The Last Stand Read online

  The Last Stand

  Blood on the Stars 14

  By Jay Allan

  Copyright 2019 Jay Allan Books Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Chapter One

  Vigillius Nebula

  8 Transits from Calpharon (Hegemonic Capital Planet)

  Year 323 AC (After the Cataclysm)

  “Keep those formations tight. We’ve got to get in and get out fast!” Jake Stockton hunched forward in his cockpit, his hands clenched tightly around his fighter’s throttle. The feeling was slightly different, the leather covering the cool metal softer, smoother, the positioning just…off…a bit. It wasn’t the kind of thing most people would have noticed, but Jake Stockton virtually became one with any fighter he was flying, and the ship’s controls were almost extensions of his arms and hands.

  The ship was a new one, fresh from the factory, the lead fighter from the first batch of Mark V’s. The new fighters were upgrades on the old Lightnings, and if things panned out according to the specs, they would be a major leap forward. Stockton hadn’t decided yet, but so far, so good. The upgraded ship class didn’t have a new name, but the pilots were already calling the sleek, dark metal craft Black Lightnings.

  Stockton pulled back on the throttle, still feeling some surprise as his eyes glanced at the small display, and he noticed the acceleration rate. The new ships were quick, much faster than anything he’d flown before, anything he’d seen before, but that wasn’t the part he found most disconcerting. It was the dampeners that seemed like some kind of magic.

  The first ships he’d flown hadn’t had dampeners at all, and he and his comrades had been forced to endure g forces straight, with nothing more than pressure suits and cushioned seats to help absorb the pressure. More than any other factor, that had placed a cap on the acceleration fighters could utilize, regardless of the power of their engines. The introduction of dampeners a decade before had revolutionized fighter combat, and the Mark III’s that had first featured the miraculous new systems had boasted more than twice the thrust potential of their predecessors. That had been a game changer in combat.

  Dampeners revolutionized spaceflight in many ways, but they had always been touchy and fragile beasts. Every time Stockton nudged up his thrust, he winced, expecting the slight delay before the system adjusted. But there was nothing at all in the new ship, no pain, no pressure slamming into him, even for an instant. The dampeners were perfectly aligned with the engines. He could have been sitting on Megara, at normal gravity, unmoving, even as his ship blasted forward at maximum thrust.

  It remained to be seen how much of the old fragility was still there when the systems were truly stressed. Combat would answer that question soon enough.

  Stockton swung his ship around, changing the thrust angle, adjusting his vector to bring him on line with his target. The enemy ship was a big one, larger than any encountered in the battles of the previous year. That was enough of a concern. Tonnage generally aligned with combat power, at least with all other things being equal. The Highborn ships the Hegemony and Confederation fleets had engaged before hadn’t been especially large, but they had been enormously powerful. He didn’t suspect the larger ships would be any easier to face than their smaller counterparts.

  The thing in front of him now was big. And that made his stomach shrivel to what felt like a quarter of its normal size.

  His eyes moved back to the display, focusing for an instant on the wings lined up behind him. It was a substantial force, over three hundred ships, but barely a recon mission compared to the massive waves of fighters he’d commanded in the conflicts of the past decade.

  It was a recon, he reminded himself, at least of a sort. He’d been leading similar forces for most of the past six months, all part of the campaign to harry the enemy and slow their advance, to buy more time for the fleet to prepare for the final battle to defend Calpharon.

  At least that was the official purpose. Stockton had another, one with a more brutal side to it. The arrival of the main Confederation and Alliance fleets had brought hundreds of fresh squadrons to the fight, but not one of those thousands of pilots had ever fought against the Others. The Highborn, he reminded himself. He didn’t understand the name, but that was what the Heggies called the enemy, and he figured they knew more about it all than he did.

  And you need to stop calling them Heggies. They’re your allies now, and that’s a damned good thing if you want to stop the Highborn before they roll right into the Rim and crush everything in their path.

  Heggies had been coined during the previous war, and while it didn’t sound particularly nasty, it had in every way been intended as a derogatory term.

  Stockton tried not to think too much about why he had truly brought his pilots there. It was for training, yes, but something more. Something darker. He was going to need an experienced force when the decisive battle started. And there was only one way to make that happen. He had to cycle his people through, throw them against small Highborn forces and see who survived. He had to forge them in battle.

  Blood them.

  That strategy had cost him heavily over the past six months, but it had also helped to slow the Highborn advance, to buy time. Whether that mattered, whether those precious weeks and months were used to good effect or not, was Admiral Barron’s problem, not his.

  Yours is just to keep leading your men and women to the slaughter, and to turn those who don’t die into something that can fight these…whatever they are.

  He checked his own vector again, and then those of the units formed up behind him. The enemy force was only three ships, but each of them was massive, five or six times the size of those encountered before. Stockton considered breaking off and returning to the base ships to run back to Calpharon and report the new Highborn ship class.

  But that report will be a hell of a lot more useful if you have some idea of actual combat capabilities…

  And even if he led his entire strike force to its end, the base ships were positioned just inside the transit point. Whatever happened, Admiral Barron and the rest of the fleet’s command staff would know about the larger enemy ships.

