Tolvern kept a close watch on the shuttles. Let them attack the fort, she pleaded silently, not land decimators on the leviathan. Let the ruse continue for a few more minutes at least, and give Svensen a chance to do his job and get out of there.
The star fortresses gave the leviathan a pair of jolts to the implants, which temporarily blinded Blackbeard’s sensors. When they came back online, the leviathan had gone rigid. A freshly sprouted tentacle had gone snaking toward the Persian fortress, and now waved feebly. While the monster was thus stunned, the shuttles dropped onto its back.
“They figured it out,” Tolvern said. She couldn’t keep the disappointment from her voice. “They’re landing decimators. Smythe, give me a full scan of the star fortresses.”
This proved challenging with so much fighting both to their front and rear, and the sensors shielded from attack, which limited their view. The leviathan came back to life and continued its attack on the fort. The freshly grown tentacle located a reactor on the orbital fortress and tore it out of the rock. The radiation from this, and from two initial nuclear strikes from the star fortresses against the asteroid, further confused the sensors. But peering through this interference, it seemed that the Adjudicators were readying more shuttles.
“They’re going to overwhelm our troops if they launch any more. We’ll have to get in close enough to hit the shuttles before they land.”
“How we gonna do that?” Capp asked. “We’ve got dragoons breaking through from behind, and if we come in at this angle, we’ll have three star fortresses all facing us at once. It’ll be a suicide charge.”
Tolvern took a deep breath. “Pilot, find us a better angle.”
Nyb Pim set to work. While he engaged with the nav computer and Jane, the ship’s AI, to search for possibilities, Tolvern directed a missile barrage at Papa, which looked like the next ship to launch shuttles.
Meanwhile, the battle to the rear was going badly. She’d already lost a sloop, and two more Hroom ships suffered heavy damage. A destroyer suffered blows, too, and dragoons speared one of her torpedo boats from either side and blew it to pieces. Two more torpedo boats struck a dragoon, disabling it while destroyers and sloops battered it into submission.
Unfortunately, before the torpedo boats could escape, they were attacked in turn, and quickly isolated to the extent that they ran through the upper atmosphere of the planet to keep from being destroyed. One skipped off the atmosphere and escaped, but the other hit heavy turbulence. Unlike some of the ships in the fleet, torpedo boats were not rated for atmospheric flight, and this one nearly crashed, only just managing a controlled descent. It hadn’t been destroyed or its crew killed, but Tolvern had lost it from the battle all the same.
The result of all this action was the loss of seven ships from the heart of what had been an underpowered formation in the first place. A gap suddenly opened all the way to her missile frigates, and the enemy took advantage. Five dragoons charged through.
Missile frigates were one of the most devastating weapons in the Royal Navy’s arsenal. With their ability to stand out of range of enemy weapon systems while landing blow after blow after blow of their own, they’d turned the tide in battles in the Hroom wars and against Apex and Adjudicator ships alike. So long as you could keep them shielded, there was little an enemy could do but suffer a seemingly unending barrage.
Unfortunately, frigates possessed very little in the way of short-range guns, had thin armor and weaker bulkheads, and were slower on the acceleration than any other ship in the fleet. Even pirate schooners had been known to run them down when they were left unescorted.
The dragoons fell on the first missile frigate. It turned sluggishly and accelerated toward the nearest help, which was a destroyer and two torpedo boats. These three ships were under attack themselves, but trying to turn around to help the frigates.
The enemy seemed to have figured out exactly where the frigates were most vulnerable. Two of them disabled the Albion ship’s undersized guns while the other three hit it with kinetic fire on the shield protecting the ammo stores. Within thirty seconds of firing, they’d pierced the shield and shoved missiles into its hull.
The frigate detonated. All hands lost.
Two more dragoons broke through to join the assault. Even while the first ship was dying, the two dragoons who’d taken out her guns moved swiftly to block the other frigates from escaping, and the newcomers joined them. The initial dragoons herded the five surviving frigates into a clump while the others came in. The rest of the dragoon formation was strong enough to pin down the warships that might have come to the frigates’ aid.
