Into the Darkness: Crimson Worlds Refugees I Read online

  “We’re through the missile barrage, Admiral,” Janz said firmly. “Beginning final approach.”

  Hurley looked over at Wilder. “The ship is yours, Commander.” Wilder and Janz had stepped aside during the last attack run, allowing their admiral to take the shot—a dead on hit that had finished off the ailing Leviathan. She’d appreciated the gesture, and she’d enjoyed the hell out of killing the First Imperium ship, but she didn’t intend to make a habit out of it. She’d accepted the stars Garret had given her, and she was resolved to behave accordingly and not act like some gung-ho pilot. Most of the time, at least.

  Technically, Hurley didn’t have a job on her ship, at least not one involved in its operation. Her fighter’s purpose was to carry her wherever she had to be to command the strike force. Much to the frustration of Admiral Garret’s plans, it had proven impossible to keep her back from the fight, so now it was not only a moving headquarters—it was another ship in the line, one more attacker determined to plant a double plasma torpedo into the guts of a First Imperium vessel.

  “Prepare for high-gee maneuvers,” Wilder said.

  Hurley sat quietly, looking at the display. She knew just where Wilder was going. The closest ship was a Gargoyle. Half a dozen fighters had already made runs at it, and three had scored solid hits. The ship was still there, but there wasn’t much left of it, and there was no fire at all coming from it. But tucked in just behind was the target that had caught Wilder’s eye. A Leviathan, also badly damaged, but still firing at the fighters buzzing past it like flies on a carcass.

  “Heavy incoming fire,” Janz said, staring at the scope as he did. The main First Imperium defensive weapon was similar to the Alliance’s shotguns. Both systems were essentially large railguns, firing clouds of metallic projectiles into the paths of incoming fighters. The First Imperium version had been designed purely as an anti-missile platform, but it performed well enough against fighters to make the hair on Hurley’s neck stand up.

  The fighter pitched hard as Wilder hit the thrust. Hurley felt the force slam into her, an impact like five times her own weight. She focused on breathing deeply as the force increased…6g…7g…8g. She held herself straight in her chair, angling her head slightly so she could see her screen. Her movement was slow, steady, disciplined. At 8g, she knew she could pull a muscle just moving wrong.

  She could see the enemy vessel getting closer—and bigger—on the display. Another fighter streaked across, putting its payload right into the huge enemy vessel. The scanners were assessing damage, feeding a continuous report on the status of the enemy ship. There were a dozen great rents in the side of the vessel, and liquids and gasses were spewing out into space. On a human-crewed ship, men and women would be dying in those compartments, blown into space or frozen and suffocated in place. But she knew it was impossible to disable a First Imperium ship by killing its crew. The robots onboard were impervious to cold, to lack of oxygen. No, to kill a First Imperium vessel, you had to tear the thing apart, bit by bit.

  Suddenly, the thrust was gone, and weightlessness replaced the crushing pressure. She took a deep breath, grateful for the ease of it. She glanced over at Wilder and then back to her screen. The range was counting down rapidly. They were moving at 5,000 kilometers per second, and the enemy was less than 50,000 klicks away. They were ten seconds out and on a collision course. She opened her mouth, but she didn’t say anything. Wilder knew what he was doing.

  Eight seconds. The pilot was totally focused, his head staring straight at the display, hands tight on the controls. Six seconds. The ship bucked slightly, as Wilder released the plasma torpedo.

  Hurley stared straight ahead, watching the distance slip away. We’re going to hit that ship…

  Then 9g of pressure slammed into her like a sledgehammer, and Wilder hit the thrust barely four seconds from impact. A few seconds of thrust couldn’t do much to alter the course of a fighter travelling at over 3% of lightspeed. But it didn’t have to do much, just enough to swing the ship around the enemy vessel. And it did just that. Hurley looked down in disbelief at the scanners. The fighter had passed within 300 meters of the Leviathan before it continued on, putting 5,000 klicks a second between it and its stricken target.

