
Victor fired countermissiles, prioritizing the closest Lysandran missiles; he didn’t have anywhere near enough countermissiles to put a dent in the swarm of warheads headed his way, but he could buy a few seconds more time.
Victor called engineering. “Cormac, I need as much from the drives as you can give me.”
“I can give you 125 percent power, Captain. Any more will melt the new drive rings,” Cormac said.
The Alexander’s acceleration crept past 250 gs as her thrusters redlined, eking out ever more speed. It was still not enough. The first missiles would reach the frigate while she was only a few seconds from the jump point.
Victor would just have to hope the point defenses and shields would keep them alive long enough to jump out.
Incoming missiles winked from existence as the countermissiles got to work. It was like watching someone holding off a swarm of angry bees with a fly swatter.
This was it; this was the end. Would Gina and Alex be waiting for him in the afterlife? Would they even want to see him after what he had spent the last years of his life doing? Victor wasn’t looking forward to the answer.
The proximity alarm screamed as multiple Alliance capital ships jumped in, including a battleship right in front of the Alexander.
“Holy shit!” Fara said. She lurched the Alexander to one side to avoid colliding with the battleship.
As the Alexander swerved out of the way, the giant warship opened fire with its point defenses, creating a wall of kinetic fire to block the incoming missiles.
Victor wasn’t sure if the battleship was covering his ship or just protecting itself from the missiles, but, just to be sure, he switched off the Alexander’s fraudulent IFF.
“Fara, don’t bother jumping. Just fly us through!” Victor said.
“Got it,” Fara said. She adjusted the Alexander’s course, and, two second later, the frigate passed right through the jump point, weaving between the newly arrived Alliance battleships and battlecruisers.
The timing of the Alliance fleet’s arrival couldn’t have been better; they had blocked all the Lysandran missiles bearing down on the Alexander. It looked like Victor’s luck had held out yet again.
“Cormac, dial back the reactors to 100 percent,” Victor said.
“Done, Captain,” Cormac said.
The Alexander’s acceleration fell below 250 gs as the frigate continued to fly away from the battle that was just picking up steam.
The leading elements of the Alliance fleet, concentrated like a closed fist, vectored straight for the scattered First Imperial Battlefleet. Along the way, they completely annihilated the Lysandran picket force.
Thrusters flared as the ships of the First Imperial Battlefleet attempted to cancel their momentum and return to combat formation, but they couldn’t do so before the Alliance battleships reached them.
The remaining ships of the Alliance fleet shot from the jump point like a spear and punched clean through the Lysandran Battlefleet. The Alliance spearhead of heavy battleships and battlecruisers scourged the exposed and isolated squadrons of Lysandran warships, leaving them vulnerable for the almost unending waves of lighter warship weapon fire following behind them.
The Battle of Gaddon had only just begun, and its outcome was certain.
“Fara, cancel out our momentum and vector us back toward the fleet,” Victor said.
“Are we joining the battle?” Fara asked. She clearly didn’t think that would be a good idea.
“No, keep us at a safe distance. Our part in this fight is over,” said Victor.
Fara sighed in relief. “Ah, good. I was worried there for a moment.” The Alexander reversed course and burned her thrusters in the opposite direction, slowing down relative to the jump point as the battle reached its climax.
Scattered, disorganized, and bloodied, three-quarters of the Lysandran fleet rerouted, fleeing for open space. The remaining Lysandran warships concentrated around the Spear of Lacano and began a fighting retreat toward the Uffizi jump point.
Then a small fast ship launched from the Spear of Lacano, shooting straight for the jump point.
It didn’t take much of a leap on Victor’s part to guess who was aboard it.
“Fara, intercept that ship!”
“Captain, it’s moving too fast for us to catch before she reaches the jump point,” Fara said.
“Then we follow her through!” Victor said. “I’m not letting the emperor get away. Not after all this!”
> “Captain?”
“Do it, Fara!”
Fara nodded and turned her attention to her controls.
Victor called engineering. “Cormac, run the drives as hard as you can.”
“Roger that, Captain,” Cormac said. “May I ask why?”
“A fast ship, likely carrying the emperor, just launched from the Lysandran flagship,” Victor said. “I intend to pursue them.”
“I see,” Cormac said. “Pushing the reactor to 120 percent.”
The Alexander shot toward the distant vessel, leaving behind the pitched battle between the Alliance fleet and the scattered remnants of the First Imperial Battlefleet.
Both sides were too heavily engaged with each other to send ships either for the Alexander or the emperor’s fleeing vessel.
The emperor was all Victor’s. Now he just had to catch him before Magnus reached Lysandran space.
Chapter 24
The Tenor 21 jump point loomed before the Daisy Mae, barely more than fifteen minutes away at her current acceleration.
Lysandra allowed herself to relax. Captain Dryer and her crew got Lysandra out of Lysandran space and out of reach of the traitor, Uther Solari. Now all Lysandra had to do was reach her father and get him to turn around his fleet. She hoped she still had time.
“Activity at the jump point!” said the Mae’s sensor officer. “A ship just jumped in.”
“What kind?” Lena asked.
“A small one, Captain. Barely big enough to mount a jump drive. But it’s transmitting a Lysandran IFF code. It’s military. A yacht by the looks of it.”
“May I take a look?” Lysandra asked.
Lena nodded. “Use my station.”
Lysandra leaned over and examined the screen. The ship was, indeed, a yacht. And when she looked at the ship’s IFF code, she felt a chill. It was the Spear of Lacano’s yacht, her father’s.
She pressed a button on the console to open a channel to the yacht.
“Hey!” Lena said, but Lysandra ignored her.
“This is Princess Lysandra Lacano to the yacht from the Spear of Lacano. Is the emperor aboard? Tell me what happened!”
Her father’s face appeared on the comm display a second later. “Lysandra? What in the name of Providence are you doing on a tramp freighter?”
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