Desperate Fire (Angel in the Whirlwind Book 4)

by Christopher Nuttall

  Kat gave him a long look, then turned back to stare out into hyperspace. Junayd wondered idly, why she perplexed him so. She didn’t act like a woman, at least nothing like the women he’d married, but at the same time she didn’t quite act like a man. He reminded himself, again, not to underestimate her. She’d beaten him in two successive engagements and foiled him in a third, preventing his masterstroke from being decisive.

  “Tell me something,” he said. “If you’d failed like me, Commodore, what would have happened to you?”

  “It would depend,” Kat said. “A small mistake . . . I might have been allowed to recover from it. The Admiralty might chalk the mistake down to inexperience and allow me to move on. But a bigger mistake? That could easily have gotten me dismissed or put in front of a court-martial board.”

  “You would have been allowed a chance to learn from your mistakes,” Junayd said. “But to us? Failure is a sign of God’s displeasure. An admiral who lost a battle lost because he did something to offend God.”

  Kat glanced at him. “Why did you survive?”

  “I like to think that there would have been questions about how the speakers have been handling the war,” Junayd said. “They’re the ones who appointed me, after all. But in truth, I just don’t know.”

  “You kill your own commanding officers for minor screwups,” Kat mused. She sounded torn between amusement and pity. “No wonder you’re losing the war.”

  She nodded towards the giant fleet. “There are some odds that just can’t be beaten,” she added. “We might lose the coming battle; we might lose the entire fleet. And yet, it can be replaced within months. We can trade five superdreadnoughts for every enemy superdreadnought and we’d still come out ahead. Your leaders managed to get you into an unwinnable war.”

  “I know that,” Junayd said. “Do they?”

  Kat met his eyes. “Do they?”

  Junayd twitched. “Some of the . . . call them the realists . . . will certainly see the writing on the wall,” he said, “but some of the others will merely see it as a spur to fight harder.”

  “Purging themselves of sin,” Kat said. She sounded oddly amused. “And terminating all of your halfway-competent commanding officers at the same time.”

  Junayd couldn’t help a flicker of bitter frustration. He knew most of those commanding officers, and he knew enough about his former subordinates to make educated guesses about who would have been pushed into the upper ranks after his defection. They didn’t deserve to die, certainly not at the hands of their masters. Searching for heresy was thoroughly pointless when the odds were so heavily stacked against them. Kat’s amusement was entirely understandable. The Theocracy, already in a terrible mess, was making matters far worse for itself.

  “There are some decent men in the Theocracy,” he said. He’d met quite a few men who had been unable to balance the demands of their posts with the reproaches of their consciences. “But none of them will have the chance to act decent if the Theocracy survives.”

  “It won’t,” Kat said. “And whatever takes its place, Admiral, will be very different.”

  “I know,” Junayd said.

  He’d dared to hope that he’d be able to parlay his defection into a position of political power once he returned home. But he knew it was a gamble, one he might well lose. It would be safer to take his family and return to Tyre, yet he needed power to survive. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life dependent on charity.

  Someone will have to serve as the link between the occupation forces and the local population, he thought. Why not me?

  Kat leaned back. “You’ve adapted well to our culture,” she said. “What do you make of it?”

  “Strange,” Junayd said. He didn’t even begin to claim to understand Tyre, let alone the rest of the Commonwealth. Tyre was just so different. “You should be in constant anarchy. But you’re not.”

  “We compete for power and place,” Kat said. She sounded almost as fervent as a cleric praising his religion. “Some of us start ahead of others, but we all compete. And we are judged by valid standards, not by devotion to a religion none of us believe in. Our competency is not judged by how well we can grovel.”

  “Point,” Junayd agreed. He held up a hand. “But don’t imagine, not for a moment, that the Theocracy doesn’t believe in its religion. There are a lot of true believers, even in the upper ranks. Some of them will be very dangerous.”

  Kat nodded. “I know.”

