Admiral's Revenge (A Spineward Sectors Novel:)

by Luke Sky Wachter

  “Another two hours to hyperspace jump, Milady,” Gants reported from his position to the side of her command seat.

  “And then we’ll be home?” she demanded, clenching the hilt of Bandersnatch until her knuckles turned white.

  “The Navigator swears this next jump will take us to Tracto, Lady Akantha,” Gants hastened to assure her.

  Akantha disliked ‘being reassured;’ she felt like returning home and killing something.

  “I hate to bring it up, my Lady,” Gants said cautiously.

  “Then do not do so,” she said shortly.

  Gants closed his eyes and took a breath his face twisting up into a horrible mask of anguish.

  “Oh, go ahead, then,” Akantha cursed, “what is it?”

  “The…guests,” he started carefully.

  “Do not bring them to my bridge,” she commanded, already knowing where this was going.

  “They asked if they could—” he said looking miserable.

  “Mother Elaina is one thing,” Akantha said sharply, “but if I have to see that three-faced bitch and her kill order again before we reach home, in my present mood I-” she cut herself off sharply. “Somehow I doubt my Protector would care for our reunion to include a headless, family corpse.”

  Gants paled. “I think you’re right,” he said fervently.

  “He is squeamish that way,” she sighed, “and it is family. Although it grates against my being to do so, it is likely best to let him deal with it.”

  “Your Ladyship is very considerate,” Gants choked.

  “Too much sometimes, I worry; else why would we be in these straits?” she asked rhetorically. “MEN knows we have fought hard enough.”

  Gants wisely kept silent and Akantha turned back to staring at the count down on the screen. She was certain that with sheer force of will, if only she wanted it badly enough, she could cause that counter to move faster.

  Chapter 57: It really was the perfect plan, honest!

  Everything was going to plan; I couldn’t believe it. The pirates had been suckered into taking on the advanced vanguard of the Bug Armada before they got a chance to see the true power of the Bug fleet.

  The Bugs were dropping like flies and the pirates were being softened up, so everything was working perfectly—just like I’d imagined it. There were a couple of pirates at the Belter’s trillium refinery—the only place in the system with any kind of repair facilities—that appeared to be down with drive troubles. But then, what did one expect from poorly maintained pirate ships? The amazing thing wasn’t that none of the pirates were still docked at the new Belter Station, but that there were only three of them.

  This is almost too good to be true, I thought gleefully. Reaching around quickly, I knocked on the strategically placed piece of wood on the command chair’s arm.

  “What’s the current breakdown of pirate ships?” Laurent asked.

  “Two Battleships, a pair of Light Cruisers, four Destroyers—two Light and two regular—and a mixed force of eighteen Corvettes and Cutters,” Eastwood replied in a crisp, carrying voice. “It could be seventeen, as one of the Corvettes just took heavy damage and looked like it was knocked out before recovering enough to get its engines going again, but it’s in the middle of a Bug swarm and isn’t firing. With all the pirate modified drive systems out there it’s hard to tell, at least from the other side of the star system,” irony was in his voice as he explained, “exactly which signatures are Cutters and which are Corvettes.”

  “Don’t forget the dozen armed freighters,” the Sensor Officer cut in, looking jealous that he hadn’t been given the chance to give the enemy breakdown.

  “And twelve freighters,” Eastwood agreed, looking grateful for the help while the Warrant Officer continued to look unhappy.

  With only a single Battleship, one Heavy Destroyer, one poorly manned Light Destroyer, a Corvette, a pair of Cutters and every single one of my ships—except for McCruise’s Destroyer—sporting recent and extensive repairs and a skeleton crew, we were by far the smallest kid in the sand box—by a long chalk.

  Learning that Yagar was dead had been satisfying, but what would have been more satisfying was to have his Flagship and escorts available for this battle. I didn’t care if they were manned by the Sundered gorilla men, our men, or Wainwright’s marines, we could have definitely used the hulls for this battle. Unfortunately, they were still stuck at the Omicron.

