The Black Flag (Crimson Worlds Successors Book 3)

by Jay Allan

  There was no way around that. He knew that was true. They were fighting for all of Occupied Space, and the consequences of failure were dire for all mankind. But such cold, analytical thinking came harder to him than to his brother. He had more difficulty reducing human beings to numbers in an equation.

  But he knew he had to help…and if he could get the gig operating, if months of sitting nearly idle under a thousand meters of water had not caused some type of damage or malfunction, he thought he could indeed contribute.

  He’d been afraid, of course, trapped alone on an enemy planet, with nothing to do but wait, and hope. Or, almost nothing to do. The boredom had been as intense as the fear, and Elias had sought to maintain his sanity by monitoring everything he could, every communication, every ship launch…anything his low power scanners could grab a piece of.

  After months of that, he was almost sure he’d come up with one thing, something he had to get to his brother, something that might help end this horrendous fight.

  He was pretty sure he knew where the enemy’s main headquarters was located.

  He’d reviewed it again and again, analyzed it ten different ways, looked at reams of raw data. He couldn’t be sure, but he was willing to bet on it.

  His eyes moved back to the display, watching as the power indicators ticked slowly upward. He could warm the ship up slowly, cautiously…to a point. But each step up in energy also increased the likelihood of detection. The radiation on the surface would help shield him, and no doubt, the enemy would have a much harder time moving against him now. But after months of patience, he wasn’t going to screw up so close to the end.

  He moved his hand, slowly, pushing the controls farther. Ten percent power…eleven percent.

  Five years of struggle, trying to even identify the enemy, and then to find a way to fight back. Now the final battle was underway. In a matter of hours, days perhaps, humanity would have broken the back of its would-be tyrants…or it would have fallen into a bottomless pit of servitude and darkness.

  Twelve percent…

  Chapter 37

  60 Kilometers from Eagles Field HQ

  Planet Vali, Draconia Terminii II

  Earthdate: 2321 AD (36 Years After the Fall)

  Erik Cain climbed up the edges of the crater, and peered out across the blasted terrain. He was leading the two senior regiments of the Corps, formations made up of the best of the newer Marines, heavily leavened with the old veterans who had returned to the colors. Cain remembered vast Marine armies from the past, the might the Corps had once possessed. By any measure, the forces he led now were only a pale shadow of those that had once taken the field. But they were Marines and, as far as he was concerned, that was all that mattered.

  He glanced at his display. His people were about sixty kilometers from the nearest Black Eagles position. The battle had been unlike any he’d fought before. There was no contest for terrain, no conventional battle lines. The fleet had blasted everything of value on the planet, at least on the surface. His people, and the Eagles and the others, had only one mission. Finding the enemy headquarters.

  The Black Flag soldiers were well-trained and led, if a bit conventional in tactics, and their lack of any kind of fear or morale breakdown made each encounter a vicious fight to the death. But he’d faced the First Imperium and the Shadow Legions, both of which were similar in that way. It had been more than forty years since he’d fought ‘normal’ enemy soldiers. He wondered for a moment if this was the direction war would take, if robots and heavily-conditioned ‘zombie’ soldiers would become the norm. He would have thought so, and he was still concerned that might be the case, but the Eagles gave him pause. Darius’s soldiers were just men and women, well-trained and led, and devoted to a cult of excellence, but not modified in any way. And they were the most feared killing machines in Occupied Space.

  “Alright, Colonel, let’s head out to the southwest. There’s a ravine there…it should give us some cover.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cain moved forward, crouched a bit, keeping his head down below the small hillside to his right. His scanner didn’t show any enemy forces nearby, but there were ruins a few klicks to the north, and with the radiation levels there, he knew he could miss an entire battalion hidden in the wreckage.”

  “Captain Fellin, take a patrol toward those ruins. I want to make sure there are no enemy forces hiding up there.” He had a bad feeling. If he’d been a Black Flag officer looking to ambush some Marines, that’s where he’d be.

  “Yes, sir.” The officer turned and raced off, waving toward a small cluster of scouts.

  Cain knew he was using the officer and his Marines as bait, that if the enemy was hiding a force in that debris, Fellin and his people didn’t stand a chance. He’d lost count of how many times he’d sent people into situations like that, how many Marines had marched into traps carrying out his commands. It had always troubled him, but now he found it cutting deeper, somehow. Cain could feel the force that had driven him for so long fading.

  He watched as Fellin and his detachment moved out, spreading into an extended skirmish order and advancing. Cain didn’t like sending men and women out there as bait, but the radiation made his long-range scanners next to useless, and it was far better to risk Fellin and a dozen Marines than expose two battalions to a flank attack by a hidden enemy force.

  He continued ahead, his eyes darting up to the display, even as his scouts began to fade in and out. It was the radiation interfering with his sensors, and he stopped and crept up to the hillside, peering out and watching directly. The scouts were close to the ruins now, perhaps five hundred meters. Cain was hoping they would just clear the area and come back, but then, suddenly, he felt something, instinct maybe, just before all hell broke loose.

