Ruins of Empire: Blood on the Stars III

by Jay Allan

  Jamison had ordered his people to sleep while Dauntless completed its journey toward the sun and back, but he doubted many had managed it. He certainly hadn’t. He’d gone down to sickbay to check on Stockton, and then he’d sat in the launch bay, watching the crew prep and check the remaining fighters.

  “Here they come,” he said sharply, watching as the enemy fighters moved directly toward his own squadrons. He had four of his units outfitted as fighters, with only the six remaining ships of Green squadron armed as bombers. That was just six plasma torpedoes, even assuming all of them made it through.

  The enemy had twenty-one fighters, all interceptors. That was good news. Jamison’s people didn’t have to worry about screening Dauntless, at least not from anything as dangerous as a bombing attack. That meant his interceptors could all hit the enemy wing…and with any luck, wipe it out quickly.

  “Break,” he snapped into his comm, and he pulled back on the throttle and blasted his ship toward the closest enemy. He flipped up a small lever, arming his first missile, and a few seconds later he launched. He swung his ship around hard, coming down almost behind one of the lead Union ships. He armed and fired his second missile, even as the corner of his eye caught the destruction of his first target. He pulled up again, panning his eyes across the display. Half the enemy fighters were already gone, consumed by his squadrons’ missile barrage. His people had only lost one ship so far.

  Now it was time to close, time to finish the job with lasers. Then the Greens could hit that ship. Every plasma torpedo that connected was that much less Dauntless had to do, that much better shape the battleship would be in when the other Union vessels finally arrived.

  * * *

  “Primaries, fire!” Barron was hunched forward in his chair, his hands clenched into fists. The enemy ship had been putting up a fight. Three of his bombers had scored hits, and Dauntless had connected twice with its deadly primaries. Everything had gone exactly how Barron had planned it—but the enemy was somehow still in the fight.

  Barron listened to the familiar sound of his ship’s main weapons, but before he got the report on whether they’d hit again, Dauntless shook hard, the enemy ship’s battered broadside connecting with four laser turrets. The blasts hit hard, and Barron knew that where they impacted, sections of the hull had melted and compartments were torn open, exposed to the vacuum of space. He closed his eyes for just a second, imagining men and women blasted out through the jagged gashes, sucked into the frozen, airless void.

  “Bring the secondaries online,” he roared. The incredibly powerful Confederation primary guns were a mixed blessing. They were the hardest hitting things in space, but they were just two guns, and at closer range, the dozen turrets of Dauntless’s secondaries could sometimes do more total damage, especially to a battered target.

  Eleven turrets, he corrected himself. One of Dauntless’s port secondaries was nothing but a blackened hole clawed out of the ship’s hull and a few splotches of melted and rehardened metal. But eleven laser cannons firing together was a powerful barrage, and Tyler Barron knew he had the best gunners in either fleet.

  “Fire,” he said, his voice tinged with malice toward the enemy. The war had been a hard one, and concepts like honor and respect for an adversary had worn down into a dull hatred. He had sympathized with the Union spacers early in the war, acknowledged that they had no choice but to serve, that they were virtual slaves to their political masters. But he didn’t care anymore. The war had become a holocaust, and his thoughts were simpler now, grimmer. They had to die. Every Union ship destroyed, every officer and spacer killed, brought the war one step closer to its end.

  Barron watched the display as the damage assessment rolled in. Eight of the lasers had hit the enemy ship, at least two of them in vulnerable spots.

  “Maintain fire. All stations, fire at will.”

  The true edge the secondaries had over Dauntless’s main guns was rate of fire. The lasers recharged in less than thirty seconds, as quickly as fifteen if the teams pushed it. The primaries took a solid two minutes, sometimes close to three. That was a long time in a close-range fight.

  Barron watched as his lasers fired again. And again. As they did, the return fire lessened sharply. The battle was almost at an end.

  “Keep pounding,” Barron said, unnecessarily. His people knew their business.

  “Captain, Commander Jamison is requesting permission to begin landing operations.”

  Barron’s head snapped around, back toward the display. His squadrons needed to be refit, but they had enough fuel to wait until the fight between the ships was over. He almost told Travis to order them to go into a holding pattern, but then he changed his mind. “Advise Commander Jamison that Beta bay is available. He is to bring as many ships as possible in, and hold the others until further notice.” It was virtually impossible to land squadrons on the side of the active broadside. The calculations involved in ensuring none of the fighters came too close to a laser blast were just too precise. But getting half his birds in would help get the refit operation underway. He’d gotten a jump on the two ships that had been pursuing Dauntless, but they were still coming…and he wanted his fighters ready before his battered ship faced another fight. At least as many of them as possible.

  “Commander Jamison is to prioritize Blue and Scarlett Eagle squadrons.” If Barron couldn’t have all his squadrons ready, he damned sure wanted his best.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And that includes him, Commander. Jamison is to land with the initial squadrons. The rest of his people will be just fine.” Barron knew, left to his own devices, Jamison would be the last pilot to land. He respected the sense of duty that drove that impulse, but he wanted his strike force commander ready to go when the elite squadrons launched again…especially with Jake Stockton out of action.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Barron turned back to the display. The readings from the enemy ship were pouring in now. Its energy levels were plunging, its thrust dead, its return fire anemic. A wave of energy jolted through his exhausted body. He was savoring the moment of the kill. Once, he would have been consumed with mixed feelings, overcome with the need to offer surrender terms to his crippled foe. But war had done its job, stripped away his romantic notions of a warrior’s honor. Barron was an emissary of death now, and he had only one thought regarding his enemy.

