Empire's Ashes (Blood on the Stars Book 15)

by Jay Allan

  Pegasus’s engines were blasting at full, and the dampeners weren’t even close to catching up. She pushed back against the pressure, trying to reach the controls, to get a status reading. She figured it was a coin toss whether at least one of her people had broken something in the sudden acceleration, but a fractured rib or snapped ulna was a small price to pay to escape destruction…or capture and slavery at the hands of the Highborn.

  She managed to lean forward enough to get a good view of the screen. The pressure was subsiding a bit, or at least it felt that way as the dampeners finally activated.

  The Highborn ship was maintaining its position…but she realized that was just the delay in its scanner beams reporting Pegasus’s energy output, and her motion, and of course, the corresponding delay in her own scanners detected the enemy’s response. There was no way that ship was going to miss what she had just done. Not even a fully operation stealth unit could hide that kind of power surge.

  Andi had watched and waited, hoping the Highborn would leave, and when she’d decided she couldn’t delay any longer, she waited for the right moment, for the enemy’s location and vector to be optimal to give Pegasus a head start.

  Then she gave the order.

  She’d planned it well, she thought…well enough to give her a chance to get her people out of the system. They were close to the coreward end of the Hegemony, and nothing but ancient dead systems likely lay before them. If she could get away from the Highborn ship, there was a strong likelihood none would be waiting ahead.

  You hope…

  She looked over at Vig, and they exchanged glances in silence. There was nothing to say. They both understood the situation, and she suspected his guess as to their chances wasn’t far from her own six in ten.

  She caught movement on the display as the Highborn vessel began to decelerate. She had only guesses on the vessel’s maximum thrust levels, or for that matter, how vital its commander would consider chasing down one small vessel in the system. Andi and her people were looking for ways to destroy the enemy, but she couldn’t imagine the arrogant Highborn would consider that. They would probably figure Pegasus was some random Hegemony ship, a small freighter that had escaped the occupation. Worth chasing down, to a point. But not a crisis either.

  She’d been careful in her planning, and Pegasus was blasting straight for the transit point. She knew what her ship could give her in terms of thrust, and that left as the only variable, the capability and determination of her foe.

  The minutes went by, and any doubt that the enemy was coming for Pegasus evaporated. The vessel was accelerating rapidly now, coming about on a direct pursuit heading.

  Andi stared, calculations running in her head at first, and then a moment later, on her screen, to double check her results. She upped her estimate on Pegasus’s chances of getting through the point. Seven in ten. That didn’t sound bad…but it still twisted her guts into knots.

  And it didn’t take into consideration if the enemy would follow her…or if they would just assume they’d driven a fugitive off into dead and useless space to perish.

  She didn’t care to assign odds to that one. If they let her go, she would be grateful.

  And if not, she would do whatever she had to do.

  That’s not a large Hegemony ship…we might even be able to beat it if we can take it by surprise…

  Chapter Seventeen

  205,000,000 Kilometers from CFS Dauntless

  Omicron Alvera System

  Year 327 AC (After the Cataclysm)

  “Wing Three, get those ships forward twenty thousand meters. We’ve got to hit that lead formation hard. We’re covering for the rest of the strike force, and that means we need to get up there, hit them, and get the hell out…before they can bring their numbers to bear on us.” Reg Griffin had blasted forward at full thrust the entire way, even as she snapped out orders to her various formations. Her people had won a handy victory against an outnumbered enemy force in the system, but after they’d returned and refit, she’d sent most of them back out to begin an intensive survey of the system. They’d just gotten deeply into that complex operation when more enemy ships began to transit.

  Reg had been angry with herself, upset that she’d deployed so many of her available squadrons to dispersed scouting ops. There were thousands of fighters with the fleet, of course but most of those, along with Admiral Barron and Dauntless and the rest of the fleet were clear on the other side of the system, two days or more away. Barron had been advancing slowly, with extreme caution, sending scouting forces into each system to explore the area around the point before the fleet followed. Then, he sent forth an advance guard, to move to the proposed exit point, and complete a detailed scan of the entire system. It was cumbersome and time-consuming, but Reg knew well how many times Tyler Barron had hidden himself in dust clouds and behind gas giants, lying in wait for an enemy, and he had no intention of allowing the enemy to ambush or surprise him the same way.

  Reg had no argument with the admiral’s tactics, save that they had left her forward with limited advance forces…just as a fresh enemy fleet appeared to be arriving.

  She hadn’t hesitated when the scan had first detected the new arrivals, ordering all her detachments to converge into a single strike force. Her pilots had just defeated an enemy force, if an outnumbered one, and morale was strong. Now, they were going to get the chance to repeat, this time against what looked very much like even odds.

  Even if I can get all the scouting groups back and reformed in time…

  She’d almost ordered the single wing she had with her to pull back, to trade space for time, but the line of Highborn carriers forced her hand. She had no idea if they were little more than launch platforms, or if, like the Confederation’s battleships, they carried heavy guns as well as fighters. If she let them get too close, her own mother ships could be in danger. She’d seen enough of the ranges and the power of Highborn beams to exercise caution on protecting her battleships. And if her squadrons lost their landing platforms, every pilot she had, herself included, would die before Dauntless and the other ships could come up and retrieve them.

