Cauldron of Fire (Blood on the Stars Book 5) Read online

  The intelligence reports were accurate. A major Gray fleet was indeed moving through Tarantum. It was a significant force, perhaps even too much for her squadrons to take on alone. But she wouldn’t have to defeat them on her own, just delay them.

  But what’s this?

  Her smile sharpened.

  The main force was continuing on, again, just as the reports had said it would. She’d planned to slip in behind, to harass the enemy, delay its transit to Pergara. But the enemy had detached a pair of battleships while the rest of the force continued toward the Pergara transit point. The strategy was sound. Someone over there wasn’t easily fooled. The dust clouds were an ideal place to hide a few ships, at least, and scouting the area carefully was the smart play.

  But it will backfire here…

  The clouds weren’t thick enough to hide an entire battlefleet, at least not with any degree of certainty. Large capital ships could be detected too easily. But Grachus didn’t have any battleships. She didn’t have any escorts either. Just fighters. Squadron after squadron…over two hundred in total. Stripped from five of the fleet’s capital ships, vessels that were needed elsewhere.

  It had been a difficult mission for her people, but they were Alliance warriors, and no hardship was too much to demand in pursuit of victory. Three days. They’d been sitting there for three days, enough to drive normal men and women mad. But these weren’t normal men and women. They were Palatians, and officers all. They would endure. They would do their duty.

  The enemy has sent out one squadron to scout the cloud.

  The two battleships are heading this way behind the fighters. Wait…wait until they’re closer.

  She was tense, ready, waiting for the right instant. Her communique to her squadrons would announce their presence. Wait…not yet…

  She had the approaching squadron on her screen. The capital ships were too far out for positive IDs, but she could tell they were both big, and one of them was downright enormous, though she couldn’t get much more from the weak passive scanners on her fighter. But that didn’t matter. Any Gray battleships were the enemy.

  And Jovi Grachus had no mercy for her enemies.

  Chapter Ten

  UWS Banniere

  Carnasus System

  Deep in the Badlands

  Year 311 AC

  “The artifact is loaded aboard, Minister Villieneuve. All components are secured for transport.” Captain Mies didn’t manage to hide her edginess very well, despite what sounded like a major effort. Villieneuve knew the officer’s tension had to do with more than just her baseline fear of him and of Sector Nine. The space around Banniere was littered with debris from the battleship’s bays and holds—fighters, crates, and spare parts jettisoned to make room for the pieces of ancient technology. Villieneuve had ordered his people to take everything they uncovered from beneath the grayish brown sands of this dead alien world, whether it seemed like part of the artifact or not. All old tech was valuable, and he wasn’t going to take any chances on leaving behind any key components. This expedition was too important to take chances, so the end result was, everything not absolutely vital to getting Banniere back to Union space had been thrown out…including every one of the battleship’s fighters.

  Villieneuve didn’t like it any more than Mies did. Banniere lost much of her fighting strength, with her fighters gone and her pilots sitting on their bunks staring at each other. It was a long way back to the Union, and he knew despite its secrecy, despite every precaution he had taken, his expedition could still find itself in a fight before it got home. He’d have preferred to have a much larger fleet, one that could deal with any threat, but the Union simply did not have that many ships to spare. Not anymore.

  He was nervous about the trip home, but he was gratified too, and glad he’d come to supervise the expedition’s work himself. He was going back with what he’d come for, something that very well might change the course of the war.

  He smiled, perversely amused at how strong the Confederation could be, and also how weak. The information that led his people here had come from within the confines of Confederation space. His people had made their payoffs in bars and hotel rooms on Confederation planets. For the most part, the sellers were Confed citizens, though few of them knew the mysterious adventurers and rogues buying their intel with untraceable platinum bars were Sector Nine agents.

  The Confeds had proven to be capable adversaries, their battlefleets formidable, the courage and steadfastness of their spacers truly admirable.

  But now they defeat themselves…

  He scolded himself for some of the earlier plans that had failed. He’d gone right at the Confederation’s strength before, seeking victory in the field, ship against ship. This time he was exploiting his enemy’s weakness. The Confederation had a direct border on the heart of the Badlands, and the explorers they hounded and imprisoned—and his people paid—were the best sources of information on potential finds.

  What fools. They could have had this artifact. They could have had the planet-killer. And who knows what else is out here. Yet they did nothing. They made no effort to seize this power.

  Why? To actually honor an international agreement? To be the only signing power that paid more than lip-service to the treaty?

  “All ships report ready, Minister Villieneuve. The fleet can depart on your order.”

  He’d always known that foolish ideals were the Confederation’s weakness, that, and their population’s unwillingness to see things through. He didn’t fool himself that their politicians were any less corrupt than those in the Union, but they were compelled to act as though they were, to speak of fairness and ethics while making little effort to follow through on any of it. Voters were fools, easily tricked, Villieneuve had no doubt about that. But it was still easier to keep the masses under tight control, and to respond to any resistance with fear. The Confeds had never learned that lesson.

  Though they will when they are conquered. Their fat, lazy civilians will learn what it is to serve the state.

