One final chance for the enemy. A moment of decision. If the leviathan followed, it meant that Tolvern had lured its masters toward Persia and the trap waiting on the planet’s desert wastes. If it stayed in Nebuchadnezzar, or worse, veered toward Xerxes, the enemy had declined the bait and the hope of pinning the greater part of the Alliance fleet in a cul-de-sac system in favor of penetrating the heart of the human and Hroom star systems. Nothing would stop it from going all the way to Albion, if the Adjudicators so desired.
“They’re following!” Smythe said. “They’ve taken the bait.”
Capp crossed herself, church-style, and Tolvern resisted the urge to do the same as a mixture of relief and fear swept over her. But it was their Hroom pilot who gave voice to what they all had to be thinking.
He whistled a long, clear note, then hummed deep in his throat before speaking. “It would seem that our gods either love us or hate us. I cannot decide which.”
Chapter Ten
Void Queen was the first to jump into Persia, and once the rest of the fleet had jumped through, Catarina led the general retreat toward the planet.
Twenty-seven million humans had once lived in this system, a successful and growing outpost of the Great Migration that had departed Earth roughly five hundred years earlier. But after the devastating Apex wars of a few years earlier, only three million remained on the surface, with a scattered few thousand more in external mining colonies, a lunar base, and the planet’s orbital fortress.
That fortress and its elevator had once been used to haul Apex harvester ships into orbit, where the aliens would set off on exterminating missions against other sentient life. Since the end of the war—the last war, Catarina reminded herself—and the appearance of the Adjudicator fleets, vast amounts of manpower and royal treasure had been spent outfitting the fortress with armaments, digging in against nuclear strikes, and garrisoning it with thousands of marines.
If enemy carriers tried to bombard the planet, they’d have to do so while under attack from the orbital fort and a ferocious defense from allied naval forces. If they tried to land decimators to knock the fort out of commission, the marine garrison would contest every tunnel and airlock. That had been the strategic thinking of the admiralty.
So many preparations, all rendered moot by the arrival of a star leviathan. An orbital fortress was no defense against the monster, its guns nothing but a blinking light announcing a buffet of goodies.
And being a cul-de-sac system, to Catarina’s eyes Persia didn’t seem like a good place to make a final stand. But maybe it was a good place to set a trap.
It’s a trap all right. A trap for us.
She’d read Tolvern’s memo since they’d slipped from the leviathan’s grasp in the Nebuchadnezzar System, but hadn’t thought much of the woman’s scheme. It sounded like a plan for self-immolation. But what other option was there?
More than thirty Alliance ships were soon racing across the system, with another seventy more vessels in patrol or already in orbit around Persia. Three hours after the last friendly ship arrived, six star fortresses pulled the star leviathan through and immediately shed their dragoons, which moved into a spear point ahead of the enemy formation.
Catarina left the bridge at the end of her shift and retreated to her quarters to rest, but rather than climb immediately into bed, she couldn’t help but turn on her personal viewscreen to watch the enemy set into motion. Even without a leviathan, it would have been a daunting enemy force. With it, the situation looked hopeless.
Yet no doubt Tolvern was also watching the enemy movements from Blackbeard and feeling a certain grim satisfaction. The first step of her plan had worked and only cost . . . what? Thousands of lives and numerous Alliance warships?
“You’d better know what you’re doing,” Catarina murmured.
Almost as if called by Catarina’s thoughts, Tolvern reached out across the fleet com. Catarina had already undressed for bed, and took the call on audio only.
“Congratulations,” she told Tolvern. “You pulled it off.”
“You sound less than thrilled.”
“Not thrilled, no, but I hope it didn’t sound sarcastic, either. I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t have any better ideas. Believe me, if I did, I’d have mentioned them.”
Void Queen and Blackbeard were only a few tens of thousand miles apart, and the delay was minimal as the response came back.