  Shots erupted from the ruins, and half of Fellin’s people were hit almost instantly. The rest dropped to the ground and opened up, returning the fire. But even as Cain watched, he knew they had no chance. Their position was raked with heavy autocannons, and a few seconds later, a wave of enemy troops surged forward. It was a battalion, at least, and probably more. Fellin’s people took down a few, and then they were overrun…and the enemy horde continued on, heading for his column.

  “All units, turn to the right and deploy. Prepare to repel.”

  He dropped down himself, setting his assault rifle on the ground in front of him and peering through the targeting scope. There were so many enemy troops coming, it seemed impossible to miss, but he took careful aim anyway.

  Then he opened fire, even as the rest of his people were dropping prone and adding their shooting to his.

  The enemy soldiers began falling, individually, and then in clumps. But they came on, and they were shooting back, raking the small rise with fire. The Marines had cover, but it wasn’t much, and Cain knew his people were taking casualties as well.

  He almost barked out a command, anything, but then he realized his people didn’t need it. They weren’t the veterans he’d led years before, but they were still Marines. They knew what to do.

  * * * * *

  “Brussels and River Plate are to fall back.”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  Camille Harmon watched her fleet dying. She was directing the battle, sending orders to various detachments, never giving up. But she knew none of it would make any difference. The enemy was just too strong.

  Her eyes passed over the screen displaying the damage reports from the ships of the fleet. She’d never been the squeamish sort before, but she deliberately avoided focusing on the data scrolling down. She didn’t need up to the second information on which of her people had just died.

  Augustus Garret was still in her mind. She knew he was dead, and yet, somehow it didn’t seem real. There had never been a moment of her career when she hadn’t known who he was. Now, he was gone.

  She turned and looked at the long-range scanner display. She wondered how the Eagles had done at planet two. If Darius had managed to fi
nd the enemy leaders, perhaps even defeat could be a victory of sorts. Harmon hadn’t come here to die, but if that was her fate, she could accept it far more easily if it came with some degree of success. If her people had died to kill those responsible for this war.

  Suddenly, she froze. Her eyes were still fixed on the display. The range of the scanners had been weakened by the enemy jamming, but now she could see contacts coming on the screen. Ships…approaching.

  Was it the enemy? Did they have even more reserves to throw at her battered vessels? Or?

  She watched, waiting. Jarrod Tyler’s ships had returned a couple hours before, a welcome reinforcement, and one that had helped extend the fight, ward off the inevitable defeat. But Tyler’s battered cruisers and escorts didn’t have the firepower to make a sustained difference.

  “Commander, I want full power on the long-range scanners. I need to know who…”

  “It’s the Eagles, Admiral! I have Commodore Allegre on your line.”

  Harmon felt a wave of relief. She didn’t know if even Darius’s battleships were enough to turn the tide, but now, just maybe, there was a chance. Things were looking a damned sight better than they had just a few moments before.

  She reached up to the side of her face, put her hand on her headset.

  “Gaston, am I glad to see you…”

  * * * * *

  Elias felt the g forces pushing down on him. He’d taken the time to build up the energy he needed to take off, but he wasn’t about to mess around with the dampeners, or any other sophisticated equipment he didn’t need. He just had to get up, out of the ocean and into the sky…and he had to find Darius’s headquarters.

  The ship sliced through the water and into the open air, lurching hard as he struggled to maintain control. He flipped on the exterior display, getting his first look at what had become of the enemy’s homeworld.

  It was a nightmare, worse even than he’d expected, a gray, monochrome scene of utter devastation that went on as far as the eye could see, nothing but dust-covered plains, pockmarked by shadowy metal skeletons. His scanners were spotty, obscured by radiation, he suspected, but his gut told him that image extended cross the entire planet. Darius had come to destroy the Black Flag, and if Elias knew one thing, it was that his brother didn’t do jobs halfway.

  He wanted to survive, to land and make his way to the Eagles, even through the hellish nightmare the surface had become, but he knew that was too much to hope for. The radiation alone had to be beyond lethal levels, and though the gig had sheltered him and hidden him for months now, the one thing it didn’t have in its stores was powered armor.

  It had survival suits, but Elias was far from sure the lighter gear would be enough to save him from the intense radiation his scanners detected. He would try, certainly, but first he had something more important to do.

  “Eagles headquarters, Eagles headquarters…this is Elias Cain. I need to speak to the general.”

  Nothing. No response. He didn’t know if it was jamming or radiation, but there was a lot of interference.

  “Eagles headquarters…this is Elias Cain.”

  Silence. Then a few seconds later, a response.

  “Colonel Cain, this is Colonel Falstaff. I’m picking up your signal. Damned glad you’re alive, Colonel. We didn’t think there was much chance. Sending you the coordinates of the general’s headquarters now. You’ll have to get within five hundred klicks or so to get through all the interference.”

  “Thank you, Colonel Falstaff. And I’m damned glad to see all of you here too.”

  Elias stared down at the screen, adjusting his course to match the data Falstaff had just sent. He wasn’t a veteran navigator or pilot, not by any measure, but based on what he saw, Darius was about two thousand kilometers west of his position.

