No air in the gutted derelict, so no sound, and now there was no com. That left hand gestures, but they all knew what was out there now, that it was serious business, and the others were alert enough to understand with minimal instructions. The marines cut away a larger section of the inner hull with their plasma torches. They’d come in where the ship’s outer armor had already been pierced during its final battle, and that made the cutting easier. It took less than a minute to widen the gap in the inner hull enough to get the stasis chamber through.
Captain Tolvern tried the com one last time. Nothing. She clipped herself to the line, which emerged from the sled where it jammed into the derelict, and slid out through the hull while Cap and the others hauled the rocket in to secure it.
Tolvern fed herself out onto the line and got a glimpse of the void. Something flared above and to the right—a slow engine burn of something coming in, a few hundred miles off, its engine a prick of light, brighter than any star. The brawler.
The ghost ship was rotating slowly from inertia given to it when Blackbeard had cut loose, and as it swept around, carrying Tolvern with it, she spotted the battle cruiser below them. Right next to them, far closer than it had been when it harpooned the derelict. It must have broken free, then come in tight, so close it risked collision. Bad sign right there. Really bad sign.
Worse sign: the ship was firing cannon.
Her helmet had zoom capabilities, and she amplified. The ship pulled into full view.
HMS Blackbeard was an Ironside-class battle cruiser, long and dark and lethal looking. The second most powerful ship in the Royal Navy after Dreadnought herself. Twenty-two guns in the main battery, with seven in the secondary, full torpedo and missile capability. Ten falcons in the striker wing. Were they in the air, too, or just the brawler?
A pair of missiles squirted off. Then a slower, heavier shot—torpedo, Mark-IV, from the look of it. Headed up on the Z-axis. The cruiser was fighting enemies in two directions. She caught bright lights, tiny pinpricks flaring. Yes, the falcons were in the air. What the devil were they facing?
The derelict kept rotating, and Blackbeard moved out of view. A field of bright stars and a red smear from a nearby nova cast a wan light across the pitted hull stretching below them. The other two boarding rockets flanked her position, sticking from the ship like ticks on a dog’s back. In comparison, Tolvern was nothing but a flea. The other fleas were hooked and sliding out on the line. And out came the stasis chamber, a tethered coffin.
Better hope Capp had secured that rocket inside. It was the only thing that kept them from floating into the void.
Tolvern now had a chance to be scared as the dead ship kept rotating, and swinging them with it. She couldn’t see Blackbeard, had no com. Didn’t know where Carvalho was on that brawler. He should be here by now, hauling them into the hold and getting them back to safety. If you could call a ship under attack by unknown enemies of unknown strength safe.
“It’s a whole lot safer than dangling out here,” she muttered. Her voice sounded hollow inside her helmet.
The ship completed another full barrel roll. Blackbeard came back into view, somewhat farther below now, and upended relative to their position, engines facing them and rolling in the same direction as the ghost ship, making her easier to track. All sorts of light, outgoing fire, incoming.
Frantically, Tolvern readjusted her zoom. And caught her breath.
A pair of explosions rocked Blackbeard. The engine flared—that was a plasma ejection, which meant the rear shields were penetrated and she was at risk of blowing. But worse was the bow, where the bridge lights were down, and the armor flattened by some earlier explosion.
Com is down. Blast it, com is down. Jammed or has the whole bridge gone out?
Another explosion struck above the bridge, and then a rain of fire hammered her from bow to stern. And Blackbeard only shuddered, absorbing it. She did not return fire.
Chapter Two
Tolvern stared in fear as Blackbeard took blow after blow. Her husband was on the bridge. The admiral in his chair, in her old chair, acting captain. And the whole bridge gone, blown open to space. That meant Blackbeard was decapitated, the other systems all blind.
She glanced over her shoulder, at thirteen mirrored helmets facing Blackbeard. They all saw what she saw. They were as good as dead. And all their mates, too. Sixteen jumps across the inner frontier. A hundred light-years from home. May as well crawl back inside the ghost ship, clip themselves in next to the other mummies, and remove their helmets.
