“The problem is that weird gravitational field the battery emits. It will mess with anyone who gets too close. Hard to work when you feel inside out and it seems like your legs are melting through the hull.”
“We’ve got a weapon, Tolvern. We must find a way to use it.”
“I could call the admiral, but it feels like something we should resolve ourselves.”
“Agreed,” McGowan said. “Anyway, Drake is far enough away now that we don’t want to hail him. The buzzards will pick up on it, and they’ll figure out we’re carrying the gravity weapon. How about this? What if we were to detach the eliminon battery from Blackbeard and tether it to some other ship? We’ll hold that ship in reserve until it’s needed.”
Suspicion bloomed in her mind. “Yeah?”
“Get over it, Tolvern. That’s not what I’m talking about. If I don’t think we can afford to lose your shot-up, ramshackle cruiser and its crew of misfits, then I’m sure as hell not going to keep my ship out of the fight. I’ll be in the thick of it, whether you want me there or not. No, I’m thinking of tethering the eliminon battery to a torpedo boat.”
“Ah.”
“That way it will be on hand to deliver the cargo whether Drake needs us chasing the buzzards or not. And we can spare a single torpedo boat.”
“I like it,” Tolvern said.
“Good. Anything else?”
“No, that’s all. Oh, but McGowan,” she said, making sure to keep her tone one of friendly rivalry and not hostile, “we’ll soon see exactly how you stack up against this ramshackle ship and its crew of misfits. You might find that Blackbeard can hold her own.”
He chuckled, seeming to take it in the spirit it was offered. “There’s a reason my ship is called Peerless, Tolvern. It’s not just a name. Try to keep up, will you?”
And with that, he was gone.
“That was almost reasonable,” she said aloud.
“I’d say,” a voice said behind her.
Tolvern turned to see Capp standing in the doorway. A smile crept up the corners of the lieutenant’s mouth.
“Don’t tell me you fancy the bloke now, Cap’n.”
“God, no.”
“Good, ’cause he’s still a wank weasel. Anyhow, I thought you was still sweet on the admiral. Or did you give that up?”
Now it was Tolvern’s turn to smile. “No comment, Lieutenant.”
“Wait a minute,” Capp said. “You didn’t, did you? Is that what you was doing over there? I thought it was a big important meeting of cruiser captains or something.”
“Ease up on the throttle, Capp. Your imagination is out of control.”
“Are you telling the truth?”
“About what? I haven’t said anything.”
Capp’s eyes narrowed, and she studied the captain’s face. “All right, then. Keep your secrets. Anyhow, I thought you should know that we found some more enemy ships. And they’re headed this way.”
Chapter Sixteen
Drake studied the approaching ships to see what they’d do, even as the mood on the bridge grew tense. There were only six lances. Not enough to threaten the massive Albion force, but enough to prove an annoyance.
Manx cleared his throat. “They look ready to jump, sir.”
“Pilot, how long until we reach Singapore?” Drake asked.
Díaz tapped at his screen. “Fourteen hours, sir.”
“And the other enemy forces? When will they arrive to reinforce the harvester?”
More tapping. “Eighteen hours and twenty minutes for the closer fleet. Nineteen hours for the other.”
“So we’ll get there first. Very good. Hold course for Singapore.”
Drake leaned back in his chair. Let these six ships jump. If they came into the middle of his fleet, he’d surround and destroy them. If they came up along one of his flanks, he’d drive them off with concentrated firepower.
But instead of jumping, the enemy ships kept charging on an intercept path that would bring them right up the z-axis, at Drake’s underbelly. He was suspicious, guessing they would try some trick at the last moment, but to be safe, he dropped another destroyer and three more torpedo boats to fortify that side of the formation.
Behind them, Blackbeard had fallen to the back of Task Force Bravo. A torpedo boat came up alongside her. Drake couldn’t decide at first what Tolvern was doing, but closer inspection showed that she was passing off the eliminon battery to one of her smaller vessels.
