Okay, last chapter. I hope we can end this well
Spoiler
“For heaven’s sake, what’s he screaming about this time?” Cheah hissed.
“Apparently the League wants to arrest him on false charges of piracy and mass murder.” Matayev didn’t even pretend to pay attention to the ranting, panicky CEO on his comm display. “We’re supposed to run back to Central where they can’t reach him.”
The exec scowled at her own display. “Well, that Eagle doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. It’s still tailing us.”
“It’s not fast enough to catch us, though.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, gazing at the plot. Both his fleet and the pursuing League cruiser and escort were moving at three million kilometers an hour, headed straight for the alpha jump point of the Sekos system. The pursuers could keep up, but they couldn’t get any closer unless one of the fleeing ships suffered an engine mischief (though unless it was the Overseer itself, Skilleton would probably demand that it be left behind), or it otherwise had to stop. So there should be no problem, except...
“They’ll catch us as soon as we have to stop to refuel,” she said. “We don’t have enough range to make it back without.”
“I know that,” he sighed. “We’ll either have to turn him over then no matter how much he protests, or try to stop them.”
“Do we? Because if not, we may as well go ahead and turn that jerk in now.”
He sighed. “I don’t know, Gerry. It seems like the most sensible thing to do, but if that’s the option we take, you and I are going to end up on the street once HQ finds out. But an act of war against the League will likely look even worse on our CVs - assuming we survive the encounter at all. Which means that, contrary to our esteemed employer’s demands, we’re not going to turn around and open fire on the Valiant if it does catch us.” He muttered a curse under his breath, then went on. “We’ll wait till they back us into a corner before yielding. That makes us seem like at least we tried to do our jobs.”
“Sounds good.” She glared at the display, watching the five green icons leading the two amber ones on a slow chase across the great expanse. “I’ll be damned if we risk our lives bailing Mr. Bigshot out of whatever crime he’s committed, anyway - and you can tell him I said so. He can shoot me if he doesn’t like it.”
“Fifteen minutes to jump point,” Sequeira reported. “The Quasar fleet will arrive five minutes before we do.”
Sybitz remained silent, staring grimly at the primary display. Four times already she’d listened in on Archer hailing the people they were running after, demanding they heave to and surrender CEO Skilleton. Three times they’d been met with the silence of the cosmos. The one exception had been the first time, which involved five minutes of Kenneth Skilleton cursing the League captain out, threatening her, her extended family and the Navy, in between entirely unconvincing protestations of his innocence.
“And what,” Dragunova sighed, “does she plan to do if they lay an ambush for us on the other side?”
“Eh.” Sybitz shrugged. “We can’t beat them in a stand-up fight, that’s for sure. But by the same token, none of them are fast enough to catch us, any more than we’re catching them right now. If we react quickly, we should have no problem disengaging from any trap they may be laying for us.”
“Right. But if we can’t fight them, why are we chasing them at all?”
“Because they won’t fight. For starters,” she pressed one index finger against another, “if they blow up a League Navy ship, they’ll likely see their business kicked out of the League for a long, long time - at minimum. If the Perseans are really *** off, well, let’s just say every officer involved in the attack is a dead man walking.”
“More to the point, though, even if Skilleton orders them to do it anyway, I fully expect they’ll refuse.” She smiled thinly. “If Mr. Bigshot CEO had spent some time studying us pirates instead of just bossing us around, he’d know a thing or two about how to inspire loyalty in your subordinates. Sure, a lot of pirate bosses are ruthless, murderous ***. But they also know not to abuse their positions - not too much, at least - and they know how to lead from the front. Most of all, they know why the time-hallowed pirate tradition of sharing the profits between the crew exists and practice it rigorously. And I’ll eat your biggest gun, Tina, if Skilleton does any of those things.”
Here Sybitz leaned forward, hands clasped, gazing intently at the plot. “If he thinks the whip hand will get his people to lay down their lives for him, he’ll learn just how wrong he was. Very quickly, and possibly permanently.”
“Jumping… now!”
In the span of a little under ten seconds, the QIS Skylark and its companions faded out of normal space, and the star-studded darkness in the distance became the deep blue puffs of hyperspace.
Matayev’s fingers drummed restlessly on his command chair. Transitions between n-space and h-space always carried a certain hazard, as the energy bleed and lingering spacetime distortions left the jumping ship greatly nearsighted for up to a couple of minutes. The same effect did help mask a ship’s identity from anyone awaiting it as well, but not as effectively or as for long. Combined with the natural chokepoint functionality of jump points in general, anyone making a jump in hostile territory was taking a risk.
In practice, pirate attacks in this manner were rare. Jump points were naturally high-traffic regions, which made them terrible places to hide from the law, and the would-be ambushee might well turn out to be a heavily armed military fleet. But Marenos was never very well-policed even before the recent piracy upsurge, and under certain circumstances, such as -
“Scanning,” came the tenor voice of the tactical officer… which then rose sharply. “Multiple contacts! Bearing three five two by zero zero seven, range 350 km and closing!”
“What?!” Matayev’s head jerked sideways to the man, then to his own display, and felt a sudden chill as his scanners placed one of the contacts clearly in the 300-kilotonne range.
“Transponder signal received,” the lieutenant reported, in a slightly shaky voice. “It’s identifying itself as the DMS Doomfist, Dominator-class.”
“Holk!” A scarlet-faced CEO stared at his display. “Why are you here? What are you playing at with taking over all these systems?”