And then, when despair had nearly taken her, and she had turned back to watch her ship’s final death throes, Blackbeard returned fire. Someone was still in charge down in the gunnery, in the engine room, and they let it rip. Torpedoes lumbered away from the ship. Missiles squirted off in clusters. The secondary cannon fired, and the ship rolled about and fired the main battery. Full broadside.
Something took the cannon fire. Invisible before now at a distance she couldn’t pick up on the stripped-down display inside her helmet, it rippled with fire, and then detonated. Her screen went white with the flash. One enemy down, and Blackbeard was still fighting. She didn’t want to think about the bridge, only knew they still had a chance.
Capp slid down the line behind her, recognizable from the others by the black scorch mark across her helmet, a proudly worn scar from an earlier battle, and she tapped Tolvern frantically on the shoulder and pointed up. An ugly black shape emerged from behind the derelict spacecraft, so close it was almost touching the dead ship.
It was Carvalho, bringing the brawler in behind the derelict. The squat, warthog-like ship was a former pirate vessel. Stripped of its warp point engine and its missile bays yanked in favor of more guns, it had been repurposed to cling remora-like to Blackbeard as it traveled through the void.
Tolvern felt a second surge of relief, almost as great as when Blackbeard had returned fire. She threw off her despair like a dirty, plague-infested blanket and waved frantically in case the brawler crew hadn’t already spotted them. The ship gave two tiny bursts from its thrusters and edged closer. A bay opened on its hull, and a line snaked out.
Whoever was at the controls was hopped up on adrenaline, and nearly took her head off, as the line whipped past her head and lashed at the ghost ship. But then it came around, more gently this time, and one of the marines caught hold of it. They clipped on the stasis chamber, then the lot of them, one after another, Tolvern the last to hook on. The line jerked the instant she clipped on, and swung about, the brawler already moving, dragging them like fish on a line.
Carvalho was accelerating away from the hulking derelict by the time Tolvern crawled the line and reached the airlocks. The outer bay doors swung shut, and she caught motion outside before they closed, lights flaring. Incoming ordnance. The brawler shuddered. An alarm went off, then stopped.
Gravity was a relief, and she popped out of her mech suit, joining the others in stripping down in the cramped space of the brawler’s small bay. It was stuffed with war materiel: mines, chained shells for Blackbeard’s deck gun, sensor packs, small arms. Food, too, crates and barrels of it.
“Marines, secure the bay,” she ordered. “We don’t know who these devils are, but if they board, you’ll give them a fight. Brockett, keep that stasis chamber sealed. Smythe and Capp, follow me to the bridge.”
Carvalho was at the helm, with the pilot chair empty and an ensign by the name of Ping Hao running the defense grid. Ping was Singaporean, a smart young guy, but Tolvern had no need for him with Smythe at hand, and she sent him down to help Brockett with the salvaged stasis chamber. She put Smythe at the joint tech console-defense grid, Capp at the pilot chair so she could interface with the nav computer in case Blackbeard made a run for it, and stood next to Carvalho. There were only three seats in the small bridge.
“You want the chair, sir?” Carvalho said, his voice thick with a Ladino accent.
That was a courtesy question only, and she ignored
it. Flying the brawler was more like running a striker, which was his bailiwick, not hers.
The viewscreen was split. The left side showed them outrunning a trio of objects—too fast for torpedoes, too slow for missiles—while the other showed Blackbeard, still blasting away and absorbing blows at the same time. She was accelerating away from the battlefield in the same direction as the brawler. As badly as the bridge had been hit, someone was still in command. She prayed it was Drake.
“Where are those hostiles?”
“Don’t know,” Carvalho admitted. “Don’t know much.”
“We have com?”
“Here, yes. With Blackbeard, no. Getting no data from them, either. It’s our own instruments or nothing.”
“Dammit. What happened? When?”
Carvalho couldn’t tell her much. He’d been inside the brawler doing routine fire control tests while a boatswain and a couple of deck crew swapped out tyrillium scale when Manx called with panicked orders. Get in the air. Now.
