Shouts of joy and relief sounded across the bridge of Void Queen. They’d destroyed a harvester ship—a bloody harvester ship!—and this time there were no caveats. A complete and total victory.
Catarina permitted herself a moment of celebration, but was already pulling up McGowan’s battle on the main viewscreen while the others were still cheering. He was suffering heavy damage as he tried to stop Hammerhead, losing star wolves, destroyers, and cruisers, either destroyed or crippled and unable to fight. Even Peerless was in the thick of it this time, although it was the Scandian force that was fighting most aggressively, and, to her eyes, fruitlessly.
She caught her breath when she switched to the other battle. Dreadnought was surrounded by all three of the other harvesters, Manta Ray, Tiger, and Rhino, who had forced the admiral up against the planet Sheol and were trying to kill or capture him. Drake’s fleet was trying desperately to break him free, but couldn’t get through the blockade. In rumbled Blackbeard, Sledge, and a host of other ships, but Catarina feared they wouldn’t be able to break through, either. The enemy was too strong.
Capp, Smythe, and the others fell silent as they took it in.
“Send orders,” Catarina said quietly. “All ships to proceed at once to Sheol. I only pray that we arrive in time.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Blackbeard and Sledge roared into the fight like a pair of enraged lions, unleashing a barrage of torpedoes, missiles, and cannon fire at the nearest of the three harvester ships. More than two dozen cruisers, corvettes, and destroyers followed on their heels, and the enemy was soon taking a ferocious beating from the rear.
The targeted harvester was Manta Ray, the same ship that had chased Tolvern’s battered fleet out of Persia, and its wide, flattened shape provided the perfect profile for attacks from above and below. By the time it rolled about to face this new, aggressive threat, Blackbeard had fired all its cannons and was gathering for a second blast. The harvester’s eye swept them with a paralyzing green ray, but it was too distant for the beam to penetrate the battle cruiser’s hull. It fired a harpoon in an attempt to snare a nearby destroyer, but the ship successfully shot down the harpoon with countermeasures before it hit.
“Load the nuke,” Tolvern ordered.
Manx gave her the briefest of looks before passing her orders down to Finch in the gunnery. Blackbeard had one and only one nuclear torpedo. To use it now, when the enemy’s shields were still near maximum strength, was a risk. And only about half of the torpedoes were getting past the enemy’s countermeasures.
But if she could hit it in the mouth, while the grasping appendages were open, she might be able to shove the torpedo right down its gullet.
Meanwhile, Tolvern and Broderick’s counterattack had arrived just in time. Dreadnought’s back was to the planet, and the three harvesters had been bludgeoning her with an overwhelming display of firepower. Closer in, Rhino was taking the bulk of Dreadnought’s counter punches, but Vargus had named the harvester appropriately, and the enemy ship’s thick hide was weathering the storm. Drake’s fleet had shredded the hunter-killer packs arrayed against it, but numerous allied ships had already been destroyed, damaged, or knocked out of the fight.
“Finch says the torpedo is ready,” Manx said. “You’re sure about this, Captain?”
“Yes, Lieutenant. Tell Finch to target that ugly mouth—we’re going to tear it apart.”
Manx gave the orders into the com, while Tolvern drew a deep breath. She was far less certain than she sounded. When Manx looked up again, she gave him a short, sharp nod.
Manx spoke into his com. “Fire at will.”
Another wave of torpedoes rolled out from the battle cruiser to join the mass of ordnance hitting the harvester from above and below. Hidden within that outgoing wave was the nuclear torpedo. Finch had done her work well; there was nothing to make one of the torpedoes stand out from any of the others.
Manta Ray let loose a fireworks display of missiles, rockets, and bomblets that forced the counterattacking ships below it to flee for their lives. Once its belly was clear of enemies, it opened ports and dropped out dozens of small black pod-like ships, each about the size of a falcon from Blackbeard’s striker wing. Good. Anything to keep it distracted.
Tolvern held her breath as the torpedoes closed the distance. Manta Ray brought down some with countermeasures. Others slammed into the harvester, one after another in a series of explosions. None of them were large enough to crack the ship’s armor, and certainly none of them had packed a nuclear punch. Her hopes collapsed.