The pirate warlord smiled thinly. “To answer your second question first, my good man, I am establishing myself as the ruler of the Marenos subsector. That much should have been obvious enough, I think. As for the first, I was waiting for you.” He tilted his head. “You see, I happen to have an offer that you can’t refuse. Your options are as follows: One, you surrender your ships intact and yourself to me. Two, I beat your ships into scrap, take them and you as well.” With visible fangs: “You have fifteen seconds to decide.”
“Holk, you *** traitor!”
“You shouldn’t be wasting your time on insults, you know. Ten seconds.”
“All those credits and weapons… you were planning this all along…!”
“Yes, yes, very deductive of you; what of it? Four.”
“If you think I’m going to surrender to a *** two-bit warlord like you-”
Holk smirked. “One.”
“Enough! I’m turning your ship into scrap metal! I’ll burn your sorry pirate corpse and dump your ashes into pig ***! I’ll teach you to *** with me!”
“Option two it is, then,” Holk said with a dramatic sigh. “Disappointing, but hardly surprising. I suppose I will have to indulge you, then. See you soon, Mr. Skilleton.”
The screen went blank.
“Situation?” Matayev said harshly.
“The Omen and the Broadswords are leading their advance down the center,” Captain Tess Wood answered, the tension stretching her mezzo-soprano. “The Sunder and Tridents are just behind them, and the Dominator and Condor are bringing up the rear. Cruiser’s probably gonna burn charge into us at the critical moment, though.”
“And Skilleton wants us to run up ahead and shield him from the bad guys.” The commander didn’t know whether to snort, sigh or scream. “Fine, we’ll put the Wolves outward to catch their lead units in a fork. The Skylark will move forward and down and help you with the big boys. It won’t be easy, but we should be able to make it work.”
Wood glanced aside, muttering something, before turning back to face him squarely. “Alright. It’s our best shot, even if it doesn’t look good. See you on the other side, Ren.”
“You too. Skylark, clear.”
He shut off the comm window, then stared at the red droplets of blood running down his plot. “Why are they bunching up like that?” he heard Cheah mutter. “You’d think they’d be trying to flank us.”
“I don’t know,” Matayev admitted. “But I don’t think it really matters in the end; they’re entering our anti-fighter envelope right about… now.”
As the fighters came swooping in, each Wolf sent sixteen Swarmer missiles at them, two for each Broadsword. Tactical and heavy burst lasers were reaching out as well, burning through the thin fighter armor and gutting their internals, and the pulse weapons were lashing at the Omen’s shield. Suren Matayev tensed in his seat as the SRMs, and the Hurricane MIRV that had joined them, closed with the enemy formation…
...only to jerk halfway out of his seat as the Broadswords fanned out and back, and the Omen triggered its EMP emitter. Highly charged bolts flashed out from the frigate’s hull, melting the missiles’ electronics into slag and turning the entire swarm into so many harmlessly unguided projectiles, and those few that survived the electric storm were easily shredded with well-aimed bursts of machine gun fire.
What happened next could only be described as a slaughter. The Quasar frigates did their best, but their lasers just weren’t enough to keep the low-tech fighters from swarming over them, dicing shields into overload with their machine guns, their own missiles tearing into the hulls of their Expansion-epoch opponents. A pinprick, each individual hit might have been, but few ships in the Sector were built to survive a hundred or a thousand such wounds. The Wolves didn’t even stand a chance.
But Matayev registered their deaths only peripherally. He was already preoccupied with his own problems.
The Sunder was closing in, long cyan tongues of its heavy graviton beams lashing at his hull. Quad heavy needlers answered with raking volleys as the Skylark jetted forward, blasters in hand. Shields came up, and the destroyer’s supercharge autopulse laser lashed out in a violent hail of energy bolts that crackled and sparkled on the Falcon’s shield.
The Skylark was not equipped to win a flux war with the likes of this foe, but it had other tricks of its own. Two Salamanders shot out, zipping past a flailing streak of machine gun fire, and while the tail gun knocked out one before it could connect, the other missile struck home and shorted out his target’s engines in an electromagnetic flare. The commander’s teeth flashed white as he closed in to batter the Sunder’s shields down and wreck its flimsy hull.
“Commander!” Geraldine Cheah cried out suddenly. “The Doomfist is burning in!”
The Dominator’s shield wasn’t particularly efficient, but it did suffice for parrying the lethal bolts of the Overseer’s plasma cannon. Six sabot pods disgorged their loads in a staggered pattern, creating a seemingly endless rain of high-velocity projectiles against the Apogee’s defenses. Wood had dropped her shield after the first one to eliminate any risk of an overload, and the armor deflected most of the initial kinetic projectiles quite efficiently, but they’d done their job nevertheless - the four Hellbore rounds mingling with the swarm flew through the space where the shields should have been, and shattered wide swathes of armor. More sabots tore into the open wounds, tearing through flesh and steel alike inside the smaller cruiser’s bow.
Blue light enveloped the Overseer again, catching the ferocious claws of autocannon fire. The high-tech main gun fired again, each plasma bolt that struck home becoming a torrent of flux into the Dominator’s capacitors, and the Hurricane launcher added its own fury to the stresses on the heavy warship’s shields. Before long, it would have the choice of venting or overloading, and the Quasar fleet would have some breathing room then.
The telltale purple-white streams gushed from the Dominator’s vents, and Wood’s ship took the opportunity to get some of its own back, sending up thick baubles of molten metal across the heavier vessel’s bow armor. Then it lowered its own shield, easing the load on its own overstrained capacitors as some of the Broadswords turned their attention to the biggest target they could find.