Ping happened to be nearby, and they’d grabbed him, thrown the deck crew down to the gunnery and the engine room—a lot of good those untrained fools would do—and got airborne. They were barely out of the docks when the first enemy missiles struck.
Tolvern watched the screen, staring hard at those three incoming attacks. Slow, but fast enough to run down the brawler. And packing a punch.
“Smythe?”
The tech officer was sweating at his brow. “I don’t have countermeasures. Can’t get them online.”
They were going to take the blows. Tolvern forced herself to look away, and called Ping. “Forget Brockett. Get your butt to the gunnery. I need countermeasures, I need guns.”
“Don’t know the brawler, sir. Haven’t run the systems since we left Persia.”
“You figure it out, Ensign, and you figure it out now.”
“We have the cannon,” Carvalho said. “We were damn lucky with that testing. But one shot from the battery, then they will have to be reloaded. That’s the fire control we don’t have.”
“I’ve got Blackbeard’s course,” Capp said. “She’ll overrun us in five if she don’t slow. We’ll be left behind.”
“Where is she going?”
“Nowhere, Cap’n. Running blind.”
Then the bridge was down. Nib Pym should be up there, charting for a jump, for a planet, for something, and matching speed to snare the brawler as she passed. That’s what Drake would have commanded. Instead, someone had spotted the brawler, come running after it, and had no thoughts but to keep accelerating.
“Find those hostiles, Smythe. Capp, get me a course, and get it now.”
The lieutenant bent over her console, running one hand furiously across her buzzed scalp while manipulating the screen with the other. The Albion lion tattoos on her left forearm gleamed gold with fresh ink, cleaned up just before they crossed the inner frontier.
Tolvern looked back at the viewscreen. Heavy missiles, she decided, which meant that countermeasures could bring them down. But twenty, thirty more seconds and it would be too late to stop them.
“Still nothing from countermeasures,” Smythe said grimly. He touched his ear. “Ping is trying to figure out the burst charge conveyor. No, there, he’s got it.”
Not enough time. The missiles were already inside burst range. It was inevitable now. Just brace for impact. Smythe got some chaff out, hoping for a miracle. It didn’t come. One of the four burst charges went out, but too late, and missed its target.
The ship rocked, then rocked again, the second time harder than the first. The third came in, ready to hit them again in the same piece of damaged armor.
Then, to her surprise, something streaked into view and attacked the final missile. Falcons. Tolvern had forgotten that the striker wing was airborne. They got in front of the missile and swept it with pulse fire. The missile detonated several miles short of the ship. The strikers arced away and raced back to defend Blackbeard.
No time to breathe, not with alarms going off. How bad? On Blackbeard, the computer took it on herself to inform you of damage whether you wanted the assessment or not. Tolvern leaned over Carvalho’s shoulder, fighting the urge to jab at the screen and pull up numbers, overriding whatever he was messing with on the life support systems.
“Forty percent degraded on the number three aft,” Smythe said. “We lost two scales. Broke off entirely.”
“Probably where those deck crew were working,” Tolvern said. Take another direct blow there and they’d be in trouble, but the damage was less than she’d expected. “Any more incoming?”
“Negative,” he said. “Blackbeard is taking it all.”
Capp slapped her thigh. “I found ’em!”
She took command of the viewscreen. Three enemy ships in all, each roughly the size of the destroyer, or less than a third of Blackbeard’s mass. There had been a fourth, she realized, since she’d clearly watched something explode in the initial engagement. They were long and sleek, with the profile of planetary-attack vessels, in that they’d been built with some aerodynamics in mind. Unusual knifelike fins protruded from the bow. A strange blue light gleamed around its midsection.
“Can we confirm they’re alien?” Tolvern asked.
“Gotta be,” Capp said. “Engines don’t look like what we seen before. Can’t get no damage reading, neither. They got cloaking we ain’t seen before.”
Tolvern did have some damage readings on Blackbeard, though. The bridge was in trouble thanks to the surprise attack, and the engines had only just survived that massive first blow, but the armor was still holding up elsewhere. Blackbeard was an Ironside-class battle cruiser. She’d gone toe to toe with an Apex harvester and survived it. No way would a handful of destroyer-sized ships bring her down.
