The Prisoner of Eldaron: Crimson Worlds Successors II Page 33

  Another hit! Two for two!

  He felt the wave of satisfaction, the feeling of a job well done. He knew on one level he’d killed other human beings, that they had probably died horribly in the twisted, burning wreckage of their tank. But those people had been trying to kill his comrades, his friends. And he knew he had probably saved the lives of some Eagles…the ones who would have died fighting those two tanks.

  He glanced at the strike force display. All his people had launched their missiles. Sixty shots at a seventy percent hit rate, he thought to himself. Over forty of those Godforsaken tanks gone.

  “Nice shooting…all of you,” he yelled into the com. “Now let’s see what we can do with our autocannons. Darryk angled his ship, bringing it into a steep dive toward the surviving tanks. He’d already spotted his first target, and he was going to go right down its throat…

  His eyes snapped around to the strike display. One of his birds was gone. He was still trying to figure out what had happened when the com went crazy.

  “I’ve got SAMs locked onto me, Major.”

  “Me too…I’m picking up multiple launch sites. Looks like something mobile.”

  “Yeah, they’re on the move. They’re blanketing the sky with targeting beams.”

  Another icon disappeared from his screen…another of his fighters gone.

  He felt a wave of frustration, anguish for the crews he’d just lost.

  You knew it couldn’t last…sooner or later, they had to get their defense grid back online.

  No…that can’t be it. We blasted their anti-air emplacements to scrap…I’d bet my life on it. So what the hell is this?

  He stared down at the enemy tank, feeling an almost irresistible urge to follow through, to rake it with his autocannons. But then he heard the high-pitched whine of a target lock. One of the enemy ground installations had him. If he broke off now, he had a chance…a good one. If he stayed on target, he’d have a cluster of missiles on his ass within half a minute. And he’d never shake them all.

  He still hesitated, thinking about taking the risk. But then his training kicked in. Black Eagles were professionals, and they didn’t throw away their lives in pointless displays. Besides, he wouldn’t be making the choice just for him. He had twenty-seven other fighters with him, and they would do whatever he did.

  “Break off,” he said, spitting the words out like they tasted bad. “Full evasive maneuvers. Return to base.”

  His eyes dropped to the display, to the wave of missiles now rising from the battlefield…and he realized not all of his people were going to make it…

  Chapter 29

  “The Nest” – Black Eagles Base

  Second Moon of Eos, Eta Cassiopeiae VII

  Earthdate: 2318 AD (34 Years After the Fall)

  John Cranston stared at the display. The Nest’s surface scanners had been swept away by the enemy bombardment, and the control center screens were almost blank. But the seismic detectors were still feeding in data, and the AI had estimated that fifty gigatons of warheads had detonated on the surface.

  That means the bays are completely gone, and all the docks too. Caravalla’s people are lost…and our weapons are destroyed. At best, we stand a siege…we hold on down here, resist any enemy attempts to penetrate to the main areas. And then we wait, hoping against hope the general and the strike forces can get back in time.

  “Captain, I want the garrison battalion deployed half on duty, at all times. All potential areas of forced ingress are to be fortified and defended at all times. I want regular sweeping patrols covering the entire Nest.” He paused for a few seconds then added, “We’ve got one job now…keeping these bastards out of here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Anders stared down at his workstation, punching at the keys to execute Cranston’s orders.

  “Vault door status?”

  Anders glanced over at the display. “Holding, sir. Exterior temperature is rising, but still within acceptable parameters.”

  Cranston grunted. The vault door was a fifty meter thick fortified barrier that closed off the main access tube from the surface. It was about as strong as a door could be, but it was still a physical construction…and that meant the enemy could get through it if they tried hard enough. Even the hyper-steel of the door would vaporize if they dropped a nuke directly on top of it. And then they’d have access to the Nest.

  And that will be the end of it all…

  Cranston was a Black Eagle, and he had the same confidence the others had, an almost cocksure attitude about what his people could achieve. But he was a realist too. He didn’t doubt his people were vastly superior to the attackers, but he also realized they were trapped, that the enemy had numbers and initiative.

  Hell, they don’t even have to come down and fight us…all they need to do it get through the vault door and start dropping nukes down here…

  There might not even be a fight in the halls of the Nest…just an extermination. But he couldn’t do anything about that. All he could do was ready his people for a fight.

  “All support personnel are to arm themselves at once. Engineers, stewards, trainees…everybody. I want backup teams assigned the garrison squads immediately.”

  There was one thing he was sure of. If the enemy came down to the Nest, every Eagle would fight. Every damned one. But he didn’t really expect the enemy to send soldiers into the teeth of desperate resistance. They had other ways to strike at the Nest.

  * * * * *

  Christos Caravalla stared out of the cockpit at the rich blackness of space surrounding his tiny craft. He’d been in the control seat of a fighter of one kind or another for half a century, and he understood enough to realize he had reached the end of the road. All his people had.

  He could see on his display the pounding the surface of the Nest had taken. The docking stations and landing bays were gone, obliterated in a nuclear holocaust. With the ships of the Eagle fleet away at Eldaron, that meant his people had no place to land. No place to refit or rearm.

