Ruins of Empire: Blood on the Stars III Read online

  “Thank you, sir.” There was distraction in her voice, not surprising since she was about to go into a fight. “Captain, I recalled the Marine transports…sent them back to the alien vessel. I don’t have fighters to escort them, and if any enemy interceptors get to those shuttles…”

  “That’s exactly what I would have done, Commander.” But it left that Union frigate there, its crew no doubt feverishly working to restore engine functionality. “Just keep a close eye on that ship.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Captain?”

  Barron spun around. Andi Lafarge was standing right behind him. “Not now, Captain.”

  “But it’s about that Union frigate.”

  Barron felt a surge of frustration. Whatever else Andromeda Lafarge was—and the jury was still out on that—there wasn’t a question in his mind she was a pain in the ass. “What?” he asked, not even trying to hide his impatience.

  “Pegasus. If Commander Travis allows my crew to launch in my ship, they can return here and pick up some of your Marines. We can get them to the Union frigate and board before the crew can effect any repairs. Pegasus is armed, unlike your shuttles. If we run into a fighter or two, at least we can fight back.”

  “Hold for a second, Atara.” He stared at Lafarge. “Your ship would have a better chance than a shuttle if she ran into enemy fighters, but you’re still talking about significant danger. Pegasus isn’t a warship, no matter what weapons you managed to sneak on there. You’d be asking your people to take a terrible risk.”

  “Pegasus can bite back, Tyler. You have to trust me on that. And I’d be taking that risk with them…this offer is based on me going too. My first officer is still on that Union ship, and my people stick together. There isn’t a man or woman on my crew who won’t risk whatever is necessary to save Vig.”

  “My Marines would be going too. They’d be exposed to the same danger.”

  “Would you rather leave a Union ship loose in the system, while your own vessel is locked in combat? The Union has engineers too, you know. They just might get that ship operational again.”

  Barron shook his head, a look of doubt on his face. But then he just said, “Atara…release the crew of Pegasus. Advise them to bring their ship back to this vessel and dock where they did before.”

  “Yes, sir…” There was hesitancy in her tone, but she didn’t say anything else.

  Barron looked at Lafarge, trying to decide if he wanted to thank her or throw her in the brig until the smug look dropped off her face. He was also worried about her. If that frigate had any operable weapons systems remaining, Pegasus’s approach could be a hot one. And he found the thought of her being vaporized along with her ship to be a terribly upsetting prospect.

  “If any of them question you, tell them Captain Lafarge is waiting for them here. These are her orders. They are to come here immediately and pick her up.”

  “Yes, sir.” Travis didn’t sound much more convinced, but she didn’t argue.

  “Now, take out that enemy ship, Commander Travis. And keep me posted.” A short pause. “Good luck, Atara.” He cut the line and stood silently for a moment. His ship was going into battle…without him. He and Dauntless had been through hell and back more than once. It was wrong for him not to be on her bridge now.

  “Tyler…”

  Barron had sunk deep into thought about his ship, and the battle it was about to fight. He realized Lafarge’s hand was on his arm. He turned back and looked at her.

  “I know it’s hard for you to be here while your people fight a battle…but you have to have faith in them. They will fight it—they will win it—for you.”

  “Thank you,” he said softly. Then, not wanting to discuss it further, he changed the subject. “You be careful out there. We can’t be sure that frigate is helpless…her engines are down, but that doesn’t mean she can’t blow your ship to atoms.” He paused, looking at her for a few seconds. He couldn’t get a good read on her. One minute he wanted to strangle her, and the next…

  He turned abruptly and looked back across the room, deliberately stopping himself from completing that thought. Anya Fritz was about six meters away, hunched over one of the strange canisters. She had equipment and scanners laid out on the floor all around the thing.