Consultation with his tech officers gave a good explanation. Blackbeard’s movements would be hamstrung so long as she was towing the eliminon battery. Better to have a less essential ship bring the battery into the action.
Meanwhile, the small enemy force entered the range of the navy’s guns. A frigate fired missiles, while destroyers formed a screen and readied cannon. Torpedo boats turned from their course, ready to make a run.
The lances shot down the first volley of missiles, then targeted one of Drake’s destroyers with pulse cannon, even as they came under withering fire themselves.
What now? Drake was tempted to split off a couple of cruisers to pin the enemy ships in place long enough for Tolvern’s task force to come up and finish them off. Except that would weaken his flank and delay Tolvern. He had to get to Singapore ahead of those other enemy fleets. But he couldn’t let these lances take potshots at him for the next twelve hours, either.
Drake muttered an oath. “We’ll have to respond. Manx, signal the fleet. Prepare for full-scale battle. Lloyd, get me Caites.”
Caites appeared on the viewscreen moments later, her eyes flashing eagerly. “I’m ready, Admiral. Give me orders.”
A few minutes later, the fleet was slowing dramatically. Dreadnought dove down, flanked by a cruiser and two corvettes, to form a wall ahead of the approaching lances, which escalated their harassment of his destroyer. Drake sent the rest of his cruisers to reinforce the destroyer screen, and his second missile frigate to maneuver through the fleet to join the first in providing fire support.
The targeted destroyer, HMS Gibraltar, broke from the fight after suffering damage along the starboard shield and retreated toward the two missile frigates. The lances feinted a charge after it, but the frigates chased them back with missiles.
Even before they could be reinforced by cruisers, the remaining three destroyers began to turn the tables. As a lance passed, they fired their main cannons, and hit it both fore and aft. It fled the battlefield, engine sputtering and dying. By the time it fell out of range, the engine was gone entirely, and it continued on a straight-line trajectory.
Drake’s cruisers entered the fight, with both Richmond and Zealand landing hits. Facing this attack, and spotting Dreadnought moving to cut off their escape to the fore and Tolvern’s task force approaching from behind, the enemy jumped for safety. The surviving lances appeared several hundred thousand miles away, above the fleet on the z-axis.
From there, the lances followed Drake’s trajectory toward Singapore as he renewed his flight. An hour later they made as if to charge again, and again he ignored them until he was sure they would attack. He’d lost more than two hours with their previous skirmish, slowing, maneuvering, and then accelerating again.
Drake was in the mess hall several hours later when he was called back to the bridge. He arrived to find the remaining lances coming at them yet again. His fleet was only a few hours from Singapore—this would be the enemy’s last charge before he entered combat—and he was still ahead of the two larger Apex fleets also rushing toward the planet.
Manx had taken the helm, but now returned to his own station. “Shall I call Caites again?”
Drake studied the viewscreen. “They’re going to throw away those lances.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“We’re still ahead of those other two enemy fleets. These five lances mean nothing to the buzzards. They’ll do whatever it takes to slow us down. I think they’re going to attack Dreadnought.”
“That woul
d be suicide.”
“But it would force us to slow down, and that’s all that matters.” Drake thought quickly. “Position our frigates to support Dreadnought. Bring in our corvettes. They can hunt them down after we bring out the big guns.” He opened a com link. “I’ll speak to the gunnery myself.”
Drake’s ships were still on the move when the lances jumped. They appeared moments later off Dreadnought’s port side. That wasn’t exactly what he’d been expecting; he thought they’d come in from above, where it would take longer to get at them with the main battery.
But his cannons were warm, his torpedo bays open and primed. He rolled and fired at the same time. The five lances raced right into his line of fire.
At the same time, the corvettes dove in from the side, and the frigates launched missiles. There wasn’t much left for them to attack. By the time these two forces entered the battlefield, two lances had taken hammer blows that opened breaches to the void, another broke in two, and a fourth exploded under Dreadnought’s main guns. The fifth emerged unscathed, but ran right into the corvettes, which fell upon it like starving barracuda. The battle was over in minutes.
