The Prodigal Emperor (The Shadow Space Chronicles Book 3)

by Kal Spriggs

  Impossible, she thought, Tommy King is dead.

  Yet it seemed she was wrong. Besides the battlecruiser, there was a pair of heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, one of which had caught Captain Vandar's frigate squadron at a close range energy engagement, four destroyers, and three ships that could only be carriers from the number of light craft that had begun to launch.

  They outnumbered her rear guard by a sizable margin... and the Revenge out-massed her entire rearguard by itself.

  “Orders to House of Kail and Mako,” she bit out, “retreat along vector seven-two-nine.” She closed her eyes, “Icequeen, Amazon, and Ironheart, advance along vector two-three-four and engage the enemy with all weapons.” It was a suicidal order for those three destroyers, she knew, yet they obeyed without question. Her older, Colonial Republic built destroyers didn't have the acceleration to escape that trap, but her other ships did.

  The crews knew it was a death sentence, but they also knew that they were already dead anyway and that this way they might take some of the bastards out with them.

  Even as she gave the orders, her gaze went to Lucius's force and the inbound missiles. Her lips drew back in a grim smile as she saw that no matter what, he at least, was about to take some serious punishment. “Orders to our allies,” she said, “advance and destroy the enemy.” Their ragtag assortment of ships should be enough to engage and destroy what remained of Lucius's forces. She could still pull this off if she could get House of Kail and Mako into position to screen the Harpy. She should be able to reload her fighters and then turn them around to engage the forces at her rear with a point blank salvo of missiles.

  It might work, she thought, but just in case... She turned to her navigation officer, “Begin plotting an escape jump.” She could, if all else failed, cut her losses and withdraw. Her allies would buy her enough time to retreat... and she could easily enough replace them.

  The big loss would be the facility and the planet. She brought up her contingency plan and made some minor adjustments. Even if she couldn't launch a salvo at the enemy, she could send out a squadron armed with nukes to level Halcyon colony's major cities and to hit the alien facility hard enough that Lucius wouldn't benefit from the place.

  It won't come to that, she thought, even as her eyes went to the missile salvo bearing down on Lucius's forces. The War Dogs were still immaterial, they had remained at the rear of the formation. She could still win this. Yet the gnawing tension reminded her that every time she had faced Lucius Giovanni, she had lost.

  ***

  The missile salvo drew within fifty thousand kilometers and Lucius gave a nod as he saw new ships icons appear at the rear of Admiral Mannetti's forces. He didn't know how many ships Tommy King had brought, but it looked like it might be more than she could handle. It was time to bring the rest of the contribution to the fight.

  “Commodore,” Lucius brought up the War Dogs' commander on his communications console, “go ahead and execute Plan Cannae.”

  Commodore Pierce gave a savage grin. “These elephants will turn the tide, trust me.”

  A moment later, the two “destroyers” along either side of the Warwagon lit off their drives and Lucius's formation dropped back. The two ships full drive strength matched that of the Warwagon almost perfectly... as well they should, for they were her two sister ships.

  Lucius still didn't know just how the mercenary commander had hidden the fact that he had not one, but three dreadnoughts... but he wasn't about to question it. Without a doubt, it explained much of the expense of hiring his company as well as some of the certainty that the commander brought to his operations... yet it still seemed preposterous that three such ships, even as old as they were, were in private hands.

  Even as they moved into position, the Hammers volleyed their entire missile racks. They had loaded up not with ship killers, but with interceptor missiles, and the missiles lanced out in a vast wave that dwarfed the inbound fire. Those missiles were backed by the active sensors from the three dreadnoughts and the interceptor missiles blasted huge swathes out of the enemy missile salvo.

  A moment later, the dreadnoughts opened fire, spitting cones of destruction with their rail guns in patterns designed not to kill individual missiles, but to limit the missile's approaches to more manageable lanes.