  Fritzie…Dauntless is going into the fight without her as well…

  His engineer was a miracle worker, one who deserved as much responsibility as he did for Dauntless’s victories. And now my ship has to fight without either of us…

  “Fritzie…” He walked across the deck toward his engineer. She’d been completely lost in her task, and he startled her.

  “Captain,” she said, “these canisters are fascinating. The nanotechnology in them is centuries beyond anything we have. And I’m convinced now that they are antimatter storage devices. In fact, I’d wager they’re cartridges designed to power something…a weapon, perhaps. Though any weapon using this amount of…”

  “Fritzie,” Barron said. “Dauntless has picked up a Union ship entering the system. She’s moving to engage.”

  Fritz leapt up, all traces of her former excited curiosity gone. “We have to get back, sir. The primaries, the engines…they’re all functional, but they’re fragile too. We have to…”

  “We’re stuck here, Fritzie. I don’t like it any more than you do, but we’re just going to have to trust our people.”

  She stared back at him, her expression communicating the helpless tension she was feeling. He knew her mind was racing, trying to come up with some course of action they hadn’t considered, some way to get back on Dauntless before the coming fight. He knew, because he’d done the same thing…and come up just as empty as the engineer was now.

  “Fritzie, I know how upsetting it is to be stuck here, but we can’t do anything about that. Still, we don’t have to waste our time. This thing…” He gestured all around. “…is clearly still operable, at least to an extent. We’ve got to figure out a way to move it. If it has lights and life support, maybe it’s got engine power too.”

  She stared back at him, dumbstruck. “Captain…I wouldn’t begin to know where to start. First of all, this ship is massive…we’ve only even explored a small section. Second, I’m like a child playing with a nuclear reactor. This technology is massively beyond anything I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t know where to even start. It would take a year just to get a good look around and come up with a reasonable guess about how its systems function.”

  “Fritzie…we’ve got to get this ship out of here. If the Union gets ahold of it…” He let his voice trail off. He was sure Fritz knew exactly what that would mean, better probably than he did himself. “We just have to get it moving. Until we do, Dauntless has to face anything and everything that comes through that transwarp link. There is no way we can leave here, not without this ship. Not even if the entire Union fleet pours into this system.”

  Fritz just nodded. “I’ll do what I can, Captain.” She looked up at him, a troubled look on her face. “Sir, I’ve got half the engineering crew here…if Dauntless…”

  “Let’s have some faith in Commander Travis and the others. You left Lieutenant Billings in charge, right? He’s a good man. He’ll get the job done.”

  Barron stared at her with what he hoped was a look of serene confidence. But inside he felt the hypocrisy of his words. He could tell Fritz her people could perform without her, and express all the confidence in the universe in Atara Travis…none of it changed the one fact that was eating him alive.

  His ship was going into battle without him.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  CFS Dauntless

  System Z-111 (Chrysallis)

  Deep Inside the Quarantined Zone (“The Badlands”)

  309 AC

  “Steady, Lieutenant…” Atara Travis was leaning forward, her edginess on display despite her best efforts to hide it. Dauntless’s fighters had hit the enemy ship hard, the Blues, Yellows, and Eagles following right on the heels of Fede
rov’s Reds, gutting and scattering its interceptor formations and clearing the way for Green squadron’s bombers to make their attack run.

  The Greens had scored three hits, their plasma torpedoes slamming into the side of the enemy vessel, tearing great rents in its hull. The Union battleship was hurt, there was no doubt about that. But it was still functional, and its disordered fighters were regrouping. The fight was off to a good start, but it wasn’t over. Not yet. In a vacuum, Travis would have felt good about the state of things. In fact, she had been satisfied…until three minutes earlier, when the scanners picked up fresh energy readings in the transwarp tube.

  More Union ships. It had to be. She thought for a brief, indulgent moment that it could be friendly reinforcements, but she knew the situation on the battle lines too well to believe that for long. It would be difficult to pull a task force from the front. Whatever was coming to Dauntless’s aid—if anything was—it wouldn’t be there yet.

