“You want to read the data, Capp?” Smythe said acidly. “Go ahead.”
“Will the both of you shut up and let me think?” Tolvern said.
They’d scanned the system upon entry. Sat there for several long days, passive scans only. Listening. Their charts were old and nearly worthless. They’d detoured so far out of their way that what info they had dated all the way back to the first explorers of the Great Migration, half a millennium ago. Jump points gone or migrated.
They were one lone battle cruiser and her rider. Drake hadn’t taken any chances. They weren’t crossing any system to investigate jump points until they were sure the place was deserted.
Enemies had been hiding out there—that much was obvious, and safety couldn’t be completely guaranteed, not even if they’d had a war junk with her wings spread wide, listening in the way only Singaporeans could. But they could be sure enough there was no colony or base large enough to build destroyer-sized warships. That sort of thing was noisy.
Which meant a carrier of some kind had carried these enemies into the system in the same way Blackbeard brought through her brawler. Had to be something big. Could be that it had hauled them in here and dropped them off, but Tolvern doubted it. Most likely it was lurking nearby throwing out smaller ships like a castle disgorging lancers.
Ping called. The cannon were ready. And Blackbeard was still fighting. The enemy ships seemed to be waiting for something before they attacked. Reinforcements? Was Drake in command or was he killed or injured? Was anyone in command?
“Captain?” Carvalho said at last as the battle cruiser loomed ahead of them. “You want to stay out here, or you want us to dock?”
“Dock.”
#
The bridge had blown. Manx was dead, sucked into the void, they said. Two other ensigns had been lost before a bulkhead closed and stopped the atmosphere from venting. Several others died in the subsequent fire, including Oglethorpe, a tech officer she’d served with since the original HMS Ajax days. The medical facility had taken a shell, and Doc and his staff were blown to pieces.
And Drake? Tolvern asked, anxious. What about the admiral? For God’s sake, was he still alive?
Yes. Her husband was alive. Badly burned, but pulled out of the bridge ahead of a spreading fire. The Hroom pilot, Nyb Pim, had dragged him to safety. The pilot’s lungs were badly burned, his purple skin crisped black on his hands and arms, but he’d saved them both. Drake and Nyb Pim were in stasis, stabilized but out of the action.
Tolvern wanted to faint with relief. But good lord, Manx and Oglethorpe? She’d been with them since the mutiny, since Admiral Malthorne’s rebellion and the fight against the Hroom death fleet. They’d stayed with her on Blackbeard through the Apex war, even while Capp and others were serving under Catarina Vargus on Void Queen. Both men gone in an instant.
Gunnery Chief Barker had slapped together a temporary bridge in a small room off engineering, and Tolvern took over there. Capp as pilot, Smythe cobbling together a defense grid. Sensors weren’t so good—they didn’t know what was out there—but she had her engines, she had all but one of her torpedo bays and all missiles, plus countermeasures.
Some of the guns from the secondary were off their carriages, but the main battery was good, and Tolvern got off another broadside with the big sixty-fives when the enemy ships closed for another attack. She drove them back, but they were more nimble this time, dancing away from her broadsides, which were hard to deliver on target as the engines continued to accelerate away from the action. Two more enemy ships had materialized, and she was sure there were more out there. Maybe a carrier, too. What kind of firepower would it pack?
“I got a crew,” Carvalho announced at one point. He’d come up on her while she was hunched over a console with Capp, trying to pick out the jump point. “We threw a patch on that scale. You want me back out there on the brawler?”
“Not a chance. And I want your strikers docked, too. We’re getting the hell out of here.”
“Got a jump right here,” Capp said.
She brushed her finger over the console, trying to bring up the chart on the viewscreen. When that failed, she swiveled the console around, moving wires. There was a tech on the ground at her feet, threading cord through a hole in the floor as they continued work on the makeshift bridge, and the man cursed as something sparked and gave him a shock.
