Sun King (The Void Queen Trilogy Book 3)

by Michael Wallace

  Moments later, the corvettes and destroyers broke free and advanced on the nearest hunter-killer pack, which had already begun to swing toward them. The enemy had been accelerating, probably intending to appear suddenly in the midst of Tolvern’s fleet, but Fox’s task force pressed the attack before they could jump.

  The two sides exchanged blows, with Tolvern’s destroyers and corvettes rapidly gaining the upper hand. A second hunter-killer pack raced to join the fight, which would even the odds.

  Tolvern ordered her frigates to fire missiles in support, but didn’t otherwise move to reinforce Captain Fox. They were on their own as Blackbeard led the charge toward Persia.

  The other two hunter-killer packs—the ones with spears in command—had been accelerating on the opposite side of Persia, and now vanished.

  “Here they come,” Tolvern said. She made a guess. “They’ll hit the frigates.”

  Manx made a call. Triumph and Champion fell in on either side of the two missile platforms, which were vulnerable to close-in attack.

  It was a gamble on Tolvern’s part. If the enemy had identified Tolvern’s target as the orbital fortress, they could come in from below on the Z-axis instead, and hammer her torpedo boats and falcons. If they wanted the Albion flagship, Tolvern might suddenly find herself surrounded by ten Apex warships tearing into her from all sides. Or maybe they were rushing to knock out Nineveh and the corvette-destroyer task force instead.

  The enemy reappeared, and right where Tolvern had guessed. They began firing energy pulses on one of the two frigates, but the attack only lasted seconds before Triumph and Champion roared into the fight. They were Punisher-class cruisers, of the same kind that Blackbeard had been before her overhaul and upgrade, and Tolvern knew full well the hell they could unleash. Torpedoes and missiles slammed into the enemy ships, even as the cruisers wheeled about to present broadsides against the two spears.

  The hunter-killer packs fell back, but this brought them into range of the sloops and war junks approaching from the rear. A lance burst apart under sustained fire, and a spear, leaking gasses from its punishment at Triumph’s guns, stumbled into their midst moments later. The war junks softened its armor with concentrated energy fire, while Hroom serpentines launched a devastating wave of bomblets. The spear cracked down the middle and broke apart like two halves of a clam.

  A second lance tried to fight clear, passed the two cruisers, and came within range of Blackbeard. The enemy’s engine sputtered, but it still had use of its weapons, and the battle cruiser’s shields lit up with incoming fire.

  Tolvern watched the lance glide past just off port. “Finish it.”

  Her gunnery let loose a pair of torpedoes, which smacked into the enemy ship one after another. They detonated, and took the lance with them. Nothing was left but residual radiation.

  The rest of the enemy ships fought their way clear. Meanwhile, in the other battle, one of the destroyers had lost her upper deck shields, but Fox had taken out a lance and crippled a second, which limped toward Persia and descended into the atmosphere to safety. The others retreated as well.

  Fox had fought an opposing force of equally matched ships and won a quick, decisive victory. He called Tolvern for orders, eager to chase them down and force another engagement, but she told him to return to the fleet instead. The swift, medium-powered warships had proven themselves capable of disrupting Apex’s charges into her midst, and there was no reason to surrender that advantage.

  Everything had gone right so far. Between the two battles, they’d destroyed the equivalent of an entire hunter-killer pack at the cost of shield damage to a handful of ships. What a contrast with the disastrous battle in Nebuchadnezzar, where Tolvern had lost seven warships and a falcon.

  Persia loomed ahead of them. The planet was on the small side for human settlement, about eighty percent standard gravity, which was no doubt why the birds had chosen it as a target to rebuild their fleet. The records from Drake’s earlier expedition indicated that the planet was of average temperature variation between equatorial and polar regions, but there were no ice caps because the poles were dominated by large open oceans, whose mixing waters moderated the polar climates.

  In contrast, the oceans at the equators were long and slender, wedged between equally elongated continents. Millions of people lived down there, or had lived there, as the Apex slaughter was no doubt well advanced. The first of the planet’s two orbital fortresses came swinging around the planet, and Tolvern braced for long-range attack.