  “Stand by…” she said softly, her eyes locked on the display. The primaries had been in range for almost a minute, but she knew every thousand kilometers closer increased the chances of scoring a critical hit. In normal circumstances, she’d have opened fire the instant Dauntless had entered range, but the new contact put her on a time limit. She wasn’t going to have time to fight it out. She’d get an initial shot, maybe a second…then she’d have to pull back. She couldn’t risk getting caught too close to the transwarp portal if a couple fresh battleships came through.

  Darrow glanced back toward her, for about the third time. She could feel the tension on the bridge. Every officer there knew that Dauntless should be firing. Travis knew the crew trusted her…but she also understood she wasn’t Captain Barron. There was some doubt there, some worry—there had to be—especially as they blasted toward their target without their beloved captain, guns silent.

  Her eyes flicked down to the scanner on her workstation. Energy readings from ships in transwarp space were notoriously difficult to read. The alien environment in the tube had different properties than normal space, and due to the reflections of transit, the energy she was reading on the small screen defied normal mathematical principles. Even Dauntless’s main AI could only guess at what was coming, its projection bouncing around, from one ship to as many as five.

  Reading the transwarp energy signatures required as much gut feel as number crunching, and Travis was one of the best at it. She couldn’t be sure what was coming, but she gradually settled on a range…three big ships, maybe four. And escorts. Too much to hold her ground and face. Dauntless would have to retreat.

  Pulling back was a brief respite, she realized, not a solution. The enemy ships would blast into the system, chase down Dauntless, and seize the artifact. Leaving the system wasn’t an option. She had to defend that ancient ship, somehow. But getting blasted right outside the transit point wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

  “Lieutenant Darrow…primary batteries are to target the enemy’s engines.” She didn’t have time to destroy the enemy ship, but with some luck she could take it out of the fight, at least for now.

  “Yes, Commander.” She could hear the uncertainty in the communications officer’s voice. The range had closed considerably from maximum, but they were still pretty damned far out for targeting specific sections of the ship.

  Travis had been watching everything, the enemy’s movement, its course. The Union vessel was performing evasive maneuvers, but she thought she was picking up patterns, similarities in the blasts of thrust designed to thwart incoming attacks. If she was right, it might be just the edge she needed.

  She punched in the figures she’d been working in her head, and she sent them down to her gun crews. She had every confidence in her people, and she knew they would make the most of what she gave them, without further instruction. It wasn’t a certainty, of course, just a better guess. But she’d take anything she could get.

  “Lieutenant…primary batteries are to fire at will.”

  “Yes, Commander.” She could hear the energy in Darrow’s voice. Her people were in danger in this system, and they were all veterans enough to know it. But it was still one of the hardest things to sit and endure inaction. Striking out, fighting back…it bolstered even the hardest, most grizzled spacer’s morale.

  She sat quietly, watching, waiting. She’d done all she could, and now she had to trust her gunners. That was the one thing that came hardest to her. Travis had pulled herself up from the lowest of circumstances, and trust had been one of the first things she’d lost. She’d found a new home serving with Tyler Barron and the crew of Dauntless, but she’d never lost her almost fanatical self-reliance.

  She watched, the few seconds that passed seeming like hours, and then she saw the lights blink, heard the familiar sound of the big ship’s main batteries firing.

  “Crash recharge,” she snapped almost immediately, knowing it wasn’t necessary, that her engineering crew would already be feeding power back into the heavy guns as quickly as the conduits could carry it.

  “Yes, Commander.”

  Travis sighed softly. Dauntless was not only without her captain, she was also fighting without Anya Fritz, the battleship’s almost legendary chief engineer. Walt Billings was a capable officer, one who’d served alongside Fritz—and kept up with her ruthless and relentless demands for excellence. Travis knew he could do the job, though his sometimes clownish behavior made it difficult to remember that at times.

  “Hit, Commander!”

