by Jay Allan
They’ll build more, too, and they’ll add the Sigma-9 emitters and whatever else they’ve got into them.
She felt a cold chill. Even if her people managed to take out the enemy behemoth, and that was still a big ‘if,’ first shot notwithstanding, the Highborn would have more of them coming, and probably soon. She’d never even thought of Colossus as something other than a one of a kind vessel. The idea of a Highborn battleline bristling with the monsters terrified her.
“Three hits, Commodore! Two of them directly amidships!”
She’d lost herself in her thoughts for a moment, but she wrenched her mind back as her tactical officer’s words reached her.
Colossus had fired over one hundred weapons, but the range was extreme, and she knew when she’d given the order to shoot that any hit at all would take some luck. But three!
“Well done, gunnery. Now, keep it up. We got the first shot, but they’ll be coming back at us any second. Maintain fire…and let’s blast that thing to bits.”
She’d barely finished when the Highborn vessel did return her fire with its own massive broadside. Flashes of light flew all around on the screen…and then a single one hit dead center, sending a rumbling vibration through Colossus’s control room.
Three to one…so far so good. But we’re just getting started…
* * *
Olya Federov watched on her scanner as Jake Stockton dueled with over a hundred Highborn fighters. Her old squad leader—and friend—flew one of the enemy ships, too, of course, and he did so with a skill and proficiency no enslaved Highborn Thrall could hope to match.
But 100-1 was, well, 100-1. And that hundred enemy ships constituted only a portion of the force surrounding him. Not even Jake Stockton could survive those odds. Soon, Stockton would have two hundred opponents, and then three hundred.
Federov checked the range, and her thrust levels. She was accelerating as much as she dared, but if she pushed any harder, she’d simply zip by Stockton, along with the entire wing she’d brought with her. She needed to get there, but then she needed to match velocity with the dogfighting ships…and show the fighters attacking Stockton just what a truly veteran Confederation wing could do.
If we get there in time…
Federov had a reputation for being cold, and she’d long heard whispered phrases about ice water in her veins and the like. She did tend toward a grim outlook at times—no one who’d been through the fights she had could be any different—but she was mostly shy, a bit socially awkward. Fighter pilots tended to be gregarious sorts, and Federov had tended to avoid the raucous late night festivities in the officer’s clubs. Most of the Federov, the ‘ice queen’ stories derived from mistaking shyness for coldness. Much later, she’d adopted the reputation, made it her own. She’d found it useful, especially as she came to command more and more pilots. Olya Federov, callsign Lynx, the cold-blooded assassin behind a Lightning’s controls, had become a legend of sorts. Less so than Stockton, of course, but still a profound force in the wings. Her years as one of the informal but wildly famous ‘Four Horsemen’ had cemented her place in fighter corps history.
But her fondest memories were of her days in Blue Squadron, with Stockton as the unit’s leader, and thirteen other pilots, all gifted, all talented.
And now, all dead. All except her and Stockton. And she wasn’t about to leave herself completely alone in that group.
“All squadrons, open fire. Now!” She followed up her order by squeezing her own finger and letting loose with a blast from her lasers. Her ships were too far out. Any hit at such a distance would be a miracle, and the lasers would be so attenuated the best they were likely to do was fade the paint a little. But just maybe they could get the attention of the enemy fighters, pull some of them off Stockton before…
She stopped her thought there. No, I’m not going to let you die, Jake, whatever you’ve done.
She fired again, and she counted down the last moments before she was close enough to do some actual harm.
* * *
“Shut those emergency doors, now!” Seb Carruthers had peered around the edge of the bulkhead, but a burst of enemy fire sent him jerking his head back, unsure for an instant if he’d managed to do so while it was still attached.
His Marines had the enemy pinned down in half a dozen locations, the situations there at least close to under control. But everywhere else, all hell was breaking loose. He’d tried desperately to hold the extreme starboard launch bay, but the enemy had just been too strong. He had no real idea how many Marines he had lost in that sector and the adjoining ones, but it was at least a thousand. The enemy had paid a heavy price, too, but they outnumbered his people badly, and he’d been forced to order a pullback despite the ferocity his people had shown.
He was about to repeat the order when he heard a hissing sound followed by a loud clang, as the blast doors shut down, sealing off the bay, and possibly any Marines who were still trapped there. It was a stopgap measure, one that could buy a little time and nothing more. The heavy doors were proof against normal fire, but he didn’t doubt for a second the boarders had heavy explosives. He could pick a new defensive position, gain a few minutes to get his people in place, but that was all. And when the blast doors came down, the enemy would still outnumber his defenders…and they would be that much closer to the reactors and the control center, objectives he knew they could not be allowed to reach.
“Alright, let’s go. Captain Stilton, I want your people in section 2304-A2. There are three corridors leading deeper into the station through there, and they all need to be held.” A pause. “I suspect I don’t need to say this, but I will. They need to be held at all costs.”
“Yes, Colonel.” The officer nodded as he spoke, wincing as he did. Carruthers hadn’t noticed the captain had taken a hit across the back of the neck. The projectile had only grazed him, but the damned thing looked like it hurt.
