Warpath
Page 15
“But what else can we do? We have to stand and fight,” Alice said over their encrypted communications channel.
“We can still carry this fight forward,” Jake said. “With help, but not on this ship.” Jake nearly fell over as he hurriedly turned towards a control panel. His vacsuit armour helped him restore his balance. “Can you control the maxjack from here?”
“Aye, I can use this and my control unit,” Frost said.
“What? What are we doing?” Ayan asked, looking from Jake to Frost.
“We’re going to take one of those pretty battlecruisers coming after us,” Frost said.
“Exactly, and we have to stay in control of the Warlord remotely while we do this, or it could all go wrong,” Jake added. “Can you coordinate with Oz and get us a few hundred soldiers? We’re going to need their help.”
“A few hundred?” Ayan asked, wide-eyed.
“Aye, taking the Barricade was easy,” Frost said.
“It was a ship full of amateurs, greenbacks,” Stephanie added over the communications channel. “We’re in the rear cargo hold. Killed two Knights on the way, sealed off all entrances. We should have about ten minutes before they break through, maybe more.”
“Weld armour plates over the doors, there are spares secured under the Uriel launch rails.”
“I see them, on it,” Stephanie said.
“Okay, so I’m ordering a couple hundred soldiers,” Ayan said.
“Wait three seconds,” Finn said as he stared at his command and control unit. “Two, one,” he counted.
Jake’s heart skipped a beat as all of his electronics flickered for a moment, but they returned to normal before there was reason to panic. “There goes the Big Surprise, I guess they didn’t manage to destroy it before it went off after all.”
“Open a channel now?” Ayan asked.
“Yup, hope you can get one,” Frost said.
“Triton, this is Ayan aboard the Warlord,” she said.
“Good to hear from you, Commodore, this is Commander Victor Davis, the Admiral is a little busy,” Victor replied. “Great work on that EMP bomb, the carrier groups’ shields are almost completely down. Our readings indicate that you fried a lot of electronics in the noses of those ships.”
“How about the battecruisers specifically? Did any of them get hit harder than the others?” she asked.
“Three ate that blast pretty heavily, at a range of about five hundred metres. Why?”
“We want one,” Ayan said. “I’m not sure what’s about to happen exactly, but we are still fighting Order Knights here, and are going to change location to one of the destroyers heavily affected by our surprise. We need boarding teams to follow us in.”
“Also, we need someone to blast those hangar doors open,” Jake said as he finished syncing his command and control unit with the flight controls for the Warlord. He sent a signal to Ashley relieving her of pilot duties, and telling her to stand by.
“Right, so an order of boarding teams with a side of crazy pilots, if you please?” Ayan asked. “About two or three hundred of the former and as many of the latter as you can spare.”
“We have a Clever Dream itching to get involved,” Victor answered.
“Ronin here,” Minh-Chu interjected. “Glad to see most of you made it through. Samurai squadron, support the Clever Dream’s run, fire on active weaponry. We only have to clear a path to the fore hangar.”
“This is Triton Flight, I’m sending three gunships and Terror Squad to assist,” Chief Mendle said.
“We have our cover,” Jake said under his breath. He began turning the Warlord, and one of the main thruster pods stopped firing. “We have a Knight cutting power to systems.”
“Well at least he’s not trying to cut through the doors like the rest of them,” Stephanie retorted.
“I can still fly this thing with three main thrusters,” Jake said, nodding to Frost.
“Maxjack is working fine, I don’t think they know we’re planning anything interesting,” Frost replied.
“This is Alaka,” announced a warm, low voice over their communicators. “Triton has given me command of twenty squads. I will lead them with my own. We are loading into gunships and shuttles now. Thank you.”
“No, thank you!” Ayan said, excitedly.
“We begin launching in two minutes,” Alaka said.
“Have you chosen a ship yet, Jake?” Ronin asked. “We kind of need to know which one we need to blow open.”
“What looks good to you?” Jake said as he focused most of his attention on guiding the Warlord back into the direction of the enemy Order of Eden fleet. He only had access to basic information. The shapes of each ship with their major systems and positions relative to his ship were visible. The Warlord’s sensors weren’t capable of determining more.
“Well,” Ronin mused nonchalantly. “I think it’s between two. One is called the Blessed Mission, and it’s sort of off-white, and the other is called Eternity, and it’s more of a light-grey-ish.” Minh-Chu waited a moment then burst; “I don’t know! They’re about the same, with about the same level of damage from the electromagnetic pulse, their forward sensors are equally dead. Pick left or right?”
“I’ll take the Blessed Mission,” Jake said, “and I already have a new name picked out.”
“That’s bad luck, you know,” Dent said. “Renaming a ship.”
“Luck is for games and fools,” Jake said. “We’re not playing and if we’re fools, we’ll be the last to know.” He had the Warlord thrusting towards the Blessed Mission’s main hangar and was busy making fine adjustments. “We’ll be on that deck in one minute and twenty four seconds or we’ll collide with that door in one minute and twenty two seconds.”
“On it,” Ronin replied. “We’ll get that open.”
