In the south, three of the sloops had broken through, while the rest stood back to lend them fire support. Torpedo boats caught one of the sloops while it was still in the stratosphere, and sent it crippled and burning to the icy sea below. The other two fled north, pursued by torpedo boats.
Dreadnought arrived. She lumbered around from the dark side of the moon, leading several cruisers, corvettes, destroyers, and missile frigates. Final victory was close at hand. Drake waited for Malthorne to push into position to form a bulwark against which the faltering death fleet would be dashed. But to Drake’s anger and dismay, Dreadnought continued forward. Her cannon came out, and missile and torpedo bays activated all along her side. She meant to enter the fray close to Albion. There was too much firepower at work already; it would only confuse the issue and make it easier for a sloop or two to break through.
Drake sent an angry message. Malthorne did not reply.
“Sweet heavens,” Tolvern whispered.
The viewscreen was split now, showing the green sloops of war on one side, still twisting and dancing to break through Albion’s defenses. On the other, Dreadnought, the black, monstrous battleship, like something out of legend. She was firing the first broadside, a bellow of dragon fire longer than the entire length of Blackbeard.
But then warning lights flashed everywhere, and Jane’s voice sounded her calm concern. Dreadnought was ignoring the Hroom fleet and firing at Blackbeard.
#
Malthorne’s treachery hadn’t caught Blackbeard by complete surprise. Drake had never supposed that the admiral would ignore the Hroom to attack him exclusively, but he had fully expected a torpedo or two, a side shot when Malthorne thought he could catch the renegade cruiser off guard. And so Blackbeard was already launching countermeasures and performing evasive maneuvers.
Cannon fire raked Blackbeard along the stern as the ship fled. To evade the missiles, Drake ordered them behind Fort Ellen. Two missiles slammed into the unprepared fort, and a torpedo hit the gray rocky protuberance that formed the underside of the hollowed-out asteroid. The fort returned fire at Dreadnought, seemingly surprised, but responding with hostility at the unexpected assault.
“Bring her around,” Drake said grimly. Into the com, he added, “Barker. Full broadside. Target Dreadnought’s main battery.”
“We can’t fight Dreadnought,” Tolvern said. “She’ll eat us alive.”
“We had better hope we are not alone, then.”
Fort Ellen’s response had surprised him and given him hope. And as Blackbeard swung into action again, Rutherford came swooping in on HMS Vigilant, her guns blazing at the battleship. Potterman’s destroyer swung around and fired a torpedo at Dreadnought, and all three of the pirate frigates joined a navy frigate in launching a barrage of missiles. Explosions tore along Dreadnought’s side, her belly, and her upper decks.
Many of the other ships, however, rushed to defend the admiral’s flagship. In an instant, the battlefield had descended into chaos. Cruisers shooting at cruisers and firing on Hroom sloops. Fort Ellen firing on Dreadnought, while taking fire from Fort William. Dreadnought shooting at Fort Ellen, at navy ships, at the Hroom. And the sloops attacking anything and everything, even as they continued trying to break through. Debris and explosions filled the sky, with flaming ships knocked into space or spiraling from orbit.
Orient Tiger pulled away, as if Catarina had decided to flee. Drake couldn’t blame her; she had never agreed to battle the might of the Royal Navy. He was only surprised that the three pirate frigates had fought as long as they had.
“Captain!” Smythe cried. “The sloops are breaking through.”
The Hroom fleet had been weakening, but Malthorne’s eagerness to punish Drake had breathed new life into their assault. Many of the sloops were destroyed, knocked out of the battle, or crippled and bleeding plasma, but a small, determined knot kept trying to force its way through. Three of them charged Fort William, drawing its fire. The last two squirmed through the gap. They dropped into the atmosphere.
Drake’s heart leaped. “Follow them!”
Blackbeard dove into the atmosphere. Jane warned of pending explosions as Dreadnought chased Blackbeard down with a final missile barrage, but by the time Drake’s pilots had them below a hundred thousand feet, they’d shaken off the missiles.
And now Orient Tiger appeared a few hundred yards off starboard, following Blackbeard down. Drake hailed Catarina, voice only. The sloops were about a hundred and fifty miles ahead of him, and almost to the surface.