Tolvern could see at once that the battle was hopeless, and she would lose every last one of her frigates. The only ship that would make it into the battle in time was a solitary destroyer, and it would no doubt be smashed as well for its effort. Without a missile frigate force, the carriers alone would be enough to destroy her fleet, even if she could somehow free the leviathan from its implant. Did Drake’s reinforcements have any missile frigates? Could Tolvern hold out until he arrived?
She put her hands to her temples as the overwhelming nature of the loss became apparent. Capp swore softly. Others stared, until Tolvern snapped at them to stay on task. Nyb Pim had found his course and was doing final calculations. They needed to transmit it to the other ships so they’d be ready to charge the enemy carriers at a moment’s notice.
But Tolvern couldn’t help but stare at the side screen to watch the final destruction of her frigates play out. The dragoons who’d got behind her lines, their numbers swollen to seven, picked out a new victim and hit its guns to take them out of the fight. In came the destroyer to mount a final, heroic defense, together with a second ship, something lean and maneuverable that the scans didn’t pick out well.
Who was that, anyway? A star wolf, maybe? Tolvern swiped a hand over her console to bring up its engine specs.
“What the . . .? Is that Scorpion?”
She’d forgotten all about Pierre Fontaine’s ship. Carrying a mixed group of Terrans and allied forces as crew, they’d patched up armor and rearmed the Stinger-class warship’s railguns. But with the captain himself a prisoner on Void Queen until they knew the extent of his collusion with the Adjudicators, she hadn’t counted Scorpion into the battle’s considerations.
The Terran ship sped past the destroyer, an ably commanded vessel named HMS Torrent, and let out a stream of fire from her primary railgun. It drilled a neat hole straight through a dragoon. The enemy ship rolled away with gasses venting from either side.
Scorpion’s secondary and tertiary let out twin streams of fire as Scorpion cut upward. One of the guns sliced through the skin of another ship, and the other hit the torus ring of a third dragoon and forced a partial collapse of its shield generator. The primary railgun came back online, squirting fire in controlled bursts as the Terran ship ducked between enemy missiles to safety.
One of the dragoons was seriously damaged, two others damaged, and the other four either scrambling in panic or trying to strike a blow at their tormentor before it could slip away. Torrent took advantage of the chaos to drop a pair of torpedoes into their midst. The dragoon that had taken the brunt of the first attack now swallowed one of the torpedoes whole. A huge section of the hull broke off, and the enemy ship drifted away and came apart with a series of secondary explosions.
The other six dragoons, now facing three more sloops and destroyers that had broken free to support the counterattack, fled for friendly territory. Scorpion and Torrent followed them with harrying fire. The five remaining frigates had avoided a near disaster.
“My God, that was a revelation,” Tolvern said.
She could imagine an entire task force of the Terran warships, with ships like Scorpion supported by gorgons. Backed by heavier Albion ships, their railguns could bring devastating pressure to bear in certain, precise situations. And the cataclysm machine. What was that?
It felt like a vice had been removed
from around her chest. She’d imagined Vargus, McGowan, and even Drake, from his vantage point halfway across the system, watching the pending disaster and noting her fatal error in not leaving any heavy warship that might have prohibited the dragoon breakthrough.
Nevertheless, she couldn’t risk a second occurrence, and weakened her already faltering line by sending back two of the corvettes McGowan had brought through. They pulled clear, and were well underway even as battle lines reformed to the rear among Alliance and Adjudicator forces alike.
Here on the main front, Nyb Pim sent through the complex set of maneuvers that would bring her through to attack the star fortresses before they could drop more decimator units onto the leviathan. The situation was already evolving from what it had been minutes earlier when the Hroom pilot began his work, but the pilots across the fleet were veterans, and some of the brightest minds in the navy. They would take his out-of-date work and configure it to fit the current situation.
