The White Fleet (Blood on the Stars Book 7) Read online

  “I said it will have to wait. Make yourself comfortable…what the hell was your name again? Or don’t. I don’t really care. But I have something I have to do right now, so either get out of my way, or I will splatter your brains on that wall.” Holsten stared at the man with a withering gaze. “Do we understand each other?”

  Aguillar was stunned, and too terrified to respond, but he did manage to nod his head slightly, something Holsten was willing to take as an answer. The spy chief turned and walked toward the door, and as the gun moved from Aguillar’s face, the bureaucrat recovered some small measure of his courage, and he shouted after Holsten. “Disregarding a Senatorial order is a federal crime, Mr. Holsten, as is pointing a weapon at a duly authorized representative of the Senate. In addition to the crimes you have no doubt committed here. You are in a great deal of trouble, Mr. Holsten. A great deal. You will…”

  Holsten just ignored it all. He stepped through the door and out into the hall, waving toward the Marines lined up against the wall. He had to go find Andi, and nothing was going to stop him, not if every Senator on Megara lied down in front of him and tried to block the way. He half-listened to the hack’s threats, at least for a few seconds…and then the shrill voice faded away as he made his way down the corridor, to the waiting transport.

  * * *

  “Andi, you are a smart woman. You know we are running out of time.”

  Lafarge looked up at Lille, at least through the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. “Just kill me now, you worm. Because if you don’t, and I get out of here, you can count on the fact that I’ll find you one day…and I’ll kill you. Count on that.” She felt a wave of satisfaction that she’d managed to remain defiant, but she knew it was empty bluster. There was no depth to it. She was spent, beaten. If she’d known anything of real value, she’d have told him already. It was something that cut at her insides, in its own way even more than the pain of the torture. She’d always prided herself on being tough, resolute. Now, she knew Ricard Lille had broken her. The only thing that allowed her to pretend she was still resisting was the fact that she knew almost nothing. Even her new crew were mysteries to her. All she had were a bunch of names, fake ones, she was sure, which she guessed they had all abandoned the instant she disappeared. She also realized just what a pro Gary Holsten was, how careful and how meticulous in protecting vital data. She’d felt bursts of anger toward her friend that he hadn’t told her more, given her some kind of currency to try and stop the torment. But she understood, and even in her wretched state, she approved.

  She’d spoken only the truth to Lille in her last statement, though. If, somehow, she did escape, there was no question she’d hunt Lille down, wherever she had to. There was no way the two of them could live, not after what had happened. He’d finish her, right here, or by God, she’d kill him, whatever it took.

  Lille smiled. You are a hard one, Andi. Such a pity you chose the wrong side. You could have accomplished wonders with us. Still, I have to thank you. Working with somebody like you is a rare challenge, and success in such an endeavor is its own reward.” He paused. “Now, tell me what I want to know, and we can stop this. I won’t insult your intelligence and tell you we can let you live, but I give you my word I will finish things with one quick shot to the head. No more pain, no more suffering. Just tell me what you know.”

  Andi looked back up at her tormenter, barely able to hold her head up. Her vision was blurry, and being down to one eye cost her any depth perception. But Lille’s smile was visible enough, and it told her all she needed to know. He had won, and she had lost. She knew it…and so did he.

  “I told you, I don’t know anything else. Gary Holsten asked me to come to Dannith and try to hire some prospectors to search for old tech…all secretly paid for by Confederation Intelligence.”

  Lille shook his head. “I wish I could believe you, Andi…but I’m afraid I just don’t.” He turned and gestured to a white-coated man standing next to the room’s sole door. “Emilio, it is time.”

  The man moved toward her with a large injector in his hand.

  “What is that?” she asked, struggling but failing to keep the fear from her voice.

  “It’s just something to make you…more cooperative. I’m afraid it is quite painful. I believe the most common description has been, ‘feeling like my insides are on fire.” Lille shook his head. “This is what your stubbornness brings you, Andi.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said, all attempts at hiding her panic gone now. “Okay…Gary Holsten, he wanted me to find out more about Sector Nine’s operations on Dannith. That’s why I went to Trencher. It’s why I agreed to meet you.”

