by David Weber
“Up their asses, Megarea!” Alicia snarled.
Megarea’s worried voice tore at the corona of violence building in Alicia’s mind. She clenched her teeth, sweating, trying to make herself think, and a part of her screamed in warning. The web about her madness sang with stress, and it was crumbling. She felt Tisiphone between her and it, felt the Fury pouring herself into the fraying web. She writhed in her chair, fighting to keep her jaws locked on the order to engage. She could break off. She could curl away from Howell and leave him to Monkoto’s unwounded ships, and she knew she had to. She and her companions were the only ones who knew the truth about Treadwell. They couldn’t let themselves die yet. She knew it; yet she couldn’t let go. She held her course, and the most she could do was strangle the order for Megarea to redline her deceleration.
The edge of James Howell’s squadron “overtook” Monkoto’s. Screening destroyers and light cruisers suddenly found themselves broadside-to-broadside at ranges as low as fifty thousand kilometers, and energy torpedoes and beams ripped back and forth. Point defense was irrelevant; misses were almost impossible, and battle screens were blazing halos wrapped about fragile battle steel. Two renegade destroyers and a light cruiser vanished in star-bright fury, but Commodore Falconi’s heavy cruiser flagship went with them, and the death toll was only starting.
Monkoto and his allies had known what it would be like the instant they realized Howell wasn’t going to run for it. They could have broken off, but they hadn’t come to break off. The two fleets interpenetrated and merged, racing side-by-side while the hammering match raged.
Procyon’s massive beam and energy torpedo batteries opened fire, and a dozen destroyers and cruisers died in the first salvo. Verdun poured her own fire into the maelstrom, but two of O’Kane’s battle-cruisers locked their batteries on her, and her fire slackened as more and more of her power was shunted frantically into her battle screen. She writhed, cored in their fire, and Procyon blew one of her attackers to vaporized wreckage.
Not in time. Verdun’s screens failed, a tight-focused salvo of particle beams ripped through them, and she vomited flame across the stars.
Procyon rounded vengefully upon her killer, but Audacious and the battleship Assassin were on her like mastiffs. They were far smaller, slower, less heavily armed, but their cyber synths were intact, and thunder wracked the vacuum as the leviathans spread their arms in lethal embrace. Two more battle-cruisers raced to join them, then a third, and all six rained javelins of flame upon the dreadnought.
Eight million tonnes of starship heaved as something got through a local screen failure, and Monkoto’s wolves set their fangs in the flanks of the crippled saber-tooth. Howell ripped his attention away from them long enough to check the main plot and swallowed a groan. Procyon was attracting more and more of the mercenaries’ attention, but there were more than enough destroyers and cruisers to pair off in duels with his own units. Ships flashed and vanished like dying sparks, damage signals snarled in his synth link, and Tracking had finally identified the newcomers: Fleet battle-cruisers, already gaining on Procyon with their higher rate of deceleration.
He glared at the red switch on his console. He could engage the shield and laugh at Monkoto’s attack . . . but there was no point. He couldn’t accelerate with the shield up; only drift, knowing that when he finally lowered it, the enemy would be waiting. He raised fiery eyes to Commander Rahman.
“Get the battleships!” he snarled.
Alicia’s nails drew blood from her palms as the battleship Assassin blew apart. She remembered Esther Tarbaneau’s gentle brown eyes, and her lips writhed back from her teeth as the red holocaust broke free within her.
The hell with Treadwell! The hell with everything! The mercenaries were fighting her fight, dying her death. She felt Megarea and Tisiphone battling to turn her madness, and she didn’t care.
“Now, goddamn it!” she snarled. “Everything we’ve got now!” and Megarea wept as she obeyed. The drive thundered and shrieked in agony, and the alpha synth began to close on the cyclone of dying starships.
Simon Monkoto’s teeth met through his lip as Assassin vanished. First Arlen, now Tadeoshi and Esther—but he had the bastards. He had them! His flagship’s AI noted a fluctuation in Procyon’s defenses, a wavering the dreadnought would have sensed and corrected had her own AI survived. But it hadn’t, and Audacious flashed orders over the net. One battleship and four battle-cruisers threw every beam and energy torpedo they had at the chink in Procyon’s armor, and her Fasset drive exploded.
