Gunfire struck Svensen’s shoulder. He turned around to see two decimators stalking toward him with their weapons flashing light. He fired back, but a third decimator landed practically on top of him and grabbed for him. He kicked the thing out of the way. Its boots lost their grip, and it went floating away from the leviathan. By the time it rocketed back to the surface, Kelly and another marine had come to Svensen’s aid, and he retreated toward the implant under cover.
About twenty humans had staked a position around the implant. Another human, this one a marine, was working at the implant with her torch. He was surprised to see how far she’d sliced through already, then realized that she was working a preexisting cut.
“Someone was here before,” Svensen said. “Someone tried to cut this down already. We had an ally.”
Kelly unleashed her weapon at a ghoul who rocketed up over the top of their formation in an attempt to come in from above. Svensen and several others joined with assault rifles, and a raider landed an explosive shell that knocked the creature across the battlefield.
She turned her helmet toward Svensen, face unreadable behind the faceplate, but her breathing heavy across the com. “That should encourage me, but it doesn’t. Whoever tried, failed.”
“We hold position,” he said. “Cut the blasted thing off, and get out of here. That’s all that matters.”
Holding position was easier said than done. Not only were the decimators directing murderous fire in their direction, but two macrophages waded through their forces and couldn’t be brought down before they reached the implant. One of them stomped a raider and held him down until the ground swallowed him. The other macrophage grabbed the marine with the plasma torch and stretched her between two limbs. She cried for help.
Svensen and others blasted off limbs until she came free. She drifted toward him, groaning in pain, with gas leaking visibly from a shoulder joint. He grabbed her by the boot and pulled her down to make contact. A marine squirted a quick-hardening gel at the damaged joint.
Their position was collapsing. There were too many macrophages about, and too many decimators. More ghouls dropped from the sky with every passing moment.
Someone hailed him on the com. “Svensen, you there? This is Lund.”
He was relieved to hear his signalman’s voice. That meant Boghammer had escaped from the leviathan’s back. Gnawing at the back of his mind—quite separate from the big worry about destroying the implant and somehow getting himself and Kelly off the leviathan alive—was the fear that his ship had been destroyed after disgorging the assault crew.
“Yeah, we’re still alive and fighting down here.”
“I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the last half hour. Too much interference.”
Half hour? Hadn’t he just checked the time to see that eleven minutes had passed? Wasn’t that only a few moments ago?
“You’ve got to keep these shuttles off us,” he said.
“I think we got that sorted out. The monster itself is killing some of them, and the ghouls sent out a few of their star fortresses to attack the fleet. Tolvern got some falcons in there to do the rest.”
If the enemy had detached three star fortresses, Svensen figured they must be desperate and that Tolvern, Vargus, and Fox were hitting the carriers too hard to ignore. But as he turned his gaze skyward, he saw that the leviathan was turning about, jetting its engines.
The asteroid swung around behind them, with the planet beyond that, and there was a gaping hole on one side of the fortress, where most of the base had been located. Huge boulders, the largest practically small asteroids in their own right, floated around the main rock. A few dropped flaming into the atmosphere.
The elevator apparatus was gone, and there was no visible evidence that humans had ever constructed a fort there, so thoroughly dismantled had it been by the monster’s attack. The leviathan was turning about to get at the fleet, and the Adjudicators were unleashing their own powerful warships to hold Tolvern’s ships in place. His optimistic view of the battlefield collapsed.
“I can’t see you anymore,” Lund said, “but I got a glimpse a couple of minutes ago. You haven’t taken out the implant yet, have you?”
“Got a couple of good whacks, but I lost my cutters. I’ll get it taken care of as soon as I clear away a few of these ghouls.”
His suit vibrated with the results of a concussive explosion. He hadn’t seen the projectile land, but he turned around to see a gaping hole in the ground. Within it, he saw squirming hoses, leaking fluids, and things that looked like mechanical mites the size of small dogs, with metallic threads in their jaws. They worked swiftly to stitch over the hole, and within seconds, there was no sign of damage. At least the explosion seemed to have taken out a few of the trees.
Whatever struck must have packed a punch to break through the skin, but didn’t seem to have harmed the monster at all. In fact, from what he’d heard, the leviathan absorbed energy and material and grew stronger if you tried to pummel it into submission.
No doubt a big enough strike could rip a hole through a full-grown star leviathan, much as it could any other biological or mechanical body. But what size of explosion would that be? Something beyond any known human or alien capability.
“Listen to me,” Lund said. “You’ve got to fall back. Do you see the ridge to your flank?”
Svensen cast a wary glance at the spiny hump they’d come over before. “That’s not a ridge—it’s a creature.”
“A what?”
Svensen stopped to fire a grenade through a gap in his men. It exploded in the midst of several decimators, who fell back a few paces before renewing their attack.
“You there?” Lund asked.
“Yeah, I’m here. I said the ridge is alive. Some creature sleeping right beneath the skin with its spines sticking out. I’d rather not wake it up.”
“That’s messed up. Look, forget that. Nightmare and Sea Stallion landed mech units, knocked out a few ghouls, and they’re coming up behind the ridge now. Unless something else stops them first, they’re going to reach the crest in seven or eight minutes.”
