by Jay Allan
Thoughts of saving the Far Stars were just that, formless imaginings, fantasies. He had sold himself already, traded his loyalties for his safety and survival . . . and for imperial coin.
You are the greatest traitor the Far Stars has even known. Billions will die because of your cowardice, your greed.
It was something he would have to learn to live with . . . but only time would tell if he could.
Idilus sat quietly in his sanctum, awaiting word the fleet was ready to resume its journey to Celtiboria. They were close now, at least by the standards of interstellar travel. The last ten light-years would have been a single jump in the empire, but Idilus had restrained his impatience and commanded that the trip be split into two shorter segments. The sector was simply too unfamiliar, too subject to strange phenomenon and effects. He’d almost gone with a single jump, but caution had asserted its place at the last moment. Having spoken with Denali—who knew the space around here better than anyone else on board—it seemed the prudent course.
Celtiboria would survive for just a bit longer.
It didn’t change the fact that Idilus was anxious to complete his mission. The destruction of Celtiboria was his final task. After it was done, he would return to Galvanus and confirm the planet had been pacified. He would leave the imperial soldiers behind as a garrison, a far stronger force than had existed before, which—together with a battleship to patrol the Far Stars—would be a powerful sign of imperial determination to hold the capital of the demesne and to claim control of the entire sector.
The conquest itself, the invasion and pacification of a hundred worlds, would be an immense undertaking, logistically at least. But with Celtiboria destroyed, there was little chance the fractured Far Stars could resist imperial power.
Especially with the ability for battleships to transit across the Void.
The key to that, of course, was the fact that he had no need to return when those ships came. Any imperial commander could lead the subsequent expeditions, spend the next ten years reducing one planet after another, putting the fear of the emperor into every manner of frontier savage. The Far Stars was a barbaricum of sorts, at least to his cosmopolitan sensibilities, and the sooner he could leave it behind and claim his rewards, the better.
There were some advantages to returning, however. The viceregal powers certainly appealed to him, sparking wild imaginings in his mind, even thoughts of what imperial power felt like. He’d have welcomed a governorship with such autonomy and added power . . . if only the Far Stars wasn’t such a remote dustbin. If the cost of autonomy was life in the wilderness, he would gladly return to the stress and frustrations of the imperial court.
Idilus was in the Far Stars to regain his stature and nothing more. No doubt, whoever followed him, whatever general or admiral was tasked with doing the gritty work, would also gain great praise and advancement. But he had been the first, the one to open the door, and that was enough to gain what he craved. He just wanted to finish things and get back to the comforts of the empire.
Idilus’s mind drifted, to thoughts of Marshal Lucerne. He’d heard much of the Far Stars’ great hero, and he wondered how many of the stories were true and how many inventions of adoring throngs or the products of the marshal’s own propaganda machine. He knew Lucerne had met his end at the hands of an imperial assassin. That made sense, and yet Idilus wondered. The empire had maintained its grip on the demesne for a thousand years, and yet those worlds were lost a scant few years after the great marshal’s death. Lucerne had, by all accounts, been a gifted military leader, and a man of considerable tenacity and strength. Yet he’d had more effect on the history of the sector in death than he’d ever managed in life.
Idilus had been glad he wouldn’t have to deal with Lucerne, but now his mind filled with concerns about what others he might have to face. Was Lucerne’s reputation deserved? Or had he simply gained credit for the acts of others, men and women who were still there, likely awaiting the arrival of his fleet? He’d been confident since his ships had left Galvanus, perhaps overly so. Might the fight at Celtiboria be more difficult than he’d imagined at first? It was hard to imagine the Celtiborians being able to face imperial battleships, but Idilus’s fleet had only seven ships. Two had been left at Galvanus to support the ground operations, and Inferni had taken the other. Idilus had resented losing one of his ships to his rival, at least at first. But now he wasn’t so sure. He didn’t know as much about this Blackhawk as Inferni, but from everything he’d heard, the outlaw had played a major role in the war that stripped the demesne from the empire . . . perhaps even commanded the Celtiborian and other forces in the fight.
I will be just as glad for Inferni to eliminate this Blackhawk. It is worth the detachment of one ship, and even sharing the credit for the reconquest if I must.
That was a hard thing to acknowledge, but not as difficult as the other realization slowly taking form in his mind, one he would keep buried and never share with anyone, but one that was real nevertheless.
He was terrified of Arkarin Blackhawk.
Chapter 25
Blackhawk’s head exploded, the pressure inside blasting his skull into a thousand fragments.
At least that’s what it felt like.
He lay in the seat, slouched down, limp, seeming almost lifeless, but in his head there was an endless burst of thought, light . . . pain.
He could feel the ship, somehow, almost as though he was part of it. It was vast. He was vast. His body stretched kilometer after kilometer, and in the conduits and fiber-optic lines that were his veins and arteries, power flowed. Power unimaginable, vast flows of energy . . . all at his disposal.
And not.
It was him, and it was not him. He couldn’t control any of it, not from the part of him that was Arkarin Blackhawk. If any part of this body still was. He was no longer sure. From the depths of his psyche, the AI that had been part of him for more than twenty years sent thoughts ripping out, command directives to reactors and power stations and weapons batteries, and none of it had to do with him, not really.
