Fractured Horizons (Savage Stars Book 2)

by Anthony James

  A flash lit up the dust-heavy sky on the edge of the central crater, interspersed with smaller flickers from a huge cluster of Ilstroms. Simultaneously, the first and second wave of multi-warhead Daklan incendiaries landed on Pinvos, way in the distance where the Trojan had been only seconds earlier. Harsh light came and lingered for long seconds. A charge cannon sphere went by overhead and then a second wave of incendiaries detonated, these ones much closer to the Expectation than the first. Straight after came a third incendiary burst, this time to the east.

  “We only detected two incendiary launches!” said Recker. “That third one came down right over the Shock and Awe.”

  Incendiaries were crude weapons and in normal circumstances, no threat to a warship. Given the low altitude of this engagement, they took on a greater significance and Recker was furious that the third launch had gone undetected.

  “The last desolator much have launched without us knowing it, sir,” said Burner. “I’m waiting on a damage report from the Shock and Awe.”

  The heat from the incendiaries had interfered with the battle network synchronisation and for many seconds, the Shock and Awe appeared to be stationary on the tactical. Recker couldn’t give the cruiser too much of his attention, but he kept glancing across, hoping that the battle network would update and show him that the cruiser was still active.

  The bad news kept on coming.

  “That next incendiary launch is coming down right on top of the Harken, sir. And us if we don’t get out of the way. I’ve detected two further launches, target areas currently unknown.”

  “What news from the Harken?”

  “No guarantees of flight, sir. The Shock and Awe took some heat damage, along with one Terrus and two Feilar impacts when they climbed out of the flames. Their offensive capability is not significantly diminished.”

  Recker could read between the lines – the cruiser had taken some damage and probably lost a few missile clusters. It was weakened and it was foolish to pretend otherwise.

  The engagement was rapidly heading towards an unfavourable outcome and Recker prepared to take a calculated gamble. He was beginning to understand the behaviour of the enemy warships – how they’d appear briefly to launch their weapons and then disappear, the timings not quite random but not exactly predictable either.

  “Ready the Hellburners, Commander.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This won’t be an easy shot for you.”

  “I’ll make it.”

  Recker watched and waited for the moment. The opportunity wasn’t long in coming – a salvo of the Trojan’s Ilstroms flew into the main crater. Anticipating the appearance of a desolator, Recker brought the Expectation higher, until it was above the rim of the crater and facing down the long slope leading to the Interrogator.

  At once, he was shocked by how much of the dust had been burned up by the exchange of fire. It still swirled, yet enormous pockets of comparatively clear air had been formed by the Trojan’s charge cannon blasts. In the crater’s centre, the Interrogator lay where it had been since impact, any sign of missile and charge cannon damage obscured by dust which remained thick around it, despite the clearer pockets elsewhere.

  With his spaceship’s nose aimed towards the Interrogator, Recker flew it sideways while keeping the Hellburner tubes pointed right at the cube. Almost at once, the sensors detected a grey, elongated shape lifting into sight from behind the Interrogator, showing a full broadside. For a couple of seconds, the desolator climbed strongly and Recker adjusted the orientation of his warship.

  “Hellburners away,” said Aston, firing just as the heavy cruiser slowed.

  Twin igniting Hellburner propulsions created low-bass thumps, audible through many metres of solid alloy. Bright orange circles appeared on the forward feed and then they were gone.

  “Enemy launch detected, sir,” said Burner.

  With the Hellburners fired, Recker dumped the Expectation towards the cover offered by the slope of this linked crater, hoping he was quick enough to escape the retaliation.

  The Hellburners crossed the short distance in the blinking of an eye. One flew wide of its target, while the second hit the desolator five hundred metres from its nose section. The blast hid the front third of the Daklan warship, but with the Expectation dropping towards the crater, Recker knew he wouldn’t have time to judge the damage caused by the explosion.

