The Prodigal Emperor (The Shadow Space Chronicles Book 3)

by Kal Spriggs

  In her the back of her mind she wondered, can I afford to win?

  Lucretta waved a hand, far more focused on the shift that had occurred in the enemy battle line. Her tactical department had already identified a battlecruiser, heavy cruiser, and pair of light cruisers, all with transponders from the United Colonies... and all with energy signatures that were consistent with ships from Amalgamated Worlds.

  Ships of the Dreyfus Fleet, she thought, rightfully mine, being used against me.

  The other ships were harder for them to identify, because they were smaller and had limited their emissions... except for the one which had broadcast. That was a Balor Dagger-class destroyer, she recognized. She had never fought the alien ships, but she had seen the wreckage of those who had. If Lucius's precious fleet had taken damage in battle with them, then that might explain where the rest of his ships were. Even so, Lucius had beaten the Balor in battle solidly enough to capture her intact... which was more than almost anyone else had managed.

  Even with the captured Balor ship, it was a pathetically small addition, a mere nine ships, one of them a Battlecruiser, she would allow, but nothing near the armada she would have expected. In fact, he had shown pure arrogance in the way he delivered the message. There was no attempt to surprise her, to reveal his presence right before a devastating strike... instead, he approached the battle as if it were a foregone conclusion.

  I'm an afterthought, she thought with sudden venom, he thinks he can defeat me with a token force. The surge of anger she felt washed out all of her fear. She felt a sharp pain behind her eyes as she ceased to care about what Marius would do... and if she had only realized it, broke his mental programming. How dare Lucius, the sanctimonious bastard, she would crush him. “Message to all ships. Disregard the transmissions from the enemy. We have them outnumbered and outmatched.”

  In truth, the battlecruiser would be a dangerous opponent as would the Balor ship, but Lucretta knew that she had the numbers to bring down both vessels. A full fighter strike, backed by an assault wave from my 'allies' and my ships will clean up what remains. “In addition, anyone who brings me Lucius Giovanni's head will be rewarded twenty million of whatever currency they want payment.” That stopped the panicked squawking she'd heard over the secondary channels. I do so love properly motivating my minions, she thought absently.

  Even as she thought that, her gaze went back to where the Ranger and her oh-so-helpful Captain continued 'rescue' operations. The mercenary had arrived in the elderly ship only two weeks earlier. She'd come to sign on to Halcyon's privateer program, in a ship that was barely spaceworthy, with barely enough money to afford food for her crew, much less to pay them. How hard to believe she is a plant... she thought, and that the 'engineering failure' was her removing the only other witness to some of Lucius Giovanni's ships slipping in from behind?

  A small, stealthy force could turn the tide, she knew, but only if it had surprise. “Order our own ships to reform,” Lucretta snapped. “I want the House of Kail and Mako at the center rear. Move the Harpy forward on vector three-seven-nine. I want Amazon, Ironheart, and Icequeen on a full reverse vector, active sweep and all crews at full battle readiness. I expect to find ships in that area.” Any of Lucius's ships moving in stealth would be either making minimal maneuvers or would have to be coasting. This attack felt much like the one she had launched against his solar array... save that she wasn't about to fall for it. If her ships caught the enemy vessels with their drives powered down and their defense screens offline, they would be so many vulnerable targets. Besides, she thought, no one builds stealth drives for ships larger than destroyers... so even if he has larger ships in position I should spot them at range.

  She looked over at her sensor feed, “Oh, and tell Captain Vandar to detach his frigate squadron. I want them to sweep up under Halcyon's moon and engage anything hiding there... including the Ranger.” Vandar's four remaining frigates would come in from below the plane of attack, the coup de grace to anyone who planned to hit her open rear.

  She saw confusion at her orders, but her people snapped to it. A moment later they moved with certainty as they thought it through. They didn't know what she had seen that told her there was a force moving to their rear, but they understood that she knew there was... and they trusted her enough to believe her. Already the Harpy moved forward, alongside the quiescent Kraken and safely within the formation of ships.