  Wilder’s torpedoes had found their mark. It was a shot generally considered impossible, a degree of accuracy almost unimaginable considering the velocities and distances involved. But Wilder had dumped his doubleshotted payload right through one of the great rips in the Leviathan’s hull. The enemy ship shuddered hard as the heavy weapon unleashed its power on its unarmored insides.

  Hurley saw the data coming in, and she knew what was happening. The torpedo was gutting the interior of the ship, destroying everything in its path. But she knew one type of damage would prove to be its doom, and a few seconds later she was proven correct. The massive vessel disappeared in an explosion of unimaginable fury, as it lost containment on its antimatter stores and unleashed the fury of matter annihilation.

  “Nice shot, John,” Hurley said simply. Then she added, “Think you can cut it a little closer next time?”

  “I’ll try, Admiral,” he said, an amused grin on his face.

  Hurley looked down at her screen. The strike force had completed its attack. They’d hit the enemy line right on the heels of Kato’s missiles, and they’d taken out half a dozen ships, including two Leviathans. And her people had only lost another twenty fighters. Normally she wouldn’t draw comfort from another hundred of her people dead, but even at her most wildly optimistic, she had imagined several times that number.

  The attack had been a massive success—and Kato’s task force was just a few minutes out of laser range. With any luck, his ships would wipe out the enemy line before his people had to abandon their crippled vessels.

  She smiled grimly, feeling a wave of satisfaction. Compton wanted us to delay them. Well, I’d say wiping out their first line will cause a delay. The rest of the fleet is over an hour behind.

  Hurley just nodded and returned the smile. “OK, according to Admiral Compton’s navigation, we should be close to the right course and speed to link up with the fleet.” A hint of skepticism slipped into her tone. She’d never even heard of fighters landing on ships moving at this kind of velocity. She understood the physics, and as long as everything was perfectly aligned, it shouldn’t be much different from a normal landing. Still, it was going to take a hell of a piloting job to pull it off, and she didn’t kid herself that all her people were going to make it. And the ones who didn’t would die. It was that simple.

  Chapter Two

  Unidentified Squadron Commander During Battle of X2:

  Let’s go you bastards…and hold those torpedoes until you can see the scratches on their hulls! Do you want to live forever?

  AS Midway

  System X2, Approaching Sun

  The Fleet: 241 ships, 48,181 crew

  Compton lay in the fluid of the tank, struggling to remain lucid despite the effects of the drugs and the crushing pressure. The fleet was blasting at 30g, heading directly for the system’s primary. Compton had considered a dozen strategies for escaping from the massive enemy fleet, but none of them had been plausible. Not until he’d really begun to think out of the box.

  The navigation plan was fiendishly complex. It was his own work, though he’d had Max Compton review every calculation to confirm his math. It was a daring plan, one they would call brilliant if it worked. But it was dangerous too, and utterly unforgiving of error. If a navigator failed to follow the instructions precisely, if a ship was so much as a thousandth of a degree off course, that vessel would die.

  The hundreds of ships in the fleet would gradually form into a single line, one vessel following the next. That alone was a difficult enough maneuver at high velocities. Then they would race toward the sun, their own thrust augmented by the increasing gravitational pull of the star as they approached. At the last moment, barely 50,000 kilometers from the surface, the vessels would blast their eng
ines at full thrust, altering their vectors just enough to avoid a collision. If the painstaking calculations were correct, the fleet would whip around the primary, one ship at a time, less than 700 kilometers from the photosphere.

  He’d reviewed the AI’s calculations himself, three times. If they were correct, his people would survive, their hulls wouldn’t melt, and their vectors would be radically altered by the massive gravity of the star. They would be on a direct course for the X4 warp gate, at a velocity the pursuing First Imperium vessels couldn’t hope to match before his fleet was gone.

