Zakota: Star Guardians, Book 5

by Ruby Lionsdrake

  Two of the Zi’i ships veered away from the gate to follow him, and they had no trouble slamming energy blasts into his backside. The warship lacked the maneuverability of the Falcon 8. Hells, it lacked the maneuverability of a brick.

  Arkyn returned fire, but it pattered uselessly off their pursuers’ shields.

  Zakota was tempted to have him unveil Hierax’s weapon. Would it be enough to cut through those warships’ shields? All he knew was that it was based on some of the Wanderer tech Hierax had taken apart in their system.

  “Do you want a status update on the rest of the system?” Orion asked from one of the consoles near Arkyn. “Or are you busy concentrating on flying?”

  “How depressing of an update would it be?” Zakota asked.

  “Depressing.”

  “Maybe you should save the information and surprise us with it later.”

  “It’s not the kind of surprise anyone’s going to like. Here comes my brother.”

  Since two of the warships had veered off to pursue Zakota, the fire falcon only had to zip past one. Asan sent them into a crazy spin right out of the gate, and even though the remaining warship opened fire immediately, the Falcon 8 sped past it almost unscathed. What hits it did take bounced off its shields. That warship didn’t give chase, probably having orders to stay there to keep the barricade up. The fire falcon raced into the core of the system, soon flying out of the Zi’i ship’s firing range.

  “At least that’s something,” Zakota whispered, glancing at the warship’s shield power as more bolts hammered into them. Too bad his pursuers showed no interest in returning to guard duty.

  “Can you lose them in the asteroid field?” Katie asked, looking at the view screen.

  Caerus Moon and the thousands of asteroids orbiting it, ranging from pebbles to chunks of rock kilometers across, had come into view.

  “Lose them, no,” Zakota said. “Their sensors are as good as ours—as Confederation tech, that is. But we can make it harder for them to hit us.”

  “Shouldn’t we be thinking of ways to hit them instead of just running away?”

  “I am firing,” Arkyn said.

  “Hit them and destroy them,” Katie said.

  “I do love a bloodthirsty woman,” Zakota said, accelerating into the asteroid field instead of decelerating.

  The two warships, their helmsmen perhaps less suicidal, slowed down. Good. He might have a chance of getting the Star Striker out of their firing range. Their shields were down to 50 percent, which was depressing, considering they’d just gotten here. Sagitta would want them available to help with the core conflict. And Zakota wanted to help with that too. Like Katie, he didn’t wish to simply hide and avoid fire. He wanted to turn the tides and make a difference.

  “I’m going to give the status report,” Orion said, “whether you’re ready for it or not.”

  “Go ahead,” Zakota said, though he had to worry more about their pursuers than anything else right now.

  And the asteroids. Since he hadn’t slowed down, they zipped past at an alarming speed. They could do damage to the shields as effectively as weapons fire could.

  “There are three Zi’i warships in a high orbit around Glaucous, and it looks like three others have taken the Hermes Station. We’ve got a lot of ships out there, but it looks like they’ve mostly fallen back to protect Dethocoles. Gods, my parents are down there. My whole family.” Orion’s voice tightened—it sounded like he had a lump in his throat.

  Zakota couldn’t blame him. He was glad his family was safe on Amalcari, at least for now. If the Zi’i took Dethocoles, the rest of the human planets in the galaxy would be much easier targets to attack.

  “Just give us the report,” Arkyn said, his voice emotionless, almost sounding like the captain’s.

  Zakota thought him unsympathetic at first, but Orion recovered and continued on in a sturdier tone, so maybe the cold order was what he had needed.

  “Zakota probably already saw them,” Orion said, “but there are several wrecks around the gate, one Zi’i warship, but… a lot more that belonged to our people. One space fleet vessel, but mostly civilian ships. It looks like they were trying to escape. And the Zi’i wouldn’t let them. Or maybe they were simply near the gate when the Zi’i fleet came in. And it is a fleet, damn it. There are way more than the eight we saw in the Scyllan System. There must have been more that came through after we left the system.”

