Queen of the Void (The Void Queen Trilogy Book 1)

by Michael Wallace

  The enemy made to charge. Capp drove them back, killing a raider and hitting several others. New marines soon replaced her losses, plus some. She soon had nearly sixty men and women, including Nix, Bergerand, and several civilians—a strong enough force to pin down the enemy mech units. Someone dragged up a heavy-caliber machine gun, which added to Capp’s firepower.

  If only she could spot the jamming mechanism. It had to be in there somewhere.

  Though she’d forced a stalemate, the enemy gunfire was too fierce to advance. How was she going to get forward? The enemy kept firing grenades, trying to either blow apart her defenses or drop them into the bunker. The only thing that saved her was the short ceiling, which made it impossible to get them over the top; they bounced off and fell short before they reached Capp’s position.

  Protected by their guns, the raiders continued to place charges against the blast doors into the command center, and Capp couldn’t stop them.

  Maybe she shouldn’t. Maybe that was her angle.

  “Listen to me!” she shouted. She grabbed nearby marines and shook them to get their attention over the thunder of gunfire. “They’re going to blow the doors. When that happens, we charge. Pass it on.”

  Nix shook her shoulder. “Are you nuts? We’re not going to take them. There are too many, and our bullets just bounce off them. Even this thing,” he added bitterly, waving his gun prosthetic, which was so hot it shimmered.

  “We just need to find that jammer.”

  “What does it look like?” someone else asked.

  “You’ll know it when you see it, mate. Gotta be big to put off a signal strong enough to go through two sets of blast doors.”

  “Look out!” someone cried.

  She glanced over the wall. Four raiders ran back from the blast doors to rejoin their comrades. They threw themselves into the bunker, and all the raiders hunkered in place.

  “Everyone down!” Capp said.

  She dropped her weapons, ducked, and clamped her hands over her ears. The explosives detonated. The tunnel shook, and Capp was semi-stunned as she rose. She snatched up her rifle and her hand cannon and leaped over the wall with a scream. Her voice sounded muffled, like her head was underwater.

  Other marines came roaring over the top of the wall with her. With them, Nix and Bergerand and several technicians and base workers, all shouting and firing. The raiders were rising, too, but more slowly, and most of them were looking toward the blast doors to see the results of their work. Incredibly, the doors still stood, only slightly more damaged than before. A few of the raiders went striding toward them to investigate, apparently not noticing the mass of enemies charging them.

  Capp tossed a grenade ahead of her. It landed in the middle of the raiders and detonated. While they were still picking themselves up, stunned and struggling, she hurled herself over their barricade and into their midst. Marines came in all around her. The scene was chaos with gunfire and struggles.

  The mech units hurled aside the Albion fighters, but there were too many, and the marines swarmed the raiders and pulled them down through sheer numbers. They bashed them with rifle butts, tried to break the mechanical arms and legs, and used knives to stab at joints and pry open seals. Two marines got an enemy’s helmet off and shot him in the face, even as he thrashed, injuring his assailants to the end.

  Capp looked frantically about her. There it was! A machine on a tripod with wires and funnel-like attachments pointed toward the damaged blast doors. The device showed a flashing purple screen, and the machine was vibrating when she grabbed it. She drew her knife and tried to cut the wires, but they were covered in a thick, nylon-like sheath. She tried to tip it over to get at the underside. It was bloody heavy.

  Nix came stumbling past her. He swung his gun attachment like a club and cracked the faceplate of a raider who’d been dragged down by several attackers and was trying to regain his feet.

  “Help me!” she cried.

  Capp and Nix heaved the device onto its side to expose the wires beneath. There were several smaller ones, and she hacked at them with her knife. She cut a green wire, then a red one, and finally, got through two black wires. The screen died.

  “That’s it!” Smythe cried through her com. “You brought the thing down. Rodriguez can access the missile arrays.”

  “Aye. Going to fall back now.”

  “Negative. Captain says you are to hold your position. We can’t risk another jammer coming up against the door.”