  There were enormous dangers beyond the potential navigational errors. The ships would first move through the star’s corona, parts of which were hot enough to vaporize even a Yorktown class monster in a microsecond. Compton had plotted a course around the hottest regions, through an area of very low density. If he was right, if his calculations were spot on, if his scanners were totally accurate…his ships should move through an area that would almost—but not quite—melt their hulls. If he had erred to the slightest degree, all his people would die, and there would be nothing left of the fleet but ionized gas. Even if the ships survived, there was a strong chance the radiation shielding would be inadequate to prevent his people from receiving lethal doses of gamma rays as they passed so close to the star.

  None of that mattered, though. To stay in the system and engage the enemy fleet was certain death. Terrance Compton hated running from a fight, but he also knew the difference between a noble stand and pointless suicide. A battle would serve no purpose, and with the overwhelming enemy strength, it wouldn’t last long either. In the end, his wild plan was the only option.

  He disliked being in the tank, drugged and hallucinating while his people’s lives were on the line. But there was no choice. The nav plan was set in stone, and it required 30g acceleration. That kind of force would kill anyone caught outside the protective system.

  It doesn’t matter, he thought, clinging hard to his lucidity. The plan was locked into the computers, and little would be served by more human involvement. The crucial part of the operation would occur while his vessels were passing through the corona and above the star’s surface. Any problem would happen quickly, far too rapidly for anyone to intervene if there had been a mistake. If the fleet passed out of the cool zone into a hotter area of the corona, they’d be vaporized in an instant.

  It would have been merciful to just surrender to the drugs, to drift into dreams and see if he ever woke up. But that wasn’t how he was wired. This was his fleet, his people were on the line. He would maintain his vigilance as long as he could, pointless or not. He struggled to stay focused, used every trick he knew to keep his drug-addled mind aware. But 30g acceleration required a large dose, and even the mighty Terrance Compton slipped slowly away from consciousness.

  * * *

  Kato leaned forward in his chair. He could feel the tension, hear his heart pounding in his ears. Greta Hurley’s fighters had torn through the first enemy line like some force of nature, obliterating six of the enemy ships and leaving most of the rest severely damaged. Her attack had exceeded all expectations, and now it was his peoples’ turn. And after Hurley’s show, anything less than the total destruction of the enemy line would be failure.

  Akagi shook hard, as a First Imperium laser ripped through the lower levels. The enemy lasers were extremely powerful, almost overwhelmingly so in the first two years of the war. But Akagi had her own weapons, and they were almost as deadly.

  Kato’s ship had been refit with the x-ray laser system developed by General Thomas Sparks. The Alliance’s master engineer possibly deserved more credit than anyone for the successes humanity had achieved in the war. In just three years, he’d taken scraps of enemy ships, combined them with his own research to begun producing weapons systems. His work didn’t give the human vessels parity with their enemies—even Spark’s unquestioned genius couldn’t make up for millennia of scientific advancement. But his creations had given the ships of the Grand Pact a chance, one far better than they’d had before.

  “All ships are to hold their fire.” The enemy fire was lighter than he’d expected. He knew his people owed that to Hurley’s fighter crews and the devastating damage they had unleashed. And now his people would take advantage of that. They would close to point blank range…and then they would unleash everything they had.

  Kato had never commanded a task force before, and he’d questioned why Compton had placed him in charge. When he’d expressed his doubts, the great admiral simply told Kato he trusted him and that he should do his best. Those words had simultaneously strengthened his confidence and clenched his stomach. He had begun to understand why the Alliance spacers followed their admiral’s commands with such impassioned reverence. Terrance Compton was like no one else he had served under, and letting him down was unthinkable.

  “Konigsberg is reporting multiple laser hits, Captain. Her reactor scragged, and she is on emergency power.”

