by Jay Allan
Barron turned and issued his own orders. He’d done everything possible to ensure the battle could continue even if Striker’s control hub was destroyed or taken. Every still-operational gunnery station on the fortress was on its own. The weapons would continue to fire as long as they remained functional and had power. The engineering sections had their orders, too…and the absolute priority for energy flow, save for minimal life support, was the weapons array. Barron had lost count of how many power conduits had been cut, and how many reroutes were keeping vital systems going, both built in backups and temporary cables strewn about by the damage control teams.
“I’m not sure you chose the best place to come.” Barron tried to smile at Akella, but all he managed was a weak grin. “I think you should stay here.” He pointed toward the heaviest section of the barricades. “And stay down when the enemy gets here…no matter what.”
Akella returned the smile, achieving something a bit better than Barron had managed. “I appreciate your concern, Tyler, but all the same, I think I’ll try to use this thing.” She held up the assault rifle Barron had given her. “As you said, we need every gun right about now.”
Barron was going to object, try to insist that Akella hide behind the barricade. He had his arguments ready…she was vital to the cause, she wasn’t trained as a warrior, the politics of the Pact would be thrown into disarray if she was lost. But the quiet courage she was displaying struck him hard, and he remained silent. He had a hundred reasons to keep her out of the fight, and only one to allow her to engage the enemy. She was an honorable woman, and she knew what was at stake. She had a right to choose how she would face what was coming, and Barron knew he had to respect that.
“Be careful, Akella. Stay low. The fire’s likely to get pretty heavy in here.”
“I will. And you too, Admiral…the fleet needs you. We all need you.”
Barron was about to respond when a shout went up among the Marines. He reacted instinctively, pushing Akella down behind the barricade, and following her himself, pulling his rifle from his back as he did.
Half a second later, all hell broke loose.
* * *
The explosion tore through the starboard wall, sending chunks of destroyed equipment and shards of metal flying across the bridge. Sonya caught something in the side, and she looked down and saw the blood soaking through her shirt. She didn’t feel the impact, not at first, but then the pain made its delayed appearance.
She winced, trying to hide it, along with the fact that she’d been hit at all. A quick scan of the bridge confirmed her initial expectations. A lot of her people were down, and almost certainly, a number of them were dead.
She looked down at her own side, feeling around with her hands. It was a bit of metal, not very large, and still sticking out. She tried to grip it with her fingers, but they kept sliding off the slick, bloody surface. Finally, she felt movement—and pain—and the shard slipped out and bounced off her leg before landing on the floor.
The wound wasn’t serious, she decided that almost immediately. It was bleeding fairly badly, but she tried to ignore it. Colossus’s epic duel with its counterpart had reached the final stages. The two ships were battered wrecks, their hulls torn open, thousands of their spacers dead at their stations, or blasted out into the icy vacuum. Nothing mattered just then, nothing but being the last one standing.
“Internal comm is down, Commodore.” She could hear in the comm officer’s tone, he too was injured. Pain had a sound all its own. “No…not entirely down. It looks like the network is cut in a number of places. I can’t reach engineering, but I do have several of the forward turrets.”
“Acknowledged.” Sonya wondered if she’d hidden her pain any better than the comm officer.
She looked around at the bridge, and she saw a nightmare. There were fires raging just beyond the destroyed wall, and the deck was littered with dead and wounded spacers…her people, torn apart, burned, bleeding, struggling to hold their hands over gaping wounds. She was a combat veteran and the child of a navy family, but she’d never seen anything like the horror unfolding around her.
And none of it mattered, not then. All that mattered, the only goal in her focused mind, was to destroy the Highborn superbattleship. Only one of them could survive, could come through the fight that had been raging for twelve hours…and that one was going to be Colossus. She refused to lose, she refused to let her enemy escape…whatever it cost.
“Do we have a line to the main engine room?”
“Yes…it’s a little staticky, but I think we can get a message through.”
“I want engines at full…whatever the hell thrust we can get, and damned the risk. We’re going right at that thing. We’ll ram them if need be, but I’ll be damned if they’re going to get out of this system.”
The officer listened, seeming both inspired and terrified at her command, and at the grave, somber tone of her voice. Then he turned and repeated the order.
Sonya stared straight ahead, through the fire and death and debris that had been her bridge, and in her eyes there was only raw determination.
She wondered for an instant if she still clung to her sanity…and then she decided she didn’t care.
* * *
“Alright, let’s move. Things are a damned wreck around here, but climbing through hell is what Marines were made for.” Johnny Givens waved his arm, gesturing for his Marines to climb out of the shuttle and into the blasted corridors of Fortress Striker. There were Marines coming in from all over the fleet, but Givens had insisted the pilots of his shuttle dock as close as possible to the control center. The communications from the fortress had become spotty, and to Givens that meant only one thing.
The control center was threatened…or even under attack.
There was another ‘or’ to that thought, the next logical step, but Givens pushed it aside. He refused to believe his people might be too late.
