The Alliance Trilogy

  Catarina spotted an opportunity. Her roving pack of corvettes and star wolves was still behind the enemy formation, readying to hook up and over to rejoin the rest of the fleet in defending the battle cruisers against the other three star fortresses. Instead, she charged them straight at Sierra.

  Under normal circumstances, four star wolves and three corvettes wouldn’t have been enough to take down a star fortress, but their cannon and pummel gun fire found no opposition. They hit already softened armor and opened a pair of holes on the flank. Two of the rescued destroyers joined the fight, followed by a pair of torpedo boats and a sloop. What had seemed the crippled side of the Alliance fleet was suddenly alive with attacks.

  At that moment, the Terran ship, Scorpion, streaked in with its primary railgun to launch a knife-like attack against Sierra’s shield generator. The blue torus ring broke apart in streams of plasma. A torpedo boat dropped a Mark-IV into one of Sierra’s wounds. An explosion lit up its interior.

  Another wave of missiles rained down from the frigates, and this time Sierra couldn’t fight them off. Explosion after explosion rocked the surface, followed by a heavy, internal shock wave. Cheers rang out across the bridge of Void Queen as the carrier broke in two.

  “One down,” Catarina said, her tone grim.

  She didn’t have time to enjoy the victory, as the battle cruisers up front were taking a beating, and she needed to recall the Sierra attack force at once or they’d be overwhelmed. They arrived and struck Romeo from behind. This carrier wasn’t under attack from missile frigates—yet, anyway—and had no trouble fighting them off. But it earned breathing room for the rest of the fleet, who now had only Quebec and Tango to contend with.

  A shout from the tech consoles turned Catarina’s head. Paulson, Snood, and Winchester were watching a side screen, where Drake’s forces slammed into the weakened force of dragoons. Inferno herself obliterated one ship, while her cruisers picked off two others. A corvette and a star wolf worked together to punish a fourth until it fled, engines shredded.

  Drake’s ships plowed forward, and dragoons kept wilting like dry grass before a wildfire. Another enemy ship destroyed, two more damaged. An entire wing of the enemy formation crumpled, and the freshly arriving Alliance forces broke through.

  “They were weaker back there than we thought,” Snood said. “Half those ships were practically inoperative already.”

  Within minutes, fresh long-range missiles began to arrive on the battlefield from Drake’s ships. The dragoons seemed for a moment like they’d try to give chase, but instead reformed ranks in an attempt to face the second wave of reinforcements, this one led by General Bailyna Tyn. What was the point of that? Surely the battle would be nearly decided by the time the sloops arrived.

  “The enemy is lost and confused,” Catarina decided. “They have no strategy left in them.”

  The missile frigates, invulnerable behind a row of destroyers, launched another well-timed attack. Word came through that some of the frigates were running low on ammunition, having been launching missiles for many hours now, but Tolvern ordered that no ship was to hold its fire for another day, and the frigates kept up their attack. Their bombardment now landed on Quebec, who’d already suffered damage, and struggled to fight it off. Catarina kept her small reserve force hammering on the same carrier.

  Meanwhile, the three battle cruisers were giving Tango a good mauling. Three straight broadsides had blasted through with little opposition, and Citadel landed a pair of torpedoes as well. Tolvern ordered the falcons back into the fight and brought them up from below to strike Tango’s underbelly with pulse fire on a damaged stretch of armor.

  Catarina had a hunch. “Ready a nuke.”

  “We only have one,” Paulson said. “And only three more standard Mark-IVs, plus a handful of Hunter-IIs.”

  “Load them all in the tubes, and hold them for now. I want the nuke in the number one.”

  Victory seemed to be close at hand, and there was no holding back now. She just needed to make her shots count.

  Her sister ships had been out of the battle for a stretch longer than Void Queen, and carried more ammo. Both Blackbeard and Citadel kept firing in an attempt to knock down the last of Tango’s defenses. Catarina waited for another barrage from the missile frigates. As soon as the enemy was engaged in pulling down missiles, she gave the order.