  Kato sighed. “Advise Captain Wentz to abandon ship immediately. His shuttles are to maneuver to the assembly point and wait for rest of us.” There was no point in risking Wentz’ crew. Emergency power was enough to maintain life support and basic functionality, but it damned sure wasn’t going to charge up the ship’s x-ray lasers.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Kato sat still, unmoving, undeterred. He was going to wait until his ships were at knife-fighting distance before he gave the command to shoot. But first his people had to run a gauntlet through the enemy’s fire. Medina was gutted by multiple hits, and Kato ordered its crew to the shuttles as well. Then Bolivar was destroyed outright as a First Imperium laser ripped through its engineering spaces and cut containment on its fusion reactor. But still he waited…

  “Range 10,000 kilometers, Captain.” It was Tanaka this time, not the communications officer. A few seconds later: “Captain…”

  Kato ignored him, staring at his screen as the range ticked down to 7,500 kilometers. Then: “All ships…fire!”

  Akagi’s lights dimmed as her giant x-ray lasers fired, every spare watt of power poured into the deadly broadside. The lasers were invisible, except where they passed through a particularly dense could of dust, but they were devastating nevertheless.

  Kato’s flagship had five of its batteries still operational, and they concentrated on a single vessel, the last Leviathan in the enemy line. The ship shook hard as the deadly beams struck, and huge holes were torn it its hull. Secondary explosions ripped through the vessel, ripping open more gashes.

  “I want power to those batteries,” Kato screamed into his com unit. “All ships, I don’t care if you scrag your reactors, but get those guns ready to fire again!”

  Akagi and its fellow ships zipped past the enemy vessels as they continued on their established vectors. “Positioning jets…180 degree shift, now!”

  He felt a gentle push as the small thrusters fired briefly, spinning Akagi around 180 degrees, then fired again, bring her rotational movement to a halt. The whole maneuver took less than three seconds. The ship was still moving away from the First Imperium vessels, but she was facing back the way she had come…bringing all her guns to bear.

  Kato watched the power monitors, as every scrap of energy was poured into the lasers. “All ships, fire as soon as your guns are recharged,” he shouted into the com. An instant later, his monitor flashed green. The lasers were ready again.

  “Fire.”

  He watched the scanners as Akagi once more spat death at its enemies. The stricken Leviathan was hit again, and it shuddered hard, as more internal explosions tore through its enormous bulk. Kato stared down at the screen, reading the damage reports as they streamed in. He knew he had to leave, had to get all his people down to the shuttles. But he wanted to know…he had to know…

  He watched at the indicators dropped steadily. The big ship didn’t blow, but it was dead nevertheless, its power generation down almost to zero. He glanced at the others. About half the enemy vess
els were gone, reduced to clouds of superhot plasma. The other half were dead hulks, floating silently in space. Not a single one was still functional.

  “Yes!” he said softly to himself. Then he turned to the com officer. “Signal all vessels…abandon ship.”

  * * *

  “Son of a bitch,” Hurley said, the words slipping through her lips before she could stop them. She’d been staring at the scope, watching the ships of the fleet whipping around the star, coming out of the corona on perfect vectors toward the warp gate. She’d known what Compton had intended, and she’d even believed in it on some level, that place in her mind where she viewed the great admiral as infallible. But sitting and watching it unfold just as he’d planned was still astonishing. She knew those ships were threading a needle, racing through a cool spot in the corona. There were sections to either side of that lane where temperatures reached into the millions of degrees, and the slightest navigational error could vaporize a ship or send it careening into the sun.

  Compton’s plan had been brilliant, wildly original…and if it worked, just maybe he would have saved his fleet from certain doom. And it looked like it was working. Still, Hurley had to get her squadrons to the designated place on time—and they had to be at the exact velocity and vector to land on the fleeing platforms. There was no room for error on her part either, and she knew the big capital ships couldn’t decelerate for her if her people weren’t in position. Compton had to save the big warships, first and foremost. A few cruisers would bring up the rear, decelerating enough to link up with the shuttles carrying Kato’s survivors, but Hurley’s fighters had to land on the battleships. And that meant they had to be exactly in position.