“It looked like you were going to run,” he said.
“I thought about it, believe me,” Catarina said. “But if I run now, how can I be sure I’ll get my payoff? Also, I’ve grown fond of you lot. Would hate to see you killed down here. So, what’s the plan?”
“Do we need a plan?” Drake asked. “Get close enough and blast them. That’s about as much as I’ve got.”
“Good enough. For Albion and the king, or whatever rubbish I’m suppose to say here. See you on the other side.”
They were above Britain, flying east at eighty thousand feet over the Welsh Mountains, a massive, snow-capped range that bisected the continent. It was dawn, and the sun glared from across the fertile York Plain. But Blackbeard’s instruments could stare right through a star and see what was hiding on the other side, and Smythe got it filtered out and the enemy back on visual.
The two sloops of war were flying in a line. The rear Hroom warship was smoking from a fire on the rear deck. Tolvern, studying her console, said the fire looked terminal. But how soon? At these supersonic speeds, they were only seventy minutes from the outer villages, towns, and ring roads of the York Town metropolis.
Drake waited until they were within a hundred miles of the enemy before he ordered missiles. Blackbeard had better capabilities in the atmosphere than a Hroom sloop, but her ordnance was calibrated for fighting in the void, not in an atmosphere. Indeed, the missiles struggled to lock on the sloops, and rudimentary countermeasures from the enemy sent them corkscrewing to the surface, where they hit the rolling green hills and detonated.
He kept closing. Now, they were over the plains, mixed pasture and mile after mile of golden wheat, ready for the harvest. At twenty miles, he opened with his deck guns. This had little effect at first, but he kept probing as they drew closer, and Orient Tiger on his flank soon scored the first hits. Both ships kept pounding away, opening a gaping hole in the rear shields of the wounded enemy sloop. Suddenly, she dove toward the ground.
“Captain!” Tolvern warned. “The fissiles!”
Dear God, no.
The sloop was loaded with atomic warheads. If it detonated while they were flying over . . .
Drake shouted a command across to Catarina, and then Blackbeard and Orient Tiger veered sharply away. The sloop hit the ground and exploded. A giant mushroom cloud rose into the sky. The cruiser and the frigate were racing away from the explosion and managed to evade the blast wave.
“Jane,” Drake said to the computer, “how big was that blast?”
“Estimating . . . twenty-two megatons.”
There was silence on the bridge. Finally, Capp said, “What the devil does that mean? That’s bloody huge, right?”
“Hundreds of square miles in diameter, it would seem,” Drake said.
Even in the lightly populated farmland of the York Plain, that blast must have vaporized several villages and estates and killed thousands of people. If the other sloop reached the dense settlements along the St. Lawrence River with that kind of payload, where a fifth of Albion’s population lived, the atomic bombs within its belly would put a hundred million lives at risk.
Evading the bomb blast had left them far behind the final sloop, which had continued east toward the St. Lawrence and York Town. Blackbeard and Orient Tiger corrected course and raced in pursuit. Drake tried again with the missiles, but with no success. Someone in orbit fired down a few shots of their own, and one of these hit the sloop, doing moderat
e damage, but the three-way fight was still raging up above, and Drake had little fire support.
They were soon flying over more settled regions. The Hroom ship detoured slightly and came over the top of Adelaide, a provincial capital of sixty or eighty thousand along the shores of Loch Foyle. Drake caught his breath, knowing there was only one reason the sloop would make a detour. He was still too far out to use his cannon.
The sloop dropped a warhead. There was silence on the bridge as it fell. A flash, and a second mushroom cloud. It was a fraction the size of the massive explosion over the plains, but big enough when dropped in the middle of a small city.
“Jane,” Drake said. His voice sounded hollow. “Estimate the yield.”
“Estimating . . . twenty kilotons.”
Or roughly a thousandth the size of the explosion caused by the detonating Hroom sloop. The warship must be stuffed with atomic warheads. Now he understood why some of the sloops hadn’t used their serpentines; they didn’t have space for extra ordnance. There must be defender ships and atomic attack ships. Malthorne’s treachery had allowed two of the latter to slip through.