“Dammit,” she said. “Manx, confirm with the gunnery.”
“Confirmed,” Manx reported glumly. “It fell to countermeasures.”
Tolvern didn’t have time to wallow. The small striker craft disgorging from Manta Ray’s underbelly were organizing into small wings and swarming the battlefield. The largest wing targeted Blackbeard’s falcons, which had been charging in with some of Drake’s torpedo boats to try to disable the harvester’s eyes.
Tolvern had given Crispin command of the striker wing after Stratsky’s death, and his falcons fought back gamely, but were outnumbered nearly two to one, and Crispin couldn’t maintain the same discipline on the battlefield as his predecessor. One falcon fell, then another. A third falcon, then Crispin’s own ship went off like a giant firecracker.
Shaken by the rapid destruction of her striker wing coming on the heels of her failed nuclear strike, Tolvern had no choice but to recall the rest of the falcons. Three more fell before they were clear. She’d lost two thirds of her entire striker wing in a matter of minutes.
Other enemy strikers smashed a torpedo boat, chased off a corvette, and wrecked one of Drake’s supporting destroyers. Freed from their battle with the falcons, the surviving enemy strikers from the first wave came at Sledge and a pair of other cruisers, who finally held the line. Cannon fire shredded one striker wing, and deck guns chased off the others.
Blackbeard fired another broadside. Kinetic shot tore into the harvester’s upper decks, but didn’t break through.
Broderick called from Sledge. His face was grim. “We’ve got its attention, at least. That should buy Drake some time.”
Tolvern cast a doubtful glance at a side screen showing the combat above Sheol. Three of James’s cruisers had fought through the enemy forces to join Dreadnought and form a unified front, but Rhino and Tiger were easily holding off the rest of his fleet while they tried to finish off the battleship.
“We’ve got to take care of Manta Ray,” she said, “and in a hurry.”
Officers across the bridge cheered suddenly, and Tolvern turned to see what had them going.
“It’s Donkey!” Oglethorpe shouted. “They got that son of a bitch.”
Caught in the heat of her own life-and-death struggle, Tolvern had momentarily forgotten the other battles. Vargus, left with only a rump fleet after Blackbeard and Sledge had abandoned her with two harvester ships, seemed to have pulled off an impossible feat. Donkey was breaking apart under sustained fire.
Vargus must have pulled some trick. But what?
“There’s an unusual heat signature on the biggest piece of wreckage,” Oglethorpe said. “Shows up on the sensors like the plasma ejectors we used to see on the Sentinel battle station.”
Singaporean tech. So that was it.
Tolvern turned back to Broderick, careful with her words in case the enemy was listening. “Whatever happened out there, I’ll be glad to get Void Queen back into the fight. Maybe that will turn the tide.”
“If we can hold on that long,” he said grimly.
Manta Ray’s striker attack was faltering, but the gambit had demolished the Albion counterattack. Cruisers and corvettes were out of position, and multiple warships were withdrawing to effect emergency repairs to engines and damaged airlocks, bulkheads, and weapon systems. The harvester seemed to think the threat gone, and wheeled around to rejoin the attack on Dreadnought. It would be back in the fight in a matte
r of minutes if Tolvern and Broderick didn’t stop it.
Broderick glanced to one side, seemed to notice the same thing, and announced, “We’re going in. All available forces. We’ll find the weakest shielding and hit it with everything we’ve got.” He vanished from the screen.
Tolvern turned to Oglethorpe. “Find me a damaged section of the hull, a weakened shield . . . something.”
He came back with something moments later.
“Here you go, Captain. There’s a piece of cracked armor roughly forty or fifty yards behind the bridge. I’m highlighting it for you now.”
Tolvern didn’t wait for confirmation, but ordered fire directed at the weak spot. Other cruisers, corvettes, and destroyers pressed in on all sides, and a heavy stream of fire was soon blasting up at the targeted piece of armor. Broderick brought Sledge up alongside Blackbeard, then nudged past. Tolvern ordered Clyde to follow Broderick’s lead. Other ships did the same.
