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

  She leaned forward yet again, struggling to get to her feet.

  “Atara, you’re too weak to stand up, and certainly to help me by playing medtech with the pods.”

  “Give me one of those stims you were taking.”

  “No…you’re too weak.”

  “Weaker than you were?” She angled her head and stared at him, a wordless message that he shouldn’t even bother to try to tell her she was.

  “No, perhaps not, but…”

  “No buts. You know it’s the only option. We’ve got, what, two dozen of the landing party still on their feet? And every one of them is sick, too, except you and me. So, let’s cut the shit and give me one of those injections…and then we can go save our people.”

  She glared across the room, watching as he finally just nodded and turned to pick up the injector. She took a deep breath as he crossed the room to give her the shot. She knew she was right. There was no choice, none save watching her people die…and, to Atara Travis that was no option at all, not when there was any hope of saving them.

  And, Bryan Rogan was at the top of that list. The big Marine’s almost indestructible constitution had somehow endured, refusing to give up its last fragile hold on life, even as men and women infected far later than Rogan had been died every day. Rogan was one of Atara’s true friends, and the idea of her blood providing a cure too late to save him was more than she wanted to imagine.

  Hang on, Bryan…we’re coming…

  * * *

  Stockton’s fighter zipped through space, heading back toward the designated assembly area of the fleet’s combined squadrons. Even as his fighter barreled toward the rendezvous point, he could see clouds of small craft converging on the same area. The wings were concentrated, far more densely than he’d ever seen in a major battle…but he was betting everything on the enemy’s lack of their own squadrons, and he wanted his force focused, ready to hit the Hegemony ships hard.

  Stockton had hoped the enemy wouldn’t have any vessels bigger than those the fleet had already met and destroyed, but his scanning mission to Zed-12 had dashed those thoughts. He’d picked up numerous large contacts, bigger even than the new Dauntless…and those could only be battleships. The smaller vessels his people had faced had been tough enough. He knew it would take all his squadrons had to hurt the behemoths he knew were coming.

  His eyes dropped to the screen displaying the data streaming in from the transit point drones. There were enhanced energy levels, more than could be accounted for by his own tiny ship, but nothing else. No transits after his, no vessels coming through.

  And then, one appeared. It was large, one of the big ones he’d presumed to be a battleship. It was half again as long as Dauntless, and his best guess was, it outmassed the fleet’s flagship by at least two million tons, and probably three million.

  He was surprised. He’d expected something smaller, a scoutship or frigate equivalent. But the Hegemony seemed to show no signs of caution. He wondered if they could be that certain of their invincible superiority…and then he thought about the aspect of the question that really scared him. Were they really that good?

  Even as he was still watching, more ships began to come through, one after the other. He analyzed their velocities and vectors, and he let out a breath of relief. The enemy ships were on exactly the course he’d projected.

  He tapped his throttle and decelerated, beginning to bring his ship around to form up with his wings. He didn’t have a single weapon aboard, but he’d be damned if he was going to run back to Dauntless and land while his people were about to go in. Lasers or no lasers, Jake “Raptor” Stockton was going to lead the attack.

  There were almost two dozen ships through already, including five of the big ones, and Stockton reached out and tapped at his controls, overlaying the minefield on his scanner. The lead enemy ships were just entering the area, and he waited, noting they hadn’t seemed to send out any signals yet to detonate the mines.

  Is it possible it’s that simple? They’ve never faced mines before…so they don’t have the countermeasures every Rim nation does?

  He wished the fleet had carried more of the ordnance, that they hadn’t been limited to the small number of makeshift mines Fritz and her crew had been able to throw together. But, anything was better than nothing, and his eyes were fixed on the display as the first of the enemy ships encountered one of the deadly weapons.

