When that maneuver failed, she pulled the sloops into position behind the brawlers, where they arrived just as Sierra, Romeo, and Uniform crashed into her fleet. The enemy seemed determined to smash her formations and send them into disarray just as the leviathan arrived, but the fleet was ready for the attack.
First, Dwiggins streaked across the battlefield with his fast-attack squadron. The squadron fired cannon and threw down a row of torpedoes, slipped away from a hail of cannon fire, and circled back to chase away two dragoons that had slipped through the rear defenses.
Then came the battle cruisers. McGowan pushed Citadel out front and was the first to fire a full broadside. The cannon caught Romeo across the bow, even as the enemy carrier fired its own guns. Both sides took damage, and as McGowan retreated behind his brawler, his new ship was bleeding from old wounds on the number three and four shields. The enemy gunnery had struck them precisely in the most vulnerable places, those segments of shield patched up after the earlier fight.
Nevertheless, the battle cruiser made an agile maneuver, delivered flashes of radiation and bursts of chaff to baffle missile attacks, and rolled upside down relative to the other two battle cruisers to present an undamaged section of the hull instead.
Capp grunted. “McGowan has them moving smartly. I’ll give him that.”
Blackbeard and Void Queen fired their main cannon in turn. They struck more blows against Romeo, and if Tolvern had kept Dwiggins’ forces at hand, she thought she might have taken the carrier. But he’d fallen even farther back with his fast-attack squadron as dragoons made a concerted push. The dragoons tore apart a torpedo boat, forced a pair of destroyers to withdraw, and mauled a star wolf that had come back to hold the line.
Dwiggins arrived just in time. Apollo, Peerless, and Vigilant isolated one of the offending dragoons and savaged it with their guns, while two other Albion warships struck several enemy ships that tried to press forward in relief. With Dwiggins’ help, the fleet’s rear reestablished their lines and pushed the dragoons back.
“Warning,” Jane said. The AI sounded almost cheerful. “Class-two explosion expected.”
Blackbeard’s number four lit up. Jane sent through her damage assessment. The number four was down to seventy-four percent, and the number three had suffered moderate damage as well. Tolvern shot a glance toward Lomelí and Smythe, who were working furiously at the defense grid to knock down enemy fire, and decided to hold her tongue.
Anyway, she was shortly presented with more grave concerns as the leviathan arrived on the battlefield. It spewed a mass of spores that nearly enveloped the entirety of Tolvern’s flanking position of sloops and star wolves. A dozen ships would have been caught at once had the spores launched with greater power. As it was, they fell a few hundred miles short of the lead fleet elements, but the leviathan was advancing at a good clip, and several of the scattering Hroom and Scandian ships seemed likely to fall to the next barrage.
At this moment, the twenty ships from Capp’s task force arrived on the scene, with the few minutes Nyb Pim’s clever calculations had bought them making all the difference. They hit Quebec with everything they could muster: pulse fire, torpedoes, serpentine batteries, and light cannon. The star fortress hesitated a long moment, as if drawing a deep breath, then released a blast of small missiles. Before these had even left the ship, it followed with a wave of kinetic fire.
The missiles caught four torpedo boats that were still mid-charge to deliver their payloads. The first two were hammered, shields already shredded by the time the kinetic fire arrived and finished ripping them apart. The other two suffered crippling blows, lost their containment fields, and drifted away with their commanders desperately trying to regain control. One of these ships still had her weapon systems online, and managed to drop a pair of torpedoes in the moments before her commanding officer ordered the ship abandoned.
A destroyer and two sloops suffered from the attack as well, but they were farther back and managed to deflect or neutralize most of it before it hit. Still, nearly a third of the attacking force had been destroyed or damaged in the first few minutes of the fight.
“They’re too weak,” Tolvern said, dismayed. “I needed something bigger, a cruiser or some star wolves.”
If only she’d had a spare force of heavy warships lying around to commit to the suicide mission.