  The ship was lurching hard, and he could see power levels were dropping. “C’mon, I need another fifteen hundred klicks out of you.” His hands tightened around the controls, as if he could will the dying systems of the ship to endure just a little longer.

  Chapter 38

  60 Kilometers from Eagles Field HQ

  Planet Vali, Draconia Terminii II

  Earthdate: 2321 AD (36 Years After the Fall)

  Cain stared out over the field, littered now with the bodies of enemy dead. The Black Flag troopers had kept coming, even as his Marines gunned them down in droves. By the time they reached his line, he guessed there were less than ten percent of them left…but they came on nevertheless, and the final stage of the battle had been fought with blades.

  His people had suffered, too. The enemy’s fire had been intense as they charged, and the desperate hand-to-hand struggle that followed had been beyond brutal, but the Marines’ losses were far lighter than those they inflicted. Cain was proud of his people, and he knew the Marines of the past, the comrades he remembered from so long before, would feel the same.

  Still, though his forces had defeated the latest attack—a victory they owed to the sacrifice of Fellin and his scouts—he had no idea what enemy forces were still out there, dug in behind the wreckage of their factories and fortresses. He’d stopped just long enough to check the field, to indulge the faint hope that some of the scouts had survived. None had, and while the dozen of them seemed insignificant next to the two hundred killed and wounded in the battle itself, their deaths cut at him deeply.

  “Alright, Major…let’s get the column formed up again and move out.”

  “Yes, sir. The next spot is eight klicks forward.”

  “Let’s get there and get the equipment in position. But keep an eye out…we don’t know how many enemy positions we might run into.”

  “Understood General.”

  Cain continued ahead, walking along the flank of the battalion. Technically, he was responsible for all the Marines on the planet, along with Cate Gilson. But he couldn’t just sit in headquarters, especially not with the comm situation so bad. His groups were all more or less on their own. They all had search areas to cover, and he couldn’t do them a bit of good sitting at some makeshift desk listening to static. At least out here, he could be of help to one team, even if that was nothing more than one rifle in a fight.

  Battle was a secondary operation for the Marines on Vali, a strange situation for a combat formation of its history and reputation. There had been fights, and there would be more, he suspected, responses to enemy attacks mostly. He had authorized the Marine detachments to conduct their own search and destroy operations, to hunt down and eliminate enemy units, but that was strictly subordinate to their primary mission.

  Every battalion on Vali had a dozen thumpers and portable scanners with them, and their main charge was to track down the enemy’s underground installations…and ultimately find the hidden refuge he suspected—and Darius was sure—housed the mysterious leaders of the Black Flag.

  Every detachment was hunting for the same thing, scattered across the planet’s surface, conducting the same operation, fighting when attacked but otherwise pressing on. Cain had no idea how long it would take, or how many enemy troops would continue to come at the teams, but he had no intention of stopping until it was done…and he knew damned well Darius and the Eagles would never let up, not until they’d killed those they’d come here to kill.

  * * * * *

  “Eagles headquarters…this is Elias Cain. I need to speak to the general immediately.”

  “Elias!”

  He sighed softly at the sound of his brother’s voice, distinctive even over the poor connection. He couldn’t remember ever hearing that much emotion in an outburst from Darius, not even when they’d been children.

  “I thought you were dead,” Darius continued. How did you survive here for so…”

  “Not now, Darius. This is important. I think I know where their headquarters is located.”

  “How could you know that? We’ve been looking for days now.”

  “Months of studying intercepts, triangulating…some guesswork. But I’d say it�
��s about eighty percent I’m right.”

  “Where?”

  “Transmitting coordinates now. Go get them, Darius. Make the bastards pay.” The ship was pitching wildly, even as he spoke. He wasn’t going to make it to Darius’s camp. He was going to crash maybe halfway there.

  “You’ll make them pay with us. Bring that ship in…you should be here in a few minutes. You can suit up and…”

  “Not going to make it, Darius. Systems burnt out…not even sure what’s kept it up this long.” His hands were moving over the controls, but nothing was responding. He could feel the ship going down.

  “The hell with that, Elias. Just hang on…keep coming this way. Just a little farther.”

  “Tell mother and father I’m sorry…”

  “Dammit, Elias, listen…” There was a crackling sound, and then the entire board shorted out, cutting the comm line.

  Elias was alone again.

  He held onto the controls, squeezing whatever shred of responsiveness remained, but the scoutship continued on its way down. He was going to hit two hundred klicks short of Darius’s camp…and if the impact didn’t kill him, the radiation certainly would.

  He took a deep breath, trying to push away the fear. A Cain shouldn’t die afraid. He’d long felt like he wasn’t a match for either his father or brother, at least not in the martial spirit the two seemed to possess in such overabundance, but now he was determined to die as they would. At least he’d made it, he’d gotten the information to Darius. Perhaps his death would come in victory and not defeat.

  But you’ll never know…

  He looked straight ahead, saw the ground coming up toward the ship. Then the impact…deafening sounds, wild shaking and bouncing, pain.