Invasion (Blood on the Stars Book 9) Read online

  She’d analyzed every detail, reviewed it all again and again. As far as she could determine, she was clear. If she was right, Lille would uncover himself in the next few hours…and she would finally have her chance.

  She tried to hold back the anger, the rage, the constant self-hatred that had driven her to chase her tormentor with such unstoppable ferocity. She’d lied to her friends, snuck off when they’d faced their own great challenges, broken more of Megara’s laws than she could easily count…all for the chance to strike at her adversary. To return to the man who’d broken her, and extract the terrible vengeance she knew was hers.

  She turned her head abruptly, glaring angrily at a woman with two children who’d looked at her with distaste in her expression. Then, she caught herself. That could be one of Lille’s people. She knew that was unlikely, but it wasn’t impossible. And she reminded herself who she was up against.

  The assassin seemed to be working mostly on his own the last few weeks, but he’d visited at least one of the black-market traders she’d frequented herself. She’d killed the gangster after she’d gotten all she could from him, and disposed of his body in the most efficient manner possible. Stuffing it into a fusion core. It was murder, she guessed, somewhat disturbed by the total absence of guilt for what she had done. The man had committed multiple capital crimes in his dark and shadowy career, and she told herself she’d just done the law’s job for them, ridded the Confederation’s capital of one more violent piece of filth that infested it, a man who no doubt had terrorized many of the destitute homeless clustered around her temporary base.

  It didn’t especially disturb her that she tried to make such excuses for what she’d done, but it bothered her that she accepted them so readily. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with her tracking and killing Lille, and certainly not the disposal of a piece of human filth like the weapons dealer…who could easily have given her up to her enemy if she’d spared him. She’d saved lives by killing him, she was sure of it. And, she’d save more when she finished Lille. Countless more the assassin would no doubt murder if he escaped from her grasp.

  She jerked her body forward, a mildly threatening move. The woman reached out for her children and skittered off. Andi couldn’t be sure, but she bet the woman wasn’t one of Lille’s. It was gut feel mostly, and the wager she made on it was the highest stakes gamble she’d ever made. Lille was no one to be trifled with or underestimated, and if one of his people had marked her, her odds in the duel had just dropped, from perhaps one chance in three, to a longshot of ten percent or less.

  * * *

  Lille walked around the back of the building. It was a five-story job, tiny by the standards of the massive skyscrapers that dominated Troyus’s central districts. It was old, preserved among its vastly larger brethren only because it dated back to imperial times. The denizens of Troyus City had never been hesitant to tear down their history to replace it with larger and greater structures, but imperial remains were nearly sacrosanct, as they were throughout the Rim.

  And, the relatively low structure had a perfect view of the street below. A field of fire.

  He looked around, checking the access road, making sure he was alone. It was late at night, no, more accurately, it was very early in the morning. He’d have to wait in place for hours, but patience was a core discipline of his profession…and this was the only time he could be sure he could get where he was going unseen. He’d traveled around in the Outer Districts, mostly masquerading as a derelict of one sort of another, but the police in Central Troyus didn’t tolerate undesirables infecting the streets of the Confederation’s urban paradise. And, killing police officers wasn’t the way to lay low.

  He reached out, pulling down the small metal access ladder on the back wall of the building. He’d scoped out the location before. The ladder led to a catwalk along the third floor. He’d have to climb the rest of the way to the roof. He had the weapons he needed, the ammunition…but there had been no room for proper climbing gear. He would have to manage it by hand…and just make sure he didn’t slip.

  He felt exhilarated. The hunt always filled him with excitement. He’d become vastly wealthy by killing, rewards heaped on him over the years, as he’d tracked and eliminated one of Gaston Villieneuve’s enemies after another. He’d always had a private smile when Villieneuve had showered money and properties on him, a wicked grin that said, “I would have done it for nothing…for the sheer satisfaction of the kill.”

  He moved slowly up the ladder, more an effort to remain quiet than any real concern about falling. He pulled himself up onto the catwalk, and then he reached up, feeling around for a handhold before he hoisted himself higher. The climb wouldn’t have been a difficult one, at least not in daylight, if he hadn’t been so heavily loaded. But he moved with extra caution, pulling down with his fingers, testing every hold before he put his weight on it and continued up.

  The climb took about five minutes, though it had seemed longer. Lille was the consummate hunter, a natural born killer, but the last weeks had tested him, pushed him to his limits. Andi Lafarge had proven more than a worth adversary, and she’d tracked him relentlessly, even killed his primary weapons supplier. He scolded himself for underestimating her, for not recognizing an animal cut from his own mold when she’d been his prisoner. Leaving her alive long enough to be rescued, that had been a terrible error, one that had come very close to being fatal a few weeks before. He couldn’t let that happen again. He’d been cautious, so watchful for any moves by her that his own efforts had slowed to a virtual crawl.

  He hoisted himself up and over the small half wall that surrounded the roof, and he moved slowly, cautiously to the front of the building. He looked down on the street below, at the spot he’d selected. His target would be there in the morning, he was sure of that, at least as certain as one could be of such things. He’d tracked, watched, analyzed. That was the location…and the roof was the perfect vantage point.