  A colossal impact against the Expectation’s upper section sent a shockwave through the bridge, making Recker’s ears ring. He groaned in pain and it took all the focus could muster to maintain control of the destroyer and get it into the crater, out of sight of the enemy warships.

  “We took a Terrus shot, sir,” said Eastwood, the loudness of his voice indicating he had some problems with his hearing after the soundwave.

  “What damage?”

  “We lost some plating and our topside is burning hot.”

  One of the sensor feeds gave Recker a partial view of the damage. The force of the Terrus strike had torn away several plates in their entirety and buckled several others, leaving a rough furrow. Heat generated by the crushing blow left traces of red which outlined the damaged area and once again Recker noticed that the slug had been deflected by the sloped edges of the armour.

  “And I thought I fired a good shot,” said Aston ruefully. “That alien bastard got us right between the eyes.”

  Recker wasn’t sure who had the bigger hammer and he put his faith in the HPA Hellburner tech to have caused the Daklan a few problems.

  Unwilling to stay in one place, he flew around the crater’s inner perimeter, a thousand metres below surface level. The Titan heavy lifter was about twenty kilometres to the south-east and dimly visible through a gap where two craters joined.

  “Find out if the Trojan or the Shock and Awe have a damage estimate for our Hellburner strike,” said Recker.

  “On it, sir.”

  With reluctance, Recker turned his eyes to one of the feeds showing the Titan. Like he’d feared, the lifter was crushed beyond recognition and the force of its impact with Pinvos had compacted its hull to less than half of its usual height. It didn’t matter how much reinforcement the engineers added – a hollow spaceship could never withstand such a collision in the same way as a solid one could.

  He turned away and checked the reload timer for the Hellburners. In a few seconds, the destroyer would be ready for another shot.

  “Incendiary detonation in five seconds,” Burner announced.

  The brief intensity of the engagement with the desolator had taken Recker’s attention away from the coming sea of plasma fire. The Expectation was out of the target area, but the Harken was not. At the predicted moment, the incendiaries went off, burning the air, thinning the dust and engulfing the HPA cruiser in a heat which its armour couldn’t withstand.

  Confronted by the destruction of another warship from the Pinvos task force, Recker closed his eyes for the shortest of moments, before opening them again, his body pumping enough adrenaline to make him nauseous and his thoughts filled with determination and a craving for revenge.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It turned out Recker wasn’t the only officer who could read a situation and act accordingly. Captain Melody had seen enough to conclude that the chance of victory was slipping away, and with it the opportunity to recover the Interrogator.

  “She’s going to execute a high-speed flyover and drop a devastator bomb, sir,” said Burner. “The intention is to take out the cube and the desolators at the same time. We’re to retreat to a safe distance and prepare for the aftermath.”

  “Easy as that,” said Recker, his mind already working out an escape route.

  “They could drop that bomb from space,” said Eastwood.

  “High speed and low altitude is the only way to ensure it lands, Commander,” said Recker. “An orbital deployment would leave the devastator vulnerable to the Daklan Graler turrets. They could aim manually and still take it out.”

&nb
sp; “That bomb’s going to make a big bang,” Aston said. She grinned. “A real big bang.”

  Recker drummed his fingers. “The Daklan aren’t stupid. The moment they detect the Trojan coming in so fast, they’ll scatter.”

  “And we’ll punch them in the face as they run towards us, sir,” said Burner. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

  What had, at first, sounded like a simple, straightforward plan lacking in nuance and forethought, suddenly seemed more layered than Recker had initially thought. “It might just work,” he said. “Insane, but maybe that’s what we need.”

  “Shame about the Interrogator,” said Eastwood. He gave a snort of humourless laughter. “Having said that, I’d far rather get back home in one piece, carrying that data we extracted from it.”

  Recker didn’t like to lose, even when the odds against victory were stacked so high he couldn’t see the summit. In this instance, he fully agreed with Eastwood’s words. Above all else, the HPA needed to find out what data the Interrogator had transmitted from its encounter with the fleet.

