Thresh felt the explosion rock the Silence before she heard it. The deck plates began to quake. Alarms from the engineering console filled the flight deck.
Thresh jumped down from the flight deck and ran to the engineering console. She pushed the Faction operator aside, he slumped to the deck. She checked the cause of the alarm. The Silence was erupting plasma from one of the lateral power conduits that fed power around the ship. The hull had been ripped away just forward of the drive section. The ship was flaring plasma like a solar arc flare.
“This is the Silence,” Thresh said on an open channel to all ships. “We are going down. We’ve taken a hit. We are going in.”
The Blue Stars were still climbing, their thrusters and grav field generators pushing them away from the planet. The assault team was firing at the Skarak fighters closing in on them. They were concentrating their pulse rifle fire on one Skarak fighter at a time, but the Skarak were in close now and their blue crackle fire was starting to land on target, knocking Blue Star marines from the sky.
“Time to stop running and attack,” Boyd said. “Move in and take the fighters out with your bayonets.” Boyd turned and led the way, grabbing a Skarak fighter with his grav field. He was pulled in fast, firing up his electron bayonet as he went. He hit the fighter hard and it knocked the wind out of him. He thrust his bayonet in through the cockpit cover, the Skarak soldier within looked up. It was impossible to read the insect like features, but Boyd was sure he saw surprise and panic there. He stabbed down with his electron bayonet and cut through the windshield.
With the fighter out of action it slowed its accent. Boyd stood on the top of the cockpit looking for his next target. The Blue Stars were spread out as the fighters performed wild maneuvers trying to fling them off their backs.
Then Boyd heard Thresh’s emergency transmission. He looked up and saw the tiny point of light falling toward the planet. He zoomed in his view with his helmet’s visor, and saw the ship falling, damaged and out of control.
“Thresh, this is Boyd. You are erupting plasma. You haven’t taken a hit, you are erupting from the inside out.”
The data on Boyd’s wrist mounted holostage showed him the Resolute and the Phantom Zero were moving away. Skarak ships were closing in on the one target they could see, the Silence.
“This was no accident,” Thresh said. “This was deliberate.”
“Skarak sleepers?” Boyd said.
“No, something designed to cripple but not destroy the ship. This was Kitzov. The Skarak are closing in, they can’t see the Resolute or the Phantom Zero anymore, only the Silence.”
“He sabotaged his own ship?” Boyd said trying to understand.
“No, he must be aboard the Resolute.”
Boyd opened a channel to the Resolute. “Hemel, come in. Jim, can you hear me? Resolute, respond!”
There was no answer.
Boyd had no time to curse Kitzov. An alarm sounded on his wrist mounted holostage, the timer countdown for the warheads. He looked down at the tower. There were no explosions. The tower still stood. It was still sending out its coordination signal.
“Listen to me, Thresh,” Boyd said. “The warhead attack has failed. You are our last chance to end the Skarak signal and the attacks in the Scorpio system. Put the Silence down at the base of the tower. Can you do that?”
“I can. I have control of the Silence, just about. It was good knowing you, Will. Thresh out.”
The Silence entered the Skarak atmosphere at high speed, burning a trail across the blue sky. The ship was heading directly for the base of the Skarak tower. She was moving so fast that the plasma fire was stripped away and the Silence fell like a meteor.
Boyd watched the ship slam into the tower at the base. It hit the black Skarak tower and stopped suddenly, like a stone hitting thick wet mud. And then the ship was drawn in slowly, enveloped in the thick black shadow, consumed and drawn in slowly like a stone sinking into molasses.
Boyd watched as the Silence was sucked into the Skarak tower.
He was still standing on the back of the fighter as it started to fall. He steadied himself as the Skarak fighter began to tumble back down to the planet. He stabilized the ship under him, stood on it watching the tower. He waited for the Silence to explode, for her core to collapse and punch a hole in the planet that would bring the Skarak signal tower crashing down.
Nothing.
He tried to contact the Silence. There was no response.
Boyd opened a channel to Doc who was clinging on to a fighter.
“I am going to try and get to the Silence. We have to make sure that her core is set to collapse. If the crew has been killed in the crash, then there’s no one to set off the core collapse.”
“Is that the real reason?” Cronin said. “Don’t you just want to try and save your Faction girlfriend?”
“Are you with me or not?” Boyd said.
Doc shrugged. “Why not. Looks like we are trapped here anyway. I’ve got nowhere else I need to be.” He jumped off the fighter he had just finished off and dropped down to the surface with Boyd. The Blue Stars all responded that they were with him too and they fell in formation, following Boyd back down to the Skarak planet.
Boyd opened a channel to the surviving fighter blades. “Move in and keep these Skarak fighters off us. Give us chance to get in that tower.”
The blades fired up their drives and dove back into the Skarak atmosphere. They avoided the Skarak crackle fire and struck with their forward mounted laser assemblies, slicing the fighters apart. More fighters came racing across the ground.
“Keep them off us,” Boyd said as he came closer to the planet surface. Dropping like a stone, he fell under the influence of the planet’s natural gravity with his thrusters pushing him. He judged his braking point, trying to make it as late as possible, reluctant to lose any speed until absolutely necessary. The dark ground was racing up to meet him fast.