  Leaning back in my chair, I took a sip of my lukewarm tea and grimaced. “Yeoman, if you could freshen this,” I said, holding out my cup of cooling tea.

  “Of course, Admiral,” the yeoman replied, taking the cup and hurrying away.

  “I’ve never seen a Commanding Officer drink tea on the bridge during the middle of a battle,” the Captain chided.

  “We’re not in battle yet,” I observed.

  “I’m just saying,” Laurent said, moderating his tone and stepping back.

  The tea arrived and I was contentedly sipping on it when there was a stir in the Sensor section. Since ‘stirring’ was only ever rarely a good sign, I felt my muscles start to tighten. Ruthlessly suppressing my body’s natural urge to jump up and start kicking an enemy that wasn’t even present, I placed a foot atop the knee of my other leg, determined to present the veritable image of ease and unconcern.

  Seconds passed and the main screen started updating with new tracks updating. The pair of pirate battleships—that black pustule on ship lists of known space currently called the Vineyard for one, and our own cruelly used Lucky Clover for the other—had been maintaining distance from the Heavy Harvesters, suddenly leapt to close the distance.

  The reaction among the pirates was mixed, with about half the warships no longer dancing around at the edge of Bug firing ranges, using the superior range of our human built weapons for best effect, even if that meant thirty seconds of firing for every five minutes of maneuvering, and instead lunging into range and firing concerted bursts. Meanwhile, the other half did almost exactly the opposite and increased distance, with about half of those immediately turning and pointing their engines right at the Bugs and burning for all they were worth.

  “Looks like something spooked them,” Laurent advised with a calm and steady voice.

  “I wonder what that could be,” I said with an innocent voice, as visions of Bug Mother-ships danced gleefully in my head. Those pirate cowards had a fair distance to go but if they kept on coming in this direction, we’d scoop them up like a child goes after cotton candy. “In your face, camel cakes,” I whispered as Jean Luc finally realized he was about to come face to face with his worst nightmare.

  “Sir?” Laurent asked, a worried look on his face.

  “Did you need something, Officer?” I responded in turn, whipping my face of any vindicated expressions it might or might not have had.

  “No, Sir,” he said, his expression once again a straight, professional mask.

  On the outside I made no move, but on the inside I gave a figurative shrug. I figured that I probably would have been worried, or at least a little concerned, if my commanding officer had suddenly started talking nonsense to himself in the middle of battle.

  As I watched, the pair of Battleships, accompanied by their Light Cruiser escorts, went up head to head with the Bug Harvesters. I was mildly disappointed when one of the Heavy Harvesters was pinned between all four ships and blown to smithereens, but I couldn’t be too unhappy about it. As much as I wanted to see Jean Luc suffer, bleed and die, my enemies were killing each other and the more Bugs he destroyed before biting the bullet, the fewer I was going to have to deal with.

  In an ideal world, they would engage in mutually assured destruction and I would simply swoop in the pick up the pieces. It was perhaps a fool’s dream, but one I was more than willing to cherish and entertain until reality decided it was time to smack me in the head.

  It took us another hour to finally start picking up the Bug Mother-ship on our scans—and we actually knew where to look
for them, unlike Jean Luc and his pirates. In that time, Jean Luc’s ships had taken plenty of damage and one of his Light Cruisers had been forced to withdraw, streaming atmo into the void of cold space, but the Harvesters had been destroyed.

  “It’s hard to tell how much damage the pirate took to his heavy squadron,” Laurent advised me in a low voice, “but I’m surprised it was only one of the Light Cruisers that had to be withdrawn.”

  “I’m not,” I said flatly, “whatever else he is, was, or will be, Jean Luc knows how to fight his ships.”

  “That’s just good news for us,” Laurent said pointedly.

  I looked over at him with disbelief, failing to see how having a skilled opponent was good news.

  “I prefer stupidity in my enemies,” I disagreed vehemently.

