Ruins of Empire: Blood on the Stars III Read online

  Ruins of Empire

  Blood on the Stars III

  Jay Allan

  Copyright © 2017 Jay Allan Books

  All Rights Reserved

  Contents

  Blood on the Stars Series

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  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The Crimson Worlds Series

  Blood on the Stars Series

  (Available on Kindle Unlimited)

  Duel in the Dark (Blood on the Stars I)

  Call to Arms (Blood on the Stars II)

  Ruins of Empire (Blood on the Stars III)

  Echoes of Glory (Blood on the Stars IV) – Summer 2017

  Introducing the

  Flames of Rebellion Series

  (Published by Harper Voyager)

  Flames of Rebellion (Book I)

  Rebellion’s Fury (Book II) – Fall 2017

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  Chapter One

  Epheseus System

  Ten Light Minutes from the Hystari Transwarp Portal

  309 AC

  “C’mon, c’mon…just a few seconds more,” Jake Stockton muttered to himself as he pursued his enemy. His eyes were focused tightly on the small screen, following the Union fighter’s every move. He’d taken out three enemy craft already, but that wasn’t enough to hang on to his status as the fleet’s leading ace…Dirk Timmons had five kills, and that left Stockton two behind his rival.

  Stockton’s mind was fully on the mission, on his almost feral need to destroy the Union ship in front of him. He knew the enemy pilots had little choice but to fight, that most had found the military to be the only escape from the crushing poverty the masses of the Union endured. But that was too philosophical to interfere with the raw hatred he felt for the foe. He’d seen too many friends die in the year since the war had begun. The faces of his lost comrades stared at him from the darkness of sleep, stoking his need for bloody vengeance.

  His hand tightened, the hard rubber of the firing stud smooth against his calloused finger. He’d sent dozens of his enemies to hell, and now he was going to add to that number.

  He heard the familiar echo of the lasers firing, the harsh whine loud in the confines of his cockpit. His eyes remained locked on the screen, even as he fired again.

  Damn.

  The enemy was angling his thrusters, his pattern almost completely random. The changes to his vector were minimal—he was traveling at nearly 600 kilometers per second, and at that velocity it took a lot of thrust to substantially alter heading. But even the slightest variations from the expected were enough to dodge a laser blast.

  Stockton felt his anger heating up. There was respect too, recognition that he was facing another talented flyer. But the admiration was buried deeply, covered over by bitterness, by the pain and death the Confederation forces had suffered in the war to date. Stockton was affable enough aboard Dauntless, but when he stepped into his fighter he became something else entirely.

  He imagined the thoughts going through his prey’s mind. Fear, of course, but also a rapid sequence of panicked deliberations, plots to deal with the danger on his tail. Stockton knew his enemy must have wanted to come about to face him, to meet him in head to head battle instead of giving his tail. But the Union strike force had been gutted, and dozens of Dauntless’s fighters were screaming forward, chasing down the few surviving enemy craft. Anything but flight was certain death for the Union pilot…and Stockton was determined that running would not save his adversary.

  He fired again…and then again. Near misses. Very near. But misses nevertheless.

  Stockton’s anger flared. He didn’t often run into a pilot who could put up a fight against him, and that was how he liked it. The Confederation forces had been outnumbered since the start of the war. There was no room for closely fought duels, not when there were twice as many enemy birds. Dominance was the Confederation’s tactic, facing superior forces with smaller ones and winning the victory anyway.

  He swung his ship around, matching his enemy’s maneuvers. He hadn’t managed to hit the Union fighter yet, but he’d be damned if was going to let the bastard get away. He fired again. Closer this time, but still a miss. His laser blast had come within twenty meters of the target, which even at close range was considerably more precise than threading a needle. But a miss was a miss.

  “You need some help with that one, Raptor?”

  Stockton frowned as the voice of Dirk Timmons filled his headset. Stockton and Timmons had been bitter rivals for years, ever since they’d attended the academy together, though they’d mutually agreed to leave the animosity behind after Timmons and his squadron transferred to Dauntless. The two aces—and prima donnas, Stockton had to admit to himself—had won each other’s grudging respect in the grim fighting of the last campaign. He’d made his peace with Timmons, but he wasn’t ready to admit he actually liked the other pilot. Not yet, at least.

  “I’ve got it,” Stockton snapped back, his intensity manifesting as annoyance in his tone.

  He fired, but Timmons words had shaken his concentration. Now he focused again, putting everything else out of his mind. There was his enemy…and there was him, and nothing else, not in all the vastness of space.