Alicia’s banshee howl echoed from the bulkheads as the dreadnought’s drive died, and her eyes were mad.
The mercenaries peeled away from Procyon, for they no longer needed to endure her close-range fire. They’d broken her wings, destroyed her ability to dodge. Once their own ships got far enough from her to avoid friendly SLAM fire, she was dead, But Alicia didn’t think about the mercenaries’ SLAMs, didn’t care about the short-range weapons still waiting to destroy her. All she saw was the lamed hulk of her enemy, waiting for her to kill it.
HMS Tsushima decelerated towards the savage engagement, and her captain’s brain whirled as she digested the preposterous sensor readings. Fleet units locked in mortal combat with mercenaries?! Insane! Yet it was happening, and Brigadier Keita’s briefing echoed in her ears. If the mercenaries were here to engage pirates, then those Fleet units must be pirates, for no engagement this close and brutal could be a mistake. Both sides had to know exactly who they were fighting . . . didn’t they?
Tsushima was the lead ship of the task force, already approaching SLAM range of the fighting, but Captain Wu held her fire. Even if she’d been certain what was going on, only a lunatic would fire SLAMs into that tight-packed boil of ships, for she would be as likely to kill friends as enemies. But what was that one ship doing so far behind the melee? It was moving at preposterous speed, overhauling the others, but something about its drive signature . . .
“Captain! That’s an alpha synth!” her plotting officer said suddenly, and Wu’s face went white. There were no Fleet alpha synths in this sector; the only two previously assigned to it had been ordered out so that there could be no confusion.
Wu swallowed a bitter curse and looked at her plot. She’d heard the gossip, knew how close Keita and that Cadre major, Gateau, were to Alicia DeVries, but Keita’s flagship was ten light-minutes astern of her. DeVries would vanish into the maelstrom in half the time it would take to pass the buck to him, and when she did, Tsushima could no longer fire her SLAMs in pursuit.
She didn’t want to do this. No Fleet officer did. She knew each of them had prayed that he or she wouldn’t be the one it fell to. But she was here, and the order still stood.
Megarea’s shriek of warning—small and faint, almost lost in her hunger—touched some last fragment of reason. Alicia saw the SLAMs racing after her, and that sliver of sanity roused, intellect fighting instinct run mad.
Tisiphone hurled herself into the tiny flaw in the hurricane, and Alicia jerked back in her command chair, gasping as the Fury smashed through to her. The terrible roaring eased, and understanding filled her.
“Break off, Megarea.” She choked the words out, thoughts as clumsy as her thick tongue. She clung to her guttering sanity by her fingernails, feeling the blood-sick chaos reaching for her yet again.
“Evasion course. Wormhole out,” she gasped, fighting for every word, and reached for the only escape from her madness. “Tisiphone, put me out!” she screamed, and slithered from her chair as the Fury clubbed her unconscious.
Chapter Thirty-three
A broken behemoth drifted against pinprick stars, flanks ripped and torn, and Simon Monkoto sat on his flag bridge and glared at its image.
He turned his head to glower at the man beside him. Ferhat Ben Belkassem’s dark face was pale from
the carnage, but he’d been the first to note the hole in Procyon’s fire where an entire quadrant’s batteries had been blown away, and Monkoto had yielded to his appeal to hold the SLAMs.
He still didn’t know why he had. They’d have to destroy it sooner or later—why risk his people on the O Branch inspector’s whim? But he’d taken Audacious into the hole and worked his way along the dreadnought’s hull, and there’d been something sensual in the slow, brutal destruction of Procyon’s weapons, in the lingering murder of her crew’s hope.
His eyes returned to the main plot, still bemused by what it showed. Thirty Imperial Fleet ships, eighteen of them battle-cruisers. They’d been a more than welcome help, but the mercenaries’ losses had still been horrendous. Assassin, three of nine battle-cruisers, four of seven heavy cruisers. . . . The butcher’s bill had been proportionately lighter among the destroyers and light cruisers, but the total was agonizing, especially for mercenaries who lacked the resources of planetary navies.
