Empires in Ruin

by Anthony James

  Many of the capital ship’s ten-barrel gauss repeaters were torn apart by warheads, though the quantity of inbound fire didn’t lessen noticeably. Hoping to cut down the number of turrets and missile clusters with a firing angle, Recker piloted the Vengeance towards the enemy hull. The overstressed engines hurled the warship across the intervening space and within a moment, only a hundred metres separated the vessels. To Recker, it felt as if he was flying amongst a forest of gauss turrets and all of them were turned his way.

  Falling back on his experience, Recker’s breathing deepened and his eyes took in the details from the sensor feeds and from his console. Though only a few seconds had passed since the Executor discharge, it already seemed apparent the Lavorix capital ship was going nowhere, and that was the worst possible outcome.

  Another realisation came. More than enough time had passed for the enemy to target and fire their missile clusters or a particle beam, yet they’d only brought their missile countermeasures to bear.

  Maybe their missiles can’t target from so close. Or maybe they can’t hit anything inside the shield perimeter.

  Whatever the truth, the Vengeance was still in one piece and the Lavorix were still attempting to access the Aeklu and the Verumol. Recker glanced at the Executor timer - it had more than four minutes left until it was recharged.

  “Those ground launchers have fired again, sir,” said Burner.

  Red dots appeared on the tactical and the Vengeance’s Maglors fired at the inbound warheads. The enemy missiles weren’t sophisticated and they flew in a straight line, which made them easy targets for the gauss turrets. A short, thudding discharge from the Vengeance’s underside turrets knocked out all bar one of the enemy warheads and that last one produced a pitifully small blast on the armour.

  “Underside missile clusters one and two fired. Holding uppers one to four – we’re too close to the enemy warship,” said Aston.

  The Vengeance wasn’t fitted with as many launch clusters as a larger spaceship, but the missiles it carried were an advanced Meklon design and carried a large payload. Twenty-four warheads from the underside clusters streaked after their targets. Numerous transports and ground launchers were destroyed by the missiles, while the Maglor slugs pulverised several more.

  Five hundred metres ahead, the edge of the Executor hole loomed, its edges rimmed with expansion heat and splayed outwards like jagged alloy teeth. Sensing he was on borrowed time, Recker piloted the Vengeance directly for the opening. All the while, gauss projectiles tore into his warship’s armour, turning the outer few metres into a mess of heat-softened craters.

  “In we go,” he said, dragging back on the controls.

  The opening was easily large enough and the Vengeance entered the interior of the Lavorix warship without scraping the sides. Immediately, the droning of gauss projectile impacts stopped and the cessation was an immense relief.

  Having seen what damage the Executor could do to its target, Recker wasn’t surprised to find the insides of the Lavorix spaceship so badly mangled. Sheared structural joints and thick sheets of internal plating hung down, and lights flickered irregularly in places, casting shadows and exaggerating the lines and edges. In the deepest part of the crater, the presence of a darker material made Recker think the Executor had damaged one of the spaceship’s ternium modules. For all the damage, the shield generator module hadn’t gone offline.

  Hiding within the enemy’s hull granted Recker the smallest of respites and he had a good idea how to make use of it. Steady hands on the controls brought the Vengeance’s nose upwards, so that it pointed directly into the innards of the Lavorix spaceship.

  “What happens if we activate the Fracture while we’re within the energy shield?” asked Burner.

  “Interesting question for another time, Lieutenant,” said Recker. Despite himself, he answered anyway. “We’d turn this bastard to dust and do likewise to the Aeklu and the Verumol.”

  What the outcome would be for Trinus-XN and the Vengeance, Recker didn’t know. If the Lavorix were on the brink of recapturing the Laws of Ancidium, maybe the destruction of everything would be the best possible outcome. He pushed the idea to the back of his mind.

  Once he’d finished positioning the Vengeance, Recker made the briefest check of the sensor feeds. Below and through the opening, much of the construction yard was visible and Larson had highlighted numerous targets. The tactical was tracking ninety-five Lavorix transports and ground vehicles and several of the former had parked on top of the Aeklu. It wouldn’t be long before the enemy gained access to those spaceships.

