“Of course,” she said. “Doesn’t mean I’ve faced every possible situation.”
“Well I have, so I’m going down with you.”
She started to argue, but they were already skimming the upper atmosphere, and even the minimal pressure up there began to buffet the suits. He planted his feet and fired spikes from his heels to fix them in place, held Kelly fast until she’d done the same, and hunkered down.
A number of men and women were still around him. Mostly marines, but six or seven raiders, as well. Presumably others who’d expended too much fuel and come to the same conclusion. Like Svensen and Kelly, they held on for dear life.
A macrophage blasted past them, dislodged from the surface. It tumbled into a marine and sent him spiraling away. Other macrophages burrowed into the skin of the leviathan and disappeared. There were other creatures, too, small, cat-sized crawling things that he hadn’t even noticed in the battle, that seized hold of the humans, not to attack, but to grip them before the rising wind buffeted them free.
At the same time, other things were emerging onto the surface. Squirming, clawing creatures that planted their heads into the ground, shoved their butts skyward, and spewed spores or tiny, wriggling versions of themselves. It was hard to believe that so many different organisms could all live on this one leviathan, as big as it was, but after hundreds of thousands of years of life, if not longer, its own ecosystem had apparently evolved.
No doubt that science guy, Brockett, would have loved it, but Svensen was more concerned about staying alive than appreciating the local wildlife. Explosions rocked the surface from all manner of incoming missiles and kinetic shot. They did little harm to the leviathan, but a concussive shock wave from a nearby explosion swept away a raider and shattered the armor of a second, whose screams of pain forced Svensen to cut the man off from the com.
Persia ate up the sky. A fat, twisting continent crossed the planet’s equator, with shallow turquoise seas on either side. Fringes of green clung to the coast on opposite sides of the continent, with snow-topped coastal ranges leaving a rain shadow at its heart. From this height, the smaller, broken ranges of the interior looked like careless tumbles of brown rock. Even deeper into the continent lay a sea of brown waves that resolved into huge sand dunes, punctuated by rocky, wind-swept expanses.
Alone among all the wastelands was a circular zone of brown and red, like someone had taken a massive broom and swept away the sand and rock. It was the military base and former uranium mines; only a few weeks earlier, it had been buried beneath the sand, but the Royal Navy and the small population of surviving Persians had cleaned it out, planted nuclear reactors, and installed missile batteries.
These batteries were firing a continual stream of rockets from the surface, some of which were striking the leviathan. Holding its attention, egging it on. Begging it to attack. And the monster seemed happy to oblige.
Svensen read his display, then toggled on the general com. “This is for anyone remaining on the surface of the leviathan. We’re at ninety . . . no, eighty-seven thousand feet, and losing a thousand feet a second. You must jump at five thousand feet. Do you understand? By two thousand it’s too late. You will be killed when the monster hits the ground.”
He wrapped his left arm around Kelly’s waist, grabbed the rocket tank attachment, and tightened the fingers into a claw to lock them in place. It was the mechanical hand; it wouldn’t break its hold. Whatever happened, he wouldn’t be letting go of her.
She tilted her head down, then back up again. He couldn’t see her expression behind the helmet’s faceplate, but he could imagine it easily enough. He’d made a unilateral decision, and now she was stuck with it.
“You trust me?” he asked.
“I trust you’ve done this more than I have. But don’t screw up, Ulfgar, or we both die.”
She’d used his first name, and he returned the favor. “If I do, Elizabeth, look for me in Valhalla. Assuming the gods let you in. Being not only an unbeliever, but even worse, a woman, they might turn you away. Or make you prove you know how to clean and cook, first.”
She laughed, as he’d hoped she would. “You are a space Viking through and through.”
“And you are a snooty Albion officer. Survive this, and I think we can make it work.”
The missile attack ended. Helicopters, planes, and other ground craft began to lift away from the base. That would be the garrison, fleeing for their lives. The human equipment looked sluggish, almost standing still as they inched into the air. Some of them were clear already, but others would never make it away in time.