  “And they’re the ones you’re going to have to kill,” Junayd added. The Commonwealth had been oddly merciful towards its former enemies, but the fanatics were a very different kettle of fish. “Because if you let them live, they’ll see it as a sign of weakness. Kill them all.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Admiral Junayd’s words hung in Kat’s mind as the fleet followed its circular path towards the Gap, remaining well off the shipping lanes and taking evasive action at the slightest hint of an unidentified starship. Kat had been a spacer long enough to know that the odds of anyone getting a solid lock on their hulls, let alone an accurate ship count, were minimal, but she understood Admiral Christian’s caution. The less warning the Theocracy had, the less time they’d have to muster a defense or devise contingency plans. She already knew a very hard fight was in store.

  And we’ll be killing innocents along with the fanatics, she thought. The enemy spacers had chosen to serve, but their civilians hadn’t deliberately put themselves in a war zone. And yet it can’t be helped.

  “Commodore,” Wheeler said, “the fleet is approaching the minefield. Admiral Christian is ordering the ships to heave to.”

  “Make it so,” Kat ordered.

  She sucked in her breath. On the display, the Gap and its attendant minefield were clearly visible. Long-range scans had picked up hundreds of mines, but ONI had warned that plenty of mines had been stealthed to make them nearly impossible to detect. The Theocracy presumably knew the paths through the mines, yet, if Junayd was to be believed, even they lost ships to their minefields. But, thanks to hyperspace, they probably wouldn’t notice losing a few hundred mines. They were cheap and easy to manufacture.

  They’re probably running short of replacements, she thought. Hyperspace, as well as normal wear and tear, had probably destroyed quite a number of mines. They had this minefield set up well before the war.

  “A couple of antimatter warheads would create an energy storm,” Wheeler commented as if he were speaking to himself. “That would sweep the Gap clean.”

  “And the storm would take weeks to dissipate,” Kat said. They’d discussed doing just that, back when the planning cell had been finalizing Operation Hammer. But hyperspace storms near the Gap had a tendency to last for weeks. There was just too much energy spewing around. “No, we have to clear the mines manually.”

  “Yes, Commodore,” Wheeler said.

  He paused. “Admiral Christian is ordering the carriers to begin launch sequence,” he added, slowly. “The gunboats are being deployed.”

  “Good,” Kat said. “And now we wait.”

  Years had passed since Lieutenant Isabel Campbell had set foot on Hebrides, years since her parents had offered her the flat choice between marrying a pig farmer or the local schoolmaster. Isabel had taken a third option and fled to join the Royal Navy, refusing to even consider returning to her homeworld until her parents relented. And then the war had broken out and returning home had suddenly become impossible.

  Cold hatred seethed in her soul as she steered the gunboat out of the launch bay and out into hyperspace. She’d loved her homeworld; she’d loved her family—she’d known they meant well, even though she couldn’t accept their choices. And now they were all gone, her family and her would-be husbands alike, either killed by the nuclear blasts or dead of radiation poisoning. She’d volunteered for the mine-clearing mission purely because she wanted a chance to hurt the Theocracy, to make them pay for what they’d done. She would have happily carried a planet-buste
r all the way to their damned homeworld and fired it, if her superiors had let her. In her head, the Theocracy deserved total obliteration.

  “Keep a constant sensor watch,” she ordered as the squadron of gunboats neared the minefield. The techs swore blind that the gunboats were too tiny to interest the mines, but she wouldn’t have cared to bet money on it. “I want every last mine zeroed before it’s too late.”

  “You got it,” Lieutenant Shawn Tombs said. Her copilot worked his console with practiced skill, isolating and targeting the mines. “Targeting . . . now.”

  Isabel nodded as the gunboat rocked, gravity waves slicing through hyperspace and lashing against her hull. Passage through the Gap had never been easy, even for superdreadnoughts and assault carriers. A lone gunboat could vanish in the blink of an eye, and no one would ever even notice. But it still beat trying to pass through the Seven Sisters.