  Aston wasn’t giving them an easy ride and she fired individual missiles from the rear tubes as quickly as she could select a target and send the launch command to the battle computer. While that happened, the Maglors spewed high-velocity death at the enemy, smashing their vehicles and pounding them into unrecognizable lumps of metal.

  “Commander Aston, launch from our forward clusters,” said Recker.

  “Shit, wait!” said Aston.

  Recker turned sharply towards her. “What is it, Commander?”

  Aston talked fast. “You told me about that nuke you fired into the Galactar way back on Oracon-1, sir. When the crew and I were already knocked out by the Extractor.”

  “Yes, I remember,” said Recker impatiently, his eye on the tactical. The ground launchers in the construction yard fired another salvo. Two of the missiles avoided the Maglor slugs and detonated against the Vengeance’s rear plating.

  “The Galactar entered lightspeed, taking the nuke with it.”

  “Shit,” said Recker, echoing Aston’s curse from a moment ago. “If we drive this enemy away while we’re in its hull, we’ll go with it.”

  “And when it exits lightspeed, we’ll have nowhere to go, sir.”

  “So we either go outside and offer the Lavorix an opportunity to target us with their external weapons, or we stay in here,” said Recker.

  He was taken by a great certainty that if he fired enough missiles into the Lavorix ship’s interior, it would go to mode 3, leaving the deployed troops to finish capturing the Aeklu and Verumol. From what Recker had seen, those troops stood an excellent chance of completing their mission, unless they were interrupted in the next few minutes.

  Caught between a rock and a hard place, Recker made his choice.

  “Fire the missiles, Commander.”

  Chapter Ten

  As he said the words, Recker gave the Vengeance maximum reverse thrust and the spaceship emerged from the hull breach at the same time as twenty-four high-yield warheads exploded in the comparative confines of the Executor crater.

  Heat and expanding air buffeted the Vengeance and, for a moment, the warship was completely engulfed in plasma.

  Still accelerating, the Vengeance raced stern-first towards the construction yard, its Maglors delivering pain without cease to the Lavorix transports and ground launchers. Falling wreckage from the missile blasts above came as well, and they crashed into the softened plating of Recker’s ship.

  “Go!” shouted Larson at the enemy.

  The mothership didn’t leave and its gauss cannons took less than two seconds to reacquire their targets. Their hail of slugs drummed once more into the Vengeance, the noise interfering with speech and thought. Hoping he was correct to think the Lavorix missiles couldn’t target within the energy shield, Recker brought the Vengeance to a halt a thousand metres beneath the enemy ship and rotated it quickly into a new position.

  Walls and consoles groaned with the strain, but when Recker was done, the loaded portside missile clusters were pointed at the Executor hole. He accelerated vertically towards the opening.

  “Wait until we’re too close for these gauss turrets to knock out our missiles, then fire again, Commander. Hit them where it hurts.”

  The Vengeance sped into the crater, the insides of which were now all colours of hot. Torrents of liquid alloy poured down, glistening with reflected oranges, reds and whites.


  “Portside clusters one and two fired,” said Aston.

  An additional twenty-four warheads plunged into the damaged interior of the Lavorix ship, and the new explosions blinded the sensors. Though Recker had kept his spaceship as close to the entrance as possible, the plasma blasts wrapped the Vengeance and spilled out into the surrounding space.

  Knowing he was playing a dangerous game, Recker flew the Vengeance straight out of the Executor hole again. His intention was to hurt the enemy enough that they’d mode 3 out of the combat arena, but not while the Vengeance was within their hull.

  More alerts went off and distant thuds indicated that another huge quantity of molten debris had been torn out of the mothership. The sensors attenuated and Recker saw dark shapes in the brightness. A massive piece of something heavy caught the Vengeance on its nose and then slid away. Down it fell, crashing into the alloy surface of the construction yard.

  The drumming of the gauss guns began again and a salvo of ground launched missiles struck the Vengeance in several places. To add insult to injury, a few of the transports were also firing their nose guns. Without the ground missiles and the mothership’s chain guns, those shuttles might as well have been pissing in the wind, but added to everything else, it was damage to his ship Recker could have done without.