  Assuming they even tried to come up. She had no idea if more enemy forces were on the way, of just what, exactly, she was up against. Admiral Barron wasn’t going to push the fleet forward recklessly, not when the survival of every human on the Rim rested on the outcome of the war. She’d sat in on the highest level strategy meetings—in Jake Stockton’s place, she never forgot—and she’d seen firsthand Barron’s reluctance. She had some idea of the factors that had pushed the admiral to launch the offensive…but she was absolutely sure he was nervous about it, almost paranoid about what might happen.

  She didn’t blame him, not even when it pushed her into exposed forward positions with a contingent of her fighters corps. She would have done the same thing in his place, and she liked to think, at least, that she wasn’t a hypocrite.

  She glanced down at her thrust readings. Her ship was coming on hard, better than three thousand kilometers per second. She felt an urge to cut back, to lay off the acceleration, but she resisted. She was risking zipping right by the enemy front line, getting caught between the vanguard and the rest of the Highborn squadrons coming up after. But there was no choice. She had to hit those forward ships, engage them before they could close on her still reforming squadrons behind. If those ships we engaged before they could recover their formations…

  She could see the range display dropping, the numbers almost a blur. Her ships would be in missile range soon, no more than two minutes.

  “All ships, arm missiles. Commence targeting operations.”

  She’d thought about holding the warheads back, bringing her ships in close before they launched. But she had to grab the attention of those fighters. She had to hold them back.

  She counted down softly to herself, needlessly repeating the information she was watching on the display. Her hand tightened around her firing controls, even as she entere
d the final targeting information and locked it into the computer.

  She started straight ahead, and her finger tightened, just as she leaned over the comm unit and said, simply, “Launch.”

  * * *

  Stockton could feel his hands moving, shifting the controls, bringing his fighter in on a course toward the Confederation squadrons. He was trying to jerk his arm, to send his ship blasting off into the depths of space, away from the Highborn squadrons he was leading, and also his old comrades…whom he was about to kill. But he couldn’t budge, couldn’t interfere at all with the Collar’s control.

  He’d trained thousands of Thralls, built a massive fighter corps that was, in many ways, a match for that of his Confed comrades and their allies. He despised himself for that, screamed silently at the universe for his inability to kill himself, to escape the waking nightmare he’d lived for four years.

  But now, he was actually going to kill his people. His hand would direct his fighter, his fingers would fire its weapons. And any hope that the instincts, the intuition, all the parts of his mind that made him a great pilot, would remain under his control, and not that of the Collar and the version of himself it had created, were quickly dashed. He’d been putting on a flying display.

  Maybe they’ll peg me as the leader. He felt an instant of hope that one of his old pilots would kill him and end his misery. But it didn’t last. In truth, he doubted anyone in the fleet could beat him…and he knew his enslaved mind and psyche would fight with all the skill and ferocity he possessed against any fighter that came at him.

  He could see through the eyes he couldn’t control, hear what his Collar-dominated self could hear. But there was nothing he could do to stop what was about to happen. He couldn’t even close his eyes, look away. All he could do was stare right at the treachery he was about to commit.

  “All wings…launch missiles.” The words were his, echoing in his cockpit. He tried yet again to take control of his arms, his hands, pull them back from their deadly task. But nothing he did could stop the arming sequence…or the firing of his two missiles.

  He tried to imagine someone who had developed an abomination like the Collar. The perverse horror of a device that removed all control, provided the enslaved psyche access to all its skills and memories, and even its raw instincts, and yet allowed some scrap of the person one had been before to watch helplessly, defied his comprehension. Anyone who would employ such an abomination had to be destroyed. He would kill all the Highborn, wherever they were, if he could, send every one of them screaming to hell.

  He tried to move again, one more effort at defiance, to overload his lasers, to do something, anything, to stop what he was doing.

  To no avail.

  He tried to turn away from the screen, from the trails of the two missiles he’d fired, but his Collar-controlled mind was fixed on the data, and that meant he had to watch.

  The warheads streaked toward the oncoming formation, just over one hundred Lightning fighters in total, with close to four hundred more forming up behind. The force he now led was almost a perfect match, a fact he knew was by design. He’d even led forth a vanguard, whose true purpose had been to give the Confed forces time to reorganize their remaining squadrons before engaging his full strength.

  He wasn’t there that day to take on the whole fleet, to throw thousands of fighters at the combined forces of the Confederation, the Alliance, and the Hegemony. That, perhaps, was something to be thankful for…though he knew the Highborn’s overall plan, and he recognized the grave danger it held for his old comrades.

  His job was to give the forces in front of him a good fight, do his part to make it seem the Highborn’s forces were spread out, that they were struggling to put up a defense against the Pact invasion. To lure Admiral Barron and the fleet in ever deeper…to where they could finally be destroyed.