Nothing, that is, except the constant, indescribable pain. Wave after wave of intense agony. Blackhawk drew on all his strength to endure, even those parts long buried, the power that had been Frigus Umbra, but it was to no avail. He wanted the pain to stop. He needed it to stop. In those moments, fleeting in reality but a lifetime to Blackhawk, he would have done anything to make it stop. His life was driven by loyalty, by devotion to his friends and crew, but he would have sacrificed them all in those seconds for just a brief respite from the pain.
There was self-hatred there, too. Many had tried to break him before and he’d never succumbed. And yet he knew he would now sacrifice all he had, all he was, even return to what he had once been . . . if it would just stop.
He screamed, a shrieking, unrestrained cry of pain and defeat, but there was no sound. He didn’t know if his vocal cords were damaged, or if the AI was somehow blocking his effort, holding him back from expressing his shame.
He tried to focus on the ship, but he couldn’t direct anything, not with his own consciousness. But he could feel what the AI was doing, the blistering flow of instructions pouring from his brain to the millions of systems in the vast ship. The engines were responding, thrust levels increasing, bringing the ship around.
Bringing its weapons to bear on its companion vessel.
Blackhawk struggled to push back against the pain, to focus on what was happening. He could see it all. The ships scanners and sensors were like his eyes. He couldn’t control them, but he could see what they did if he tried.
He couldn’t issue orders, either, but if he tried hard enough, he could hear the commands the AI was issuing. Not hear, not really, but he had a sense of the vast flow of instructions pouring out from his brain.
Giant capacitors filled with energy, batteries charged to full power, and still the output flowed from the massive reactors to every extremity of the giant vessel.
Th
e comm system came to life, calls, increasingly frantic, from the other ship, questioning the power readings, the unexplained activation of weapons systems. Those calls went unanswered, and then the scanners observed similar readings on the other ship. Its captain had clearly become suspicious enough to ready his own vessel for battle.
But he was too late.
Blackhawk winced as the heavy main batteries, giant weapons systems ten kilometers in length, installed along the spine of the great battleship, fired at full power. The beams were massively powerful, designed to engage targets a hundred thousand kilometers away. But there were aimed at a ship less than one hundred kilometers distant. At that range, it was almost impossible to miss, and the power of the beams nearly incalculable. The first shot slammed into the target, melting and vaporizing large sections of armor plating and digging deep into the heart of the giant warship.
Blackhawk could see—in a manner of speaking—only what the scanners could detect, but he knew from long experience what was happening on that ship. Entire compartments were torn apart, opened to the deadly vacuum of space. Storage tanks were shattered, spreading toxic materials throughout vast sections, and secondary explosions spread the extent of the damage. Reactors shut down, spilling radiation everywhere.
More than material was affected, of course. All along the impacted areas, people died, incinerated by the beams themselves or the resulting explosions, torn apart by collapsing girders and structural supports, crushed by falling debris. Some were overwhelmed by radiation a thousand times the lethal level, killed instantly or on their knees, vomiting as the deadly sickness gutted them. Still others were killed by cold or suffocated in the vacuum, thrown into space or trapped in areas with no life support. It was a nightmare almost unimaginable, and one unlike anything the imperial spacers, so used to utter superiority, had experienced . . . or even heard about.
Those first shots did catastrophic damage, even to a target the size of the battleship, but Blackhawk could feel the urgency to recharge for a second shot, power flowing through the lines at one hundred ten, one hundred twenty times the “safe” rate. Even as those deadly main guns prepared to fire again, a hundred scattered laser batteries opened fire. They were weaker than the main weapons, but also designed for far longer ranges, and as they struck the other ship, sections of hull were torn open, laser turrets were ripped off or vaporized, and as with the heavier weapons, spacers died.
Blackhawk knew those crucial first shots had done immense damage, that they had gained the upper hand in the fight. But imperial battleships were massive, their resources almost beyond imagination. Even with massive gashes in its side, with whole systems obliterated, the target ship was still there, and she still had fight left in her.
Blackhawk knew the returned barrage was coming, and even so, when it hit, it took him by surprise. The ship shook hard as its adversary’s own main guns struck. The other ship had been rushed, its weapons less fully charged, its targeting systems already damaged by the hits it had taken, and still, those shots hit hard, and now Blackhawk could feel the wound in his ship. He was aware of the destroyed sections, the areas where atmosphere burst out of the vessel, widening the already huge breaches in the hull.
There was no crew on the ship, of course, save for his own people, and they were as deep inside the great warship as it was possible to get. That didn’t mean they couldn’t be hit, but likely, they would survive if the ship did. And if it didn’t lose life support or all of its power.
But Blackhawk saw whole sections disappear, areas of the ship cut off, no longer accessible to the ship’s AI, or the one in his own head. Whole stretches of laser batteries were out of action, either because they were cut off from receiving orders, or they were damaged or destroyed outright. Reactors were down, the power flow that had seemed almost limitless was now badly reduced.
