Empire's Ashes (Blood on the Stars Book 15) Page 5

  Her eyes narrowed, focusing on the blip in front of her. The target she’d been pursuing with relentless determination. The last goal in her life, the one thing she wanted, needed, before death took her. She fired again, and she missed.

  Damn…

  She was running out of time. She started forward, punching coordinates into a small keypad on her console, nudging her targeting screen. She was going to hit with the next shot. If effort, determination, pure stubbornness had any say in the matter, she was going to hit.

  But she never got that final shot off.

  Her fighter suddenly lurched hard, and then it flipped over, spinning end to end in a vicious roll. She knew she’d been hit, and she reached out, trying to grab the throttle, to regain control of her fighter. Her eyes moved to the side, trying to get a read on the damage her ship had suffered. She was still there, still alive, and she still had at least some power. But she could tell almost immediately her control circuits were fried.

  She sat still for an indeterminate time, probably no more than a few seconds, but seeming like much longer. She was dead, in every way except the final blow. She had no control over her ship, and that meant her vector was fixed. Her ship might be spinning and rolling all around, but it was following an unchanging course in space…and that reduced targeting to a simple set of equations.

  A microsecond’s effort by an AI, and then…

  She looked ahead, ignoring her screens, her gaze fixed on the black velvet of space before her, trying to focus on its beauty, on anything except the thought echoing through her head…the realization that she would die with four kills, not an ace, just a pilot who had come close. A commander who had lost her entire force.

  She could feel the tears filling her eyes, streaming down her cheeks. And then, suddenly, her ship shook hard again, and she could feel the thing splitting apart, the cockpit shattering, the breath being ripped from her lungs…and the unimaginably frigid cold…of space, and of the death that took her.

  * * *

  Sparks flew across the control room. Metal creaked and twisted, and a few seconds later, an entire section of the structure collapsed from above with a sickening crash. Outpost Seven was dying. The attacking fighters were tearing it apart section by section, one laser blast after another ripping into its lightly armored hull.

  The fighters were interceptors, their only ordnance a pair of wing mounted lasers. They’d loosed their ship to ship missiles on their first run, and that barrage had virtually crippled the outpost’s defenses. Now, they were picking it apart piece by piece in an extended orgy of destruction.

  The energy output of their lasers was a bit higher than that of the comparable weapons on the Lightnings, a reflection of generally higher enemy technology. It hadn’t made any sense to St. James, not at first. Why send in fighters ill-suited to take on the station when the Highborn ships could have positioned themselves out of the range of return fire and blasted the structure to atoms in a matter of minutes.

  Then he understood. The enemy was making a point, showing the defenders just what they faced. Perhaps they were even giving their own squadrons combat experience…before any truly climactic battles were fought.

  St. James had dispatched all the comm drones, but the station’s battered transmitters were still sending data to the ones that hadn’t yet transited. He knew he had to get as much information on the enemy fighters as possible back to Admiral Barron…but it pissed him off as it occurred to him that was just what the enemy wanted as well.

  He understood, or at least he thought he did. They want to crush our morale. They think they can break us, that we’ll surrender when we realize the fight is hopeless…that we will worship them.

  Never!

  St. James felt an instant of rage, of defiance, but it quickly faded, buried under the realization that whatever resistance the warriors of the Pact offered, however hard they fought, he wouldn’t be part of it. His role in the war was almost finished. It would end right there, in the collapsing wreckage of his outpost.

  Almost as if to reinforce that realization, the station shook hard, and he could see on the single screen that remained functional that a large lower section had been blown apart. It hadn’t been the reactor. If it had been, he wouldn’t still be there staring at the display. But a series of secondary explosions had definitely torn through the structure.

  His eyes moved to the comm panel, unmanned at present. He’d expected the enemy to demand surrender, to offer him a chance to plea for his people’s survival. The Highborn were brutal, willing to kill as many as they had to, but they weren’t genocidal. If the research done over the last four years had gotten anything right, the enemy wanted to conquer humanity, rule over it. Not destroy it.

  But it seemed a tactical decision had been made to destroy Outpost Seven. Perhaps there was a large invasion force just beyond the point, waiting to come through. Possibly, taking a few prisoners was just too much trouble.

  More likely, the Highborn wanted to send a message to the Pact forces, of the futility of resistance.

  St. James was grateful in some ways the surrender demand had not come. He was full of fury and resistance, but the fear was growing as well. Cold terror at the approach of death. He wanted to believe he would spurn any demand that he yield, but he wasn’t sure his will was strong enough. His image of himself was of a man fighting to the very end, but there was something else inside, and he feared what he might do to survive, wondered if he would beg for life, bow down as the enemy demanded rather than face a death he saw as honorable.

  The station lurched again, and he could hear a series of explosions closer than the last. The air had turned acrid and it burned his eyes. The smell of electrical fires was everywhere. There were three officers left on the bridge. The rest had been killed or wounded, or he’d sent them elsewhere, to reinforce hard hit sections of the outpost.