Shouts went up across the bridge.
“Well done, sir!” Manx said.
“It was a lucky guess against a weak enemy. Let’s see what happens next before we start the celebrations.”
Drake changed the viewscreen, and this quieted them. There, directly ahead, lay the cool blue sphere of Singapore. A large moon lay behind the planet, not so different in size and shape from Albion’s. There was a smaller moon, a captured asteroid, really, that had once contained an orbital fortress, according to Hillary Koh. Apex had ravaged it in their attacks. It was now out of view on the far side of the planet.
Drake’s first glimpse of the planet filled him with a deep longing for home. With cloud cover obscuring the details of the facing continental mass, he might have been looking at Albion. A warm, welcoming home world.
But there was an enemy fleet in orbit, which quashed his nostalgia. The fleet contained a menacing force of lances and spears, and there, in the middle of them all, lurked the massive, octopus-like form of the harvester ship. Bloated from an orgy of feasting on the helpless, terrified people of Singapore, it now turned its eye toward the human and Hroom fleet rushing toward it.
Drake shook his head. That was ridiculous—the ship wasn’t a star leviathan, and it hadn’t physically changed form from all the victims that had disappeared into its bowels. And it didn’t have an eye. But Drake couldn’t shake that malignant feeling as he studied it on the viewscreen.
“We’ll have two hours before those other two enemy fleets arrive,” he said. “Let’s make them count.”
#
Led by Dreadnought, Task Force Alpha rumbled toward Singapore. Drake positioned his cruisers to starboard, to be swung like a battering ram, and his destroyers and corvettes like a massive shield off port. The missile frigates he positioned above, and the torpedo boats in a small but lethal pack below, ready to charge.
The harvester remained in orbit, and its support ships organized into hunter-killer packs. But they made no move to scramble their forces, either to intercept the incoming human ships or to flee. It was beginning to look like a straight-up brawl.
As Drake’s forces slowed, Tolvern brought Task Force Bravo alongside Alpha’s left flank, a few hundred thousand miles beyond Drake’s destroyer-corvette shield. To the enemy, it must look like he was setting up this smaller force to hold off the hard-charging enemy reinforcements.
The enemy spears fired pulses of energy at Dreadnought that lit up the nine and ten shields. In response to the attack on his flagship, Drake’s frigates launched their first missile barrage.
Throckmorton called over from the defense grid computer. “Our own batteries are in range, sir. But long-range missiles only.”
“Hold fire,” Drake ordered. To Manx, he said, “Give Caites the signal.”
Moments later, the four cruisers sped away from the rest of Task Force Alpha as the other ships continued to slow. They flung themselves straight at the mass of spears and lances, whose probing attacks against Dreadnought were growing stronger. Spotting the new threat, the enemy turned its weapons to target the cruisers instead.
“Send the boats,” Drake said.
Six torpedo boats broke from formation and followed the cruisers. When they were away, he gave orders to launch missiles from across the remaining ships of his fleet. He slipped a couple of slower-moving torpedoes into the mix, then ordered another barrage from his frigates.
Caites streaked past the planet’s moon in a dive toward the planet, her cruisers in a tight cluster, missiles flashing ahead of them to clear the way. A few of the outlying lances dodged out of the way, but the mass of enemy ships bunched together, with the forward elements knocking down missiles, while the others targeted one of the cruisers, which turned out to be Zealand.
“She’s taking damage, sir,” Lloyd announced.
Then the cruisers flashed past. They were going too fast relative to their targets to fire cannons, but Richmond and Repulse launched torpedoes. Two of these struck one of the lances as it turned to give pursuit. It fell back, hull cracked and bleeding gases. More than a dozen of the enemy ships were accelerating to chase after the cruisers.