  He reached down and pulled the sniper’s rifle from the large nylon bag he carried. It hadn’t been an easy thing to find in Troyus, and even more difficult to carry around, but this was as far as it had to go. He could discard it anywhere after he was done with it.

  In a few hours, it would be morning. And, Ricard Lille would do what he did best.

  He would kill.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  CFS Constitution

  210,000,000 Miles from Planet Ulion

  Venga System

  Year 317 AC

  The Battle of Ulion – Phase Five

  “All ships…open fire!” Clint Winters was a cool professional, almost always calm in battle.

  Almost always. Now, his blood was up, and for once, he couldn’t hide the roiling emotions inside. He knew he probably shouldn’t have ordered his battle line forward. His plan had been carefully crafted, designed to exploit the one advantage Confederation arms had over the Hegemony enemy. But, like most plans, it had barely survived implementation. The enemy hadn’t been idle as Confederation strike fighters savaged their vessels in one engagement after another, and the fight at Ulion had seen the deployment of a new group of enhanced escorts, ships modified to serve a single purpose.

  To shoot down fighters.

  The ships had taken Winters by surprise, and he cursed himself for that foolishness. He should have expected some kind of response to the repeated bombing runs that had, so far at least, held the mostly-victorious Hegemony forces back from totally obliterating the Confederation’s battleships.

  Winters had never been one to excuse failings in his subordinates, and he wasn’t about to look the other way when he was the one who’d dropped the ball. This is a tough enemy, advanced, well-organized. You have to be ready next time.

  If there is a next time.

  He nodded as the acknowledgements came in, and, seconds later, he heard the distant whine of Constitution’s primaries firing. He looked over to the display, watching as every battleship in the line opened up. The
approach so far had been a successful one, and as far as Winters had seen, the enemy only had a single battleship with operational railguns. That vessel had fired three times as Winters’s ships closed to their own firing range. Fortune had been with the ‘Sledgehammer,’ at least for those desperate few moments. Two of the enemy shots had been clean misses, and the other had been a glancing blow to Terminus. Even a superficial hit from the deadly enemy guns was serious, though, and the battleship had lost a chunk just starboard of the bow…along with its primary batteries. But, every other ship in the line was fully operational, and, as they opened up with their particle accelerators, damage assessments began to pour into Constitution’s bridge.

  The range was still at the outer edge of long, and fewer than a quarter of the shots found a target. Nevertheless, the hits were mostly solid ones, and one enemy monster took too critical hits within seconds of each other. The vessel was huge, and even the massive impacts proved insufficient to destroy it utterly, but it was floating in space now, wracked by internal explosions, its engines seemingly dead.

  Winters felt a rush of excitement, and he savored the brief seconds between his fleet entering range of its primaries, and moving into the slightly-lower targeting distance of the Hegemony’s secondary arrays.

  Even as he still savored the joy of the near-kill, he saw flashes on the display, dozens of the Hegemony’s high-powered x-ray lasers, slicing toward the fleet. Despite their sophisticated AI technology, the Hegemony didn’t appear to have any miracle cure for the difficulties of targeting at extreme range, but along with a series of relatively close misses, three of the initial shots scored hits.

  Constitution was spared, at least in the first round, but Illumination stepped up as the bad luck vessel, absorbing two of the three hits. No damage reports had come through, but a quick check of the status reports showed the ship was still in the battle line, maintaining its thrust. Winters’s gut told him the vessel’s primaries were down, an instinctive guess that was proven right when the rest of the fleet fired a second volley, and the stricken ship remained silent. She no doubt had plenty of firepower left in her secondaries, but it would be another several minutes before the broadsides came into practical range.

  Winters looked at the longer-range display, at the second and third lines of the enemy formation. Those battleships were farther back, but they were mostly untouched. When they got into range and opened up with their rail guns, Winters knew his battleships would be blasted to slag. His warrior’s spirit had taken control, unleashed the rage and allowed it to drive him into the maelstrom. But, now he began to worry about the withdrawal, a stage of the battle he knew would come, no matter how fiercely his people fought.

  He couldn’t get too far in…assuming he wasn’t already. And, a quick look at Eaton’s forces twisted his guts into tangled knots. He didn’t know how any of her people, half his total strength, were going to get out.

  And, he didn’t know what to do about any of it. Should he leave them on their own, hope that some of the battered vessels might find a way to escape? Or, should he press on, engage the enemy more closely…and give Eaton a chance to pull her people back?

  He stared ahead, silent, grim. Then he turned toward the tactical station. “Fleet order…all ships, maintain forward thrust. We’re going right down their throats.”

  * * *

  “Commodore, there are thirty-three Lightnings in the task force that could launch now. Mostly ships with light damage that weren’t ready when the strike force went out, or ships whose pilots were wounded. I had to scrape through the fleet rosters, but I found pilots for the extra ships.” That was an exaggeration. Half the ‘pilots’ she’d found were Academy dropouts, who’d had basic flight training before transferring to other disciplines.