  Her gaze went back to Lucius Giovanni's formation and her smile became a cold thing. I'm coming for you, she thought, and I will have payment for everything you have taken from me: my lands, my rank, and all my dreams you have destroyed.

  ***

  “No, no, no!” Rory shouted, “You'll damage the equipment in there if you use a breaching charge!”

  “The overpressure blast alone might ruin everything,” Feliks nodded.

  Gunfire whined down the corridor behind them and Gunnery Sergeant Tam Chen snarled behind his armor's helmet. The two had seemed bound and determined to prevent any destruction to their precious base. Tam thought it likely that Gunnery Sergeant Ramirez had purposely got himself shot just so he wouldn't have to deal with Feliks so that left both engineers with Tam and his platoon. While the Lieutenant was with second squad and held off the enemy counterattack at their rear, Tam Chen had first squad and the two engineers.

  As far as Tam could see, the alien base was made up entirely of empty corridors and guards who couldn't seem to differentiate between innocent civilians and the enemy. The first time he had stumbled across a room filled with dead civilians, he had had to choke down vomit. By the third time, he had simply ordered his platoon to ignore surrenders from the enemy. If the Baron disapproved, he could press charges later.

  “This is the shortest route to your precious command center,” Tam snapped. “If we go the long way, they might have time to get in there and activate a self-destruct or something.”

  “They wouldn't!” Rory said with horror.

  “Why not?” Tam asked. “They've already massacred at least a hundred of the local workers by the looks of things.”

  “This base is a priceless...” Rory trailed off. “You know, the self-destruct system on this base would be a fascinating thing to watch in action.”

  I'm going to kill them, Tam thought with venom as he pulled out his breaching charge.

  “Until the fiery explosion at the end,” Feliks nodded. “It utilizes a magma recirculation system which funnels the planetary core's heat into a series of pressure reactors which then power turbines to provide power for the base. If those pressure vessels were to rupture, we would have an extinction level event...”

  “Oh, yes,” Rory nodded, completely ignorant of Tam as the Marine advanced on the pair. “You'd have something like thirty thousand tons of molten rock, fifty thousand tons of molten sodium, and thousands and thousands of cubic meters of superheated steam, all of it rupturing and mixing instantly...”

  Feliks absently stepped out of Tam's way as the Marine walked forward. The engineer pulled out his datapad, “I should calculate the explosive radius.”

  Tam attached the breach charge to the door. “Clear,” he said, and then triggered it.

  The armor shielded him from the blast, but the two engineers were knocked to the ground from the concussion at such close range.

  “What was that!?” Rory bleated in panic.

  Tam waved his first squad forward even as he hoisted both engineers to their feet, “That was a breaching charge. The room beyond is empty, as you can see. Can we move on?”

  Rory peered around through the dust from the explosion, “Huh,” he said, “I guess you're right.” He frowned then, “Was that safe? I mean, couldn't you have killed us from overpressure?”

  Feliks nodded, “Almost certainly. Safe radius for a Mark II breach charge like that is at least ten meters, we were only three meters away. You can suffer internal organ damage and bleeding, concussions, traumatic brain injuries...”

  “Maybe
I should get checked out by a medic,” Rory said as he looked down at himself.

  I am going to kill Gunny Ramirez, Tam thought.

  ***

  Reese looked up as he heard gunfire echo down the corridor. “Great,” he muttered without looking up from his computer console, “some idiot probably got jumpy and mowed down some more of the local workers again.” It wouldn't be the first time since Lauren and Mason's run through the base. Indeed, most of Admiral Mannetti's guards were extremely jumpy. They'd killed something over thirty workers in the weeks since the attack and more annoyingly, they had damaged some of the base in the process.

  Nothing I can't repair, he thought, but still more work for me to do.