  Zakota wasn’t sure whether he wanted to look at the sensor map of the system for himself or not. He was busy speeding between asteroids and flying them high above the cratered, orangish-red surface of the moon. One of the warships had come into the field after him, but the other was waiting, content to try and get him when he came out. Which he would have to do at some point if he wanted to help.

  “Sage is flying straight toward the fighting at the core of the system,” Orion said, “but one of the warships from Hermes Station is moving to intercept him. And there’s another one that was between planets that’s veering toward him too.” He paused, then added, “And there’s more bad news.”

  “You sure you don’t want to save some for later?” Zakota flew them under a hulking asteroid full of caves and craters.

  A part of him wondered if he could find some cavern to hide them in until the Zi’i forgot about their wayward warship. But that wouldn’t happen. That one warship following him had the power to pulverize an asteroid. As he’d told Katie, he couldn’t truly hide from these invaders.

  “There’s some kind of giant weapons platform, it looks like,” Orion said. “It’s bigger than four of their warships combined, and it’s flying slowly toward Dethocoles. I’m scanning it now, getting as much information as I can, but it seems to have some sensor-scrambling tech. Interestingly, I don’t see any shields, not in the traditional energy-absorbing sense. You’re not using the view screen to navigate, are you?”

  “No.” Zakota didn’t take his hands from the controls to gesture at the holographic display surrounding the helm station, but he jerked his chin at it.

  “Then I’m putting a picture of the weapons platform on the view screen.”

  “The captain said his Tyrax Station contact described a huge caravan of pieces of equipment being flown through the system,” Zakota said, “like something very big that had been disassembled to go through the gate.”

  “And that was reassembled in our space?” Orion asked grimly. “This could be it then.”

  As promised, he brought an image of the weapons platform up on the view screen.

  Zakota, busy starting his second lap of the moon, only spared it a glance. It had a giant cuboid shape, a blue-black color that reminded him uncomfortably of the metal alloy favored by the Wanderers—a very hard metal alloy. Bristling spikes stuck out of the box, like rockets ready to be launched. Maybe they were rockets.

  “Now that looks like the Borg cube,” Katie said. “On steroids.”

  “I’m going to assume a Borg cube is something bad,” Zakota said.

  “I only saw a few episodes as a kid, but the Enterprise definitely didn’t care for it.”

  Zakota dove between more asteroids, keeping the entire field between them and the warship lurking outside, waiting. He also was careful to keep a couple of asteroids between them and the warship pursuing them. The one outside fired at the Star Striker, no doubt hoping to get lucky. Most of the beams spattered into asteroids, blowing some of them up. A couple made it all the way through to skim past behind the warship, eventually burrowing into the moon.

  “It doesn’t look like they’re going to give up and leave us in here,” Zakota said. “Arkyn, we’re going to need to at least take out the one following us.”

  “Hierax’s weapon?” Arkyn asked.

  Zakota wished he knew more about what Hierax’s weapon was supposed to do. “Let’s get on the far side of the moon from the observer there, then try it on our pursuer. Maybe if we’re able to take him out quickly enough, he won’t be able to repo
rt to his people that we have something special.”

  “Are we sure we do have something special?” Orion asked.

  “If Hierax touched it, he would assure us it’s special.”

  “Uh huh. Did he get a chance to test it?”

  “I don’t know,” Zakota said. “You ready, Arkyn?”

  “To press the big red button? Yes. Any time.”

  “I’m going to make a few sloppy turns and let them gain ground. Be ready.”

  A beep sounded, not from anyone’s logostec this time, but from the communications station.

  “Katie, you want to answer that?” Zakota asked, glancing back to see if Orion was busy at the sensors. He had a real-time map of the system up to study.

  “Sure,” Katie said, jogging to the comm station. “How?”

  “Just wave your hand over the flashing button, but don’t say anything. I don’t think the captain knows you’re here.”

  “How come he’s not calling on your wrist thing?”

  “He’s probably switched to ship-to-ship to make sure our transmissions are properly encrypted. Lieutenant Coric installed a com-sec device the day we claimed the ship.” Zakota waved toward a small box jury-rigged to the comm station.