Two seconds later, its captain realised her mistake.
Amidst the chaotic back-and-forth, the Tridents had run the gauntlet into the enemy’s midst, their shields and the distraction of an incoming Pilum volley keeping them from death by PD laser. Two of the three had popped up beside and behind the Overseer, and they launched their Atropos torpedos at close range.
Burst lasers got one on each side, but the other zipped out of their turret arcs, and there was neither gun nor shield to stop them. They detonated simultaneously, sending chunks of hull and bulkhead spalling deep into the ship, and the hull lit up with the bright blue fury of fully charged capacitor banks exploding. Then the Omen pulled up alongside them, blasting highly energetic discharges into the Apogee’s circuits, paralyzing the entire port side of the ship.
The third Trident went for Matayev’s ship, and his helmsman swerved just in time to catch the torpedo his lasers had failed to stop on the shield instead of the hull. The distraction had cost him time, allowed the lamed Sunder to restart its engines, and he cursed as it sidestepped him to go after the vulnerable Overseer. Pulse laser bolts and graviton streams pummeled the belatedly re-raised shields into shutdown, and if the four Harpoon missiles that followed lacked the lethal punch of the Atroposi, they quite sufficed to further bleed the wounded beast. Especially the one that struck the plasma cannon mount and blew out the power feed to its magnetic drivers.
“Back off, Tess! Tess! You there?!”
He felt the sweat trickling into his eyes as he watched the QIS Overseer dying before his eyes. Only his ship was still combat effective, and that would change in fairly short order once they turned their attention to him - as the Sunder was already doing. The Buffalo they’d brought along didn’t count; he may as well have shot their crew himself as sent them up against warships of any kind, much less the ones he faced now. And Captain Wood and her bridge officers were out of contact… or dead.
His whole body was shaking with the sense of imminent doom, and there was nothing he could think of to do that would save either his friends’ ships, or his own.
At least he’d had time to vent his capacitors, readying it for a fresh charge into the teeth of danger. If he accepted the destruction of his ship as a given and sought only to do as much damage as possible before he went down, he could…
“Hyper footprint!” someone barked sharply, and he felt his heart lurch. The amber icons he had forgotten all about five minutes ago appeared on his plot once more.
“My god.”
It took Archer several seconds to realise it was she who had uttered the words. The situational display that had greeted her at the jump point exit was a completely unexpected one: the gutted, maimed QIS Overseer, the still-hot wreckage of its two escort frigates, and multiple hostile ships and fighters swarming about the sole surviving escort. She didn’t have any way of knowing for sure who the mystery attackers were, but she had little reason to believe they were friendly… and deep down inside she already knew there was only one group in the subsector would have dared launch such an audacious move.
“The Dominator is hailing us, ma’am,” Gray announced, and Archer pressed the receive button without a word. The face that appeared on her viewscreen was one she recognised from the briefing she’d first received so many months ago, and though she showed no outward sign of it, every nerve in her body was taut.
“Ah, the esteemed Captain Artemis Archer, in the flesh,” Manza Holk said in an unexpectedly pleasant voice. “I suppose you can surmise who I am.”
“Manza Holk, of the Black Hatchet,” she said, her own tone just a little terser than she’d anticipated. “I didn’t expect to run into you here.”
“Not quite, Captain.” He smiled. “It’s now Manza Holk, Dominion of Marenos.”
“Dominion.” She glared. “So that’s what this whole conquest thing is about. I see you’ve been busy.”
He let out an understated sigh. “As have you, Captain. You’ve caused me a lot of trouble - frankly, if I knew just how much, I would have invested some actual effort into killing you. But that’s all in the past,” he went on, reclining in his chair. “For now, what can I do for you, captain?”
“You can start by turning Kenneth Skilleton over to us,” she said. “And then you can take your fleets and go home to Vaas before we kick you out.”
“Such threats, my lady! Surely you know I wouldn’t have made it to my present position if I was going to back down so easily.” Head tilted now, eyes dancing with amusement. “As for our mutual friend from Quasar, I’d like to help you, but I’m afraid I have my own plans for him.”
She raised an eyebrow. “And those would be?”
“Please, captain! Do I look like some comic book villain, blabbing all my plans to my enemies just before I feed them to the sharks?” He snorted derisively. “Maybe I’ll hold him for ransom. Or perhaps I intend to have him executed before the people of the subsector to start off my reign. Who can say?”
“You really think you can get away with this warlord thing?”
“Warlord? Come now, Miss Archer. What I’m doing is no different from what any number of much-respected leaders throughout human history, including in our very Sector, have done. In fact, the only difference between you and me is that your League prefers to do it with a pile of credits instead of a fleet.”
“Those two things are not equivalent and you know it!”
“I do believe the historians will say otherwise once I have triumphed. That is what they have always done, after all.”
“And you also believe the League will let you get away with this? Or the Hegemony?”
Holk barked a short, sharp laugh. “Oh, that’s a good joke, alright. Your weak, vacillating League Assembly - no offence, Captain - takes a month of debate to decide on the color of its own socks. Once I present them with my fait accompli, they’ll see no option but to give in and accept their new not-so-friendly neighbours.” He glanced away thoughtfully. “The Hegemony might act differently, but as things stand, why should they? The Dominion will be a thorn in your side, not theirs. In short, there is simply no-one out there with both the will and the power to stop me.”
