The Lost Stars 01-Tarnished Knight (23 page)

“There it is!” Marphissa cried as part of the battleship finally appeared, its bulk hanging in a low orbit. “Communications, we’re a lot closer and in line of sight. Try to punch a message through to Sub-Executive Kontos and let him know we’re almost there.”

Iceni inhaled deeply, feeling relief flood her. If the snakes hadn’t broken through to Kontos yet, then success might be very close indeed. “Colonel Rogero, are your forces ready?”

“Yes, Madam President.” Like the rest of the ground forces, Rogero wore full combat armor, the mass of it looming in the passageway where the special forces waited to run through the access tube and into the shuttle mated to the outside of the heavy cruiser. Iceni checked the other heavy cruisers, seeing their status reports indicating their shuttles preparing for separation.

The strain on the warships grew as they swung closer to the gas giant and the battleship while simultaneously trying to reduce their velocity so that it would be slow enough to safely release the shuttles for their assault on the battleship. Normally, this kind of maneuver, a close swing by a planet or star, was made to use their gravity to accelerate ships. Iceni’s flotilla was instead fighting that, and she could hear the hull of the heavy cruiser creak alarmingly as it protested the forces wrenching at it. The moan of the inertial nullifiers rose to a higher-pitched shriek as they maxed out. Iceni’s display flashed red, frenzied warnings blinking for attention.

Reengage maneuvering safeties immediately.

Exceeding maximum stress conditions.

Hull failure possible.

Inertial nullifiers overstressing.

System failures imminent.

“Kom . . . mo . . . dor,” Iceni struggled to say over the strain of the g-forces.

“Forces . . . are . . . passing . . . maximum . . . now,” Marphissa got out, and as she finished Iceni could feel the pressure on her body ease and hear the pitch of the nullifiers begin to descend.

The battleship was growing in size at alarming speed while the warships kept slowing as fast as their main propulsion units and hull structures could manage. “Go, Colonel,” Iceni said, but Rogero already had his soldiers in motion, the hulking figures in their armor stumbling down the access tube into the shuttle and latching into the seats there. Without the power assist from their armor, the soldiers couldn’t have moved under such conditions.

“Forty seconds to shuttle launch,” the operations specialist announced.

Iceni watched the last soldiers hurling themselves onto the shuttle as the seconds scrolled down. “We’re still going too fast,” she said to Marphissa.

“We’ll be within acceptable parameters when we launch the shuttles,” Marphissa replied, her eyes locked on her display.

Iceni could see the velocity markers edging down steadily, dropping to meet the safety margins for shuttle launch, and wondered if they would make that. The battleship appeared to be right on top of them, so huge compared to even the heavy cruisers that it seemed to be more a moon shaped like a massive pregnant shark rather than something made by the hands of humanity.

“Ten seconds to launch.”

“We’re not there, Kommodor!” Iceni said.

“We will be.” Marphissa didn’t take her eyes off of her display, one hand hovering over the command for the shuttle launch.

Off to one side, light cruiser CL-773 tore past the merchant ship, pumping out hell-lance fire and slamming two grapeshot bundles into the ship’s command deck, the impacts knocking the merchant ship off course. Rolling slightly, the merchant ship wobbled onto a descent toward the gas giant.

“Five seconds.”

The velocity markers and launch margins were coming together as Marphissa’s hand swept down a small distance. “Launch!”

Iceni watched the symbol of the shuttle detach from her heavy cruiser, the other two shuttles breaking free of their own cruisers within a couple of seconds and following the first in a dive toward the battleship which now seemed to fill space before them.

“We’re coming under fire,” the combat specialist exclaimed. “Hell lances from the battleship.”

“How many?” Marphissa demanded.

“One . . . three . . . four hell-lance projectors. They’re not firing in a volley. They must be under local control.”

“The snakes,” Marphissa said. “Sub-Exec Kontos’s people still command the fire-control center, so the snakes can only employ as many hell lances as they can manually aim and fire.”

“Four hell-lance projectors is still too many when we only have three shuttles!” Iceni retorted.

“C-555 is taking hits,” the operations specialist said. “They’re targeting the heavy cruisers.”

Iceni laughed in sudden relief. “Idiots. They probably haven’t even noticed the shuttles yet.” Her heavy cruiser, like the other warships, was pivoting again, turning to continue around the curve of the gas giant, gratefully accepting the gravity assist from the huge planet as the flotilla began accelerating once more.

The battleship was there, then behind them, still heart-stoppingly close. But the shuttles were almost in contact with the hull now. “Make sure you drop relays,” Iceni ordered. “I want to be able to monitor the special forces once we’re out of line of sight. Have you managed to contact Sub-Exec Kontos?”