  She looked back at the main display. Both primaries had hit their target. The AI was still chewing on the data, trying to assess the damage inflicted. Travis knew that would be an estimate at best. Looking from the outside, tens of thousands of kilometers away, was far from a perfect way to detect damage. But she could see the enemy’s thrust dropping…to less than half its previous level. That wasn’t an absolute certainty—the enemy captain could have cut thrust voluntarily, perhaps even to mislead her—but her read of the Union vessel’s earlier moves suggested an inexperienced and unimaginative captain, one unlikely to attempt such a rapid-fire deception.

  “Very well,” she said, trying to hold back her own excitement. A hit was a good thing, but they were deep in the shit, and she still couldn’t see any way out. It wasn’t the time for feeling good. “I want the engines ready for maximum thrust back toward the artifact…as soon as the primaries fire again.”

  “Yes, Commander.” Darrow relayed the command to the engine room.

  Travis glanced over at the officer sitting at her station. Captain Barron had requested Darrow for his crew after the communications officer had suffered the misfortune of serving under the only Confederation captain in history convicted of treason. The mud from that sorry incident had splashed far, and nowhere more heavily than on the man who’d sat at the guilty officer’s communication station.

  There had been no proof against Darrow, none at all, but no other captain in the fleet would take him onto his or her crew. Barron’s sense of honor had been offended by the injustice of it all, and he’d personally requested Darrow as his senior comm officer. Travis had been against the move at the time, her own past having taught her to invariably expect the worst from people, but now she had to acknowledge the captain had been right. Darrow was a fine officer, and she didn’t doubt his loyalty for an instant. Dauntless was stronger for his presence, and any suspicions that might have existed about his trustworthiness were long gone.

  She looked at the status bar for the primaries. Just over half charged. She slapped her hand on her own comm unit, pulling up Billings’s line.

  “Yes, Captain?” The engineer was tired, and he sounded out of breath.

  “Lieutenant, I need those primaries charged now. You have to push more energy through those lines.”

  “Captain…the reactors are at full power now. We…”

  “Then take the reactors to one hundred five percent…but I need those primaries in thirty seconds. And twenty would be better.” S
he slammed her fist down on the control, cutting the channel before the engineer could reply. She didn’t have time for the usual disclaimers on the dangers of overpowering the reactors.

  She looked back at her screen, at the energy numbers from the transwarp gate. The first enemy ship would emerge any second, and the others would be close on its heels. She was running out of time to break off. And she wanted that last shot.

  * * *

  “All right, Dauntless!” Dirk Timmons shouted loudly, his voice echoing off the bubble of his cramped cockpit. He was racing back to the ship, along with the rest of his Eagles and the Blues, when he saw the first shot of Dauntless’s primaries on his scanners. Both weapons had connected, and it looked from what he could tell like both had scored solid hits. And the second shots had been even better placed.

  His fighter didn’t have the scanning suite to do complex damage assessments, but there wasn’t a doubt in his mind the primaries had hurt the Union battleship…on top of the three bombs the Greens had planted in her. He could see the ship’s thrust had dropped, that she was accelerating at less than 1g.

  He checked his fuel gauge again, and some of the elation slipped away. He had enough to get back easily, at least to Dauntless’s current location, but he also suspected the battleship wasn’t going to be there by the time his people made it. There was something coming through the transwarp link…and he was almost certain Commander Travis would pull back out of range. That was a sound tactical maneuver, but also one that would leave his squadrons chasing their mothership, burning massive quantities of fuel to catch her and land. And he was far from sure any of his people had enough left.

  “Warrior, I need you to bring your people around. Dauntless is going to have to pull back, and you don’t have fuel to waste.” Kyle Jamison had read his mind. Timmons had come to respect Jamison tremendously, both as his immediate superior, and as a man. “Thunder” Jamison was a deadly pilot too, if not quite his equal in the cockpit.