“I don’t want to abandon the implant. We might never get it back.”
“Problem is, you’ve got about thirty more decimators approaching from your right, and you’re in trouble enough as it is. But if you retreat to the ridge, you’ll have numbers on your side. You can make another advance once you’re reinforced.”
Lund tried to say something else, but there was a brief moment of interference where Svensen caught a few garbled words and then nothing. Kelly had found another marine with a plasma torch, and she brought the woman toward the implant. But as he glanced behind the pair, he caught a view of the fresh force of decimators. They came rocketing above the surface with their weapons already blasting.
The humans had lost several of their number in that direction, some killed by enemy forces, others torn apart by the leviathan’s own defenses. At first glance it seemed a logical place for the Adjudicators to send in new troops. But what the enemy couldn’t see was that the macrophages were thickest on that side and that the decimators already fighting through the breach were suffering more casualties than were the humans.
The new enemies were going to face a small forest of the creatures if they landed there. An old Scandian adage of battle came to mind: if your enemy stumbles and falls on his dagger, don’t offer to pull out the blade.
He put out an order over the general com. “Fall back to the ridge. Reinforcements are on the way. Repeat, fall back. Maintain fire as you retreat.”
The humans lifted into the air like a swarm of glowing beetles. They sprayed the surface with gunfire and exploding grenades as they launched.
Svensen expected a heavy firefight as they withdrew, but it proved relatively easy to disengage his mech units from the enemy’s. The Adjudicators may have rushed their forces into the attack, but it seemed they hadn’t been prepared to do battle on the surface of a star leviathan. Some carried
heavy explosives, and they’d dropped a vehicle with side claws and tractor treads that looked like a combination of a tank and a burrowing mole. The sort of thing that might be good for digging into tunnels on a military base with artificial gravity, but here they had a hard time keeping it anchored to the ground.
Meanwhile, the humans shooting down from above had a secondary effect. A mass of macrophages slumped in from the surrounding environment to converge on the site of the implant. Two of them grabbed the tank, which was using its hooks to keep it grounded as it advanced, and wrapped branches through its treads. Another tree snaked more limbs beneath. They gave it a flip that dislodged the hooks and sent it drifting away from the enemy army.
By the time Svensen touched down on top of the spiny ridge, there were so many macrophages converging on the implant site that he began to hope the leviathan’s own defenses would win the battle for them. Kelly landed by his side.
“The ghouls thought they could control a leviathan,” he told her. “It’s no dog on a leash—it’s a force of nature. You can’t control it.” He flipped on the general com again. “Hold here. Don’t shoot unless shot at first, and by all the gods, try not to hit the surface if you can help it.”
Kelly looked up toward the battle overhead. Persia’s ruddy surface reflected off her faceplate. “More incoming shuttles.”
Three bright lights descended from the sky. They dropped until they hovered about two hundred feet above the ground, where they spat out more decimators. Several dozen more from the looks of it. These turned their rocket packs toward the ground and came down to join their comrades.
Under continued attack from the leviathan’s own defenses, the decimators had been pushed into a knot of their warriors centered near the implant. The fools kept fighting, and for every macrophage they cut down, two more seemed to appear. Even the freshly arriving forces did little to stem the tide.
“King’s balls,” Kelly swore. “We don’t need to do anything, just sit here and watch them die.”
With the last of their troops disgorged, the Adjudicator shuttles made as if to retreat to whatever star fortress had sent them. Suddenly, the decimator units surrounding the implant dropped to the ground and hunkered in place. Nozzles appeared on the bottom of the shuttles and sprayed a thick gel over the battlefield.
The tree-like creatures writhed beneath the gel as if hit with burning acid. The rubbery limbs shriveled and curled in on themselves, then blackened and fell off. Within moments, the area around the implant was cleared of them, and the decimators rose to their feet. They gathered their forces and maintained position, but didn’t yet begin shooting. The shuttles tore away with blasts of outgoing exhaust.
“So much for trees winning the battle for us,” he said.
Helsingor bounded up with his ridiculous grinning balloon face helmet. “Our friends are on their way up. Look.”
Svensen glanced behind him to see the raiders and marines from Nightmare and Sea Stallion on the other side of the same small valley that his forces had crossed earlier to reach the spiny ridge. Someone else was moving even farther back, roughly a mile behind them. He amplified his vision and was pleased to see that they were more humans. Troops from the last few star wolves.
Once they arrived, the two sides would be roughly evenly matched. If the blasted ghouls stopped receiving shuttle drops, he still had a chance.
The enemy had laid down some heavy weapons and now trained them on the hillside and kicked up a steady fire. The back of the submerged creature was covered with boulder-sized humps as well as the spines, and there was plenty of cover for Svensen’s forces. He got his own guns in place and fired them at the decimators in turn.
His attack raised only a handful of macrophages—the earlier fight seemed to have drawn most of those in the vicinity—and the decimators put them down shortly. Several ghouls ran in front of their comrades, unfurling some sort of screens, while others sprayed a quick-hardening foam that fixed them in place. It was a barricade, and without gravity to assist, it was challenging to get bombs over the top.
