Blood on the Stars Collection 1

by Jay Allan

  It had required considerably more work to rearrange his ship’s bays so they could carry and support seventy-eight fighters, instead of the sixty they’d been designed to handle. The first hurdle had been Chief Evans, who’d been ready to dig in his heels and oppose the measure, at least until Barron tried a little reverse psychology on the gritty non-com who ruled Dauntless’s bays with equal measures of unfiltered competence and pure fear. Instead of pushing the chief to acknowledge that his people could handle the increased load, Barron had told him he’d decided to refuse the Eagles, since it was clearly too much for his bay crews to handle. After that, it had just been a matter of holding back laughter as the chief made an impassioned argument about just how and why his people were more than ready to take on the extra load.

  Barron had found his additional squadron to be enormously useful, even more so because the added formation was one of the very best in the fleet. He still rated the Blues just a touch higher, but he’d also admitted to himself more than once that his judgment was as likely the result of old loyalties as cold analysis.

  “Let’s increase our thrust, Commander. The Blues and the Eagles aren’t outfitted for bombing runs, so they could probably use some backup if they’re going to take that thing out.” Barron knew Dauntless had no chance of catching the enemy vessel before it transited. But he was just as sure that Stockton and Timmons were well aware of that fact…and that they would be doing everything they could to degrade or disable the battleship’s engines. And he wasn’t about to bet against them pulling it off. “Besides, Stockton’s and Timmons’s people are going to burn up the rest of their fuel, and we’re going to have to head that way to pick them up anyway.”

  “Increasing thrust, Captain.” Atara Travis’s voice was relaxed. He’d caught a look at his first officer’s display a moment before. Travis, too, had just looked at the casualty figures. And, like he had been, she was obviously relieved at what she’d seen.

  Barron felt a slight pressure against his chest as Dauntless’s engines roared to life. His people had endured the pain of massive g forces when the ship’s dampeners had been damaged or knocked out completely, but they were fully functional now, and the slightly more than 10g of thrust felt like a bit less than 2g. Uncomfortable, but not the hellish torment of 10g.

  “Advise Commander Fritz I’m going to want full power for the primaries.” Dauntless’s deadly main guns were fragile and subject to maintenance issues. But when operational, they were enormously powerful, a massive advantage in a duel with Union battleships and their significantly less effective heavy lasers.

  “Yes, sir. Engineering reports primaries intact and ready for action.”

  Barron nodded. “Very well.” He turned and looked straight ahead, into the massive 3D tank in the middle of Dauntless’s bridge. His ship was a small blue ovoid in the center of the mostly empty space. There were clusters of tiny pinprick spheres, three of them—Yellow, Red, and Green squadrons—heading back toward Dauntless, and two, the Blues and the Eagles, moving up on the red icon representing the enemy battleship.

  “Captain, Commander Stockton advises that Blue and Scarlet Eagle squadrons have engaged. They have targeted the battleship’s engines, and he reports that enemy thrust has been degraded sixty percent.”

  “Very well.” Barron wasn’t surprised that his squadrons had battered the enemy’s drives, but even he was a little startled at the rapidity. Stockton’s and Timmons’s pilots had nothing heavier than lasers, and the amount of damage inflicted in such a short time suggested some crazy fighter tactics, including reckless runs into the teeth of heavy defensive fire. He almost snapped out an order for the attacking squadrons to cool it, to refrain from taking any unnecessary risks. But it was too late for that. His chance had been to forbid the attack altogether, and he hadn’t done that.

  Because you wanted that ship as much as they did…and you knew damned well how they’d go in. Don’t be a hypocrite. Even if they suffer losses, it’s worth it if we bag an enemy capital ship. One more step toward winning a war that has already cost millions of lives…

  “Cut thrust enough to begin powering up the primaries, Commander. I want them ready to fire as soon as we enter range.”