  Villieneuve took a last look at the main display, at the semi-circular representation of the planet below. He wished there was more time to explore the planet and the system, and the whole immediate area of the Badlands. This was farther out than the planet-killer had been, but the trend was clear. More than a century of random exploration may have finally led to a concentration of ancient tech. Villieneuve knew in many ways, the future lay in the past. The Union would come back here, as soon as the war was over, before any other power could exploit the wonders of the ancients. The prize for uncovering more artifacts was nothing less than total dominance. And he liked the sound of that.

  But now it was time to go back home and win the war.

  “The fleet will move out, Captain Mies. At once.”

  * * *

  “There was definitely someone here, Andi, just like in Ibulan. But these readings are all over the place, much heavier. Multiple vessels, and at least one a damned sight larger than any Badlands adventurer’s ship I’ve ever seen. If I didn’t know better, I’d say…”

  Lafarge was staring at the small display on Pegasus’s bridge, and now she turned to her exec. “You’d say what? Spit it out, Vig.” But she already knew what he was going to say.

  “I’d say there was a battleship here in this system. Something as big as…”

  “As Dauntless,” she finished for him, holding back a small sigh. “But Dauntless isn’t here, we can be damned sure of that. So, if there was a large warship in this system, we’d better start figuring out what it was. Whose it was…or is. Any signs of anything here now?”

  She looked back at the screen, reading the AI’s analysis for herself, and flipping to the direct scanner feed. She came to the same conclusion as Merrick. There had been ships here, and a significant presence at that. But there were no signs of any current activity, at least none Pegasus’s passive scanners could detect at this range.

  It could have been a ship from the C
onfederation, she thought, with more hope than conviction. But her gut told her whatever ships had been there were not friendlies. The Confederation was struggling to support two fronts right now, and while she certainly wouldn’t be privy to any expeditions into the Badlands, she’d have bet a tidy sum the trails her scanners had picked up were not made by Confed ships. There were a number of possibilities, some less dire than others, but if there truly had been a battleship out here, that quickly narrowed the usual suspects down to one.

  The Union.

  Dammit. Are they back out here?

  She remembered the terrible combat around the planet-killer—my God, was that almost two years ago already?—the nearly hopeless struggle that Barron had somehow managed to win. With a little help…

  Did they find something else out here? The planet-killer had been a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, something monstrously powerful and relatively intact. But it wouldn’t take something that large to make a difference in the war.

  She’d known all about Sector Nine’s presence along the Confederation’s Badlands frontier, about the payoffs they offered, years before war had broken out. The totalitarian Union often looked farther ahead than the reasonably democratic and often tumultuous Confederation, planning and executing long-range plans while the Confederation Senate stumbled by year after year, pandering to the shifting moods of the populace.

  The Union operatives thought they were acting in secret, and with most of the rogues and smugglers on the frontier they probably did. But Lafarge knew the real denizens of the scummy ports and ramshackle taverns where such business was conducted, and Sector Nine agents waving around cases of pristine platinum bars were a damned sight more obvious than they seemed to think they were.

  Of course, the Confed navy was always more interested in harassing ship captains than cleaning up the enemy agents infesting the frontier.

  Andi hadn’t been above dealing with Sector Nine once or twice, at least before the war, though never with anything more than routine trinkets. The Union operatives always paid the best, and discretion was even more important to them than to the ship captains operating somewhere between smuggling and piracy.

  She hadn’t gone near any of her old Union contacts, not since the war started. Not since she’d met Barron. She wasn’t a traitor, nor a disloyal Confederation citizen, even for all her scrapes with the law. She didn’t feel good about the deals she’d made earlier, not now that the Union was the enemy, but she was sure nothing she’d sold them had cost the lives of any Confed spacers.

  Pretty sure…

  “Cut the engines, Vig.” She was suddenly nervous, more so than she had been. “Let’s coast in. Minimal power output. I know it will slow us down, but let’s not take any unnecessary chances. If there’s something here, we don’t want to make it easy for them to find us.”

  Of course, if there is a task force of some kind here, they’ll have scanner buoys or some type of picket force at the transit points. The Union navy wasn’t a match for the Confeds, but they weren’t incompetent either.

  “Yes, Andi.” She could tell from Merrick’s tone he agreed with her.

  She looked back at the long-range display, her eyes darting around the system’s features. Six planets and a yellow primary sequence star. She moved her fingers across her station, bringing up a star map next to the system display. “It could be this one, Vig,” she said softly. “Or this one.” She reached out, pointing toward one of the small star icons.

  Pegasus wasn’t out here wandering aimlessly. Andi had her own intelligence, clues about a particularly juicy piece of old tech. But, like most things in her trade, her data was hopelessly partial and vague. She had basic descriptions, but this far out there was little familiarity with the system cartography. Even the names were spotty, with each star having three, four, even more designations. They were outside the borders of the charted and notated areas of the Badlands, and that meant they were feeling their way through the unknown.

  “It could be this one here, also.” Merrick stood up, extending his finger toward yet another icon. “There are half a dozen systems on here with six planets confirmed, more even that might have six.” The partial map they had listed specific planet totals for some systems, and ranges of numbers, notations like “4-7” for others. A good third of them had nothing listed at all, which really cranked up the degree of difficulty in figuring where they were. They could backtrack and find their way home without a problem, but tracking down what they sought was proving to be difficult and frustrating.