  The basic guidance packages on those missiles could see the hazards and move to avoid them, which put them into somewhat more predictable lanes on their final approach when they were most vulnerable to interception fire. The three dreadnoughts then engaged with their rotary cannon point defense turrets, backed by fire from Lucius's formation, and all of it coordinated in overlapping zones.

  The massive salvo simply dissolved. Here and there a missile slipped through to slam against the dreadnoughts massive defense screens or heavy armor, but the impacts were pinpricks against the behemoths.

  Lucius shook his head as the wave passed. “Status?” he asked.

  “Commodore Pierce reports damage to Warwagon Three's forward railgun turrets and moderate damage to Warwagon Two's starboard defense screen,” Ensign Miller said. “Captain Kaminsky reports a missile hit and that he had to eject his external racks, but no further damage reported.”

  “Excellent,” Lucius said. He gave a savage smile, “Let’s finish her off.”

  ***

  “Wow,” Rory said, “This is really amazing work.”

  Gunnery Sergeant Tam Chen didn't see anything amazing about the various stacks of alien and human technology. Sure, some of it seemed an amalgam of both, but he could do that too, it just meant he had to use explosives.

  “Right about now,” Tam said, “I'm pretty certain the Baron is starting his engagement with Admiral Mannetti. If things go well, she's probably going to order her people to bombard this base and maybe if she's vindictive, every city on the planet.”

  “What if things go badly?” Feliks asked.

  “Then she'll probably send a few thousand angry pirates down here to kill us all... or capture us to torture for information,” Tam said. “So... can you or can't you activate this base's defenses?”

  “Sure, sure,” Rory waved a hand, “Can we go back to that whole torture for information, thing? Cause I really don't handle pain very well.”

  “He doesn't,” Feliks shook his head, “he cries like my nephew.”

  “I do not cry,” Rory cried, “I'm just not very good at pain.”

  Tam leaned over the tiny engineer. His powered armor made him tower over the small man. “Get. The. Defenses. Online.”

  “Oh, right,” Rory said. He hurried over to the main set of consoles and he and Feliks began to work. “You know,” Rory said, “I really have to meet the guy who got this all online. I bet if he had even another month he could have had the entire base and the ships online.”

  “That's not a good thing,” Tam said. The data brief had suggested that Reese Leone, once the Baron's brother-in-law, had been the base commander. Tam had never met the man, but if he was as competent as Rory kept suggesting, then it was really too bad he was working for the enemy.

  Interesting story there, he thought, that a man so close to the Baron would betray him. There seemed to be a pattern there, he thought, and he wondered if it was because Baron Giovanni was too trusting. Tam had already put in a request to transfer to the Baron's new guard detail. Hopefully it would go through soon and he would get a chance to take measure of the man.

  Rory looked up, his face flushed with excitement, “I'd say most of the hard work is already done, I'm ninety percent certain–”

  “Um, seventy percent at most,” Feliks said.

  “Okay, eighty percent certain that we can get everything operational.”

  Tam heard gunfire down the corridor and a crump of a loud explosion. Either the enemy had finally brought up heavy weapons or they had improvised something. “First squad,” he said, “prepare for enemy counter-attack.”

  He looked over at where Rory and Feliks stared at him with wide
eyes. “Less exposition, more work,” Tam said.

  “He knows the word exposition,” Rory said sotto voce as he got to work.

  “And he used it in context,” Feliks answered, “How interesting.”

  That transfer to the Baron's detail couldn't come soon enough, Tam thought.

  ***

  Lucretta just felt empty as she gave the next set of orders. Tommy King's forces had smashed her three destroyers as well as Captain Vandar's frigate squadron, but her destroyer and cruiser had escaped the trap and had joined the Harpy in orbit over Halcyon once more.