The jump was yellow. Fairly stable, but they had no idea what was on the other side. The charts didn’t have it. Could be straight into the void between systems, although jump points generally formed around ripples in the grav fields, which meant mass. More likely and more dangerous was close to a star. You’d better be prepared for that kind of jump or you’d cook like a turtle in its shell.
Tolvern considered for a split second. They weren’t going to find anything better. “Take it.”
“Aye, Cap’n,” she said. “Five hours. Can we hold on that long?”
“Yes.”
She was not at all sure. It would be a tough go of it. Was she wrong? Would it be better to keep the strikers in the air, send out the brawler?
Drake was down, and there was a powerful enemy here, closing off the inner frontier. After weeks of probing, they’d found a way through toward Old Earth, but it was not unopposed. What kind of an enemy were they talking about? She had to get word back to Albion. Get the Alliance fleet in motion.
“Smythe. I want a subspace.”
He looked up from his console. “Huh? Out here? For fleet headquarters?”
“It’s going to take some energy, I know.”
“Unless you want to come to a standstill, drain all power from the engines, you’ve got”—he tapped at his console“—sixteen characters.”
Sixteen characters! Tolvern closed her eyes. It was noisy here close to the engines, and the floor vibrated. A dangerous part of the ship in a fight, which was why the bridge was generally as far from the engines as possible. May as well be in the armory; at least all the explosives were shielded behind bombproofs.
Who should she compose it to? General Mose Dryz was second lord of the admiralty, but he was a Hroom, and there’s no way the king would leave the Royal Navy under alien command. No, it would have to be an officer from Albion, and that meant McGowan, most likely.
Edward McGowan was aggressive enough to deal with the threat—aggressive when maneuvering other ships, that was, not necessarily his own. That was good, if she didn’t have such an instinctive dislike for the man. Better the general and his caution, his lack of creativity, but his loyalty to Drake.
Defensive could be the better choice anyway, at least until they knew what was likely to follow Blackbeard back toward Alliance territory. And if Blackbeard escaped, the general could have resources positioned to quickly reinforce her.
“They don’t know Drake is incapacitated,” she said aloud, “and with sixteen characters, I can’t tell them, either. They’ll assume the admiral sent it.”
She composed the message before she passed it along. “No punctuation,” she told Smythe, “but make sure you’ve got the spaces so they can understand.”
“Aye, Captain.”
She spelled it out. “Enms prtct prsia.”
Enemies. Protect Persia.
Chapter Three
Boghammer hit a mine coming out of jump. It was a little thing, really, barely a tap against the ship’s lower shields, but it set off the defense grid alarms.
Ulfgar Svensen didn’t understand at first. He emerged from the jump feeling drunk on too much mead, his head thick with cotton. Humming a Viborg drinking song—where that had come from, he couldn’t say. The alarm kept ringing, but he took it at first for the cheers of his fellow raiders in the drink hall, celebrating a successful raid, and he burst into full-throated song before he realized that something was off.
Laughter.
Svensen looked around the bridge, eyes clearing, the jump concussion fading. He’d imagined holding a stein aloft, but instead he was toa
sting with the stump of his left hand, cut off by a cruel man when he was still a boy. After all these years, he still forgot sometimes that it was missing.
His crew were hard-faced men, beards covering old scars of plague and battle. Patches on eyes and prosthetic arms spoke to fights against human and alien enemies. They were grinning like children now, laughing and pointing at their commander.
“All right,” he growled, and lowered his stump. Men turned back to their work. “What happened? Who is attacking us?”
“Nothing, nobody,” Jörvak said. Boghammer’s squat second-in-command had his meaty fingers tapping at his console. “There was a mine floating around the exit point of the jump, that’s all. Class-four, Albion-classification.”
“Don’t give me that foreign rubbish. What did it do to us?”
“Nothing, I told you—bit of damage to the forward plate is all. We took a good hard scan of the area, and there don’t seem to be any others around, either. One mine, that’s it.”