Thresh picked herself up off the flight deck and stood at the engineering console. Why was she still alive? The Silence was unpowered. Even if the Silence had her deflection shielding, and the hull stability field fully powered, the impact at that speed should have vaporized the ship and set off a catastrophic core collapse.
She scanned the surroundings. The Silence was sitting just inside the Skarak tower. The ground level was vast and empty apart from the stream of people walking at a steady ambling pace from a small entrance toward the center of the tower.
Halfway up the tower directly above the center point was a large single Skarak. This Skarak alone was almost as big as a warship. A Skarak queen. She was attached to the walls of the tower with long tendrils of dark Skarak matter. She was reaching down with long insect arms and snatching up the naked humans that walked in at a steady pace. She fed them into her abdomen in a mechanical rhythm.
Thresh saw the pilot who was lying on the deck where she had shot him down started moving, he groaned and moved slowly as if waking from a drunken stupor. She fired another low yield pulse round into him and knocked him to the ground again. She fired another into the engineer too just to be safe.
She knew exactly how to rig the ship to explode for real, to turn the Silence’s core into a fusion bomb, a small, short lived star capable of hammering a city sized hole in the planet’s crust. She didn’t know how powerful these Skarak really were, but nothing could withstand the force of a core explosion.
A Faction trooper burst into the flight deck. He saw the fallen Faction crew and Thresh at the engineering console. Thresh raised her pistol. The Faction trooper was young, Kitzov liked them young and impressionable. He was looking at her, and shook from fear and betrayal.
“He left us,” he said.
“Yes,” Thresh agreed. She lowered her pistol. “And not for the first time.” It had happened to her before, but only now could she see clearly that every iota of Faction loyalty she thought he may have had was merely a selfish, self-centered desire for power and control. Kitzov was no more
loyal than any pirate of the deep black, but every bit as self-serving as the worst of them. She tapped on the console and prepared the reactor for overload.
“Take those two men and get out of here,” she said. “The Silence is done being quiet, she is about to make the loudest noise you’ll ever hear.”
Boyd touched down on the planet surface. It was a dark and desolate waste land. The Skarak tower was only a few meters away. Its dark surface was strange and mesmerizing. Boyd fired up his electron bayonet and plunged it into the tower.
“Hurry,” he said to his team. “The Skarak will come for us any minute.” He cut away at the tower. His team was hesitant and locked in a trance looking at the dark tower. “Blue Stars! Bayonets. Now.” Boyd roused them. “I’ve done this before. Trust me, we can get through. I need to get to the Silence, and then…” he trailed off. Everyone knew what came next. “Then we play our ace. We will win this battle, this war. Even if we’re not here to see it, we know that victory will be ours.”
The Blue Stars fired up their bayonets and they plunged their fizzing blades into the thick black surface.
Then the Skarak soldiers came. They came across the desolate plain toward Boyd and his team.
The blades swept in from high above and raked the ground with spitz gun fire, tearing up the ground and the Skarak soldiers who were rushing toward Boyd and his team. A group of Skarak fighters chased off the blades, firing as they closed in. A blade was struck and went down, spinning and alive with cracking blue fire. It exploded as it hit the ground away in the far distance.
More Skarak soldiers were coming. They were gathering the aimlessly staggering humans with them as they came, and soon a mass of Skarak and human bodies were charging toward Boyd and his team at the base of the tower.
Doc Cronin turned to face them.
“Blue Stars, on me. You keep going, Lieutenant. Get to the Silence. We will hold them off.” Cronin took a knee and put the pulse rifle to his shoulder.
Boyd looked around for the lieutenant, and then realized that Cronin meant him. He was the leader of these marines. But Doc Cronin was a leader too, and he was giving Boyd a chance to get the job done.
Cronin fired a stream of pulse rounds. The assault team lined up alongside him in a tight formation, concentrating their pulse rifle fire. A wall of white fire flashed across the Skarak planet surface toward the approaching enemy.
“Go, Will,” Cronin said as he walked toward the oncoming Skarak. “Take the tower down. Go!”
Boyd cut more furiously, and he could feel the strange material weaken and give way. He pressed forward, and the more he cut, dragging his blade back and forth, the more he felt the resistance fall away. He stepped forward, pushing his body into the material. He pushed through the thick walls of the tower and was soon walking forward surrounded by the thick and heavy black.
15
Boyd pressed on, not sure if he was moving at all. The material surrounded him was like thick tar, and it felt as if he were adrift in a vast empty space.
Then he emerged on the far side. He was thrown forward, expelled from the dark material. He found himself in a wide open space. His suit’s environmental readings told him the air was just about breathable, but he was not about to take off his helmet. A thick haze obscured the far view, but his enhanced data view on his visor showed him the location of the Silence nearby.
He ran toward it.
The tower was hollow and reached high up, disappearing in the hazy darkness. Far above, he could make out the shape and movements of a huge Skarak creature that was snatching up people who walked mindlessly forward.
Bodies of Faction crew lay on the dark ground around the ship. Some were further away from the ship than others, those who had fled the furthest.