  “Yes, Captain.” Travis turned and flashed a glance toward his station…and in her eyes he saw the cold killer he knew lived inside her. “We will be in firing range in seven minutes.”

  Barron pushed aside a shiver at the eagerness in his first officer’s voice.

  Chapter Two

  Epheseus System

  One Light Minute from the Hystari Transwarp Portal

  309 AC

  “Fire!” Barron was leaning forward, gripping the armrests of his chair as he shouted out the command. A few seconds later the sounds of the great primary guns firing resounded across the bridge. All eyes moved to the screens and displays, waiting for the scanning reports to see whether the massive weapons had hit or not. Dauntless was still at extreme range, but the enemy ship’s engines appeared to be completely offline, and the lack of any thrust capacity made the target’s course highly predictable…and easy to target.

  “Hit,” Travis said, reporting the data as it came in. “Two hits.”

  Barron just nodded. He’d seen it on the display even as Travis made her report. He realized how his own attitude toward such things had changed. He’d known his people would score a hit. Not expected, but known. His gunners might miss a wily enemy running a series of evasive maneuvers, but there was no way they would fail to hit a target on a fixed course and vector, no matter the range. The instant his fighter squadrons had knocked out the enemy ship’s engines, they had sealed its fate.

  “Recharge primaries,” Barron snapped out, unnecessarily, he knew. His people knew their business, as well as any spacers he had ever seen. They’d been good when he’d taken command of Dauntless, and he hadn’t hesitated to use his family name to secure a few special additions like Atara and Fritzie. But now he truly realized what his people had become. He wondered if they even needed him anymore. They all knew their jobs, and they executed them with almost frightening proficiency.

  “Blue and Scarlet Eagle squadrons have disengaged, sir. They report fuel status critical.”

  “Have them get clear of enemy weapons range and then cut their engines. We’ll pick them up after we take out this battleship.” The idea that Dauntless might fail to destroy its adversary never entered his mind. The Union ship was as good as crippled without thrust capacity. Barron didn’t even have to close to its weapons perimeter…he could pick it apart with his longer-ranged primaries. It almost seemed too easy. Indeed, compared to Dauntless’s other struggles over the past year and a half, it was too easy. His people had been honed in battle with opponents like Katrine Rigellus and her razor-sharp Alliance crew…and behind enemy lines, trapped and outnumbered, running a gauntlet to destroy the Union’s main supply base. A one on one fight with a crippled enemy battleship seemed almost like an exercise.

  Except you still lost people. Less than usual, but men and women who followed you are dead in this fight.

  He felt a wave of guilt at his confidence, and at the relief he felt that casualties were relatively light. No matter how great a victory he won, he’d long ago sworn to himself that he would never forget that the blood of his crew was the currency with which he paid for his triumphs. Even when, very occasionally, one came cheap.

  He knew the Blues and the Scarlet Eagles had suffered more losses in their attack on the Union vessel. Battleships relied on their own interceptors to defend them against fighter attack, but they also mounted dozens of small laser turrets. Any attack, even one against a vessel stripped of its defensive fighter screen, would suffer some degree of losses to this deadly fire. Barron deliberately looked away. He didn’t want to see, not now. There was nothing he could do about it, not one man or woman he could save by focusing on the losses while the battle still went on. There would be time for that later, when he was alone. When he owed nothing
to his crew’s morale and he could sit in the solitude of his office or his quarters…and feel pain for those lost. And the guilt for sending them to their deaths.

  “Both Blue and Scarlet Eagle leaders confirm your orders, Captain. They have transmitted their positions and vectors.”

  “Very well, Commander.” He still wasn’t used to the “Scarlet Eagles” designation. Timmons’s unit had been called the “Red Eagles,” but Dauntless already had a Red squadron, and confusion in battle could get men and women killed. Barron didn’t like insisting that Timmons make a change—after all, he knew how superstitious fighter pilots could be about such things—but he did it anyway. In the end, the star pilot hadn’t put up much of a fight, just one perfunctory objection. Barron suspected Timmons considered ‘scarlet’ a synonym for red, and therefore a sop to whatever subconscious concerns he had about tempting the gods of flight by making changes.