“What do you want me to do? Grip the deck once we’re down?” Frost asked.
“Yes, we’ll have to use the maxjack like articulated landing gear,” Jake said. “We’ll only have three minutes to leave the Warlord once we touch down. I’m setting the autopilot so it takes off after that time then heads for the least damaged destroyer, that one there,” Jake said as he marked the furthest destroyer from them on his comm unit’s small holographic tactical display. “I need you to set the maxjack to grip the hull of that ship as soon as it makes contact. I’m linking the maxjack with the containment systems for our antimatter reserves.”
“But, the Warlord!” Finn said.
“It’s always been more a weapon than a ship,” Jake said. “Today it’ll be a bomb, and it’s going to save lives.”
“Aye,” Frost said. “Easy to set up. There it is, done.”
“I’ll finish the antimatter link,” Ayan said.
Jake saw a large explosion on the starboard side of the Blessed Mission and realized that the British Alliance was still firing on it with their largest munitions. “Oz, can you tell the British to stop shelling my new ship?” he asked over scrambled communications between the Warlord and Triton Fleet.
“This is the Triton Flight Deck, we’re signalling them now and marking your target,” replied Chief Mendle. “I think they were just trying to keep them off balance until the last moment.”
“Tell them that they’re on the hook for any holes I find once we’re aboard,” Jake shot back.
The last preparations were completed in silence. Jake could see enough through his sensors to know that the Clever Dream fired a vicious volley of missiles at the pair of destroyers defending the carrier central to the Order of Eden battle group, further delaying their fighter operations. The ship hadn’t been able to get a single vessel off its deck since entering the area.
The fighters accompanying the Clever Dream was split between supporting the large gunship, which seemed to gleefully skip through the battlefield as it disappeared and reappeared, cloaking itself between volleys and targeting the weapons on the battlecruiser the Warlord wasn’t flying towards and its two accompanying destroyers.
“Finally,” Jake sighed as a third surgical missile strike opened a large hole in the hangar doors of the Blessed Mission. The Warlord’s upper port thruster scraped a jagged edge as the ship passed through. Everyone cringed as the vessel touched down hard and scraped for several metres.
Finn, Frost, Alice, Ayan and most of the people gathered in the starboard cargo area looked to Jake. “I’m rusty!” he announced with a shrug. “Disembark, quick, cover our exit. We can’t let any of the Knights leave the Warlord.” He picked up a shield droid with narrow treads and a one metre tall emitter rod, activated it and handed it to Alice as she passed. “Drop this ahead of you, before you go through that hatch,” he told her, pointing at the doors the Big Surprise passed through only minutes before.
“Okay, hurry up and get off the ship,” Alice said.
“Don’t worry,” Jake told her. “Just provide cover for the first group with your team.”
Jake helped most of the people with him jump down through the launch doors, Ayan and Frost were the last through before he dropped through himself.
“Check in,” Jake said. “My group is out.”
“Alice here, my group and the Rangers are out.”
“Stephanie here, my group and about three hundred two skitters are out.”
Jake checked their lists against the confirmed casualty list Crewcast was keeping and nodded. One hundred sixty seven people made it off the Warlord, the dead they left behind would be cremated with the ship. The British Alliance reported that they’d located all seven of the Warlord’s escape vessels and rescue operations were under way.
The hangar was illuminated by the firing thrusters of gunships taking turns dropping their soldiers off, not taking time to land, they literally walked off the debarkation ramps and fell to the deck in groups of fourteen, except for Alaka’s squad of nafali soldiers, who leapt clear of their gunship. They looked even larger in their specially made vacsuit armour. The metal plates were painted with snarling faces and jagged symbols in the Nafalli language.
The deployment was so quick and practiced that the enemy defending the landing bay, hiding behind shuttles and taking cover in hatchways, were driven back by the shock of it. Three automated shield droids dropped from one of the slim Triton combat shuttles. They rolled towards the Warlord crewmembers, expanding their protective barriers to join the energy shields that were already being projected by the bots Jake and his crew had already activated. All in all, over four hundred crewmembers and armoured troops filled the main launch bay, crowding the enemy defenders, blasting them into corners and incinerating them within minutes. Jake didn’t have the opportunity to fire a shot, stuck in the middle of the deployment pattern.
A hatch from the Warlord burst open and an Order Knight emerged, his shield bending the light around him. The force of every soldier and crewman left from the Warlord was on him before he could fire a shot. Within three seconds, the landed boarding crews joined in.
Jake only had a chance to fire two of his explosive shells before there was nothing left of the Knight but a narrow crater on the deck. The timer for the Warlord’s departure continued to count down, and Jake couldn’t stop glancing at it. “Clear the hangar doors,” he ordered as it counted down to nine. The boarding crew craft did their best to move to the side, leave, or hover near the deck.
The Warlord’s thrusters pulsed, then fired gently, lifting up with a precarious wobble before backing out through the hole in the launch doors. Jake took a deep breath as it disappeared from sight. “Give ‘em hell, one last time,” he said. “Thanks for keeping us alive.”
