“Yeah, and when you left me behind to fight off those dragoons by myself, do you think I was in a position to conserve ammo? We’re done here, you realize that, don’t you? A couple of bursts and then it’s just run, run, and run.”
“And hope they don’t land any blows on our porous armor.”
“And that,” Al-Harthi said with a nod. “Mine is the consistency of goat cheese. Yours looks about the same.”
“All we have to do is get out of here—that’s the only thing that matters. One more jump. Then maybe we run into the Russians or some other remnant population. A supply dump, a base, a planetary fleet. Anything.”
“Great plan,” she said, and there was sarcasm in her voice. “So what are your actual orders to make that happen, Captain?”
With a shock he realized that he was now the ranking officer in the fleet. When they’d set out, he’d been seventh in seniority out of the captains of the eight stingers and two gorgons, with Al-Harthi ninth. Qayyum had been in command since the death of Brukehald on Centipede; that unenviable position now fell on Fontaine’s shoulders.
He gave it some thought. “Position yourself off starboard with your tertiary railgun providing cover where I’ve burned out my primary. We’re pulling away from the jump point, and I’ll send you a full course shortly.”
Chapter Two
Two hours later, Fontaine still had no plan. Not really. Make a run at those dragoons and hope they weren’t hiding a carrier in the vicinity. Which he knew they must be. The system had no bases, not even an enemy supply depot that he could spot.
He’d toyed earlier with the hope that a carrier had jumped earlier, dropped off the dragoons, and gone back for more riders, with the intent of setting up a blockade in the system. The larger ship out by the gas giant could be the carrier returning with additional dragoons. He was still charging semi-blind through the system, and hadn’t yet got a good read on that pack of enemy ships.
A fight against five dragoons was a battle they might have won a couple of weeks ago, with Medusa still alive and ammo on hand. With a gorgon and some cataclysm bursts, they could have even tackled a carrier.
As it was, he didn’t see how they’d survive the fight. But of the three enemies, one in front, one behind, and one soon to jump into the system, the five dragoons and their missing carrier were the least formidable.
And the jump on the opposite side of the star was closer, and therefore slightly less desperate. He might find a miracle and slip through unscathed.
There would be fighting, of course, even under the most fortunate of circumstances. With judicious use of fire control, the two stinger ships could get off a handful of attacks each. Slow the rate of fire from the railguns and squirt off short bursts. The trick was making them count while fending off blows from missiles and kinetic fire against the human warships’ damaged armor.
His short-handed crew was exhausted after so many hours of combat, and that was on top of running eighteen-hour shifts for weeks, but they were still working through emergency repairs, and he couldn’t spare a single man or woman in the short hours before combat. Instead, he distributed stimulants. That was a dangerous measure under any circumstances, but more so at present, with the crew already running on pure adrenaline.
The five dragoons ahead of them moved to intercept, and repeated attempts to cloak movements failed. Finally, Fontaine sent word to Al-Harthi with orders to use active sensors. If they couldn’t hide, they could at least pinpoint the Adjudicator warships.
He soon had a stronger picture of the charging dragoons, and enjoyed his first glimmer of hope since the ambush and jump. Two of the five ships came into especially sharp focus, right down to the blue torus rings that served as armor-strengthening shield generators. One of the knife-toothed projections that thrust forward from the dragoon’s bridge reflected so much radiation from the subspace sensor hit that it seemed to be glowing.
Fontaine caught his breath and his hand went to the knob on his skull. “Tell the gunnery to target that ship.”
Bisset made to comply, but Gauthier interrupted. “Captain, that one is helping us see the others—the bad cloaking is giving off an echo. Seems like we should target that one last.”
“That’s not bad cloaking, it’s a damaged shield ring,” Fontaine said. “That dragoon has been in combat and been knocked around some.”
For a moment he could smell the sour air inside the enemy ship, a memory of his slavery. Most of the crew—mainly human and Cavlee—would be devotees. Driven by their implants to obey their masters. His body shuddered with ugly memories. Compulsions, desires, pains.
