The readings were more clear now. There was definitely radiation emanating from the moon. Something artificial.
“You seeing this, mates?” he asked on the com, as he kept a few thousand miles behind the small moon, which swung in orbit around the planet.
“Looks like a good anchor for a space elevator, eh?” Greeves said.
A glint of flaring plasma showed Greeves’s ship off starboard, with a swath of stars in a creamy white glow behind her. Somewhere to his right, but only visible through the instrument panels, were four other falcons.
“Sure, if the navy wanted to put a base down in the gravity well of a dead planet,” Carvalho told her. “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”
“You mean ’cause it’s running hot?”
“Right. I figure there’s a ship there, or an old mine, or something. Maybe just wreckage.”
“Most likely just wreckage,” Greeves agreed. “Wasn’t it around here somewhere that Drake whacked that harvester last year? Could be that, right?”
Bailes piped up. “Or it could be one of ours. Drake lost a bunch of ships in that fight.”
“I’d better call it in,” Carvalho decided.
He got the bridge of Void Queen a few seconds later. Capp answered after only a brief delay.
“You fall asleep out there, luv?” she asked. “’Cause you been tracking that big ol’ baked potato for twenty minutes now. Time to get in there and check it out up close.”
“It’s hot—you see that, right?”
“What?” she said. “No, I . . . hold on. Right, Smythe has picked up a bunch of stuff in orbit. There was a battle here, remember?”
“I’m not talking about the orbiting wreckage, Capp,” he told her impatiently. “I’ve filtered all that stuff, and there’s something stuck on the back of this moon. There’s a hill or something on one end—looks like a big nose. You see that?”
“Yeah, I see it.”
“It’s near there. Might be an enemy ship sitting behind that hill and using it to shield itself. Either that, or it’s just wreckage,” he added. “I’m hoping the junks can spread their wings and take a closer look.”
“Cap’n is off duty, but . . . let me think. Hold position there. I’m going to get the rest of your falcons in the air.”
Carvalho didn’t think it was so serious as to get the entire striker wing out. They’d been running patrols for the past thirty-two hours, ever since coming into the Zoroaster System, changing out every six hours. Those six hours back in the ship were critical rest time. But he heard a hint of concern in Capp’s voice, and wondered if Smythe was picking up something on the tech console that he couldn’t see from this vantage point.
The five falcons already out held position above New Mars, with the small moon in front of them. The planet rotated below, streaks of brown spreading across red wasteland like a giant’s grasping fingers. Ancient waterways. That meant it had once been warmer, with an atmosphere, seas, and rivers. Probably half a billion years ago, but the universe was old, and derelict spacecraft had been discovered after floating through space for millions of years. Perhaps the planet below had once been the home world for some ancient civilization.
A huge mountain rolled beneath, a near continent-sized volcano, so tall that the crown was covered with dirty white. Ice or frozen carbon dioxide, he supposed. Was there enough water left on the planet to turn it green once again with the right combination of engineering?
Five more falcons launched from Void Queen, which sat with the rest of the fleet a few tens of thousands of miles away. A war junk had been in low orbit around New Mars’s southern hemisphere, but pulled back out so it could search the moon instead. Capp came back on a few minutes later as the five new falcons joined the rest of Carvalho’s patrol.
“You still there, luv?”
“Aye.”
“We can’t see clearly from here—that rock overhang is doing a trick—but it’s hot all right. Smythe thinks it’s something live and that it ain’t one of ours. Hold on.”
Capp’s muffled voice conferred with someone else on the bridge.
“Smythe says it’s big,” she said when she’d returned. “Go in there, but be careful, yeah? I’m gonna call Vargus back to the bridge just in case.”
Carvalho passed along the information to his fellow pilots. “You see anything funny, you bug out of there. We are not here to fight, only to scout. We have got the whole fleet back there to do our fighting for us.”
