“With an emphasis on ‘semi’ or ‘stable?’” Drake asked.
“We’re not going to find ourselves trapped on the other side, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Lloyd said.
That was exactly Drake’s worry, that Apex was luring his fleet into jumping into a cul-de-sac system. One way in and out, and that jump point rapidly decaying behind him. He’d go down in Albion history as the admiral who disappeared with his fleet into an unknown system, never to reappear.
No, because if he did that, there wouldn’t be any Albion history to record his folly. Apex would exterminate his people.
“Lloyd, give me your confidence level. How much longer does that jump point have?”
The answer came a few moments later. “Ninety-nine percent certainty of 5.5 years in duration, plus or minus a year. Less than one thousandth of a percent that it will decay in less than six months.”
That was good enough.
“Send a message to Woodbury, to Caites, to the other captains. We’re making a run for it. Standard fleet jump formation.”
Drake wanted a fight, but not on Apex’s terms. And it seemed that this was the battlefield of the enemy’s choosing. He could stand his ground against these two forces, but if a third fleet showed up, he was in trouble. Better to accept his victory and circle back around to Sentinel 3 and get the tech Li had promised.
“Ellison,” he said, “time to rendezvous with our friends. Send a subspace to Captain McGowan, Captain Tolvern, and General Mose Dryz. Here is the message . . .”
The enemy would intercept the subspace, of course, but he did his best to disguise the information.
As soon as Drake sent the message, he ordered a course change. Soon, he had his fleet accelerating toward the unknown jump point.
Chapter Twenty
Tolvern and the others made their way through the gap in the perimeter fence and onto the higher ground of the spaceyards. It had turned into a battlefield. Giant birds stalked across the tarmac like walking tanks, even as gunfire and hand cannons blasted at them. They opened their beaks and spewed projectiles, spread their wings to launch missiles. Vehicles burned, and one of the large hangars was on fire, casting flames high into the sky.
Green light swept across the ground from the birds’ eyes. When it fell on gunmen and fleeing yard workers, the humans and Hroom collapsed to the ground as if they were automatons and someone had flicked a switch. Tentacles swept down and dragged them skyward to join the squirming masses.
Tolvern kept clear of the fighting and led the others in a crouching run from the protective wall of warehouses to the shelter of a merchant frigate, which sat burning in the middle of the tarmac. The side of the frigate had been torn open, exposing the guts of the vessel, from which smoke and flame poured out.
“I spent three hundred pounds repairing that piece of junk,” Rodriguez said mournfully as they waited for one of the giant birds to stride away. “Never see that money again.”
“Not to mention the bloke what lost his ship,” Capp said.
“Quiet, the both of you,” Tolvern said. “Wait until it turns its head, then we’re making a run for it.”
It was still raining, but at normal downpour levels, nothing like the deluge that had overwhelmed Samborondón earlier in the day. The sky was, however, still dark and growing darker. Even as the cloud cover thinned, the sun was dipping behind the western mountains. Soon it would be night. Fortunately, there was plenty of light from the fires to find their way. Tolvern could clearly see the path they needed to take, off toward a pair of undamaged hangars to the left. Blackbeard was inside one of them. Hopefully.
The bird cocked its head and turned toward something to its right. That left the path open to the left. Tolvern chopped her hand forward and set off at a run. The others followed. She rounded the corner and saw the open doors of the larger of the two hangars, with Blackbeard sitting dark and still inside. And undamaged, thank God.
We’re going to make it.
They’d come into the base with nearly twenty men and women—Tolvern, Capp, O’Keefe, Carvalho, Oglethorpe, and Rodriguez, plus roughly a dozen survivors from the truck. A few others had joined them as they entered the base, and now, running across the open, other yard workers spotted them and broke from hiding places. Soon, there were dozens running to join them.
One of the giant stalkers noticed all of the movement, and its head swiveled like a rooster spotting a row of tasty insects. Its gaze swept over the runners, and they collapsed. The bird stepped over them, head still swiveling to catch new victims in the green light even as tentacles dipped from its abdomen to hoist up the ones who had fallen.