Manta Ray had resumed firing long-range missiles at Dreadnought, but couldn’t ignore the renewed attack for long. It released a burst of missiles and self-propelled bombs, which slammed into the joint Blackbeard-Sledge fleet. A cruiser broke apart, and a corvette fell under the harvester’s paralyzing gaze. The harvester snatched the corvette out of the sky with its grasping appendages, ripped it open, and cast it aside. The green ray swept out once more.
And found HMS Sledge.
Too late, Broderick tried to fall back. But he was at such close range that the beam seemed to be penetrating his bridge and engine room. The Punisher-class cruiser drifted, unresponsive. Manta Ray lunged.
“Get us in there!” Tolvern shouted.
She made a desperate call to Broderick’s bridge, but Sledge was nonresponsive. She overrode Broderick’s control of the main fleet com and gave a general order: full-scale assault. Torpedo boats darted in to drop their weapons from close range, while destroyers swept past the harvester’s jaws, now stretching to snare Sledge from the sky. Blackbeard had already fired her broadside, but targeted the grasping appendages with her secondary battery and deck gun. Torpedoes rushed from their tubes.
Even while moving on Sledge, Manta Ray turned its guns on Blackbeard. Explosions smashed into the fore and aft shields, and Jane offered a grim assessment of mounting damage. Tolvern ignored her ominous pronouncements and the worried noises of the crew, and forced Blackbeard closer.
“I need a broadside. Now!”
Too late. Manta Ray stretched its arms and grabbed Sledge.
The captured cruiser seemed to awaken. Her guns went off, and shouts came over the com from Broderick and others on board. The horrific details of the enemy attack came through in the cries for help and the orders to crew and marines. Apex drones were flooding the ship, overwhelming the marines trying to hold them back. The enemy had reached the bridge, Broderick shouted. The sound of gunfire and then . . . nothing.
A single escape pod launched, carrying a couple of techs who’d been fortunate to be near enough to the launch bay to get the hell out before it was too late. And then Manta Ray spit out its victim. Sledge’s gutted, split hull drifted, still sparking and burning with venting gasses. The harvester looked about for its next meal.
Blackbeard had rushed in until it was only a few hundred yards away. The nearest allied warships were falling back, and Tolvern stood alone as the enemy’s paralyzing beam swept toward them, and the arms stretched to grab her ship and devour it.
#
Battle drones burst through the floor and ceiling and came screaming onto the bridge of Bloodaxe. The birds wore bizarre harness-like contraptions with guns, flamethrowers, and tubes from which grenades flew, operated by beaks and talons. Others wore helmets that flashed beams of green light.
Olafsen let out a wild cry and fired a hail of bullets. Blood and feathers and the tang of burning machinery filled the air. A paralyzing beam swept over him, but he fought through it, and his suit was unaffected.
Two birds with green lights caught Jarn in a sort of crossfire, and the young signalman froze in place. Other drones knocked him down. They had hardened metallic-looking beaks and mechanical claws, which they used to tear into the joints of his suit.
Olafsen aimed his guns and let loose a pair of short bursts that shredded the attackers, but Jarn lay on his back, screaming and flailing, with birds still about his face. More birds rushed him and resumed tearing into his suit.
Olafsen, Björnman, and two other raiders formed a knot and fired on the drones that kept pouring onto the bridge, even as they fought toward the flailing signalman. The birds got Jarn out of his suit—or most of him, anyway, as one of his feet had somehow remained behind—and dragged him off, screaming, toward one of the gaping holes on the bridge.
Olafsen cursed and surged forward with his companions following, but a bomb struck one of the others, who fell, and the remaining raiders had to fight desperately to save him from a similar fate. Jarn and his captors disappeared.
“Too many buzzards,” Björnman said. “Too damn many. We’re going to die.”
Olafsen turned and blasted a bird shrieking toward him with wings flapping. “Then I will see you in Valhalla, friend. Today we will drink with our grandfathers.”
“They’ll never take me alive.”
“By the gods, no.”
The shattered bridge was full of dead enemies now, and screams and curses and shouts across the com indicated that there were drones in all parts of the ship, still flooding in from the harvester. The enemy was winning, capturing prisoners and killing those who couldn’t be taken alive.