  And, two claimed to have shuttle piloting experience before they’d joined up, but nothing that showed up in the files. She took them at their word.

  “Commander, you’re talking about ships scattered around the fleet, from all different squadrons…and more than a few pilots with…shaky…credentials.” Sara Eaton’s voice was strong coming through the comm, but Federov detected a waver in the determination…and she went in for the kill.

  “I am, Commodore. I’m not saying it’s ideal. I’m saying we can get thirty-three more Lightnings into the fight, now…and I’m saying I’m ready to lead that wing, however cobbled together it might be.” She’d been arguing conventionally, trying to convince the commodore. But, now, she dropped the bomb. “What choice do we have, Commodore? Can we afford to lose any strength we can get in this fight?”

  There was silence on the comm, for ten seconds, perhaps fifteen. Then, Eaton’s grudging voice returned. “Okay, Commander. Do it.” The commodore sounded like she’d have rather ordered just about anything else, but Federov had gotten what she needed, and she wasn’t about to push her luck.

  “Thank you, Commodore.” She cut the line immediately, as if that would somehow prevent Eaton from changing her mind. She flipped the channel over. “Stara…we’re a go. Get those launch orders out now!”

  She spun around, and she raced across the flight deck, toward the Lightning she’d commandeered, the replacement for the ship she’d flown since the closing days of the Union War, the blasted hulk that was now floating out there in the system somewhere, shot to shit and left behind.

  It was time to make a new fighter hers. Time to start racking up kills.

  * * *

  Stockton jerked his hand hard to the side, a sharp adjustment in his thrust vector. He wasn’t responding to anything in particular, just bringing his ship in on a wildly unpredictable course, doing all he could to throw the targeting from the escorts.

  The enemy frigates were firing wildly, one shot following the last with almost impossible frequency. Stockton wasn’t an engineer, and he’d never claimed any particular knowledge of what made any ship’s system function. But, he knew the batteries that had savaged his fighters required one hell of an energy source to maintain the rate of fire they did.

  That has to be fragile…if we can hit these things hard enough, maybe we really can hurt them, even with just lasers…

  “Listen up…I want all squadrons to go in on tight patterns, each targeting a single ship. Hit those bastards hard, and go in one ship right after another. Those things have got some serious power systems to feed those guns, and we should be able to chop those up.”

  As he spoke, his eyes moved over his screen, choosing a target for himself. He sent full squadrons in against the other ships, but this one was his.

  He listened as his squadron commanders acknowledged, a seemingly unending stream of voices that reminded him just how large a force he’d come to command. He wasn’t sure how he’d gotten where he was, how he’d come through the fury of war to lead over a thousand fighters in a desperate battle.

  But, he was sure of one thing. He wouldn’t fail. He couldn’t fail.

  He moved his hands, bringing his ship around, eyes focused on his chosen target. He felt the vibrations from his engines, heard the rumble of the thrust. His Lightning was like an extension of his own body, a strange symbiosis he’d felt from the first day he’d crawled into his trainee’s ship at the Academy. He couldn’t explain it, but he knew he’d been born to fly fighters, to lead wings.

  He’d come through blood and death and suffering, but he knew he’d do it all again if he had to. He could endure whatever was necessary, any nightmare that might come upon him…save being barred from the cockpit, from the one thing he needed, even as he did breath itself.

  “Let’s go, all of you…let’s do this!”

  * * *

  “They’ve got to be using antimatter, Commodore. I can’t think of any power source on a ship that size that could allow those batteries to maintain that rate of fire.” Anya Fritz’s voice was hollow, frail, the weakness in her body clear in every word she uttered. But, she’d responded immediately to Sara Eaton’s request. It had taken two med techs to help her
up to Repulse’s sprawling control center, but she’d come nevertheless, and now she sat at the battleship’s engineering control station, reviewing every report and scanner reading on the enemy escorts.

  “We figured they used antimatter for the railguns, too. Could they have that much of a supply?” It had become clear the Hegemony was capable of producing antimatter in substantially greater quantities than the Confederation, but the best guesses had maintained that it still had to be an expensive and at least somewhat rate commodity for them.

  “I wouldn’t have guessed they could, but I think it’s obvious that’s what we’re seeing here. There is no other way they could keep those guns firing like they do. Perhaps they reacted to the damage we’ve been able to do to their railguns. Maybe they transferred some of the antimatter supply to the escorts, so they could target the fighters who’d been so degrading their primary batteries.” Fritz paused, drawing a ragged breath. “My best guess is, this has to be throwing a wrench in their logistics, at least with regard to antimatter. They’re probably desperate to reduce their losses to bombing attacks, and they’ve certainly hurt our squadrons with these escorts. But, maybe, on the backend, this is hurting their battle line. Any antimatter they deploy to shoot down fighters isn’t available to fire railguns.”

  “That’s a big assumption, Captain.” Eaton didn’t sound doubtful, not exactly. She just didn’t like trying to figure out a subtraction equation when she didn’t have any idea what the original total was. “It’s clear the enemy has been massing a great fleet for many years. Couldn’t they done the same with antimatter?”