  “All batteries, maintain maximum fire. Blast that thing back to the atoms it’s made of.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  CFS Dauntless

  System Z-111 (Chrysallis)

  Deep Inside the Quarantined Zone (“The Badlands”)

  309 AC

  “They’ll be in range in twenty-two minutes Captain. Primaries are online, but Lieutenant Billings advises the power lines are badly damaged. He’s got several reroutes in place, but…”

  “Understood, Commander.” Barron hoped his interruption hadn’t been too aggressive in tone, but he was just too exhausted to listen to the usual engineer’s disclaimer about the power systems and the primaries. His people had done an extraordinary job managing and repairing the damage Dauntless had suffered in the past weeks, and he was well aware neither they nor his battered ship owed him a thing. But they were all in the fight together, and there were only two options. Victory or death.

  Dauntless would fight. His ship would give its all. If the primaries went down, she would fight with her secondaries. She would battle to the last turret, the last fighter, the last watt of power produced by her straining reactors. If she won the victory, it would be a triumph for all of them, for the fighter pilots who had lost so many of their brethren, for the gunners at their stations and the sweating engineers crawling through the bowels of the ship.

  And Fritzie and her people over there…and those contraptions they created…

  He had no idea if the minefield would work, no real sense of the power of those devices, save a vague mathematical idea of the power each explosion would unleash. Effective
mines were usually highly sophisticated devices, with propulsion units allowing them to close with targets passing nearby. These had none of that, just a simple fuse, and a hodgepodge of ECM devices the brilliant engineer had managed to throw together from bits and pieces of the dismantled shuttles. It was an amazing achievement for the small corps of engineers, and almost unimaginable display of their brilliance and skill. But he had no idea if it would work. If it would be enough.

  “Captain, Commander Fritz is on the line.”

  Barron reached down, grabbing his headset and putting it on. “Fritzie?”

  “We’re ready, Captain. I’ve rigged up a…call it a launcher…using the remains of one of the docking tubes. We’ve run some calculations, and we’ve set the tube up so we can create velocity, at least enough to launch these in roughly the pattern we want.” She paused. “It’s crude, Captain, but I’ve run some calculations. We’ve got some play on angling the tube, and we can vary the amount of air pressure we use to launch. I’ve got a rough coverage plan if you’d like to review it.”

  “No, Fritzie, I trust your judgment.” It went against his nature not to check and recheck everything, but he knew there was no point. There wasn’t time to change any of the plans, so there was no point in even looking. Fritzie had earned his trust over their time serving together, and he was determined to give it to her. However difficult it was for him.

  “Very well, sir. Shall we begin launching?”

  “Yes, Fritzie. Get started…and get it done as quickly as you can.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Barron sighed softly and closed his eyes for a few seconds. He had Dauntless ready, her squadrons prepared to launch. His battleship would hit the enemy just as they moved into the makeshift minefield. With any luck, the antimatter canisters would help even the score, make the two on one fight a fairer matchup.

  “Captain! We’re picking up launches, sir.”

  Barron was surprised. He hadn’t expected the enemy to launch this far out.

  “They’re from the other ship, sir. The disabled one.” A pause. “The one we believed was disabled.”

  Barron felt like he’d been hit in the gut. The ship Travis and his people had fought first, the one that had been crippled near the transwarp point. He shook his head in disgust. He frequently praised his own engineers, felt gratitude for all the times they’d brought Dauntless back from the brink and sent her into the fight once again. Somehow, for all that he’d almost come to expect miracles from his people, it seemed a cold surprise that the enemy had managed to get their wounded vessel back in the fight.

  “Bring us around, Commander. Fifty percent thrust, directly toward that ship. And scramble all fighters.” Barron suspected the enemy vessel was still in bad shape, that it had managed to get its engines partially back online and at least one of its fighter bays operational, probably only by the barest of margins. But it was coming at Dauntless from almost the opposite direction of the other ships.

  He couldn’t stay where he was, absorb attacks from two sides. That single ship had to be badly damaged still, and that meant he could take it out quickly. With any luck, Fritz’s mines would hurt, or at least intimidate, the enemy. That would buy time for Dauntless to get back. Before the Union ships could land FRs, and wipe out the Marines and engineers still on the artifact.

  The plan had been desperate enough before, but now it was hanging by a thread. Barron hated the idea of launching his squadrons now, of risking facing the remaining two ships without them, but the “crippled” ship had launched an impressive strike, one he simply couldn’t allow to reach Dauntless unimpeded.

  They must have gotten both bays operational. Do they have a Fritzie over there?

  “Fighter control reports all squadrons ready to launch, Captain. Awaiting your command.”