  The ship didn’t actually strike the mine…the percentage chance of something like that was vanishingly small with the distances involved in interplanetary navigation and combat. But, the massive nuclear warhead detonated less than three-quarters of a kilometer from the Hegemony battleship. The great vessel staggered, hit by massive waves of intensely hard radiation. In some areas, the ship’s hull buckled, even the incredibly strong alloy the enemy used melting as the intense energy pour over the vessel. Gaps appeared, gashes in the armor, and great geysers of air and fluids blasted out into space, freezing almost instantly into long pillars, floating out from the stricken vessel like massive spears thrown into the void.

  Stockton felt a smile forming on his lips as he saw that the mine had seriously damaged the huge enemy ship. He’d enjoyed two years of peace, but he’d always known that, to some extent at least, he was a creature of war. He craved peace…but he needed an enemy. Now, he had one, and from all he’d seen about them, they were even more detestable than the Union. The predator in him was alive again, in control, awakened from two years of hibernation. His grin widened as a second mine exploded, triggered by one of the smaller enemy ships. The vessel was a bit farther away, and the damage less severe…but every bit helped.

  He sat in the cockpit, all thoughts of his discomfort and soreness gone now, and he watched as nearly two dozen mines detonated over the next few minutes. Ship after ship was impacted, two of them, at least, suffering what appeared to be serious damage. The field was sparse, with far fewer mines than such a thing would have had fifty years before, when they were still a fixture of war on the Rim. But, it was all the fleet could manage, and Stockton knew that, before this fight was over, his people would need every edge they could get.

  He tried to imagine the arrogant Masters, so utterly convinced of their superiority, communicating frantically as their ships triggered one nuclear detonation after another. He could pick up the signals back and forth between the ships, but the encryption had defied all attempts at decoding, at least so far. Still, he imagined what they were saying, the frantic nature of the communications, the fear…and he savored it.

  He watched as the approaching force passed through the last of the mined area, and moved toward his waiting squadrons. His eyes narrowed, focused on the screen as the enemy’s leading ships continued forward. He was watching for any evasive maneuvers, any course changes he’d have to match, but the wall of ships just kept coming forward.

  He waited as another minute passed by, then ninety seconds. The enemy was coming on, just as he’d projected. It was time.

  He flipped on his comm line, setting the channel to the entire strike force. “Attention all units, this is Raptor.” He might have used his name and rank, but there wasn’t a pilot in the force—or in the entire Confederation—who didn’t know who Raptor was. “Here they come. These people don’t seem to know what fighters can do, so we’re going to give them a lesson now, one they will never forget.” He reached out, put his hand on his ship’s throttle. He didn’t have a gun hot enough to cook his lunch, but he was going in with his people anyway. “Squadron leaders, you all know your positions. Bombers…this is your show. With any luck, you’ll get the chance to hit these ships without worrying about interceptors hitting you, so take your time and focus. I want those torpedoes planted right into the guts of these ships. You’ve all seen what their heavy guns do to our capital ships, so keep that in mind when you’re launching. Your comrades on the mother ships need you to hit this force hard…before they can get into range and rake our battleships.”

 
Stockton tightened his grip on the throttle. “You’re all veterans…you know what to do.” That wasn’t technically true. He had a few rookies in the strike force, but the vast majority of his people had seen action against the Union. “So, let’s cut this talk and just do it.”

  He took a deep breath and glanced down at his screen again. The enemy fleet was large, powerful…and he knew just how deadly those ships were. He was confident his wings would savage the Hegemony forces, that his people would do their jobs…but he didn’t know if it would be enough. His squadrons would have the advantage now, but once they’d completed their runs, the surviving enemy ships would close and rake the fleet with deadly beams, long before Dauntless and the other battleships were able to return fire. He didn’t know exactly how much damage his people had to cause to even things…at least beyond the disturbingly non-specific ‘a lot.’

  He inhaled again, holding the breath for a few seconds before exhaling hard. Then he nodded, a gesture to himself, and he tapped the comm again.