“No, Madam President. We’ll drop two relays as we come around the planet.”

“Shuttles have made contact,” the operations specialist said. “Reporting solid locks on the hull at targeted locations.”

“They’re inside the firing zones of the hell lances,” the weapons specialist added. “The shuttles are safe from defensive fire.”

On her display, Iceni’s eyes held for a moment on an image of the crippled merchant ship, its control gone, gliding past the battleship and sliding inexorably closer to the gas giant’s atmosphere. Anyone still alive on that ship wouldn’t be alive much longer.
There’s nothing I can do about it. They’re too far behind us now for any of my ships to get back there in time even if I wanted to rescue snakes from that fate.

But it’s still an awful way to die.

“Give me a display linked to the ground forces assault teams,” Iceni ordered. Moments later the display popped up next to her. All she had to do was turn her head and touch individual screens to see exactly where the team leaders were and what they were doing. The screens flickered, then steadied. “What was that?”

“Something on the battleship tried to jam the connection,” the comms specialist said. “We powered through it.”

“Give me the— Where’s the—” Iceni finally hit the right touch spot, and the view from Rogero’s armor expanded while his comms became audible to her.

The view felt odd, looking through the vacuum of space at an angle along a slightly curving wall where other suits of combat armor clung. “Get the lock open,” she heard Rogero order.

One of the soldiers placed a palm-sized device with care, then waited while information scrolled across the readout on the device. “Access code broken,” the soldier near the device reported. “Override code blocked. Autolock overridden. Local lock disengaged.”

A large section of wall faded back, then slid sideways. From Rogero’s position, Iceni could see the outer layer of armor on the battleship forming a thick bar on the side of the lock. “Inside,” Rogero ordered. “Full combat footing, weapons free to fire.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SHE
had read Rogero’s plan and knew that each team of special forces had an objective. One would head for the engineering control center to rescue the surviving crew there. The second for the weapons fire-control center. And the third, with Rogero, for the bridge.

They had to get through two more air locks to reach the interior of the battleship, passing successive layers of heavy armor and leaving tiny comm relays in their wake to keep the signals clear even when the air-lock hatches sealed behind them. The soldiers encountered no one as they cleared the last lock and stood within the passageways of the battleship, stretching eerily empty in all directions.

One soldier raised an arm to point. “Surveillance cam up there watching the lock exit. That’s not on standard battleship schematics.”

“Snake gear,” Rogero said. “They know we’re inside now. Get going.”

Rogero moved in the middle of his group as the three sets of soldiers scattered, heading for their respective goals. “Sub-Executive Kontos, this is Colonel Rogero of the independent Midway Star System. We are inside the hull and heading for your location. Can you hear me?”

No answer.

Iceni saw a swarm of symbols swim across Rogero’s heads-up display. “Team Two has encountered resistance,” someone reported to him, her voice slightly distant across the comm system tying the suits into one network whose every piece was mobile. “Not, repeat not, vipers.”

“Try to get one alive,” Rogero ordered, “so they can tell us how many of them are aboard and whether there are vipers anywhere on this thing.”

“Negative. All dead.” The other team leader didn’t sound too regretful. “Proceeding to objective.”

“How big are these damned things?” one of the soldiers muttered into the comm as they rounded a corner and headed down another long passageway broken at intervals by bulkheads with armored survival hatches set into them.

“You can get lost for days,” another soldier remarked. “How come none of the internal hatches are being sealed on us, Colonel?”

“Controlled from the bridge,” Rogero replied. “Part of the antimutiny system. The snakes can only override one hatch at a time. Left here,” he ordered as they reached an intersection of passageways.

“But the plan in our suits—”

“Is a straight shot to the bridge. Guess where the snakes will be waiting for us?”

“Team Three meeting resistance. One soldier down.”

“Team Two has hit an ambush. Four, five snakes. Got one still alive.”

“Make the snake talk,” Rogero said, his voice toneless despite the exertion in it as his team trotted down another stretch of passageway.

“Team Three through resistance. Four snakes dead.”

“Team Two reporting prisoner died before talking. Looks like conditioning-driven suicide.”

“That is sick,” a soldier grumbled.

“They’re damned snakes; what do you expect?”

“Keep it down,” Rogero ordered. “Right here and up that ramp.”

Iceni pulled her attention away from the soldiers for a moment, refocusing on the bridge of her heavy cruiser. “How does it look?” she asked Marphissa.

“The other flotilla is coming back, heading straight for the battleship. We’re twenty minutes from intercept. How are the dirt eaters doing?”

“So far, so good. Get my attention when we’re ten minutes from intercept. I want fire concentrated on the heavy cruiser and the light cruisers. Those HuKs could pound the battleship all day and hardly scratch it.”