  “Fire the number one, two, and three.”

  The two and three were not quite decoys, but designed to take the pressure off the number one, which was what she hoped would break through. The gunnery targeted all three at a stretch of damaged armor just forward of the carrier’s torus ring, which was still active, but leaking. The torpedoes rolled forward, and she chased them with explosive shot from her secondary battery.

  The range was close, and it was only minutes before the torpedoes accelerated into the range of Tango’s defense grid. The enemy made a weak attempt to knock them down. The torpedoes struck, one after another.

  The sensors blanked as they compensated for the radioactive blast. When the screens came back on, a smoking wreck appeared, with incoming fire from cannon and missile savaging what was left. Another carrier down, and another cheer sounded on the bridge.

  The admiral arrived on the battlefield with all guns blazing. The two remaining star fortresses, in a desperate attempt to get free of their death trap, joined forces, picked the weakest stretch of Tolvern’s lines, and pushed forward. The handful of destroyers, sloops, and star wolves opposing them laid down fire and made an orderly retreat.

  Four battle cruisers chased them from behind. Inferno barely had a scratch, and had arrived with most of her ammo stores. Drake may have been the son of a baron, but he was no vainglorious aristocrat, ready to arrive at the last minute and take full credit. Nevertheless, Catarina sensed his eagerness to participate in the victory.

  It was a victory that had been in their grasp a few months ago during the battles in Heaven’s Gate and Lenin, only to turn into a full-scale retreat when the leviathan appeared. Nothing was denying them this time. The battle cruisers and most of the other ships of the still-powerful Alliance armada trailed the surviving star fortresses deep into space.

  At the same time, the general arrived with her sloops. Reinforced by a handful of corvettes and cruisers to pick off those desperate enough to flee, the sloops showered the battlefield with bomblets from their serpentine batteries. The injured dragoons died one by one.

  Of the remaining star fortresses, Quebec fell first. Already knocked about by missile frigates, it lost one of its engines and fell behind. Drake ordered the four battle cruisers to continue after Romeo, while the smaller ships surrounded Quebec, finished slagging the enemy’s guns, and expended what remained of their ammunition as target practice.

  Romeo seemed as strong as ever, and determined to fight all the way to the jump point, alone, if needed. But two hours after the chase began, it stopped firing and simply ran. A probing attack from Blackbeard revealed the truth. The enemy seemed to have run out of ammunition.

  The battle cruisers drew alongside it. Citadel above. Inferno below. Blackbeard off port. Void Queen to starboard. No need to give orders, as they all knew what needed to be done. Fire at will.

  Drake’s ship, with more ordnance than the others, broke through first, wrecking the starboard shields. Void Queen took out the torus ring. Citadel and Blackbeard broke off chunks of the enemy ship with what remained of their explosive shot. Finally, the admiral ordered the rest to stand back while he launched a pair of nuclear torpedoes into the wreckage.

  Romeo exploded. Nothing remained after but a few scattered pieces of wreckage.

  And with that, the victory was complete.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Pierre Fontaine stepped out of the lift and took in the bridge of Void Queen, impressed at first glance. He’d heard word that her captain, Catarina Vargus, was a former pirate, and her crew a motley collection of misfits from across the Royal Navy and scroungy
frontier worlds. He didn’t see it here; everything was clean, spit-polished, and professional in appearance.

  There was no sign of Vargus herself, but the marine leading Fontaine gestured at a set of closed doors on the far side, saying it was the war room and that he should enter. He was no longer a prisoner, and had been treated well in the couple of days since Brockett eliminated the blockage in his brain, but he’d also been confined to quarters as the battle cruiser and her companions fought for their lives against a powerful Adjudicator fleet.

  Before he obeyed, he turned his gaze on the main viewscreen. Void Queen was in orbit around the planet they called Persia, which dominated the screen. At four o’clock hung the remains of the orbital fortress, a mountain-sized asteroid surrounded by hundreds of smaller boulders and rocks where the star leviathan had torn it apart.