Two battle cruisers, six light cruisers, four corvettes, and more than twenty star wolves targeted Papa and Quebec, the two carriers dropping shuttles, as well as Sierra, which had already recovered its shuttles from a rapid deployment to the surface of the leviathan and seemed to be readying another drop.
“Citadel is back in action,” Capp said. “Gunnery online, shields holding. She’s coming to help, but can’t take frontal assault until she gets the number one shield patched.”
“Who is in command?”
Capp ran a hand over her scalp as she took in the info on her screen. “Wang herself went over.”
That hadn’t been Tolvern’s meaning when she’d ordered Wang to send officers to replace the ones killed alongside Fox, but who better to be in command, at least in the short run? Wang may not be familiar with the battle cruiser—so far as Tolvern knew, the woman had only ever captained a war junk—but she knew how to inspire obedience. That was precisely what the shattered command structure on Citadel needed to carry on the fight.
“Launch all striker wings.”
Falcons emerged from their respective battle cruisers. She wished she had Dreadnought’s eighteen, or that the Royal Navy had built the carrier that was on the drawing board, but the ones she had on hand should be enough to disrupt the enemy from landing more decimator units on the leviathan.
The commander of the orbital fortress was begging for help, but there was nothing Tolvern could do but tell him to hunker down, find the deepest possible tunnels and airlocks. To stay as far from explosives, fissionables, and heavy metals as possible; these would only attract the monster.
To the man’s counterpart on the surface, Tolvern sent a separate message. Arm all missile batteries. Prepare to expose the portable nuclear reactors hauled out to the desert. Either they’d slip the leviathan from its leash or not, but once she gave the order, there would be no turning back.
Carvalho led the three striker wings in a single, arcing formation that hurtled past Sierra and came in hard against Quebec as it launched shuttles. Or tried to. Carvalho struck the first outgoing vessel with his two small missiles while three of his companions pulsed down incoming fire that tried to sweep the falcons from the sky. The shuttle slammed back into the surface of its mother ship and exploded.
Capp leaned back in her chair and put her hands behind her head with a satisfied grin. “That’s my man.”
Unfortunately, another shuttle broke through the falcons, who were forced to evade enemy attacks while they tried to destroy the landing craft. Two of Citadel’s falcons went after it, blasting away, and unwisely let loose with their missiles, which missed the shuttle and struck the monster instead. Spines burst from the back of the leviathan and impaled the two small ships. Tentacles, so small they seemed hair-thin compared to the larger appendages devastating the fort, but still miles long and ten feet wide, reached out and snared them both. The falcons were not so small as to evade the monster’s interest if they should provoke it.
Capp’s smug expression vanished the instant the two falcons came under attack. She got Carvalho on the com. “Watch them spines!”
The surviving striker craft narrowly evaded another burst as they fell back to regroup.
Another enemy shuttle, however, was on its way down, and fell victim to the leviathan attack. It joined the two falcons in the grasp of the tentacles. And then, unbelievably, the monster sent a burst of spines and spores against one of the star fortresses. A tentacle stretched for it.
“It’s going after the ghouls!” Capp shouted in unrestrained glee.
But before Tolvern could allow herself to hope, the Adjudicators gave it a massive jolt. The leviathan stiffened and withdrew its tentacles.
The enemy shuttle burned itself free. One of the falcons did too, and limped back toward Citadel. The second pilot had been killed when his ship was punctured by spines.
The leviathan resumed its attack on the orbital fortress, but seemed to be finishing its meal. The asteroid had a massive new crater in it, a mile in diameter and hundreds of feet deep. The elevator cables, made of carbon nanotubes within a tyrillium mesh, had been severed, and the ferocity of the attack had pushed the asteroid into an unstable orbit.
“It’ll go down in about three weeks unless someone pushes it back into place,” Smythe said. “If that asteroid hits, the planet will be rendered uninhabitable for years.”