The detour to vaporize Adelaide had allowed Blackbeard and Orient Tiger to close some of the distance to the enemy ship, and they were still twenty miles from the outskirts of York Town when the sloop fell within range of their guns. Drake ordered all available firepower brought to bear, and everything from cannon to torpedoes and missiles flew at the enemy ship. Its shields took hits, and it began to smoke.
There was no chatter on Drake’s deck, no side conversations, only anxious, highly focused orders and responses. The gunnery was furiously working to bring that ship down, while Nyb Pim and Capp took advantage of every enemy maneuver to close the distance a few more yards and bring the sloop further into the range of Blackbeard’s guns. Off starboard, Orient Tiger matched their pace.
Another bomb dropped as the sloop passed over Shelby, then a third at Haw’s Bay. These two towns on the outskirts of York Town went up in clouds of fire and ash. Drake could only imagine the panic on the densely populated banks of the St. Lawrence as old air raid sirens went off. An alien assault had always been a hypothetical possibility, but the Hroom Empire had never once penetrated Albion’s defenses to attack the surface. Already, three cities had been annihilated, and dozens, even hundreds more faced the same fate if Drake couldn’t destroy the enemy ship in time.
“She’s going down!” Tolvern shouted.
Yes, it was true. The Hroom sloop was on fire, its engines sputtering, spilling plasma that tumbled in great globules fifty thousand feet to ignite towns and forests in raging infernos. All three ships were at fifty thousand feet, but the sloop was losing altitude in a hurry.
Only not fast enough. Someone tracked the ship’s trajectory and where it would come down. The result was disaster.
The blue, curving ribbon of the St. Lawrence lay dead ahead. On its banks and beyond stretched the city of York Town, five million people. The green, bucolic west bank of the city was already visible from here: the palace, the king’s gardens, and the Royal Forest. A spire of stone rose at the edge of the palace, York Tower, the tallest building on the west bank of the river. It was the very place Drake’s parents had been held prisoner. On the east bank were the Kingdom Tower skyscrapers in the heart of the city. Near that lay the houses of parliament, the offices of the Royal Exchequer, the headquarters of the Bank of Albion, the fleet headquarters of the Royal Navy, and practically every other symbol of royal and government power.
Both human ships were firing constantly, launching every conceivable weapon in an attempt to bring down the Hroom ship. Plenty of shots were hitting, and the whole back end of the sloop was breaking apart. But at these speeds, not fast enough. The sloop had no control, could only fall as it continued its forward momentum. It was at five thousand feet, then two thousand, and then Drake had no choice but to pull up. Blackbeard and Orient Tiger climbed away.
The sloop had long overshot the city center, and was nearly six miles east and several miles south of the heart of York Town when it hit. It didn’t matter, not really, not with that kind of payload. A flash, a blackened viewscreen, and a rumble that caught Blackbeard and tossed it like a rowboat on an angry sea.
When the viewscreen cleared again, a massive mushroom cloud was rising above the city, together with a rolling shock wave that obliterated the land for miles around. The whole of York Town was caught in the explosion. The king, the palace, parliament, every major building of the Albion government, gone in an instant.
Chapter Twenty-four
Drake led Blackbeard and Orient Tiger back into orbit to discover one battle won and the other lost. The last of the Hroom suicide ships had been defeated. Two sloops had broken past and into the atmosphere, but they’d been heavily damaged already and were hunted down by a torpedo boat and Potterman’s destroyer and finished off. The human ships chasing the sloops that had entered the atmosphere in the southern hemisphere had destroyed those enemies as well before they could reach inhabited land. Nothing remained of the suicidal fleets. The cult of the Hroom god of death, Lyam Kar, had been vanquished.
This victory had come at a terrible cost. York Town was destroyed, and several million people presumed dead The capital city, the very heart of Albion was no more. The king himself must have been killed in the initial blast.
Meanwhile, Dreadnought had taken a terrible beating, but had in turn mauled Fort Ellen into submission, cowed Fort William and the other orbital forts into joining him, and destroyed several mutinying vessels.
