Message for the Dead (Galaxy's Edge Book 8)

by Jason Anspach

  It was then that he realized that the last section of the bridge had been retracted. The bridge ended in space, a several-meter gap between it and the pole towers.

  Owens didn’t even break stride. He pushed through the blaster fire, reached the end of the bridge, and leapt.

  Moments later he smashed into the side of the lower tower. He had to grab on to a control handle to prevent himself from rebounding off into the void below. But he didn’t even have time to catch his breath before he felt a sharp pain in his lower back. It was a feeling he’d experienced before. Blaster fire.

  Somehow he managed to slide down onto a narrow catwalk that encircled the lower pole of the resonance array. Biting down on the pain, he stumbled along the catwalk out of the troopers’ line of sight. Blaster fire chased him, smashing into the array, heedless of any damage it was doing to the device. He glanced at controls and readouts that would have meant nothing to him at the best of times. And at this moment, his mind wanted only to cave in and deal with the hot fiery hand that had hit him in the lower back.

  He was already losing feeling in his feet.

  He leaned against the tower. Some distant part of his mind told him that he’d been hit in the kidneys. With a blaster shot, that was a death sentence. His vision blurred, and his heart raced.

  He forced himself to look at the polished black surface of the control panel, where a readout flashed at him.

  “Connected for test. Implosion cascade flush.”

  Owens knew that was one of the quirky things about these capital ship tractor beams. Only the biggest ships carried them, and even then the tech was still dangerous. Certain subspace effects, or even strong gravitational anomalies, could cause the machine to reverse itself, creating a highly dangerous situation. Instead of pulling another object to itself, the array could malfunction and pull itself into itself. In that event, the whole chamber had to be vented and both poles ejected to prevent the catastrophic destruction of the ship.

  Owens felt his world begin to shrink. His entire field of vision had been reduced to a narrow circle directly in front of him. He forced his eyes wide open, as some insane thought told him that if he did so he might see his wife one last time. And the kids.

  “Not… here…” he muttered. “Not today…”

  He tapped “Start Test” on the touch screen.

  Above and below him, massive sections of the ship’s hull irised open. They moved slowly, but the sudden storm they created inside the chamber was anything but. The internal atmosphere was sucked out into the vacuum of space beyond the hull.

  Shock troopers were sucked out with them.

  As was Major Ellek Owens.

  “I love you…” he mumbled to his wife.

  He was dead in moments.

  As his body spun out into the cold and darkness, wide-eyed and sightless, both towers’ explosive bolts were ignited, sending the tractor array systems away from each other and out beyond the hull.

  ***

  The immense hangar deck of the Overlord was seized as if by some violent subterranean tremor. An apparently catastrophic explosion had sounded in a distant part of the ship, and its effects resounded through the massive superstructure.

  Casso, carrying the wounded and unconscious Jory, reached the forward ramp leading up into the command bridge of the Audacity before everyone else.

  Desaix was already shouting orders.

  “Thales, I need you back in engineering. Check on the interface coordinator we swapped out. If it’s still in the green then we go for hot start. Atumna, gear up in three minutes. Rocko, take the waist turret and keep them from boarding us.”

  By the time they’d all reached the ship, the first elements of the shock trooper squads were showing up and not hesitating to fire. But because the corvette was a warship, she was not as easily disabled by ground fire as the average civilian freighter.

  Desaix held the boarding portal until everyone was through, then he lowered it and dogged it shut. That wouldn’t prevent the shock troopers from cutting into it with tools similar to what the Legion and marines used for boarding actions, but it would slow them down.

  He watched as Atumna’s butt wiggled itself up the ladder to the bridge. A moment later he heard her throwing power to the systems and talking herself through the Audacity’s start-up sequence.

  “Don’t go to full until we get the green light from Major Thales,” he warned her.

  “I know,” she shot back down. She always knew. She knew everything. Even when she was doing the opposite of what he wanted her to do. Saying “I know” was her way of saying, “I hear you.”