  “Let’s go,” he said, his voice cold, grim. “All squadrons…attack.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  200,000 Kilometers from Transit Point Alpha

  Zed-11 System

  Year 315 AC

  Stockton brought his fighter around, angling toward the massive battleship sixty thousand kilometers directly ahead of him. At least, he assumed anything bigger than the huge new Dauntless had to be a battleship…though for all he really knew, the enemy considered the ship a frigate, and somewhere they had vessels three or four times the size.

  That wasn’t something he wanted to dwell upon, not while his people were coming in against the largest, most powerful ship they’d ever faced. The imperial planetkiller had been larger, of course, but that had been inoperative, and Stockton had no doubt that the vessel in front of him was completely ready for action.

  He had two bomber squadrons coming in against the vessel, approaching along distinct vectors. He’d planned out every detail of the attack plan, and he’d allowed for any possibility. Simultaneous squadron assaults were difficult to execute and were intended mostly to overwhelm a target’s point defense capability. The Hegemony vessels seemed to lack the dedicated anti-fighter batteries that Confederation vessels—and all other warships of the Rim nations—mounted. But, he’d seen the escort ships in the previous fight repurpose their smaller guns to close-in defense…and he’d watched them make it work after a fashion, adapting, steadily increasing their kill rate. He wasn’t going to let his guard down, not for an instant.

  “Yellow Lightning squadron, ready for attack run.”

  “Gold Vipers, ready.”

  He took one last look at the scanner as the squadron leaders acknowledged their bombers were in position. Then he said, simply, “You may begin your attacks, Lightnings, Vipers.”

  He brought his own ship around, adjusting his vector to match those of the Gold Vipers. It wasn’t an intentional preference. The Vipers were the closest to his position…and he intended to go in with the attack on way or another. He couldn’t add anything, save perhaps for the morale boost of having the strike force commander along for the assault, but he just had to go in. Dauntless’s pilots, including the legendary Blue squadron, were on the far side of the formation. His instinct had been to fly over there, to join up with his old command. But, he knew they didn’t need him. He’d forged the Blues into a deadly weapon, as he had all of Dauntless’s wings. It hurt to think they didn’t need him anymore, but he knew it was true. He could do more with less experienced squadrons, like the Vipers and the Lightnings.

  He positioned himself in the middle of the attacking squadron, and tapped the throttle, matching his velocity with that of the bombers. He looked down at his screen. He had nothing of his own to throw against the enemy ship…but he could watch, study, analyze. He’d seen the enemy learning in the last battle, watched them figure out almost immediately how to counter his fighters. Now, he would watch…and he learn exactly what the Hegemony ships could do.

  And how to counter it. How to best destroy the enemy.

  The target ship was just ahead, and even as he rechecked the range, his scanners flashed to life. The enemy was firing its weapons. For an instant, Stockton thought they might be using point defense batteries, but the pulses were too heavy, the firing angles too imprecise. The enemy was doing the same thing the earlier ships had, repurposing its smaller batteries…but the battleship had a lot more guns than the cruisers or escorts had.

  “Evasive maneuvers going in…I don’t want anyone getting careless. Those guns aren’t optimized for anti-fighter operations, but a hit will kill you just as dead as a point defense laser.” Stockton’s hand moved to the side, following his own orders. Blundering into a clumsily-targeted laser blast wasn’t the example he wanted to set for his pilots.

  “And don’t forget…these ships are faster and more maneuverable than our own.” He didn’t know that about the battleships, at least not for sure, but he’d seen the cruisers and the thrust levels they’d employed, and it seemed a reasonable assumption that the big capital ships were also faster than their Confederation counterparts. “So, we’re going in…all the way in. I don’t want a torpedo launched outside ten thousand kilometers. And, six thousand would be better.”

  His eyes moved to the screen, watching the wave of bombers as they made their final approaches. The Vipers and Lightnings were coming in from different angles, one approaching the Hegemony ship’s starboard side and the other, the port. The attack plan called for them to launch simultaneously, and Stockton could see they were close to the planned synchronization, though he thought the Lightnings were a touch ahead of their sister squadron. He had no real complaint about either of the bombing groups, both of which were based on Excelsior, but he missed being able to focus on the near-perfection of Dauntless’s magnificent squadrons.