  “Status, Zakota,” Sagitta said as soon as Katie did the appropriate hand waving.

  “Hiding in the asteroid belt, sir.”

  “Is it hiding if two ships know where you are?” Katie whispered.

  “You’ve seen the cube,” Sagitta said, not making it a question.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve been in touch with Admirals Eliados and Enroy. It’s what they’re most worried about. We know the capabilities of the warships, but that cube is an unknown. It’s come to a stop, and they believe it may have reached firing range, even though it’s three planets out from Dethocoles.”

  “Yes, sir,” Zakota said, though he didn’t know why Sagitta was bothering to give him this intel. It wasn’t as if the Star Striker could do anything from Caerus Moon. They were practically still kissing the gate way back here. Sagitta also looked to be plenty busy with his own problems—a glance at the sensors showed the Falcon 8 trading fire with two warships that seemed intent on keeping it from reaching the main conflict or the cube.

  “Our people have been firing at it whenever they can get close,” Sagitta went on, “and they report that nothing’s making it through. They’ve confirmed that it doesn’t have shields and that the metal itself is absorbing our en-bolts. That’s the Wanderer alloy, which we’ve known about for a long time and can make, but there’s more to it than that. HQ has had two days to ponder that cube as it was assembled and then began its approach, and they believe it’s using some Wanderer tech. It’s possible that the Zi’i have also found some of their ruins recently. Maybe it’s what spurred on this whole invasion.”

  “Wonderful,” Zakota muttered, swooping slowly around an oblong asteroid several kilometers in length. The Zi’i ship was closing on them, accelerating now. If not for the curvature of the asteroid, the Star Striker would already be in their sights.

  “Hierax is looking over the data that’s been gathered so far,” Sagitta said, “and he’s spotted a couple of access shafts on the cube that a very small ship might be able to fly into.”

  “To what end, sir?”

  “To drop off a couple of Hierax’s warheads, set a countdown timer, and get the hells out.”

  Zakota grimaced, starting to get the gist of why the captain was giving him this information. They had two Zi’i shuttles, and he remembered that look Hierax had given to them as he’d mentioned delivering some of his weapons manually. Had he known about this? Even planned for it?

  “It looks like there are Zi’i inside and parts of it have a breathable atmosphere,” Sagitta went on. “A combat team in a shuttle could go in, find a vulnerable place to plant the explosives, and get back out again.”

  “Our combat team? Sir, the fleet must have far more people and shuttles that could be used for this. We’re already stretched thin here, and I’m not even sure how I can get this ship all the way over there, as we’re dealing with problems here at the moment.”

  “Fleet has already tried.”

  “And failed?”

  “They couldn’t get into the shafts. There are forcefields over them. Coric and Tala have been examining them, since they appear to be Wanderer tech instead of Zi’i tech, and we know a thing or two about them now.”

  “Shouldn’t have dropped Indi off on the station,” Katie said. “She was the one good at finding the music patterns.”

  The deck shuddered as the Zi’i warship caught up to them and fired, striking the aft shields.

  Zakota pointed at Arkyn. “Red button, do it.”

  “Firing,” Arkyn said.

  A wharrrm sound reverberated through the ship, and an alarm blared as the shields went out.

  “What the—”

  The shields flashed on again before Zakota could finish the sentence. They’d fired something, a weapon that looked like a glowing torpedo. The oblong object rocketed away, growing brighter as it traveled, as if it was drawing energy from the sun. It streaked unerringly toward the Zi’i ship.

  The Zi’i must not have been concerned because they did not bother with evasive maneuvers. Their shields were up, and they continued forward, accelerating to close the distance.

  Hierax’s torpedo smashed into their forward shield. Zakota expected a flash of light, proof of some big explosion. Instead, it burrowed its way through the shield, slowing down as it went, but not stopping altogether.

  All of the ship’s shields dropped in its wake. It continued on to strike the hull of the warship, burrowing halfway into it before stopping.