  Keeping his warship low out of the enemy firing arc, Recker watched as the Trojan rose from its own impact crater and accelerated across the planet’s surface, heading directly away from the Interrogator.

  “Right into the thickest part of the remaining dust,” said Burner. “And at a two hundred metre altitude.”

  “The longer Captain Melody keeps out of sight, the greater the chance of pulling this off,” said Aston.

  “Two hundred metres is low for the approach – they’ll be travelling too fast to correct any errors in flight,” said Recker, trying to calculate the velocity at which Melody would deploy the bomb.

  “Our Hellburners are reloaded,” said Aston. “We’re ready anytime.”

  Five hundred kilometres from the Interrogator, the Trojan slowed and turned. Captain Melody delayed a few seconds, during which Burner reported the launch of more Daklan incendiaries. One of the desolators appeared on the sensors and fired a thick wave of Feilars, then a second appeared and did likewise.

  “Some of those were aimed towards the Trojan’s last known position,” said Burner.

  Recker held his breath, hoping the enemy wouldn’t realise the battleship was elsewhere. The desolators had only emerged from cover for a short moment – long enough to hunt for a target and then drop out of sight when they failed to detect one.

  “It’s likely the enemy comms officers will examine the recorded sensor data more closely now that they’re back in cover, sir,” said Burner.

  “Damnit,” said Recker. His eyes returned to the green dot representing the battleship on his tactical. It wasn’t moving. “What’s keeping them?” he muttered.

  The answer was: nothing.

  Captain Melody gave the order and the Trojan thundered across the sky, gathering speed at a rate which put anything else in the HPA fleet to shame. At four thousand metres and 35 billion tons, it was the pinnacle of the HPA’s weapons and engineering expertise. It would need to be, if it were to resist the incoming fire from three desolators for more than a few seconds.

  “The devastator bomb,” said Eastwood, reminding himself of the facts. “A ternium-accelerated plasma cannister with an armoured shell and twin boosters, designed to blow the crap out of absolutely anything it lands on.”

  “Don’t forget to mention the blast radius,” Aston reminded him.

  “Everything within two hundred kilometres of the initial blast will be incinerated. The sides of the crater should limit much of the expansion.”

  Recker wasn’t keen to find out exactly how much containment the Interrogator’s impact crater would offer his warship. He watched for a moment and the instant he saw three red dots appear on the tactical, he flew the destroyer backwards, gaining altitude at the same time. The engines roared and the warship’s nose pointed straight at the enemy.

  The velocity gauge surged upwards and Recker kept his eyes on the sensors, searching for the best target. He chose one - a shape flying amongst the confusion of flames and dust that engulfed this area of Pinvos.

  “Give them some missiles, Commander.”

  “Firing forward clusters #1 and #2.”

  Twenty Ilstroms raced away into the gloom. Without targeting, they had little chance of hitting the enemy, but Recker hoped they might provide a distraction.

  “Trojan at two hundred klicks from deployment area,” said Burner. “Their comms team reports heavy incoming fire.”

  One of the sensor arrays was locked on the battleship and, though the image was far from clear, Recker’s eyes picked out a series of faint grey trails which seemed to be following the Trojan’s progress.

  Plasma fires, he thought.

  A sphere of blue appeared underneath the battleship’s nose and then accelerated towards the Daklan positions. The desolators scattered and the charge cannon bolt exploded in a flash on the rim of the Interrogator’s crater. When the feed cleared, the three enemy warships were still in the air, one of them with its rear half alight.

  “Come on,” urged Burner. “Break up, you asshole.”

  The desolator didn’t break up, though the flames didn’t burn out. Recker guessed the heavy cruiser might fail eventually, but it wasn’t happening quickly enough.

  As he watched events play out, Recker’s grip on the controls tightened until his knuckles ached. He hated being relegated to the position of spectator. He couldn’t approach the bomb deployment zone and he couldn’t order the launch of the Hellburner missiles – it would require a miracle to hit the enemy from this range. Fifty klicks east, the Shock and Awe was similarly constrained and reduced to firing a smattering of Ilstroms, rather than waste its own Hellburners on a fire and hope launch that would leave its missile tubes mid-reload if the Daklan changed tack.