They hit fifteen thousand feet, and the monster began to decelerate. Barely. It was still going to slam into the ground at more than five hundred feet per second. Nobody wanted to be standing nearby when that happened.
Eight thousand feet, seven thousand, six . . .
“Now!”
He and Kelly hit the ignitors on their rocket packs. They shot away from the leviathan and immediately found themselves swept along in the wind, turning upside down, and fighting to align their competing rocket packs. Finally, he killed his engine and let her burn the last of her fuel to get them righted.
There was a tremendous boom, and a shock wave threw them end over end. Kelly’s sputtering, dying rocket pack was suddenly overwhelmed by a blast of air that threw them hundreds of feet higher into the sky.
Svensen’s display flashed red with all sorts of warnings about bursts of radiation and blows from rock and debris, but it was nothing his suit couldn’t handle, and he concentrated on getting them out of the swirling maelstrom.
He reignited his rockets and carried them south and over the clear desert. They were back at three thousand feet. As he realigned them, he saw that they were just clear of a towering mushroom cloud, a result of the massive force generated by the mountain-sized leviathan slamming into the ground at hundreds of feet a second.
Figuring it was more dangerous in the sky than on the ground, he brought them down as fast as he could. They descended into a shallow boulder-strewn valley a couple of miles south of the missile base, and his thought was to hunker down behind one of the rocks until the whirlwind subsided.
But the leviathan was flailing away at the base of the mushroom cloud. Its tentacles flew into the sky and slammed into the ground as it tore its way down in its eagerness to get at all the goodies, both natural and man-made, beneath the surface. The struggles threw house-sized boulders into the sky, and they rained down across the plain, where they thundered down with a series of earth-shaking booms.
After the third of these objects blasted a crater near where Svensen and Kelly were cringing in fear, they finally gave up, rose to their feet, and cranked the power to full on their mech suits.
And then they turned away from the rampaging star leviathan and ran for their lives.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Four of the five remaining star fortresses escaped the leviathan before it dropped to the surface of Persia. The fifth went down with it, entangled in tentacles, along with a dozen other warships. Had Catarina been told before the fight that the leviathan would be out of play, only four star fortresses would survive, and that the dragoons would be a scattered, battered, and ragged force by this point in the battle, she’d have liked her odds.
Unfortunately, the Alliance fleet had been mauled in the action, not the least by the leviathan itself. The creature was down at the surface now, thrashing its way into the trap/banquet table set for it. With luck it would devour the missile batteries, the weapon stores, and the nuclear plants, then settle in to eat the high-grade ore beneath the surface. Eventually, it would eat its fill and enter one of its long dormant periods. Let future generations worry about how to deal with it.
But even though the monster was out of the scene, it had left the battlefield littered with paralyzed victims. Blackbeard and Citadel were both gummed with spores, as were more than thirty other warships, most of them human and Hroom.
Th
ere were plenty of Alliance ships free at the rear of the crippled battle cruisers, with the most powerful being several corvettes and light cruisers, but they were still fighting dragoons, trying to keep them from knocking out the fleet’s missile frigates. Meanwhile, the four surviving star fortresses—Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, and Tango—were pulsing their blue torus rings. Every pulse hardened the sticky masses from the leviathan’s spore cannons, and soon the substance flaked away in dry, brittle pieces.
Blackbeard and Citadel dangled helplessly in front of them, together with all of the other ensnared vessels that drifted in orbit around Persia. As soon as the enemy engaged, they would have an array of helpless targets to choose from.
Drake had been closing with Inferno and her support ships for the last several hours, but he was still a few million miles away and only just beginning his initial deceleration. He might arrive in time to turn the tide, but only if Catarina could keep her fellow battle cruiser captains and their ships alive and in the fight.
“It’s us or nobody,” she told her crew. “I need our blasted containment field loosened. Tell engineering to burp the engine.”
“Guns are still offline,” Paulson said.
Snood spoke up from the defense grid computer. “Get them back online and I can hold off incoming attacks. We’ve got the grid up and pulse charges armed.”