“Then why in all the icy hells is that alarm still going off?” Svensen demanded. “Doesn’t that indicate significant damage to the tyrillium plate?”
“I . . . um, think it chimes at any hit, and then when you’ve seen the damage assessment, you manually shut it down.”
“So shut it down.”
Jörvak glanced at Lund, but the signalman shook his head with a scowl and got back on the com, speaking to someone down in weapons. Doing his job. A glance at the main screen showed the port-side pummel guns online. The number one and two torpedo bays armed, too. That was good, Svensen thought. A second star wolf would jump through in five minutes, and Boghammer was in position to defend its entrance into the system.
“We don’t know how,” Jörvak said.
Svensen stared. “You don’t know how to shut down the damage alarm?”
The first mate looked sheepish. “It never came up before.”
The star wolf captain strode over to the defense grid computer, fists clenching, head still throbbing from the jump, losing his temper now at the insistent alarm. Blasted foreign tech. Not a thing wrong with the old damage assessment system, so why had he agreed to replace it in the first place?
Lund announced that a second star wolf had come through. It was War Cry, gutted in the fight with Apex and rebuilt in the Roskilde yards. Its crew had been recruited from old raiding families and well trained. Good men, disciplined, but Svensen didn’t fully trust any crew or ship that had come on since the war. They were under Albion’s thumb now, their loyalties suspect.
Almost at once, War Cry sent a worried message over inter-ship com. Boghammer was sounding the damage alarm. Did Svensen require assistance?
Svensen launched into a string of curses that would have singed an old woman’s eyebrows. “No, I do not need assistance. Tell that fool to take position ahead of us on the Y-axis and . . .”
He stopped as the door slid open and a woman entered. Her presence on Boghammer was still enough of a novelty—a foreigner and a woman—that men across the bridge stopped to stare. She ignored them and went to the defense grid computer, where she tapped the screen twice. The shrill clanging stopped.
“Unless you wanted it to keep banging on like that,” she said. Her Scandian was suspiciously good, lightly accented, with only her vowels giving her away as Albionish.
Lieutenant Elizabeth Kelly may have spoken the language well, but she didn’t look Scandian. She had auburn hair and hazel in her eyes that hinted at mixed Ladino heritage, and word had it that she’d joined the Royal Navy after a stint on the rough outer frontier. Probably had a pirate or smuggler background like so many in the admiral’s growing navy. Drake would take anyone—Albionish, Ladino, Singaporean, Persian, Scandian, even Hroom. He’d drafted entire systems and civilizations into his adventures. Given the recent war, Svensen was wary of aliens of any kind, but so long as the Hroom kept their distance, he didn’t worry about the lot of them.
He hadn’t wanted any foreigners on his ship, and he certainly didn’t want one on his bridge.
“Good,” he told her. “Now get back down below.” A third star wolf jumped through. It drifted, plasma engine sputtering, as the crew came out of their jump concussion. “You have work to do.”
Lieutenant Kelly had muscled Lund aside and didn’t look up from the defense grid computer. “My work is here.” She switched to English, muttering to herself. “What the devil was that thing?”
“You have something to say, you’ll say it so we can all understand,” Svensen said. He wasn’t about to let on that he understood her language.
She looked up, and those strangely colored eyes met his. “That mine is unknown tech. It wasn’t one of ours, and it wasn’t from a known alien or human race.”
“We’re six jumps from Persia—way out across the frontier. These charts are fifty, sixty years old. Don’t you think a human colony could have come up with new weapons since then? What does it matter, anyway? It was barely a tap.”
“You don’t wonder what we hit?”
Kelly sounded outraged, but if there was one thing Svensen had learned about this woman in the past few months, it was that she had a burning need to know. She wanted to chart a collapsed jump point, to run full scans whenever they caught wind of an unknown signal. If he discharged his guns in training, she counted every spent charge and interrogated his gunners about their performance. Once, when they passed a derelict alien ship from the war, she’d demanded that he divert the fleet halfway across a system to haul it in. Svensen had ignored her then, and intended to ignore her now.