“If the asteroid hits, it will have already been rendered uninhabitable,” Tolvern reminded him, “because it will mean we’ve failed.”
There was no further communication from the orbital fortress, and no way to know if there were survivors down there, or if the garrison of nearly four thousand humans and Hroom had been exterminated. The leviathan turned about under further jolts from the Adjudicators.
She thought at first that it was going after the base on the surface, which was picking up the pace of its attack so that the enemy didn’t get suspicious. But it was too early to spring the full trap. She needed evidence that Svensen’s assault team had succeeded first.
To her mixed relief and terror, the leviathan turned its attention back to her fleet. She was prepared to fall back as far as the moon, then dance around as long as it took. That was true whether Svensen succeeded or not. Collect her secondary force and hold out for Drake’s arrival with Inferno and Bailyna Tyn’s sloops.
Three star fortresses broke from their formation around the leviathan: Romeo, Sierra, and Uniform. Before, necessity had kept them pinned into positions that limited their effective range of fire. Unencumbered by the leviathan, they came straight for Tolvern’s fleet.
Tolvern barely had time to take in this stunning turn of events before the trio of star fortresses unleashed a massive volley of missiles at Blackbeard and Void Queen.
Chapter Seventeen
A raider named Einarsson from Icefall was the first to attack the damaged implant. Einarsson was a big man already, several inches taller than Svensen, and the extra bulk of his suit made him look all the more impressive. Like all members of the assault team, raiders and marines alike, he carried a fuel pack to help him rocket out of here when the mission was done, but he also wore twin fluxors on either hip, which connected to a hose and nozzle for the plasma torch.
Einarsson sparked the end of the nozzle and thrust it at the implant, which stood gleaming in the middle of the barren patch around which the humans had taken position. Unfortunately, the gods had deemed this the moment of Einarsson’s death. No sooner had the man started his work than something slammed him to the ground.
An explosion went off, and the raider’s arm flew past Svensen’s head, turning end over end. The armored fist still gripped the nozzle, and a length of hose spit globules of green plasma as it snaked back and forth. A figure rose above what remained of the man’s body: gray armor, gun attachments on the ends of its three arms. Kelly had a direct connection to Svensen’s com, and she let out a string of curses.
Lights flashed in the sky. Another decimator slammed into the ground and fired its gu
ns at the stunned marines into which it had landed. A split second of lull, and then decimators were raining from the sky. They came in with their rocket packs flaring and their guns firing. The shuttles, instead of landing, were directly overhead and spewing their cargo at the ground. The attackers weren’t landing at a distance and hauling in from there, they were hitting the implant site directly, which brought them right into the midst of the humans.
Of course that’s what they were doing. Why land and risk your ship if you didn’t need to? And if you knew exactly where the damaged implant was located, of course you’d come in right on top of it.
Svensen shouted orders to his raiders. Kelly and a young colonel were doing the same thing to gather the marines. It was an attempt to abandon the perimeter defense and form clusters of defenders instead. But the enemy was coming too fast, landing with force and weapons blazing. Within seconds, they’d overrun the entire human position.
The battle would have turned into a rout, but for two things. First, not one raider or marine lost his nerve and panicked. Not that fleeing would have done any good. The surrounding terrain was as hostile as anything the Adjudicators could throw at them.
Second, the gunfire awoke the trees, those same macrophages that had attacked Helsingor’s assault team. Several burst out of the ground with waving appendages and grabbed for the nearest living creature, whether human or Adjudicator. Others dragged themselves across the landscape with roots and branches.
Hand cannons and Gatling gun fire blasted off limbs. That was only a temporary victory, as the things grew them back quickly, but there were other attacks that proved effective. Some of the ghouls had weapons that spewed burning, acidic liquid, the heavier bomb throwers of the marine hand cannons could split open macrophage trunks, and two of Helsingor’s men had success with a radiation pulsing weapon.
Even so, the number of attacking creatures continued to grow, and a general melee between human, ghoul, and macrophage resulted.
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