The Alliance Trilogy

by Michael Wallace

  What’s more, his body had the exhausted, wrung-out feeling of having run an obstacle course. The mech suit and the low gravity did most of the muscle work, but nothing could ease the mental exhaustion of an extended battle.

  He turned to Kelly. “My display is broken—what’s the mission time?” He braced himself for the result.

  “4:53.”

  Not as long as he’d expected, but long enough. Nearly five hours had passed since Boghammer pulled away and left them stranded. Five hours in which the star leviathan had torn apart the orbital fortress and turned its attention to devouring the fleet. No doubt Alliance ships were being destroyed even as these thoughts crossed his mind.

  “Tell those men to cut faster,” he said. “I don’t care if they burn out their fluxors—we’ll get replacements. We’ve got to get that thing down.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The first assault of the three freed star fortresses nearly overwhelmed Tolvern’s vanguard. She maneuvered Blackbeard and Void Queen to blunt the enemy ships, with brawlers positioned to absorb damage. Citadel, now captained by Anna Wang, moved into position to join them. A handful of destroyers, Punisher-class cruisers, and corvettes supported her. As the enemy approached, the allied ships unleashed their cannons and torpedoes.

  But the enemy carriers were too strong to stop with a brute display of firepower. They muscled through Tolvern’s supporting forces and came at the battle cruisers themselves. She couldn’t let them drive her too far back, not while Svensen’s assault on the leviathan’s implant was still underway, but had no choice but to retreat. Several dragoons smashed through and struck her rear, further compounding her troubles.

  Nevertheless, she’d almost broken free from the engagement and fallen among a larger group of fleet ships that could support her, when Citadel fell behind. Sierra and Romeo immediately set about attacking the isolated battle cruiser while Uniform swung around to hold off a rescue attempt. To make matters worse, there seemed to be some problem calibrating Citadel’s main battery, and her return fire wasn’t striking back at full power.

  Tolvern might have lost the battle cruiser altogether if a powerful force of star wolves hadn’t arrived on the scene. After landing troops on the star leviathan, they were hardly at full strength; half the ships had disgorged many of their crew to the surface, two star wolves had been destroyed altogether, and three others had been badly mauled. But they were strong enough to force a wedge between the enemy carriers and their prey.

  Citadel escaped before she could be overwhelmed, and limped back to friendly lines.

  “Get Wang, and find out what’s going on,” Tolvern told Capp, who moved to comply. She spotted something on her screen farther out in the system. “Smythe, what is Drake up to?”

  “He’s split his forces. The faster ships should get here a couple of hours ahead of time. They’re still twelve hours out, though. The others a little more than fourteen hours distant unless we go to meet them.”

  The faster ships would be Inferno, two corvettes, and two Punisher-class cruisers. Even without Bailyna Tyn’s sloops and the other auxiliary ships in the squadron, those four alone would be a welcome addition to her forces. But she couldn’t leave the planet to join forces or she’d never be rid of the leviathan. To say nothing of her striker wings and mech units. No way would she leave them out to dry.

  Capp looked up from her console. “Eh, Cap’n? Wang says nothing is wrong with the cruiser—nothing they can’t handle, yeah? It’s the crew that’s the problem. Them new blokes is still trying to figure out stuff.”

  “They’d bloody well better figure it out in a hurry.”

  Several hours had passed since Svensen’s landing, and the leviathan had finished tearing up the orbital fortress. Signals had come through; there were still people alive down there. But the surface had a massive chunk taken out of it, millions of tons of rock torn away in the monster’s search for energy and materials. Boulder-sized rocks fell flaming into the atmosphere. Others rolled along in orbit, a hazard for any ships getting too close to the planet.

  After their near-death experience, Tolvern’s missile frigates were once more safely positioned behind a powerful force of warships, which now included the Terran Stinger and its railguns in Tolvern’s mental calculations. She pulled the frigates and support craft away from Persia to come in behind the battle cruisers, then unleashed one of her wolf packs to help the light cruisers get safely into position.