“Go, go…we’re out of time.” Even as he shoved the last of them into the corridor, he could hear fighting sounds at the head of the column. He’d have landed right on top of the control center if it had been possible, but that vital section was buried deep inside the station’s hull. His people would have to make their way to the command deck, and very likely fight their way in. But Tyler Barron was in the control center, and Johnny Givens commanded Dauntless’s Marine contingent. He didn’t care how many Highborn Thralls his people had to fight, how difficult a journey it would be to reach their destination. No one was going to stop his people from protecting the admiral.
No one.
He pushed his way past the Marines clogging the corridor, heading toward the sounds of combat. His rifle was in his hands, and his magnification goggles were pulled down from his helmet, set at 2X. He was ready to plunge into the fighting, but when he finally made it to the front of the column, the firefight was over. Three of his people were down, two of them dead. Half a dozen enemy bodies littered the corridor up ahead.
He turned toward a private standing next to him, and he gestured toward the wounded Marine. “Get him back to the shuttle…and then catch up with us.” Dauntless’s Marines didn’t have any medics or normal support services. They were equipped for shipboard duty and not invasions or protracted combat. His wounded would mostly be on their own, he knew…but he still couldn’t leave them lying on the deck bleeding when he had any alternative. The shuttle had medical supplies, and it offered a relatively safe refuge, and a chance for a wounded Marine to try to give himself first aid.
Givens turned back and moved to the front of the column. “Okay,” he shouted back to the Marines lined up behind him. “Let’s get to the control center…and make sure none of these bastards get near the admiral!”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Forward Base Striker
Vasa Denaris System
Year 328 AC (After the Cataclysm)
Striker’s control room had plunged into the fiery depths of some nightmarish hell. Gunfire tore into ha
stily assembled barricades thrown together from crates and chunks of blasted equipment. Workstations were torn into bits and pieces by the withering gunfire, and they exploded into wild showers of sparks. Structural supports weakened and collapsed under the punishment. And everywhere, men and women fought and died.
The Marines in the forward line held grimly, pouring fire into the advancing Highborn troops. The enemy dead lay in piles at the entrances to the room, mounded up so high the soldiers coming up were using the bodies of their comrades as cover. The defenders had repulsed no fewer than five attacks, but they had taken losses in each successful effort, and less that half the Marines and spacers who’d begun the desperate battle were still standing.
Tyler Barron crouched down behind the second barricade, just back from the most intense fighting. He felt the urge to lunge forward, to stand with his people in the most forward position, but he also knew his responsibility. He was the overall commander, of the fleet and of Striker, and the weight of that duty was no less for the lack of any formal Pact commission.
He was lying against the wall of metal crates, holding his rifle in one hand, while the other worked the portable comm unit connected to what remained of Striker’s communications network. He was checking status reports from the fleet, squinting to see the maps and reports on the tiny screen. The battle would reach its climax soon, he knew, if only because the two sides couldn’t endure the punishment much longer. He was proud of his people, and he pained for those he lost. He had no idea what that number was—thankfully—but it was certainly in the tens of thousands, and probably the hundreds of thousands. That was immense carnage, and yet, Barron told himself, such numbers were almost meaningless in a fight over the freedom and survival of hundreds of billions.
He could hear Bryan Rogan’s voice, hoarse from hours of desperate screaming. Rogan was encouraging his Marines, and the spacers who’d taken up weapons and joined them on the firing line. There was little else the general could do. There were no more tactics, no elaborate strategies, no decisions on where to go. His people had pulled back as far as they could. Now, they would hold where they were…or they would all die.
Barron reached down to the comm unit, about to check in again with Atara Travis on Dauntless…but he never finished punching in the code.
A series of lower, louder shots rang out, and a section of the barricade was blown apart. Another half dozen of the shots—small rockets of some kind, Barron guessed—ripped into the control room and shattered the barricades.
Just as the enemy forces surged forward.
Barron dropped the comm unit and pulled up his rifle. Private, general, spacer, admiral…everyone left in the control center was a rifleman now. He fired, and then again, taking down two advancing enemy soldiers.
His cover was mostly gone, but he crouched down behind what little was left, and he continued firing. He took down another of the Thralls, even as his eyes caught a strange, bright flash…and then another.
He saw one of his people drop, and he realized with surprise that the enemy was firing some kind of stunning weapon. The deck was strewn with dead and dying combatants, but as he knelt there, his mind raced to understand why the Highborn would be using stun guns when they had killed so many and were on the verge of victory, at least on Striker’s control center.
Then, suddenly it was clear, and a near panic took him.
The enemy hadn’t come for Striker…they had come for him.
* * *
“Abandon the bridge…all of you, get out of here now!” Sonya Eaton staggered across the deck, moving toward the main tactical station. The officer who’d manned that post was dead, lying about a meter away from his chair, his head bent at a grotesque angle from his body.
She had a difficult time even staying on her feet. Colossus’s engines and dampeners were both critically damaged, and with the two systems cycling between short malfunctions and partial operation, the bridge was experiencing a wild ride from zero gravity to 2 or 3g and back again.