“How can you be sure?” Gauthier asked. Fontaine’s second studied him with a sharp gaze.
“Because I am. It has been in battle, and recently, too, or they’d have either patched it up or sent it off to their yards. Your point is well-taken,” he added. “That one helps us see the others better. But our only chance is to reduce their firepower, make them think Scorpion and Black Widow can still sting.”
The dragoons were already firing energy pulses in a long-range probing maneuver. Now that he was using sensors, the enemy would have no problem spotting the Terran ships’ own damaged hulls, and had probably come to similar conclusions. Fortunately, there was still enough tyrillium to absorb the attenuated energy pulses, but the enemy ships launched missiles in a secondary attack.
Still long range, no real threat. The human ships brought up countermeasures and knocked them down.
Bisset touched his ear. “Al-Harthi is on fleet com.”
He put her through. The woman’s cool voice sounded through Fontaine’s headset.
“We’re at extreme range. Too far. But I’ve got tertiary ammo to spare . . . relatively speaking. I’ve got an angle in”—a slight hesitation—“twenty-seven seconds. I want to waste a few bursts.”
“I hate doing that. Any little bit counts.”
“Yes, it does, and the enemy knows we’d never waste it unless we could.”
It was a backwards, perverse sort of logic, but he saw what she was driving at. After spotting the damaged Stinger-class warships, the enemy would naturally wonder about ammunition stores. Surely the humans wouldn’t waste limited ammo in speculative attacks.
Black Widow doing so constituted a bluff. At the same time, the tertiary railgun was of limited use, given its destroyed mount and its current fixed position on the hull. If Al-Harthi were going to waste ammo, that was the gun to do it with.
“Good idea. Make it happen.”
Moments later, the two ships made a coordinated roll, and Al-Harthi let loose with a pair of eighty-millisecond bursts from the tertiary. She followed this with a longer, sustained stream of fire that lasted nearly two seconds. It was a horrific waste.
“Dammit, what are you doing?” Fontaine said.
Two of the five dragoons had shifted upon Black Widow’s initial bursts, but the Terran ship altered its line of fire, which kept the enemy in front of the sustained stream. The only way to avoid plowing through it was a rapid . . .and suddenly, he understood.
Startled, Fontaine glanced at his console, which ran numbers from the targeting computer. A familiar pattern emerged, so clear it may as well have been flashing neon lights. Black Widow had pushed the enemy in front of Scorpion’s guns.
“Bisset! The secondary!”
The gunnery was on it in an instant, twenty men and women in contact with targeting on the bridge. Scorpion shook as the secondary railgun buzzed out rapid-fire pulses of thousands of projectiles that painted kinetic fire across a grid ahead of the oncoming dragoons.
The first one slammed through the buzz saw and fell back with its torus ring sputtering and its engine burping plasma. The second, which happened to be the one reflecting so much noise, followed in, and peeled open under a hail of kinetic shot. Seconds later, there was a big flash, and when the screen cleared, it was gone.
The three officers on the bridge cheered. One dragoon destroyed, another damaged.
But the joy was short-lived. The remaining dragoons were launching missiles in earnest now, and even if the humans had had more countermeasures to launch, they were too short-handed to track all of the incoming attacks.
Black Widow broke off and rolled away to divide the incoming fire. Bisset found another target with the secondary railgun and took the shot while directing the tertiary against the dragoons giving chase to Al-Harthi’s ship. For several minutes, the two Earth warships were dodging, letting out radiation bursts to baffle incoming shot, and blasting away with their railguns, even as the dragoons closed the net around them.
The humans hit the same dragoon Scorpion had damaged earlier, and for a long moment the enemy looked ready to flinch. Then came Al-Harthi’s grim pronouncement over the fleet com. Black Widow was down to the immobile fixed tertiary battery, her other guns exhausted. That very nearly took her out of the fight entirely.
“What have we got?” Fontaine asked Bisset. “Give me numbers.”
“Slightly over four seconds on the secondary gun,” the gunnery officer answered. “And .743 on the tertiary. A few more microbursts and that’s it.”