He reached the hull of the Silence and looked for a hatch, a way in. He moved along the hull until a hatch opened just above him. A hand reached down to grab him. He recoiled instinctively.
“Boyd, get in.”
Thresh reached out again and this time Boyd reached up to her. He moved up with a pull from Thresh and a light burst from his suit’s thruster jets.
Closing the hatch behind him, he pulled off his helmet. He stepped up close to Thresh, close enough that he could feel her warm breath on his face, igniting a fire in the pit of his stomach.
“Miss me?” she asked sarcastically.
He wanted to say something back, something equally sarcastic, but he stopped himself. He had already wasted too much time grappling with his feelings for her and what she had done. Now there might not be much time left. He didn’t want to waste whatever little they had left if his plan didn’t work. Or if it did.
He slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her close, closing the gap that was between them. He could feel her chest heaving against his, her breath just as ragged as his own. He looked into her eyes and hoped this wouldn’t be the last time he held her. “I couldn’t leave you.”
He leaned in and gently kissed her, taking the moment to feel her warm, full lips against his. His heart ached as Thresh pushed further into him. She loved him and he knew it.
Thresh pulled away and held Boyd’s face in her hands. Her forehead pressed against his.
“Coming here is going to get you killed, Will. I am about to set the core to overload.”
Boyd nodded once. “Good plan. Let’s do it.”
“Together until the end, is it?” Thresh led the way.
“Let’s try and make sure that our end is a long way off.”
The thumping noise on the outer hull began to grow louder and was coming from all over. Boyd looked up.
“Can you show me the outer hull?” Boyd asked.
Thresh accessed the Silence surveillance node on a corridor console.
The hull was crawling with Skarak soldiers all trying to cut their way in to the Silence with focused blue fire from their personal weapons.
“We need to work fast,” Boyd said.
Thresh ran ahead and flung open the drive room hatch, pistol held out.
The drive room was empty.
“The crew have already fled,” Thresh said.
“They didn’t go far,” Boyd said. “I found them outside.”
Thresh stepped up to the primary core console. She hesitated for a second and looked at Boyd.
“Do you want to die here or out there?” She asked, her hand hovering over a sealed panel.
“Can we be sure the core will detonate if we leave?”
Thresh mulled it over. “We can seal the drive room. It’ll take the Skarak a few minutes to break in. We can set a short fuse on the containment field collapse, but we won’t have long.”
“I will take a chance at living,” he held out his hand. “I have seen what it is like to be dead.”
Thresh gave him a confused look.
“It was life without you,” Boyd said. “It was worse than death, in fact.”
Thresh couldn’t help but laugh. “When did you get so sentimental, Boyd?”
Boyd winked and blew her a kiss. He loved their back-and-forth banter. Even in the middle of a stressful situation it was still there.
“Get ready to run,” Thresh popped open the panel.
“Your leg?” Boyd said. “Will you be able to run?”
“I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”
Boyd shrugged.
“I guess not. Do it. Let’s blow this thing.”
Admiral Selby could not sit down. He stood at the holostage and watched the Skarak armada close in. Every fiber of his being told him he should turn and run, but he overcame his fear and bravely stood his ground, facing the oncoming Skarak armada. If he could not stand in the face of the Skarak threat, then how could he expect any of his officers to stand their ground? If they did not stand, then all would be lost. However hopeless it seemed, he would stand his ground.
The masterships at the center were flanked by hundreds of warships. Thousands upon thousands of the small fighters patrolled the fringe
s of the Skarak formation.
“They are intent on hitting the center of our formation,” Selby said in a strong and clear voice. He could not let emotion out now. If he showed any hint of fear it would spread throughout the command center and could quickly build to full blown panic. That would be as disastrous to the fleet as any Skarak attack.
“If we break, we are finished. Launch combat drones. All ships across the fleet, launch everything on my command. Target the masterships. We can deal with the warships and fighters if we can first knock out their masterships.”
The fleet responded and all ships were quickly ready to fire. Selby gave the order.
A thousand combat drones were deployed in an instant, racing away from every ship in the fleet. Only the squadrons of fighter blades did not have combat drone launch capability, they waited for their chance to attack. Every launch tube deployed a combat drone, and all tubes were reloaded in seconds as the entire fleet reported ready to launch a second salvo.
Selby didn’t hesitate. He needed to strike now and strike hard. He ordered the launch. The second salvo of drones was deployed and raced off after the first.
The two carriers launched a hundred combat drones in each salvo and still had enough drones for a third and final salvo. The cruisers carried a maximum of twenty-four drones, but many had already been deployed to the Belt to slow the armada.
A third salvo launched and raced in toward their targets just as the first salvo neared the massive Skarak masterships.
The masterships began to glow with blue crackle fire as the first salvo moved in. A sudden blast of blue fire erupted from the masterships, fine lines flickering out across black space that reached into the wave of combat drones.
The drones instantly lost power, their drives cutting out as the blue fire flickered over them. A moment later they detonated.
The salvo of combat drones created a wall of superhot plasma boiling in the vacuum of space. The second salvo raced into the plasma wall.
Blue Star Marine Boxed Set Page 71