Sonya Eaton commanded the greatest ship any Rim nation—or the Hegemony—had ever possessed, but she knew it was near death. Colossus had been battered until it was little more than a pile of wreckage, and even its still-functioning systems were barely this side of crippled.
She’d shut down three of the reactors that had still been functioning, concerned that damaged containment systems could fail…but she’d needed to keep some energy generation going, and it wouldn’t take more than one microscopic antimatter leak in any of them to destroy all that remained of her ship. She felt a cold shadow, a realism that at any instant that dreaded malfunction could occur. Would she even know? No, almost certainly not. The escaping antimatter would obliterate the ship before she or any of her people realized what was happening.
Her fears and doubts went with her every step, but they didn’t slow her down, nor stop her from doing her duty. As bad off as Colossus was, its opponent was at least as ravaged. The massive Highborn superbattleship was torn open in a dozen places, and massive eruptions burst out into space, like dark metallic volcanoes, the gasses and fluids being expelled freezing almost instantaneously once they cleared the fires and explosions within the battered vessel.
Colossus was no less threatened by internal explosions and spreading fires. The bridge’s radiation alarms had gone off moments earlier, and Sonya almost immediately began evacuating her surviving officers. Most of them were off the bridge, now, though she had no real idea how far the contamination spread. The monitors showed dangerous levels already, and they were rising steadily. But Sonya wasn’t going with her people. She wasn’t going to leave the bridge.
Not until the fight was over.
“Commodore…you have to come with us.” She heard the call, but she couldn’t place the voice. It didn’t matter. She wanted them all off. There was no place safe on the battered ship, she knew, but the radiation on the bridge was already close to lethal levels, and her gut told her they were going to continue increasing.
“I’ll be right behind…” A lie. Sonya Eaton wasn’t leaving the bridge. Not until Colossus destroyed its enemy. “…help the wounded…I want everybody out now.”
She finally made it to the tactical station, and she forced herself into the chair, realizing almost immediately that she’d sat down in a pool of half-congealed blood. It was the kind of thing that might have bothered her once, but she hardly noticed it. She had more urgent things on her mind…like how she could direct the fight still raging. How she could do it alone, without her bridge crew of sixty or more.
“Commodore…everyone is out. Come on…there’s no time.”
“I’m right behind you…go!” She shouted out the order, waving her hands to the officer to emphasize her command. Then, the instant the man reluctantly slipped through the opening, she turned to the workstation. It was damaged, only some of it functional…but she found what she needed. She punched a quick code into the small keyboard, and the heavy emergency door slammed shut. Her people were locked out of the bridge.
And she was locked in.
She worked the controls, bringing taking direct control of one of the forward batteries, the last of Colossus’s main guns still operational. She pulled up the targeting display, letting out a frustrated sigh as the image shook and flickered in front of her. More damage.
The thing wasn’t fully functional, but it was workable, at least partially so. She adjusted the firing solutions, modifying the equations produced by the targeting AI…and she fired.
A near miss.
She slammed her fist down on the workstation, counting silently to herself as the gun recharged. She went into a short coughing spasm, and when she pulled her hand from her mouth, it was wet with blood. Her stomach was wild, tormented, and for all she tried to tell herself it was nerves, when she doubled over and vomited pink-tinged froth all over the deck, she had to acknowledge the effects of the radiation.
As if in response, the alarms sounded again, a different tone…one t
hat signified LD50 levels. Half of a human sampling exposed to the radiation on Colossus’s bridge would die from it. Sonya was an accomplished mathematician, first in her Academy class in several disciplines, but it didn’t take advanced calculus for her to figure she had one chance in two of surviving…assuming she made it through the fight.
Her vision was blurry, and she had one hand on her chair, fighting off the dizziness. She tried to focus, to keep her eyes fixed on the targeting display. She was still working the solutions, but she was having trouble focusing. Her analytical mind was mostly out of the fight, sinking into a whirlwind of confusion and fatigue. All she had left was blind instinct.
Her fingers moved over the controls, her tortured gut in full control of the targeting. A few seconds later, the display moved to the fully charged indicator…and she fired.
She dropped from her chair, landing on the deck, between the seat and its dead former occupant. Her stomach wretched again, and she turned her head to the side and vomited…bright red blood pouring out of her mouth now. But her eyes remained fixed on the display, and she was watching through the blurry haze as her shot struck the enemy ship dead amidships…and a few seconds later, Colossus’ nemesis vanished in the blinding fury of matter-antimatter annihilation.
Colossus had won the duel…by the slimmest of margins.
Sonya Eaton stared at the display for a few seconds, a strange look of grim satisfaction on her face. Then her head dropped the rest of the way to the deck, and she let go of the burden of consciousness.
* * *
“No!” Bryan Rogan’s shout was raw and primal, a ferocious scream that rose above the cacophonous gunfire even as it tore at his parched and aching throat. He’d seen his Marines killed, been forced to give up position after position, been cut off from the rest of the station, unaware of the status of his other units.