Then the main guns fired again, even as the secondary turrets maintained their barrage, blast after blast slamming into the opposing ship; return fire continued to pound Blackhawk’s vessel. There were no grand tactics, no masterful piloting, no ploys or stratagems of war. It was a toe-to-toe slugging match, the equivalent of a knife fight between two vast battleships.
And, in the end, the first shot prevailed. Both vessels lost more systems, their fire slowing down, more and more guns knocked out of action. But the opposing vessel was harder hit, and it weakened faster. One by one, its batteries failed. Its main guns were knocked out, and more and more of its reactors were shut down. Blackhawk could feel victory, and he tried to see through the pain, to relish the success that seemed imminent. But there was only agony.
Then, victory tried to elude him. The target ship blasted its battered engines, pouring what little power remained into a desperate escape attempt. The great warship broke orbit and raced out into the system, pouring everything it had left into its thrust.
Blackhawk felt the urge to pursue, to redirect energy into his own ship’s engines, but he was not directing the battle. The AI maintained fire, targeting the fleeing ship’s engines and steadily blasting them to rubble, long before it escaped from firing range.
It was as good as over then, but Blackhawk’s AI continued sending out orders, maintaining the fire of every weapon still capable. More than half the batteries were off-line, blasted to scrap or cut off from their sources of power. The main guns were so much wreckage, spanning more than half the length of the ship. But the turrets that remained still fired, and by then, practically every hit struck a section of battered or destroyed armor on the target, penetrating deeply, and setting off chain reactions of secondary explosions.
Imperial battleships took twenty years to construct and they required the concentrated labor of entire planets. Now, Blackhawk was watching one entering its death struggle. A testament to human industry and capability, two decades of tireless labor, millions of workers . . . brought to the edge of oblivion in less than ten minutes.
Still, the guns fired, and still, the target remained, blasted, battered, billowing explosions and escaping plumes of fiery hot gases . . . but there, a great hunk of steel and all the technology humankind could produce, stubbornly refusing to die.
There was no return fire anymore, and that virtually guaranteed victory. Yet the fight went on, and with it the unbearable pain testing Blackhawk’s mettle to the core. He was broken, utterly, and perhaps permanently. He had no sense of his condition, of any damage to his brain, his body . . . save for the unrelenting pain. And he was too finished to care. He could die right there. He might die right there. He was too far gone to resist death. All he wanted was to see the end, to know that the enemy ship was destroyed. Then he would give himself to whatever fate awaited.
But the enemy ship remained. Whole sections were torn off, kilometers-long gashes torn deep in its hull. Its weapons were gone, its engines so much twisted and molten metal, and still it endured, and absorbed shot after shot.
Blackhawk could feel his own ship weakening, the massive rates of power generation and transmission unsustainable, the damage its adversary had inflicted spreading, as system overloads worked their way down the line from blasted areas of the ship. It seemed it would never end, that the victory that was so close, would never come.
Then it happened.
First, there were energy spikes, readings even the battered scanners on Blackhawk’s ship couldn’t miss. Then a massive explosion erupted out of the top of the ship, about a kilometer forward of the main engines. A vast plume of fire escaped, extinguished almost instantly as it reached the airless vacuum.
The ship shuddered, and then a huge crack opened in its midsection . . . and it split into two pieces, the cross section of hundreds of decks visible for a few desperate seconds, before another series of explosions tore the sections apart, leaving only a cloud of wreckage and hard radiation.
The pain vanished.
Blackhawk was lying down. At least he thought he was. He couldn’t feel his body. He couldn’t see anything, either, not through his eye
s. And the view of the vast ship was gone, the distant scanners and the control circuits that had extended his senses, no longer there.
Nothing remained except growing darkness, and a voice, somehow familiar, but distant, fading away with each word.
Arkarin. The battle is over. We were successful.
He could feel himself fading away, slipping into an all-encompassing darkness. He felt an urge to fight it, but he let it slip away, let the darkness envelop him.
Arkarin Blackhawk . . . do you understand me? Are you there? Are you okay?
Still words, but far off now, soft, unintelligible. Then, nothing at all.
Only the darkness.
Chapter 26
Inferni stared at the main display from his perch in the center of the Exantallus’s massive bridge. The battleship’s command staff was working feverishly, as they did after any hyperspace jump, and particularly one into potentially hostile space. For all the might of the imperial navy, its officers and spacers weren’t accustomed to worrying about significant threats. The occasional rebellion had arisen, of course, but hastily armed freighters and the random bits of force revolutionaries had managed to field had never posed a major threat.
The Far Stars, and its partially united forces, while still vastly overwhelmed, presented the greatest strength and opponent imperial fleets had seen in centuries. The emperor’s forces were still dominant, almost absurdly so, but that did nothing to diminish the tension in the air, a cloud of concern that if the warriors of the Far Stars were truly united, the sector could at least mount some kind of defense.
“General Inferni, we are picking up strange readings,” the ship’s commander said. “There is one battleship in orbit around Galvanus, but the energy levels are atypical.” The commander looked down at the report he was reading. “General, it looks very much like the ship has extensive battle damage. We’re also picking up strange signals near the vessel. It appears to be wreckage of some kind.”