  Capp looked around in dismay. The marines were finishing off the last of the raiders, but at terrible cost. Men and women lay all around her, some dead, others clutching broken arms and gashed-open bellies. One was Bergerand, who lay writhing a few feet away, his knee bent at a bad angle. More than half her force was either dead or wounded.

  She couldn’t hold here. Not with the forces left to her.

  A commotion came from down the hallway, and a group of about two dozen marines came sprinting toward them, running flat out. Clanking after them, a dozen raiders. There would be no retreat whether she wanted it or not.

  She found a hand cannon on the ground, popped a bomb from her belt, and shoved it in the gun’s rear loading bay.

  “All right, you blokes. We ain’t going down without a fight.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Catarina watched the viewscreen with grim determination. She’d fired broadsides and launched missiles and torpedoes, while her supporting warships unleashed their own missiles and cannon fire. McGowan’s ship, Peerless, found itself in a ship-on-ship face-off with one of the star wolves. The two traded blows for several minutes before a Peerless broadside cracked the enemy’s armor, and it withdrew.

  But there were too many star wolves, and they had the luxury of hammering Void Queen while picking apart her defenses. One of her schooners fell under the guns of a star wolf, which hammered relentlessly with its pummel gun as it tried to squirm away. Catarina directed missiles to relieve the schooner, but not in time. It detonated.

  McGowan’s missile frigate was the next to face the wrath of the Scandians. Tired of being hounded by the missile platform, a pair of wolves dove in and forced the frigate away from Peerless, where they set upon her mercilessly. Soon, she was listing, engines blown, gasses venting from a dozen fissures into space. Her bridge didn’t respond, and the ship drifted away, dead.

  With a third of the fleet’s missile support lost, the star wolves redoubled their efforts to disable or destroy the two navy cruisers. Void Queen fought off one star wolf, only to have another charge from the opposite flank. She sent her falcons at it, but pummel guns chased them away. The four strikers ran the gauntlet of other enemy craft, and somehow emerged unscathed beyond the action.

  “Deck shield at eighteen percent,” Jane warned after torpedoes forced the latest enemy to withdraw. The AI’s neutral tone only made the warning all the more ominous. “Mid shield twenty-seven percent. Aft shield, forty-eight percent.” She stopped her pronouncement. “Warning, level two detonation expected.”

  Catarina was on the com with the gunnery, which had taken damage through the bombproofs and temporarily lost the cannons in the main battery. She whipped her head up to the main screen at Jane’s warning.

  An enemy missile penetrated countermeasures and slammed into the ship. Alarms went off, and the electrical systems flickered. Jane resumed her catalog of the ship’s ailments, even as another star wolf approached to hit Void Queen from above. The main battery was not yet ready to fire, and Catarina could only stand by and absorb the punishment while her crew tried a variety of lesser measures to drive off the enemy.

  Was this it? Was it really her destiny to die out here in the void, defending a bit of rock in an uninhabited system? Doing the bidding of the Albion crown, dying like a good soldier? Curse McGowan. Curse Admiral Drake. Curse Albion. How had she let herself be dragged into this mess?

  And then Smythe shouted that he had the base commander. Capp’s forces had broken the quarantine around
Fort Alliance’s headquarters, and Rodriguez had access to his missile batteries. She gave Smythe orders to pass along to Capp (hold your position!), then called the base commander.

  “Get those missiles in the air.”

  “What is our target?” Rodriguez growled.

  “Pick a damn target. Just get them off my back.”

  “You got it, Vargus. Brace yourself.”

  She turned the main screen away from the nearby action and to Fort Alliance. Bombproofs retracted, and several batteries lifted. Moments later, missiles streaked from the surface of the moonlike asteroid. Soon, the sky was filled with incoming fire, far more than McGowan’s destroyed frigate could have managed.

