by Jay Allan
Vian Tulus turned to the main display, checking the range to the enemy. His contingent had been fortunate so far. Save for the vicious fighting aboard the vessels that had been boarded, his ships had mostly escaped the enemy’s attacks. There was fortune in that, Tulus knew, but shame as well. The Highborn had learned that the Alliance vessels were the least dangerous of the Pact’s armament, their ranges the shortest and the strength of their weapons the lowest. Palatian lore had often excused backward technology as a point of warrior’s pride, instilling in the more sophisticated weaponry of their neighbors some hint of cowardice, some dishonor in overreliance on equipment and machinery. Tulus had come far from his early days, far enough to realize the absurdity of such thoughts. Victory was victory, and defeat meant death and slavery. And Palatian technological levels were at best some arbitrary assignment of ‘appropriate’ for a true warrior to employ. Palatians had directed their weapons on enemies with less sophisticated weaponry many times without assigning any of the enhanced levels of glory they claimed for themselves.
“All ships are to open fire the instant we enter range. I want gunners constantly updating firing solutions. This is the greatest battle any of us have fought. Every shot is vital.”
The Hegemony and Confederation battlelines were already engaged in combat with the Highborn…and Colossus was locked in a death struggle with its twin, the Highborns’ newest weapon. It tore at Tulus’s soul to watch the struggle but not yet to be engaged. His fighters had joined the initial dogfight, of course, but his Palatian ancestors screamed to him from the dark recesses of his mind, howling for the might of the Alliance fleet to plunge into the maelstrom, to fight, and if need be die, alongside its allies.
The Imperator’s insides were tight, his muscles flexed with tension as he watched the distance readings drop. A few of his ships were taking fire as he watched the screen, but his forces were still mostly being ignored. Tulus knew this was simple tactical logic, but it was also a slap in the face…and he would make sure the Highborn paid for besmirching Palatian honor.
The numbers ticked down, and Tulus turned toward his senior aide. “All ships…open fire.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Forward Base Striker
Vasa Denaris System
Year 328 AC (After the Cataclysm)
Federov’s ears echoed with the drumbeat of her heart. Her face was wet with perspiration, and her body was rigid, her fingers pale white from squeezing the throttle has tightly as possible. She was blasting her fighter at full power—beyond full power, even, since she’d flipped off her safety controls—toward Jake Stockton. His responses to her communications had concerned her, but it was seeing his ship cease its wild evasive maneuvers and go into a straight-line course that had pushed her into panic mode.
She knew what he was doing, and she could hardly believe it. Jake Stockton had been a hard taskmaster, a wild and occasionally boastful pilot, and a bit of a carouser in his younger days…but one thing she’d never seen him do—ever—was give up.
Until just then.
A dozen Highborn ships were chasing Stockton, and as soon as they realized he was traveling on a dead straight course, they’d adjust their targeting to take him down. Federov was struggling with her own feelings on all that had happened, sympathy for her old comrade dueling with natural anger over the harm Stockton’s captivity had caused…but it was clear to her, at that moment even more than it had been before, she didn’t want to watch him die.
She knew in her heart, and the in the coldly analytical part of her mind, that Jake Stockton had not willingly aided the enemy in any way. Indeed, he’d placed himself in jeopardy by transmitting the evasion routines. Now, he was going to kill himself to atone for his sins.
Sins that were not truly his.
Federov couldn’t allow that to happen, she couldn’t let Stockton die. But she wasn’t sure she could do anything about it. She’d tried to convince him to come back, begged him, but she knew more than almost anyone just how stubborn he could be. The most urgent task was to take out the fighters close enough to attack Stockton’s helpless ship…but there were close to a dozen of them, and that was a lot to handle, even for ‘Lynx’ Federov.
She’d tried to reach him, to convince him to resume his evasive maneuvers, and to return back to base with her wing. But he’d been silent, and his ship was moving forward on a dead straight vector. A first-year cadet could have picked him off with eyes closed.
She blasted her ship forward, plunging into the cluster of Highborn fighters closest to Stockton, firing her lasers like a woman possessed. She took down one, two…a third. She was spewing death into the enemy formations, but no matter how many ships she obliterated, it seemed three or four took its place.
Her wing was fully engaged as well, but she had pushed farther forward, and she was alone facing the enemy ships closest to Stockton. She fired again and again…four ships destroyed. Five.
Six.
“Dammit, Raptor…cut the shit, and let’s get out of here. Before you get us both killed!”
She tightened her fingers on the firing stud, even as she spoke.
Seven.
* * *
“All ships, maintain maximum fire.” Atara Travis sat at her usual station, snapping out commands. She knew she should have switched over to the flag position, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. That was Tyler’s chair, dammit, and she could command just as well from her own usual seat.
“All units acknowledge, Admiral.”
Atara nodded, a gesture as much to herself as the officer at the comm station. Technically, she commanded nothing more than she had before, but this time, Barron wasn’t sitting a few meters away. Atara had always been confident and capable, a stone-cold leader whatever the situation. But she felt naked and alone without Barron there. She could handle her duties alone, she didn’t have any doubt about that. But she was still uncomfortable, and she realized with some surprise just how rattled she was by a change in the normal dynamic.