  Barron stared out at the display for a few seconds. He almost withheld the order. He knew he was just postponing the inevitable. Even if the antimatter mines worked, the enemy battleships would launch their squadrons long before they entered the range of the makeshift weapons. If both ships were completely destroyed, he’d still have to deal with enemy fighters, trapped and suicidal. But he had to survive this attack to face the next.

  “Launch all squadrons.”

  * * *

  “Gator, watch out…you’ve got one on your tail.”

  “Roger that, Warrior. I’m…”

  The voice of his pilot was replaced by harsh static. Timmons’s fists clenched in frustration and anger. The Union squadrons weren’t a match for Dauntless’s, not really, but that didn’t mean men and women he knew wouldn’t die in the fight. Weren’t dying, even now.

  The enemy strike force had no bombers. He suspected they hadn’t been able to get any of their fighters equipped for anti-ship assaults. It made sense. The plasma torpedoes and their mountings were big, bulky. If the sophisticated rail systems in the enemy bays were out of action, there was no way to get the heavy weapons in place, at least not in any reasonable time. It all made sense. But it also made the whole thing more hazardous for his squadrons in one way. Interceptors were a lot more dangerous to other fighters than bombers.

  As “Gator” Simmel can attest…

  “All right Eagles and Blues, you’re the best pilots in the fleet, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to fucking focus! Take your eyes off these people and they will seal your fate. I know you’re all tired, but we’ve got a job to do, and that’s all that matters. You’ve all got stims…take ’em if you need ’em. But I don’t want anybody falling asleep at their controls.”

  His pilots were highly capable—over half the men and women in the two squadrons rated as aces—but exhaustion was starting to take its toll…and that was something he couldn’t accept. Dying because you were outnumbered, because the enemy was better, or because you faced overwhelming odds…he understood those. But being killed by an enemy you should defeat, but don’t because you’re tired? It made him rage inside at the waste of it all.

  “I want these squadrons cleaned up, and I mean now. You all look like shit, and this isn’t the time for it.”

  Jamison had left him in command of Dauntless’s two elite squadrons, as he led the Greens and the Yellows in an attack run against the Union battleship. “Lynx” Federov and her Reds had been deployed in front of Dauntless, a precaution made far unnecessary by the lack of enemy bombers. They were moving up, even now, but Timmons knew he shouldn’t need them. Not if he could shake his dazed and exhausted pilots back to their standard level of performance.

  “Attack,” he shouted into the comm. “All fighters, attack now. It’s time to finish this.”

  He brought his ship around, opening up with his lasers on the Union fighter right in front of him. There were about fifteen enemy ships left, and he was going to see something done about that.

  Right now…

  * * *

  “Fritzie, we’re about to enter firing range. We’ll finish this as quickly as we can, but we’re out of range…and out of position too.” Barron’s voice went silent for a few seconds. “Those other ships are going to get there before we can get back.”

  “The mines are deployed, Captain. We’re as ready as we’re going to be. But the fuses are tied to short-range comm units, sir. Dauntless is too far away to control them.”

  “You’ll have to do it.”

  “Captain, I’m an engineer, not a gunner. Not a bridge officer.”

  “You’re a gunner now, Fritzie.”

  Fritz stood at the portable comm unit, suddenly feeling the weight of the past week’s fatigue. She’d been in mortal danger, of course, many times. It wasn’t fear of death or defeat paralyzing her. But for all the desperate situations she’d been in, all the times she’d raced against the clock to feed Captain Barron the power he needed or to get a crucial system back online, she’d never stared into the display before, watching the enemy approaching, deciding when and where to attack. That had always been Barron’s role. And the stress of
it was crushing her now, testing her to her limits.

  “I’ll try, Captain.”

  “Do better than try, Fritzie. There’s not a doubt in my mind you can do this…unless you convince yourself you can’t. Be calm, cool. Watch them approach, and when you think they’re as close as they’re going to get to one or more of those mines…do it. It might as well be all at once, Fritzie. That ECM you worked up isn’t going to hold forever. We’ve got surprise on our side, but we can’t push it too far.”

  “Yes, sir.” Barron’s words made her feel better. A little. But she still wanted to crouch down and vomit.

  “I believe you can do this, Fritzie…and I need you to believe it too.”

  “I do, Captain.” She hated lying to Barron, but she was far from confident.

  “Do what you have to do, Fritzie, just like you’ve always done before. Barron out.”

  The line went dead, and Fritz turned toward the display. Like everything else she had available on the ancient ship, it was a makeshift affair, cobbled together from the scraps of their shuttles and other tools. But it worked well enough. If she failed, she knew should couldn’t blame the equipment.

  The enemy ships were almost there. She had to make this work…she simply had to. Dauntless wasn’t going to get back in time to prevent a landing. And two Union battleships carried five to six hundred FRs. She knew Rogan’s people would fight to the last man. But there were barely seventy of them left, and as good as they were, they had no chance, low on ammunition and outnumbered eight or nine to one.

  Her eyes were fixed on the screen, on the two ovals moving slowly forward, flanked by three smaller icons, the last survivors of the escorts that had accompanied the Union task force when it first emerged into the system. They were getting close…but not close enough. Not yet.