Ruins of Empire: Blood on the Stars III Read online

  But there was something else in her tone too, a concern even her joy at his survival couldn’t mask. He’d been worried about Dauntless’s status as he’d led his battered squadrons back in, but now he was sure. Everything was far from well on the ship.

  * * *

  “Blue and Scarlet Eagle squadrons have landed, Captain. Twenty-two fighters. Refit and refueling operations are underway.”

  “Very well.” Barron suspected Travis would have preferred to leave out the number of returned fighters, but her fastidious nature would never allow her to make an incomplete report. She hadn’t included a reminder that the two squadrons had launched thirty-three craft, but Barron didn’t need one. He knew exactly how many ships his two elite forces had sent into the maelstrom, and he was also perfectly capable of doing the necessary subtraction to determine how many of his people hadn’t come back.

  He also knew any claims of aggressive refitting efforts underway were exaggerations. Red, Green, and Yellow squadrons were on the way in, and they’d commence landings in less than ten minutes. Dauntless’s bays were capable of bringing in fighters while equipping others, but conducting the operations simultaneously slowed both down. And the incoming squadrons were flying on fumes. Even Chief Evans’s ferocious team leadership would be tested to its limit in prepping the Blues and the Eagles for relaunch while bringing in the other squadrons quickly.

  “Captain, with your permission…I’d like to go down to the bays and assist.” Travis turned around in her seat.

  “Go,” he replied. “Do what you can. Even a few extra minutes could help.” He knew Travis was as aware as he was just how important a job refitting those fighters was. Dauntless’s primaries were down, and its power transmission systems were badly damaged. He knew Commander Fritz was crawling through the guts of the massive weapon system, desperately struggling to get it back online. He considered his chief engineer to be a virtual sorceress, and he’d seen her repair systems he’d thought were nothing but scrap, but his gut told him this time the damage was too extensive. He would have to fight this battle without his heaviest guns, and that meant he needed his fighters. As quickly as possible.

  “Yes, Captain. I’ll keep you posted.” She leapt out of her chair and moved across the bridge at a pace somewhere between a jog and a run, a gait Barron suspected was intended to get her there as quickly as possible without instilling panic in the crew.

  Barron hadn’t discussed the pending final showdown with his first officer, but the two shared an almost telepathic link, and he was certain she’d been thinking the same thing he had. With Dauntless’s primaries out of action, the Union ship had the edge in a close-ranged fight. Normally, Barron might feel he could counter a weaponry and tonnage advantage with expertise and the skill of his crew, but now he was facing the pride of the Union navy. His people might still be better—he’d argue to the end they were—but it wasn’t by their usual margin, and he doubted it was enough to prevail if the enemy ship still had its own primaries online.

  No, Dauntless wasn’t going to win a close-ranged duel, or if she did, it would be by the slimmest of margins. She’d be one step out of the scrapyard by the time she gained her “victory.” But there was more at play than two battleships blasting away at each other, and Barron suspected whichever ship could refit and relaunch fighters first would prevail.

  For all the tactics he might employ, and the skill of his gunnery teams—and the sweating engineering crews struggling to get systems operational—the battle likely lay in the hands of the technicians in the launch bays, and the speed with which they turned the battered fighters around and got them back into space again. And if that was the case, he’d put Chief Evans and his people up against any other launch teams…even the pride of the Union. Especially with Atara Travis breathing down their necks.

  “Lieutenant Darrow, take Commander Travis’s station.”

  “Yes, sir.” The communications officer leapt up, struggling for a few seconds to slip out of his harness. Then he raced across the bridge, his nervous jog exhibiting none of the careful control Travis had just displayed.

  Darrow dropped into the seat and turned toward Barron, waiting for orders.

  “Get me a status report from engineering, Lieutenant. I need Commander Fritz’s updated assessment on the primaries and reactor B.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Darrow spun around, pausing for a moment as he stared at Travis’s panel. Dauntless’s executive officer was almost as much a legend to the crew as the captain. Travis was unmatched in her ability to follow multiple data streams coming in—like a chess master playing a dozen opponents simultaneously—and she’d had additional screens and keyboards installed at her station. Darrow stared at it all, looking stunned for a few seconds. Then he just dove in, flipping on the comm unit, and yelling out commands, doing his best to emulate his recollections of Travis at work.

  “Captain, Commander Fritz reports she is still working on the primaries, sir. No estimate on time to completion.”

  “Very well. Barron had almost snapped back a demand for a projection, but there was no point. If Anya Fritz hadn’t given him a time estimate, it was because she didn’t have any idea how long it would take. Forcing her to give him a wild guess was the definition of pointless.

  But she didn’t say she wouldn’t get them back online…and she would have if there was no hope…

  Fritz was the closest thing he’d ever seen to a miracle worker, and he knew there was at least a chance she would come through. But until then, he had to assume the primaries were gone. He had to find a way to win the fight without them.

  * * *

  “Chief, we need those fighters ready to launch, and we need it five minutes ago.”