Captain Fontaine barely heard this. He was working the course computer and interfacing with the AI himself, tasks that should have fallen to others, if there had been others to take up the slack. He was simultaneously exhausted and jittery from the battle stimulants.
The four surviving dragoons kept harassing them, even as the larger enemy squadron had closed to within extreme range and were beginning to launch missiles. The pair of human ships would shortly be pinned between the two enemy forces.
He fired the secondary, drove off a dragoon, and bought a few seconds of reprieve. He called his counterpart. Al-Harthi appeared on the screen, expression haunted, her eyes bloodshot and darting from side to side and down to her console.
“Follow my lead,” he told her after a glance at his own console. Already, the dragoons were coming in again. “We’re going to make a break for it.”
“Ammo?”
“Next to nothing. I’m going to use it all to smash our way clear, and then we’ll run.” He shook his head at the pinched eyebrows that formed Al-Harthi’s only reply. “I know it,” he told her. “But I can’t think of . . . it’s our best hope.”
“It’s no kind of hope at all.” Someone shouted behind her from the bridge of Black Widow, and her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open in a look of naked fear. The screen froze with that ugly expression still on her face.
“They got her!” Bisset cried. “God help us, she’s dead.”
“She” was either Black Widow or Captain Zakiya Al-Harthi herself. They were both gone, a smear of radiation against the tapestry of stars. A dragoon had slammed kinetic fire into a broken part of the ship’s armor and detonated Black Widow’s engine. The ghost of Al-Harthi remained fixed on the screen, her face frozen in the final act of recognition that her ship was about to die, and all the crew with it.
Fontaine, Bisset, and Gauthier stared, stunned. But there was no time to wallow, or even to consider the fact that theirs was the last of the Terran Arms Fleet. Fontaine shouted, and the other two set back to work.
There was no hope left. None. Even if they could somehow evade four dragoons, the other ships coming in from behind were firing at will now, and the first wave of their attack was about to crash down on them. In a final, desperate act, he charged the dragoons and sprayed the battlefield with his remaining ammunition until it was spent.
An explosion. A second. Dragoons reeled under a bombardment that came from . . .
It was so unlikely that Fontaine briefly wondered if he were hallucinating, if his mind had crossed into madness and was trying to convince him that he wasn’t about to die. If he were the one frozen in a final act of terror, and time had slowed to the speed of the microsecond bursts from a railgun.
But his companions were reacting, too, so he couldn’t be hallucinating, and he wasn’t a slave of the enemy. Not anymore. What he saw must be true, that the larger group of Adjudicator ships was attacking the smaller one, and not their prey.
Had the Lord of Lords come for him at last? His fingers went to the knobby, regrown bit of skull near his right ear. A memory of a long gray face flickered on the edge of his vision, a strange remnant of his time as a devotee on an Adjudicator military base.
And then Gauthier finally got a good look at the newcomers and put it up on the screen. They were not Adjudicator vessels at all, but some other kind of warship. One of the dragoons broke apart, ripped in two by missiles. The other three fell back under heavy fire, now kinetic as well as explosive, some sort of cannon from the largest of the seven ships.
“We’re being hailed,” Bisset said. His voice was high and excited. “It’s a known Merchanting Federation protocol, sir, but I don’t think they’re Merchers.”
“Put them on the screen.”
A woman appeared, eyes dark and piercing, her black, curly hair pulled into an unusual braided style. She wore a uniform that was nothing Fontaine had seen before. Behind, the bridge was shiny and in immaculate condition, and clean-shaven, well-dressed officers moved in the background.
The woman spoke, and it was a strange, garbled English that came out. Quite different from Fontaine’s own dialect of the same language. If she’d spoken quickly, he’d have been lost, but she enunciated her words slowly and clearly, like someone who was accustomed to communicating in various language situations. He had no problems understanding.
“This is Captain Catarina Vargus of HMS Void Queen. Withdraw to the protection of my cannon and I will destroy the alien craft.”