  Yeah, it wasn’t Repub Navy protocol, but neither was his ship. Not since the Battle of Tarrago.

  A moment later the point defense cannons opened up on the shock troopers outside. Desaix watched from a porthole as the powerful anti-missile blasters spat out streams of tight short blaster shots across the unfinished deck of the hangar. Troopers were cut down in groups while they foolishly tried to return fire.

  The smart ones scrambled for cover first.

  The next minute was tense. Blaster fire and engines whining to life. The ominous hum of the repulsors coming online as more shock troopers threw themselves into the battle.

  Jidoo Nadoori was caring for Jory in the forward sick bay. Casso waited with Desaix, heavy blasters ready to defend any of the boarding stations the enemy might try to enter.

  Finally, Thales came over the comm.

  “Green light. Go to full power from the reactor. She can take it… or she won’t. We’ll find out in the next thirty seconds. That’s all I can guarantee.”

  It wasn’t much of a guarantee.

  Atumna didn’t need her captain’s order to hot start the ship’s main reactor. Slaving off the ship they were docked to, she flooded the reactor chamber with emergency power. Takeoff systems panels were lit in red… which switched to yellow. And then, one by one, they began to cycle into the green.

  Atumna didn’t wait for all of them to hit acceptable minimums. As soon as she had repulsors in the green, she induced power to those and got the ship off her gears. As she swung the ship about, the waist PDCs still drew lines of hot blaster fire across the internal hangar deck. Dead shock troopers lay like forgotten rag dolls as the big corvette pivoted and made to clear the Overlord.

  Desaix scrambled up to the nav station. He was setting up the jump calc by the time they were beyond the hull of the dreadnought. Atumna went to full maneuver power.

  Desaix was sure they’d send fighters. But with Jory out cold from painkillers and tranqs, Desaix had no one manning sensors, no one to tell him what was about to happen in near space. Or more importantly, if that tractor was operational and had target lock.

  “Feeding you the calc now!” he shouted as the corvette’s engines spooled up to max power, creating a tremendous hum and rattle throughout the ship. The ship groaned at its forced obedience to physics and energy.

  If the Overlord’s tractor array was active, then they were about to subject themselves to two unyielding forces that wanted very different things. One wanted to pull them out of her. The other wanted to hold them in place. Both at once.

  They would be ripped apart.

  But the tractor field was gone. When Desaix cranked his head over his right shoulder from the co-pilot’s chair to look at the massive sprawl of the Overlord’s surface, he saw the gaping wound in her hull where the debris trail of the tumbling tractor array pylons began.

  He tried the comm.

  “Major Owens?”

  He said it again as he watched debris tumble like a slow ballet set in the velvet void of space. He knew there would be no answer. Owens had purchased their freedom. And died doing it.

  “Stand by,” said Atumna.

  The fear and doubt he’d heard in her voice in their detention cell was gone. Behind the controls of a ship she was as free as she ever wanted to be. This was the real her.

  Desaix looked away from the death of Major
Owens.

  Atumna Fal was the opposite of all that.

  She was life in a galaxy of death.

  And then the star field shifted, and Audacity raced away from Tarrago, heading directly for Utopion.

  19

  Combat Information Center

  Republic Super Carrier Freedom

  Talking via hypercomm, Admiral Landoo and Commander Keller came to a rough working arrangement that involved protecting Utopion, and the House of Reason, until the EmpireBlack Fleet was defeated. While Landoo would continue to command the Seventh’s Armada, Admiral Ubesk would have overall command of the Combined Fleets Task Force, with Captain Durad acting as a liaison aboard the Carrier Freedom.

  Scout corvettes with long-range sensors had watched the Black Fleet depart from Bantaar Reef, leaving much of the base in ruins. The question that remained in the aftermath of the surprise attack was where would the powerful fleet strike next.