  “The enemy vessel is still not moving, sir,” said Burner.

  “I can see that, Lieutenant.”

  This was the time when Lieutenant Eastwood would have proved his worth by scanning the enemy ship for power fluctuations. Output spikes or drop-offs could provide clues about an enemy’s intentions. Neither Burner nor Larson had the expertise, while Aston and Recker couldn’t divert themselves from their tasks.

  “Ready the starboard clusters,” said Recker as he rotated the Vengeance again.

  “Starboard clusters ready.”

  Intending to repeat his earlier manoeuvre, Recker accelerated for the opening. The missile detonations had turned the Executor crater into something much more significant, and the hole had been increased to twice its original volume. Yet more debris fell and the Vengeance was struck time and again.

  The starboard missiles remained in their launch tubes. Having seen enough, the Lavorix activated a mode 3 transit and the Law of Ancidium vanished from the construction yard, leaving behind thousands of troops and dozens of transports. The instrumentation on Recker’s console registered a violent displacement of air and an expulsion of energy, neither of which were sufficiently powerful to affect the 2.7-billion-ton Vengeance.

  “They hit mode 3,” said Aston, blinking in surprise, like she’d thought it would never happen. Slowly, she withdrew her finger from the missile launch button.

  “The mothership has gone, but we’ve still got a job to do, folks,” said Recker loudly. Part of him was just as surprised as Aston.

  The generous speckling of red dots on the tactical reminded him exactly how many Lavorix had deployed in the construction yard and he scanned the sensors for the highest priority targets.

  “There,” he said, spotting a transport which had landed on top of the Aeklu. Its cargo of troops was disembarking and making a run for the unfinished turret, like they knew of an entrance hatch somewhere close by.

  Recker turned the Vengeance so that its nose was pointing north and he accelerated towards his intended position midway between the Aeklu and the Verumol.

  “Prioritise and destroy,” said Aston with relish.

  She selected targets rapidly and the priority list appeared on the tactical. The Maglors clanked and Lavorix died. In a few seconds, Recker had the Vengeance in place, with the flanks of his warship facing the two Laws of Ancidium. This allowed the maximum quantity of firepower to be directed at the enemy and he held stationary while Aston eliminated the enemy troops and vehicles.

  “We’re not killing them fast enough,” said Recker.

  “We’ve got backup coming, sir,” said Burner.

  A huge shape dropped from the sky and came to a halt five kilometres from the Vengeance. The Langinstol looked like crap, but its weapons and propulsion appeared to be working fine. Equipped with far more guns than the Vengeance, the annihilator chewed through the Lavorix with relentless ease.

  “Here comes another,” said Larson.

  The Pulveriser appeared and then came the Ildinir. Neither was shipyard fresh but again, they had enough active weapons to give the Lavorix a fatal headache.

  “Let’s take a look at what’s happening below,” said Recker.

  He guided the Vengeance nearer to ground level and positioned it so that one of the forward arrays obtained a clear view into the space beneath the Aeklu. Sure enough, a pair of Lavorix transports had taken refuge there and Aston hit them with a burst of Maglor fire. Banking away, Recker flew close to the Verumol and again, the sensors located enemy transports. Maybe there was an underside entrance hatch – he wasn’t sure – but a few thousand Maglor slugs ensured this incursion didn’t achieve its intended goals.

  “Would you look at that?” said Larson in wonder.

  A company of Lavorix soldiers had taken refuge behind one of the many personnel cabins, a few hundred metres below the Vengeance. Brazenly, the alien soldiers fired handheld weapons and shoulder launchers at the Ildinir.

  “Any of ours in that cabin?” asked Recker.

  “I can’t locate any comms receptors, sir,” Burner confirmed.

  “Good,” said Aston. “Let’s try this on manual.” Taking control of a portside Maglor and without compunction, she delivered a spray of gauss slugs into the single-storey cabin. Its walls crumpled and the building was knocked across the ground, leaving a greasy red smear on the landing strip.