Catarina acknowledged him with a nod and turned back to Paulson. “Secondary battery, missiles, anything?”
“Deck gun. That’s it.”
“We’re not saving our ammo. Azavedo, tell the gunnery to target Tango and see if you can use the deck gun to slow them down, at the very least.”
“If all we’re shooting is the deck gun, they’ll know we’re crippled.”
“They can see that plainly enough already. Do it.”
Catarina sent word to the remaining elements of the fleet to pull forward. Guide the missile frigates in, but don’t go to undue lengths to protect them—more important was their firepower in the immediate fight. She needed a cruiser—and that meant Captain Pearson on Vigilant. As Pearson brought her ship forward, Quebec and Tango broke free and began to fire their missile batteries.
Vigilant eased alongside Void Queen, turned to present her engines, and gave the larger battle cruiser a hot plasma bath. The AI squawked a warning, but the gummy mass from the spores sloughed away like the skin of a shedding snake. Engines came back online, the secondary battery, too, as well as torpedoes. Some minor damage to targeting sensors; the gunnery estimated five minutes until the main battery was ready to give a broadside.
By now, all four of the enemy carriers were back in the action. They came at Citadel, the most trapped and vulnerable of the three Albion battle cruisers. Catarina was forced to admit that McGowan had fought with skill and energy, initially at the helm of Peerless, where she’d come to expect it, but more surprisingly from the moment he’d been sent over to the battle cruiser.
He’d arrived to find Anna Wang in charge, having come over from First Dragon after Fox and most of his fellow officers on the bridge were killed in the dragoon attack. Wang had reestablished order, but had been unable to use the battle cruiser to its full effect until McGowan’s arrival.
The bridge of an Ironside-class battle cruiser was similar to that of the lighter Punisher-class cruisers, and its weapon systems worked along similar lines, albeit more complicated. But the ship maneuvered differently, had a different sensor array, and its captain needed to command not only his own ship, but his brawler and striker wing, as well as any auxiliary ships assigned to it. So Catarina had been surprised at how quickly and effectively he’d returned Citadel to full battle effectiveness.
Citadel wasn’t effective now, as she sat in a gummy mass of spores while the enemy struck her repeatedly with missiles. The lead star fortress, Romeo, came into cannon range and fired a punishing volley with kinetic weaponry.
Catarina called Badger to order the brawler out front to shield Citadel, then positioned Void Queen alongside and used her own defense grid to knock enemy projectiles from the sky before they could strike. With the main battery still offline, she ordered Vigilant into position and used the smaller cruiser’s cannon in place of her own.
Other Alliance ships approached in support of Void Queen and Vigilant. First to arrive was a collection of sloops, followed by two war junks. The Singaporean ships turned their armor-softening energy beams on Romeo, who flailed in their direction with missiles and pushed them back again. The sloops unleashed their serpentine batteries.
That bought Citadel a few moments of breathing space, and Vigilant slid forward from Void Queen and worked to burn free McGowan’s trapped battle cruiser.
Two more light cruisers arrived—Trafalgar and Polaris—and Catarina sent them to aid Blackbeard. Unfortunately, Tolvern’s ship was still trapped, maneuvering solely on auxiliary power.
Of the other star fortresses, Sierra raked one of the trapped destroyers with cannon as it passed, leaving the ship a smoking, venting wreck. Tango and Quebec smashed open the sloops shielding Void Queen, caught one of the offending war junks, and burst it open like a rotten melon.
Elsewhere, Dwiggins freed Apollo and joined Bolt and Swordfish in a trio of corvettes that came in alongside Vigilant as Citadel finally broke free. This knot of warships moved into formation just as Tango and Quebec slammed into them, with Sierra close on their heels.
Unfortunately, the corvettes, which had proven lethal against dragoons, didn’t have the muscle to slug it out with star fortresses. Apollo took damage, kinetic fire tore a hole in Bolt’s portside shields, both fore and aft, and Swordfish and the two light cruisers suffered additional blows that forced them back. If a handful of Scandian ships from the Second and Third Wolves hadn’t charged in with their pummel guns firing, they’d have been overwhelmed, and the battle lost.