“Run!” Tolvern yelled.
So close now. Someone screamed behind her, a sound that was cut dead. Her heart thumped, her lungs burned. Her feet pounded the tarmac.
Ahead, Blackbeard’s familiar curves. It loomed above her, propped on struts. The skull and crossbones gleamed with reflected firelight. The Albion lions.
Green light. Her body went rigid, and she was falling.
No!
She hit hard, tossed casually against the pavement. Her heart thundered in her chest from her exertions, but nothing else was moving, not even her lungs. Behind, the sound of claws on pavement, the screams as tentacles hoisted men and women into the sky and they regained control of their bodies only to find themselves enveloped in the twisting, python-like coils.
The ground thumped, as if from a giant hammer pounding against the ground. A horrible screech of pain sounded behind her, then a crash. Tolvern could breathe again. She took a ragged gasp. The acrid scent of burning feathers scratched her throat. She tried to rise to her feet, but someone was screaming for her to stay put. A hand grabbed the back of her pants and yanked her down. It was Carvalho.
Lifting her head, Tolvern saw why. Blackbeard’s deck gun had opened up and was thumping away with heavy fire. That gun was powerful enough to tear a hole in a pirate schooner, and it was certainly enough to rip apart one of the giant birds, armored or not. It had mowed down one of them already, whose victims were trying to fight free of the tentacles, and moved on to a more distant target. That one died, too. The deck gun fell silent.
Tolvern and the others sprang to their feet. A ladder descended from the belly of her ship, and voices shouted for her to come up. She grabbed the rungs, joined quickly by others.
When she got up, she was greeted by the long, solemn face of Nyb Pim. She was so glad to see her pilot that she planted a kiss right where his lips would have been . . . if he’d had them. He blinked back with his large, liquid eyes.
“I do not understand the significance of you kissing me,” he said in his high, almost crooning voice, “but Lieutenant Smythe is waiting for you on the bridge, and he says we should leave at once.”
#
“Good thing Rodriguez is leaving the yards behind,” Tolvern said as Smythe informed her of the situation, “because we don’t have time to get onto the tarmac. We’re going to trash the hangar and set the whole blasted place on fire. Capp, get the gunnery. I want those birds targeted on the way up. Send those monsters straight to hell.”
The plasma engines fired off and they lifted from the ground, tearing through the hangar and leaving behind flaming wreckage. Guns targeted the giant birds as they elevated.
She’d have liked to swoop over the city and fight whatever landing craft was sending these giant birds down, but there was an Apex fleet in orbit. Blackbeard had to clear the gravity well and make a run for it, and that meant abandoning Samborondón to its fate.
The ship shuddered as they fought their way through the turbulent atmosphere that had dumped ungodly amounts of rain on the island. Instruments lit up, warnings and advisories. Smythe and Lomelí struggled to manage crashing computer systems, while engineering worked to keep the whole bucket of nuts and bolts from flying apart in a million directions.
The overhaul wasn’t a hundred percent finished, but it was close enough. Normally, on
ce the final repairs had been completed, they would run tests while still in the yards, make tweaks, perform simulations, then bring her into orbit. There they would run another full battery of tests and take her for a longer test run before declaring her battle ready.
But this was war. There was nothing normal about it. There’d been no time to run diagnostics; better hope they hadn’t overlooked something critical. The next few moments would be tense ones.
The inertia engine hiccuped, and a giant fist first shoved Tolvern into her chair, then tried to fling her at the ceiling. Finally, it worked properly, and gravity returned to normal. The ship broke the cloud cover, still accelerating rapidly.
Blackbeard held together. Of course she did. She was a damn good ship.
Minutes later, they were in outer space, the curve of the planet below them. From this height it looked like a single ocean, deep, almost midnight blue. A string of emerald-green islands encircled the equator like a jeweled belt, with another ring of islands crowning the northern polar region.
