by Jay Allan
Her ordeal had involved physical pain, of course, more intense than any she’d ever experienced. But it wasn’t remembrances of the agony that drove her desperate need for vengeance. It was the fact that Lille had broken her. She knew, with a soul-wrenching certainty, she would have done anything to make the pain stop. She would have sold out her friends, her comrades…even Barron himself, she feared. She was disgusted with herself, devastated at the realization that her endurance wasn’t unbreakable, that she was so much less than she’d once believed. She was aware that anyone could be broken…and Lille was perhaps the best at the trade of anyone on the entire Rim. Still, she hated herself…and she knew that would never stop, not entirely, anyway.
There was no way to undo what had been done. The best she could manage was to keep the dark truth a secret, to never speak of it, or even think of it. She could manage that, she thought, given enough time. But there was one other person who knew her secret, who had seen her a broken wreck, begging for mercy.
That person had to die.
She knew Tyler needed her, but she also realized he would also need one hundred percent of his focus. Their relationship had seen its share of action as well as affection, but she wasn’t part of the elite combat unit he’d led so often into battle. The one he would need now if he was to right things in the Confederation…and prepare the navy to face the real threat, the one she imagined even now was approaching.
The few people who meant anything at all to her were in peril…but she would be no use to anyone, not until she’d done what she had to do. It would hurt Vig and the others, her utterly loyal crew, when she slipped out without them. But where she had to go, they couldn’t follow. She would get Pegasus through Megara’s security net, with some help from Holsten who, in spite of his swift fall from grace, appeared still to possess considerable resources. Then she would be on her own, a duel between her and her adversary. With any luck, she’d have the advantage of surprise. Lille had to know she’d been involved in Barron’s escape…and he’d assume she was in hiding far from Megara.
Or would he? Don’t underestimate this man…
Lille was a deadly opponent, she knew that well enough. But she had more pressing problems just then. She’d wondered since the initial escape from Megara how to break the news that she was leaving to Tyler, what she would tell him. How she would lie to him. Tyler was no fool…he almost certainly knew she’d been through a lot, that she wasn’t her old self. But she doubted he could truly understand, or realize the emptiness she felt when she looked into his eyes and wondered if she would have betrayed him to save herself from the relentless agony.
She looked over at Gary Holsten. Her cover.
She had still been trying to think of a way to explain her departure to Barron when the former spy chief approached her about taking him back to Megara. Holsten had been unsettled for quite some time after they’d rescued him, mostly silent, and absent from strategy meetings. While it wasn’t hard to understand considering the situation, it was startling to see her friend so removed from his usual utterly composed norm. Now, suddenly, he seemed his old self, and he’d told her he had to get to Megara, to connect with the assets he was sure were still active…and to try and stop whatever was happening behind the scenes…before Barron had to do it his…blunter…way.
Andi wanted—needed—to get to Megara anyway, and Holsten’s plan gave her the cover she sought. She would pretend she was only going to sneak the spymaster back through Megara security…and once she was there, she would finish her business with Lille. She didn’t underestimate the assassin, and she was far from confident she would succeed. But she knew one thing for certain.
She would kill Ricard Lille…or he would kill her.
Chapter Seven
CFS Repulse
1.400,000,000 Kilometers from Planet Dannith, Ventica III
Year 317 AC
Sonya Eaton sat in Repulse’s command chair, tense, watching the readings on her scanners that could mean only one thing. The invasion they had all awaited, feared, struggled to prepare for…had come.
There wasn’t an enemy ship in the Ventica system yet, but that calm, peaceful state of affairs would last perhaps another thirty seconds. Then the ships generating those energy signatures would begin shifting from the alternate dimension of the transit tube into the normal space of Dannith’s solar system.
When that happened, war would begin. The first assault had been the start of the conflict, if not the attacks on the White Fleet out in the Badlands. But this was the real thing, evidence of a true commitment by the Hegemony, and from what she’d seen in the Sagamore system, they were coming with every ship they could muster.
She didn’t know that, of course. She had no idea how large a force the Hegemony possessed—for all she knew they had a million ships, ten million—but she simply couldn’t imagine any entity fielding a fleet much larger than the one that appeared about to materialize in front of the fleet.
They don’t need one much larger…
Her mind was split into two parts. One, the logical, rational side, knew the fleet had no chance of holding the Ventica system and its single inhabited planet, Dannith. The enemy was just too strong. The Confederation forces could fight, even do some damage, but if Admiral Winters was to have any hope of mounting another defensive deeper into Confederation space, he would have to withdraw with his forces more or less intact.
The other, more emotional side, tried to rally, to cry out inside her head that the fleet could stand, that the veteran fighter squadrons would tear into the enemy, gut their formations…that the Hegemony forces would be so stunned by the viciousness of the defense, they would fall back into the Badlands. She might have been able to convince herself of that if she hadn’t been part of the White Fleet, but she’d seen firsthand the Hegemony’s willingness to accept heavy losses.
