Witch Of The Federation III (Federal Histories Book 3)

by Michael Anderle

  By the time they’d joined her, she stood over the bodies of three very dead Telorans. She caught the captain’s eye as he emerged. “Good call, sir.”

  “I ought to put a leash on you.” He growled his annoyance and she bared her teeth.

  “It’s three-nil, sir. The boys have some catching up to do.”

  “Get moving,” he ordered. “The admiral needs her ship and she hasn’t got all day.”

  The shock troopers moved quickly, leapfrogged through the corridors, and created devastation where they went. They weren’t alone. Having solved the problem of the Teloran energy shields, the Dreth fought to take the ship from its former owners.

  The enemy fought fiercely and went from energy weapons to hand-to-hand combat with ease. Even when the haze of darkness cleared from their armor, their faces remained blank until they fell. Their dark eyes remained open in death, and more than one Dreth put an extra round in their heads to make sure they stayed down.

  One Dreth team reached the hangars.

  “You know that pirate ship the Morgana boarded…” one began.

  His team grinned and scattered.

  “This one’s mine.”

  “I’m taking this one.”

  “Try breathing vacuum, Tegorthan spawn!”

  When they’d run the length of the ship and vented every compartment they found to space, they stopped and looked at each other.

  “Where do they keep the engine rooms?”

  Moving up a level, they failed to find the engine room but they did find what looked very similar to a data center. Racks and racks of boxes stood before them and each one flickered with a galaxy of lights.

  The Dreth exchanged glances and opened fire to move through the data banks like a small destructive tide. When everything around them was nothing but smoking ruin and the half-dozen Telorans they’d found nothing more than silent corpses, they looked for more.

  “By Hrageth, I hope that wasn’t important,” one commented as he surveyed the destruction, “because I don’t think I can fix it.”

  Another of the Dreth looked around. “Which way’s out?”

  The first one stood and loaded a grenade into the launcher slung under his blaster’s barrel. He’d fired three before the first one exploded and opened a way into another compartment. As soon as the haze cleared, they realized they might have made a mistake.

  The room beyond the data center was a simple affair. The single door into it stood ajar and the figure silhouetted in it was as tall as they were. The others, however, turned and fired.

  The Dreth only had one answer.

  They retaliated and two remembered to use shockers. The others fired and charged as the haze of darkness fell away from the Telorans’ armor.

  The aliens closed ranks to block the shock troopers’ path to the tall figure in the doorway. As they fought, he stepped back into the room and drew the door closed behind him.

  “So good of you to join us,” he snarled and gestured at the dead screens and lifeless consoles. “I take it you are responsible for this?”

  The invaders did not answer. They had reached the Telorans’ defensive line and were busy trying to hammer their way through it. None of them noticed as the field around the leader shuddered. It wasn’t until the first shock trooper eliminated an alien warrior and turned to the next that he struck.

  He unleashed a burst of dark lightning and the Dreth shattered before he could even scream. The Telorans continued to fight, but they were outmatched in ferocity and skill and the Dreth fought harder to reach the being who had destroyed their war brother.

  With a laugh as cold as space itself, he unleashed lightning on a second of their group and this time, allowed the lightning to take longer to do its work. That warrior died screaming.

  The three remaining shock troopers looked at each other, and the one who’d remembered the pirate ship remembered something else.

  “Faces!” he ordered and snapped his helmet closed. The other two followed suit.

  “I heard the Morgana did this once,” he said and spun to blast his way through the wall.

  The Teloran paused. It had been drawing in more negative energy, but the Dreth had it intrigued. What had the Morgana done that involved blasting a hole in the hull? The only time she’d made a hole in a starship had bee—

  That thought ended as the other two warriors joined their comrade and the hull gave way beneath the combined weight of their fire. The Teloran had barely retrieved the memory of exactly what the Morgana had done before it was sucked out into space—exactly as its predecessor had been.

  Although it hadn’t had three whooping Dreth warriors for company and it certainly hadn’t died with the sounds of their celebration in its ears.

  Jaleck, in the meantime, had reached the Bridge—and she hadn’t succumbed to the battle rage that threatened to engulf her. That last had been a victory in and of itself. If it hadn’t been for the captain’s warning, she might have given herself over to the fury that pulsed consistently through her.

  And if it hadn’t been for years of diplomatic duties, she might have given in to the urge to shoot every living thing in sight. She’d fought that need for years and with far more reason to kill. Not giving in to a reasonless desire was almost easy by comparison.

  Still, it was a relief when her team of shock troopers was too busy to prevent her from helping them win the Bridge. Just because she’d been an ambassador didn’t mean she’d never fought, only that it had been a long time since she’d been allowed to fight with more than words.

  It felt good to wield a sword again.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t feel as good to look at the controls when the command center had been won and to realize she didn’t understand a single one of the symbols on the controls before her.

  She struggled to apply some kind of logic to them when the trooper on communications tried to get her attention. “Admiral?”

  Jaleck held her hand up. “I’m a little busy here. It’s damned annoying that they didn’t label their controls in Dreth.”

  “I’m sorry, Admiral, but four of our people are hailing us on the SOS bands.”