  He watched as the ships formed up into three lines, a third of the vessels accelerating slightly and a third decelerating. Each squadron was coming in on a narrow angle, heading right for the massive ship’s midsection. Stockton glanced at the range display…fifteen thousand kilometers. Very close by normal standards, but not for this fight. He’d already promised every pilot in the strike force that he’d skin them alive if they launched a torpedo from fifteen thousand.

  The bombers moved closer in, and as they did, they began to take losses. One of the vipers was hit first, followed by two of the Lightnings. Stockton could feel the tension as he saw the effectiveness of the enemy targeting improving with each passing moment.

  How could they analyze our approach, our capabilities, so quickly?

  “I said evasive maneuvers!” he roared into the comm as he watched the second Lightning ship hit. The first two fighters had been destroyed, but the last one took a glancing blow, and it spiraled out of the attack formation. Stockton didn’t know if the pilot would regain control and manage to limp back to the mothership in his damaged fighter, or if he would have to ditch…but his gut told him the survival chances of any pilots who ejected in this battle were damned poor.

  The fire from the target ship increased in frequency. At first, Stockton was concerned the ship had more batteries than he’d expected, but then he realized the rate of fire had increased. It was just another jarring example of the enemy’s technological advantage…most likely superior energy generation and transmission, something that had confounded Confederation engineers for two generations.

  His eyes remained fixed as the first line of bombers slipped in under ten thousand kilometers. The Lightnings were about two seconds ahead of the Vipers, but the two squadrons had come very close to executing the synchronous assaults he’d ordered, and the limited fire from the target ship was indeed split between the two squadrons. Stockton was grateful for that, especially as he saw another of the Vipers hit, a bird no more than four thousand kilometers from his position, practically on top of him by the standards of space combat.

  He checked his scanners, l
ooking for a pod, any clue to suggest the pilot had escaped, but there was nothing.

  The fire was heavier now, and the destruction of a ship so close by jarred him against being careless. His modified Lightning handled in a way he’d charitably describe as ‘like a pig,’ and he focused again on making himself a difficult target. He had no real reason to be where he was, save for the fact that he couldn’t bring himself to watch more than seven hundred fighters under his command attack while he held back. That was reckless enough, something he suspected Admiral Barron would give him a tongue-lashing over when he returned to Dauntless…though there would be at least some hypocrisy in that. Barron had a reputation himself for taking personal risks that Stockton knew from his own experience was understated, if anything.

  His lead ships were under seven thousand kilometers and moving at almost five hundred kilometers per second. Against a vessel with a proper point defense array, he knew the squadrons would have been virtually wiped out by now, but his force, despite the losses it had suffered, was largely intact.

  He felt a wave of pride in his people, in the determination with which they were following his orders. All their training told them to launch their torpedoes from ranges vastly farther out…but they understood that the realities of combat had changed with the discovery of the Hegemony. The enemy ships were too maneuverable, not a single torpedo would hit from twenty or thirty thousand kilometers.

  He watched as the first line of bombers let their torpedoes fly, the small devices blasting hard, accelerating at 50g for a few seconds, directly toward the target. Then, almost simultaneously, the doomed AIs directing each of them triggered the reactions that converted their entire mass to energy, transforming each projectile into a super-hot plasma heading right for the enemy vessel.

  The ship fired its engines, a last ditch evasive maneuver to escape from the path of the deadly projectiles. The plasmas had consumed the mechanical drones that had carried them, and now they were fixed on a direct, unchangeable path. That gave the target a chance to evade…and the Hegemony ship made the best of it, blasting its own engines at nearly 50g, lunging forward as a cluster of plasmas zipped by behind it, right through the space it had occupied seconds before.