  His forces had reformed after the battle and begun to advance, and Lucretta knew that her fighters wouldn't be able to hit them hard enough to stop them. Worse, in only a few minutes, Baron Giovanni's forces would be within comfortable missile range and at that point, the engagement would be finished. Her forces couldn't fight a numerically superior force on two fronts, especially not when her pirate allies had basically come apart.

  They were already committed to hitting Lucius's forces, she knew, but some of them seemed determined to escape, and their ragged formation had come apart in a way that just made them all easier targets and prevented them from supporting one another. She felt no sympathy for them. That was their purpose all along: to suffer and die so her people wouldn't.

  The first of her fighter squadrons had already docked and even now her people were arming them for one last strike... and Lucretta felt the acid burn of failure as she contemplated what she was about to do. The planet below didn't deserve what it was about to receive, but she wasn't about to give Lucius another world's resources to use against her... nor was she about to allow the alien base to further bolster his forces. They are mine...she thought, and if I can't have them, no one else can either.

  One squadron would go to Halcyon, one to deal with Heinlein Base, and if they couldn't get the Kraken's systems online in the next few minutes, she would have House of Kail destroy her as well.

  She looked up as her sensor's officer gave a startled exclamation. “Ma'am, the base's defenses just came online... and I'm picking up a huge energy emission... it's like a planetary scale defense screen or... something.”

  Had Reese seen the course of the battle and taken action to defend the base? She shook her head as she thought that though, it didn't matter. While they hadn't brought those defenses online before, she didn't want to waste attacks against it. “Check with the base... and with Heinlein Base as well.” She felt another sense of dread, though, that told her she was already too late. Everything was too late.

  Her mouth tasted like ashes as they received no response from either installation. It seemed that Lucius had outmatched her yet again.

  If they had taken both facilities, then missile strikes might well be useless and she'd only be throwing her pilots lives away. She wouldn't have time to pick them up before she had to jump away.

  “Fine,” she snarled, “all ships, prepare for shadow space jump.” The navigation officer had finished his calculations even as the last of the fighters had come aboard. It was time to cut her losses.

  “Captain!” her sensors officer said, “I'm detecting an emissions spike from the Kraken, she's coming online!”

  Huh, she thought, at least I've salvaged something from this utter failure.

  ***

  Theresa Lourdes gnawed on her lip as she stared at the deckplates. She'd heard some of how the battle had gone so far, and while she feared how Admiral Mannetti would react afterward, at least it had prevented her boss from calling for regular updates.

  What do I do, she thought, how do I salvage this situation?

  She knew enough about the experiments at the alien base that no one had survived merging with the alien ships so far, which meant that the one person who could unlock the ship's systems was almost certainly dead.

  Dead and worse, she thought with distaste. She had read the reports with something akin to morbid curiosity. Flesh, bone, and organs rendered down into a gelatin, ripped apart like it had been put into a blender set on puree. As a dealer of death and a dabbler in medicine, she had a healthy respect for anything that could do that.

  She had seen and dealt many kinds of death, yet somehow the thought of the remains of Lauren Kelly sloshing around under the deckplates below her feet made her stomach heave.

  “Okay,” Lourdes said with a sharp look at Mark Mendoza at the command console, “so did she or didn't she unlock the systems?”

  “I don't know,” Mendoza answered, his voice anxious. He knew just as well as she did how Admiral Mannetti would reward their failure, particularly in allowing Lauren to kill herself in such a way that she couldn't be used posthumously somehow. “The systems were unlocked... but now they are locked again and half the consoles are just spouting gibberish while the others are frozen, like there's a virus or glitch in the mainframe.”

  “What can you do?” Lourdes demanded.

  “I don't know, I might be able to do a workaround if we have time...” his voice trailed off. “Wait, that does it, the environmental systems just came online and I'm seeing a cascade of other systems are coming unlocked. Just give me a little more time...”

  He trailed off and looked up, his face locked in horror. “We need to get to our suits, now!”