Still, the attacking ships had thrown down enough firepower, and continued to throw it down, to force Quebec to respond with countermeasures. The Hroom serpentine batteries, especially, used enough bomblets in their attacks to challenge the stoutest defense measures. Tolvern had faced those serpentines before, and while each small explosive charge was barely enough to scratch a hardened tyrillium shield, you ignored them at your peril. Let them get through, and it was like being stung by a thousand wasps; it would kill you all the same.
While Quebec was countering this attack, the two torpedoes launched by the doomed torpedo boat had begun a slow, almost lazy acceleration toward their target. Because that target was not the star fortress, the Adjudicators seemed to discount them at first, probably thinking they’d been nothing more than the desperate flailing of a dying warship. But soon they were racing toward their target, and the enemy took notice.
A swarm of tiny missiles raced to intercept them. They caught and destroyed one of the torpedoes. The second slipped through. It raced past the hull of the star fortress, emerged unscathed from an attack of pulse fire, and slammed into the star leviathan in front of one of its rear plasma vents. Far from Svensen’s ground assault force, Tolvern hoped.
A nuclear explosion turned Blackbeard’s viewscreens white for an instant before the sensors compensated. Even such a massive strike had failed to cause the leviathan visible damage, but it had certainly caught the monster’s attention. It shuddered, and the tentacles grasping at the main fleet twisted about and came at the small rear force instead.
The sloops, destroyers, and torpedo boats fired again. This time they ignored Quebec entirely, shooting everything at the star leviathan itself. The star fortress fought equally hard to knock down the attacks, but plenty of explosive and kinetic fire broke through the countermeasures, including dozens of the wasp-stings from the Hroom serpentine batteries.
The Adjudicators hit the monster with several jolts to its implants in an attempt to regain control. The leviathan didn’t turn about to face the new target, but neither did it ignore them. Instead, it fired spores both forward and backward. A sloop caught a blast of spores up front, another sloop to the rear. A torpedo boat and two destroyers from Capp’s attack force. Another forward blast caught a sloop and a star wolf.
Eight ships were shortly enveloped in the gummy, expanding substance the star leviathan used to snare its prey. While Tolvern watched, horrified, it sent out tentacles and grabbed them, one by one. And all the while, it continued forward, and had nearly stumbled into the trio of battle cruisers and their support ships. There were plenty of tentacles still waving around, and spore cannons already firing at the heavier ships.
Suddenly, the star leviathan gave a shudder. Plasma flared at its rear. It turned a mass of spore cannons at the nearest ship and fired.
That ship was Papa, one of the three star fortresses that had been guiding the star leviathan while the other three detached to fight the Alliance fleet. Spores swept over its hull, hit the blue torus shield generator and wiped it from sight, then struck the engines. Before the Adjudicator commander seemed to realize what was happening, half of its massive ship had disappeared beneath the gummy substance.
The leviathan swung out an appendage and slammed into Papa. The carrier, responding at last, flared its engines to burn off the substance. It tried to pull away. A second tentacle struck it from above. Even while Tolvern’s forces were still squirming in the leviathan’s grasp, trying to cut their way free or simply abandoning ship in escape pods, the leviathan swung the star fortress around front, where it grabbed the ship with two smaller, but thicker appendage
s and hauled the ship into its gaping maw.
Blackbeard’s bridge fell silent as they watched the nose of the star fortress enter the leviathan’s mouth. Explosions, flares of gas and plasma. Another bite, the mouth opening wider. Within minutes, the whole thing had vanished into the leviathan’s mouth. An entire star fortress gone in a few mouthfuls. It was a mesmerizing and terrifying sight.
Sierra, Romeo, and Uniform fell back to join the two surviving star fortresses at the leviathan. They hit it with jolts, but this only seemed to enrage the monster. It fired its spore cannon again, and this time it hit Uniform. The leviathan soon had it snared, too.