  That he had in plenty. Even with the Kraken's systems in lockdown, he had benefited from a firsthand look at the ship's code. Whoever had restored the vessel in the first place had been masterful and Reese regretted the fact that the programmer was dead. Whoever he was, he had merged human and alien code almost flawlessly and probably with far fewer resources than Reese had on hand.

  Reese had become more and more certain that the Illuari had trapped the ships after they captured the base from the Zar, either to kill more of their enemy in case they recaptured the base or simply to kill anyone else who came along. From what they knew, the Illuari were sick bastards like that. If that was the case, the solution might be something in the ship's hardware, something that someone had missed when they first looked the ships over.

  There was the dull thud of an explosion and Reese's eyes went wide. That had to be a breaching charge... which meant this wasn't some guard panicking and mowing down civilians... it was a full scale assault. Reese didn't have to pull up the map on his console to know that he was far from the command section.

  His first thought was that he should head that way and notify Admiral Mannetti of the attack, yet he discarded that plan a moment later. If the enemy had already made it this far, then they were already well within the base's defenses. That, in turn, meant they had a map or at least a good idea of the base's layout. Their priorities would no doubt be to seize the power and command sections. If they had the firepower to make it this far, then Reese would be nothing more than a target if he got in their way.

  Reese could have activated the base's self-destruct capabilities... but he hesitated to do that. For one thing, he might not have time to escape the base. For another, he didn't really want to kill a bunch of innocent people and from what he could guess, the base's power sections would cause a massive explosion that would definitely wipe out the closer civilian towns and maybe even some of the bigger cities.

  Reese stood and switched the console off, careful to power it down and save all his data. Only then did he unplug it from the base's systems and put it in the foam-lined hard case. Whatever happened here, he had copies of everything in the systems. There were thousands of files, with everything from weapons schematics to inventories on the base's storage rooms.

  And access codes for the base, he thought, for when Admiral Mannetti wants to take it back.

  He slipped out of his office and down a corridor, away from where he heard a more constant rattle of gunfire, now. The lighter shots would be the base's guards, he knew, but the deeper barks of the attackers' weapons sounded somewhat familiar as well. Heavy weapons, he thought, probably powered armor. No one in the base would be ready for that. Grenades would be only marginally effective against powered armor and small arms fire would be almost useless.

  Only two nations had powered armor for this kind of assault, he knew. The possibility he couldn't quite discount was that the Centauri Confederation had learned about the base and wanted to seize it for themselves. Yet, far more likely was that the smuggler Mason McGann had warned Lucius and the United Colonies Fleet had assaulted.

  If that was the case, then it was best that he leave before they even knew he was here.

  Reese hurried along and worked his way deeper and deeper in the base until he came to the hidden access tunnel. He had discovered it when he mapped the base schematics against mass imaging of the base... and Admiral Mannetti had been suitably impressed. Clearly it was an escape route of last resort for the original base defenders. The tunnel led almost three kilometers under Brokenjaw Mountain to a small hangar bay. The fact that they had found it empty meant that possibly some of the Zar had escaped the fall of their base to the Illuari a million or more years previously... but Reese didn't much care about that now.

  What he did care about was that Admiral Mannetti had wanted an escape route of her own if some invasion caught her at the base. She had stashed a fast courier vessel there, small and fast, it would be able to break atmosphere and then escape the system hopefully before anyone really noticed it. Reese knew well enough how to pilot a ship and he had brushed off the dust from his old training in the months since in an effort to be more useful to Admiral Mannetti.

  He was certain that Admiral Mannetti wouldn't begrudge him its use, not with the information he carried. If she did, well, that would probably mean that she would have need of it... in which case she would be left behind, and Reese didn't much care in that case. He had little doubt that Lucius would want to deal with both of them rather harshly and Reese would rather it was Admiral Mannetti rather than him.