How much was known about the Zoroaster System anyway? Drake had come through here twice, as had other ships in the fleet. Zoroaster had good access from Scandian systems into the inner frontier, and it was only a couple of systems further on where the admiral had discovered the main Apex base terrorizing the small human colony of Persia. There had once been two harvesters in the area. One had been destroyed here, in Zoroaster, and the other driven into Persia, where its forces had apparently been absorbed into the master flock.
A couple of spears and lances had broken free in one of the many battles at the jump point where Persia and Nebuchadnezzar met, and they’d last been spotted entering Zoroaster. Why here? Had they been trying to rescue Apex forces left stranded when their harvester was destroyed? Surely that small moon was not an attempt to build a new base? It was mostly rock—not enough of the important resources to bother with.
Carvalho nudged toward the asteroid with little bursts on his engines. The others pulled in next to him, but not so near as to present a single target. Greeves continued along starboard, while Stephenson moved into position off Carvalho’s port side. Manríquez came in below, King above, and the rest brought up the rear.
Viewed from a distance, the moon had been a tiny speck above the planet, but up close it took on mountain-sized proportions: three miles from the front of the potato-shaped object to the rear, and about half that in width. The rocky protrusion at the far end was curved, unnatural looking, and it was only as he came in closer, hitting it with his active sensors, that he saw how strange it really was.
It was a massive hook of rock with a cave beneath. The gravity of the moon was negligible—the structure would have collapsed otherwise. That didn’t answer how it had developed like that in the first place. Looked artificial, and Carvalho didn’t like where that train of thought took him.
“Pull back, the lot of you,” he said. “I’m going in closer. Got to get right under that rock if I am going to see what’s in there kicking off radiation.”
“I say we toss some missiles in there,” Stephenson said.
Greeves brayed with laughter. “You’re nuts.”
“Why not?” Stephenson insisted. “We’ll see what comes out.”
“And when we find out we blew up a crippled torpedo boat that’s been hiding in there, unable to move?” Carvalho asked. “No, I’m going in for a good look. Then, if it isn’t one of ours, I’ll throw in some firecrackers and wake them up.”
“More likely a bloody star leviathan digesting its meal,” Greeves said. “But go right ahead, mate, shine a big light and wake him up if you want.”
“Thanks, Greeves,” Carvalho said lightly. “I wasn’t even worried about star leviathans until you mentioned it. But don’t worry, I’m sure it’s just our friendly neighborhood buzzards. Get ready for some action, all of you.”
He peeled away from the other falcons, tapping at the thrusters as he approached the small moon. Straight ahead, there was the yawning mouth of a cave, three hundred yards across and completely black inside. He hit the interior with active sounding. The data went back to Void Queen, but he didn’t need a response from the main tech console to see that there was something inside. Something big.
Not one of theirs, and not a torpedo boat, that was for sure. He drifted backward while he waited for Void Queen to analyze the data.
Capp shouted over the com. “It’s Apex! Get out of there!”
Carvalho’s heart skipped, and he reversed thrust. But he couldn’t resist thumbing ope
n the panel to the launch button and letting loose. A pair of small missiles raced into the cave and detonated.
If the enemy had been asleep before, they weren’t now. He fled from the moon, even as the enemy turned on its engines, prepared to leap after him.
#
Roused from her quarters midway through her sleep cycle, Catarina had been watching with the rest of the crew on the bridge as Carvalho nudged his falcon closer to the far end of the small moon, with the other falcons waiting behind to cover his retreat. There was no question now, based on the magnitude of radiation emissions and the unnatural topography of the moon, that something was hiding down there.
She was ninety percent sure it was Apex, even before Carvalho got up close and hit the interior with active sounding. But as others had pointed out, Drake had lost ships in the chaos of battle—some lost lost, rather than simply destroyed—and it was possible that one of their own vessels had taken refuge inside, holding on with crippled life support systems while awaiting rescue.