The world had two small, silver-colored moons, and a neighboring planet gleamed like an enormous red star. Beyond that lay the Milky Way, an endless swath of stars, still so breathtakingly beautiful and peaceful looking no matter how many times Tolvern looked at it.
The alien fleet swung around the planet and shattered the peace. Four hunter-killer packs jostled for position like wolves snarling and biting at each other’s flanks. The lances dominated in numbers, slender and gleaming gold in reflected sunlight, but there were several of the heavier spears among them. And then, pulling around behind them, the harvester ship.
Bigger than a battleship, it resembled an elongated octopus, with a bulbous, warty head that bristled with weapons and several short stalks on the other end, opened now to reveal a large inner docking bay. The harvester ship plopped out pod-shaped shuttles like it was laying eggs on top of the planet. These dropped into the atmosphere, glowing red as they absorbed heat.
No doubt they carried more of the giant warrior-gatherer birds, and would fall by the dozens on every island and population center. Killing and burning and gathering their gruesome harvest.
Silence ruled the bridge for a long moment, broken only by the tap of Nyb Pim’s long fingers over his console. Alone among the crew, he continued his work, charting a course to jump away from this doomed system.
“Enough,” Tolvern said. “Everyone, move.”
Her words were like a jolt of electricity to the stagnant bridge. Cloaks came up, and the ship angled away from the planet and the Apex fleet. Tolvern kept her eyes glued to the viewscreen while they worked. No sign yet that the enemy had detected them.
Other ships burst through the atmosphere, Hroom and human alike. A new stream of refugees. Apex let them go. Maybe a few tens or even hundreds of thousands would escape—for now—but they were little more than fleas jumping off the back of a drowning dog. Millions would remain on the surface, and it was on these that the buzzards would enjoy their unhurried feast.
Tolvern thought Blackbeard would slip away with the other refugees. She brought them next to a freighter and matched its lumbering speed. Stay in its shadow, rely on cloaks. They slid past a hunter-killer pack. The lances seemed to sniff at the freighter as it passed, but didn’t deviate from course to destroy it.
“All right,” Tolvern said, her stomach a bundle of knots. “Time to hit the gas.”
Capp sent the order to the engine room. They swiftly pulled away from the freighter and passed between the two moons on their way to deep space. Nyb Pim gave the coordinates to carry them to the jump point out of here, back toward where they’d left the Hroom general. Still no sign of pursuit. Tolvern let out a deep breath.
“Oh, no!” Smythe said from the tech console. “Now he sends it? Of all times, now?”
“You’re babbling, Smythe,” Tolvern said. “What is it?”
“A subspace message from Admiral Drake.”
“Well, what is it? Don’t just sit there gawking, send it through.”
Have inflicted heavy damage on an enemy fleet with modest losses suffered to Royal Navy forces.
This was typical understatement on Drake’s part, she was sure. No doubt he’d delivered a crippling blow. But the part about ‘modest losses’ might also be understated. She kept reading.
Under pursuit by an unknown quantity of enemies. Seeking rendezvous at agreed upon location at your earliest possible convenience.
AJD
The agreed upon location meant Sentinel 3. The message had no doubt been sent to the Hroom general, as well as to Captain McGowan, who had been picking his way out from his defense of the home worlds, leading Peerless at the head of a second fleet.
“What do we do now?” Smythe asked.
“We’ll do our best to obey,” she said dryly. “The so-called Dragon Quadrant is a dangerous neighborhood for a lone cruiser, and we might not make it.”
“Eh, Cap’n?” Capp said. “I think you’re missing the question.”
“It’s a subspace message, sir,” Smythe said.
“I know what it means,” she said, watching the viewscreen. “Drake sent a message and Apex no doubt heard. Bad timing, but all we can do is deal with it.”
Enemy ships were already moving. Two of the hunter-killer packs split away from the planet.
“We’re getting hit by active sensors,” Smythe said. “They caught the subspace, all right. Now they’re looking for us.”