  “Ready countermeasures for incoming missiles.”

  But the fortress didn’t fire on them, and the reason became apparent as the tech officers completed their scans.

  “It’s in ruins,” Oglethorpe said. “A Persian base, smashed up in the alien invasion and never rebuilt.”

  “The queen commander is in too much of a rush,” Tolvern said. “All she wants is to strip the planet, exterminate the population, and move on with a bigger, nastier fleet. With any luck, they won’t have bothered reinforcing the second fortress, either.”

  That last part was mostly wishful thinking, and contradicted minutes later when the second fortress swung around the planet. This fortress was the site of the space elevator they were trying to destroy, and the Apex flock hadn’t been so foolish as to leave it unguarded. The first missiles launched from the surface and sped toward Fox’s destroyers and corvettes. A second wave launched, this one targeting Blackbeard.

  The incoming missiles weren’t yet a serious concern, and Tolvern was more worried about the spear and lances, which had formed a single large force of thirteen ships that was reorganizing into three hunter-killer packs. They began to accelerate in preparation for another short-range jump.

  “Orders, Captain?” Manx asked.

  It was do or die time. Fall back to fight the remaining lances and spear and she could probably wipe them out entirely or force them, damaged and defenseless, to take refuge on the surface. With that accomplished, nobody would blame Tolvern for declaring victory and retreating to Nebuchadnezzar to wait for reinforcements.

  The alternative was to attack the orbital fortress in an attempt to ground the harvesters for good. She might lose, and lose badly, but how could she resist that opportunity?

  “Ready the charge on my mark. We’re going to pulverize that space elevator.”

  The first wave of enemy missiles was approaching, and out went countermeasures to bring them down. Stratsky’s striker wing hung back in the company of the torpedo boats. As soon as the missiles were taken care of, Tolvern gave the orders, and five torpedo boats and nine falcons streaked away from the fleet toward the fortress.

  Blackbeard, Triumph, and Champion followed, firing missiles and readying a full barrage of torpedoes. They had to draw its fire.

  Meanwhile, the spear and lances were nearing jump speed. Tolvern called Nineveh, which had rejoined the main fleet along with the rest of Fox’s task force.

  “Protect the frigates,” she told Fox. “Soon as those hunter-killers jump, they’re going to be all over us.”

  His voice was steely resolve. “Aye, Captain. The buzzards won’t get through.”

  Fox’s destroyers and corvettes swept past the Hroom sloops and came in against the two frigates, which were firing waves of missiles toward the orbital fortress.

  Meanwhile, enemy fire was getting past Blackbeard’s countermeasures. One missile hit her on the number four shield, and another struck the number three. Damage was limited, but more enemy fire was incoming.

  “Bayard, keep those missiles off us.”

  The lances and spear jumped, ready to reenter the battle. Let them come. Fox had his five destroyers and three corvettes in perfect position. The enemy would emerge battered and bloodied, if not wiped out entirely as an effective fighting force.

  To Tolvern’s shock , the enemy ships flashed back into place not near the frigates, nor even in against the battle cruiser and two smaller cruisers, but next to the orbital fortress.
That would put them in the line of fire of Blackbeard, Triumph, and Champion, where they would surely be mauled, while providing little protection for the fortress.

  But it wasn’t to fight the trio of powerful warships bearing down on them that the lances and spear had moved into that position, as became quickly evident. Instead, they seemed to have recognized the threat of the charging torpedo boats and falcons.

  They moved first on the five boats. Energy beams lit up the Albion ships.

  “Drop your load and get out of range,” Tolvern ordered the commander of the boat force. “That fort will tear you up.”

  Mark-IVs and Hunter-IIs rumbled away from the torpedo boats. The two lead boats were close enough to target the fortress, while the others fired at the enemy force bearing down on them. A pair of torpedoes hit the first lance, which fell back as if stunned, engine leaking plasma. A second lance fled the battlefield, pursued by a pair of Hunter-IIs.