Drake’s torpedo boats arrived next, but slowed quickly rather than running the same gauntlet as the much larger and more powerful cruisers. Instead, they launched torpedoes and fell back toward the fleet. The torpedoes forced the attention of the enemy. They shot down several and sent lances through to lure the rest away. The lances jumped at the last moment, when the torpedoes were about to overtake them.
The end result of the torpedo boat attack was that Drake’s cruisers slipped through the net and swung wide around the planet to rejoin the flagship. But unfortunately, the charge had accomplished little. One wounded lance, some shield damage to Zealand, but otherwise status quo. And status quo favored Apex, which had only to wait for reinforcements.
There were roughly twenty lances in all, plus four spears. They swung in two masses on either side of the harvester, which at last began to move out of orbit. It opened, and small ovaloid ships plopped out and ignited their engines. Batteries of energy weapons and bomb launchers warmed across the harvester’s bulbous head.
The lances resumed firing on the fleet, and Dreadnought again took damage. Energy pulses hit the shields above the bridge and along her flanks. More pulses struck the bombproofs housing the main batteries.
“Hold fire,” he said. “Let our friends do their work.”
One of the spears and two lances hit Dreadnought above the bridge, temporarily blinding the sensor array being fed into the main viewscreen. It went white.
“Damage to number six shield,” Simon said. “Remaining strength sixty-eight percent.”
The viewscreen returned to focus. There, ahead of them, was the ugly shape of the Apex harvester ship, approaching rapidly.
“Now!” Drake said.
#
Tolvern kept a wary eye on the second and third Apex fleets even as she focused on Drake’s forces entering the fray to her right. He’d sent in four cruisers and a handful of torpedo boats in an attempt to scatter the smaller ships so the rest of Task Force Alpha could attack the harvester. It hadn’t worked.
Instead, the lances and spears had traded blows with Drake’s cruisers, fought off the torpedo attack, and circled their forces around the harvester. Dreadnought went right at them, even as the enemy ships concentrated firepower on the Albion battleship. In return, Drake’s forces targeted the harvester.
The sky between the two fleets filled with missiles, bombs, pulse weapons, torpedoes, and cannon fire. Both sides were delivering and taking hard blows. Drake was under so much fire from the spears on his starboard that he sent his cruisers and corvettes to engage the ships before they overwhelmed him.
“We gonna sit here doing nothing?” Capp asked. “He’s getting pounded do
wn there.”
“Keep your nerve, Lieutenant. We’re not ready until our torpedo boats are in position.”
She’d sent them on a wider arc than the other ships, which left them exposed and vulnerable, but kept the towed eliminon battery from whiplashing and killing the battery crew.
Meanwhile, the mood on the bridge grew tense thanks to the pending arrival of the second and third Apex fleets, which had been charging toward Singapore almost from the moment the Royal Navy entered the system.
The first of these two fleets was close enough to jump into the action, but it looked as though it were waiting for the other ships to catch up. When they did, they might go against the admiral, or they might leap right into the thick of Tolvern’s ships. Could she hold off twenty lances and two spears?
Possibly, depending on how well Lenol Tyn’s sloops acquitted themselves. The Hroom force sat below her, bunched like cavalry for a mass charge. The other ships of Task Force Bravo milled about nearby, and she almost sensed the tension of their captains and crew, waiting for her orders.
Capp touched her ear. “We got the signal, Cap’n. Them boats are in place. We’re ready to go.”
Tolvern called the gunnery and got Barker on the line.
“Make sure everything is preloaded. Things are about to get hot.”
“Aye, Captain. We’ll be ready for it.”
She ended the call. “All right, people, let’s win this thing.”
Tolvern flared Blackbeard’s engines twice, giving the signal to the other ships, then moved to join the fight.
Chapter Seventeen
Blackbeard dove in from above, while Peerless stabbed up from below. Task Force Bravo’s three corvettes, five destroyers, and six torpedo boats punched straight forward, and the two frigates stood back a pace, hurling a barrage of missiles into the enemy formation.
Shattered Sun (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 3) Page 15