  Lille smiled. “That’s so much better, Andi…but I’m afraid still far from enough. I regret that you have forced me to use this. In addition to being rather…unpleasant…I’m afraid it will leave you a blubbering imbecile, at least at the dosage I suspect we will have to use on you. I would have as soon allowed you to die with your wits still about you, but, alas, you have made your choice.” He gestured to the man, who started moving toward her. “Goodbye, Captain Lafarge.”

  She could see the white-coated man coming toward her, obscuring her view of the rest of the room…and her eyes locked on the injector, coming closer…

  Closer…

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  75,000 Kilometers from CFS Dauntless

  Zed-11 System

  Year 315 AC

  Nothing. No fighters launching. Not even close in defenses worth a damn. What is going on here?

  Stockton was looking straight ahead as his squadrons closed on the enemy warships. He’d been waiting for some kind of response, a flight of interceptors, some level of point defense. But, beyond a few hastily repurposed and largely ineffective light batteries, there was nothing.

  He felt a coldness inside, and he couldn’t set aside the fear he was leading his people into some kind of trap. Memories of vicious battles passed through his thoughts, fights against massive Union fighter wings, and worse, the deadly struggles against Palatian formations during the Alliance civil war. This enemy was more advanced than any he’d fought before, and somehow, deep inside, he just knew a war with them would be a holocaust like nothing he had ever seen. With all that, it was just too hard to believe he’d discovered a weakness in their defenses so potentially devastating.

  The warships were moderate in size, and they didn’t look like battleships, or any other kind of carrier, so the lack of fighters made at least some sense. But the closer his formations got to the enemy vessels, the more it seemed they had never even seen fighters before.

  It didn’t take more than a quick check of the fleet status readings on his screen to see how badly these four ships were hurting Admiral Barron’s battleships. The fleet’s primaries were firing back now, but they were having trouble targeting the wildly-gyrating vessels. One of the enemy ships had taken a pair of hits, and Stockton was relieved to see that, however advanced they were, the opposing vessels were not immune to damage. The primaries had hit hard, even if their effect had been rather less than it might have been against a Union or Alliance adversary. The problem was connecting with more shots. He’d seen Dauntless manage hit percentages north of fifty percent in the past, even at the current long range, but the fleet as a whole was shooting below ten percent…and to Stockton’s utter astonishment, he noted that the flagship and its famed crew of gunners hadn’t scored any hits at all.

  He watched the display, trying to follow the evasive maneuvers of the enemy ships…his targets now. It was going to be hard to connect, especially from any significant distance. But if these ships are really without close in defenses…

  He toggled the comm. “All squadrons, this is Raptor. We’re going to toss the book in the can on this one.” He didn’t suppose that would be much of a surprise to many of his pilots. He’d been a maverick his entire career, and from everything he’d heard, his reputation had exaggerated his exploits considerably. “These ships don’t see
m to have much in the way of close in defenses, and we haven’t seen so much as a single enemy fighter. So, we’re not going to pop off those torpedoes out at long range. These ships are too fast, too maneuverable. If we want to hit them, we’ve got to get in close…and I mean close.”

  His eyes were fixed on the screen as he spoke. His lead squadrons were less than sixty thousand kilometers from the enemy ships, right about at the edge of long range for plasma torpedoes. A normal attack closed to around forty thousand, or even thirty thousand if the squadrons were aggressive. Any more than that, and the increased losses to defensive fire would offset any gains in accuracy.

  But now there was no defensive fire. That meant the fighters could get a lot closer…and the torpedoes could go all the way in under power, converting to plasmas at the last instant. The enemy ships would have to evade like hell to escape the 50g thrust of the torpedoes.

  “I don’t want a weapon launched outside of ten thousand kilometers…and anybody who holds until under five thousand, you’ve got a drink coming to you in the officers’ club, on me.”

  There was usually some chatter on the comm line, but now it was a cacophony of pilots shouting, screaming. His people were ready, and from the sounds of things, it looked like he might be out a month’s pay in drinks.