And then Carvalho hit the interior with active sounding. A big signal returned. A ship so large that it could only be . . .
Capp cried over the com for Carvalho to get out of there. He turned away, firing a pair of missiles as a parting shot. They detonated in the interior, and the resulting echo eliminated any final doubt.
There was a harvester ship in there.
Fortunately, Catarina had been maneuvering her fleet into battle formation ever since Capp sent out the second wave of falcons. The battle cruiser sat out front—the point of the spear—with a half-moon of destroyers and Hroom sloops above, ready to swing into formation to block any breakout attempt.
She called the captains of her missile frigates first.
“Full barrage on that moon,” she said. “Knock that cave to rubble. Bury these vermin before they get into the open.”
Next, she called the barracks to tell the marine commander to bring Royal Marines out of stasis as quickly as he could and get them armed and ready to repel boarders.
“It ain’t gonna come to that, right?” Capp asked. “Carvalho is saying that—”
“Quit messing around with your boyfriend,” Catarina told her. “I need the torpedo boat captains on the line.”
“Aye, Cap’n.”
The three missile frigates—HMS Catapult, HMS Firebolt, and HMS Sling—had their missiles in the air even before Capp connected her to the torpedo boats.
“I want these buzzards under ten thousand tons of rock,” she told the five captains. “Who has the nuclear-tipped torpedo—that’s you, right Dickens? Drop it in there. The striker wing will draw fire.”
It was a hard command to send in the torpedo boats nearly unescorted. A harvester ship could tear the small ships to pieces, and probably maul the striker wing as well, but if she could hit the thing before it brought up countermeasures, a single, massive blow might cripple or destroy it before it could get in among her ships.
Determined not to leave the torpedo boats dangling out front, Catarina ordered the rest of the fleet to follow them toward the small moon. The first of the long-range ordnance began to strike the rocky promontory above the cave hiding the harvester ship.
Rock and dust exploded from the end with every blow, shooting off into space. Shooting at a stationary object was easy, and every missile hit, so many fiery explosions lighting up the far end of the moon that it seemed hard to believe anything would survive the initial bombardment. The nuclear torpedo would settle matters—but she had to get that boat forward, first, before it could launch.
Smythe cursed. “It got out, Captain.”
It took a moment before the chaos of exploding missiles and debris cleared enough to show what the sensors had already detected. A massive Apex warship emerged from the cloud of dust and rock and rumbled toward the fleet. The thing was twice as long as Void Queen, yet somehow looked squat, like a sea turtle with a green eye and an insect-like mouth of grasping mandibles.
The harvester’s carapace was battered and pitted with the scars of an old battle, with one large hole the size of a navy destroyer that had been patched over, but not fully rebuilt.
“That thing absorbed a lot of punishment,” Catarina said. “No wonder Drake thought it had been destroyed.”
Lomelí looked up from the defense grid computer. “The logs say he chased a harvester and several hunter-killer packs into this system, sir, and fought a battle somewhere around here.”
“I remember hearing about that,” Catarina said, “but wasn’t the harvester destroyed?”
“That’s what they thought,” Lomelí said, “but nobody witnessed the destruction. They found a radiation trail down to New Mars and an impact crater on the surface. It seemed as though the harvester had gone into the gravity well.”
“It apparently staged its death and has been hiding here all along.”
Catarina couldn’t blame Drake for moving on. The battle with the hunter-killers had cost him ships, and Dreadnought had been so battered after all the fighting across multiple systems that he’d been forced to retreat from the frontier all the way to Viborg for repair.
The harvester and her outer fleet elements were rapidly approaching a closer engagement, with only Carvalho’s striker wing between them. The falcons swooped in to harass it with pulse fire and undersized missiles, which brought return fire. But the harvester soon grew tired of swatting at these distractions and resumed course to engage the main fleet.
“It’s coming right at us, Cap’n,” Capp said.