  “Nether Ops is in play,” said Captain Durad at the CIC staff briefing aboard Freedom. “They have a plan in motion, kicked off just before the jump from Bantaar Reef. If their operatives succeed, then we expect the Black Fleet to jump in to Utopion sensing an obtainable victory. Our hope is that Black Fleet forces, upon seeing the Legion fleet in close orbit over the capital of Utopion, will believe that the Legion is staging a landing against the capital in order to continue their prosecution of the House of Reason. The Seventh and her support ships will be attempting to repel the attack with ranged fire.

  “When the Black Fleet finds a divided enemy at war with itself, we expect them to attempt to knock out the Legion before they can deploy on the ground. Our most conservative estimates indicate Black Fleet shock trooper numbers do not match the Legion with regard to ground combat. So obviously, taking the Legion out before they reach the surface would be seen as a top Black Fleet priority.

  “As their capital ships attack, the Seventh will charge in at the Black Fleet flank, following an initial alpha strike of ship-based SSMs. The Seventh will sweep the battleships, volley fire at broadsides during that pass… and then break off to run for deep space. Hopefully this maneuver will screen the approach of the Legion’s fleet. At that point the Legion will commence boarding operations while the Seventh returns to target critical propulsion systems on the main capital ships and provide ship-based fire support to Legion units clearing the bigger ships.”

  “Sounds easy,” said the first officer of the Freedom.

  Durad wasn’t fazed by this bit of graveyard humor. He continued with his matter-of-fact blow by blow of how the battle might play out.

  “It won’t be. But it’s a plan, and we’ll try to stick to it for as long as the situation requires. Stand by for coordinating changes direct from Admiral Ubesk.”

  “And we’re not going to use the Kaufman Retrograde we’ve been training our entire fleet for?” asked the fleet’s fire coordination officer.

  “In a matter of sorts, yes, we will be,” answered Durad. “The Seventh might draw a single battleship in pursuit after the initial alpha strike. Except instead of initially running, you’ll present forward deflectors and charge the enemy fleet at broadsides. The ships that survive the initial attack run will then effectively be engaging in the Retrograde and firing as they retreat. We have distributed a Critical Targeting Analysis at the outset of this briefing, and we’d like your gunners to adhere to the protocols as they commence the various phases of group fire.”

  A moment of silence passed through the CIC. Admiral Landoo was aware that all her officers were staring at her. Checking in with her. As though asking her one last time to make sure this was the course of action they had decided upon.

  A sort of mutiny.

  “I know what many of you are thinking,” the admiral began, not bothering to stand. Her eyes still taking in the digital sand table that showed what the battle that was supposed to take place in the next few hours might look like. Casualty estimates were at seventy-six point eight percent. Which, to an admiral who signed off on a daily crew report for her fleet, went beyond what in less desperate times she would have called “unthinkable.”

  Dead people. KIA. MIA. Captured. Missing.

  “You’re wondering,” continued the admiral, “if this is the right thing to do. You’re wondering how you feel about betraying the House of Reason in order to save the Republic. In other words, you don’t know what to do. And you’re used to being able, with the way the service has become, to collectively decide, together, through the offices of your grievance committees, micro-aggression courts, and military occupational branch representatives.”

  She stared down at the three battleships, digitized red. Three split-hulled triangles.

  “Well,” she sighed. “I don’t care how you feel about it. I’m the admiral. I’m in command. This is how we save our people. If any of you wants to mutiny or charge me as being unfit for command, then now is your chance. Speak up and do it now, while we have the luxury of not being shot at.”

  She looked up from the digital map. She panning the entire briefing room, meeting each attendee’s gaze directly.

  “Make your case now,” she said.

  No one did.

  “Then we’re all in this together,” concluded Admiral Landoo. “Win or lose. There is no other way this time.”