  The base commander had targeted three separate wolves. The first, and closest to the fort, barely commenced countermeasures before missiles slammed into its decks. It was one of the ships that had recently been targeting Void Queen, forced to withdraw after suffering significant damage, and the new assault was too much. A missile punctured the forward deck, and a secondary explosion burst through the bridge. Several more struck it in quick succession.

  Finally, one of the missiles punctured a bulkhead and hit what must have been a battery. A massive detonation tore the star wolf in two. The final few missiles exploded unnecessarily against the resulting debris.

  The second and third star wolf took lesser damage, but much of this hit the rear shields protecting the plasma engines. By the time Alliance’s bombardment ran its course, these two wolves were dropping globules of plasma to keep from losing their engines. They fled from the fort in a path that would take them right at Void Queen.

  McGowan called. “Here they come. Hit them as they go by, and I’ll finish them.”

  Peerless came sliding in behind Void Queen. Smoke leaked from her decks, and one of the engines sputtered, but she was intact. These cruisers could take a beating.

  “Get the other ships behind,” she said. “We need to hold off those other star wolves before they join the flight.”

  “Obviously, Vargus.” He cut the call.

  Catarina was too focused to bristle at his tone. She called the gunnery. “Barker, you there?”

  “Aye, Captain?”

  “Give me a status.”

  “Two guns off their carriages, but I’m bringing them offline so we can fire the rest. Give me three, four minutes.”

  She glanced at the oncoming star wolf. It would be too close to manage. “Hold the guns. Mark-IVs on my command.”

  “Right.”

  Void Queen had nearly expended the torpedoes she had at hand, and while others were on their way up from the armory, she’d suffered damage to the conveyor system and it was taking too long. The battle cruiser only got off three torpedoes before the star wolf was past. Catarina hit it with her deck guns, and managed to further weaken the enemy ship’s engine. One of the torpedoes got through and struck it another blow to its underside. The wolf listed, but continued on its way.

  Until it reached Peerless. McGowan held his nerve, even as other star wolves fired past his defensive perimeter to hit him with pummel guns. When the wounded star wolf crossed his path, giving a desperate attempt to twist away, he swung around and let loose with his cannon. Kinetic fire shredded what was left of the enemy’s armor. It drifted away, riddled with holes and venting gasses. Another gutted victim of the fight.

  The final star wolf of those targeted by Fort Alliance went past Void Queen. It struck the battle cruiser with concentrated fire, and warnings flashed along Catarina’s console. The shields couldn’t take any more abuse.

  Lomelí shouted from the defense grid computer that Barker had the main battery ready to go.

  “Fire at will.”

  Void Queen shuddered as it hurled hundreds of tons of kinetic shot at the enemy. Explosions ripped along the length of the star wolf. Plasma shot out the rear, an explosion burst through its deck, and the armor peeled open like a tin can torn apart by a pair of pliers. Suddenly, half the ship was on the outside as chunks of debris hurled themselves into the void.

  Cheers rang across the bridge of Void Queen.

  Three star wolves down. And at that moment, Fort Alliance’s batteries got off another shot. This time they targeted the ships trying to break through McGowan’s defenses. The war junk was under attack now, her armor cracking apart. Only the pending arrival of more missiles forced her tormentors to withdraw.

  Two more star wolves took moderate damage in this barrage. The surviving enemies—still stronger in numbers than the Albion forces, regrouped. McGowan called Catarina during the pause in the fighting.

  A shadow darkened his voice. “We can’t drive them away, Vargus. We’re not strong enough. We’ll have to pull back to Fort Alliance and let her batteries shield us.” His voice turned grim. “Those marines have got to hold on.”

  “You’re getting info from the base?” she asked.

  “I am. Not looking good, is it?”

  “No, McGowan. But the battle could still be won.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Brief updates had come through during the last hour of fighting. Capp was holding on, but barely. There were more raiders joining the fight, which was now entirely focused on the command center. The raiders’ lack of discipline had hurt them early on, but they seemed to understand the key to victory was taking those missile batteries offline, and the hell with the looting until that was accomplished.