  Nothing happened after that, and Zakota felt a stab of disappointment. Was it a dud? Or maybe that was all it was supposed to do, to bring down the shields.

  “Fire at will, Arkyn,” Zakota said, reversing thrusters to take them back toward the enemy. He got rid of the cube on the view screen and brought up the Zi’i ship.

  Before Arkyn’s first en-bolt sailed away, the explosion Zakota had expected came.

  Instead of light flashing, it was like darkness spreading, swallowing the illumination from the ship’s running lights. A strange wave of dark energy rolled over the Zi’i vessel, and it broke apart before Zakota’s eyes. Disintegrated.

  Not trusting what the view screen showed him, Zakota checked the sensor display. But it only backed up what he saw. Where there had been a massive warship, manned by a crew of hundreds, nothing but space dust floated.

  “That was effective,” Arkyn said.

  “No shit,” Katie said. “How many of those things do we have?”

  “We had two. Now we have one.”

  Zakota slumped against the helm. How could Hierax have come up with amazing super weapons that could turn the tide of a war and then only made two of them?

  He hoped the Falcon 8 had some of its own. Had Hierax had time to install any over there? He had been over here on the warship a lot of the time.

  Maybe one of these new weapons could tear up the cube without the need for a suicidal infiltration mission.

  “We’re working on a musical frequency pattern that we believe will cause the forcefields to lower,” Sagitta said—he must have been distracted by some battle or flurry of evasive activity too. “We’ll transmit all the information on the cube that we got from Fleet, and the pattern as soon as we figure it out.”

  “You sure they can’t just fly some X-wings into a trench and fire at a vulnerable target handily located at the end of it?” came a woman’s voice from somewhere behind Sagitta. Juanita?

  “Dr. Tala,” Sagitta said, his voice softer, as if he’d turned away from the pickup, “when I invited you to the bridge to work with Lieutenant Coric, I do not recall mentioning you should bring visitors.”

  “Don’t pick on my woman, Sage,” Orion said, “or she’ll write you into a story as a villain and then kill you off
.”

  “Enough,” Sagitta said, the command apparently for everyone—maybe especially for his brother. “Zakota, figure out a way to fly that warship out of there and as close to the cube as you can get it. Then divide the combat team between the two shuttles. Hierax and I talked about the potential of using them to deliver weapons earlier, so each one is already stocked with a warhead. You and Arkyn will pilot them into the weapons platform, and the combat teams will work together to find a way to destroy it from within. We’ll do our best to assist fleet and keep the Zi’i busy so they don’t notice you until it’s too late.”

  “Uh, sir,” Zakota said, glancing toward Katie, who’d stood up very straight at the mention of the shuttle, “if Arkyn and I are flying the shuttles, who’s piloting the warship?”

  He had a hard time imagining that Sagitta planned to put any piloting responsibility on Katie’s shoulders—Zakota still wasn’t sure if the captain knew she was over here—but it didn’t take him long to run down the list of six Star Guardians who’d come over from the Falcon. Aside from Arkyn, only Orion had piloting experience, and Zakota knew he hadn’t touched any of the Zi’i helms yet. Further, it was unlikely that his bounty-hunting experience had deposited him at the helm of many Zi’i ships in the past.

  “We’ll need a big distraction if you’re going to fly to the cube unnoticed,” Sagitta said. “I was thinking that you could set the warship on a course to ram it before you take off in the shuttles. Since everyone will be on the shuttles, the warship will no longer matter. The cube doesn’t move quickly. It’s possible the Zi’i will blow up your warship before it reaches its target, but that ship will carry a lot of mass and momentum, and some of the wreck might make it through.”

  Zakota blinked slowly as he envisioned this plan. Sagitta was known for his creativity in battle, but this sounded crazy. If not suicidal.

  “You want us to crash a massive ship into the weapons platform while we’re infiltrating it?” Zakota asked.

  “Make it so the warship reaches the platform before your shuttles do. You can break off if it looks like the ship striking it does a great deal of damage, but from what I’ve heard from Fleet intel, it won’t. It will serve as a distraction only.”