Authors: Tony Gonzales
Blake slammed her fist into the console.
“Is it possible for you to just shut the fuck up?
Ever?”
Miles turned toward her.
“Hear me out,” he said.
“Want to know how to make yourself absolutely irresistible to him?”
“No.
I don’t.”
“Make
me
your boyfriend,” he said.
“Capsuleers
love
competition.
He won’t be able to lay off you.
Ah … bad choice of words.”
Blake was ready to launch herself out of the chair when the bridge’s sentry alarm chirped.
Miles snapped back to his instruments and froze.
“Oh, wow,” he muttered, just as Captain Jonas appeared.
Korvin was right behind him.
“Report.”
“Six Imperial Navy warships just jumped in-system,” Miles said calmly.
An ominous threat Klaxon sounded; five red triangles suddenly appeared on the bridge’s tactical display.
“Two battlecruisers, two battleships, and an interceptor just warped in,” Blake said urgently.
“Three hundred and seventy klicks out and closing, heading directly toward us.”
“Sound battle stations,” Jonas ordered.
“Shield hardeners up.”
The
Morse
began undulating in ghostly hues of blue and white as its reactors pumped gigajoules of power into its shield emitters.
“Done,” Blake said.
“They’re targeting us—”
“You can’t win,” Korvin interrupted, studying the display.
The interceptor was burning toward them.
If it got within range, it could cripple the
Morse
’s engines.
“You should warp away.”
“Quiet,”
Jonas snapped, tapping Miles on the shoulder.
“You said there were
six
ships, not five.…”
* * *
TEMPLAR SIX WAS SHOUTING
in a language that no one alive had ever heard.
But his desperation and rage were universal as he thrashed in his restraints with violent headshakes, spittle flying everywhere as he cried out in an alien tongue.
He freed himself from the harness and reached for the pistol strapped to his thigh.
Templar Five’s hand darted forward in an attempt to keep the weapon holstered; the delay gave Vince time to detach his own harness and the ARML slung across his chest.
Six managed to squeeze off a shot just as Vince smashed the rifle stock into his face, knocking him and the weapon to the deck.
There was a shriek as the high-powered round slammed into the shin of Templar Three; the bullet smashed the bone into dozens of smaller projectiles that exited along with the bullet from the soldier’s calf muscle.
Vince discounted the wound as non–life threatening and raised the rifle butt in preparation for a second, harder blow.
Vince struck him with a force that would have pulped the face of a normal human.
But Six still managed to sweep his legs and drive him into the deck, pummeling him with a barrage of punches.
Over both the intercom and TACNET, the Vex pilot was demanding to know what was happening, warning that the drop was in less than three minutes.
Vince registered this—and the fact that the
Doystoyov
was now traveling at warp speed—all while fending off the approaching combat knife of his attacker.
Templars Two and Four yanked Six off of Vince just in time, hurling him into a bulkhead.
With a soldier restraining each arm, Vince grabbed the ARML and resumed clubbing Templar Six, whose head came apart unexpectedly on the third strike, exposing part of the metallofullerene implant buried within.
Sixty seconds remained, and the Vex pilot was demanding a “go, no-go” answer from Command.
Vince ordered the other Templars to strap themselves back in.
Six had been in charge of the squad’s only suppression weapon—a heavy arc cannon whose destructive power was worth the weight of carrying it around.
Assuming Six’s responsibility, Vince detached a nanite canister from his belt and tossed it to Templar Four, who pushed it into the chamber of an injector gun and plunged it into Three’s injured leg.
Vince hoped the molecular lattices would form quickly enough to support the soldier’s weight before the drop.
Everyone felt a sudden surge of vertigo and disorientation as the dreadnought emerged from warp.
They were in the hot zone, just seconds away from combat.
Vince was scrambling to get the arc cannon’s charge packs off of Six’s corpse, when Lord Victor contacted him on the TACNET.