Smythe had the data now, too. “They’re pushing her this direction. Forming up for a charge. Looks like they want a deciding fight, with us in the middle of it.”
Why? Unless the enemy had something that could absorb kinetic firepower, going against a ship Blackbeard’s size and her brawler, itself roughly equivalent to a destroyer in firepower, was the equivalent of suicide. Unless . . .
She got on the com. “Ping, have we got the rest of those burst charges ready yet?”
“Yes, sir. Cannon, too. We’ll be slow reloading, but we can manage.”
“Fire them ahead, spread them out, and set them off,” she told Smythe. “Make sure we’ve got our sensors trained in that direction.”
The charges went out. A few minutes later, they exploded in massive bursts of radiation, designed to fry the hardened electronics of missiles and torpedoes. It was like throwing a lit torch into a darkened room, as all of that radiation came bouncing back to the sensors.
Four more enemy ships lay in a tight triangle ahead. Guns were out, kinetic and energy weapons at the ready. The brawler was going to overshoot, but Blackbeard would stumble right into them, bridge-first. And there take a second massive attack, unprepared.
Tolvern was shouting her orders now, but there was no need for it. Her crew were all moving. Capp, changing course, presenting guns. Carvalho working inertia and antigrav to keep them from splattering against the floor or ceiling at the violent forces caused by a high-velocity change in course. Smythe sent a rapid-fire burst of radiation in Blackbeard’s direction, a signal developed during the Apex war, when the buzzards were constantly monitoring regular channels.
Pull short. Enemy ahead.
Hopefully, Blackbeard was listening.
The brawler shifted posture to show its guns. They swung in against the enemy formation, and Tolvern gripped the back of Carvalho’s chair. If the enemy weapons could be rapidly re-aimed, they’d be obliterated.
“Fire!”
The ship rocked as its eight cannon let loose. Hundreds of tons of kinetic and explosive shot raced toward the three enemy ships. The enemy vessels were nearly motionless, too close together, and had scarcely begun to move when the brawler’s cannon fire struck
them.
A ship crumpled under the fire. A bright detonation, and it broke in two. A second ship took heavy fire and began to limp away, engines bleeding plasma. The third enemy ship pulled back, flailing to avoid incoming shot. Only the final ship emerged unscathed.
Tolvern could no longer help herself, and reached over to swivel Carvalho’s console toward her. Data scrolled across the screen, a dozen reports, systems, and sensors begging for attention. She thumbed twice. The cannon were slow to report.
She called the gunnery. “Ping? I need those guns.”
Labored breathing. “We’re working on it. Blast, where is the belt command?” This last part was said to someone else, and Ping let out a string of incomprehensible Chinese as the line cut out.
The third enemy ship continued to retreat, but let loose a stream of outgoing fire as it fell back, little bomblets that resembled a Hroom serpentine battery. More like a squid squirting ink to hide its retreat than anything. They were going dark, and the brawler’s limited sensors struggled to keep them identified.
The other enemy ships were retreating now, too. Blackbeard slowed to let the brawler either dock or continue to serve as independent fire support.
“Come around fore of Blackbeard’s bridge?” Carvalho asked after Tolvern had given him back his console. “We can shield her there and protect our own damaged section at the same time.”
“I can bring us in close, no problem,” Capp said. “We got this one. We’ll make these fools regret they ever saw us. Wipe ’em out.”
Smythe cleared his throat. “Eh, Captain? I’ve got some scans here. Something funny about those enemy ships. Not one of them has a warp point engine.”
Tolvern stiffened. “You’re sure? No way to jump?”
“Not unless they’ve got some magic way in and out of here. Any known warp point engine for going through the jumps has got to have its own—”
“I know the tech,” Tolvern said impatiently. “But you’re sure.”
“One hundred percent.”
“But there ain’t no planets or colonies here,” Capp protested. “You gotta be wrong on that, mate.”
The Alliance Trilogy Page 2