  “Weapons locked,” Lieutenant Tombs said. “I have twenty-seven mines within my sights.”

  “Fire,” Isabel ordered.

  The gunboat shook slightly as the railguns opened fire. Her gunboat normally carried two shipkiller missiles and powerful plasma cannons for dogfights with enemy gunboats, but the shipboard techs had replaced them with tiny railguns that looked as though they belonged in a museum. The popguns wouldn’t even scratch a starship if they happened to strike its hull, yet they should be more than enough to take out a mine. And the impact shouldn’t be enough to trigger the mines.

  Unless the techs are wrong and some of those mines are crammed with antimatter, Isabel thought as mines began to vanish. A single detonation would really ruin our day.

  “Move to the next set of mines,” she ordered. There was no time to waste. If she had been setting up the minefield, she would have put a ship or two in direct position to observe the mines and watch for anyone clearing the field. “Hurry.”

  “Of course, Most Gracious Empress,” Lieutenant Tombs said.

  Isabel gave him a one-fingered gesture, then returned to her console. Tombs had flirted with her ever since she’d entered the training program, something that flattered and appalled her in equal measure. She’d hoped to go home one day, not throw herself into a radically different culture and never look back. And yet, now there was no home to go to. The remainder of her people were refugees.

  A dozen more mines died in quick succession, but the field was starting to wake up. Isabel cursed as a mine exploded, taking out two gunboats; a second detonated moments later, scattering a hail of shrapnel in all directions. The pilots hastily avoided the blasts, still firing burst after burst of railgun pellets to take out the surviving mines. Three more mines detonated, perhaps triggered by their comrades; Isabel pulled back, half hoping the mines would detonate in sequence, half fearing the potential results. Nuclear detonations might just cause an energy storm, particularly in the Gap.

  “I’ve got five more mines targeted,” Lieutenant Tombs said.

  “Continue firing,” Isabel said. A chain reaction of detonations would be very useful, if it didn’t set off an energy storm. “I’ll take us forward.”

  “We used to think this minefield was impassable,” Junayd observed.

  Janice laughed, not unkindly. “It seems very passable to me.”

  “But then, we used to have a destroyer or two watching the mines from a safe distance,” Junayd admitted. On the display, more and more icons were blinking out of existence as the gunboats ravaged the field. “I’m not sure if they have a guardship now.”

  “They should,” Janice said.

  “We only ever had a handful of escorts,” Junayd said. The limited number of escorts had been a constant frustration, even before Kat Falcone had led her flotilla into Theocratic Space to attack a number of under-defended worlds. “They were always in short supply.”

  He stroked his beard in annoyance. His superiors had committed themselves to building up the largest battle fleet they could, and he had to admit that they’d worked miracles, but they’d concentrated on superdreadnoughts at the expense of everything else. The shortage of transports had been bad enough, yet the shortage of escorts and flankers had clearly taken its own toll. He didn’t want to think about how many Theocratic superdreadnoughts had been lost because they hadn’t had enough flankers. Superdreadnoughts were tough, but there was a limit to how much damage they could soak up on their own.

  “A terrible oversight,” Janice agreed. She tapped the display. “Do you have any further insights?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Junayd said. “None of those mines should be antimatter—”

  “But you don’t know,” Janice finished.

  “No,” Junayd agreed. “Blocking the Gap permanently would have been a deadly mistake ten months ago. It would have cut the Theocracy off from its fleets. Now . . . now it might be a wise idea indeed.”

  The mine seemed to loom up in front of Isabel, so close that there wasn’t a hope of evading before it was too late. She gritted her teeth, ignoring the illusion. Her sensors insisted that the mine was well clear of her gunboat—and dead, as Tombs picked it off with a blast of pellets. The mine shattered, the debris flying in all directions. Another mine died a moment later, followed by five more. And then another exploded, taking out three more gunboats.

  “Dave’s dead,” Tombs said.