Tolvern found her voice at last. “It’s free. Svensen did it, he destroyed the implant.”
Her jubilation was short-lived. The leviathan had awakened to find itself in the middle of a feast of vast proportions, and it seemed determined to consume it all, human, Hroom, and Adjudicator alike. It fired its spore cannons in every direction.
The star fortresses tried to flee, but every last one of them took spores, as did several dragoons that had raced in after braving a gantlet of Alliance firepower in an attempt to rescue the carriers. Spores hit sloops, destroyers, torpedo boats, and star wolves.
More spores blasted forward into Tolvern’s battle cruisers. Citadel and her brawler practically disappeared beneath a mass of spores, as did Void Queen as Vargus swung her ship around in an attempt to flare her engines against Citadel’s hull to burn it free. Void Queen emerged with her engines intact, but unable to fire her weapons.
Blackbeard was slightly farther back, but she, too, took spores. They left her main battery unscathed, but gummed the containment field around the engines and left her drifting, unable to fly away without blowing the engines. Another spore blast fouled up the cannon, and she could no longer shoot.
Other friendly ships came to help, and several of them were caught as well. These included Dwiggins’ corvette, Apollo, and two war junks that seemed to think they could creep in with their superior cloaking and help without being detected. The star leviathan hit them with a direct blast from its spore cannons, and they were soon drifting and helpless like all the rest.
There were so many ships caught, and more being snared with every passing minute, that the leviathan had time to consider how it would consume them all. Some ships remained floating, gummed and helpless, others remained in the grasp of its tentacles as if being saved for later, and still others were hit with spores, grabbed by the nearest appendage, and shoved straightaway down the monster’s throat.
As soon as Tolvern had recovered her wits from the initial chaos of the leviathan’s freedom, she made a frantic call to the planetside base in the heart of the Persian desert.
“Fire everything you’ve got,” she told the commander, even as her own ship was hit with another blast of spores. “Set off nukes, overheat the reactors, and set them into meltdown mode.”
The surface base had been firing away since the beginning of the battle, a small, but steady barrage that was big enough to explain the purpose of the military installation for the enemy’s benefit, but not so fierce as to affect the course of the battle. Until now.
It took a few minutes for the results of her orders to be felt, and all she could do was order her unharmed ships to stay clear and battle the surviving dragoons while the leviathan ate friends and foes alike. A few of her ships burned or blasted their way free. Most struggled in vain while they awaited their fate, including the three battle cruisers.
Pearson took command of Dwiggins’ shattered forces from on board Vigilant, maneuvered to shield the still-vulnerable missile frigates, and hammered the dragoons until they fled the battlefield.
Nuclear missiles exploded in Persia’s upper atmosphere. Other missiles raced toward the leviathan. Some detonated at intervals, while others continued all the way to the leviathan and struck it, one after another.
The human base at the heart of the isolated stretch of the Persian wastelands was soon aglow to the sensors, not only from outgoing missiles, but from nuclear reactors pulled from behind bombproofs and exposed to the surface. These were deliberately overheated to start a meltdown that would give off more radiation. At the same time, explosions on the surface exposed the rich fissionable ores that had once made this a center of Persian mining operations.
The leviathan seemed to hesitate. Tolvern held her breath. Missiles continued to rain on it from the surface base. Finally, it turned its vents, pulled in most of its tentacles, and made for Persia. Dozens of ships remained in its grasp, and it carried them toward the surface, but the rest of the fleet had been abandoned, ignored as the monster sought juicier prey.
At long last, the trap was sprung.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The implant had broken free with a sparking, sputtering jolt of electricity that slammed into the raider and the marine cutting through it, as well a second marine, who’d been standing guard. All three of them flew end over end away from the leviathan, and attempts to hail them failed. Svensen and Kelly rocketed after the last one and brought him back down to the ground. He was stunned, but alive.
The humans positioned near the implant were fighting off another attack by the tree-like macrophages with their waving, rubbery arms, and could do nothing for the other pair but watch them drift away, unresponsive. Perhaps dead, perhaps not.