Alaka dropped down with one other member of his boarding crew. He’d replaced the fighter class weapon he once carried with a new two barrel weapon that was only a little shorter, still nearly as tall as Ayan, who stood beside Jake. From what he could see, the top portion was some kind of beam weapon, while the bottom barrel was a rapid fire shrapnel gun, made to rip through infantry but not through thick hull plates. “Where do you want us, Captain?” Alaka asked.
“Now that’s a sight,” Frost muttered wide eyed at the towering pair of Nafali.
“Alice’s squad and the maintenance crew will clear the ships in this bay. Stephanie’s people will go with you. How does the main causeway look?”
“Our scans show troops regrouping there,” Alaka replied. “They are blocking the only way to the bridge.”
“We’re going to take it in one rush, cloaked. Remmy’s Rangers are going to start heading for engineering, just in case the crew decides to try to activate a self-destruct. I’d like him to take half the boarding teams with him.”
“Aye,” Alaka replied. “There may not be enough room for them to move through the choke points.”
“Use lesser routes, clear rooms as best as you can along the way,” Jake said. “Remmy will be able to direct them in more detail, he’s one of the best Rangers I’ve seen.”
“Aye, they will follow his orders,” Alaka said.
“All units, engage cloaking systems,” Jake ordered. In the space of seven seconds it appeared as though every crewmember from the Warlord, and every boarder from the Triton disappeared. Jake knew that the odds that Regent Galactic technology had caught up to their cloaking systems were very low. The ship would be theirs if they could avoid any serious missteps.
Chapter 19
Victory’s End
Oz could feel the slightest impression of what was going on between Hausgiest and the being at the core of the other ship. After all the time he’d spent mentally connected to Hausgiest, learning about him, asking him questions about his existence, he’d never considered that the heart of a Sol Defence ship could hate another of its kind. There it was, at the edge of Oz’s perception, the awareness that Hausgiest was trying to calm the Pontos’ living intelligence down, to ease its hatred of him and the crew Hausgiest’s extended body, the Triton, was host to.
“Admiral,” Agameg addressed from his station at tactical. “That last torpedo took out the Pontos’ main thrusters, they are adrift with minimal thrust power.”
“Hold fire,” Oz ordered. “All stations; hold fire. Get me a deep scan of that ship, I want to know everything now that her shields are down, right down to the DNA of the captain,” he said. “What is wrong with this thing?” he said under his breath. “Why are we so significant to Citadel that they’ve trained their intelligence to hate us?”
Victor only gave him a momentary glance. He was aware that there was something more going on in Oz’s head, a discussion that would come up later, Oz was sure.
‘The being in control of the Pontos was tortured,’ Hausgiest replied telepathically. ‘Another controller, older than me, was in its mind. It is a believer in Citadel, perhaps a component of its leadership. It tortured him, it brainwashed the heart of the Pontos into believing in the Order of Eden, in a destiny that required the success of this mission, but it took months of torture.’
‘That’s possible?’ Oz asked mentally.
‘Only in the young,’ Hausgeist replied. ‘He wants to show me the conviction of his belief! He is pushing his reactors past their limit to charge his shields so he can buy time to prepare another planetary attack weapon. This time he’s going to detonate it while it’s still inside the ship! He wants to destroy all the ships in range.’
“Could we break through its shields?” Oz asked aloud, forgetting that the people around him could not hear Hausgiest’s last statement.
“They are drawing power from their last planetary wea
pon,” Hausgiest replied through the bridge sound system. “Their shields will be fully charged in nine seconds.”
“Fire all weapons, reverse away from the Pontos,” Oz ordered. “Maintain fire while we retreat behind Kambis’ horizon.” He sat in the command seat and looked at the tactical display for a moment. The Barricade and the British Alliance were moving to close on the Order of Eden carrier group, which was too close to the Pontos. The only segment of combattants that weren’t already too close to the Pontos, and drawing closer, were the mid-sized ships in Triton Fleet, who were returning to Tamber orbit just in case there was a third prong to the Order’s offensive. “Open a channel to all ships,” Oz said. “This is Admiral McPatrick. The Pontos is about to self destruct, get as much distance as you can. Fire on that ship if you can, maybe we can knock out some of its powered systems.”
“Sir, one of the Pontos’ gunships is hailing us on an open channel,” announced communications.
“Let’s hear it,” Oz said.
“Triton Command, most of the crew aboard that ship are dead, the intelligence and the first officer have taken control. They have activated another antimatter cluster weapon. We surrender and request asylum. Our weapons are powering down.”
“Is there any way to shut it down?” Oz asked.
“No, you must get as much distance as you can or get your fleet on the other side of the planet.”
“Can you get there yourself?” Oz asked.
“We have about ten minutes before it activates, so, yes, but not with every ship in the system firing on us,” replied the pilot.
Oz silenced his side of the communication using his command and control unit. “You scanned their ship?” he asked the analysts to his left.
“We did, his missile bay is empty, and their weapons are powered down. Approximately nine percent shield power left. There are no signs of antimatter, and the gunship is powered using a pair of fusion reactors that cannot be set to explode.”
“Do your scans confirm what he’s saying?”