Chapter Three
Captain Jess Tolvern joined the shuttle crew, determined to inspect the trap with her own eyes. It was supposed to be a quick visit, down to the surface and back again, but the advance meteorological evaluation left something to be desired, and the shuttle landed in the middle of a blistering sandstorm. There was nothing to do but hunker down and wait it out.
She figured it might last an hour or two, but further analysis from the orbiting fleet soon disabused her of that notion. The storm was only gathering strength as hot, dry air from the south mixed with a cooler, but equally dry mass from the north until it encompassed a half million square miles at the heart of the sandy wastes on Persia’s second largest continent.
By the time the storm blew over, eighteen hours had passed, and she was ready to strangle her counterpart from HMS Peerless, Edward McGowan, who took the opportunity to rehash (several times) the recent battles, telling her all the things she should have done. Had Catarina Vargus been there, Tolvern was quite certain McGowan would have been strangled.
Tolvern was also tired of sharing close confines with the architects of the leviathan trap, Smythe and Brockett, and wishing she’d left Capp behind, as well. The first mate grew bored and started needling McGowan, who responded with sharp retorts, which Capp pretended not to understand. Her innocent act wasn’t fooling anyone; even Carvalho rolled his eyes. Meanwhile, Smythe and Brockett kept up an endless conversation about xenobiology that didn’t interest her in the slightest.
Tolvern didn’t wait for the storm to fully die before she fixed a bandana over her mouth and nose and stumbled through the bay doors, down the ramp, and into the hazy, sand-blurred landscape.
Massive red dunes lay sculpted like a sea of waves ahead of her. They stretched to a distant range of brown mountains that peeked above the hazy remnants of the sandstorm. Here and there gray-green trees lifted on slender, spiny stalks above the sand, and as the wind died, Tolvern stared in surprise as they unfurled smooth limbs and spread their needle-like leaves to catch the sun.
The others emerged from the shuttle, passing around a spray bottle of sunblock, even Carvalho, who was Ladino and of a complexion that would theoretically bronze in the sun. He hadn’t seen actual solar energy in months, though, and was nearly as pale as the rest.
A pair of marines took up position outside the shutt
le doors, assault rifles in hand. Two other armed marines tromped down the gangplank and accompanied the naval officers as they set off in the direction indicated by Brockett’s hand computer.
Capp hooked a finger at the marines. “What do we need them for? We ain’t expecting the ghouls to attack us down here or nothing, are we?”
“Didn’t you read the briefing?” McGowan said. He handed Capp the sunblock, then scowled as she sprayed her buzzed scalp and rubbed it in. “You might have brought a hat, too, if you’re going to keep shaving your pate, marine-style.”
“Nah, I didn’t read nothing like that. Took a quick look—it was mostly them Persians bragging on about their planet, yeah? We gonna get attacked down here, or what?”
“There are giant lizards, apparently,” Tolvern said.
Capp perked up. “Like them monster toads on Samborondón? Big as houses?”
Smythe came alongside with his hand computer out. “Not that big. Five thousand pounds, max, according to the briefing. Think of the biggest crocodile you can imagine, then double it.”
“Me and Carvalho are armed,” Capp said. “We can handle it, yeah?”
All the same, Tolvern wasn’t keen on running into five-thousand-pound lizards, and she scanned the dunes, wondering if there were any dug in nearby, waiting to spring out and drag off some unsuspecting fool.
Tolvern had read the briefing; she always did. It wasn’t only lizards they had to worry about.
There were apparently insects that would try to eat you, too, beetles and mantises that could grow three or four feet long, but it was their dormant season. Probably. Nobody was especially sure. This had been uninhabited desert even before the Apex war, which had reduced the planetary population to roughly a million people, these since gathered in a handful of central locations to facilitate the war effort out here on the Inner Frontier.
The storm had died to occasional gusts and a stiff breeze that stirred the sand more than blew it skyward, and Tolvern pulled down the bandana. The air carried a whiff of cinnamon and sage, stronger when they drew near one of the trees. And another scent, something vaguely sweet, like treacle. Brockett was the expert on xenobiology, and suggested, for the sake of caution, that they avoid touching the trees or approaching too close.
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