Her eyes darted toward the tactical station. She’d been waiting for word from Constitution, the order from Admiral Winters to scramble her bomber squadrons. Her pilots were already in the bays, standing beside their fully fueled and armed ships, waiting for the command from her, as she was waiting for it from Winters.
Repulse’s pilots were among the very best in the fleet, built largely around the corps of veterans who had served aboard Dauntless before that vessel left the fleet to bring word of the Hegemony threat to the Confederation. From the looks of things, Admiral Barron had not been as successful as they all had hoped he would be at rallying the fleet…in fact, there were rumors flying all around, some even suggesting Barron had been arrested on charges of treason. That seemed absurd to Sonya, so much so that she discounted such gossip outright. But she kept hearing it from different sources, and she’d begun to realize something was very wrong.
Whatever had happened to Barron, the fleet wasn’t ready. There had been no large force massed and positioned on the border. If Barron hadn’t gotten word to Clint Winters, and if that officer hadn’t scraped up all he could from the frontier garrisons, there would have been nothing at all waiting for the first enemy invasion.
As she watched the scanners update, dozens of small icons just beginning to appear on the screen, her mind flashed back to images of the Hegemony forces she’d seen already. She wondered if it would even matter if every ship in the Confederation fleet was there, waiting alongside her own battleship.
She didn’t have long to ponder such thoughts, though. A few seconds later, she heard her tactical officer’s voice relaying the launch order from the flagship. What ifs didn’t matter anymore. It was time to fight.
“Launch all squadrons.”
* * *
“Some of you have fought the Hegemony forces with me…others of you were there when we defeated the Union and crushed their fleets. None of that matters now. Those who faced this enemy know what to do, and those who haven’t, even the aces out there, take your lead from the pilots who’ve fought these bastards. We all know fighters are crucial to any space battle, more so than the high
command or most of the fleet’s admirals like to admit sometimes. But I’m telling you right now, if we’re going to win this war, it’s going to be the fighter corps that gets it done. Our comrades on the big ships will fight hard, too…but in this war, they’re outgunned, outnumbered, and outmatched. We’ve got the advantage, and we’re facing an enemy with no fighters of their own. No interceptors, no squadrons nipping at our heels when we make our bombing runs. You all know this already…but now you’re going to find out just what it means. Because we’re going to hit these enemy ships as they emerge from the transit point, and we’re going to hit them hard. I don’t want to see a torpedo launched outside five thousand kilometers. That stuff you were taught in the Academy about launching at ten thousand, twenty thousand…forget you ever heard it. If you want any real respect, make it three thousand. Stay sharp, focused, and remember your evasive maneuvers. These bastards may not have interceptors, but that doesn’t mean they can’t take you out. They’ve got defensive batteries…and under five thousand kilometers, they’re damned accurate.”
Jake Stockton felt home again, as if he’d been born to the small, cramped space of his fighter’s cockpit. His rank and acclaim had taken him to the very top of the fighter corps, a hair’s breadth from the level that would finally pry him from the controls of his sleek Lightning and put him…where? An office? The Academy? Teaching new cadets? Rewriting fighter doctrine in some cubbyhole on Megara? The thoughts terrified him, even more than the specter of the massive enemy force approaching. There weren’t many clear career paths for fighter pilots of his experience and achievements when their days in the cockpit were over…and there was a single, disturbing reason for that.
Not many lived long enough to fill roles in the flag ranks. There were a few old pilots in the service wearing stars, but most of them sat behind desks, with prosthetic arms and legs and other mechanical parts taking the place of those lost when they were pulled from battered, fiery cockpits. Stockton didn’t have a death wish, no more than he suspected most pilots did…but he wondered if he wouldn’t prefer a heroic end to such a long, slow decline, reliving glory days in his head while signing off on work orders and other administrative drudgery.
It doesn’t matter what you prefer…the odds say you’ll die in this fighter. And that chance is only greater now than before.
He understood, more perhaps than any other man or woman in a Lightning, just what a fight the Confederation faced, what a deadly—and possibly overpowering—enemy the Hegemony truly was. He’d seen the losses the squadrons had suffered in the Union War, and the ranks of friends and comrades from the conflict’s earliest days who were gone greatly exceeded those still present. The Union had fighters of its own, and most of the men and women lost in the wings had been taken out by enemy interceptors. That wasn’t an issue in this war. The Confederation had the monopoly on small craft. He’d already heard talk among his comrades, boasting of how they would tear apart the enemy battleships with no interceptors to stop them.
But Stockton knew better. The Hegemony point defense was powerful, and worse, the enemy had become more proficient with each passing engagement. The fighters would bear the brunt of this war as they had in no other conflict before. They were the Confederation’s sole advantage against a larger and technologically superior enemy…and Stockton understood just what that was likely to mean in a long and bloody war.