“I’d wonder if there were more of them. But we’re not under attack, and my job is to keep it that way until I get the Fourth Wolves through in one piece. Then your beetles can do a scan if they want while we assemble for a run toward the inner system. Otherwise, no, I do not care.”
“This is why star wolves are worthless on their own,” Kelly said. “And why Scandians need handholding when they go into battle.”
Svensen pointed at the door. “Out!”
Kelly gave him a sullen look and made for the door. “Barbarian,” she said in English, as if talking to herself. “You act like a bunch of apes, and your whole bloody ship smells like onions. Do you think I asked to be here?”
He resisted the urge to respond, and let her go out the door, still insulting him and unaware that he understood every word. He’d love to verbally smack her down, but that would inevitably lead to more questions.
Svensen returned to the work at hand as soon as she was gone, but felt Jörvak’s eyes on him. The next ship through would be Icefall, with her deadly payload, followed by the beetle ships—more foreigners, but good for their eyes and ears—and then three more star wolves, and they’d have their fleet.
“Well?” he said impatiently as Jörvak continued giving him glances. “If you have something to say, then say it.”
“The lady had a good point.”
“You call Kelly a lady? Hah!”
“There’s a hostile power in the system,” Jörvak said. “They mined the jump point, which means they expect visitors.”
“If they were expecting visitors, we’d be under attack. There’s nothing on the short- or long-range scans.”
“We can’t be sure until the beetles come through,” Jörvak said. “Might be someone charging toward us right now.”
Which was why Svensen was arranging his wolves into a defensive formation around the jump point as fast as he could manage. But he wasn’t happy to be operating blind, that much was true. He’d grown accustomed to patrolling the inner frontier this past year with Albionish and Singaporean eyes and ears always at hand, feeding him data. The Singaporean war junks—the beetle ships—had the best gear, but the Royal Navy ships could also see much farther, much clearer than the star wolves.
The Odense yards were working on new hull designs to incorporate thick Scandian armor with borrowed foreign tech for new sensor arrays, but the first of those ships were only just coming int
o play. Long-range detection had never been a Scandian strong point. Hadn’t needed it. Most fighting was within Scandian systems, and the hostile forays into Albion territory had been quick, devastating raids. Land a hundred raiders in mech suits to gather slaves and steal tech and other supplies, then make a run for it. Find a merchant ship, disable it with pummel guns, and send over a boarding party.
Above all, avoid pitched battles against the Royal Navy. A single star wolf against a single cruiser or destroyer made a good fight. But pit a dozen star wolves against an equal number of naval vessels, and the blasted Albionish always came out on top.
We’re not built for that kind of open warfare. Not our ships, not our weapons, and not our organization. Especially not that.
The Royal Navy had been giving them a beatdown before the Apex invasion changed everything. One could argue—and many Scandians did—that things were better with the end of the war, the defeat of the aliens, and the passing of the plague years. Industry was humming in the home systems, trade and work for everyone. Svensen had too much Old Earth Viking blood coursing through his veins; he didn’t like it.
“Lund,” he said to the signalman. “Why am I not seeing data on the screen?”
“Because it’s bad data,” Lund said. “Not much worth seeing. Not until them beetles come through.”
“Show me anyway. Let’s get the lay of the land.”
Lund obeyed. It was an unusual system. There was only one rocky inner world against six gas giants. The star was smaller and cooler than average. That inner planet was supposedly inhabited by a tiny human colony—or it had been two hundred years ago. That was a long time to develop. Or not.
The planet might have been abandoned in favor of greener pastures, or it might have tens of millions of people living on it. Someone had come through here several decades earlier, recently enough to update the charts, but it was a quick look in and out, as the system had been far off the spacelanes.
The human colony was quiet at the moment, its planet a distant blur on the long-range scans. If they’d detected the entry of the joint Scandian/Singaporean fleet, they hadn’t sent a subspace. If they had ships, they were cloaked and hiding.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 3