“Good. It’s injured and we’ve got an entire fleet to back us up. Lieutenant, order the boats to hit that damaged section with everything they’ve got. Get that nuke through, by God.”
The torpedo boats had cut high on the Z-axis while Carvalho created his distraction, and now dove at the harvester. Catarina’s frigates launched a second barrage, this time supported by missiles from other ships across the fleet, including from Void Queen.
Meanwhile, to Catarina’s starboard flank, twenty-three Scandian star wolves strained forward, anxious to press the attack. She called Longshanks and told him to hold until the torpedo boats had dropped their loads. Then he was off the leash.
The torpedo boats fired and peeled away. Ten Mark-IVs rolled out from the boats, slow and with poor maneuverability, but packing more than the usual punch. One of them packing an atomic punch, in fact. All she needed was for it to get through.
For one brief moment, it looked as though the Apex queen or princess commanding the harvester was so intent on attacking Void Queen directly that it would ignore the torpedoes as yet another nuisance. It was not to be.
Bursts of fire launched from the back of the turtle shell. One torpedo after another detonated before it could get close. Then, seeming to realize that it was in mortal danger, the harvester tried to roll away, even as it continued to fire countermeasures.
Three of the Mark-IVs got through and slammed into the patched-over hole on the side of the massive enemy ship. Catarina caught her breath, then joined the cheers as a massive explosion engulfed the harvester ship. More cheers came across the general com from across the fleet.
The screen cleared, and Catarina was stunned to see the harvester still coming right at them. Gasses leaked out of a smoking hole in its side, but the ship was still intact, its grasping appendages opening. Green light flared from the eye.
“I don’t understand,” Capp said. “We hit them buzzards right up under the shell. Shoulda been atomized. How’s it still coming at us?”
“Smythe, give me info,” Catarina said. “What just happened?”
“It’s extra shielding, sir,” Smythe said. “Looks like they took a couple of spears and patched their armor onto that wounded section. It wasn’t as weak as it looked.”
“They must have known we’d hit that spot,” Catarina said. “And we just wasted our nuclear torpedo.”
Destroyers and sloops fell on the enemy ship from above, while her mercenary ships and war junks came up
from below. Longshanks charged with nearly two dozen star wolves.
“Capp, call in the reserve. And tell Carvalho to keep hitting that damaged section.”
The reserve was two cruisers and two corvettes. She’d intended to use them to stop any attempted escape attempt, but it was clear that the enemy had no intention of escaping. Probably, it couldn’t. Its engines were accelerating so sluggishly that it would never reach jump speed, and it had no hunter-killer packs to escort it.
Catarina fought down a rising sense of panic. Missiles and torpedoes were striking the harvester along both flanks, and Longshanks had fearlessly charged into pummel gun range, and was blasting away with everything he had. Yet there seemed to be no stopping the enemy ship, which had yet to fire its weapons as it muscled its way through the human and Hroom ships to get at Void Queen.
It doesn’t intend to fire. It intends to take us alive.
“Enough with the torpedoes. Bring us about. Full broadside. And make it count, people. We get one shot before it’s on us.”
The battle cruiser only took seconds to get into position, and the gunnery was at the ready with explosive shot loaded. That left retracting the shields to expose the main battery, which was executed perfectly and with time to spare.
The harvester absorbed blow after blow. Carvalho had tried to blind the paralyzing eye, as he’d pulled off in the battle of the Odense System, but this harvester had better shielding in that part of the ship, and his shots had little effect.
The eye cast its paralyzing beam, but not at the battle cruiser. Instead, it hit the destroyers and sloops of war that were smashing into the wounded section of the armor. Their guns fell silent, one after another, and the harvester rolled to use the eye against the star wolves. One of them careened into another, which then smashed against a third.
Still approaching Void Queen, the harvester now dominated the viewscreen, its mandible-like appendages reaching eagerly to grab the battle cruiser.
Sun King (The Void Queen Trilogy Book 3) Page 5