Cauldron of Fire (Blood on the Stars Book 5)

by Jay Allan

  He came to see Kat so many times, and he always seemed so fond of her. And when Lucius Rigellus was killed…he stayed for weeks. He must have dropped every duty he had to come to the estate. How could he have betrayed her? Conspired to sacrifice her to his machinations with the Confeds?

  She exhaled hard, pushing the distracting thoughts away yet again. She couldn’t accept the possibility of being wrong. Her eyes went back to her scanner, watching as her wings pushed forward, absolutely shattering the Gray fighter forces…what there were of them, at least.

  She’d expected hundreds more fighters to oppose her attack. She’d pushed her bombers to the back of her formation, intending to allow time to crush the defending interceptors before going against the battle line for the kill. But there were no interceptors, not from the battleships, at least. Just a thin line of fighters, perhaps three hundred in all.

  All from the station, and none from the battleships…

  It had taken her some time to realize that all the squadrons her people faced had indeed launched from Sentinel-2. Her mind raced, trying to divine what Vennius was up to. Was he trying to pull her forces in before he launched? Divert her attack toward the base, and then send his fighters out behind them? A desperate attempt to sneak an attack in against the Red battleships? It didn’t seem likely. In fact, none of it made much sense. But as each minute passed, and no fighters launched, she became more and more worried.

  She almost wanted to call off her attack, to pull her ships back until she knew what was happening. But that wasn’t an option…and if Vennius wanted to leave his ships undefended, so be it.

  “All bomber squadrons, accelerate at full. Prepare to commence attack runs.” She wasn’t going to let any doubts interfere with her duty. Not vestigial emotions for Jarus. Not uncertainty he seeded in her head. And not endless worries about what Vennius might be up to.

  “Wings three and four, isolate and pursue remaining enemy squadrons.” Whatever thoughts raced through her mind, she had nothing but respect and admiration for the pilots of Sentinel-2’s squadrons. They had thrown themselves into a hopeless attack, and they’d battled to the bitter end, losing more than half their strength so far and still fighting. But she wasn’t going to play their game anymore. She wasn’t going to let them tie up her whole attack. As they did so well already…

  She looked up at her screen, at the Gray battleline. Her face was hard, her stare fixed. She was ready.

  But something was wrong.

  The Gray battleships were blasting their thrusters suddenly, accelerating at full thrust. Away from the attack.

  Were they retreating? That makes no sense. Where can they go that they will be stronger than here? If they abandon the base, we’ll destroy it, and then they’ll be fighting us someplace else without it.

  But there was no question. The entire Gray battle line was on the move, directly away from the Red fleet. Directly away from her fighters.

  * * *

  “We seem to have gotten the jump on them, Your Supremacy.”

  Vennius nodded. “Yes, Brutus, at least to some extent.” He was watching as Egilius and his staff directed not only Bellator, but an entire wing of the fleet. The Gray Imperator wasn’t surprised at the enemy’s apparent confusion. It made no tactical sense for his forces to withdraw from Sentinel-2. Their position was hopeless even with the base, but without it the Red fleet would crush them even more certainly. His only concern had been the fighters. His decision to hold them back had been a difficult one, and certainly a choice a lot of his people disagreed with…but there had really been no option in his analysis. His fleet would fight again, the final battle, and that combat would take place in a location Calavius would never suspect.

  Assuming Commodore Barron and his people succeed. Somehow.

  Vennius knew Barron’s mission was difficult, a longshot by any system of measurement. But he also found himself believing in the Confed officer…and he decided there was a chance after all. A good one.

  He looked back at the display, at the large orb representing Sentinel-2. The great base had become his home, and the rallying point of his cause. It felt wrong to abandon the facility, to leave it to be destroyed by the enemy…along with the skeleton crew of volunteers he’d left behind.