  ‘Lucky Seven,’ as he’d come to call it in his tenure as commander, was almost out of action…but not completely. There was a single gun still in the fight, and enough power to fire it—though he wasn’t sure exactly how. He’d ordered the reactor shut down after a series of hits had pushed it to edge of a containment breach. That was standard practice, but it had left the station with nothing but battery power. He knew that wasn’t going to keep the laser firing much longer. He was stunned it had lasted as long as it had.

  His decision to issue the shutdown order had also denied the crew’s survivors the fast and somewhat merciful death of uncontrolled nuclear fusion.

  He took a deep breath, a reflex action that backfired badly as he coughed wildly, and spat out a spray of blood. He wasn’t sure what had gotten into the air, what caustic and toxic chemicals were loose in the outpost’s atmosphere, but between that, and the explosions and wild shaking, he knew the end was close.

  He could feel death’s breath on his neck, the coldness spreading over his body.

  He caught one last glance of the screen before it went black like all the others, and he saw the line of Highborn ships, waiting just outside range as their fighters picked the outpost apart one chunk at a time. That had been a tedious operation for the pilots involved, no doubt, but it was nearly at its end.

  St. James was thrown forward suddenly, his harness holding him back, and nearly breaking his ribs in the process. His hands moved about wildly, trying to unhook the thing, to escape from his chair. He had done all he could to push back the fear, to take hold of himself and face his end as he’d always imagined he would.

  Among other things, that meant, on his feet.

  He finally unhooked the heavy straps and threw them aside, leaping up to a standing position…and then stumbling forward, landing hard on his knees with a painful grunt.

  The fight was almost over. Everything was almost over. He hadn’t heard the whine of the laser in some time, and now he could hear a hissing sound growing louder. The shattered hulk of the outpost was losing pressurization, bleeding out the acrid haze that passed for its a
ir. St. James wondered if there would be an explosion, if he would die quickly. Or if his end would come with him on his knees, coughing up bloody chunks of his lungs.

  No…not on my knees…

  A strange will hardened inside him. He had no hope of escape, nor of survival. All that mattered now was that he die standing, staring back at the enemy with the defiance he believed would see his comrades through to victory.

  He managed to get back on his feet, holding on to the edge of his chair as the station shook again and again. He could hear the screeching sound of metal twisting and fracturing.

  The end had come.

  He stood where he was in his final few seconds, and at the very end, he screamed with all the volume his bloody throat could muster. “Avenge us, Admiral Barron…avenge those who died here for…”

  Chapter Six

  Planet Elestra

  Site of Quasar Project

  Epsilon Demarest System

  “I want every micron of those magnetic conduits checked and rechecked, and I do mean checked. This is damned ticklish stuff we’re playing with here, and one microscopic failure, anywhere in the system, and almost four years of work, the fruit of nearly twenty percent of Confederation GDP, vanishes in an instant. Along with all of us.” Anya Fritz had always been a brutal taskmaster. Her reputation as the best engineer in the fleet—hell, in the entire Confederation—had been built to some extent on the effort and work she’d squeezed out of her subordinates. But there was something different now, something even harder and more resolute than Anya Fritz in her normal role with the fleet, in battle.

  She was a straightforward sort, and she didn’t sugarcoat things, not for others, and least of all for herself. And she had to admit…antimatter got under her skin.

  She was cold, in relationships and in the face of danger. She’d crawled around fusion plants, channeled massive energies, often at flow rates well past safety levels, even sanity levels. She’d faced death a hundred times, and she’d never let it interfere with her work, her duty, but the antimatter had gotten to her in a way nothing ever had before. She’d never had so much difficultly dealing with edginess and tension, and she knew she was unloading that on her people.

  Antimatter wasn’t like any other substance. The reactions inside fusion plants were monstrously powerful, and the magnetic bottles containing them held temperatures inside in the millions of degrees. But a fusion reaction could be terminated almost immediately. Warships scragged their power plants all the time, shutting down the deadly reactions inside if a containment breach seemed imminent, even for routine maintenance. But antimatter couldn’t be turned off. The slightest loss of containment, any contact at all with regular matter, and an apocalyptic explosion was inevitable…and instantaneous.

  She was precise by nature, but tackling a system where the slightest failure, even for a microsecond, would cause utter and complete disaster, was almost too much, even for her. The plans the Hegemony had provided detailed numerous and repetitive backup systems, half a dozen lines of defense to prevent cataclysm if a system failed. She had added more to these…new monitors, auxiliary control stations, extra reserve power sources. Still, she felt a cold chill down her spine every time she walked down the endless corridors of the enormous complex.

  “The crews are checking, Admiral Fritz, as per your previous orders. The systems have been tested twice already. The current effort is the third.”

  “And I just ordered you to conduct a fourth, didn’t I? Was I somehow unclear? I’m not repeating my previous order…I take it as a given that will be followed and completed. I want those systems checked again. And I don’t’ expect to have to give the order another time.” She knew the stress was affecting her behavior, and she felt guilty for being so hard on them. But she didn’t stop.