  McGowan pulled Peerless into place alongside Citadel, who at least was back in the fight with her missile batteries. Countermeasures were up to snuff, too. The battle cruiser and her lighter counterpart formed a united front that was now facing only a single carrier. All three of the star fortresses had arrested their charge. The reason why soon became clear.

  “Here it comes,” Smythe said. “My God, is that monster ever not hungry?”

  The leviathan pushed off from the ruins of the orbital fortress and flared its plasma nozzles. Only three star fortresses held it in place now, but they seemed to be in full control.

  And just when Tolvern had seemed to be getting the upper hand in the battle again. She clenched her teeth, but couldn’t indulge in despair.

  “I need to know what’s happening on the leviathan,” Tolvern said. “Someone get me info, tell me if Svensen and the lot are alive, and if so, what the devil is keeping them.”

  A few minutes later, an assistant tech raised Carvalho, who said he’d recently done some fighting above the surface of the creature and was still swooping around nearby with several other falcons. The tech put him through to the captain.

  “Are you getting me okay?” Carvalho asked.

  “You sound like you’re at the bottom of a well,” Tolvern said. “But I can hear you fine.”

  “I tried earlier, but there’s too much interference down there. I spotted our people. They’re still alive, still fighting. There was a worm trying to eat them, but I ripped it up with my guns.”

  “You were shooting a worm?”

  “More like a maggot. Think big. Like the size of one of our ships, big. Good thing it was all soft and gooey inside.”

  “So Svensen is alive?”

  “Yeah, looks that way. I could not see if he found the implant or not, but he was trying to hold position. There were ghouls and walking trees made of rubber and God knows what else. He has lost a lot of troops, and there are others who didn’t land in the right place trying to fight their way over. Ay, diablos, it is a mess down there.”

  It sounded like more than a mess, it sounded like a nightmare. Tolvern told Carvalho to hold his striker wings and concentrate on shooting down shuttles. Ironically, the safest place for the falcons seemed to be between the leviathan and the star fortresses. They were too small for the leviathan to notice, so long as they kept mobile and didn’t keep lighting up the surface, and the enemy ships couldn’t shoot down toward them out of fear of drawing the creature’s hungry attention.

  As for the three detached enemy carriers, their objective seemed to be pushing Tolvern’s fleet away from the ruined fortress and the missile batteries on the surface of Persia while pinning them from behind with the dragoons. And then, no doubt, to let the leviathan devour them in a single, massive banquet of destruction. Enemy ships would hunt down and destroy any who attempted to escape.

  Tolvern would have preferred to keep an open lane for escape, but she’d staked too much on this one gambit, and couldn’t afford the brutal struggle needed to fight her way clear. While the trio of carriers maintained position and waited for the leviathan to catch up, she and Capp rearranged their forces. They had maybe twenty minutes before the shooting intensified. Shortly after that, the leviathan would lumber into their midst, and the allied forces would be in trouble.

  Capp threw up her hands and released a string of curses. “That McGowan is a right piss nozzle.”

  “What now?”

  “He doesn’t like where you’ve put him. Thinks he should be in with the ba
ttle cruisers.”

  “I don’t care. I need Peerless loose and mobile. McGowan’s in charge of the fast-attack force.”

  “I told him that.” Capp looked exasperated. “Says Dwiggins should do it, instead.”

  “What? Put him on.”

  McGowan appeared an instant later. He looked as confident as ever, almost smug, in fact. “Tolvern, you know I can’t do anything with your first mate—she’s far too arrogant for her station. A word in private? Perhaps your war room?”

  “Dammit, McGowan. I don’t have time for this.”

  “For God’s sake, will you stop being so stubborn for a moment?”

  “Me? I’m the stubborn one? Are you serious?” She put him on hold and rose from her seat. “Capp, I need you to collect twenty warships—the smaller stuff—and form a reserve. Let’s call it a reserve to a reserve.”

  “Torpedo boats, sloops, and the like?” she asked.

  “Destroyers, too. I need mines and torpedoes. A few nukes, if you can scratch them up.” Tolvern turned to Nyb Pim. “Pilot, I want a course that will charge the rearmost of the star fortresses still hovering around the leviathan.”