  “Alright, we’re going in…and you all know what that means. Keep those payloads until the last second, and plant them right in the guts of that monster right up front.” He listened to the acknowledgements, nodding to himself as one squadron commander after another shouted out on the comm, sounding almost eager to throw themselves and their squadrons at the deadly enemy ships.

  Stockton felt something different, a grim darkness lit by flashing recollections of the last battle, of the losses his people had suffered when they’d joined the fight to save their new Hegemony allies.

  He understood the eagerness of his officers. He’d felt that way once himself.

  You haven’t fought this enemy. None of you have…

  That wasn’t entirely true. Stockton had about a dozen veterans of battles against the Highborn with him, mostly in command roles. Enough to help him throw the force against the enemy in a wild assault, but not enough to reduce the cost he knew his people would pay.

  He stared straight ahead, and he felt his face tensing. It was time. Stockton had lost count of the battles he’d fought, of the hours he’d spent crunched in his fighter, battling for his life against one enemy or another. One day, he knew, he would climb into his cockpit for the last time, and fly off into his final fight.

  Then he repeated his mantra, the thought with which he’d always countered thoughts of his death.

  One day…but not today…

  * * *

  Gelak closed his eyes, watching the battle unfolding a few hundred thousand kilometers from his fighter’s position. He twisted, reaching around, scratching at the small implant and the
cable connected to it. The Kriegeri wing commander had finally become accustomed to the neural link, if not exactly comfortable with it yet. The abilities to ‘see’ the battlefield in his thoughts, and to send commands to his ship without speaking or moving, seemed ready to usher in a revolution in small ship combat tactics, save for one problem. The Hegemony had a very short history of such operations, and despite the hurried manufacturing and training programs that had put thousands of Kriegeri warriors into cockpits, Gelak knew he and his comrades were still woefully inferior to their Rim counterparts—now allies—despite the link and the generally higher technology level of their ships.

  That was something that rankled at him, and at his Kriegeri pride. It was unbecoming, perhaps, something a Master might have handled differently. But Gelak was driven by a need to match the skill of his allies, to lead his own squadrons into the fight as competently and aggressively as any Rim commander. But the Confed officer Stockton was in command, by order of none other than Commander Chronos himself, along with the Rim admiral, Barron. Stockton was a legendary pilot, one not even his Kriegeri dignity could deny was the absolute best. Stockton had once again placed Gelak and his Kriegeri in reserve, and Gelak seethed silently.

  Gelak had been born to serve, to obey his superiors without question…and he had done just that his entire career. But Stockton was a Confed, and the Rimdwellers still felt like enemies to him. He found resentment eroding his grim acceptance of orders, and deep inside him, there was something entirely unfamiliar, an urge to ignore the commands he’d been given, and to lead his people forward into the fight without authorization. It was suppressed, under control, but for a Kriegeri veteran, it was disconcerting nevertheless.

  He watched as the Confeds, this time supplemented by a wing from the Alliance, the mysterious nation from even farther out on the Rim than the Confederation, moved forward toward the lead Highborn ship. His resentment began to give way to respect as he watched the squadrons bearing down, holding their formations even as the enemy defensive fired began to take a toll.

  The Highborn ships were large, much larger than the ones previously encountered. Gelak knew that didn’t bode well for the prospects of the war going forward, but he pushed such thoughts blithely aside. Concerns of that sort were not for him. The Masters would make strategic decisions, and he and his warriors would do as they were commanded to do. That was the way, the only way. Gelak had been born into his Kriegeri status, a subject of the Hegemony his entire life, but his father had told him of the days before the Masters had come, of starvation and disease and endless conflict, and slow, painful deaths from radiation. The Masters had made his people their servants, at least in a manner of speaking, but they had also brought them the comforts of civilization, food, medicine, order. The average lifespans of his people had doubled almost immediately, and internecine warfare became a distant memory. Gelak served because he had no choice, because he’d been trained to obey. But also because he wanted to, because he was loyal and believed in the Hegemony.

  He watched as more of Stockton’s fighters were destroyed, eighteen in total. That was a large number, especially since the attack force was still more than thirty thousand kilometers out. The new Confed fighters, the black ones, were more or less a match for those his own pilots flew, save for the links, of course. But only about ten percent of the Confed force had the faster, more maneuverable craft, and the Alliance ships were even slower than the old Confederation ones.

  Give us the order…you need help against these ships…

  Gelak sat, watching the growing carnage, and wanting above all things to plunge himself, and his pilots, right into the middle of the maelstrom.

  But he remained on station, true to his orders. It was the way. Obedience.

  It was the only way.

  * * *

  Stockton watched in horror as the wave of missiles—at least that’s what he guessed they were—moved steadily toward his formations. The volley was unexpected, something he hadn’t seen before, and he didn’t like the look of it. There were close to a hundred of the weapons approaching his ships, and that barrage had been launched by the lead ship alone. He had no idea how effective their targeting was, but the things had accelerated at better than 130g, and that meant they were fast.

  Too fast for his ships to evade.