  “It means less Bugs for us to have to deal with later,” Laurent explained, ignoring the bite in my voice even as a swarm of Bug Scouts fifty strong detached to from close protection of the Mother-ship and surged forward in search of pirate targets.

  I winced. They might be small individually, but fifty of anything was a huge number as far as I was concerned, at least when it came to enemy warships—or Bug ships, as the case may be.

  Despite not admiring my enemy’s skill with a fleet, everything was going well, almost exactly as planned. Behind that swarm of fifty scouts came a dozen additional Harvesters, including the last of the Heavy Harvesters. Yes indeed, everything was going just fine—good, even. Our enemies were killing each other, and we got to sit on the sidelines cooling our heels until one of them had been battered unrecognizable.

  That’s why fate decided to throw us a curveball.

  “Contact,” exclaimed one of the Sensor operators in disbelief, and a sense of urgency that we hadn’t had from the Sensor section since the Mother-ship showed up.

  “What have you got, Sensors?” Captain Laurent demanded, and I was more than happy to sit back and look the part of the unruffled Admiral in total control while my subordinates did the heavy lifting.

  Of course, that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t interested and…concerned.

  “I’m picking up a hyper footprint twenty degrees around the edge of the hyper limit from position of the current battle,” the Warrant Officer reported.

  “Verify,” snapped Laurent, “and find out who it is.”

  “Contact,” cried a Sensor operator, “I have another contact, Sirs, we’re getting multiple hyper wakes from the same general area of space. It looks like it might be some kind of convoy, Captain.”

  I ran my hand through my hair. Was it possible that Jean Luc had just gotten additional reinforcements?

  “Get me class and hull types,” the Captain barked, “I want to know who that is.”

  I didn’t like this—I didn’t like this at all.

  “I don’t like this,” Laurent said to me, almost as if he’d been reading my thoughts.

  “What’s not to like?” I asked dryly, my smile twisting. “Our enemy gets more reinforcements to fight Bugs and we don’t have to deal with them tomorrow, after we ourselves have already been in battle. Or maybe it’s nothing but a couple of random merchant ships, and while I’ll feel sorry for them, there’s a war on in this system. I’d do what I could for them if that’s the case but in all our time picketing this system, there hasn’t been any real activity except for those tribute ships we swiped, so I doubt that’s very likely.”

  “I’m getting some strange readings, Captain,” the Sensor Officer reported after an almost interminable wait while Sensors did their thing and scanned the black.

  “Strange…how?” Laurent asked tightly.

  “We’ve tentatively identified three Corvette class vessels,” the Warrant Officer said reluctantly, “but the other one’s a mystery. If I hadn’t known it was there, I doubt we would have been able to spot it at all. If I didn’t know better…I’d say it had some kind of cloak.”

  Laurent pursed his lips irritably. “And just how do you ‘know’ that they don’t have some kind of stealth properties to that mysterious, fourth ship?” Laurent growled in the tone of voice that makes you straighten up in your chair question your assumptions.

  “Well,” the Sensor Officer gulped, “because they made a big hyper splash and all four of our new contacts appeared together. If they were trying to be sneaky, I’m pretty sure they’d have split up some, at least.”

  “Pretty sure?” Laurent scoffed. “Next time just give me the data and leave the speculation to others, Sensors—all I’m interested in is the facts, man, not assumptions. You do know what assumptions make by now, don’t you Warrant Officer?”

  “Of course, Sir,” the Sensor Officer flushed, “right on it, Captain.” He turned back to his team, and a half hour passed with only minimal updates until they finally conceded.

  “We’re confounded, Sir,” the Sensor Officer reported back for at least the sixth time, per Captain Laurent’s request, “we can get a general size profile: it’s in the Cruiser range—Heavy Cruiser is our best bet—and the Corvettes are acting as escorts. But we won’t know more unless we get closer.”

  “You did the best you could, Sensors,” Laurent said grudgingly, “keep trying.”

  “Aye, Sir,” replied the Warrant, turning back to his task.

  Laurent and I shared looks,but there was nothing we could do without more information.