“Go, Captain. And remember, you’ve got a cross corridor about fifty meters back if you need to shift your forces to a trouble spot.” Carruthers’s tone softened a bit, and he waved for Stilton to go.
He turned toward another officer. “Lieutenant, where is Captain Elliot?” He knew the answer before he heard it.
“He’s dead, Colonel.” The officer gestured toward the blast doors. “Back in the bay.”
The colonel almost asked if the lieutenant was sure, but he stopped himself. If Elliot was still alive and now trapped in the midst of the enemy because of his order to close the doors, Carruthers didn’t want to know.
“That makes Company C yours, Lieutenant. We’ve got the corridors coming out of here covered. We should be able to hold.” For a while. “But there are some large conduits leading into the bay from here, and from the reactors. We can take a chance the enemy will try to get around us that way. Get your people into those service tubes. You should have complete station schematics. Anywhere big enough to get a soldier through, or even a drone, I want it covered…and I want it held. Is that understood?” He’d almost said, ‘at all costs again,’ be he’d held it back. His people knew what was at stake.
“Yes, Colonel!”
Carruthers turned his eyes toward the next officer, and then he heard something, noise reverberating through the blast doors. The enemy was on the other side, and that meant he was running out of time.
“Carlson, take your people to…”
* * *
“General Rogan is falling back again, Admiral. His Marines are forming a defensive line around Reactor Three.”
Barron heard the report, the latest in what seemed like an unending barrage of disasters. Striker was still in the fight, but the enemy soldiers pushing through its corridors had cut off at least three major batteries. Barron had no idea what had happened to the gunners and crew caught in those sections, but the silence of the guns didn’t seem like a good sign.
Striker had lost twenty percent of its fighter capacity as well, and two more bays were threatened. He’d almost ord
ered those areas evacuated to shorten the Marines’ defensive cordon, but the station’s wings were almost back from their first engagement, and he needed the flight decks to land them and get them back out. The fighter battle had gone remarkably well, and while Barron knew that would not be repeated in the next dogfight, he was grateful for anything that went better than expected. So far, the lopsided engagement between the strike forces was the only thing in that category.
Barron hadn’t even looked at the Marines’ casualty figures. He knew what they had to look like, if only from how much of the station’s real estate Rogan and Carruthers had yielded up to the enemy. Neither of the Marine officers were the type to pull back from a fight, and the fact that they had been retreating steadily suggested just how badly they were outnumbered.
He’d been relieved at least that the fighter losses had been lighter than expected, especially considering how much damage the wings had inflicted on their counterparts. But that just meant Striker had to accommodate more returning fighters than Barron had expected. That was in every way a good thing…every way but one.
He’d be landing close to eight hundred of those fighters within a hundred meters of the front lines of the battle to hold the station. It would a massive stroke of luck if he could get the ships all in and the pilots and flight crews out of there before the enemy pushed into the bays themselves…and a bigger one if his crews were actually able to refit the squadrons and get them back out in time.
“Admiral…” It was Anya Fritz’s voice. Barron had long kept an open line to his engineer in battle, though this time Fritz was handling damage control on Striker and not on the smaller Dauntless. It was a gargantuan job, but Barron knew there was no one on the Rim—hell, in the whole damned galaxy—that could handle it better than Fritz.
“What is it, Fritzie?” Barron knew his engineer never called with anything unimportant, certainly not in the middle of a fight.
“Admiral…I want to shut down reactor four. The fighting is just too close. If we’re not careful, we could lose containment, and that would mean…”
Fritz didn’t finish, but she didn’t have to. Striker was a vast construction, but if one of its hybrid fusion-antimatter reactors lost the magnetic bottles containing the antimatter and thermonuclear reactions for even a nanosecond, vast sections of the fortress—if not the whole thing—would be vaporized.
“What will we lose, Fritzie?” Barron would have known the answer to that question on Dauntless, but Striker was not only enormous, it was fighting its first battle. He didn’t have the same feel for its systems and power consumption.
“I can nudge the other units up five percent with a decent margin of safety, at least for now. We won’t be able to keep everything firing at full, but if I shut down the point defense grid, I can probably keep the rest of it going.”
Barron didn’t like it. The enemy fighters bad been soundly defeated in the first exchange, but their numbers would eventually tell. Still, it would be some time before they could rearm and relaunch, and the fight to hold Striker was going on as he sat there.
And Anya Fritz wouldn’t be asking to shut down a reactor if the battle raging through Striker’s compartments and corridors wasn’t right outside its damned door.
“Do it, Fritzie.” Barron glanced up at the display for a few seconds, trying to keep track of the rest of the battle while he dealt with the fight aboard Striker. It was too much, and he knew that…but there was no choice. “Flush the antimatter, Fritzie…and spike the reactor. Then pull your people out.” He hated the idea of basically destroying the reactor, but he didn’t know what had prompted the Highborn to try to board Striker and a number of the fleet’s battleships. He didn’t doubt for a second they’d send their slaves, their Thralls, to sabotage reactors, however, to launch suicide missions to destroy the fortress and the battleships formed up around it from within.