Archer stared coldly at him for several seconds, left fingers clenching, then exhaled slowly, closing her eyes. Recollections of everything she’d seen in the subsector flashed through her mind - a pleasant commissioner on Catal, a desperate rebel on Duval, a lonely orphan boy in Mazic, even a jovial pirate skipper in Calpe orbit - and she came to a decision.
“Well, well,” she said with a thin smile, eyes open again. “It seems like you’ve thought this through very well indeed. There’s just one flaw in your plan.”
“And what would that be?”
She leaned forward, her left hand forming a fist on the armrest, and stared him in the eye. “All I have to do is kill you here, and your little pocket empire falls apart before it even begins.”
“My, what audacity!” He smirked. “You may be right, but I’d advise against making the attempt. They say political power flows from the barrel of a gun, and I made sure to bring along the biggest guns I could get - rather bigger than yours, I’d suggest. It would be quite tragic if a capable woman like yourself were to perish fighting for a futile cause, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I’ve faced down impossible odds for causes everyone else thought was futile before, Holk. I’m not going to stop now - not when so much is at stake.”
He leaned back in his chair, sighing. “How melodramatic. Very well, my lady. If you’re so insistent on dying at my hands - as Skilleton here did, though for rather less noble reasons - I suppose it would be most ungracious of me to decline you.”
The DMS Doomfist turned to face its new foe, weapons gleaming in the violet light of the jump point, and Manza Holk’s face flashed with a cold keenness.
“En garde, Captain.”
“I can’t believe you’re actually fighting that guy,” Sybitz muttered. “If I didn’t like you so much, I’d be running the other way right now and you’d get to run this fool’s errand on your own.”
“Bin it, Adela,” Archer snapped. “Listen, I’m going to fence with the Dominator and keep him diverted from you and the Quasar survivors. I want you to go and mop up everyone who doesn’t come after us. Can you do that?”
The ex-pirate glanced at the tactical display, where several fighters, a frigate and a destroyer were all engaging the one light cruiser still fighting. “Always asking for the impossible, aren’t you? Fine, we’ll go whump on your new friends.”
“Good. And… be careful.”
“Be careful, yourself.” Sybtiz smiled. “Don’t forget, you still owe me a month’s pay. A&R, out.”
Once again the Doomfist opened the engagement with a volley of sabots, a stream of missiles riding with a four-shot Hellbore salvo. But this time the target had anticipated something like this, and her maneuvering jets flipped her 90 degrees portwise around her long axis. The high-explosive cannon shells passed by on either side, and those of the kinetic projectiles that did not similarly miss ricocheted harmlessly off the Valiant’s angled armor as her course took her on a barrel roll that any atmospheric fighter would have envied.
She quickly levelled off again, and where the mighty Hellbores had gone wide, her own smaller HVDs struck the Dominator’s armor dead center. The EMP effect dazzled the larger ship’s sensors and targeting systems, and its next cannon barrage missed even wider than the first. Then the Eagle was circling it, lashing at it again and again beyond its range, like a picador of old against a bull.
Some of the Broadswords dancing about the Skylark noticed the Lasher-class frigate bearing down on them and turned their attention to it. Others were distracted or remained focused on the Falcon, machine guns chewing at the broad shield as it tried frantically to hit them with its heavy weapons, a man swatting flies with a sledgehammer.
It scarcely mattered which course they took.
The Armed & Reckless dove into the fray, and where the cruiser’s blasters had missed more often than not, the frigate’s machine guns and Vulcan cannons ripped the attacking fighters apart in sharp, precise bursts. The rapid-fire weapons perforated and shredded their thin armor with ruthless ease, and the pirate fighter pilot who could outwit Valentina Ilyinichna Dragunova’s gunnery had never been born.
Some of them, caught a little less off balance than their fellows, tried to fight back. But the Lasher’s shields were deactivated, and their low-caliber MGs had no hope of doing any real damage to even frigate armor. Most of them had exhausted their Swarmers on the Quasar fleet, and the few launches they could muster were intercepted quickly and efficiently by the same PD guns that were cutting them down like so much ripe wheat. One particularly unlikely pirate even ended up flying in front of the Reckless and getting blown apart by a few well-placed 25mm shells from the assault guns.
“That’s right, boys” Dragunova snarled as another well-timed trigger of the port Vulcan knocked out yet another fighter, the ship continuing her deadly dance of destruction. “Run home to your mommies and cry some more!”
Manza Holk gritted his teeth. The sudden intervention of the Valiant and its escort had turned what should have been a mop-up into a dangerously even battle, and he’d already taken more losses than he’d bargained on. Fighters were always expendable on some level, of course, but they weren’t free… and they wouldn’t be the last of his force to go down if anything further went wrong.
What he needed was to take his own ship over there and finish that Falcon so he could wrap up the capture of his former employer and leave. The frigate could run or die for all he cared; torpedo-armed or not, it could make no difference once the larger ships were dealt with. But he dared not expose his back to the League cruiser that now seemed to be taunting him, pricking the Doomfist with its HVDs, flickering its shield to contemptuously catch his own cannon rounds.
“Go to sequenced fire, Rigo. And have Trisula form a tetrahedron with us. It’s time we clipped this eagle’s wings.”
“Unbelievable,” Matayev whispered, to himself as much as to anyone else, as the shield came up once more to stop the flashing autopulse bolts. “That Lasher just took apart the entire squadron!”
His console beeped with the comm chime of a squadron network signal, and a woman’s crisp brown face appeared on his screen. “Adela Sybitz, of the Armed & Reckless,” she said. “How’s your ship?”