  And the fighters…

  Vennius closed his eyes as he looked at the ragged, sparse clusters of small dots. One-third or less of Sentinel-2’s fighter complement remained. Holding back his ships’ squadrons, allowing those pilots to go into battle alone, unsupported, it had been one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. But he knew he would need his battleships’ fighters at Palatia.

  When we settle this, once and for all…

  He looked back at the Red ships on the display. They hadn’t yet responded to his fleet’s abrupt run for the transwarp point. They were still pounding Sentinel-2 and chasing down the last survivors of the station’s fighter wings. Vennius had ordered his own ships to pause briefly and land as many of the scattered ships as they could. In the end, they’d recovered forty-one; not a lot, at least not by the standards of the casualties this civil war had already caused. But there was a point, in Vennius’s view, where rationality and expediency had to be abandoned, at least momentarily. Those men and women had fought for him, and he’d felt he had no choice but to save them if he could. He was leaving hundreds of other behind, the volunteers manning Sentinel-2, firing the last of its guns as the Red fleet blew it to bits, the pilots who’d already been lost, and the seventy or so that remained but were too far away to retrieve. They were all going to die in the next twenty minutes or so, Vennius knew, even as he watched them continue their desperate and hopeless battle.

  He saw the large white dot on the screen, the transwarp point, growing closer with each passing moment. Bellator would transit in less than ten minutes, and within an hour, every one of his ships would have left the system…or they would be drifting fields of rapidly-cooling wreckage.

  One more battle, my old comrade, Calavius. One more, at a place of my choosing. I will see you to hell, if I must take you there myself.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Above Planet Palatia

  Astara System

  311 AC

  “All right Marines, we’ve got sixteen minutes ’til we land. Let’s not waste it. Check your weapons, your ammo…and say whatever the hell you want to whatever god you think gives a shit, because when we hit ground, it’s on.” Bryan Rogan’s voice was coarse, his words harder than his usual.

  A chorus of half-gripes came back over his comm—pretty standard from Marines who’d just been told to check their kits for third time—but Rogan wasn’t in the mood for it, and he shut them down with a savage, “That’s enough…you’ve got your orders.”

  Rogan was usually in far tighter control of himself, but right now he felt out of his depth. He was a Marine, through and through, and he’d see any mission to the end. But this time he was invading a planet—not just any planet, but one renowned for its warrior culture. And he was doing it with less than three thousand combat personnel. If he hadn’t gotten the orders directly from Commodore Barron, he’d have been sure someone was pulling some kind of prank on him.

  You’re not invading a whole planet, just grabbing a few key installations, mostly in the capital. Which the fighter wings were kind enough to soften up for you. And you’ve got surprise on your side, and the fact that these Alliance troopers have to be on edge, split in their loyalties…

  Rogan had already been deployed with his people in the landers when the fighters broke off and returned to their ships, but he’d heard enough back and forth chatter on the comm to be pretty sure they’d taken some nasty casualties from the ground defenses. Defenses that won’t get a shot at us, thanks to the fighter jocks, and the risks they took flying in so close. Rogan generally subscribed to the notion common in the Corps that there were Marines and then there was everybody else, but he was about ready to relax that a bit, and make some of those pilots
honorary leathernecks.

  It was still night over the main target area, though Rogan knew it would be less than an hour before predawn light began to cut through the darkness. The city was completely blacked out—Rogan wasn’t sure how much of that was a defensive measure and how much was the result of the fighter wings pounding the hell out of the power grid. But there was light, coming from what looked like thirty or forty different fires still burning. None of them were massive conflagrations, and that, he suspected, was a testament to the accuracy and restraint of the attacking squadrons. If the pilots had been as precise as it appeared to Rogan, maybe his people had a chance after all.

  The assault shuttle shook hard as it entered the thicker atmosphere. Rogan was with the central force, tasked with securing the main military command structures—and if they were lucky, capturing some of the high-level Red officers. His orders on that account were clear. He was to take them alive. The attack on Palatia was about military success, but it was about diplomacy too, at least of a sort. There were Red officers who had chosen their allegiance based on lies and propaganda…and the idea was to undo some of that, to win back adherents to the Gray cause.