  I was so close, Reese thought with a last look behind him, so close... and once again Lucius took it all away from me.

  He shut the hatch and locked it and broke into a jog for the courier ship.

  ***

  Chapter XII

  Halcyon Colony, Garris Major System

  (Contested)

  May 1, 2404

  Lucius shook his head as Admiral Mannetti's force shifted. He didn't know what had tipped her off, but she seemed to have noticed something. Whether that meant that Tommy King had been spotted or simply that she had figured out he must be there, Lucius didn't know.

  This entire thing had begun to unfold rather like the Battle of Trinity, he realized. Admiral Mannetti filled the role he had held as the defender of that world, while he seemed to represent a portion of Tommy King's forces and Tommy King seemed to reprise his role. It is damnably similar, he thought, in that I too realized that my flank had been turned and repositioned forces to cover it.

  He'd had the War Shrike and some local forces for that purpose, the battleship more than a match individually for any of Tommy King's ships, with the possible exception of his flagship. Here Admiral Mannetti had her carrier and heavy cruiser. Though it was the carrier's fighters that were the real threat, he knew.

  On that thought, the fighters began to advance, lining up their initial missile run. He knew that his ships could weather that initial salvo... except that the fighters would have plenty of time to reload and rearm on her carrier, safely behind her screen while his damaged ships would engage her pirate allies... and then the fighters would sweep in a second time.

  This was going to be a very nasty fight, he knew, and all the worse for the fact that every ship he lost here would be one less to face the Chxor at Nova Roma.

  The massed fighter strike assembled and Lucius grinned a bit as his own ships started to pick off the enemy probes launched earlier. The fighters would have the opportunity to launch, but they wouldn't have quality targeting data.

  At a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers, the fighters launched. A hundred and twenty of Admiral Mannetti's Interceptor fighters launched four hundred and forty two missiles. They were lighter missiles than Lucius would have favored, with cheaper fission warheads rather than more expensive heavy fusion or antimatter warheads. Then again, Admiral Mannetti normally faced destroyers and cruisers and against those lighter and more nimble ships, lighter missiles made somewhat more sense.

  The five squadrons of pirate fighters launched a more ragged salvo a few seconds later, this a mix of lighter, faster missiles, with a few heavier ones mixed in. In total, just over five hundred missiles went out from Admiral Mannetti's fighters... and then they turned and began to brea
k away at an escape vector.

  ***

  Tommy King stroked his chin as he contemplated the battle. He wasn't certain if he was a little rusty or if Admiral Mannetti was better than he had estimated.

  Which wasn't to say that she was his match, he thought with a cold smile, or even a match for Lucius Giovanni. Some part of him felt tempted to let the battle play out as it was, just to see what the good Baron had planned for that contingency... but at the same time, he had told the man he would be here... and he had a debt of his own to collect.

  Besides, he didn't like to see good men and women die unnecessarily and that missile salvo would be far less effective without guidance from Admiral Mannetti's ships.

  “Orders to Captain Gerrod of the Ranger,” Tommy said, “clear those frigates out of our path, and make certain they don't harm his sister ship.” Tommy couldn't help but grin as he said that. Gerrod had felt insulted that an ancient and decrepit frigate had the same name as his fit and trim light cruiser. He had, in fact, repeatedly asked for permission to wipe it out of the sky, which Tommy had denied on general principles. Tommy had listened with more than a little amusement as the plucky Captain Jenny had strung Admiral Mannetti along about the “engineering accident” and her “rescue operations.” If Captain Jenny survived this engagement, he might well have a place for her in his command.

  “All other ships,” he said, “engage the enemy with a full missile spread and let's close to energy range and finish the bastards off.”

  ***

  Lucretta bit back a gasp as an entire fleet appeared at her rear.

  Her surprise turned to dismay as reports came in on the ship classes. They had already identified an Nagyr-class battlecrusier, which broadcast its identity openly, the Revenge.