  “And what about the other nine wolves?” she said. “If we can’t beat this force, how are we going to handle the Scandian reinforcements?”

  “You’re right, Vargus. We’ll have to take the fight to the enemy.”

  “And we’ll have to win it in . . .?” Catarina glanced at Smythe with raised eyebrows.

  “Six hours until they arrive,” Smythe said.

  “Six hours,” she told McGowan.

  He let out his breath. “All right, let’s ready the charge.”

  But the enemy took the choice out of their hands. The remaining star wolves began to withdraw. They jostled for position as they fell back, slowing only long enough to pound Ravelin one more time on their way out. It appeared to be preventative, but Catarina knew that the small secondary fortress provided no threat to the enemy. The Scandians had already rubbled her defenses and destroyed her guns. Of the ninety crew manning the position, over eighty had died in the attack. The rest were trapped in pockets of air beneath heaps of shattered rock.

  Soon, the surviving Scandian warships slipped free and gained the freedom of open space beyond the asteroid cluster. They made a course to meet the nine additional star wolves, and McGowan called for Catarina and the other captains to hold position while he took advantage of the lull to approach Fort Alliance.

  The barges and smaller schooners had stayed hidden across the surface of the moonlike asteroid during the fight, but now McGowan called up one of the ships holding marines in stasis. The intention was to shuttle them toward the main crater, where fighting still raged beneath the surface.

  But before the reinforcements could land, Capp called, exulting. The raiders were throwing down weapons and surrendering. The Scandians claimed they’d been running low on ammunition, unable to mount a final assault. Those three ships hit by the initial missile barrage from the fort had been bringing promised reinforcements and resupply. When the star wolves withdrew, the fight went out of the raiding party.

  Catarina sank into her chair exhausted. She didn’t know how long of a reprieve they’d gained, but for now, the fighting had come to a halt. They had won a crucial victory.

  #

  Olafsen raged across the bridge. Ragnar Forkbeard’s fresh force of nine star wolves had maneuvered into position and demanded that the two brothers halt their battered fleet.

  Bloodaxe was wounded and bleeding. Three of the four shields shredded, pummel guns jammed, missile bays melted into slag. The com system was sputtering, and he couldn’t reach the gunnery at all. A crewman rushed onto the bridge to report that a
stasis field had ruptured, and thirty raiders were dead. He’d lost dozens already, along with their mech suits, in the failed assault on the enemy fortress, and those thirty were the bulk of his remaining fighters.

  Enraged by the bad news, Olafsen struck the crewman on the back of the head and sent him tumbling to the floor. Wisely, the man stayed down while waiting for the marauder captain’s anger to burn out.

  “We’re getting a message from Storm Rider,” Björnman said. “Forkbeard is demanding that you take his call.”

  “Ragnar Forkbeard. Curse his miserable soul. I already brought my ships to a halt. What more does he want? I’m inclined to answer with my pummel guns.”

  “Two of the main gun arrays are offline,” Björnman said.

  “I know that, damn you!”

  “Perhaps it would be best to talk to him.” The big man sounded defeated. His shoulders slumped. “He claims he has already spoken to your brother.”

  Olafsen glared at Björnman. “How did this happen? Dammit, how?”

  The chief mate didn’t answer.

  Olafsen wanted to rage, wanted to lop off heads. The Scandian fleet had the firepower and the will to win the battle, but the lack of discipline had doomed their expedition. Marauder captains jumped into battle before they were told, eager to steal glory. Once on the surface, raiders had stopped to loot instead of engaging and exterminating the enemy. The underground structure had proven much deeper and better defended than guessed, and though they’d nearly seized the fort headquarters and with it the base commander, the enemy had launched a counterattack. Missiles from the fort had damaged or destroyed several star wolves, and the entire attack collapsed.

  Björnman glanced at his console, and his face darkened further. “Forkbeard says that if you don’t take his call, his next message will be boarding rockets and pummel guns.”

  Neither of which Bloodaxe could fight off. Nor could most of the other ships in his fleet.