“Yes, Madam President.”

Back to Rogero, who was in yet another long passageway but moving more slowly, his soldiers moving in groups of two which rushed forward while others covered their movement with their weapons. The bridge was located deep inside the hull, well protected and linked to exterior sensors so that it had as good a view as if it were on the outside of the hull in a compartment lined with picture windows.
Windows on a warship. What a funny idea,
Iceni thought.
Who would put actual windows on any spaceship instead of using virtual ones and keeping the hull as strong as possible everywhere?

“Ten meters to the bridge citadel boundaries,” one of the soldiers said. “Where the hell are they?”

“Hopefully not in—” The soldier who had spoken flung himself backward as weapons fire lashed the passageway.

“We found ’em!” someone yelled as Rogero’s team all fired, the crisscrossing patterns of fire in the passageway momentarily intense enough to cause Rogero’s face shield to protectively darken nearly to black.

“Move!” Rogero yelled. The soldiers charged forward, the fire from the light weaponry of the snakes glancing off their armor and staggering the soldiers as they ran straight at the defenders.

Iceni couldn’t grasp what was happening for the next few moments as images flashed by too quickly to interpret. Rogero was with his soldiers, firing, shapes in lighter armor were falling, springing up, trying to run, only to fall, sometimes in pieces as more than one hit from the soldiers’ weapons literally tore apart some of the snakes.

“Area clear.”

“Spread out and check for more,” Rogero ordered, stepping over one of the dead snakes to peer around a corner. Down a short passageway sat the heavily armored main hatch leading onto the bridge. Scars on the armor told of attempts to break through it, and damage to the nearby bulkheads and overhead marked active defenses for the bridge that had been destroyed by the snakes so they could gain access to the hatch.

The plug-in for the local comm net was still fine, though. Rogero shoved a wireless link into it. “On the bridge, this is Colonel Rogero. The snakes out here are dead.”

The reply took a moment. “Colonel?”

“Sub-CEO. We’ve changed our rank titles now that we’re no longer subject to Syndicate rule. Do you have control of the internal monitoring system? We don’t know how many snakes are aboard or where they are.”

Another voice broke in on Rogero. “Team Three has reached the fire-control center. Contacting occupants now.”

“Team Two is engaging another snake strongpoint just short of engineering control.”

The voice from the bridge came on, loud and stressed. “Main propulsion! You need to get to main propulsion!”

“We’ve got people almost to engineering control—” Rogero began.

“No! Main propulsion. The snakes couldn’t run the main drives, but they could rig the fuel cells to blow! They threatened to do that if we didn’t surrender.”

“Now you tell us,” Rogero growled. “Team Two, Team Three, new orders. Leave sections to protect the fire-control center and engineering control, and the rest of you get down to the fuel-cell bunkers as fast as you can and look for sabotage. The snakes have threatened to blow the cells.”

“What are we looking for, Colonel?”

“Explosive charges, det cord, timers, nuclear weapons, anything that doesn’t belong.”

“Sir, we don’t know what belongs in fuel-cell bunkers—”

Iceni broke in, speaking to both Rogero and Marphissa. “We’re setting up a link to engineers on the warships for your soldiers. By the time they get down there, we can have engineer eyes to assist their search.”

“Understood,” Rogero called back. “The sooner the better.”

“I’ve got a battle to fight here!” Marphissa snarled as she frantically hit some commands. “We’re eleven minutes from contact with the other flotilla . . . ten minutes now. Comms, get engineers on the heavy cruisers linked to the ground forces net. Everyone else, eyes on the other flotilla!”

Ten minutes. Iceni checked her display, where the two flotillas were coming together at a slight angle this time since the other force was aiming for the battleship rather than trying to hit Iceni’s flotilla. That didn’t make them any less dangerous, though, and her own CL-773 light cruiser was still trying to claw back into formation but a bit behind.

Well behind them, but angling around the curve of the planet, the doomed merchant ship was glowing with heat as it coasted through the upper layers of the gas giant’s atmosphere. Part of the merchant ship broke free, spinning deeper into the atmosphere to form a trail of bright fire before it vanished. Iceni tore her eyes from the sight, hoping that no one on the freighter was still alive to suffer through its destruction.

Marphissa was chewing her lip as she eyed the oncoming flotilla. “With CL-773 lagging, we’re tied with them for light cruisers and only have a superiority of one Hunter-Killer, seven to six. Our advantage is in having three heavy cruisers to their one.”

“What is your argument?” Iceni asked.

“You ordered me to target the light cruisers and heavy cruiser. That will disperse our fire and make it unlikely we can achieve any kills on this pass. I want to either concentrate fire on the lone heavy cruiser, or on the three light cruisers.”