  “Commander…we’re doing everything we can, but the rail systems are damaged. It’s slowing the transfer of fuel and weapons to the bay.” Evans had a reputation as a hotheaded bully, one who drove his crews mercilessly, but now he was on the defensive. The slim woman facing him not only outranked him, but she was just as “chew through steel girders” tough as he was.

  Atara Travis was shaking her head before he even finished. She knew she was popular with Dauntless’s crew, but she was just as aware of the stories about her unlikely rise from the slums of a hell world to her current rank and position. Many of those tales involved rumors of bodies left behind, and rather fewer of them actually came close to the truth, but she never debunked any of them. Together they created a useful legend, one she was not hesitant to use to get what she needed. And she was amused by the fact that Chief Evans, the terror of Dauntless’s landing bays, was scared shitless of her.

  “That’s not enough, Chief. The primaries are down, and the only way we’re going to win this fight is to launch a fighter strike before the enemy does. I don’t care what you do, but I want two squadrons ready to launch in fifteen minutes…and the other three fifteen behind that.”

  “That’s just impossible,” the burly chief protested.

  “It’s impossible if we stand here arguing about it.” Travis gestured toward the open area of the bay, just behind Evans. “I don’t see you hauling equipment, Chief.” She turned and waved her arm behind her. “I brought another sixty sets of arms and legs with me.” The men and women lined up against the wall were stewards, scientists…virtually everyone on Dauntless who didn’t have a crucial battlestations role. “So, put them to work. Put me to work.” She glared at him with an intensity that made the big man cringe. “But stop telling me what you can’t get done.”

  Evans stood there for a few seconds, an uncertain look on his face. Travis thought he might object or argue, but then he just nodded. “Yes, sir,” he replied, as meekly as she’d ever heard him. Evans was a career spacer, a veteran of the last war, and he normally expected his utterances to be obeyed like the word of God. Even officers who outranked him generally quaked in his presence, but now he had met his match on Dauntless. Again. Travis knew Anya Fritz and her people had invaded his launc
h bay during the fight at Santis, and now she had repeated the engineer’s performance, with her own special touches.

  “Then let’s get to it, Chief. We’ve only got thirteen of those fifteen minutes left.”

  Chapter Twelve

  CFS Intrepid

  Hystari System

  Sector 3 – “The Front Line”

  309 AC

  “We’re doing everything we can down here, Captain…but that last hit was bad. Half the power feeds from the reactor are severed. It’s fixable, but it will take time.” Commander Merton’s tone said more about the situation than the report itself, communicating stress and exhaustion more emphatically than mere words.

  Eaton shifted in her chair, her anger and tension causing her to momentarily forget her injuries. She winced as a wave of agony shot up and down her back, but she just gritted her teeth and ignored it, even as her eyes moistened from the pain. She was a Confederation captain and a veteran warrior…she wasn’t about to let pain distract her. Not when her ship was in danger.

  “We don’t have that time, Doug,” she said, as matter-of-factly as she could manage amid the chaos breaking out all around her. There were fires in the landing bays, compartments blown open and exposed to the vacuum of space, and at least two dozen of her people dead…but the worst problem right now was the engines. They were completely offline, and until she had some kind of thrust capacity, Intrepid was stuck in Hystari, watching the rest of the task force withdraw.

  Commodore Reynard had given the retreat order, the one she’d known was coming. But now it was beginning to look like it was too late, at least for her and her people. Intrepid’s combat space patrol had shredded the first three waves of torpedo bombers, gunning down ship after ship before they’d reached launch range. But a struggle so intense came at a cost, in resources as well as casualties. She’d lost more than a third of her fighters to the enemy interceptors accompanying the bombers, and the rest had been on full turbos for most of the battle. She’d had no choice but to order them to land to refuel and refit, just as fresh waves of bombers approached. Her gunners had done the best they could against the fresh assault forces, but there had just been too many enemy ships.

  “I understand, Captain,” Merton said, “but that doesn’t change reality.” He paused, and she could hear the sound of a hard exhale through the comm. “Let me go, Captain…I’ll get it done as quickly as possible.”

  “Go, Doug. I have faith in you.” She cut the line. Distracting him wasn’t going to serve any purpose.

  She did have faith in her engineer. Commander Douglas Merton had seen her ship through crises before, and Eaton always backed her people one hundred percent. They gave her their loyalty, and she gave them hers. Besides, there was nothing else to do. Intrepid had twenty minutes, perhaps thirty. After that, she’d either be through the transit point, retreating with the fleet…or the eighteen Union battleships and fresh waves of bombers streaking across the system would be on her.

  Intrepid had taken three hits, all of them bad, and one of them nearly critical. It would have been worse, but her assault squadrons returned from their attack run just as the final group of Union bombers was beginning its attack run, no doubt planning to finish off the crippled battleship. The interceptors of Black Helm squadron were almost out of fuel when they reached the Union strike craft, their laser cannons down to their last watts of power. But Angus Douglas had led them on a blistering attack anyway, slicing through the approaching strike force and then coming about and hitting them again. Only two bombers got through, and Intrepid’s gunners took those out, a significant feat considering that centralized fire control was out shipwide. It was a bit of shared heroism that just possibly saved Intrepid from destruction. But that salvation was temporary, and Eaton knew her ship wasn’t out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.