He defeated this by having his troops rocket into the sky, shoot down from above, and then descend rapidly before they could be fired upon in turn.
“Watch your propellant,” he warned. “You go below sixty-five percent and you’re never getting off this monster alive.”
The first of his reinforcements arrived. He thought briefly about starting his counterattack, but his position was stable. A scan of the skies overhead showed no more shuttles descending. Could be the enemy was done. If that were true, his strength relative to theirs would increase the longer he waited.
“We’re not taking any casualties,” he told Kelly. “Must be something wrong with the enemy’s targeting system. It’s noisy down here, but you’d think they’d go to visual.”
“They’re not shooting at us,” she said. “They’re shooting at the ridge. I think they’re trying to wake up the monster.”
A light streaked in from the enemy position and slammed into the hillside a few dozen yards away. The ground shuddered from the impact. Two marines went flying, along with chunks of shiny, sparking bio-mechanical debris. Shouts failed to raise the dislodged men, and they drifted away from the leviathan, stunned or dead.
The ground gave a second heave, and he looked around for another explosion. No atmosphere or sound, and unless he was close, he wouldn’t feel a shock wave. But it wasn’t an explosion, rather the entire hillside shifting beneath his feet. The decimators increased their fire. The skin of the leviathan began to peel open on top of the ridge.
A massive, grub-like head broke through on the far end of the hill. Giant, biting mouth parts, and horny, clawed limbs. He’d assumed from the spines and bumps that it was a lizard-like creature living down there. Instead, it seemed to be a monstrous caterpillar.
Compared to the vast bulk of the star leviathan, the thing was no bigger than a tick, but to the even tinier creatures doing battle on the surface, the thing tearing itself through the leviathan’s skin was as big as one of their warships. They had to get off it now.
At the same time, fresh lights from the sky drew his attention. More shuttles were dropping, the biggest wave yet, a dozen or more ships. How many hundreds of decimators would be on board, ready to disgorge onto the battlefield?
And with that, the last of Svensen’s advantage collapsed.
Chapter Eighteen
They called the man Brockett, and he’d apparently come over to Void Queen during the heat of battle, flung across by another warship of equal strength by the name of Blackbeard.
Fontaine, strapped onto his bed, feigned sleep, as if he were taking an unusually long time coming out of the stasis-induced fugue. He listened carefully, desperate to glean details about the battle that was apparently raging outside even as they prepared to dig into his skull. Dr. Willis kept her voice low, tone wary, as if suspecting he might be listening. The science officer was not so careful, and Fontaine caught bits and pieces.
“. . . more than ninety minutes, and there’s still no word from the assault crew. Tolvern thinks they might have been lost. She’s trying to get falcons in there to be sure.”
“Keep your voice down. Listen, what about . . .?” Willis’s voice trailed off, and Fontaine didn’t hear the end of her question.
“No, there’s too much interference. Some of it is the leviathan, but those star fortresses are . . .” Brockett’s voice dropped, and Fontaine missed the end of that, too.
“We’ve got them away from the planet, anyway.”
“We’re trying to get them to the planet,” Brockett said.
Willis asked a question, her tone too low to pick up, and Brockett’s answer was equally muffled.
Fontaine risked a closer look and studied Brockett with particular attention. The science officer wore a lab coat and glasses. Didn’t they bother correcting myopia around here, or was it a personal affectation? Large forehead, intense expression.
Almost as if sensi
ng his gaze, Willis looked over at him, and her eyes narrowed. “Hope you enjoyed all that.”
“Can you blame me for wondering what the devil is going on?”
“You’re out of the loop on purpose,” she said.
“What could I possibly do, shoved in and out of stasis and then strapped down like a common criminal?”
Willis narrowed her eyes. “How are we supposed to know that until we know what secrets you’re carrying?”
“Anyway, I’m not going to . . .” His tongue felt suddenly immobile. Again, that feeling like he’d had a stroke, and it had robbed him of his ability to communicate.
“Nobody thinks you’re purposefully trying to betray us,” Brockett said, his tone mild. “But you understand we can’t take risks.”
The doctor’s expression softened as well. “This is literally the destruction of the human race we’re talking about.”
“And a lot of other sentient beings as well,” Brockett said. “All those worlds and systems the enemy has reduced. Hell, I’m steamed they’ve got a star leviathan enslaved, as well. They should be studied and admired, not chained into war.”
Willis snorted. “I’m not going to admire the bloody thing. The only thing that matters is that we aren’t part of its next meal.”
“I didn’t say I want to make it my personal pet,” Brockett said. “Although, I have to admit I’m envious of Svensen and the lot. They’re standing on the actual surface of a star leviathan. How many people have ever done that? Imagine the discoveries you’d make.”
This brought another snort. “You’re absolutely mad, Brockett, you know that, don’t you?”
“I wish Smythe were here. He’d understand.”
The doctor and the science officer worked while they spoke, examining hand computers and fiddling with monitors. A nurse smeared gel on Fontaine’s scalp that brought the familiar numbing sensation. He remained calm. Let them dig what they wanted out of his head, get it over with.
The Alliance Trilogy Page 67