  He’d ordered his squadrons to regroup on the far side of the moon, away from the enemy fleet. It was a temporary respite, but at least it gave him time to think. He didn’t fool himself that he’d devise some plan that offered his people a chance at survival…but if they were going to die, he was determined they should die well, striking at the enemy any way they could. The fighters had fired all their torpedoes, but they still had some power left for their laser cannons. And enough fuel for one more good attack run. Caravalla had twenty-four fighters left, sixty percent of what he started with…and far too few to take on the enemy fleet alone with any hope of victory. But they might take out a few ships, and since the alternative was waiting to be hunted down and destroyed, any price they could extract was better than none.

  “All ships, arm laser cannons. Prepare for attack run.” He stared down at the schematic displayed on his screen. “We’re going to swing around in a tight orbit. The tracking satellites are all down, so we don’t have data on the enemy deployments, but my gut tells me we can come in on the flank of the vessels bombarding the Nest. That’ll give us a chance to do some real damage be…” He cut himself off. Adding, “before we’re destroyed” to his speech wasn’t going to do anything to rally his battered force. They all knew they were on a suicide mission—there was no reason to dwell on it.

  “Alright, Eagles…follow on my lead.” He nudged the throttle, working the thrust up to 2g, and he saw that the rest of the fighters fell in behind him. He smiled as he watched, proud of the precision his battered squadrons managed to maintain.

  If we’re going to die, let it be with some dignity…and dishing out some hell to our enemies.

  He increased the thrust gradually. Three gees. Four. He eased back slightly. He wanted to build as much velocity as he could without breaking orbit. The moon’s gravity would help his fighters whip around, changing their vector as they progressed.

  He knew they wouldn’t have much time. The enemy ships would react imme
diately…especially after the price his people had extracted in the earlier fighting. So his fighters had to be coming in hard when they swung around into detection range.

  He glanced down at his nav controls. Four gees was the maximum acceleration…anything higher would push his ship out of orbit. He knew it would only be another minute before his force would come around, and their last battle would begin. He’d been so focused on the specifics of the attack, he had barely considered the full implications. But now he realized in clear terms…he was leading his people to their deaths. They might take down some of the enemy’s vessels, but now it came to him coldly, harshly. In a matter of minutes, perhaps half an hour, he and his people would all be dead.

  Better to die in battle than wait to run out of power and life support…

  But the thought was still a stark one, and he had to make an effort to get it out of his mind. It wasn’t so much his own life…he’d been at war for half a century, and he’d known that any one of the hundreds of missions he’d flown could have been his last. But he mourned for his pilots and crews, the men and women he was leading to their deaths.

  There’s nothing you can do. They are dead already. This is about how they die…

  He took a deep breath, eyes fixed on the scanner.

  Almost there…

  Suddenly, his screen lit up with icons, ships coming into scanning range. The AI displayed the enemy vessels with small red triangles.

  “Okay, Eagles…here we go…”

  His eyes dropped to the display again. More red triangles had moved into view. He was about to look away, but then he froze. There was something else, on the very edge of the screen. A row of icons, small yellow circles. He squinted, reading the designation listed next to each of them.

  Unidentified vessel.

  * * * * *

  “I think those are burrowers, Major. I read a dozen or more, positioned all across the surface.” Anders was flipping switches on his workstation, reviewing the data coming in from the few remaining scanners buried beneath the surface. “Yes,” he said, “I’m sure of it. There’s nothing else that could create that kind of vibration in the rock.”

  Cranston sat quietly in his chair, staring out over the Eagles’ compact command center. He sighed softly, trying to keep the sound to himself. He couldn’t understand why the enemy didn’t just blast the vault door. Perhaps they lacked decent intel on the Nest, didn’t know where it was. Considerable effort had been made to hide the main entrance to the Black Eagles’ base.

  The burrowers were a more indiscriminant weapon system, the kind of thing an enemy would deploy if they didn’t understand the layout of the target. The high-yield warheads would dig into the rock of the moon’s surface before detonating, gouging out great craters with each detonation. The Nest was buried deep, but the burrowers would work their way down eventually…and when they did, the Eagles base, and all the personnel in it, would be obliterated in the fury of a final thermonuclear blast.

  This enemy knew what they would need to destroy us…and they knew the fleet would be away…when to strike. Who is this?

  Cranston realized it didn’t matter. He suspected that whatever mysterious enemy the Eagles had encountered on Lysandria and Eris was behind the attack. But he still knew almost nothing about them, other than this demonstration of just how much power they could deploy. Even if he could figure it out, he couldn’t get the information out. He and his people would be dead soon.

  Cranston felt the anger building inside him, the frustration. The Black Eagles were many things, but even those who hated and despised them acknowledged they were an elite corps, the best at what they did.

  And now we’re going to die like rats caught in a trap.

  He stared at the display, trying to think of a way to strike back, to take the fight to the enemy. But there was nothing. Only the bitter taste of defeat.

  * * * * *

  “Who are they?” Caravalla’s com had exploded. It seemed like every one of his ships had sent out a message, reporting the mysterious vessels on the scanner, or asking who they were.