  Rogan didn’t know much about that kind of thing, but Barron had explained it carefully, mostly in the context of trying not to blast officers that could be turned. It seemed like a reach to him, and his recollections of fighting Alliance troops didn’t especially bode well for taking prisoners. But he realized that the overall purpose of the entire operation was to get Imperator Vennius’s word out to the Red fighters, to try to shift their allegiance. He didn’t much like the sound of it, but that wasn’t his call, and he had enough to worry about already.

  He glanced to the side, to a small group of three landers on the flank of the main formation. Clete Hargraves was over there, in command of a reinforced platoon, sixty of the hardest veterans Rogan had. The grizzled old sergeant wasn’t leading an assault on enemy military headquarters or a crucial transport junction. No, he was on a mission to find and rescue two children. Rogan had been stunned when Barron had given him the orders. The whole attack was desperate enough, but five dozen Marines, going off alone, hundreds of kilometers from support—to find two kids? It was insane. But Rogan respected Commodore Barron more than any man he’d ever met, and he would carry out any order he was given, however hopeless, however insane.

  And this one was both.

  I’m sorry, Clete…you’re the toughest Marine I’ve ever known. And I had to send my best on this, whatever the risk.

  * * *

  “First squad, up on point. These kids are probably under guard, and even if the Reds don’t have any troops there, the family retainers will likely put up a fight.” The Marines were there to safeguard the children, to rescue them, but Hargraves knew that in actual practice, what they were doing would be very like kidnapping them.

  He moved forward a few meters, to the edge of the woods. The manor house was off in the distance, on a large hill about two kilometers south. Part of the approach was covered by tall grasses and a stretch of something that looked like vineyards, at least from his position. But the last thousand meters stretched over open, manicured hillsides. If anyone was watching—and with the planet under attack, he had to assume everything was being watched—his people would get pegged before they were close to the house.

  He watched as the ten Marines of his first squad moved past him, slipping out beyond the tree line, crouched down below the shoulder-high grass. He waited a few seconds, letting his scouts get about a hundred meters up, and then he turned and gestured to the clump of Marines behind him. “Let’s go,” he said, speaking loudly enough for them to hear, but not yelling. He had everybody on communications silence. The invasion and the fight for control of vital targets was hundreds of meters away, mostly in and around Victorum. But it wouldn’t take more than an intercepted comm transmission to truly raise the alert here.

  Hargraves slipped around the tree he’d been behind and moved ahead. He had a pair of pistols at his side, but right now he held a heavy assault rifle in his hands. He wore a shoulder strap holding a dozen reloads, and three grenades. He had a protective vest and some other light body armor, but he and his people had sacrificed a level of protective gear for speed. They had to get in, grab the kids, and get out. Fast. The shuttles would be there in an hour, and if he and his Marines weren’t there waiting…well, it was a long walk back to the capital, through hostile country.

  Hargraves was a sergeant, low in the overall hierarchy of the invasion of Palatia. But that didn’t tell the whole story. He was a hardcore veteran of thirty years, respected by privates and generals alike. It felt strange to be relegated to some fringe theater, away from the fighting that would decide if the invasion succeeded. He might have been offended, annoyed to be so mis-utilized, but he was too accustomed to following orders to allow himself such thoughts. Besides, these orders came directly from Commodore Barron, and in the years since he’d been plucked from his posting at Santis and made part of Dauntless’s complement, he’d fallen under the same spell as the rest of the crew and Marine contingent. Tyler Barron was a natural leader, and in all his decades of service, Hargraves had never admired an officer more. He would do anything Barron commanded, even lead a crack team away from the main fight to rescue two kids.