  Other torpedoes fell short of their mark or were taken down by countermeasures, including all four launched at the orbital fortress.

  The torpedo boats had meant to flash past the planet and come back around for a second assault, but came under a withering counterattack before they could slip by. Energy beams and missiles hit them from all sides, with the first two boats under attack by four ships each.

  One of the lead ships burst apart like a melon struck by a sledgehammer. The second vented burning gasses and went spiraling into the atmosphere, where it burned up as it went down. The other three fled, pursued by more than a dozen enemy ships. The boats would have been destroyed entirely if not for Stratsky’s striker wing, which came screaming in from behind. The nimble falcons danced through the enemy ships, firing small missiles at some enemies and targeting others with energy pulses.

  The falcons wreaked enough havoc to draw enemy fire, and the three remaining torpedo boats took advantage of the chaos and escaped. The falcons now found themselves alone and undefended. One took a missile and vanished in a terrific explosion. The others began to fall back.

  Blackbeard, Triumph, and Champion pulled up short and unloaded everything they had at the spear and lances.

  Stratsky called. The shouted orders of other falcon pilots bled over onto the channel, and his ship computer warned of incoming fire.

  “Now or never,” he said. “I’m going in.”

  “The devil you are,” Tolvern said. “You’ll be killed.”

  “I’m gonna shove this nuke down their gullet, gonna to take it out, Captain.”

  “You can’t take it out, Stratsky. You’ll never get close enough to drop your torpedo. Soon as you slow down to fire, they’ll annihilate you.”

  “Tell Oggs to check the elevator, Captain. Look what it’s hauling up.”

  Tolvern snapped her fingers at Oglethorpe, then returned to the com. “Whatever it is, we’ll handle it. You get your butt back here—I’m not in the business of sending out suicide missions.”

  “King’s balls,” Oglethorpe swore.

  The tech officer switched out the main viewscreen to show the elevator. It was moving, all right, and hauling an entire harvester ship through the atmosphere.

  How was that possible? A harvester must weigh 200,000 tons, which was far too heavy to be pulled all the way from the surface, even on a low-gravity world like Persia. This must be only the hull, like a crab shell without the crab inside, in which case they had nothing to worry about.

  But as it came bursting through the cloud cover, she got her answer. It was blasting plasma downward, assisting the lifting power of the space elevator. No, the elevator wasn’t strong enough to lift a harvester into orbit, and neither could a harvester launch itself from the planet’s surface. Working together, however, they were managing the task.

  Tolvern’s mouth felt dry. The ship was almost up; all it had to do was climb the last few miles and break its tether, and it could rumble straight into the battle.

  “There’s more, Captain,” Oglethorpe said. His voice sounded hollow. “I’m looking through the cloud cover down at the enemy yards on the surface and . . . see for yourself.”

  The view changed to show the surface of the planet, as pieced together by Blackbeard’s suite of sensors and compiled into a composite image. It showed a massive clearing in the middle of a mountain range, where entire mountaintops had been sheared away as the enemy devoured them for their mineral resources.

  The surrounding landscape was a blasted, withered surface cleared of trees and vegetation for fifty miles in every direction, and the smoke of thousands of fires blocked sunlight from reaching the surface. Blackbeard’s instruments peered through the smoke and zoomed in on the yards at the bottom of the elevator.

  There, spread out on the surface, were the shells of seven more harvester ships in various stages of construction. Seven! If they got into orbit, the war was over.

  “You see, Captain,” Stratsky said. Tolvern had forgotten he was still on the com. “I’ve got to take out that elevator. If I don’t, if more of those ugly things get up here . . .”

  “But you’ll never get your torpedo off in time. Soon as you pull short to fire, you’re dead.”

  “I got a plan for that.”

  She told him to hold as Blackbeard fell under renewed attack. The lances and spear had thrashed the torpedo boats and sent the falcons running, and now slammed into her fleet.

  Fox charged up from the rear with his corvettes and destroyers, which blasted at the enemy formation, trying to knock it apart. The spear and lances weren’t so easily scattered anymore, however, not standing, as they were, in the shadow of the orbital fortress’ guns.