  Isabel nodded. There would be time to mourn later, assuming she survived. The minefield seemed to be getting thicker, layer upon layer of mines laid so close together that destroying one triggered several more. She was torn between admiring the sheer determination that had gone into assembling the minefield and laughing at the waste of resources the endeavor represented. The mastermind behind the plan had to have been a groundhog. A spacer would have understood that piling mines up so close together, even on an interplanetary scale, was just asking for trouble.

  “Keep firing,” she ordered. More and more mines were going active, trying to angle into position to damage or destroy passing ships. “Don’t give them a chance to react.”

  She wondered, idly, just what the mines were programmed to do if they came under sustained attack. Their briefers hadn’t known. The Commonwealth hadn’t really experimented with mines, certainly not on such a large scale. The analysis had warned that the mines were possibly programmed to detonate in unison, yet their limited brains wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a deliberate attack and an energy storm. The Theocrats might have looked up one day to discover that their entire minefield had self-destructed.

  And that would be a laugh, she thought nastily. Their minefield wiped out by their own incompetence.

  “Twelve more mines down,” Tombs reported. He paused. “That one looks very nasty.”

  “It does indeed,” Isabel said. A mine was sending out sensor pulses in all directions without any regard for its own safety. “Kill it.”

  She braced herself, expecting an explosion. But the mine merely shattered into a thousand pieces. Its comrades went active a second later, sweeping space for targets. Isabel cursed, then launched a decoy drone as she yanked the gunboat back. The mines picked up the drone and detonated in sequence, obliterating the drone. But they’d also taken out a large chunk of the minefield.

  “I see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Tombs said. “Do you?”

  “We’re not out of this just yet,” Isabel snapped. “Keep firing.”

  “They’ve cleared a passage,” Wheeler reported. “The flag is ordering us to advance.”

  Kat nodded. “Take us into the Gap,” she ordered. “Point defense is to engage any surviving mines without waiting for orders.”

  She forced herself to watch as Queen Elizabeth crawled forward, advancing steadily into the space cleared by the gunboats. The debris posed no threat to the superdreadnought, but it was quite possible that one or more stealthed mines had remained undetected. She kept a sharp eye on the display, knowing that everything would depend on her electronic servants. No mere human, no matter how enhanced, could pick up an active
mine and take it out before the damned thing detonated. And a nuclear blast so close to her ship might cause all sorts of problems.

  “Seventeen mines killed by point defense,” Wheeler said. “Long-range scans are clear.”

  Which proves nothing, Kat reminded herself. The enemy could remain hidden from us even at very close range.

  The seconds ticked away as the entire fleet slowly made its way through the Gap and into Theocratic Space. Kat felt the tension rising on the flag deck, even though no enemy vessels appeared to menace or shadow the fleet. If she’d been in command of an enemy guardship, she would have hurried to report home. If she’d had two ships, one of them would have gone home and the other would have kept an eye on the fleet. But no enemy vessels materialized.

  “Signal from the flag,” Wheeler said. “Flanking units are to spread out.”

  “Pass the word,” Kat ordered. If an enemy ship was lying doggo, the bastards had probably had more than enough time to get an accurate ship count before fleeing. “And keep watching the sensors.”

  “Local space is clear,” Wheeler said.

  Kat didn’t feel any better, even as the flankers failed to pick up any enemy vessels. There was just too much distortion on the far side of the Gap, too many eddies that could conceal even an uncloaked ship from prying sensors. And yet, the enemy couldn’t stay too close to the Gap. The chance of being blotted from existence by an energy surge was just too high.

  She closed her eyes for a long moment, centering herself. Kat knew how to handle a battle, she knew what to do if she saw an enemy fleet, but sneaking around, unsure if she was being watched, was different. If Junayd was right, the Theocracy didn’t have the resources to guard the shipping lanes, yet he could be wrong. He’d defected nine months ago. Everything Junayd knew was out of date.

  And they might have gotten more ships from somewhere, she thought morbidly. They’ve certainly been trying hard to purchase entire fleets.