  It’s for their own good, too. Most of them will die in a nanosecond if any part of this system fails…

  That was true, of course, and she knew it. But she also knew there was a line, a limit to just how hard someone could be pushed before they fell apart, before the whole thing became counterproductive. And she was close to it.

  Even for herself.

  She rubbed her face, pushing back against the fatigue. She felt the impulse to take another stim, but she remembered she’d taken one less than two hours before. She was addicted to the things, she realized that on some level. She told herself once Quasar was up and running, she’d be able to stop.

  Then she told herself addicts had been saying that kind of thing for centuries.

  Still, she had to get some sleep. She’d grabbed about three hours, two days before.

  Or was it three days?

  She couldn’t remember.

  “Let’s go, all of you. We’ve got a major test run tomorrow, and we’ve got to be green in all respects if we’re going to make our production deadline.” And I promised Admiral Barron I would have this place generating antimatter in quantity by then. I’ve never broken a pledge to him yet, and I’m damned not going to start now.”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “Advise all teams we’ll be working through the night. If everything gets done, if the test run goes as planned…then everybody gets a hot meal and a night’s sleep. Until then, it’s nutra-bars and work, so let’s pick up the pace around here.”

  The last part had been louder, intended for all in earshot to hear. If Barron and the Pact’s other top commanders were going to find a way to defeat the Highborn, one thing was damned sure.

  They were going to need more antimatter than one overtaxed and vulnerable Hegemony facility could provide. And she was going to see that they got it.

  * * *

  “Mr. Holsten, it’s a pleasure to see you, as always.” Emmit Flandry was a seasoned politician, the Speaker of the Confederation’s Senate, and skilled at both of his primary trades, negotiation and lying. But he still couldn’t disguise the fact that he was about as glad to see Holsten as he would have been a recurrence of Crellian Firerash.

  Holsten and Flandry had worked well together in the past, and Flandry had learned to shove his normal political urges to the side and focus on striving to give Admiral Barron all he needed to win the war. It felt unnatural to the Speaker to ignore political gain, to set aside his usual agendas and truly serve the Confederation’s interests. But Holsten had won him over, in no small part with a gentle and somewhat inappropriate touch of hand brushing across the back of his neck…along with a vague description of something called a ‘Collar’ Holsten had described in excruciating detail his experiences watching the thing extracted from a recovered enemy body, and the last time he’d been on Megara, he’d explained with some degree of relish, the experts’ best guess on how the thing was implanted.

  “I am as pleased to see you as you are me, Speaker.”

  Touché.

  Flandry just nodded. “So, what brings you back so soon, Mr. Holsten? Surely you do not believe we are going to find more resources somewhere for your war projects?” Flandry might have said something similar at any point in his career, though in the past, he might have conspired to devote more of his efforts to personal political aims, like bribing and rewarding allies. This time, he really didn’t know where to look to find more production. Every factory, every shipyard, every mine in the Confederation was working at full capacity, even beyond. Safety regulations had been suspended, workplace accidents had increased measurably, and mandatory overtime requirements had been in effect for over two years. The Confederation’s economy had been pushed to the brink, and on more than one planet, Flandry feared outright rebellion, even mass starvation if things didn’t change soon. It had been a longstanding economic exercise to estimate what the Confederation could produce if it poured every resource into something with single-minded dedication.

  It wasn’t an exercise anymore. It was reality.

  “I am back to check on the progress of Project Quasar…and on our other efforts, especially Excalibur. The admiral knows all resources have already been
committed, and that you have done all you have promised, all you can do. He just wanted to be sure that no one on Megara—or elsewhere—was beginning to think the lull in hostilities was reason to believe the war was over. We have limited intelligence from beyond the border, but what we do possess suggests that the enemy is building as quickly as we are, perhaps even more so.”

  “No, Mr. Holsten…I, at least, am not of such an opinion. Though I will confess, the lack of combat has made it difficult to keep the Senate united. Many are indeed beginning to wonder if the threat was exaggerated, if perhaps this is a Hegemony problem and not one that need concern us.”

  “You mean, assuming we hadn’t signed the Pact and taken all their technology, of course.”

  “Yes…ah…of course.” Flandry wondered sometimes if Tyler Barron and his group of comrades were really as earnest as they seemed at times…or if they were better politicians than even he and the other senior Senators. He knew Holsten, at least, was no stranger to crawling in the mud when it served his purposes. The head of Confederation Intelligence had quite the file of Senators’ secrets and even crimes, including a few of Flandry’s own, and Holsten had never shown the slightest hesitation to resort to blackmail when it was the most efficient route to accomplishing his goals.

  “That is immaterial in any event. We have committed to the Pact, and the Hegemony has honored their obligations to the letter. And, if it helps, if honor and honesty and doing as they promised to do are not enough for you colleagues, it is very clear the enemy is massing some kind of very large force. The Hegemony is immense, and the Highborn occupy almost half of it. That’s a lot of industry turned to their uses, assuming they have been as effective at controlling the native populations as we expect. They will attack, Speaker, that is a virtual certainty. And when they do, we will need every ship under construction, every weapon in production…and we will most definitely need Quasar.”