  One of the corvettes, HMS Race, drifted too far forward in her eagerness to get off a shot from the main guns, and the enemy’s fire suddenly concentrated on taking her out. Missiles sped toward Race, and energy pulses stabbed from above and below.

  Too late, the corvette’s captain realized his danger and tried to retreat. Other ships from the fleet tried to guard Race’s retreat, but she couldn’t fall back in time. Missiles punctured holes in her damaged armor. An emergency signal. Two escape pods launched, but couldn’t get free of Persia’s gravity and went down. More holes burst holes through Race’s armor, and the emergency signal died. The corvette drifted away, dead.

  It looked as though the rest of Fox’s ships would escape, but a lucky shot from the fortress hit a destroyer’s engine as she was still accelerating. The containment field ruptured, her engine died in a long stream of bleeding plasma, and she drifted away from the protection of the fleet. Three lances pounced and savaged the ship until they’d torn through her armor. She broke into three separate pieces, one of which exploded.

  And here came the harvester. It was up now, next to the orbital fortress, and trying to work its way clear of the tether, which still held it in place.

  Finch called up from the gunnery, saying she had the main battery ready to go. Blackbeard unloaded on the harvester with twenty-two cannon. The enemy ship absorbed the blow without returning fire. The orbital fortress, on the other hand, was hurling missiles at the battle cruiser as fast as it could launch them, and all the cruisers were taking blows, even as Fox tried to get his surviving corvettes and destroyers out of harm’s way.

  “Captain!” Stratsky said.

  Again, she’d forgotten he was on the line, as his falcons were engaged in a fight to one side, pursued by a lance, which they drew farther away from the battle with each skirmish.

  “What’s your plan?”

  “I’m going in solo. Going to charge in as fast as I can.”

  Manx was listening in on the conversation, and scoffed. “What, did you discover some new way to fire a Mark-IV?”

  “I’m not going to fire, sir.”

  Tolvern stopped, realizing what he meant. The warnings from Jane, the shouted action from the defense grid computer, the battle playing out on the viewscreen—it all faded into the background.

  “A few days ago, they had me ripped open and my
guts on the operating table,” Stratsky said. “That thing was in my head, Captain. Would have made me its slave. I know more than anyone here what they’re like, and I’ve got to do what it takes to stop them.”

  “He’s right, if he can pull it off,” Manx said slowly. “We can still win this war with one harvester in orbit. We’ll fall back to Nebuchadnezzar and wait for reinforcements. But if the buzzards get seven more off the surface, we’re doomed.”

  “We have to take out that elevator,” Tolvern agreed. “One way or another, we have to do it. But like this?”

  “Give me the order,” Stratsky said.

  Tolvern couldn’t wait any longer. “Do it.”

  Then she cut the line, unable to speak to him any longer. The harvester was free of the fortress and coming at her.

  Chapter Eleven

  The first step in springing Catarina’s battle plan involved tricking the Apex commander. She pulled her three missile frigates into a tight position behind Void Queen, guarded them with Longshanks’s twenty-three star wolves, and ordered them to fire a few exploratory shots at the harvester, as if testing range.

  At the same time, Void Queen edged forward with the two smaller Punisher-class cruisers and a screen of corvettes and destroyers, as well as the pirate frigates, Orient Tiger and Pussycat. Five torpedo boats lurked behind this force, ready to charge.

  In response to this threat, the two hunter-killer packs sliced up on the Z-axis and accelerated, priming for a jump, while the harvester changed course to meet the oncoming fleet head-on.

  “That sets the trap,” Catarina told her first mate. “Let’s see if the enemy steps into it.”

  Capp rubbed her buzzed scalp. “Hell of a risk, ain’t it?”

  “The birds must have a good handle on Albion tactics by now. We protect our missile frigates so they can soften the enemy from range. That forces Apex to jump in and try to knock the frigates out of the fight, with varying degrees of success. That’s how it has played out in the past, anyway.” She nodded. “So this time we’re protecting them with a stronger force.”