  She looked up. “Well? Where are they?”

  Another of the troopers gave a shout of surprise and she looked around. He stared at the forward viewscreen as four Dreth troopers drifted by. Each one had a hand on one of the others, and each of them had a firm grip on the Teloran body they hauled with them.

  The shock captain groaned. “Kagrach.”

  As if his name were a signal, one of the troopers waved at the pick-up, his grin apparent through his visor. He pointed at the alien and his grin widened.

  “It looks like he’s gone and caught himself a special Teloran,” one of the troopers remarked when he noted the body’s armor.

  “He’ll be impossible to live with,” the captain commented, and she was sure she heard the same tone in his voice as she’d used when Vishlog had pulled one of his stunts. Maybe Stephanie had room in her team for one more Dreth.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Half a system away from the fight, two more Teloran battle cruisers completed transference. With the Meligornian fleet seven hours away and too deeply engaged in the battle to pay close attention to their scans, they had almost reached the planet by the time the Ebon Knight selected its next target.

  Which was when the scan teams on the Selestine’s Hammer and The King’s Warrior saw them.

  “I can’t get clear,” V’ritan had replied to the Selestine’s hail.

  “And we have no way to reach them before they fire,” the captain had told him.

  On the Teloran command deck, there was silent jubilation.

  “They have not seen us,” the leader of the scan team informed his captain.

  “And even if they do, it will be too late. They cannot reach us now.”

  They’d arrived with no regard for the Exclusion Zone around the planet. The only zone they cared for was the outer boundary of the MU cloud—an
d that only because it would destroy them.

  “How long before we can commence the attack?”

  “An hour, sir. You are right. The Meligornian fleet has no hope of reaching us—and the Witch is equally challenged. Her ship is fast, but it is not fast enough. Meligorn will be rubble before they even know it is gone.”

  None of them heard Stephanie’s cry of dismay when the captain directed her attention to the forward viewscreen. The scene shifted from the battle raging around them to the two Teloran ships approaching Meligorn.

  “Get us out of here,” she ordered when she saw the two vessels appear—on the other side of the planet and the other side of the system.

  Captain Emil did not argue. “King’s Warrior, Ebon Knight requests permission to break from battle.”

  V’ritan’s reply was short. “Granted. Selestine’s speed.”

  The Meligornian blessing was echoed from a hundred Meligornian ships, and Emil looked at Jonathan. “Get us clear, Wattlebird.”

  He raised his voice. “Shields full. Gunners clear the path. Missiles hold.”

  “Teloran A and B have seen us, sir.”

  “C is locked on.”

  “Hellsfire, sir. We’ve attracted the attention of the entire goddamned fleet.”

  “Wattlebird!”

  “Aye, sir. Engineering is on stand-by. I’ll have us free in…”

  “B is locked on. Multiple batteries.”

  “…three…”

  “A is locked on. C is firing.”

  “…two…”

  Missiles shattered against the Knight’s shields.

  “A and B are firing. C is firing hot.”

  “…one. Jumping.”

  That one quiet word was all the warning they had before the world around them blinked. It reminded Stephanie of being in the Virtual World when the scene changed. One minute, they cruised past the slowly turning bulk of a Teloran battleship and in the next, they were in clear space and in a hard approach toward two more warships.

  Below them, there was confusion on the Teloran command deck.

  “Where did they go?”

  “They fled the battlefield.”

  “They surely died in that last barrage.”

  “I see no evidence of a ship death.”

  Alarms shrieked and the scan team turned horrified looks to the screen.

  “She’s coming in behind us!”

  On the other Teloran ship, the commander stared as the Ebon Knight unloaded her forward batteries into their sister. “Get us in closer. We will begin bombardment now.”

  “They’re firing on the planet,” the scan team announced and brought the relevant images to the screens.

  “How?” Stephanie demanded as the ship they were firing on crumbled when its drives imploded.

  “They waited until we were busy,” Emil told her.

  “Well, we’re not busy now,” she told him and caught sight of the two massive rocks on a direct trajectory to Meligorn. “Jump me!”

  “Where?”

  “There!” she shouted and stabbed her finger at the screen. “Jump me there.”

  “Where there, Steph?” Lars asked. “It’s an awfully big screen.”

  “Between the rocks and Meligorn.”

  “What?” the guard protested but Wattlebird didn’t hesitate. “Jumping.”

  Captain Emil tensed as the pilot set the Ebon Knight in the path of the rocks that hurtled toward the planet. Beyond them, the Teloran fired a second set.

  Stephanie was up and out of her seat and strode to the front of the command center

  “You motherless…sons…of…bitches!” she screamed, raised her hand before her, and wove them in a complex pattern.

  Lars thought she might be drawing a door or outlining a hole in the ship’s hull.

  “Show me the Telorans,” she demanded, and the view expanded to display a view of the Ebon Knight in relation to the Teloran ship, Meligorn, and the oncoming rocks.

  She snickered and the sound took on a sinister echo. “I have you now, you asswipes.”

  Vishlog gave his teammate a concerned look. “She has never sworn this much before.”

  He snorted. “I blame the Marines.”