“I’m not happy either, and nothing is settled, anyway. The monster is sniffing the bait, but it still needs to step into the trap.”
“You’re not waiting for it to step into the trap, though, you’re giving it a push. Isn’t that right? The plan is to get the monster into orbit, land our people on its surface, and knock out the implant?”
“That’s the gist of it,” Tolvern said. “Once the enemy loses control, it should be fairly easy to get the monster to attack the surface base.”
“So the hardest part is theoretically over with. The psychological operation.” Catarina freely let the irony into her tone. “The rest is just execution.”
Tolvern gave a short, harsh laugh. “To hear Svensen tell it, yeah. Get his boys down there and they’ll tear things up. Hell, he thinks they may as well knock out all the implants while they’re on the surface, free all six nerve clusters so the enemy fails regardless of whether we get the leviathan to the surface or not.”
“Easy as pie,” Catarina said. “Or, as I picked up in my pirate days among the Ladinos, pan comido.” She hesitated. “Do you have orders, or is this a social call?”
Technically, Catarina Vargus and Jess Tolvern were of equal rank in the hierarchy of naval officers, just below Admiral Drake and Colonel Bailyna Tyn—make that general now that her predecessor had died when Dreadnought went down the leviathan’s maw. But Tolvern had operational control of the fleet in the absence of the other two.
“Let’s get the bad part out of the way first,” Tolvern said. “I want Void Queen and Peerless in the vanguard as we drop toward the inner system.”
“So you’re teaming me up with McGowan, is that it?”
“Yeah, sorry.”
They were facing annihilation in the form of an unstoppable monster of the deep, so it said something about the attitudes of both women that working side by side with Edward McGowan was considered the bad part. At least Tolvern’s clashes with the man had been professional only. Catarina had once been engaged to him, before he threw her over for entirely classist reasons. Ironically, it was his disgust upon learning of her pirate father that had pushed her into piracy herself.
Catarina suppressed a sigh. “I assume there’s a good reason.”
“There are six destroyers coming out from the planet to rendezvous, and McGowan will take command of them. We’re going to lay down a minefield.”
“Mines aren’t going to slow a leviathan.”
“Not by damaging it, no,” Tolvern said. “What I’m hoping is that it will stop to eat them. The ghouls will eventually shock it back into motion, but even an hour or two will help. We need that extra little time to position our forces around the planet.”
Catarina saw where her counterpart was going with this. “Whatever else you can say about him, McGowan has great execution. He’ll get that minefield laid faster than anyone else.”
“But perhaps not fast enough to avoid a dragoon charge. They’ll get out ahead of the leviathan and try to pick off Peerless and her destroyers before they can finish their work.”
“So you want me giving McGowan fire support while he gets the mines down? Can you loan me a couple of corvettes?”
“How about Bolt and Swordfish?”
“Swordfish is fine,” Catarina said, “but I’d rather have Apollo than Bolt. Dwiggins knows how to fight off these dragoons—he’s kicked them around before—and if the ghouls recognize his ship, they might show extra caution, and that could prove useful.”
“Done. You’ll have Apollo and Swordfish.” Tolvern cleared her throat. “Tell me ab
out this Old Earth captain. Name is Fontaine, right? I got your first briefing, but it sounds like you were going to interrogate him a second time. Did you find anything new?”
Catarina settled onto her bed. Exhaustion was coming over her, and she was suddenly conscious of the fact that her planned ten hours off shift might be shortened depending on how soon she’d need to haul Void Queen out of line to begin this side mission laying mines.
“I haven’t thought about Fontaine much, to be honest. The doctor wanted him to rest before we dug deeper into his head, but then we entered battle, and I never thought to pull him out of stasis again. I’m not sure we’ll need him at this point.”
“We could always use one more ship.”
“Right, but we can man it ourselves, along with the skeleton crew Fontaine left behind. My onboard plant has already figured out how to manufacture railgun ammo, and navy personnel have been training around the clock to learn how to run the thing. The new mixed crew should be ready for action by the time we get to Persia.”