“Suren Matayev, commander of the QIS Skylark.” He didn’t even try to keep the immense relief out of his expression. “I think you just saved all our lives. Thanks.”
“Anytime, big boy. Now could you return the favor and help us deal with the two other baddies with us? We’re not equipped to handle that kind of threat.”
“Of course.” His grin somehow managed to combine gratitude with a predatory sentiment. “I think it’s time we got some of our own back.”
The Omen was duelling with the Lasher, trying to get behind it where its EMP emitter and PD lasers would do something beyond disappearing into the other ship’s flux capacitors. That was when the Falcon engaged its thrusters and lunged straight for the high-tech ship, sending a flurry of Salamanders before it.
Against threats from two directions, the pirate skipper would have been just skilled enough to disengage and escape mostly unscathed. With three and a still-recharging emitter, he stood no chance at all; two EMP missiles struck home and knocked out his engines as he tried desperately to outmaneuver his opponents. Three blaster bolts send the frigate into overload a couple of seconds later, and another two broke it in half like a child’s toy.
That leaves just the Sunder. Which, to its credit, was still putting up a good fight; its energy weapons brought the Skylark’s still-strained shields to the brink of overload, and six Harpoon missile streaked in to gouge its opponent’s armor along the starboard prong. Damage control alarms shrieked throughout the ship, and Matayev felt as if it was his own body that had taken the blows - he didn’t even want to think about how many of his people had just died - but unlike the Overseer, his ship was still alive and functional. The light cruiser swiftly turned to present its mostly-intact port to the enemy while it vented, and the smaller ship was already backing away slowly, knowing what four heavy blasters on continuous fire could do to it now.
He was about to give the command to close in and finish the destroyer off when another, different warning signal buzzed from his console. He jerked his head up to the squadron net display, and felt his elation draining along with the blood on his face at the flashes of red on the screen.
“Back out further!” Archer barked, even as Helmsman Divila was already engaging the Valiant’s reverse thrusters. Her tense fingers gripped the armrest in a white-knuckled hold, the flux warning indicators flashing in the corner of her vision and the center of her mind.
She couldn’t drop her shields as long as she stayed in effective Hellbore range, not with the way it was sequencing its shots. Even if the torque was throwing the Dominator’s aim off with each shot, it would only take a few good hits to batter her ship badly once her shield went down. No matter how many times she lanced the beast with her own guns, it didn’t seem to stop, and even the couple of Harpoon hits she’d managed to land barely slowed it down. Another five minutes of this and...
“Tridents incoming,” Diamond said sharply, as the point defense lasers stopped another Pilum volley. “They’re fanning out in a triangle.”
Archer felt the cold sweat beading on the back of her neck, her breaths harsh in the confines of her helmet. If she had adequate flux reserves when they came in for the attack, she could shrug their torpedoes off and still be able to fend off the heavy cruiser’s advances until help arrived. What would happen if she didn’t scarcely bore thinking about. And if Holk had any idea whatsoever what he was doing, he wouldn’t order them to strike until-
“Doomfist burning in!”
She practically leapt out of her chair, gripping her command station. “Maneuvering jets! Climb now!”
The Eagle leapt up, spinning a hundred and eighty degrees on her long axis and driving vertically relative to the plane of their engagement, and only the desynchronisation this caused in the enemy’s carefully timed attack maneuver saved her from certain destruction. The torpedo bombers dove in at once, even as the Doomfist angrily flung sabots and autocannon shells at its evading prey, and six Atropos torpedoes flew out as streaks of yellow towards their target, at so many angles she could never hope to stop them all.
Still, she tried her best. PD lasers knocked out three short of their targets, and another vanished in an actinic flash on the shield. Said shield was quickly dropped to prevent an overload, and a fifth Atropos ripped a huge but survivable gash on the ventral port bow section.
The sixth snaked past laser and shield alike and detonated in the Valiant’s port main thruster.
Four ratings in the engineering department died instantly as a plasma conduit ruptured no more than eight meters from them. Another three suffered severe burns, and several others were cut up by a hail of flying shrapnel. The damage to the engine caused the starboard thruster to flame out as well, leaving the ship to drift helplessly as the Dominator ended its burn drive and came turning to bring its main guns to bear.
Ross Diamond slammed his hand down on the emergency vent button, but even as the accumulated flux began gushing out into the surrounding hyperspace, the enemy had locked on and gone to maximum rate of fire. Huge high-explosive rounds struck the League ship over and over like the fist of an enraged giant, shattering even the toughest armor the engineers of the Core Epoch could shape, and sending jagged chunks of bulkhead spalling through rooms and corridors to slice through any crewman unlucky enough to get in their way.
The entire left deckhead of the bridge caved in, air rushing out through the breach, and the lights went with it. Darkness shrouded the Valiant’s officers for a second before they were illuminated in emergency red. Cries of pain went up all around, one of which was abruptly cut off almost before it started, and Artemis Archer barely heard her own scream.
“Orders, Captain?” Diamond called out.
She could not respond. She could only sit still, breathing heavily, pulse racing. “Captain!” he shouted again, even as he knew there was command she could give that would do any good. Not while they were immobilized, waiting to be picked off like apples from a tree.
With violently trembling hands she punched in the command for a comm link to Engineering, her heart pounding in her ears. “Captain to Engineering,” she said, fighting to keep the quaver out of her voice. “Rolls, come in! Rolls!”
“No!”