Yet none of the renegade fleet had escaped, and only two destroyers had surrendered. The mass murders on Ringbolt—yes, and Elysium—were avenged . . or would be, when Procyon finally died.
A com signal chimed, and he hid a flicker of surprise as he recognized his caller’s craggy face.
“Admiral Monkoto,” a voice rumbled, “I am Brigadier Sir Arthur Keita, Imperial Cadre. Please accept my thanks on behalf of His Majesty. I am certain His Majesty will wish to personally express his own gratitude to you and all your people in the very near future. The Empire is in your debt.”
“Thank you, Sir Arthur.” Monkoto’s heart rose, despite the pain of his losses. Sir Arthur Keita was not known for meaningless praise. When he spoke, it was with Seamus II’s voice, and the Terran Empire paid its debts.
“I also wish to thank you for not destroying that dreadnought.” Keita’s face hardened. “We want its crew, Admiral. We want them badly.”
“I also want them, Sir Arthur.” Monkoto’s voice took on the steely edge of a file.
“I understand, and we intend to give you the justice you and your people deserve, but we need live prisoners for interrogation.”
“That’s what Inspector Ben Belkassem said,” Monkoto acknowledged, and Keita’s tight face eased just a bit.
“So he is with you. Good! And he’s right, Admiral Monkoto.”
“Fine, but how do you intend to collect them? We’ve pulled most of their teeth and disabled their shield generator, but they have to know what the courts have waiting for them. Do you really think they’ll surrender?”
“Some of them will,” Keita said with flat, grim finality. “I’ve got an entire battalion of Cadre drop commandos over here, Admiral. I believe we can pry them out of their shell.”
“Drop com—“ Monkoto closed his mouth with a snap. A battalion? For just a moment he felt a shiver of hungry sympathy for the bastards aboard that hulk. He shook himself and cleared his throat.
“I imagine you can, Sir Arthur, as long as they don’t blow their power plants and take your people with them.”
“They won’t,” Keita said. “Watch your plot, Admiral.”
Monkoto’s eyes dropped to the display as four battle-cruisers moved towards Procyon. For a moment he thought they were about to launch assault shuttles, but they didn’t. Keita had something no one else did—the complete blueprints for a Capella-class dreadnought— and the battle-cruisers’ short-range batteries stabbed into Procyon’s hull. It was over in less than two seconds; long before the renegades could have realized what was happening, every one of Procyon’s fusion plants had become an incandescent ruin.
“As I say, Admiral,” Keita said with cold satisfaction, “they wont be blowing those plants.” He paused a moment, then nodded as if to himself. “Another thing, Admiral. I don’t know if it’ll be possible to salvage that ship. If it is, however, she’s yours. My word on it.”
Monkoto sucked in in astonishment. Badly wrecked as Procyon was, she was far from beyond repair if a replacement Fasset drive could be cobbled up, and the thought of adding that eight-million-tonne monster to his fleet . . .
“But now,” Keita said more briskly, “my people have a job to do. I’ll speak with you again later, Admiral.”
Tannis Gateau closed her armor’s visor. The soft “shusssssh” of a solid seal answered her, and she checked her battle-rifle’s servos. Many drop commandos preferred plasma guns or lasers for vacuum. Energy weapons weren’t very popular in atmosphere, where their range was drastically reduced, and even in vacuum a well-timed aerosol grenade did bad things to lasers, but the laser’s lack of recoil made it popular in zero-G. Of course, lasers had horrific power requirements, and plasguns could hardly be called pinpoint weapons, especially in the confines of a starship’s passages, yet most seemed to feel their advantages more than compensated. Not Tannis. The battle-rifle was a precision instrument, and using her armor’s thrusters to offset the recoil had become instinct years ago.
She shook off her woolgathering thoughts with a wry smile. Her brain always insisted on wandering in the last moments before action was joined . . . unlike Alley, who only seemed to focus to an even greater intensity.
She pushed that memory away quickly and watched the troop bay repeater as the assault shuttles formed up. At least Alley had gotten away. She hadn’t been killed by her own, and there was still hope—
The last shuttle slid into place, thrusters flared, and they swooped across the kilometers towards Procyon’s savaged hulk.