  “You’re only saying that because there aren’t any Marines here to hear you.”

  Lars grinned. “No, I’m saying that because it’s true.”

  “How many times do you swear?”

  “Every time she turns all Morgana on us, but when was the last time you heard me say ‘motherless sons of bitches’?”

  Vishlog frowned.

  “Exactly,” he concluded and returned his attention to where she worked her magic.

  She had taken a wider stance and put her entire body into it to make the circle bigger. He glanced at the screen and the proximity alarms began to blare.

  Another glance at the pilot showed Jonathan’s eyes fixed on the scans, his hands poised over the flight controls. Light from the console reflected from the sweat beading on his forehead, and his cheeks shone. Around them, the command center had gone perfectly silent.

  At the head of it, Captain Emil had also left his seat and stood statue-still, his gaze torn between the screen and what she was doing in the foreground. Beside him, Lars felt Vishlog grow tense.

  The Dreth shifted uncomfortably in his pod and unbuckled his harness.

  “Someone has to get her to a pod,” the warrior explained when his teammate looked at him.

  He followed his example. “You have a point.”

  Before either of them could do anything more than take a step in her direction, a gleaming purple circle appeared on the screen and spread between the Knight and the first rock. Lars breathed a sigh of relief when the rock vanished and reappeared through a second purple circle set to one side of the Teloran battleship.

  The proximity alarms turned briefly to collision alarms, then returned to proximity alarms. Stephanie swept her arms to the side and the purple disc shifted to capture the third. The fourth swept past it as she moved her hands, and Jonathan’s palms punched the controls.

  The Knight blinked out of the meteor’s path, and the Morgana screamed.

  “Shit,” Lars said.

  “Hrageth’s great and furry gazontha,” Vishlog agreed.

  Stephanie was well and truly gone. The Morgana was present, and she was furious.

  “Jump me,” she shrieked. “There!”

  This time, a blue shadow shaped like the Knight appeared on the screen, again between the planet and the incoming missile.

  “I can’t,” the pilot told her.

  “Jump me!” she roared and her voice rolled over him as purple flame burned around her.

  He cringed but held firm. “It’s too close to the planet. You would kill us all.”

  She opened her mouth to speak again and he hurried on. “The Meligornians need you too much for me to kill you. You must fight what you can.”

  He swallowed and licked his lips as he glanced at the rock headed toward the surface. “They will survive it.”

  “Not all,”’ the Morgana disagreed and his face paled a little more.

  “No,” he admitted in a voice that cracked, “but less than if I let you kill yourself and everyone with you. The Telorans are still here.”

  “Give me the fleet,” she shouted, and both the scan and communications teams leapt to obey as she added, “I want to see them on the screen. If they like their missiles so much…”

  They certainly did. The battleship had evaded the first two meteors and sent another six in their wake. The Morgana turned back to the screen.

  “I will ensure they receive them.”

  Even though they knew she hadn’t meant them, the communications team raised the defender’s fleet—but only so Captain Emil could warn them of what was coming. Orderly chaos followed in the battle zone.

  The Meligornian ships cleared the Teloran flight line as well as they could or worked to distract the enemy battleships from the larger vessels. The Dre
th still commanded the Teloran ship they’d taken, and it was clearly marked.

  The Dreth battleship attached to its hull made it impossible to mistake.

  The aliens, however, still held their own. More Meligornian ships exploded while they attempted to defend the battle line. Others were on fire. The ranks of the smaller ships had fallen from two hundred to less than one hundred.

  The enemy soon learned that a dying Meligornian ship was the most dangerous of their adversaries. They lost two of their eight ships of the line to the Meligornians’ defiance before they began to target any wounded ships as a priority. Their smaller craft couldn’t get to them all.

  Meligorn wasn’t the only place MU could be found. It traveled with the mages and fueled their ships and their spells. When a ship died, the Meligornians blew the engines and the MU of its passing filled the space where they’d been.

  While nMU interfered with Meligornian drives, MU choked the Teloran engines completely. It was a disaster and became more so when one large purple circle formed at the end of the line and another two ships down, quickly followed by a third.

  One Teloran captain took evasive action but he didn’t stand a chance. The house-sized rock that careened through the portal smashed into the flank of his ship and destroyed his engines. The implosion left very little behind it.

  All along the line, the massive Teloran ships tried to maneuver away from the circles that hovered parallel to them. One tried to dive and the rock that penetrated its hull left a gaping hole through the middle of its decks.

  Another veered away and collided with its sister ship before the next missile struck it above the engine deck. The second wave arrived almost immediately.

  The Teloran crews scrambled as destruction hurtled into their midst. Some made it to escape pods and others through bulkheads before they were sealed. Most died in the explosion or the vacuum that followed.

  By the time the Morgana had returned the first six missiles, half the Teloran fleet was too busy burning to attack. She’d also repositioned the gates to redirect the evaded missiles into the would-be planet-crusher’s hull.

  The King’s Warrior destroyed two of the Teloran ships and the smaller craft flew back to join the melee. On board the Ebon Knight, the Morgana stared intently as the wandering missiles exited the repositioned gates.