  Below lay a large, dry land mass surrounded by shallow turquoise seas. A massive cloud of dust and haze obscured the heart of the continent, and it was there that the leviathan was said to have descended. He’d heard a little bit of the Alliance’s plan to trap it on the surface, and it seemed to have worked.

  At the same time, the allies weren’t taking chances, and he spotted two tugs hauling wrecked dragoons through the upper atmosphere. They were apparently dropping what was left of the enemy fleet onto the leviathan’s feeding ground to keep it eating until it was sated. He had no idea what they intended to do after that. Bury it beneath a billion tons of sand, perhaps.

  A scowled deepened across the marine’s face. “Captain Fontaine?”

  Fontaine turned from the mesmerizing view and made his way to the war room door, which slid open at his approach. He entered to find several people sitting around a table and one man standing, this one mid-to-late thirties, with a strong jaw, an aristocratic bearing, and a posture that commanded the room. The man had been showing something on a viewscreen that showed a map of stars and jump points whose location Fontaine didn’t immediately identify.

  Fontaine made a guess. “Admiral Drake?”

  A curt nod. “Take a seat.”

  The only other person he recognized at the table was Catarina Vargus. Void Queen’s commanding officer sat next to another woman, this one with short blond hair and gray eyes that contrasted with Vargus’s jet-black hair and almond-colored eyes. That one must be Jess Tolvern, captain of Blackbeard, unless he was mistaken. Both battle cruiser captains were young and intelligent looking, yet carried a world-weariness that he’d seen in every fighting force from Earth to the Albion-led fleet.

  Next to them sat another woman, this one somewhat Asian-looking, although there was unfamiliar mixing of blood out here on the far reaches of human-settled space that produced features that were very different from those of continental populations on Earth. She wore a distinctive, cream-colored uniform with dragon pins on the shoulders. This woman gave him a hard look, and he found himself stiffening his posture.

  Next around the table from the woman with the dragon pins were two men, the first with the same aristocratic bearing as the admiral, but an expression that approached arrogance. The second was a powerfully built man in a canvas vest with a wolf pendant around his neck. Heavy stubble, a missing left hand. Cut from a different cloth, a different nation entirely, than the other humans, yet he wore the same sort of skepticism as the Asian-appearing woman.

  At the far end of the table, a Hroom. He or she—Fontaine had no way of telling which—was at least seven feet tall, very slender, and had purple skin. No hair on its head, nose slits, and enormous eyes without irises. It hummed deep in its throat.

  He’d seen a handful of Hroom in the factories and rendering plants of the Adjudicator base, but the only one he’d seen up close was the nurse that he’d spotted upside down in Dr. Willis’s surgery. This one looked noble and serene, and there was no alien tech jutting from its skull. Without thinking, Fontaine rubbed at the bald spot where the enemy had once drilled an implant into his own head.

  Catarina leaned in and said something in a low voice to the woman next to her, the one Fontaine took as Tolvern, but he couldn’t pick out the words through the low tone and thick accent.

  Tolvern shook her head. “Brockett says he’s safe. There’s no reason to doubt it.”

  The seat Drake indicated was next to the Hroom, and Fontaine tried not to stare as he sat. The humming was disconcerting, and the occasional whistle made him feel like he was a dog being summoned.

  “Whatever Brockett did, I can talk now,” Fontaine said. “I’ll tell you everything.”

  Admiral Drake remained standing. “Do you recognize this map?”

  Fontaine stared a long minute, then shook his head. “Should I? Is that Albion space? The Hroom?”

  Drake tapped something on the screen, and the map rotated about two-thirds of the way around in a counterclockwise direction. “How about now?”

  Everything came into focus, as if he’d been looking at a globe upside down and now turned it upright again.

  “Ah, yes. The red stars are where the Adjudicators hid themselves. The twin star system on the near edge is where the Lord of Lords maintains his base.”

  Drake glanced at Tolvern, who returned a slight nod.