All three people on the bridge of the ISS Armed & Reckless were watching the same thing on their respective screens: the vivid imagery of the PLS Valiant incapacitated by the torpedo attack, the Hellbores beginning to tear into it.. All of them could do the math, and knew that only their own ship could possibly intervene in time to save the League cruiser, especially with the Sunder still threatening the Skylark’s rear. That if the Eagle went down, they would have no choice but to retreat in the face of the still-superior opposition, ending everything they’d done up to now in failure. And yet, they could only intervene at great, possibly lethal risk to themselves.
“We have to help them,” Sequeira said in a low, almost timid voice.
“Are you nuts?” Dragunova glared at him. “What do you think that Dominator is going to do to us if we give it the chance?”
“I know you don’t much like the League or Captain Archer, but look at it this way - if she dies, we don’t get paid.”
“If we die, we don’t get paid either and it doesn’t even matter if we do!”
They both turned to look at Sybitz. “Skipper?” the ex-smuggler said, his expression clearly that of one seeking guidance from above.
For what seemed like forever Adela Sybitz had been staring with burning eyes at her screen, watching the murderous explosions rippling across the Valiant. Men and women died as hull plates shattered and ammunition stores and capacitor banks ruptured, and she saw the face of a captain who had so often risked her life for others. A captain who had saved the life of a boy so much like the brother she couldn’t.
“We’re going in,” she said coldly.
“Skipper,” Dragunova began, “I must object –”
“Drive straight for the front of the Doomfist. As soon as we’re in point-blank range, launch both torpedoes, half-second delay.”
Sequeira’s eyes widened. “Skipper, I don’t think that’s –”
“Do it!” Sybitz roared.
Her two most trusted companions hesitated for a moment, as if they were about to refuse. But then the moment passed, finely-honed team instinct taking over. The frigate was already taking off, sprinting as fast as her engines could take her without spontaneously exploding, and they closed the distance in a streak of orange fire. Fifteen kilometers… ten… five...
By now the Eagle’s vent had ended, its shield coming up again, buying some valuable respite, but it could only be a temporary relief. She trailed atmosphere and debris, bleeding horribly from her wounds, and Sybitz felt her nerves turned to steel.
Machine guns and Vulcan cannons opened up on the still-unshielded Lasher, followed belatedly by autocannons, and rounds of various sizes pelted and splintered the thin armor. Her shield was still down, seemingly relying on faith and fury to protect her through the hail of lead, and then she reached her destination. One red torpedo went away, then the other, and the Armed & Reckless broke off almost as swiftly as she had charged.
With the initial boost of their parent ship and their own overpowered engines, the Reapers bore down on their targets like the fists of Satan himself. Point defense weapons spat metal in a desperate bid to stop them, but they were too fast to track effectively, and their plating held against the few stray hits.
The first torpedo flashed in a violent burst of heat against the shield, and the flux feedback shorted out half a dozen capacitors deep within the ship and sent the entire grid into overload. That left the second Reaper free to strike home on the Doomfist’s bow, carving out a massive crater in the damaged armor with the fury of a miniature star.
“Ugh!”
Manza Holk snarled as his ship shuddered and reeled from the blow they’d just taken. Air flowed out in streams from the gaping wound in its bow, the blast doors thankfully sealing off the affected area. Half his sensors were gone, overloaded capacitors were sparking all over the ship, and the only reason the functional loss of three of his six missile pods wasn’t more infuriating was because they’d all emptied their loads anyway.
For the first time in many cycles, he felt genuine, untempered rage boiling within. He’d worked so long and so hard for this, to prove himself worthy as a master of all that he surveyed. Yet now this League interloper who had no right to even be here, much less challenge him, was thwarting his best laid plans at every turn. Was she now going to steal his moment of triumph, to humiliate him on the field of battle?
No. That was unacceptable even for Holk the pirate, much less Holk the ascendant ruler of Marenos. Whatever else happened, Captain Artemis Archer could not be permitted to live through this day.
He carefully throttled his anger, forcing the lava back into the earth it sprang form, and looked steadily at the rendered image of the Valiant’s shattered form. Yes, she’d hurt him badly… but he’d hurt her even worse. A few more good hits, and he would carry the day in the end, after all.
“As soon as our overload ends, burn drive to close range against the Eagle,” he commanded, cold anger dripping from his voice. “She’s been a thorn in our side for long enough. Fire everything... and kill her.”
“...come in! Rolls! Please respond!”
The desperation in her captain’s voice roused Commander Rollyn Bracket from where she lay dazed on the deck. It was dark, the only light in the room coming from a small, crackling fire in the corner and a few electronic devices that miraculously still worked. Several other bodies were scattered about, unconscious… or dead. The faceplate of her skinsuit was cracked and splotched with red, and she felt a distinct wetness running down her face. And why does everything looks so flat?
She tried to push herself off the ground with her arms, but only one would respond, and she gasped in horror as she realised why. Frantically she looked around, straining the one eye that still seemed to work, but to no avail.
“Engineering, please respond!” the terrified soprano was in her ears again. “Captain to engineering…”
“I’m… I’m here,” she began, then cried out in pain at the stabbing pain in her lungs. Just how many ribs had she broken? Shaking her head, fighting back the tears, she tried again: “T-This is Bracket. You… you needed me captain?”