  ***

  Legion Fleet

  Super Destroyer Mercutio

  Utopion System

  “Your job,” began Colonel Speich, who was giving the briefing as Commander Keller stood nearby, “is to destroy those battleships. We don’t want them captured. We don’t want prisoners. This is a break their stuff mission. Each of you has an objective packet being downloaded now. Secondary and tertiary assignments will come to you via L-comm as long as we can establish traffic during the battle. The fleet will be close, so we don’t see that as being a problem, but we know this Empire is fielding some new technology that may deny us comm in certain situations. If that does occur, just stick to the primary mission and destroy these ships.

  “The Seventh will be hitting as hard as they can with SSMs and broadsides, but our intel analysis section thinks the Black Fleet PDC network is superior to what Repub fire control can deal with. In other words… the Seventh is just the bait. You are the uppercut. Our destroyers will come close, under heavy fire no doubt, in order that the assault shuttles have as little distance to cross as possible on their way to their insertion points on the battleships. Once you’ve breached the hull, move forward and knock out your objectives at any cost.”

  As was his gift, Colonel Speich ended his portion of the briefing so abruptly that none of the Legion commanders were actually sure it was over. Even Commander Keller, who had thus far appeared to be preoccupied with something else, was caught off-guard. It took a cough from the colonel to prompt Keller to stand and step forward into the cone of illumination shining down on the briefing console.

  The commander cleared the briefing orders, comm codes, and other data that had been on display throughout the briefing. Then he looked across the room full of Legion officers, knowing many would die in the next few hours. He nodded slightly. Barely. Making sure he fixed the faces of the dead in his mind. If only so that the someone who would order them to their death did so not lightly.

  Then…

  “Gentleman, you have your orders. KTF.”

  ***

  Black Fleet

  Imperial Flagship Imperator

  Hyperspace

  “Thirty minutes, Admiral.”

  Rommal heard the officer telling him how far they were from exiting the jump, but his mind was already past all that. Engaged in battle around Utopion. Directing his forces. Playing every card he had. For victory. A total victory. Not one eked out in the margins of the final tally.

  He looked up and smiled, barely, and the officer took this as an acknowledgment of the message. The bridge crew had learned the ways of their melancholic leader, and had adapted to suit him.

  Rommal returned to h
is moody introspection.

  This was for everything. He’d never been a card player, but in those terms, this was for all the chips. Or all the marbles as some had once said when they were children. He knew that this battle was not just important, but that the fate of their war hinged upon it. He knew this, because the emperor himself had insisted on boarding Imperator before it jumped away for Utopion.

  After the victory at Bantaar Reef, the Black Fleet had returned to orbit above the shipyards of Tarrago for rearming. As corvettes joined the battleships to form a task force, the emperor’s personal shuttle had left the behemoth Overlord, still under construction, and started toward Imperator. The whispers and hushed conversations had begun immediately.

  The emperor’s coming aboard.

  The assault on Utopion had been meticulously planned for the entire seven years the fleet had been training out there along the edge of the galaxy. It was the most planned-for event in the brief history of the Empire. But a key element of that plan had involved having Overlord in the vanguard of the fleet when the attack on Utopian occurred.

  Until now. Some unexpected bit of intel had changed that plan—and moved up the timetable to attack Utopion months ahead of schedule.

  “It’s just come a bit sooner than I expected,” whispered Rommal to the unquiet buzz of a battleship’s bridge as it prepared to drop from hyperspace in the next twenty-eight minutes.

  He turned his mind to his assets.

  Three battleships.

  Eight ex-Republican corvettes.

  Three wings of tri-fighters with auxiliary support role squadrons for each.

  Three divisions of shock troopers.

  And of course… whispered some part of his mind that he wasn’t sure was his… me. Don’t forget me, Admiral Rommal.

  And when he heard this voice, his mind saw the emperor.

  A man—was he really just that?—who had captured the Tarrago orbital defense gun almost singlehandedly . A man of strange powers. A man people preferred to whisper about instead of mentioning out in the open.