“I don’t like that. Either way, you would be letting some significant firepower get past us.”

“If I try to engage all of them, Madam President,
all
of their significant firepower will get past us.”

Subordinates didn’t argue with CEOs very often, knowing the futility of it and not wanting to risk the consequences. Iceni gave Marphissa a cross look. “I don’t like either alternative.”

“There are no other alternatives. We don’t have enough warships to stop all of them in one pass.”

“Then which do you recommend?” Iceni asked, knowing how she sounded from the way the specialists on the bridge were taking care to avoid doing anything that might attract her attention. “The light cruisers or the heavy?”

Marphissa stabbed one finger at her display. “The heavy. Whoever is in charge of the snakes will be on the heavy. If we decapitate the snake force, the others may take some time deciding who is in charge, or even call superiors elsewhere for instructions.”

“Or they may go on and hit the battleship in some vital spots while it can’t defend itself.”

“Yes, Madam President.”

A frustrated pause. “Get the heavy cruiser.”

“Yes, Madam President.”

Of course, if the snakes had rigged the fuel cells on the battleship to explode, and the soldiers couldn’t disarm the sabotage in time, the battleship was going to be blown apart regardless of how the engagement between flotillas went. And she couldn’t dive back into watching how the soldiers were doing, not when her flotilla was less than five minutes from clashing again with the other warships.

The box formation of Iceni’s flotilla was actually coming in from slightly above and to the side of the other formation and would cut at a diagonal through the other flotilla during the firing pass. Marphissa was aiming straight for the heavy cruiser at the center of the other formation, and Iceni could see the units in the other flotilla beginning to pivot a bit so they would be bow on to the attack while continuing in the same direction toward the battleship. “Combined closing speed of point one six light this time,” Marphissa commented. “And only a small deflection on the targets. We should have good hits.”

“So should they,” Iceni replied.

There was nothing else to do but wait and watch the other flotilla rapidly swell in size, then in an instant be right there and in the next instant be gone, the heavy cruiser Iceni was riding rocking from impacts and alarms warning of damage. “All units come starboard one three zero degrees, up zero seven degrees, immediate execute,” Marphissa was ordering.

The flotilla began curving around to try to catch the other force again. Most of the flotilla, anyway. “CL-924 and HuK-2061 have suffered propulsion damage,” the operations specialist was saying.

At the same time, the combat specialist was reporting on damage to their own ship. “Hell lance battery one is inactive. Missile launcher three disabled. Several hull penetrations, no critical systems lost.”

“Get the penetrations sealed,” Marphissa ordered. “I need that missile launcher back online.”

“We don’t have the means to repair it,” the combat specialist replied hesitantly. “Damage is too extensive. We’ll need repair support.”

Marphissa clenched one fist, shaking her head. “If this were an Alliance warship, we’d have enough people and parts aboard to fix damage like that. Damn the Syndicate bureaucrats and their cost-cutting ‘efficiencies.’”

Iceni remembered the same frustration from her time in the mobile forces, having to wait to repair any significant damage until civilian contractors could arrive. “We can change that, but it won’t happen overnight.”

“Thank you, Madam President. The other flotilla must have concentrated their fire on this cruiser. It’s a good thing they had fewer heavy cruisers than we did.”

Reports were also coming in on damage to the other side as the sensors on Iceni’s warships spotted and evaluated whatever could be observed, and Iceni could see damage markers blinking into existence on the symbol of the lone heavy cruiser in the other flotilla. “At least we hurt him worse than he did us.”

The extra firepower of Iceni’s three heavy cruisers had made a difference, inflicting serious damage on the enemy cruiser. “He’s completely lost maneuvering, drifting away from the rest of his formation,” the operations specialist said.

“But he’s not dead yet.”

“No. It looks like he still has comms to the rest of his force, and there are some weapons assessed still operational.”

Iceni turned a narrow-eyed look on Marphissa, who was frowning in thought. “I think we should go for the kill on the heavy cruiser,” Marphissa said.

“Why?”

“Because we can’t catch the rest of the other flotilla before it reaches the battleship. But if the commander on that heavy cruiser gets scared enough, they will be yelling for help and may order back their own units to save them.”

Another set of bad choices to choose from. “There’s no way of catching the light cruisers?”

“Not unless they turn back toward us.”

“A possibility that you didn’t mention when asking me to concentrate our fire on the heavy cruiser!” Iceni tried to suppress anger and frustration, knowing that she had to make the decision quickly and still worried about what might be happening on the battleship.
Go for the head. When dealing with snakes, always go for the head.
“Get the heavy cruiser. This time I want it destroyed.”