  He moved steadily forward, eyes darting back and forth, making sure the Marines on both sides of him were staying down, using the cover as long as they had it. He could see his squad up on point stopping, hesitating at the edge of the high grass, waiting for his orders to rush the house.

  “Your Marines maintain their order very well, Sergeant.” Optio Hursus and ten of his stormtroopers had been attached to Hargraves’s command. He understood the logic of including Palatian troops with each ground force, but he still didn’t like it. Truth be told, he found Hursus to be quite likable, and clearly a good soldier, not terribly unlike Marine sergeants he’d known, or even himself. But he’d seen almost his entire command destroyed fighting the troopers on Santis, and despite the Palatian’s clear efforts and his willingness to submit to Hargraves’s orders, the old Marine still couldn’t see anything but an enemy standing there.

  “They’re well trained.” His tone was curt, and it didn’t invite further discussion. He didn’t have time to deal with Hursus now. He’d kept the Palatians at the rear of the formation, something he suspected they might take as an insult, but he didn’t want to deal with them, not now. And he didn’t give a shit if they were offended.

  He pulled out his comm unit. Everything was ready. With any luck, the radio silence had kept their presence and approach a secret. But now they were going to be spotted no matter what. He knew enough about the Alliance to be sure if there were troops here watching the children, they’d have sentries posted…especially after the invasion commenced.

  “All squads, here’s the deal. We’re going to rush the house. First and fourth squads, cover the flanks and look out for enemy snipers and fire positions in and around the house. Second and third squads, with me. We go right in, no stopping. Any Red troopers are to be shot on sight…” Like there’s any way to know if someone we run into is a Red. “Any retainers…try to spare them if you can, but if they’re armed and they come at you, you’re authorized to shoot to kill. But make sure you know what you’re shooting at before you fire. The Marine who hits one of the kids we’re here for is in a world of shit.” Hargraves had gone over all this before, but in his thirty years, he’d never seen an instance where a reminder wasn’t worthwhile. “We’re here for the two kids, period. Once we grab them, we get out and head to the extraction point.”

  He paused, but just for a couple seconds. His transmission would most likely be detected, and he had no intention of standing around until the enemy reacted.

  “Let’s go…forward!”

  * * *

  “They’re both still asleep. I just checked.” Vilia Drovus walked out of the hallway into the Blue Room. At least, that was what
the household staff had told her the sitting room was called, named, she guessed, for the blue wall coverings. The manor house of the Rigellus estate was vast, enormous. She’d known the family was rich, but now she saw up close what that truly meant. And all just for those two kids…

  It occurred to her that there were only two Rigellus heirs because every other member of the family, three generations at least, had been killed fighting the Alliance’s wars. But still.

  “That’s good.” Firtus Mascius was her partner, assigned to Rigellus Manor the same day she had been. They hadn’t met before, but she’d found him easy enough to work with, if a little hard-edged. “With everything going on tonight, I’d just as soon not have to deal with them. Unless…”

  “Yes.” Drovus had thought this assignment—her first as a member of the new Alliance First Bureau—would be easy, almost effortless. Keeping the kids in line had been somewhat annoying, but there were more than enough family retainers to see to the brats’ everyday needs. She and Mascius were there for one reason, and one reason only. If the Red Alliance fell, they were to see that the Rigellus kid were taken care of…and that did not mean clothed and fed. They were to kill both of them and dump their bodies in the sea.

  That had seemed a remote prospect, with the relative fleet sizes and strengths…at least until a couple hours before when, from what they’d been able to gather, enemy fighter squadrons laid waste to Victorum’s defenses, followed by what was starting to look very much like a ground invasion.

  Now, suddenly, the destruction of the Red cause seemed at least possible, and Drovus knew Calavius’s defeat would mean the end of the fledgling agency, and very likely severe punishment for all who had been involved in it. She’d signed up mostly because of the promise of rapid advancement, but now she wasn’t so sure. If they didn’t follow their orders, if they spared the children, would the invading Grays show mercy?