  “Primaries charged and ready, Captain.”

  “Batteries are to fire at will until the enemy is destroyed.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Barron leaned back in his chair, some of the exhilaration he’d felt earlier slipping away. He wished he could escape from Dauntless’s bridge, flee to the sanctuary of his office where he could face the conflicting emotions. Part of him, at least, felt less like a soldier, fighting for a cause…and more like an executioner. A murderer.

  He knew that was unfair. He would have accepted the surrender of the Union vessel, and he knew any prisoners he took would be treated humanely in Confederation custody. But Union ships rarely yielded. His mind drifted back to the struggle at Santis, the great battle with Captain Rigellus and Invictus. Alliance ships never surrendered either, though that was about honor and the codes mandated by their culture. Barron hadn’t fully understood the fanaticism of the Alliance spacers when he’d fought that fateful battle out on the Rim, but he’d read all he could since then on the history of the Palatians, and on the militaristic empire they had built in just over half a century.

  The ancestors of the Alliance had been subjugated, their world conquered, their people enslaved. They had endured generations of misery, and when they finally threw off the shackles, they built a culture centered in strength. Never again…those words became their mantra, and the core of their national philosophy. Barron didn’t approve, at least not of the extremes to which their stark society had taken its mandate, but he understood.

  The Union, however, was something utterly alien and contemptuous to him. A self-proclaimed egalitarian republic, in reality it was an oligarchy ruled by a rapacious class of politicians, one in which all but the most highly placed lived grim lives of hard work and deprivation. The prohibition against surrender was enforced in a practical and brutal way, by holding the families of spacers responsible for their actions. Any Union personnel yielding would do so knowing their parents, spouses, children, and siblings would pay for the crime with their lives…and few doubted the rapacious efficiency of the Sector Nine intelligence agency in such matters.

  Barron detested the Union. He considered it a blot on humanity, a threat to every other nation. Yet the men and women his people killed were little more than slaves. They had no choice, unless you could consider watching everyone you cared about murdered for your own failures a choice. Every Union ship his people destroyed was one small step toward winning this war…and losing it was unthinkable. But each victory also meant more unfortunate human beings slaughtered, people who had been consigned to an unending nightmare, simply because of the misfortune of being born on the wrong worlds.

  His eyes never left the main display, even as he wrestled with such thoughts. His people were doing their jobs magnificently, Dauntless’s gunners carving up the Union battleship like some kind of roast on a holiday table. It was clean looking, at least on Barron’s readouts. Words, numbers, diagrams. He knew the reality was quite different, that on the dying Union ship, men and women were suffering unimaginable fear and torment.

  It will be over soon, at least, he thought, listening as Dauntless’s primaries fired yet again. Almost as if in answer, the bridge erupted into cheers as the small ovoid vanished from the tank. The enemy ship’s reactor containment had failed, releasing the equivalent of a miniature sun inside the vessel. The destruction was complete—there was nothing left of Dauntless’s adversary now, save for a cloud of plasma and a blast of hard radiation.

  It was another victory, but the thrill was gone for Barron, even the sense of achievement. No matter how many battles his people fought, how many of their enemy they defeated, each struggle just seemed to lead to the next. It seemed war, once begun, had no end. Only more killing, more death.

  “My congratulations to the gunners, Commander,” he said, trying not to sound as robotic as he felt. “Another outstanding performance.”

  “Yes, sir.” He could hear a hint of something in Travis’s tone. Either his first officer was feeling the same conflicting emotions, or she was picking up on his.

  Or both…

  “Bring us around, Commander. Let’s go fetch the rest of our fighters.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “And send out the recovery shuttles. We’ve got some pilots out there to pick up before they run out of life support.”