  I have no idea who they are. More enemies? Friends?

  He stared at the display, but the AI had not updated the labels. That meant there was still no positive ID. But that changed almost immediately.

  “Attention Black Eagles.” The deep voice blasted from his com. “Attention Black Eagles, this is Jarrod Tyler in command of the Columbian fleet. We are here to assist you in your struggle against these invaders.”

  Jarrod Tyler? Caravalla knew Columbia’s dictator and General Cain had a relationship of sorts, but he was surprised Tyler would come so quickly and forcefully to the Eagles’ aid. Still, now that he thought about it, the intervention made sense. Tyler was a highly suspicious man, far more apt to see threats where none existed than to ignore ones that were real. And Columbia and the Eagles did share the Eta Cassiopeiae system. A huge fleet of warships coming through one of the warp gates was sure to arouse Tyler’s concern.

  He felt a wave of excitement as the realization set in. The battle wasn’t over yet. Far from it. Indeed, Tyler’s forces were about to move into combat range…and the enemy vessels were spread out, deployed to bombard the Nest, not face an attacking fleet.

  He hit the button to activate his com. “General Tyler, this is Captain Caravalla, strike force commander for the Nest. My fighter squadrons are deployed, but the rest of the Nest’s surface weapons have been knocked out. The enemy is bombarding the surface, attempting to reach and destroy the main facility.”

  “Very well, Captain. We’ll put a stop to that soon enough. My forces will be engaged in less than a minute. Then we’ll show whoever this is what happens when outsiders invade Eta Cassiopeiae.” Tyler’s voice was firm, grim. There was a coldness there, one almost devoid of emotion. Tyler had no bloodlust, not even any evident anger against the invaders. But Caravalla knew without a doubt that wouldn’t stop him from exterminating every one of them if he could.

  “Your aid is most welcome, Mr. President. On behalf of the Black Eagles, please allow me to thank you…and to wish your forces good fortune in battle.”

  Caravalla switched his com back to the strike force’s frequency. “Alright, things have changed just a bit. Now, we’re supporting the Columbians, so break formation and go pick your targets. It’s time to send these bastards to hell.”

  Chapter 30

  Below the Citadel

  Eldaron City

  Planet Eldaron, Denebola IV

  Earthdate: 2319 AD (34 Years After the Fall)

  “There’s an entrance to the detention area just ahead.” The Eldari captive’s voice was weak, his fear coming through with every word. But he seemed to have accepted that his best chance of survival was to cooperate with the Black Eagles. He was scared of the Tyrant, certainly, but he was no less afraid of Darius Cain. And Cain and his people were a lot closer.

  Darius stared at the prisoner, his gaze alone reducing the Eldari to a near state of panic. “Where is the cell, Henri?” Darius’ voice was cold, ominous. “He has been here a very long time. I know you know who I am speaking of, and if you don’t tell me what I want to know…” He let his voice trail off. Nothing he could have said would match the horrors he suspected his captive’s mind would produce.

  “It is a special cell, at the very end of the main hall.”

  Darius nodded. Then he toggled the unitwide com. “Alright, Eagles. We’re going in…and we can damned sure expect some serious trouble. We know this is a trap, that we were lured here. Whether or not Erik Cain is in the detention area, the enemy knows that is where we are going. We have been fortunate not to have run into more resistance so far, but we can be sure that respite is at an end.”

  Darius could feel his heart pounding. He was consumed by emotions…the tension before battle, and anticipation of seeing his father after so many years. His prisoner’s confirmation that there was indeed a special prisoner who had been held for many years beneath the Cita
del was a cause for encouragement. Perhaps Erik Cain was alive. It was hard to imagine in any terms that felt real. Darius had lost his father when he was seventeen…before he’d left Atlantia, before he’d become a mercenary, before the Eagles. Everything that had happened since, the years that seemed now like most of his life…it had all existed in a reality where Erik Cain was dead.

  Despite the captive’s words though, Darius knew the mission could still end in disappointment, in finding it was all a hoax, that Erik Cain was indeed dead. And he already felt the guilt for leading his people into an ambush, into a fight he almost certainly knew would be a bloodbath. If it proved to have been for nothing…he couldn’t imagine the pain of so many of his loyal soldiers killed for no purpose.

  There were positive feelings too, though, beyond just hopes that his father was alive. Satisfaction that he had come this far, certainly. And pride in his warriors, and in the loyalty they had shown him. The Black Eagles were mercenaries, they fought for pay. But to a man they rallied to their leader, agreeing—no, demanding—to follow him to Eldaron, whatever the danger. He’d always been dedicated to his Eagles, but now he truly realized how special a group of misfits he had assembled.

  Darius stepped forward, moving toward the front of the two hundred armored men and women crowding the passageway. He was pushing the prisoner before him, and Alcabedo was close on his heels.

  “General…I think you should stay in the center of the formation.” There was obvious concern in his voice.

  “Yes, Ernesto, I know you do. And I want you to know I appreciate your efforts.” He paused. “But there are some things a man must do, some times he must lead.”