  “I believe that is Quebec.” The Hroom gave an uncertain hum deep in his throat. “And will our ships be targeting the enemy vessel for attack, Captain? Or merely charging?”

  “A full-on attack.”

  With that taken care of, she strode toward the war room and pulled McGowan up on the screen.

  He looked surprisingly patient, given that she’d kept him waiting. “You’re in a killing box,” he said. “The moon at your back, the planet in front. Dragoons hemming you in on one side and a trio of enemy star fortresses in front. All feeding you into the mouth of a star leviathan that could eat every last one of our ships and barely get indigestion for its troubles.”

  “You do realize that time is of the essence, right? That every second here is time I don’t have to get my forces arrayed for battle. I’m fully committed now—so long as our troops are still fighting on the leviathan, there will be no change in battle plans.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that you need the best use of your forces, even if the leviathan turns aside. Right now, Citadel is your weak link. I need to take the helm.”

  Tolvern blinked. “You what?”

  “I’ll keep Wang on board—she’s a solid officer and well respected. Knows her discipline. But she doesn’t understand Royal Navy tech. I’ll bring over three other officers to help me run the bridge.”

  “And Peerless?”

  “Harding will take the helm of my ship. He is a competent officer, perhaps lacking in some creativity, but commits few mistakes. I believe that with Harding on Peerless and myself commanding Citadel, we will maximize our chance for success.”

  “I see what you’re doing,” she said. “You’re giving yourself a brevet promotion to the commanding officer of a battle cruiser.”

  “Technically, you would be giving me the promotion, Captain Tolvern, but yes, that is precisely what I am proposing. I believe it is expedient under current circumstances.”

  Not only that, but by extension, McGowan would be positioned to replace Algernon Fox in the admiralty. Good heavens, Fox was only dead a few hours, they were in a life-and-death struggle, and McGowan was already making his move. It was hard to imagine a more cynical bid for power.

  More charitably, Tolvern thought he was right. For all of her personal distaste, his command, both at the ship and the task force level, had been impeccable of late. And he’d called her into the war room to make his suggestion. In the past he’d have attempted to bully her in public, force her to stand down in a humiliating fashion.

  “Very well. Make arrangements. It will be as you say.”

  He nodded solemnly and delivered another surprise.

  “I’ll take the lead. Citadel has suffered damage and is by far the weakest of the three battle cruisers at hand, and, if I am honest, will be the most poorly commanded, even after I take the helm. I don’t have the experience of you or Vargus, and my crew will be a hodgepodge any way you look at it.”

  The admissions were so surprising, given McGowan’s history, that she initially missed his implication. “If she’s the weakest, why position her to the front?”

  “Ships will be sacrificed to the monster, sir, while we hold on for our marines and the Vikings to do their work. If battle cruisers are to fall, let the first be HMS Citadel.”

  She had no argument for this. His logic was impeccable.

  “Only if necessary, of course,” McGowan added. “I would prefer to stay alive. Even Dreadnought’s death bought us scant time, if you’ll recall. Yet it was sufficient to allow our fleet to escape and fight another day. If that brave crew could give up their lives for the cause, so can Citadel’s.”

  #

  What the devil? Tolvern wondered as she made her way back onto the bridge. Was this the same man who’d thrown over Catarina Vargus, with all her intelligence, drive, and beauty, for the mere crime of being born of the wrong sort of lineage? The same man who’d fought Tolvern with cape and sword, as the Ladinos said, for the right to lead the fleet? Not once, but several times throughout the Apex and Adjudicator wars.

  Nevertheless, McGowan was swiftly in command of Citadel, with Wang as his first mate and Harding leading Peerless away to join Vigilant, Trafalgar, Polaris, and several corvettes. Tolvern put Dwiggins in charge of this force, and added the Third Wolves, her most powerful remaining pack of Scandian ships.

  Dwiggins’s squadron was not precisely a reserve, because she needed these ships in the fight, but would roam about the battlefield, chasing off dragoons and rushing in to rescue any battle cruiser that got in a sticky position.