  His eyes narrowed, locked even more tightly on the display. Then, in the face of all the tension, of the fear and strife of battle, he let himself go. He ignored the pit in his stomach, and let his intuition guide him. He tried to envision what he would do, the moves he would make to shake a foe. He could see the enemy ship in his mind, the view from his adversary’s cockpit. He was the enemy pilot, moving the throttle, trying to escape the deadly hunter on his tail.

  His own hand moved, angling his throttle as his instinct demanded. He fired, and then again, still missing, but ignoring it. There was no frustration now, no urgency, just the enemy, in front of him. Inside his head.

  His finger tightened, the sound of the lase
rs again filling his tiny cockpit. But this time was different. He knew. Somehow he knew before the scanners reported, before even the deadly weapons fired. This time he had hit his mark.

  He felt the rush inside, the excitement at the kill, but for an instant he struggled to check it, waiting for the screen to confirm what his gut was telling him. Then the small icon representing the Union fighter winked out of existence. He had one more kill, one more stamp to place on the exterior of his ship.

  “Nice shot, Raptor.” The earlier slightly mocking tone was gone from Timmons’s words, replaced by honest congratulations. “That looked like a tough one.”

  “Thanks, Warrior.” Stockton hoped his response was as genuine as his former rival’s compliment. A decade of bad feelings was hard to erase entirely, but age and long overdue wisdom had come to Dauntless’s two hotshot pilots. The pointless conflict between them seemed especially foolish now that they shared an enemy.

  “So, Raptor, now that you got that guy, what do you say the Blues and the Scarlet Eagles do something about that battleship…before it gets to the transwarp link and jumps out of here?”

  “I like the way you think, Warrior,” Stockton shot back, angling his thruster to bring him toward the rest of his squadron. “I like the way you think.”

  * * *

  “The Blues and the Eagles are beginning an attack run on the enemy battleship, Captain.” Atara Travis looked over from her station, her eyes meeting the captain’s, carrying unspoken words. No one had authorized the fighters to engage the enemy mother ship…they had just been sent to pursue the broken Union squadrons.

  Barron held her stare for an instant. His own silent reply. Let it go.

  Dauntless had one of the best fighter contingents of any ship in the fleet. The best as far as Barron was concerned. And the core of that came down to his two elite squadrons, Stockton’s Blues and Timmons’s Scarlet Eagles. Not only were the squadron leaders almost certainly the two best pilots in the fleet, but each of their formations was jammed full of veteran flyers.

  The skill of his battleship’s squadrons had just been displayed in no uncertain terms. Dauntless had been on a forward scouting mission, a quick advance into the “no man’s land” between the two fleets…and she had run into her counterpart, a Union vessel executing similar orders. The enemy ship had responded quickly, launched a heavy bombing assault, but Dauntless’s interceptors had shot down the attack craft like fish in a barrel. Not a single torpedo-bomber had even reached launch range, and their fleeing escort fighters, those that had survived the first engagement at least, were hunted down by Dauntless’s deadly squadrons.

  Barron felt pride…and relief. He’d seen his ship battered before, felt the impacts of hit after hit, ripping through her hull, destroying her systems and killing her people. But now, Dauntless was like a razor, a war machine of such capability, she was the prohibitive favorite in any one on one fight against a comparable enemy vessel. She’d faced an equal here, at least in terms of tonnage and numbers of fighters, but she didn’t have a bit of damage…at least none beyond that she’d brought with her into the system.

  He looked down at the screen, at the casualty reports that were, for once at least, far less extensive than usual. No one on the ship itself had been killed. There were two injuries, one an engineer who suffered some burns when a cooling pipe blew, and another who fell five meters from a catwalk.

  His squadrons had suffered terrible losses in Dauntless’s great battles of the past year, but even in his combat wings, casualties had been far lower than he’d feared. The Blues and the Eagles had only lost one ship each, and the combined toll for all five squadrons was only eight…and at least three of those had managed to eject.

  The Blues had been Dauntless’s since Barron had taken command, but he’d only gained the Eagles during the fight against the enemy’s massive supply base. And he’d had to pull out the Barron name to hang onto them once his ship rejoined the fleet. They’d originally been assigned to the flagship, Repulse, but the shade of Barron’s war-hero grandfather was still powerful, and his own reputation was rapidly growing as well. It had taken a little effort, though in the end far less than he’d expected. Admiral Striker was a very different man from Admiral Winston, much less likely to take a stand on staid orthodoxy…and willing to accept the assurance from his most successful captain that Dauntless could indeed handle a total fighter complement more than twenty-five percent above its rated establishment.