  At three hundred kilometres from the planned blast zone, Recker slowed the destroyer and flew it unpredictably from side to side. The Daklan didn’t seem interested in either the Expectation or the Shock and Awe, having evidently concluded that the Trojan was the main threat to their victory on Pinvos. Recker took little consolation from the lack of inbound missiles – the Expectation’s front armour was particularly thick and he would have happily used it to soak some of the heat directed at the Trojan.

  The approach of the battleship allowed Burner to improve the feed quality and what Recker saw made him sick to his stomach. Instead of individual plasma fires burning on its hull, the Trojan had become a fireball of vivid white, which left a thick grey smear for a dozen kilometres in its wake.

  “Why isn’t Captain Melody taking evasive action?” said Aston.

  “She is, Commander,” said Recker, coming to a sudden realization. “The weapons targeting is active on at least one of those desolators.”

  “You’re right, sir!” said Burner. “The sensors didn’t pick it up until you said it. Some of those Daklan missiles are veering onto target!”

  “Which means the Terrus cannons will be on target as well,” said Eastwood.

  “Our own weapons lock is still unavailable,” said Aston miserably. “I can’t even access the configuration menu.”

  “We’ve got to do something,” said Recker.

  It was easily said, but he didn’t know what the hell he could do about the unfolding tragedy. One of the three desolators was showing a broadside to the Trojan, which meant that was the warship with the functioning targeting systems. Unfortunately, the Daklan rarely let down their guard and the heavy cruiser was flying up, down, left and right to evade the Trojan’s own – unguided - inbound missiles.

  “The Trojan has lost its front charge cannon,” said Burner. “Half of its forward missile clusters are out of action.”

  “It’s not coming through this,” said Aston softly.

  Recker didn’t say anything. The Trojan looked as if it was on the verge of breaking up, though its velocity was undiminished.

  “Nearly there,” he said.

  “The desolators are heading for the star
s,” said Burner. “They’ve guessed the plan.”

  While two the Daklan heavies accelerated vertically and one went sideways, the Trojan’s stern drifted wide and Recker knew warship’s control systems were failing. With her battleship on the brink, Captain Melody took the only available course of action and detonated the devastator bomb while it was still in the hold.

  A shocking flash of black-specked blue-white appeared where the Trojan had once been. With tremendous speed, the blast sphere expanded, hitting its peak diameter of four hundred kilometres in less five seconds and making the bridge feed so bright that Recker was forced to squint. Somewhere amongst it, the desolators were lost from sight.

  The blast wave struck the Expectation, sending a dozen electronic needles jumping, and agitating the surrounding dust clouds enough to make them briefly impenetrable to the sensors. With the blast wave, came heat enough to fuse the airborne dust into hailstones of glass and set off the destroyer’s hull temperature alarms.

  “Here come the Daklan incendiaries,” said Burner.

  The last of the previously launched warheads crashed into the surface in an overlap to the recent devastator blast. More flames – an ocean of them – came and lit up this distant world.

  Recker sat it out, his expression fixed. The bomb blast receded quickly and, for long seconds, that area of Pinvos was clear of dust – an oasis in this ruined desert. Soon, the incendiaries dwindled on the uncaring stone, the winds blew and the dust swept in once more.

  Then, something – a desolator - rose from beneath the rim of the Harken’s impact crater. Every inch of the heavy cruiser glowed in patches of white, orange and red, while semiliquid sections of its plating tumbled away like an alloy rain. Slowly and with an apparently monumental effort, the Daklan cruiser rotated and climbed, as if it were desperately seeking whatever had inflicted this damage upon it.

  How this opponent had survived the devastator bomb, Recker had no idea and he guided the Expectation towards the enemy ship. On the Shock and Awe, Captain Hutton did likewise. An injured beast could lash out unpredictably and Recker flew erratically in case of incoming fire.