“The railguns, only?”
“The other main weapon, the cataclysm machine, is beyond our ability to recharge. We’d need one of the Terran support ships, the gorgons. Or barring that, several months of research in one of our naval war laboratories.”
“Do what you can about rearming Scorpion,” Tolvern said. “I’d like Fontaine at the helm, with the hope of making a new ally in the Earth System. That is, if it’s possible.”
“I wouldn’t risk it. The ghouls still have a presence in the man’s skull, and we don’t know what or why. Nothing good, that’s for sure.”
“I put it to my science officer. He has a few thoughts.”
“Brockett?” Catarina asked.
“He’s been studying Adjudicator brain implants—along with a whole lot of other stuff, some of it of dubious worth, admittedly—and he says the device is fully capable of controlling every aspect of its host’s behavior. An implant can induce a fear or anger response by dumping chemicals. If the enemy controlling it wants you to feel a flush of religious awe, you’ll drop to your knees in praise. It can hit your dopamine receptors, or bring you to the point of orgasm in an instant, then leave you aching with desire. And if that fails,” Tolvern continued, “it can drop a lethal poison into your brain and kill you that way.”
“Right, so this head ghoul sent Fontaine and his counterpart toward Earth to act as traitors. The Terrans dug it out, but there’s a fail-safe apparently.”
“But would there be two fail-safes? There’s already a poison in the implant. If your mole is captured, you give him a dose and write it off as a loss. Whatever is down there is something else entirely—that’s Brockett’s theory, anyway.”
Catarina had no good answer to that. “You want me to bring him out of stasis and keep digging?”
“I do. Even if we don’t end up trusting him, he might reveal something more about how the enemy forces are organized, where their bases are, and most importantly, if they have another leviathan to send against us.”
#
By the time Fontaine was fully conscious, they’d already dressed him in a white jumper and strapped his wrists and ankles to a hospital bed. Nurses were moving about him while the female doctor with the iron-gray hair had some sort of magnifying device against her eyes and was making tiny marks on his skull, presumably where she’d insert wires.
Someone shifted an overhead lamp, which glared in his eyes until he shut them. Another woman spoke from behind, her voice low as she asked questions of a nurse, who responded too softly for him to pick out the words.
“Is that you, Vargus?” he asked. “How long have I been down?”
“Only a few days. Were you worried?”
“You never know. I half thought you’d never bring me up again, or I’d awaken twenty years from now in some strange lab, all my limbs severed and my head in a suspension jar.”
He was trying to get a chuckle out of the woman in the hopes of gaining her sympathy. The situation was intolerable, and he knew he was in danger. These people were fighting a desperate struggle, and wouldn’t care anything about him, his ship, or his crew except for how they aided the war effort. His head very well might end up in a jar.
Vargus’s response was serious. “We were in battle.”
“Did you win?”
“We’re still alive, let’s leave it at that.”
“How many star fortresses?”
Vargus didn’t answer him, but spoke to the doctor instead. “You’re not as close as I thought. I’m going back up to the bridge to oversee . . .” She seemed to catch herself. “. . . to continue operations. Call me when you’ve induced his memories.”
“Shouldn’t be more than twenty minutes,” Willis said.
“Wait!” Fontaine said. He tried a different approach. “Look, there’s a Terran Arms fleet trapped in Old Earth. Ships and tactics developed over decades. We can kill dragoons and disable a star fortress. Can you make the same claim?”
“We knocked out several enemy carriers in a single battle just a couple of months ago.”
“Several?”
“We have destroyed nine since the war began last year.”
Nine? He was taken aback by this, and wondered at the kind of firepower the Albion-led alliance must have brought to bear to manage the feat. Assuming it was true; there was doubt and suspicion in every word Catarina Vargus spoke, and she might be lying to gauge his reaction.