  Recker wasn’t normally the bloodthirsty kind, but the wholesale slaughter of these Lavorix seemed righteous. Unfortunately, he had other work to finish.

  “I’m going to land on top of the Aeklu,” he said. “If the enemy ship comes back, I want to be on the bridge of a vessel capable of trading blows. That, and I won’t rest easy until I’m certain the Lavorix troops didn’t find a way inside.”

  “I’ve communicated your intent to the other members of the fleet,” said Burner.

  “How many of the fleet remain?” asked Recker.

  “Twelve, sir. They finished off the Lavorix support vessels while the mothership was on the ground.”

  The losses were heavy and, given the enemy firepower, Recker couldn’t decide if the allied fleet had got off lightly or not. Having seen the armaments on the capital ship, he suspected the outcome could have been far different.

  The Lavorix won’t give up.

  The thought added impetus to Recker’s actions and he flew the Vengeance at high velocity over the topmost edge of the Aeklu.

  “Has someone passed on the order to Sergeants Vance and Shadar?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” said Larson. “I’ve told them to muster at the forward boarding ramp.”

  “Thank you,” said Recker, glad his crew were on the ball.

  Even though the enemy mothership was gone, the pressure he felt hadn’t subsided. Turning the ship so the forward boarding ramp was closest to the topside entrance, Recker dumped the Vengeance down on top of the Aeklu hard enough to produce a series of groaning complaints from the landing legs.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Pausing only to grab his gun, Recker dashed from the bridge and his crew followed. The sprint for the airlock passed in a blur and soon they arrived where the soldiers were waiting.

  “Open the ramp!” yelled Recker.

  “Ramp opening,” called Vance.

  Clamps banged and motors whined. Cold air rushed into the Vengeance and Recker breathed it in. The soldiers ahead got moving and he followed, adrenaline and Frenziol mixing to produce a heady feeling of battle lust and desperation.

  Stepping onto the hard surface of the Aeklu’s topside armour and seeing the scale of its construction from so close was enough to make Recker giddy. Two thousand metres away, the turret o
f the warship’s main armament – just the turret – was larger than two HPA battleships side-by-side, while the lesser guns and the missile clusters were monumental in size when viewed from foot level.

  Adding to the spectacle, the Ildinir, the Langinstol and the Pulveriser flew across the construction yard, their guns and propulsions producing a physical wall of sound which threatened to trigger Recker’s primal flight instinct. He clenched his jaw and turned east, wondering if he could see the Verumol from here. Although the Aeklu was the taller of the two vessels, the faraway edge of its plating intruded upon his sight and denied him the view.

  Recker shook his head clear. The platoon members were similarly dazed by their surroundings and he barked an order to snap them out of it.

  “Move!” he shouted, pointing west.

  The entrance was no more than a hundred metres away, at the base of a gauss repeater turret. Recker broke into a run, craning his neck to check the external damage on the Vengeance. All he could see was the underside and a part of the nose which had escaped the worst of the gauss impacts.

  A freezing wind swept across the warship’s hull, producing a dreary, hollow sound as it blew into Recker’s helmet microphone. He located the entrance – it wasn’t a hatch in the conventional sense, since it was twenty metres square – and hurried over to the flush access panel. The nearby repeater towered over everyone, each of its eight barrels large enough to accommodate a – doubtless reluctant – Daklan and capable of discharging four hundred rounds a second. The Aeklu had hundreds like it.

  Recker brought his attention back to the panel. The old Lavorix access system had been ripped out and the HPA security hardware replacing it was familiar. Recker stood adjacent to the panel and waited for his platoon to gather. One of the first to arrive was Corporal Hendrix and when Recker looked, her eyes skated away.

  “Thanks for earlier,” he said on a private channel.

  “No worries.”

  Recker crouched and activated the panel. He felt a clunk of metal underfoot and the entrance slab dropped twenty metres into the hull. Another clunk and an eight-metre platform emerged from the side of the shaft, five metres below the surface, and a set of alloy steps slid into view. It was somehow amazing to think that the Lavorix had conjured up such an ingenious method.