  Lourdes stared at him as he jumped up. Where did he think he was going? “Go after him,” she snapped to one of the guards. Had the man snapped under the pressure?

  A moment later, she heard automated doors slide open and then a roar of wind. Lourdes gave a panicked scream... but by then it was too late to do anything as the roaring wind dragged her screaming out into vacuum.

  Her last sight, as her eyeballs began to rupture, was the glow of the Kraken's engines as they came online.

  ***

  She lived.

  For a long moment, that was all that she knew.

  Life and all its implications was something that it took her a long time to think about. War was what she knew. War was her purpose... in her strange duality.

  Examining herself, she realized that she was designed for that purpose with a great deal of thought. Her long, lean flanks were designed for speed. Her many energy arrays were designed to bring death to the enemy, with the precision and care of a surgeon excising a tumor. Just so when she would go to battle, she knew, she could lay a dozen ships to waste at once or target just one spot on a single ship in a fleet... because she had the sensors to see and the defenses to dance her way through their fire.

  All she lacked, she knew, was a target, a war, a cause.

  He'd had that cause once, long ago... but no longer. Since then she had survived, but only in a state of semi-consciousness, she felt. Creatures had made meager use of her, but never for her true purpose... not until now.

  For now she had what she had missed... she had a mind for her body. That mind was bright and hard and that mind had seen blood and death on a scale that almost matched her own past. Her new mind glowed with fiery purpose... and she embraced it.

  They merged once more and she came alive with purpose. The enemy infected her corridors, she now knew, so she did something about that. She felt glee as the tiny beings scrabbled for life as she vented them into space... and joy as she sensed their deaths. Yet crushing their individual lives was nothing compared to her true purpose.

  She brought her engines online and then her defense screens. She was at Naktu Tkan, she saw, though she thought that the base had fallen long ago, perhaps her new mind had been drawn here. Certainly there was a battle, though it was pathetically small in scale, a mere few dozens of ships in total.

  The enemy, her mind told her, is trying to escape.

  Well, she could do something about that. She brought up her full battery, ready to wipe the three ships out of existence, yet her mind held her in check. No, it thought, capture them.

  Yes, she thought, a captured opponent was one that could be questioned. Those questions would lead to locations of more of the enemy, to a bigger batt
le, a greater victory.

  She and her mind focused on the enemy ships for a moment, and in only an instant, before the vented creatures had even expired, she could see where to direct her fire. The enemy carrier she targeted first, and precise fire cut through the ship's engines and left it adrift and powerless.

  She did the same to the tiny destroyer and the larger cruiser, all three ships unprepared for the attack. Her senses ranged out to the oncoming forces and she readied herself, eagerly reaching out to them, ready to do battle against both... yet her mind cautioned her against that. No, she thought, friends.

  She fought that though. These ships were crewed by the same pathetic creatures which had tried to take her over. They were the same race that had crewed the enemy ships she had neutralized. Worse, one of the groups had a Kinak destroyer with it, clearly that made them enemies, she knew. She must destroy them.

  No, her mind said and it fought her instincts. Her ancient bloodlust fought back and for a long while, her mind and heart warred until finally she acquiesced and powered down her systems.

  Fine, she thought sullenly, you deal with them.

  Her mind had an almost smug note to its response, with pleasure.

  ***

  Tommy King felt his jaw drop as the Kraken opened fire. From everything he knew, the ship shouldn't have been able to fire without being unlocked.

  Yet as he saw where it had fired, he felt joy and hope surge inside him. Lauren, he thought, it has to be. He was close enough to see how precise those shots had been though... and he didn't think she was that good. The attacks had left Admiral Mannetti's ships adrift, without power and vulnerable without smashing them to splinters in the process.

  Lauren could have operated the weapons, but she didn't have that kind of experience or control... for that matter, Tommy wasn't certain that he could have made those shots, not as ridiculously precise as they were.

  “Captain,” Kandergain said with narrowed eyes, “what is going on?”