But Blackbeard was free again. She joined Void Queen, Citadel, the brawlers, and Vigilant in shoving past Romeo to form a solid front. The three battle cruisers fired torpedoes and cannon, and more than fifty allied warships of every kind gathered in a knot of ships that drifted back from the planet until they had their backs to Persia’s moon.
At last, Tolvern called and took control of the armada once again, much to Catarina’s relief. It was a general fleet call, audio only.
“We’re not pinned, we’re making our stand here on purpose. We’ll be concentrating firepower on Sierra and fighting off the other three until the admiral and the general arrive with reinforcements.”
A second, private communication arrived for Catarina only. “Jane’s memory core is damaged, and she can’t interface with your ship’s AI. Give me your damage assessment.”
“Light to moderate damage across all shields,” Catarina said. “But nothing has penetrated any bulkheads or bombproofs, and my weapon systems are all online.”
“Good. Can you organize the salvage operation? Get as many of our stranded ships out of there as you can. Send anything you need except for one of the battle cruisers.”
When the call ended, Catarina put Azavedo in charge of Void Queen’s combat operations so she could concentrate on rescue. She soon had a determined knot of corvettes and star wolves formed into a squadron, and they fought their way past the enemy carriers. They came in near the ruined orbital fort and the wreckage scattered nearby.
The rescue operation harpooned stranded ships, burned off spore masses, and launched missiles at the rear of the star fortresses to draw their fire. This dangerous tactic succeeded in costing the fleet another corvette from the fight—heavily damaged, it was forced to flee for Persia—and a star wolf, which limped to safety with its engines damaged and its guns smashed. If not for a well-timed volley from the missile frigates, it would have been run down by dragoons and destroyed entirely. But Catarina rescued all of the stranded ships except for a single torpedo boat, which the enemy blasted apart as the carriers rolled forward to rejoin the fight.
Drake was finally close enough to force the e
nemy to take his arrival into account. The Adjudicators gathered their scattered dragoons and withdrew them from the battlefield. Positioned outside the orbit of the moon, they formed a shield ring to blunt Drake’s reinforcements, who were well into their deceleration.
The enemy carriers had entered the system with three dozen dragoons and were down to twenty-five ships, with several of the survivors damaged, even crippled. They faced Drake’s small, but powerful force of Inferno, two corvettes, two light cruisers, and a star wolf. Eleven sloops from the rejuvenated Hroom yards and a pair of Ladino privateer frigates trailed at a distance, a couple of hours further back.
The dragoon task force placed their strongest ships at the front and braced to hold the line. This side battle would be a reversal of most of the action of the war, with the smaller, but stronger force on the side of the humans, and the numerically superior, but more lightly armed force belonging to the Adjudicators. Someone on the bridge pointed out that humans had won many of these earlier battles.
“But when we won, we did it by maximizing the advantages of our different ships,” Catarina pointed out. “Using war junks or star wolves or corvettes to maximum effect in the given situation. The enemy only has dragoons out there. We know exactly what they can and can’t do.”
As for the star fortresses, they’d seemed invincible only a few hours earlier, but now looked vulnerable. The ghouls couldn’t even flee, with the system’s solitary jump point so distant and the Alliance commanding so many warships capable of running them down and forcing an engagement.
What the enemy did have was plenty of firepower. Quebec and Tango squeezed Vigilant, Peerless, and Polaris off from the rest of the ships. By the time the battle cruisers forced the enemy to engage with them, all three of the lighter cruisers had suffered damage.
By holding the enemy carriers at the moon, Tolvern had given her frigates a chance to calibrate their missile volleys. Rolling waves crashed down on Sierra, which picked off individual missiles with a stunning display of defensive prowess. But at the same time, star wolves charged in, pummel guns snarling, their commanders as fearless as ever. The surviving war junks kept their beams focused. Sierra was forced to absorb these secondary attacks, since the missile bombardment kept its defenses fully engaged.
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