Pointless orders are a symptom of that…
There had been no need, of course, to order her ships to maintain fire. The fleet was deep in the flames of hell, locked in mortal combat with the Highborn invaders. Every ship was under standing orders to fire everything they had, and there wasn’t a ship commander in the fleet who wouldn’t be blasting away even without orders to do so. Still, she was startled at how little there sometimes was for a commander to do in the middle of a fight. Sure, there were times she would be pulled in a hundred directions, when crises would fly in from every angle. But a large part of commanding in a desperate fight was sitting and watching…and trusting her captains and crews to do the jobs they’d been trained to do.
It was difficult, tense in a way she suspected would be difficult to describe to someone who hadn’t experienced it…and it bore down on her with greater weight without Barron present on the bridge. Her duties as the admiral’s aide filled those otherwise quiet and tension-filled moments, and without her longtime comrade sitting there, she had to endure the maddening nothingness of sitting silently and waiting.
Her eyes saw four enemy ships approaching. The ship classes were unfamiliar, but the mass and energy readings strongly suggested they were battleships of some kind.
That’s a lot of firepower.
She almost spat out a new series of commands, but she held back. Her people on Dauntless knew how to fight the ship. She’d set the evasion routines, the guns were firing at full, and the damage control teams were ready for anything that came. There was nothing to do again, nothing except watch and wait.
At least the fighting on the ship had almost ended. There were a few holdouts among the boarders, pockets of resistance remaining in a few non-vital areas of the ship. But the primary threat had ended. None of the ship’s major systems had been damaged, and any danger of the enemy reaching some vital spot or taking control of the ship had ended.
Now, it was time for Dauntless to face the enemies ou
tside its hull. Atara had faith in the ship’s crew, but the vessels coming at her were big, and Highborn battleships didn’t carry fighters like Confederation ones did. That meant more reactors and more guns for the same mass.
Atara wasn’t intimidated by that in a one on one matchup. She’d scoff even at two to one, her pride and confidence powering her defiance. But four to one was trouble.
Her mind raced, searching for something, anything, more she could do. But there was nothing. Dauntless was ready, her people were ready.
She looked ahead as the battleship’s primaries lanced out, the particle accelerators taking one of the approaching Highborn vessels amidships. It was a solid hit, and the screen lit up with preliminary damage assessments. She watched the data scrolling, the strange combination of actual scanner readings enhanced by the AI’s best guess about the target’s condition. Atara didn’t rely much on such things—she’d seen far too many mistakes in that kind of estimate. But she was willing to bet the hit had knocked out at least some systems on the enemy ship, and that was a good start.
She looked down, doublechecking Dauntless’s evasion routines, and then her eyes moved back to the main display…just in time to catch the next volley. Another hit on the same ship. She felt a rush of excitement at the marksmanship of her gunners, and then as no fewer than five enemy shots ripped by, all within a kilometer of Dauntless, and all barely evaded by the ship’s wild navigational gymnastics.
But the enemy ships were closing fast, and Dauntless’s luck ran out a few seconds later with the sixth enemy barrage. No fewer than three of the blue and black-speckled beams struck the vessel’s hull. Atara was thrown forward, hard into the harness holding her in her seat. She felt a sharp pain, and the breath was forced from her lungs.
She sucked in a deep, raspy breath as she leaned back against her chair. She was okay. She’d have one hell of a bruise, she knew, when she took her uniform off, but no major injuries. At worst a fractured rib…and Atara Travis had never let anything like that deter her from her duty. Not in the middle of a fight.
She looked down at the damage reports. The grim list of casualties and damaged systems was far more accurate than the guesswork about an enemy ship thousands of kilometers away. One of the reactors was down to half strength, and the gamma fighter bay was a nightmarish wreck, out of control fires raging, and two full squadrons of refitting Lightnings a total loss.
But the primaries were still online. The great particle accelerator batteries were much more durable than they’d been in the old days. She watched the power gauge moving up and then turning green as a full charge was achieved.
Then, she gritted her teeth and uttered another needless command.
“Fire,” she said, her voice cold and grim.
* * *
“Captain…Dauntless is being attacked by four Highborn battleships.”
Cliff Wellington was already staring at the screen, seeing the same thing the aide was reporting. The battle was raging over a line half a million kilometers long, but the fiercest fighting was right in the center, and the flagship was in the heart of the maelstrom.
“Vector adjustment, Commander. Bring us in on a line toward those ships.” Wellington’s voice was cold, decisive. He was violating orders, to a point at least. He had a preset course, and a list of targets, but Excalibur was also the closest ship to Dauntless. At least the closest one with enough firepower to make a difference.
“Yes, Captain.”
Wellington winced as the display showed another two hits slamming into the fleet flagship. Dauntless was still in the fight, still pounding away at her enemies…but it looked like the battleship’s primaries were offline. That didn’t matter as much as it would have at longer range. The battlelines were close to each other, and the larger number of secondaries put out almost as much total destructive force as the big particle accelerators, at least from under seventy thousand kilometers. That point was emphasized as three of Dauntless’s laser cannons slammed into the forward Highborn ship…and the stricken vessel vanished in a vast explosion.