Just when he thought the battle lost, the flood of incoming drones slowed dramatically, then stopped altogether. Olafsen scarcely dared to hope.
“Lars,” a voice said through his com. “You still there? Lars!”
Olafsen regained his balance. The voice came from his brother, somewhere above on Thor’s Hammer with the rest of the allied fleet.
“Yeah, Sven. I’m alive. Barely. What the devil is going on out there?”
“The blackfish are in place. They’ve broken through the hull and are dropping raiders into the enemy’s nest.”
So that was it. Olafsen’s gambit, sacrificing his ship, had worked after all. Distracted the enemy long enough to let the blackfish slip in under their defenses. And the buzzards’ attempt to take Bloodaxe’s crew alive had failed because they were now fighting off a furious onslaught of Scandian raiders elsewhere in their ship. A fierce pride rose in Olafsen’s breast.
“But you’d better hurry,” Sven said. “Get in there and finish it. This blasted Hammerhead”—the English word sounded strange on Sven’s tongue— “is tearing us apart. By Odin’s beard, we can’t hold them off much longer.”
Olafsen got onto the com. “Take this fight through to the enemy, raiders. Anywhere you find a breach, follow it through onto the enemy ship. Blood and plunder!”
He gestured with his armored hand toward one of the gaps sheared in the bridge. Björnman and the others joined him in tearing apart the mound of dead enemies and the shattered remnants of two mech suits, one of them Jarn’s, to get at the hole. A cool red light glowed through from the other side.
And then Olafsen was pushing through, into the harvester ship and the lair of the queen commander.
Chapter Twenty-two
Tolvern stared at the screen as Manta Ray closed on Blackbeard with its appendages swinging. The arms had serrated edges, and now, at finer resolution, she could see throbbing red lights on the inner surface of each arm, bubble-like objects that must contain drones to be injected into her ship.
“Is the main battery ready?” she asked. “Good. Fire all available weapons. Drive it off.”
Oglethorpe responded. Manx and Clyde, too. She didn’t hear them, only her own voice. It sounded calm, almost eerily so as it gave an impossible command.
Inside, she was engulfed in turmoil enough to match the flashing lights, the alarms, and Jane’s warning voice running through a litany of shield
damage. A marine colonel shouted over the com, something about his men out of stasis needing more time to get armed and in position.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she reached for her sidearm, not yet drawing it, but needing to feel its cool steel in her hand.
Drive it off.
So simple to say. They would be in the monster’s grasp. Only a matter of seconds now, and then the drones would be on top of her. She should use the pistol to shoot herself in the head before they took her alive, but of course she couldn’t do that. She had to keep fighting to the end.
The ship shuddered. Tolvern closed her eyes and drew her gun. When she opened them, the enemy ship was farther away, not closer. Manx was shouting to someone over the com.
“What happened?” Tolvern asked.
“We took a torpedo!” Manx said. “It was from Void Queen.”
“What do you mean? A mercy killing?”
“No, Captain,” Oglethorpe added from the tech console. “Vargus is hitting the enemy with everything she’s got, and we got caught in the crossfire.”
More torpedoes lumbered in, striking the harvester on the grasping arms, and it was retreating. Fresh human and Hroom ships were arriving with every moment, and they joined the remnants of the Tolvern-Broderick force in hammering the massive alien ship.
But that didn’t explain why Manta Ray had fallen back right at the moment it was about to seize the battle cruiser in its jaws. Or why it was turning about, lashing out in all directions with missiles and explosive shot. It was almost as though something had gone wrong on the bridge, she thought at first, as if their systems were malfunctioning, and the enemy commander was trying to fight phantom enemies.
“I don’t understand,” Oglethorpe said as some twenty small missiles launched from the enemy ship’s back and spun off in random directions.
Catarina Vargus called. Tolvern took it on a side screen. The woman looked across with the corner of her mouth turned up in a half-smile. It was a look that had once seemed arrogant, but Tolvern had a different view of it now.
Sun King (The Void Queen Trilogy Book 3) Page 21