Monkoto felt his stomach tighten as the silvery minnows darted towards the wounded leviathan. They were such tiny things—little larger than an old pre-space airliner—and if he’d missed even a single energy mount. . . .
But no weapons fired. The Bengals snarled down on their prey, belly-mounted tractors snugged them in tight, and hatches opened.
Tannis ducked instinctively and swore as a blast of penetrators spanged off her armor. One of her headquarters section reared up between her and the fire, staggering back a meter as the heavy-density projectiles slammed into him. They were from a standard combat rifle, and fiery ricochets bounced and leapt as his armor shrugged them aside. His weapon rose with the deadly economy of tick-enhanced reactions, and Tannis winced as a gout of plasma spewed up the passage, silent in the vacuum. The rifleman vanished—along with twelve meters of bulkhead.
“Prisoners, Jake,” she said mildly. “We want prisoners.”
“Sorry, ma am.” The hulking commando, a third again Tannis’s height, sounded almost sheepish. “Got carried away.”
“Yeah, well, thanks anyway.” Her lip twitched as her team picked its way past the glowing wound. Jake Adams sometimes forgot how drastic the consequences could be when he got “carried away.” Combat armor gave anyone the “muscle” to use truly heavy weapons; Adams also had the size, and his “plasma rifle” was the equal of a shuttle cannon.
Her amusement faded as she focused on her display. Boarding assaults were always ugly. Even though they knew every nook and cranny of their battlefield, there were still too many places for die-hards to hole up, and no pirate had any illusion about his or her ultimate fate. Her HQ section’s circuitous route had been planned to reach their real objective while her other people distracted the enemy rank and file to clear her path. They were doing it . . . but they were taking losses despite their equipment.
She peered about her, checking corridor traffic markings against her display, and grunted in satisfaction.
“Beta Company, Ramrod has cleared route to Tango-Four-Niner-Lima down Zebra-Three. Form on my beacon.” Captain Schultz’s acknowledgment came back, and she tucked away her display and swung her rifle into fighting position.
“All right, Jake. You see that hatch down there?”
“Yes, ma’am. I surely do.”
“Well, this piece of shit’s flag bridge is on the other side of it.” She smiled up at him and waved a hand with the tick’s dance-like fluidity. “Feel free to get carried away.”
James Howell crouched behind his useless console in his vac suit. The laser carbine was alien to him, clumsy-feeling in his grip, but he waited almost calmly, his mind empty. There was no room for hope, and no point in fear. He was going to die, and whether it happened in a few minutes or a few hours—or even in a few months, if he was taken alive—didn’t matter. He’d betrayed all he was sworn to uphold to play the great game; now he’d lost, and his own stupidity had brought all of his people to the same degrading end.
Echoes of combat quivered through the steel about him, and he glanced across the bridge at Rachel Shu, small and deadly behind a bipod-mounted plasma rifle. Others crouched with them, waiting, eyes locked on the hatch. Any moment now—
The heavily-armored hatch shuddered. A meter-wide circle flared instantly white-hot, and a tongue of plasma licked through it, a searing column that leapt across the bridge. Someone got in its way and died without time even to scream as the heart of a sun embraced him.
Another bolt of fury blew the hatch from its frame in half-molten wreckage, and the first drop commando charged through it.
Howell braced his laser across the console and squeezed the stud. A dozen others were firing, flaying the armored figure with tungsten penetrators and deadly beams of light, and the invader staggered. His battle-rifle flashed white fire as he went down—an unaimed spray of heavy-caliber penetrators that chewed up consoles and people with equal contempt—and then Rachel’s plasgun fired, and what hit the deck was a less than human cinder.
Tannis Gateau swallowed a curse as her point man went down. It was her fault. Other teams had already taken heavy fire; hers hadn’t, and she’d let herself grow overconfident. Now she slid forward, hugging the bulkhead and trying not to think about Adams and his monster gun behind her. Her racing mind rode the tick, and she reached out through her armor sensors. She couldn’t get a clear reading, but with a little help . . .