“Oh, thank god,” Archer exhaled in relief. “We need the engines back, Rolls. The Doomfist is pounding us, and if we can’t move soon…”
“Just… just give me a moment,” the engineer wheezed, forcing herself upright and to her feet. “I just need… I just need… oh god, I can’t find my arm…”
“Rolls, please, hurry...” the voice was a whisper now. “The ship needs you… I need you…”
With a groan Bracket stumbled over to a console in the wall, flashing red with warning messages. Her mind was a haze of red pain, but she saw, and understood.
The main reaction feed had been destroyed in the explosion, sealed off automatically when it vented several hundred standard cubic meters of burning plasma into a cargo hold full of supplies instead of the ship’s exhaust pipe. The automatic shunt had somehow failed as well, but there was an electromechanical switch thankfully in the same room, mounted in the wall several meters away, that would hopefully do it.
Another explosion rocked the ship, and she fell over with a sharp cry. It took several seconds to pull herself back up, stifling a sob, and then she hobbled slowly in the needed direction, counting off slowly to keep her mind off the agony that seemed to grow with each step. Three… one… four… one… five… nine… two… six… five… three… five...
The switch was right in front of her now, and she reached up with her right arm and pulled down.
It wouldn’t budge.
Shaking violently, she pulled harder and harder, even as the fire burned in her ribs. Come on, old girl… let me save you… we have to help each other… She raised a foot and pressed it against the wall, then the other, bring her entire body weight to bear on the problem. Her arm strained, her muscles howled in protest…
And the switch gave way.
She did it!
Artemis Archer felt the chains of despair fall away from her heart as the ship’s engines came to life again, active readouts flashing on her monitor. They could move again - they had a chance, after all.
But only one chance, she reminded herself, as the display showed the enemy cruiser’s overload wear off and its guns return to life again. If it decided to close, there would be no running away from it, not in the shape her vessel was in. It was do or die, now - only one of them would walk away from this.
“Prepare to level off and flush racks,” she said, her voice harsh, eyes hard as diamonds. “Stand by to execute on my mark.”
“Aye, ma’am,” Diamond acknowledged, and as his hands flew over his console he could feel her fury in his soul as well. All they had to do was wait for the enemy to make the only move possible, and…
“Now!”
The Dominator kicked in its burn drive and bore down like a charging rhino, Hellbores firing as quickly as they could bear. Half a dozen 51-centimeter cannon rounds streaked through space at the PLS Valiant, ready to smash her shield flat and break her once and for all.
Until she went to maximum thrust and sped up and out of the line of fire, the devastatingly powerful shells flying past behind her. She did what was still known among atmospheric pilots as an Immelmann, facing down her foe once more, and a full dozen Harpoons flew off their racks in a screaming hail while hypervelocity penetrators and phase beams crossed the distance between them to tear into their hated foe.
EMP arcs flashed along the hard, tan bow, shorting out already half-blind targeting systems and turning point defense weapons into so much deadweight. The missiles converged on their target, swarming through the scattershot MG fire coming to meet them, and tore into the cruiser’s breached armor as one.
Explosions rippled across a hundred meters of hull, secondaries gutting countless ship compartments, and then the DMS Doomfist was blown into dust and ashes as its fusion chamber let go.Spoiler
Captain Artemis Archer, Persean League Navy stood in her civvies, gazing out from her 27th floor hotel room at the morning sun. Carda’s bright G4 rays reflected on the shimmering city spires, a symbol of the subsector’s potential with its shackles gone.
She rubbed her right shoulder uneasily. The doctors had done a good job of fixing her joint, but it’d only been three days ago, and she still wasn’t quite used to having her arm back and free again; the very first day she’d broken a glass in quite a spectacular fashion. It was still a little sore, too.
But for all that - her expression turned morose - at least it could be fixed. All too many of her people were beyond fixing.
She’d lost twenty-one of her crew in that fateful final battle, in addition to Kauffman on Mazic and sixteen other Marines on Port Ikonia - a full fifth of those who’d set out with her to Marenos three months ago. Several thousand more civilians and security personnel had perished in the various battles around the subsector, and she could only wonder how many livelihoods had been buried in the wreckage. There’d been no shortage of time to count, no paucity of nightmares awaiting her in the dark since the PLS Valiant had limped into port as a mangled half-wreck three weeks ago.
It’s alright. It’s over now. It’s over…
A chime sounded behind her, and she turned around. “Come in,” she called out, then startled at the sight of the tall, dark figure who appeared as the door slid open. Her right hand came up in an awkward, crooked salute, even as she cursed herself for doing it so badly. If her Academy instructors found out...
The man chuckled. “At ease, Captain,” Rear Admiral Bernard Slater said gently. “If anything, I should be the one saluting you. There’s no way we can fully reward you for everything you’ve accomplished out here, but I promise we’ll try our best.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said in a low voice, lowering her hand. “They say you’ve brought the crisis to an end.”
“Decisively. The three task groups of TF22 converged on Vaas eleven days ago and annihilated the pirates’ nest in an afternoon of stand-up fighting. The occupation forces in the captured systems are similarly being rolled up, and the couple that we still haven’t gotten around to yet are already negotiating a withdrawal. For all intents and purposes, not just the Dominion but the pirate threat in the Marenos subsector is finished. And it’s all thanks to you.”
She flushed. “I can’t possibly dream of taking all the credit, Admiral. It was only possible because I had a splendid crew, and...” though it galled her to admit it, “the help of the Armed & Reckless.”
“Ah, yes,” he murmured, the corners of his wide mouth twitching. “Miss Adela Sybitz and her merry band of pirates. It’s too bad she seems to have disappeared; she seems like quite the character. I would very much have liked to meet her.”