Vigilant, Pussycat, Outlaw, and several navy destroyers, corvettes, frigates, and torpedo boats continued the struggle long enough to allow Blackbeard and Orient Tiger to escape Albion’s gravity well, and then this battered flotilla of pirates and Royal Navy ships fled toward outer space.
For the next hour, Malthorne gave chase with Dreadnought and several cruisers and corvettes, but he seemed to have darker plans in store. Returning to Albion’s orbit, he brought his marines out of stasis and sent them to the surface to take command of the Royal Marine bases. By the time Blackbeard and the others reached the nearest jump point a day later, Malthorne had declared himself the sole head of the Admiralty, elevated Colonel Fitzgibbons to major-general of the Royal Marines, and placed the planet under martial law. Some of the dukes, earls, and other aristocrats voiced opposition, but the outcry was muted.
And then Drake brought his fleet through the jump point, and they lost the thread of news for a stretch.
#
It was three weeks after the battle when Tolvern once again stood on the surface of a planet. After the escape from York Tower, she hadn’t expected to have her feet on solid ground again so soon. Today, she relaxed in a pleasant little inn, enjoying the warmth and earthy smell of a peat fire on the hearth. Rain pattered on the roof and streaked the windows. She nursed a mug of dark beer, and waited for her meal to arrive. At the moment, she was the only one of Blackbeard’s crew in the tavern, and the others in the room—fishermen, shepherds, and peat diggers—watched her curiously.
They’d planted themselves in Aberdeen. It was the fourth-largest town on Saxony, but it was more like an overgrown village, not much larger than the provincial towns of her home island of Auckland. Only twenty million people lived on the cold, damp world of Saxony, the majority near the equator, where they scratched a living on the rainy moors, the heath-covered plains, and the marginal farmlands stretching in a belt of several million square miles in what they called the temperate zone.
She supposed it was temperate, if by that you meant that it didn’t snow much. Of course, it was currently the middle of summer, and just walking from her quarters to the tavern had left her soaked with a chilling rain. Saxony’s climate had apparently been warmer during the initial years of settlement, when the planet had seemed even more promising to the Anglosphere refugees from Earth than Albion itself, but that had been deceptive. Unbeknownst to the early settlers, Saxony had been enjoyi
ng an interglacial period in an ice age, and the ice sheets had already started to advance when humans arrived. Several hundred years later, ice entombed the northern and southern latitudes, leaving only a thin habitable region near the equator.
Drake pushed open the door. He kicked water from his boots and took off his hat and jacket to shake them dry. Tolvern had wondered if he would come in wearing a navy uniform, as he’d just emerged from a meeting with Captain Rutherford at headquarters, but he still wore the tan canvas vest with the loops and brass buttons that she’d given him.
He must have caught her appraising him as he approached. “I would wear my old uniform, but I have been told I look good in this thing.”
“By Catarina?”
“By you!”
Tolvern felt herself blushing. “Oh, yeah.”
He gave her a friendly smile that set her at ease. “Others have said so, too. Apparently, I cut quite a figure.”
“Aye, that you do, luv,” the barmaid said, approaching with a tankard of the dark beer that was the only thing on tap.
She smiled at the captain coquettishly and set the beer in front of him. The barmaid was an attractive young woman with red hair and freckles who had been flirting with every officer in the fleet, men, women, and Hroom alike.
“Thank you, miss,” Drake said, somewhat formally. The barmaid winked and returned to the kitchen.
“I understand that we’re enlisted in the navy again,” Tolvern said. “Is that the gist of it, sir?”
“Yes, I suppose we are. Those who are up for it, anyway.”
“What about Catarina Vargus?” Tolvern asked. “You aren’t tempted to follow her?” She kept her tone careful, neutral, not wanting to suggest anything one way or the other.
“A little bit, yes. Catarina has a vision, and I admit that I find it enticing.”
“A vision of piracy?”
“A vision. We’ll leave it at that.” Drake took a long drink of his beer. “But if you’re asking if we’re lovers, the answer is no. Not anymore. I won’t follow her, and she won’t follow me. How could we? It would be a fleet of two, and without a clear leader. That is untenable. So I’m afraid we’re finished.”
Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) Page 21