  He tapped his throttle, edged his vector over, maintaining his position on the outside of the formation. As usual, his bird was fitted as an interceptor, which meant it was next to useless against an enemy that had no fighters. For a moment he considered ordering his interceptor squadrons to follow the bombers in and make strafing runs. But he had over two hundred of the heavy attack ships bearing down on four enemy vessels. If fifty plasma torpedoes apiece didn’t do the job, the puny lasers on his lighter interceptors weren’t going to make the difference.

  He hit his thrusters, decelerating sharply, holding back so he had a good vantage point as the bombing groups went in. He watched as they closed. Twenty thousand kilometers, fifteen thousand…still no enemy fighters launching. The small number of light guns firing began to hone their targeting, however, and the bombers started taking hits. Two were down, then six…but the attack force ignored the losses and continued to close. The lead formations crossed the ten-thousand-kilometer mark, and not a single ship had launched yet.

  Stockton felt pride in his people, and for his part in organizing such an effective and capable force. The first squadrons launched at around eight thousand kilometers, and then the whole thing turned into some kind of makeshift competition, each successive wave coming in closer than the one before. Six thousand, five thousand…even four thousand.

  Squadron launch acknowledgements echoed in his headset now, one after the other, as scores of torpedoes lurched forward from the ships carrying them, and zipped toward the target ships, accelerating at 50g and matching every evasive maneuver the enemy vessels could manage.

  Almost every maneuver. Stockton watched in stunned silence as the four ships responded to the sudden threat of his bombers’ barrage. They fired up their own engines, blasting away at—how is it even possible?—40g. No…more, he thought a few seconds later, as the readings coming in matched the 50g of his torpedoes.

  He’d never heard of a manned ship hitting more than 20g for any sustained period, and even that was rare. The pressure of 50g acceleration would squash crew members like bugs. There were force dampeners, of course, but he’d never seen any powerful enough to absorb even a meaningful fraction of that kind of thrust.

  They are ahead of us…pretty damned far ahead from the looks of it.

  He felt a chill pass down his spine. If these ships had been equipped with fighters and close-in defense networks, he shuddered to imagine what they might have done to his wings.

  He watched the barrage moving forward, heading toward the now-desperately evading enemy ships. The wild moves and almost impossibly complex series of rapid changes in thrust and vector, were indeed shaking many of the incoming projectiles. But enough were holding their target locks.

  Stockton almost gave an order for his last waves to launch at eight thousand kilometers and not try to close further. The lead squadrons’ losses had quickly ramped up. Part of it was the shorter range, he guessed, but there was another cold truth. The enemy targeting systems were adapting, and their hit ratios, even with a relatively small number of guns firing, were soaring. The fighters struggling to close beyond the five-thousand-kilometer mark were giving the target ships too much time to get solid locks, and to fire with deadly effectiveness. The losses hadn’t reached the levels he’d seen in the desperate battles of the war, but they were becoming too high to ignore.

  Stockton had almost allowed himself to believe the fight would be a walkover, one where his forces suffered no or extremely light losses. But his bombing squadrons penetrating to the closest ranges were losing a ten percent, even, in a few cases, close to a quarter of their number.

  None of that mattered, though. One glance at the status of the fleet kept him silent. The battleships engaged in the fight were taking damage…serious damage. He had to see those ships destroyed, and as quickly as possible. Before Dauntless and the other ships took too much more damage.

  He watched as three-quarters of the torpedoes zipped past the enemy ships, their nav AIs unable to match the rapid evasion programs of the target vessels. But even a twenty-five percent hit rate was better than a dozen torpedoes per ship. And, for all the speed and weapons power of the enemy vessels, they were not indestructible. A single hit didn’t destroy one, or even cripple it, but three or four was enough to knock one out of action…and none of the four survived more than seven. By the time the last wave of torpedoes reached their target’s positions, they encountered nothing but clouds of dust and radiation.

  * * *

  “Vanguard reports she can land Yellow squadron, Admiral. That should account for all the fighters.” Eaton snapped out her report, crisply and coolly, much like Travis had done in her years as Dauntless’s first officer. Barron had dropped all pretext of sticking to the admiral’s role midway through the battle, and now he was shouting out orders the way he had for six years, when he’d had a captain’s insignia on his collar instead of admiral’s stars.