  “That should hold off the star fortresses,” she said. “So long as we’re only facing three. If any more break off, we’ll be in trouble.”

  “Not sure the enemy can control the leviathan if they do that,” Smythe said. He was hitting the creature with scans, as were the Singaporean war junks, trying to figure out what was happening on the surface, but with little success. “It’s already trying to break free. They’re blasting it with pulses every sixty to eighty seconds to keep it in line.”

  “What about the monster, anyhow?” Capp said. “We can fight them ghouls all we want, but if our boys don’t cut down that bloody implant, it’s not gonna do any good.”

  “We need a sacrifice to the gods,” Tolvern said.

  Capp turned with a puzzled expression. “How’s that, Cap’n?”

  “You can’t defeat the gods, you can only appease them for a while. We’re going to bring in a series of sacrifices and let this particular god pick and choose.”

  She still looked confused. “You mean our ships?”

  “Pilot, do you have that course worked out yet?” Tolvern asked.

  Nyb Pim hummed deep in his throat. “Very nearly, Captain Jess Tolvern. I only need the final configuration of ships so I know their engine types and likely acceleration.”

  “The ships are the reserve force Capp organized earlier,” she told him.

  Capp’s face paled. “King’s balls. So you’re going to feed the ships I just gathered to the monster? You mean I just sent all them blokes to their deaths?”

  “Some of them will probably die, yes. They’re going to charge Quebec and try to separate it from the leviathan. Maybe they succeed, and the enemy’s control slips a little. Most likely they won’t. But they’ll be to the rear of the leviathan, shooting hard, even dropping nuclear torpedoes into the mixture. I don’t care how many shocks the ghouls give the leviathan, with only three carriers in place, the creature is going to go after whoever is shooting it back there.”

  “At which point it eats them, is that what you’re saying?” Capp asked.

  “It will try. Our attack force will try to escape before it does.”

  Nearly everyone on the bridge glanced at the side screen, where the leviathan was still accelerating toward the
m. Spore cannons bristled along its flanks, and a mass of tentacles surrounded its mouth, reaching and probing. Any single tentacle was enough to snare one of the ships Capp had gathered beneath the battle cruisers.

  “Get the commanders of those ships,” Tolvern said. “I’ll give them the message myself. Let them know the exact plan. If anyone balks, they can fall back and I’ll send someone else in their place. Of course, that may only buy them time. Good chance we’ll all be dead, and Drake’s reinforcements, too, before this is all done.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  In the end, none of the ships Capp had gathered, human and Hroom alike, shirked from the order. Everyone knew the stakes. Knew they had to keep the leviathan near the trap on Persia’s surface, and knew that if the monster got into the middle of the Alliance fleet, all their hopes were gone.

  There were nine torpedo boats, six sloops, and five destroyers in the force Capp had organized while the captain was meeting with McGowan. Tolvern had expected Nyb Pim’s course would have them hook across the Y-axis, come over the top of the leviathan, and hit Quebec from above.

  But to her surprise, he instead sent the attack squadron away from the fleet toward the moon. From there, the ships ducked behind the fleet of dragoons and circled back toward Persia. The squadron used the planet’s gravity to slingshot around and come at the targeted star fortress from behind. The maneuver kept the large, but underpowered squadron shielded from attack until the last moment, with the exception of a few scattered, ineffectual shots from the dragoons as they’d crossed between them and the moon.

  Capp gave the pilot an admiring glance as it became clear what he was up to. “That’s some fancy piloting, mate.”

  Nyb Pim whistled modestly. “It seemed to be the safest possible course and will gain us a few minutes of time.”

  Tolvern supported the attack with a barrage from her missile frigates and cruisers, targeting not only Quebec, but the other two star fortresses holding position around the leviathan in an attempt to draw their fire. She tried to use an additional force of Hroom sloops to shower the battlefield with bomblets, but couldn’t get the sloops past the three detached star fortresses, who’d taken position ahead of the leviathan to escort it forward.