The implant, a giant, barrel-shaped object, drifted clear, and some marines shot at it to push it farther away still. The leviathan skin around the broken-off stump twitched and shivered, and soon, the ground all around was shaking and heaving as if they were standing on top of a volcanic cauldron about to blow.
“We did it!” Kelly said. “The monster is free!”
She sounded jubilant, but an undercurrent of fear tinged her voice and pulled it up half an octave in pitch. Helsingor came rocketing over the surface at a rapid, almost reckless speed as he danced away from grasping macrophage limbs. He plopped down and rooted himself next to Svensen, who was reloading his rifle after emptying it against one of their attackers.
“By all the icy hells, what are we still doing here?” Helsingor asked.
The answer came in the form of a projectile that rocketed in and slammed the ground nearby. More marines and raiders went flying. Fresh gunfire blasted from down the plain in the direction of the leviathan’s mouth. The surviving decimators had reorganized and were mounting another attack. Within seconds they’d pinned down nearly twenty humans—Mead Horn’s forces—and cries came across the com for help.
There was no longer any need to defend the implant site, and so Svensen, Kelly, Helsingor, and a marine colonel organized the center of the position and pushed toward the decimators to flush them clear. The enemy, in its assault, had attracted the attention of even more macrophages, who were indiscriminate in their attacks on human and Adjudicator alike.
The sky darkened overhead as one of the leviathan’s appendages swung by and blocked out the reflected light from Persia. It pulled back around with a sputtering, burning ship in its grasp.
Svensen got a magnified look at the ship before the leviathan dragged it out of his vision. “It’s a star fortress! It’s attacking the ghouls.”
As if that wasn’t enough to confirm that they’d freed the leviathan, missiles began to slam into its surface, a barrage that seemed to be coming from Persia. The monster swung about slowly, and its tentacles reached and grasped toward the planet.
The decimators gave up the fight. One moment they held their forces in ranks, with the front enemies carrying shielding and light assault rifles and the rear elements hauling forward heavier launchers and machine guns, the next, they were igniting rockets and blasting clear of the leviathan.
Svensen toggled the general com. “The monster is attacking the planet. We’ve won—abandon the monster. Go!”
Marines and raiders flared their rocket packs and were soon joining the decimators in flight. Dozens of humans and aliens popped from the surface like rocket-propelled fl
eas. Svensen grabbed Kelly’s wrist with his stronger, fully mechanized hand.
“What’s your fuel level?” he asked.
“Twenty-six percent.”
He groaned. “Mine is only sixty-one. I don’t have enough for the both of us.”
“Let me go, then.”
“Forget that,” Svensen said. “We’ll have to try. Hold your fuel until we’re clear. Then I’ll give you a direction and we’ll give it a push.”
“Go on without me, I’ll figure something out.”
“The devil you will. You’ll blast free, burn through the rest of your fuel, and be dragged into the gravity well. We’re too close already.”
“That’s my plan. I’m going to ride it down.”
Svensen blinked. “You’re going to ride . . .”
He stopped as he figured it out. Scandians had long mounted planetary assaults. The classic two-ship raid had one star wolf use its pummel guns to clear a landing zone and mow down anything that approached from the ground while the second ship disgorged its raiders on the surface.
But if landing a star wolf was too risky—say, if there were planetary warplanes to bomb you when you were grounded—it was possible to drop your ship to several thousand feet and toss your mech units from an open bay. The raiders would ignite rocket packs a few hundred feet off the ground and come in for a landing on top of the target.
And of course the marines’ mech suits were based on Scandian design, most of them built in the Odense yards and factories. So Kelly’s suit was also capable of handling a high-velocity free fall. In theory.
“Have you ever done it before?” he asked.
“When would I have done it?”
“Presumably they trained you in that thing before you took it into combat.”
The Alliance Trilogy Page 71