  It had required considerably more work to rearrange his ship’s bays so they could carry and support seventy-eight fighters, instead of the sixty they’d been designed to handle. The first hurdle had been Chief Evans, who’d been ready to dig in his heels and oppose the measure, at least until Barron tried a little reverse psychology on the gritty non-com who ruled Dauntless’s bays with equal measures of unfiltered competence and pure fear. Instead of pushing the chief to acknowledge that his people could handle the increased load, Barron had told him he’d decided to refuse the Eagles, since it was clearly too much for his bay crews to handle. After that, it had just been a matter of holding back laughter as the chief made an impassioned argument about just how and why his people were more than ready to take on the extra load.

  Barron had found his additional squadron to be enormously useful, even more so because the added formation was one of the very best in the fleet. He still rated the Blues just a touch higher, but he’d also admitted to himself more than once that his judgment was as likely the result of old loyalties as cold analysis.

  “Let’s increase our thrust, Commander. The Blues and the Eagles aren’t outfitted for bombing runs, so they could probably use some backup if they’re going to take that thing out.” Barron knew Dauntless had no chance of catching the enemy vessel before it transited. But he was just as sure that Stockton and Timmons were well aware of that fact…and that they would be doing everything they could to degrade or disable the battleship’s engines. And he wasn’t about to bet against them pulling it off. “Besides, Stockton’s and Timmons’s people are going to burn up the rest of their fuel, and we’re going to have to head that way to pick them up anyway.”

  “Increasing thrust, Captain.” Atara Travis’s voice was relaxed. He’d caught a look at his first officer’s display a moment before. Travis, too, had just looked at the casualty figures. And, like he had been, she was obviously relieved at what she’d seen.

  Barron felt a slight pressure against his chest as Dauntless’s engines roared to life. His people had endured the pain of massive g forces when the ship’s dampeners had been damaged or knocked out completely, but they were fully functional now, and the slightly more than 10g of thrust felt like a bit less than 2g. Uncomfortable, but not the hellish torment of 10g.

  “Advise Commander Fritz I’m going to want full power for the primaries.” Dauntless’s deadly main guns were fragile and subject to maintenance issues. But when operational, they were enormously powerful, a massive advantage in a duel with Union battleships and their significantly less effective heavy lasers.

  “Yes, sir. Engineering reports primaries intact and ready for action.”

  Barron nodded. “Very well.” He turned and looked straight ahead, into the massive 3D tank in the middle of Dauntless’s bridge. His ship was a small blue ovoid in the center of the mostly empty space. There were clusters of tiny pinprick spheres, three of them—Yellow, Red, and Green squadrons—heading back toward Dauntless, and two, the Blues and the Eagles, moving up on the red icon representing the enemy battleship.

  “Captain, Commander Stockton advises that Blue and Scarlet Eagle squadrons have engaged. They have targeted the battleship’s engines, and he reports that enemy thrust has been degraded sixty percent.”

  “Very well.” Barron wasn’t surprised that his squadrons had battered the enemy’s drives, but even he was a little startled at the rapidity. Stockton’s and Timmons’s pilots had nothing heavier than lasers, and the amount of damage inflicted in such a short ti
me suggested some crazy fighter tactics, including reckless runs into the teeth of heavy defensive fire. He almost snapped out an order for the attacking squadrons to cool it, to refrain from taking any unnecessary risks. But it was too late for that. His chance had been to forbid the attack altogether, and he hadn’t done that.

  Because you wanted that ship as much as they did…and you knew damned well how they’d go in. Don’t be a hypocrite. Even if they suffer losses, it’s worth it if we bag an enemy capital ship. One more step toward winning a war that has already cost millions of lives…

  “Cut thrust enough to begin powering up the primaries, Commander. I want them ready to fire as soon as we enter range.”

  “Yes, Captain.” Travis turned and flashed a glance toward his station…and in her eyes he saw the cold killer he knew lived inside her. “We will be in firing range in seven minutes.”

  Barron pushed aside a shiver at the eagerness in his first officer’s voice.

  Chapter Two

  Epheseus System

  One Light Minute from the Hystari Transwarp Portal

  309 AC

  “Fire!” Barron was leaning forward, gripping the armrests of his chair as he shouted out the command. A few seconds later the sounds of the great primary guns firing resounded across the bridge. All eyes moved to the screens and displays, waiting for the scanning reports to see whether the massive weapons had hit or not. Dauntless was still at extreme range, but the enemy ship’s engines appeared to be completely offline, and the lack of any thrust capacity made the target’s course highly predictable…and easy to target.

  “Hit,” Travis said, reporting the data as it came in. “Two hits.”

  Barron just nodded. He’d seen it on the display even as Travis made her report. He realized how his own attitude toward such things had changed. He’d known his people would score a hit. Not expected, but known. His gunners might miss a wily enemy running a series of evasive maneuvers, but there was no way they would fail to hit a target on a fixed course and vector, no matter the range. The instant his fighter squadrons had knocked out the enemy ship’s engines, they had sealed its fate.