“They won’t see us, right?” Capp asked. She rubbed her buzzed scalp. “We’re cloaked, and Apex sensors are bollocks. Right, Cap’n?”
“We’re about six inches away,” Tolvern said grimly. “Bollocks or not, I think they’ll find us.”
“Then we’re buggered.”
“You could say that,” the captain agreed.
“Why did he send it now?” Smythe repeated.
Yes, why now? He could have sent it a week ago, or in three days, when she was in the clear. Give her a billion miles to work with and it wouldn’t matter if Apex could temporarily pinpoint her location or not. But here and now, when she was so close she could feel the enemy’s hot breath on her neck as she crept past? Hardly his fault—Drake wasn’t one for sending frivolous messages—but the timing couldn’t have been worse.
“There we go,” Smythe said. “They got us. Their sensors are about as sophisticated as two men banging metal buckets with hammers and listening for the echo, but now that they’ve fixed on us, they’re hitting us regularly. We can’t lose them.”
The hunter-killer packs flew past the freighter, which still lumbered gamely away from the planet. The freighter made an awkward turn, what passed for an evasive maneuver, which would have been as effective as a giant tortoise trying to dodge a pack of lions, but the lions weren’t interested. They kept going, coming straight after the fleeing human warship.
The lances were out of weapon range, and Blackbeard was increasing the gap between herself and the pursuing ships. As the two sides built speed, Blackbeard’s advantage would only grow, if not for those blasted short-range jumps. It was only a matter of time before the enemy appeared on Blackbeard’s flanks.
There was nothing left for it now. “Drop cloaks. Bring all weapon systems online.”
Back in battle. And the odds were grim. Realistically, nonexistent. Tolvern’s only hope was to inflict a few blows before she went down with her ship.
Chapter Twenty-One
For once, Drake awakened quickly after passing a jump point. He shook his head, no more stunned than if he’d stood up too quickly and gone lightheaded. He was giving orders even before the dizziness passed.
Drake had suffered a final moment of doubt the instant he approached the jump. It must be another trick. Make him think there was a third, hidden enemy fleet in the system, that they’d surround his fleet and annihilate it. Trick him into running toward the only jump point out of the system.
And what was on the other side? Maybe nothing. Maybe the aliens were beat
en down, convinced they were going to be destroyed by Dreadnought and her support ships. Apex had finally met its match and could only hope to trick him into running away. But if that were the case, why hadn’t they tried to make a run for it themselves? They could jump ahead of him, stay out of his range indefinitely.
The other possibility was that a massive enemy force waited on the other side of the jump point. Lances, spears, even a harvester or two. He would come through stunned, and they’d tear him apart before he could recover.
But the area around the jump point was clear.
“Get us away from here,” he told his pilots. “Any direction. The rest of our fleet can follow, and we’ll plot a new course as soon as we’ve had a look around. Lloyd, get us cloaked. No long-range sensors, we can’t give ourselves away. And somebody find the jump points in this system.”
As those wheels set themselves in motion, Drake turned his attention to organizing his forces. Normally, he’d position his corvettes out front. They were the quickest out of the blocks in a scrape, more powerful than a destroyer, and more maneuverable than a cruiser. But Apex’s ability to leap into the fray rendered them vulnerable.
Instead, he positioned Dreadnought in the vanguard, with his cruisers bringing up the rear. He set a destroyer screen on one side, with the corvettes below and behind. The missile frigates and torpedo boats took a comfortable, protected position above Dreadnought.
They were underway even while the last two cruisers were still jumping through. He took a small risk in leaving them to catch up with the others.
Scans brought up more information. This system was a desert. There were two rocky inner worlds, slightly inside and outside the so-called Goldilocks Zone, respectively. One a hot, gas-choked planet, the other cold enough for carbon dioxide to fall as snow. There might once have been a more promising planet somewhere between their orbits—the huge number of asteroids in wobbly orbits around a yellow-orange star seemed to indicate that something had broken up at one point.
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