  “All squadrons, adjust course thirty degrees in the y plane. Let’s see if we can go around those things.” His instincts had already answered that question, and a few seconds later, his calculations confirmed his gut’s conclusion. No, his squadrons were not going to get around the incoming attack. The best he could hope for was to lessen the impact. A hundred warheads that maneuverable constituted a massive threat, one he knew could very well gut his entire force. But he decided to press on, to run the gauntlet.

  Then, a hundred became thousands.

  Stockton was a hardened veteran, the legend of the fighter corps, and a warrior almost invulnerable to shock. But he stared at his screen, paralyzed by the horror of what he was seeing.

  Every one of the incoming weapons had split into twenty separate contacts…and every one of those was still coming on, still accelerating at more than twice the highest thrust capacity of any of his ships.

  He gritted his teeth, struggling for a stretch of seconds that felt like eternity to regain his composure. He wanted to complete the attack, to take his ships in and see what these enemy behemoths were really made of. But he knew that had become an impossibilty. If he didn’t break off immediately, not one of his ships would make it back.

  He wasn’t sure any of them would anyway, but he didn’t give up. Not ever.

  “All squadrons, break off. Maximum thrust back to the landing platforms. Full evasive maneuvers.” He caught the acidy feeling of bile in the back of his throat, even as he gripped his ship’s controls, and blasted his engines at full.

  His mind was racing, the hope of saving at least some of his pilots struggling with the growing realization that there was no escape from the approaching wave of death.

  “Repeat, abort the mission. Return to the base ships at maximum possible speed. Full evasive maneuvers.”

  But that was mostly for his pilots, for what remained of morale. In his own mind, he was rapidly losing hope, and a dark and desperate thought began to emerge from the deep shadows of his mind.

  Perhaps he had made that last, fateful climb into his ship.

  Chapter Two

  CFS Dauntless

  Orbiting Calpharon (Hegemonic Capital)

  Sigma Nordlin IV

  Year 323 AC (After the Cataclysm)

  “I’ll have another…” Tyler Barron angled his head, and he looked toward his companion at the table. “You?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he glanced back at the steward and said, “Admiral Winters will have another, too.”

  “Ty…I think we’d better take it easy. We’ve got a lot on our plates right now, and if the latest scouting reports are correct, we don’t have much time before the enemy completes their reorganization and renews the offensive. We both know they’ll be coming this way as soon as they’re ready. And we’d better be prepared when they do.”

  “Does it really matter? We win, we lose, what difference does it make? If we win, there’s just another fight, worse than the last one. Maybe if we lose, it will finally all end.” Barron respected his friend’s abilities, but Winters hadn’t seen the enemy the way he had. He still harbored some belief victory was possible. That hope had largely abandoned Barron.

  The admiral turned again, about to yell for the steward, but the spacer was already on his way back to the table, a small tray in his hand. Barron watched as the man put the two drinks down, and spun around, walking swiftly away from the table.

  As quickly as he could manage. That’s okay…I wouldn’t want to be near me either.

  Barron picked up the glass, knowing it had to be something close to the last of the quality brandy in Dauntless’s stores. He’d never been much of a drinker, but
when he did partake, it was almost always the best, a fine wine, or a topnotch brandy.

  This time, though, part of Barron was ready to work his way down that particular food chain as supplies ran low, all the way to whatever homemade rot gut the ship’s cooks would invariably manage to concoct from the galley’s leftovers after everything else was gone.

  Dauntless’s officer’s club was nothing special to look at—though it was far plusher than the small compartment that had served the same purpose on the old Dauntless. Barron had rarely frequented such establishments, at least not after his ascending rank had mostly barred him from predator-like visits to the poker games that often popped up at one of the tables. He’d always considered it unseemly for a commander to win money from those he led…and if he played, he usually won. His gambling skills were still legendary in the fleet, though accounts had become mostly secondhand, as so many of those who’d experienced one of his fleecings had been lost in one battle or another, or had retired, half broken and hollowed out by endless war.

  “Ty, I know it’s hard on you. I knew it would be when Andi gave me the message for you. But you have to look at the good in it, too. When you get home, you will see them both, Andi and the baby. And you have a child, another Barron. There is joy in that.”

  “When I get home?” Barron’s tone was brusque, almost caustic. “You think any of us is getting home?”

  “Ty, I know it seems…”

  “I’ve seen these things, Clint. Their ships, what they can do. I know I called for the fleet, and thanks to Andi, we’ve got more force here than I could have hoped. But it’s still not enough. When the enemy finishes licking their wounds and masses their forces, they’re going to come here, to Calpharon, and they’re going to hit us like nothing you’ve ever seen before. We’ll hurt them, but we’re not going to stop them. They’ll get through us here, and anywhere else we manage to put up a defense with whatever force we’ve got left. We’ll fight, because there is no choice, but we’ll die here, somewhere out in the Badlands, far from home. It will be a mercy of a sort. But Andi and my child…” Barron paused, clearly struggling to hold back the emotions struggling to take control. “…well, I don’t know what these…Others…want, but we both know Andi’s not the kind to surrender, to grovel for mercy, don’t we?”