“Listen to me,” he pleaded. “Earth needs your help. And you need ours. Put me back on my own ship and let me fight, let me—”
“Wonderful plan,” she said. Her tone was dry. “Why don’t you tell me everything you know about the Adjudicators first. Especially this Lord of Lords. How old was he? How many forces does he command? That sort of thing. Then maybe I’ll let you out of here. How does that sound?”
And with that, Fontaine couldn’t speak. Thoughts were buzzing in his head, all sorts of responses, but his tongue simply wouldn’t move in his mouth, nor his lips form the words. She’d asked him specific questions about the enemy, and he’d gone mute in response.
Catarina sighed. “Then you’re not much help, are you? But I’ll keep your ship. That might be of some use even if you are not.” She turned away from him. “Doctor, notify me the moment he goes under.”
He wanted to call after her, but his tongue remained thick and unresponsive. They held his head immobile, and he couldn’t see the Albion officer leave, but he heard the hiss of doors as they slid open and closed again.
One of the nurses approached with a device in hand that looked like a miniature circuit board, which he affixed to the shaved part of Fontaine’s skull using a cold, tingling gel. The other nurse took a hand computer and tapped in a command. A strange taste entered his mouth.
The second nurse studied him. “Is that sweet or sour?”
“More like metallic.”
“How about this?” She tapped again, and the metallic flavor vanished, replaced by something honey flavored.
“Now it’s sweet. That’s much better.”
“What color is the taste?”
“Color? Oh, it’s kind of . . . green? Yellow-green.”
“Good. Now I’m going to stimulate your extremities,” the nurse said. “You might feel some tingling in your fingers and toes, and possibly your nose, ears, anything else that sticks out.”
It felt like his extremities had all fallen asleep and were waking up with pins and needles. An unpleasant sensation, most especially in his lips and groin. The nurse told him to describe an incident from his childhood, one where he was very happy. He related a memory of hiking in the Alps with his father when he was about twelve, when they’d photographed a flock of migrating parrots.
Next, she told him to tell her about a challenging incident—a memory at least ten years old—where he’d achieved something with great effort, preferably physical. He thought for a minute, then came up with something. When he was in a training mission at
Great Greenland, they’d been required to swim across a four-kilometer-wide fjord. A strong tide was coming in during the swim and the water was cold that far north, even in July. Halfway across, he developed a cramp in his thigh and had to swim through it to complete the training.
The nurse questioned Fontaine for about twenty minutes, during which time her colleague stepped back from working on the device attached to his skull. Dr. Willis threaded a long wire through the device while studying a screen at the edge of Fontaine’s peripheral vision, just out of sight.
He felt pressure in his skull and was suddenly afraid, knowing they were digging deeper into his brain, that they would trigger a so-called land mine that would kill him.
“Keep that amygdala suppressed,” Willis told his nurses. “It’s reading high, and we’re going to see some fear response. What we’re looking for is . . . ah, there! See that?”
“What is it?” Fontaine asked. “What do you see?”
“Try to relax,” the male nurse said. “We’re putting you down right now. We should know more very soon.”
He wanted to ask more, but an overpowering exhaustion rose up and pulled him down.
Chapter Eleven
Ulfgar Svensen was six hours into his acceleration toward Persia when he got a call from Jan Helsingor, asking permission to approach with Icefall and come onto Boghammer to discuss problems with pummel gun coordination throughout his wolf pack.
The request was reasonable on the surface, but Svensen was suspicious. Helsingor had been recently promoted to the commanding officer of the Second Wolves, which hadn’t fought as well as they might have during the Nebuchadnezzar fight, thanks to individual star wolf commanders dismissing too many orders as mere suggestions.
As a result, Tolvern had reorganized the two wolf packs, sending Helsingor from the Fourth Wolves to the Second, where he was to take command. There, he would hopefully instill some discipline. Perhaps he was having trouble getting the other commanders to accept his position and wanted to discuss it in private.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 60