  She’d promised herself one thing. If she found what she was looking for, she’d offer it to the Confed authorities for use in the war. She had her resentments for the way she, and the other adventurers combing the Badlands, had been treated by the authorities, but she was still a patriot, in her own way.

  But they would pay for it this time…and they would pay what it was worth. If they could pour billions of credits into R&D and ship construction to fight this war, she was damned if she’d be a charity again, especially when she and her people were risking their lives doing what the Confederation government should have been doing all along.

  In fairness, the last time Pegasus had been out here seeking an old tech artifact, her people had been in trouble, and it had taken significant Confederation intervention to save them…and keep the planet-killer out of Union hands. And Admiral Striker hadn’t exactly stiffed her people. They’d been paid, a nice sum if not the king’s treasure the antimatter they’d brought back would have fetched on the black market. And Striker had fixed up Pegasus for her too, gratis, doing such a first-class job, she’d hardly recognized her old vessel.

  “Andi…the system is still clear, but we’re getting more readings. The third planet seems to be the center of whatever activity took place here. We’ve got multiple drive trails and lots of residual energy readings.”

  She looked back at the scanner, staring intently. Still nothing. “Bring us to the third planet, Vig. Minimum possible thrust. Just enough to alter our vector.” This wasn’t the system she was looking for. The map said she was seeking for a binary star with just one planet. But she had to at least take a look. If the Union was out here and had gone, that could mean they’d given up on whatever they were looking for.

  Or it could mean they found it.

  She felt the burst of thrust as Merrick fired the engines, just for about thirty seconds. Then Pegasus returned to minimal power output. “We should be in orbital insertion range in…twenty-three minutes, Andi.”

  “Twenty-three minutes,” she repeated, sighing softly as soon as she did. With any luck, she’d find evidence of a clearly abandoned search site, a wild goose chase that had drained away Union resources for no gain. She could hope at least.

  But Andi Lafarge wasn’t one for unfocused hope. She preferred cold, rational analysis…and that was telling her something she didn’t want to hear.

  Her people had stumbled onto something here, something bad.

  Chapter Eleven

  CFS Dauntless

  Tarantum System

  Near the Porea Transit Point

  Year 62 (311 AC)

  “Lieutenant Federov reports no contacts, Commodore. She is…” Travis’s voice stopped cold. Then she spun around, looking right at Barron. “Sir, Red squadron is reporting multiple energy sources from within the dust cloud.”

  “Battlestations.” Barron wasn’t surprised, not really. After five years of war, his caution had morphed into a sort of fatalism. He retained his basic confidence in himself and his crew, but otherwise he expected the worst at all times. And how often have you been wrong? “Notify Illustrious.”

  “Battlestations, sir.” The klaxons sounded an instant later, and the bridge was bathed in the all too familiar red light of the lamps. A few second later: “Captain Reardon acknowledges.” Then, almost immediately, “Illustrious confirms battlestations.”

  Barron glanced down at his screen, his eyes moving over the series of readouts. A red
alert triggered a whole series of automatic responses, from the activation of combat duty stations, to the manning of all fighter squadrons in the bays. But a launch would require his expressed order, and he wanted to be sure what was out there before he gave it.

  “Lieutenant Federov reports…”

  “Put her on main comm, Commander.”

  Travis flipped a switch, and Federov’s voice blared from the speakers. “…fighters. Multiple squadrons, coming out from all along the clouds…”

  Barron leaned forward, putting his mouth to the comm unit to ask Red squadron’s commander to be specific, but before the words came, his screen lit up with contacts, the data relayed automatically from Federov’s ships. Fighters. Hundreds of fighters.

  “Status in the bays?”

  “Commander Sinclair reports Blue and Scarlet Eagle squadrons will be ready to launch in…four minutes. Yellow and Green four minutes after that.”

  Barron shook his head. He’d been careful and careless at the same time. His ships were too damned close to the clouds. He’d been concerned about scoutships and escorts, not fully-deployed attack squadrons.

  “Lieutenant Federov, pull your squadron back now. You can regroup with the Blues and Eagles when they launch.” Federov’s fighters were outnumbered twenty to one. Barron had faith in his people, but a battle at those odds would be a slaughter.

  “Commodore, I think we can delay them, make them brake their acceleration to engage…”

  “Negative, Lieutenant. Pull back. That’s a damned order.”

  He didn’t even hear her acknowledgement. He was deep in thought, checking out velocities and vectors, trying to decide if her people even could break off before they were fully engaged. A lot depended on what the enemy did, but his best guess was right around 50-50. The odds of Dauntless and Illustrious getting away before the enemy fighters reached them were rather less.

  “Active scanners on full power, Commander. There are motherships out there somewhere, and we’ve got to find them.” We should have gotten some kind of readings before now. He knew the fighters were small, and already launched as they were, it was no surprise his people hadn’t picked them up until they were so close. But hiding battleships is a different matter entirely…