Wince. “You don’t, Admiral. Trust me on this.”
He grinned, then shook his head before going on. “As for Quasar Industries, we’ve discovered a whole treasure trove with the help of your friend General Manager Lain, and half the suits in the local division are turning state’s evidence in a desperate attempt to save their own skins. CEO Skilleton is in custody and will be turned over to the local governments for trial.” His face was hard, now. “I expect they’ll draw lots on who gets to hang him first.”
“I thought you didn’t approve of capital punishment, sir.”
“I don’t. But sometimes, it becomes awfully tempting to make an object lesson of those who abuse their lofty positions to trample upon others.” The admiral looked away for a moment, breathing slowly, then turned back to her. “Anyway, we’ve also made it abundantly clear to the Quasar board that we will brook no retaliation of any kind against you and your crew, or the people of Marenos. The League has ways of making its displeasure… acutely known.”
“And Sekos? What do we do with them?”
“That’s an open problem, yes.” He frowned. “They weren’t involved in Skilleton’s piracy thing - I think they wouldn’t have been happy if they’d found out - so the most we can accuse them off is being yet another bunch of totalitarian thugs. There are some who’ve been calling for the Navy to hammer them flat, but most of us realise how easy it is to make things even worse that way. Still, we should be able to turn the cranks hard enough on them to dissuade them from any more mass shootings, at least. And without their Quasar sugar daddies backing them up now, let's just say they'll soon be running up against the limits of the jackboot in dealing with dissidents.”
“What about Mr. Arrastia and his men… and for that matter, Mir?”
“Felipe Arrastia and his followers have requested asylum in the League. We’re still processing their applications, but I don’t foresee any trouble. As for that kid of yours,” he smiled, and she felt her cheeks heat up again, “don’t worry. He’s already an official League citizen, and we’ll find a good foster home for him.”
The admiral snapped to attention and saluted her. “All things considered, it’s not the best possible outcome, but no-one could have done better than you did. Good work, AA. We’ll make sure the contributions of you and your crew are properly recognized as soon as we get back. Your ship’s taking you home for a well-deserved rest in two days.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, her eyes suddenly misty. “I… I’m just glad to be going home.”
“Of course. Goodbye, Captain, and see you back at Fleet Command.”
Slater dropped his arm and started to turn away, then abruptly stopped and faced her again. “One more thing, Captain,” he said, his voice suddenly tense. “I… reviewed the logs of your battle with the Doomfist. Specifically, some behaviors you exhibited near the end.” His eyes narrowed. “I think you’ve been... keeping secrets from us.”
Archer gasped. “Admiral, I…”
“No, don’t apologize. It’s not your error… it’s ours.” He stared at the floor for a few moments, before forcing himself to look his former tactical officer in the eye. “If there’s anyone who knew what you went through, who should have thought to check up on you, it was me. I should have, and I didn’t. The Navy failed you, and I failed you, AA. I’m sorry.”
“Admiral… Uncle Bernard…”
“Listen,” he said softly, putting her hands on her shoulders. “We may have let you suffer in silence all this while, but not any longer. No more secrets. As soon as we get back, you’re going to get a psychiatrist and you’re going to work with him to deal with your inner demons. Understood?”
“I…” She shook herself, then nodded. “Understood, sir.”
“Good girl.” He smiled again. “Well then, I’m sure you still have plenty of sightseeing to do for the next two days. Enjoy yourself, Captain.”
Two days later Artemis was staring wistfully out another window, this time not at a cityscape but at the panorama of the stars in the distance. The port lounge was empty except for her, as she stood in silence with a travel bag slung over her shoulder, only a few inches of plastiglass separating her from the void.
How long would it be before she could sail those stars again? She knew that after what Slater had said to her that day, it would be a long time indeed before they’d even consider putting her back on a ship. She’d be stuck in one desk job or another while the shrinks worked on her, left to reminiscence about all the adventures she’d had, the memories that she was now about to leave behind. Meanwhile the Valiant would go to some other captain, someone who’d never truly know what the old bird had gone through here in Marenos. The stars of the Sector would continue their slow drift around the galaxy, planets in tow, shining brightly as ever...
“Hey,” a soft feminine voice behind her broke her reverie, and she turned around, eyes widening as she came face to face with a smiling Adela Sybitz.
“How did you get in here?”
The pirate shrugged. “Trade secret. Anyway, I heard you were going away, so I thought I’d show up to say goodbye and such.” She sighed softly. “We made a pretty good team, you know. I’m really going to miss you.”
“That makes one of us,” Archer said tartly. Then she looked away, shuffling uneasily on her feet. “Actually, back there in the battle against Holk… I guess you did save my life a second time. And my crew and my ship, too. So… thank you, again.” Turning back, glaring: “And if we ever catch you in an act of piracy again, we’ll blow your ship right out of space. Got that?”
“You’re so tsundere, AA.” Sybitz grinned, jabbing the older woman in the shoulder. “Relax. I couldn’t rob these people after everything I’ve done for them. Actually, I have a couple of ideas of what I’m going to do after this. Something I’ll be comfortable telling my grandkids about. Maybe we’ll meet again someday - without you having cause to kill me on the spot, that is.”
“...Maybe.”
They were standing side by side now, looking out into the vast beyond. The sun was rising over the edge of the planet Hévíz now, glowing a brilliant yellow, the heralding of a dawn after the long night.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Adela said softly.
“Yeah.” Artemis whispered, eyes shimmering. “It is.”
Author
Topic: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31) (Read 51286 times)