  “We call that system Heaven’s Gate,” Drake said. “The fleet mounted a raid and fell back when the enemy raised the star leviathan.”

  “The leviathan came from the watery planet, didn’t it?”

  Drake nodded. “That’s right. How did you know?”

  “There were enemy ships in orbit when I passed through, searching for something,” Fontaine said. “That was about eighteen months ago. It must have been the leviathan.”

  “I read the briefing of your memory session. The plan was to raise an army of leviathans like the one we faced, is that right?”

  “Not exactly—the ghouls can’t manage to control so many—but we were supposed to wake them up at least. There was one leviathan dormant in each of the systems we’d be passing through. Once awake, they would go on the rampage, like this one is doing on Persia. They can be plenty destructive, and these ones will be coming out of a long dormancy and ravenous.”

  “And you apparently stopped that? Is that what I understand?” There was more than a hint of skepticism in the admiral’s voice. “You and your fellow warship captain, this Tunisian who was killed before we made contact?”

  He closed his eyes at a brief welling pain when he thought of Al-Harthi’s death, her face frozen on the viewscreen as Black Widow met her death. So close to surviving.

  “We didn’t stop anything. We didn’t start it, is the point. Before that happened, we were taken in, our implants removed, and . . . the point is that the leviathans are still asleep, so far as I know, and will remain so unless the Lord of Lords can send out another shuttle.”

  “I’m going to bring up a map of the Heaven’s Gate System, and I want you to identify as many features as you can.”

  “Are you planning another raid?”

  “If by raid, you mean a mission of annihilation, then yes. We’ll be here twenty-four hours longer—just enough time to shuttle ordnance from the surface to rearm and reload. Any ship that is battle worthy will be joining the new armada.”

  “But you saw my briefing, right? You can destroy Heaven’s Gate, kill the Lord of Lords, but you won’t stop the other ghoul faction. You have to hit them first.”

  “Why?” Vargus asked. Her tone was blunt. “If there are two enemies, why not hit the one that is both closer and is the one that attacked us in the first place?”

  “Listen to me,” Fontaine said. “The one outside of Earth is the real danger.”

  “To Earth,” said the other Royal Navy officer. “Not to Albion. Tell us about Heaven’s Gate.”

  “Let him explain, McGowan,” Drake said. He turned back to Fontaine. “Well?”

  “The Adjudicators’ first enemy was their native race. A faction of them, seeing the wreckage of their home systems’ natural environments, created a secret army and set
off on a centuries-long campaign of genocide. Only after they finished slaughtering their own people did they seek out other sentient life forms.

  “After thousands of years, there were very few of the original faction left, with the rest being the artificial caste of holy warriors that did the actual fighting. Genetically manipulated offspring of the original race. The workers were untold millions of devotees—slaves with implants, like me—but it was the warrior caste who did the actual fighting. Within that caste, a new creed arose. These ones worshiped the old race, the so-called gods who created the leviathan. When the last of the early types—the Lord of Lords and his dying companions—began to meddle with the star leviathans, it opened a breach that eventually turned into full-on conflict.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked the barbarian-looking man with the missing hand. “I read the briefing, and it’s full of opinions and blather, but short on details.”

  Fontaine remembered how he and Al-Harthi had been taken. “There was a battle against the second Adjudicator faction, with the first Earth fleet of Stinger-class warships and gorgons trying to break out. Both the humans and the second Adjudicator faction were trying to capture me. The ghouls would have taken me, but they hadn’t faced the new Terran ships, and our people came out as hard as they could.”

  Terrans had broken the quarantine, in fact, and briefly freed New California. After his capture, the humans had sent Fontaine to Mars, where medical experts removed his implant and dug out some, but not all of what Willis and Brockett had discovered. Enemy fail-safes and the like.

  By the time the Terran fleet returned home, battered, New California lost once more and the quarantine back in place, a second fleet was under construction, and the desperate survivors had cast about for men and women to command their ships. Al-Harthi and Fontaine had attended the Martian Academy and knew the lanes to Tunis, New California, and beyond.