That’s one down…
Wellington was felt a little better. Dauntless had lowered the odds. But the flagship wasn’t going to last much longer by herself.
She won’t have to…
“All batteries…I want firing solutions on the ships attacking Dauntless. All turrets ready to fire on my command.”
Wellington watched as Excalibur closed on the enemy vessels. The ships had been focused on Dauntless, but now one peeled away, directing its fire on the approaching superbattleship. The first shots went wide, missing by several kilometers, and Wellington reworked the evasion routines in his mind, tapping at his workstation to make a few adjustments. He liked the think it was more than just a series of guesses about where the next enemy fire would come in, but he couldn’t be sure.
Not until the Highborn fired again.
He felt the tension, each second passing slowly as he waited for the Highborn to fire again. It wore on him, twisted his stomach into knots…but still, he didn’t give the order for his own ship to open up.
Not yet…patience. We’re going right down their throats…
His eyes were fixed on the display, watching as a second enemy ship adjusted its vector. Two of the three ships that had been battling Dauntless were now targeting Excalibur. A shudder and a series of sparks along the far wall of the bridge told him that one of the Highborn had scored a hit. He glanced quickly at the monitor, confirming his gut reaction. There had been damage, but nothing significant.
Still, he didn’t give the command.
Flashes of light whipped by on the display, the full fire of two Highborn battleships. Half a dozen shots missed entirely, but not all of them. Excalibur lurched hard, and Wellington’s display flooded with fresh damage reports. His eyes darted down, ignoring casualty updates and references to anything except the reactors and the weapons arrays. The superbattleship still packed almost its entire punch.
Wellington let out a deep breath of relief, but it didn’t relax him at all. He was pushing his luck and he knew it. The superbattleship was the cream of the Confederation fleet, but the Highborn ships were enormously powerful. They could hurt even Wellington’s massive vessel. They could destroy it.
Still, he closed, holding his fire.
He was counting down softly, under his breath. Another two great energy lances from the Highborn ripped by, one missing by less than fifty meters, close enough to fry some scanner dishes on the outer hull.
Still, he waited another ten seconds.
Then: “All guns…open fire.”
The batteries of the Confederation’s greatest scratch-built warship opened up and spat death before them. The massive spinal mount railgun sent its thousand-kilogram projectile tearing through space at almost 0.1c. It struck one of the enemy battleships near the stern, carrying off close to a quarter of the vessel, and sending the rest into a wild spiral.
The sixteen particle accelerators, the full barrage from the four quad mounts blasted forth, no fewer than six of the deadly beams slamming into the other enemy vessel. The target hung there in space, holed in half a dozen spots and drifting along its previous course, dead, lifeless.
“Vector change, bring us around on that last Highborn ship.”
Wellington stared out at the display, at the indications of the carnage he and his people—and their immense ship—had just unleased, and he smiled.
“And get me a line to Admiral Travis.”
* * *
“I’m not leaving, Raptor, no matter what comes at us here.”
Stockton sat and listened to Olya Federov on the comm, and he felt as though the world was closing in on him. She was one of his oldest friends, one of the Confederation’s greatest pilots…and she was going to die in front of him, trying to protect him. From himself.
He’d tried to convince himself she was bluffing, that she’d give up and pull her wing out, head back to the mother ships. But he knew her too
well. She was a lot of things, but at the very top of that list, Olya Federov was stubborn.
She’ll never break off…unless I’m dead…
But she’d gunned down every ship that had come close to him.
He looked down at his controls, at the reactor flow valve. Highborn fighters had multiple levels of safety controls, but he figured he could get around those, push his reactor until it overloaded. He would meet his end in the heart of a miniature star that lasted for perhaps a few seconds.
And then Olya and her people will break off…before the rest of those Highborn ships get here…
He’d been prepared to die for a long time. Still, it was hard for him to give up. He’d intended to die fighting, to take down as many Highborn fighters as he could before they finally overwhelmed him. It had taken all he had to yield enough to drop his evasive routines, to leave himself open and helpless.
Could he really flip a switch, and just kill himself? It went against every fiber of his being, every trait that made him the relentless fighter he’d always been. It was the only way to save Federov and her pilots, though.
Almost the only way…
Stockton almost heard the thought inside him, the voice deep within telling him there was another way. He could go back with her. He could go home.
No, that’s not possible, not after all that’s happened.
He tried to imagine facing them all, Federov, Reg Griffin, Tyler Barron. Stara…
It seemed impossible.
But the voice remained. Coward!
How could he go back? There were some nightmares from which it was impossible to return. But the thought kept at him. He was weak, unwilling to face those he had harmed, those who had loved and respected him. He was running away, fleeing from his fate. The unstoppable Raptor, Jake Stockton, the fearless warrior…running to death to avoid facing the consequences of his actions.
Federov’s voice was there, too, begging him, screaming at him, pounding away without the knowledge that she had an ally inside his own psyche.