  “Admiral,” the Comm.’s Officer bolted upright in his seat looking shocked, “I’m getting a general transmission hail from the mystery ship.”

  “Put it on the main screen,” I instructed, feeling grateful that something at least was happening. Hours spent sitting in that chair had done nothing for my back and I was about ready to break down and pull out my data slate to surf the archive for interesting bits of minutia.

  “Sir, it’s…” the com-tech pulled himself up short. “Of course, Sir,” he said, sounding formal.

  A vision of loveliness appeared on my screen that I thought I would never see again. Beautiful, blond haired and with pale, white skin, her features were as familiar as the dreams I had every night where I tossed and turned wondering what she had been up to. I was surprised to see the twin lines of scars running down beneath each eye—almost as if they had been made by tears.

  Snapping back to reality, I realized she was speaking. “This is Akantha of Messene aboard the Furious Phoenix, and I am a Hold Mistress of Tracto. To the warring parties within this system, I say: fear my Name. If you surrender now, I promise to make your deaths swift, although I cannot promise they will be merciful after what you’ve done,” my wife said in a harsh, brutal voice. “So flee if you can, or kill yourselves if you are cowards, but know that if you survive this battle, you will be hunted down like the kine you are for what you’ve done to my home world,” she drew herself up and pulled her sheathed sword around in front of her. “Upon the Sword I Bear, I swear it,” she finished, drawing Bandersnatch half way out of its sheath to expose the blade, “Akantha of Messene, out.”

  The transmission ended, and for a long moment everyone sat there, utterly stunned.

  I thumped the palm of my open hand on my forehead and Laurent and I exchanged a look. “We have to go get her,” I said with more than a hint of exasperation in my voice. I was simply unable to believe that my grand battle plan, the work of sweat, bloody months and careful planning had just been thrown on its head. I was used to hearing about battle plans that didn’t survive contact with the enemy, but I’d yet to hear a saying about how they couldn’t survive the arrival of your wife. “Now!” I snapped, with iron in my voice.

  “Of course, Admiral,” Laurent acknowledged, looking like he was unable to believe what was happening or what he had seen.

  I understood because I was feeling the same way. Weeks and weeks without any contact; I hadn’t even known if Akantha had lived or died from her proposed mission to head to Capria, and now out of the blue she picked today to show up—during the middle of the battle?! It defied belief. It defied my ba
ttle plan. And it had the potential to ruin everything. But after everything she had suffered due to my failures, I couldn’t stand back and do nothing.

  Besides, after everything ‘I’ had suffered, I was selfishly going to go and save my wife. I felt like I was entitled to something more than the chains of duty—chains thick enough that Jacob Marley himself would have sympathized with me.

  Come what may, at least we’d go down together. This would be my payment for everything that had happened to me. The smart play might have been to sacrifice Akantha and her little squadron. The pirates might even believe that this was the extent of what we were able to muster and let their guard down afterwards. The more I thought about it, the more it sounded like the sort of plan my uncle would have employed. Sacrificing others—men, women and yes, even wives—to ensure his victory.

  For me, however, the choice was clear. I was not my uncle, and I would not sacrifice my wife on the Altar of Victory. To me it was no choice, and even if my Akantha hadn’t been onboard that ship, and it had ‘just’ been regular officers and members of my fleet and crew, I like to think I would have done the same thing.

  I was going to go and get my wife back!

  Realizing no orders had been issued by my Captain, I turned and glared at the man. “Communications,” I snapped, “issue general orders to the fleet: silent running is canceled. Everyone is to turn around and thrust full speed back toward the hyper limit, while spinning up their hyper drives—the fleet will jump in unison.”

  “Helm, Navigation,” Laurent growled, seemingly snapping out of his paralysis, “you heard the Admiral!”

  Filled with nervous energy, I could barely contain myself. Glancing back and forth between my now clenched hands and the main screen, I tried to calculate if we were going to get there in time. Unable to sit still for another instant, I jumped out of my chair.