  Half of the surviving Black Helms had been forced to ditch as their birds ran out of fuel. She’d sent out the rescue shuttle, but now she was far from sure it would be able to land in time. The bays were in bad shape, and a series of internal explosions had degraded conditions further after the craft had launched.

  Whether or not she could get the rescue ship back onboard, a fighter launch was out of the question. There was no way to refuel or rearm the squadrons, not with the fires and the blasted systems in the bays.

  Survival was in her engineer’s hands now. Either her people would escape or they wouldn’t. There was frustratingly little she could do but wait.

  She remembered the long hours in the dust clouds at Arcturon, waiting moment by moment for the enemy to find her. She’d escaped detection that time, and it was ultimately her own action that gave away her location, as she launched a massive fighter attack on the enemy ships attacking Dauntless. This time was different. If the Union battleships got into range of her crippled vessel, it would be over in minutes. Her primaries were down, and more than half the secondaries too. Much of the damage was repairable, severed power conduits and the like. But when the enemy closed into range, none of that mattered. She would either have weapons to fight or she wouldn’t…but Intrepid would be overwhelmed either way. The engines—escape—that was her only chance.

  Without the engines, every man and woman on the ship was as good as dead. Intrepid fresh from the shipyard couldn’t have faced eighteen enemy ships alone. And there was no doubt, she would be alone. The commodore would torture himself over leaving her behind…but he would do it. This was war, and he couldn’t risk five ships to save one, not when the battle would still be hopeless. Eaton had no bad feelings about that. She knew she’d do the same thing in his shoes.

  “All gunners to operable stations, Commander. We may have to make a fight of it here.” It was bravado, as much a way to keep her people busy as to fight off the fear. Eaton would go down fighting, that was a certainty. But with nothing but half her secondaries she wasn’t going to do more than a few pinpricks.

  If they get close enough at all. They can stop outside the range of our secondaries and blast us to dust with their primary batteries.

  “Yes, Captain.” Nordstrom relayed the command on the intra-ship comm. A few second later, he spun around, staring across the bridge at her. “Captain, I have Commodore Reynard on the comm.”

  She grabbed the headset she’d set on the armrest and strapped it over her head. “Commodore?”

  “Any progress on your engine repair, Captain?”

  “My damage control teams are working on it, sir. That’s all I have to report right now.”

  “Any projections?”

  “Commodore…the truth is we have no idea. The damage is fairly extensive and widespread. We might get lucky…we might not. We’re in trouble, sir.” She paused. “You have to leave us.”

  “None of that, Captain. The Confederation navy doesn’t abandon its personnel.”

  “There’s no choice, Commodore. We’re too outnumbered. You can’t lose six ships instead of one. You can’t save us.”

  “Abandon ship, Captain. Vanguard and Resolution are closest. We can pick up your lifeboats.”

  “Commodore,” Eaton said softly. “You know there isn’t time. Go, sir, please. Don’t let us carry the lives of all the spacers in the fleet with us. The Confederation needs those ships. We don’t know what this new attack means, but it’s a pretty sure bet we’ll need every vessel we can get.”

  “We will stay until the last possible moment, Captain. If there is anything we can do to assist your engineering crews, you just have to ask.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She knew Reynard had meant what he said sincerely, but also that it was an empty offer. There wasn’t time for any of the other ships to come to her aid, any more than there was to evacuate her people from Intrepid. She also knew he’d needed to say what he had, and she’d let him do it.

  She looked around the bridge, at her people, focused on their stations, not a sign of panic or indiscipline. She felt a sudden touch of guilt. They expected her to get them out of this. They were afr
aid, but their faith in her was stronger than their fear. They’d been abandoned in Arcturon and as good as lost, but she’d gotten them out of there—and led them deep into enemy-held space to destroy the Union’s supply base before she’d brought them home.

  She’d had lots of help there, of course. Tyler Barron had been the overall commander, and Eaton was far from sure she could have matched his performance in that role. But the situation now was different. If Merton and his engineers didn’t get the engines back online, she and all her people were going to die. There were no tricks, no stratagems that could hold off such a massive enemy force.

  “Captain, Commander Merton on your line.”

  Her hand moved to the side of her headset. “Doug, what is it?”

  “We’re still trying to get the engines back, but believe it or not, I’ve got the primaries operable. I can’t promise a thing. They might get knocked out by the first hit we take…they might even just stop working. But right now, you’ve got them both online.”

  “You’re a miracle worker, Doug…but what we really need is the engines.”

  “I know, Captain. We’re doing everything that can be done. Don’t give up yet.”

  “We never give up, Commander. You know that.”

  That doesn’t mean we don’t fail. That we don’t die.

  Her eyes darted to the display. The Union officers knew as well as she did how fragile Confederation primaries were. They would probably assume Intrepid’s main guns had been knocked out. She stared at the symbols on her screen. The Union ships were strung out across the system, in the order they’d transited. A cautious commander would have stopped and reordered his fleet, moving his ships into a real battle formation. But obviously, the Union admiral didn’t think a crippled Confederation battleship was anything to worry about.