“Yes, Admiral. I was going to suggest that. We’ll need about five minutes. Hopefully the Marines can hold that long.” The doubt in her tone hit Barron like a punch to the gut. Anya Fritz wasn’t easily shaken up, and there wasn’t a doubt in his mind she was worried.
Just do what you have to do, Fritzie…we’ll get you the time you need.” He cut the line, and he turned toward Vinson’s station. “Commander, get General Rogan on my line. Now.”
Barron knew the Marines were hard pressed everywhere…and he had no idea what units the general could get to reactor four…but he was painfully aware of what would happen if Fritz and her people didn’t get the time they needed.
“On your line, Admiral.”
“Bryan…I need you to get some reserves to reactor four. Right away…”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Free Trader Pegasus
Telus Zakaris III
Year 328 AC (After the Cataclysm)
“It’s working, Andi. I’m not sure how, but it’s working.” Sy’s voice was soft, her sadness evident in every word. Vig had been one of Andi’s closest friends, but he’d been Sy’s brother. The two friends had been working around the clock, driven as much by the need to keep busy as by their realization of how important their mission still was.
Andi hadn’t really believed she would find the secret to defeating the Highborn without paying any cost. She’d been on too many expeditions, seen too many of her comrades claimed in the pursuit of ancient imperial artifacts. Tyler’s fleet had paid an almost unimaginable cost in the war so far, and she couldn’t even begin to guess what was happening on all those occupied Hegemony planets. It had been a near certainty her people would be called on the make more sacrifices.
But she hadn’t expected it to be Vig.
Vig had been her friend, someone he’d considered as her own brother. She’d always been able to count on him, and any time she’d needed him, he’d been there.
Now, he was gone.
“That’s good, Sy. Not that I doubted you for a second.” Andi was trying to do exactly what she knew Sy was doing…go about normal business and pretend that nothing was wrong. That Vig wasn’t dead, lying in Pegasus’s medpod in the cargo hold. Andi had resisted moving it out there, but she’d found herself almost falling apart every time she walked across the lower deck and seen it in Pegasus’s tiny infirmary. And as crushed as she was at her friend’s loss, she had work to do. If she failed, not only would Vig’s death have been for nothing, but she could very likely lose Tyler and Cassie, as well, and everyone and everything that meant anything to her. She felt vaguely guilty at her ability to focus on the work at hand, but she did it anyway.
“First, let’s get the thing to analyze the virus engineering data. It might have lost a few of the processes, but it might be able to help fill in some of those gaps. The thing’s probably got more computing power than the Primary System on Megara.”
“I’ve already got it working on that. It’s remarkably functional, but we have to remember, it does have some damage to its core. We’re going to have to double check everything it does just to be sure it’s not malfunctioning in any way.”
“The main system at Striker should be able to manage that. We’re not talking about matching this thing’s capability, just more or less checking it’s math, right?”
“More or less.” Andi got the impression from Sy’s tone she would have been amused at that last comment…if a cloud of sadness and pain hadn’t enveloped them both.
“We were almost out of there, Sy…” Andi cursed herself immediately for backsliding, for speaking of Vig’s death.
“Andi, Vig was my brother, and I loved him. I’ll mourn him in one way or another for the rest of my life. But you need to stop blaming yourself. He was young when he first came to Pegasus, I know that…though not all that much younger than you were. But that was a long time ago. He was his own man, Andi, and a veteran Badlands prospector among other things. He knew the risks every time he headed out here…and if he’d known what was going to happen this time, it wouldn’t have delayed him for a second. He lived the l
ife he wanted to live, and he’d never have been able to do that without you. We have to let him go, at least for now. We have to make certain his death was in a good cause, that he helped to save others. The real tragedy would be if he died for nothing.”
Andi shook a little, struggling again to hold back tears that were pushing to escape. “You’re right, Sy, I know that. But Vig…” Her voice was shaky, but she didn’t cry. Not quite.
The two sat silently for a moment. Then, Sy spoke, clearly trying to change the subject. “I’ve been looking through the data banks as I hooked them up. This thing has all kinds of imperial history stored on it…far more than we’ve ever known.”
Andi looked at Sy, completely aware of what her friend was doing. But she went along with it. She ached for Vig, but honestly, between her friend’s death, her fear for Tyler, and the open wound of missing her daughter, she just couldn’t take any more darkness. She needed something else to think about, something to do.
“Let’s take a look at everything it’s got on the Highborn first. We’re trying to re-create the virus, but anything about how it was used, or any other ways the imperials fought against them, would be useful, too.”
“I think there’s a fair amount about all that.” Sy looked up at her friend. “If you help me, I think we could get through most of it in a few hours.”
Andi managed something vaguely resembling a smile. Sy was full of shit, at least about needing Andi’s help. Every one of Ellia’s people would be more useful at combing through ancient data banks. But she was grateful for the lifeline her friend had thrown to her, for the distraction she so desperately needed.
* * *
“Humanity didn’t originate in the empire.” The words were still a shock to Andi, even though she’d helped to uncover that particular bit of data. Even in her younger days, amid the misery of the Gut, she’d always looked on the lost empire as man’s origin. But the histories she and Sy had found were clear that wasn’t the case.