  He tried to tell himself he would break free of the Collar before then, that he would stop it all somehow. But he didn’t really believe that, not anymore. Stockton would never give up…it wasn’t in him. But he knew he would fail, despite his best efforts.

  His misery about the future was augmented by horror at what he was seeing at that moment. Both of his missiles had found their targets…destroying two Confederation fighters. Stockton had hated himself for training the Thrall pilots, for his part in the battles they had fought, the Confed flyers they had killed.

  But now he had killed Confederation pilots himself, his own hands on the controls, his own targeting bringing the missiles in on them, and blasting them to plasma.

  The silent screams in his head turned to wild howls of misery and despair. He begged the universe to take him, to end his nightmare, even as his hands moved again, bringing his fighter toward the Confederation wings just ahead…and his display flashed, showings a full charge in his lasers.

  * * *

  “There is something wrong. I can’t explain it, but the enemy pilots, their flight plans, the tightness of their formations…” Reg Griffin sat as a small table, flanked by two legends she’d practically worshipped as a young pilot. Dirk Timmons and Olya Federov carried the scars of their many battles, including a pair of prosthetic legs in Timmons’s case. There was a grimness to each of the battered warriors, an exhaustion countered only by their unbreakable devotion to duty.

  Timmons and Griffin had come up with the main fleet, and she’d asked them to join her as soon as they arrived. Her forces had driven off the second Highborn force, albeit at significantly higher losses than they suffered against the first. But she was more worried than ever, and she hoped Timmons and Federov could help her make sense of the situation.

  “They are certainly better than I would have expected…in more ways than one. Perhaps they were able to secure sufficient data on our own tactics. The Hegemony must have been studying such things, and with half of that power’s worlds in enemy hands…” Timmons let his voice slip to silence for a moment. “But the Hegemony didn’t really engage in fighter versus fighter operations until the very end of the conflict, and even then, they faced pilots on our side raised on bombing operations, and poorly trained in such tactics as dogfighting. Yet, the Highborn pilots are quite skilled.”

  “Is there any way they could have obtained footage from Union sources? We certainly had our battles with them.” Federov moved in her chair, wincing as she did. She’d recovered from the wounds that had taken her out of action near the close of the Hegemony War, at least as much as she was going to. Some things never completely healed.

  “I don’t see how. They no doubt know about the Union, but the only way the Highborn could actually reach Union space is around the edge of the Hegemony and the Badlands. That’s a long way to go just to get data on fighter combat.” Reg shook her head. “I’ve wondered if they could have intelligence assets in the Confederation. I don’t like to think some of our people would help an enemy like that, but we all know the sad truth. Still, the same problems apply. How could they maintain communications with intelligence sources, with Striker and the whole fleet, and thousands of scanner buoys, between them and the border?” She paused, and her frown deepened. “There is one other thing…I’m sure it’s my imagination, but…”

  “But?” Timmons made eye contact.

  “Well, those formations, the tactics…they remind me of something. Back from the Union War.” She fell silent again.

  “They remind you of Raptor’s tactics.” Federov said it first, but Reg knew they’d all been thinking it.

  “Yes. I know that’s ridiculous. Maybe…if he’d faced them, led squadrons into dogfights against them. But how could they emulate Jake Stockton’s methods, when they’ve never even seen him in combat against other fighters?” Reg was agitated, and it was showing in her voice. She was stressed about dealing with an enemy that seemed more capable than they should be, but it was more than that. She felt like she was fighting Jake Stockton’s ghost, almost as though her old mentor had abandoned her, and was fighting against his old comrade
s.

  The room was silent for a long while, and Reg knew they were all thinking of their lost leader. Almost four years had passed, but in ways it still seemed to Reg as though it had been just yesterday. She’d worked herself endlessly, drove herself to the brink of exhaustion, feeling Stockton’s presence somehow always with her, pushing her harder. He’d had the confidence in her to anoint her as his successor, and she couldn’t imagine a more terrible fate than failing her lost leader.

  “I’m not sure it matters…” Timmons looked up from where his eyes had been focused on the table. “What matters is defeating them. They’re better than we expected, better than they should be. Okay, we know that now. Would knowing how or why improve our tactical situation? You did what you had to do, Reg…what Jake would have done. And those pilots out there in the fleet’s bays, they’re a damned sight better than they were before, even since I got out here. Don’t forget, that last fight was on even terms, and they caught you by surprise…and they still ended up turning tail and blasting out of the system. So, however much better they are than we think they should be, don’t sell yourself, or your pilots short. One thing I can tell you about Raptor is…he worried as much as anyone, sat up nights trying to figure out how to fight against the odds. Not many people know that, because he didn’t let anybody see it. The squadrons think of his as a legend, but he was just a man, one who did what had to be done. And you’re more like him than you think, Reg. I can see why he picked you as his second out here, as his successor. This is going to be a hard war, and I won’t lie to you and tell you anything else. But you have my confidence. I believe you can do what you have to do, that you can lead these wings to victory…and you can count on me fighting at your side to the end.”