  Dauntless’s Alpha bay was in bad shape, even worse than he’d thought when the first damage assessments had come in. Several of the structural supports were severed, and that was a heavy repair even in spacedock, and next to impossible in deep space. It was ‘next to impossible’ instead of ‘impossible’ for one reason and one alone.

  Anya Fritz.

  Fritz had shed the bonds of her own lofty rank as readily as Barron had. He suspected she was on her hands and knees, even then, crawling around some access tube, hunting down a power outage or undiagnosed malfunction. Fritz was the closest thing to a magician Barron had ever seen in an engineer, but even the mighty Fritzie was making her way through unfamiliar territory. The old Dauntless had been ripped from her as it had from him, and as much as he’d loved his old ship, he had to admit no one had known the old girl better than Fritz had.

  “Captain Horace on your channel, Admiral.”

  Barron turned and glanced over at Eaton. She did remind him of Atara, in more ways than one…including how alert she looked, when he knew for sure she’d been on duty for at least sixteen straight hours. He felt like he was about to fall over, himself, but then he realized he probably didn’t look as tired as he was either. It was part of the job, setting an example, and it came almost instinctively to him.

  “Put him through.”

  “Admiral…you wanted to speak to me?” Barron had sent a communique to Kraken a few minutes before. The fast cruiser had suffered a hit during the battle, and the bridge crew had advised the fleet commander that the ship’s captain was off the bridge…and not accessible at the moment.

  Barron had smiled at the nervous bridge officer’s words. She’d sounded like she was ready to bear the brunt of some tirade he might offer in response, but instead, he just l
eft instructions for Horace to contact him as soon as he was available.

  Buck Horace was a cantankerous old officer, one who’d scared the daylights out of a first-year cadet by the name of Tyler Barron. He was also hands on, in a very literal sense, and Barron knew what ‘unavailable’ meant. Horace was down in the bowels of Kraken’s engineering section, riding his damage control parties, digging around in fried circuitry, right next to his engineers, and, most likely, nowhere near a comm.

  “Buck…yes.” Barron paused for a few seconds, a smile slipping onto his face. Horace had been on the verge of retirement, having terrorized his final class of cadets…but the war had been at a nadir, and the navy needed every experienced spacer it could get. Horace took a cut in grade along with the command of Kraken, one of the new fast cruisers fresh off out of the shipyard, and he’d been there ever since. He’d been scheduled to hang it up once and for all, when he’d asked Barron if there was a spot for him in the White Fleet…and the newly promoted admiral jumped at the chance to get so experienced an officer in his new command.

  “I don’t know where these people we fought are from,” Barron continued, “but they came through point delta, so there’s a good chance that’s the route to their base.”

  Barron knew perfectly well that any of the system’s five transit points could lead to the enemy’s home, except, probably, the one his fleet had entered through. But he had to make some guesses, and that seemed like a good one.

  “It’s certainly one way to wherever they come from.” Horace’s voice was low, scratchy, even more so than Barron remembered. He wasn’t that young, inexperienced kid anymore, all full of piss and vinegar, but so easily intimidated too. Years of war had hardened him, made him into a veteran warrior and a fleet commander…but Horace still scared him. A little.

  “Those freighters will warn their people about what happened.” Barron had almost sent his ships in to destroy the enemy supply ships, but he was still clinging to some hope there was still a way to restore the peace. Perhaps letting the freighters go would send a message, one that hopefully more effective than anything he’d managed to say earlier. “Hell, the signals from the satellites in orbit already did that. It’s a pretty good bet we’ll have another force coming this way eventually, and an even better wager it will have more than four warships with it.” Barron knew he was guessing about everything. He had no intel, no idea at all how many of the enemy there were, or what kind of forces they commanded. For all he knew, the four ships Stockton’s fighters had destroyed were the only ones these self-proclaimed ‘Masters’ possessed. But he didn’t believe that, not for a second.