  * * *

  “You called for me, Captain?” Atara Travis stood at the open doorway, staring tentatively inside. She wouldn’t come in without an express invitation, Barron knew. Not though he’d called for her, nor even because she was his best, most trusted friend. Dauntless’s first officer tread an odd and highly specific line with him between discipline and friendship. He’d never been able to quite figure it out, why in some situations she could sit back, call him Tyler, and even once in a while, on those rare occasions when either of them drank, tie one on with her old friend with nary a salute in sight, yet in others she displayed a surprising degree of formality. She was always proper with him in front of the crew, of course, but it was her behavior in private that varied so widely.

  “Yes, Atara, come in. Sit down.” He waved toward the small counter separating the tiny kitchen in the captain’s quarters from the main room. “I just had tea sent up. Pour yourself some if you’d like.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She walked across the room, grabbing the small teapot and filling a cup. She turned around, facing Barron again. Then she walked over, sitting in one of the chairs flanking the sofa where Dauntless’s captain, in a surprising display of relaxation, was actually semi-sprawled out. Not lying exactly, but not quite sitting either.

  “It’s just us here, Atara. You can check the ‘captains’ and ‘sirs’ at the door.” He smiled, just in case his tone wasn’t enough to assure her he wasn’t scolding her, just inviting her to relax.

  “Commander Fritz reports that all systems are operational…” Travis paused. “But, she also advises…and this is exactly how she put it…that she’s got everything taped and glued together and about half the equipment on this ship could fail at any time if somebody so much as looks at it the wrong way.” Travis’s tone was lighter than it had been, but Barron could hear the worry there too. Dauntless had come back from the grueling battles behind the Union lines battered and barely patched together, functional only by the grace of God…and the unmatched skill of her engineering team. She’d desperately needed a full repair and refit in spacedock then, but she hadn’t gotten one. Instead, she’d spent an additional six months on the front, there because the Confederation needed enough ships to deter any immediate moves by the Union…and because, for all she’d been through, there had been a backlog of ships even more in need of repairs.

  “Well, it looks like her tape and whatever else she used managed to hold up long enough. I just got the orders by direct comm. We’re coming off the line. We’re to proceed to the fleet base on Dannith immediately for extended repairs…” His smile broadened. “…and shore leave for all personnel.” Barron needed a break, he knew that much. He needed time for his head to clear, and a few months
with no life and death decisions was just the prescription. And he was certain Atara and the rest of the crew were just much as in need of a rest.

  “That’s good news, Tyler. The crew will be thrilled. Why don’t you make an announcement?”

  “I will. It will be good to get her back into top shape again, won’t it? We’ve earned our pay, but the last full refit we had was before we went to Archellia. Since then, every break we’ve had has been cut short, the repairs underway slapped together half-finished.”

  “We really need it. If we didn’t have Commander Fritz, I doubt we’d have a functioning system aboard.”

  Barron nodded. No one had to tell him what a precious asset Anya Fritz was to his crew…even if she was a terror who drove her staff almost to the point of insanity. Barron had heard half a dozen of the nicknames the engineering crews had for their commander, and he didn’t presume to think they’d all made their way to the captain’s ears.

  His eyes darted back to Travis. There had been something in her tone. Concern? “What is it, Atara?”

  “Sir?”

  “Something’s bothering you. So, spill it.”

  “It’s nothing, Tyler. Really.” She paused. “I was just wondering…”

  “Wondering what?”

  “Well, why would they send a routine order to report for service and shore leave directly to the captain, rather than to me?” She looked up at him. “Was it on the regular line?”

  Barron hesitated, tension suddenly weighing on him. “No, it was on the Priority One channel.”

  Travis frowned. “Does that seem like a normal use of the Priority One channel, Ty? Maybe I’m worrying about nothing, but it seems an order like that would have come in with the normal housekeeping traffic.”