His eyes were fixed on his screen, watching the enemy forces emerge and deploy. Even as his thoughts wandered, a part of his mind remained totally focused. Flying his Lightning had become almost an instinctual effort. It seemed that his body—his arms, legs, eyes—knew what to do by themselves. It took a bit more conscious effort to direct the entire strike force, of course, and much of him longed for the days when he’d led only a single, tightly knit squadron of cold veterans into the fight. Most of his old Blues were gone now, killed in action or wounded too seriously to return. The few who’d made it through the war had all risen on to commands their own squadrons and wings now. Stockton recognized a few familiar names on the OB of the massive forces he led, but it just wasn’t the same as the old days.
Kyle Jamison had led Dauntless’s strike force back then, and it had been sixty fighters, not a thousand. Stockton still teared up when he thought of his old commander, and the best friend he’d ever had. It had been years now since Jamison had lost his last dogfight, but that wound was sore to the touch.
He brought his ship around gradually, altering the vector and locking his course onto the nearest of the large enemy battleships. There were dozens of tactical considerations, but Stockton had pounded one into his pilots’ heads above all others. Focus on the largest enemy ships. They were the ones that carried the heavy railguns, and Stockton had seen what those monstrous weapons could do, even to battleships like Repulse. The fighters carried a heavy load in this new war, and there was nothing more important than taking out as many of the deadly enemy main guns as possible.
Before they blasted the Confederation battle line to molten scrap.
He almost flipped the comm back on, but he held back. He’d encouraged his people, rallied them for battle. He’d reviewed the tactical plan a dozen times, dragged the fleet’s pilots together in their wardrooms again and again to watch him on the screen and listen as he pounded the same things into their skulls…until he suspected they couldn’t stand the sight of him or the sound of his voice.
There was nothing more he could do. They were ready.
And, if they weren’t, nothing was going to change that now.
He stared intently at the incoming targeting data, adjusting his vector, matching the evasive maneuvers the battleship had already initiated. Hegemony captains—he assumed they had something comparable to Confederation captains in command of their vessels—had seemed inexperienced at first at evading incoming bombers, but there was no question that they had improved rapidly since the initial encounters. He was grateful not to have to worry about interceptors nipping at his heels, but he had to admit, the ship in front of him was evading his attack run as well as any Union ship he’d yet faced.
That doesn’t bode well for the battles to come…
The idea of the enemy becoming ever more proficient at defending against bomber assaults was upsetting, to say the least. If Hegemony fleets were able to close to within the range with their massive railguns intact, they would be able to obliterate Confederation battle lines before those battleships could respond with their own primary batteries.
His discipline clamped down. He stared at the battleship, still amazed at the sheer immensity of the Hegemony’s capital ships. His reflexes reacted to every change, his instincts guessing what would come next. He had become somewhat familiar with the enemy ships, and he was developing a feel, an ability to guess what the Hegemony commanders, or their AIs, would do in response to incoming attack craft. The Hegemony seemed to have a fairly wide array of battleships designs, but he’d begun to notice enough similar vessels to start to get an idea on class groupings and their capabilities.
He was facing one of the largest, now, a vast behemoth, thirty kilometers in length and armed with a heavy battery of railguns. The ship was death to any Confederation vessel it targeted, unless the fighter strikes were able to knock its seemingly fragile weapons offline before they entered range. Even a battleship like Repulse could be disabled or destroyed by a single direct hit, and there was almost no chance of surviving a second or third. The railguns outranged the Confederation’s deadly primaries by seventy thousand kilometers.
Stockton knew his plasma torpedo wasn’t enough to seriously threaten such a vast ship, but he’d also come to realize that the enemy railguns were complex and frail devices, more so, even, than the Confederation primaries. The ship in front of him would be an invincible nightmare in any ship to ship duel, even without its heavy guns…but if Stockton could knock out the railguns, the Confederation battleships would make a fight of it.
Stockton was under ten thousand ki
lometers and closing fast. He’d been accelerating hard, backing off only to engage in his own evasive maneuvers. The vast ship before him had dozens of point defense batteries, and they were all firing at the roughly forty fighters inbound along with Stockton. Two of his comrades had been hit, but as far as Stockton could tell, both pilots had ejected. He wasn’t sure that mattered, if any rescue operation could be remotely feasible this close to the enemy’s ingress transit point, but he chose to retain some hope his people would survive.
He saw the range slip under seven thousand, and the intensity of the enemy fire increased sharply. Another of his fighters vanished, and there was no thought this time of anyone escaping the fiery wreck.
More losses…and more to come…
Stockton shut it out of his mind. He would look at the cost later, write the letters to relatives, blame himself…but all after the battle. In that moment he was a predator, a killer, and all he could do then for his lost pilots was extract revenge.
Under five thousand, and moving at better than five hundred kilometers per second. There was no time now to change plans, to even think of altering course. All he could do was work the intricate dance, for a few more seconds, evading the enemy ship’s fire while reacting to its own efforts to dodge the coming assault.
He could see flashes on his screen, enemy laser blasts coming within a kilometer of his ship. None had come dangerously close, but the nearer he got, the more accurate the enemy fire would become.
He counted down the final seconds as his ship slipped under two thousand kilometers, and then he pressed the firing stud, jerking his hand an instant later, blasting at full thrust to alter his vector enough to clear the vast enemy ship dead in front of him.