“Situation,” Lord Victor demanded.
“Contained; good to go,” Vince replied.
“Do not reanimate Six.”
The
Doystoyov
’s bay doors began retracting beneath the Vex, revealing swirling cloud formations high above the planet’s reddish green surface.
Vince ripped off his combat vest and started to put Six’s on.
“Understood,” Lord Victor said.
“God be with you.”
“Ten seconds!”
the pilot shouted.
Vince barely had the cannon secured to his suit when the latches holding the Vex in place released.
He and the mutilated corpse of Six began floating toward the craft’s canopy as the dropship began free-falling into the atmosphere.
Pulling himself toward his seat, Vince only had time to get one strap buckled in before the craft’s plasma engines ignited, throwing him and the unsecured corpse violently into the other Templars.
* * *
THE CAPTAIN OF THE
DOYSTOYOV
was among the most experienced in the Imperial Navy, handpicked by Lord Victor for this special mission.
Guided into the system by a cynosural beacon dropped by the cloaked sixth ship that had entered through the Osoggur stargate, the captain executed an extremely dangerous maneuver that in spacefaring slang was called a “mountain scrape”: The dreadnought had emerged directly from warp into the lowest possible altitude of the gauntlet.
The
Doystoyov
was now just 141 kilometers above the surface and speeding at nearly 8,500 meters per second; a plasma bow wave was already forming ahead of the ship as its shields plowed through the mesosphere of Pike’s Landing.
Precisely on schedule, the drop master announced the release of all craft in his siege bays.
Their trajectories would put the Templars, conventional infantry, and supporting equipment exactly where they needed to be on the colony.
The volley of Stackfire antiship missiles rising from the surface, visible on his radar and optically on the horizon as white-orange dots atop vertical columns of smoke, was to be expected.
But the appearance of a Mordu’s Legion Drake-class battlecruiser, in low orbit and within firing range, was not.
* * *
“PUT MISSILES ON THAT DREADNOUGHT
right now,” Jonas muttered.
“High explosives; hurry up!”
“Tracking,” Blake said, her face awash in the glow of ship telemetry and targeting data.
“Those aren’t gonna put a scratch in that thing.…”
“Just do it,” he barked.
“Keep bringing it until I say otherwise.”
The space surrounding the
Morse
brightened as the first salvo of Scourge heavy missiles streaked away.
“Multiple dropcraft entering the atmosphere,” Miles reported.
“Predicted trajectory places all of them on the colony.”
“No kidding,” Jonas growled, opening a direct line to Mack.
The tactical display sounded a warning chirp: The interceptor had closed half the distance to the
Morse.
They had less than a minute at most.
“Mack, ordnance coming in hot!
Get to shelter now, now,
now
!”
* * *
DESPITE HIS OLD AGE,
General Vlad Kintreb reacted a half second faster than Mack did.
The raid sirens began when the Stackfire batteries four kilometers from where they were standing hurled a dozen missiles into the air with a deafening roar.
The building closest to where they were standing wasn’t reinforced with energy-absorbing alloys that could protect them from a beam weapon strike; the closest such structure was more than a hundred meters away.
General Kintreb ordered them into a futile sprint toward shelter, which prompted Mack to laugh, fully aware that their survival at this point had absolutely nothing to do with whether they ran, walked, or simply sat down where they were.
* * *
THE
DOYSTOYOV
WAS COMMITTED
to the gauntlet; a computer would determine when to commence the bombardment.
The firing solution was a one-second tight-beam exposure that would strafe a path fifteen meters wide and nine hundred meters long as it was “walked” over the target.
Whether the beam hit or not was now beyond the captain’s control, and his attention shifted to ensuring that the ship had enough altitude when the incoming “vampires” detonated.
Heavy on firepower but lacking in agility, a Revelation-class dreadnought is a huge, cumbersome ship, with a mass to the order of 1.2 million metric tons.
Stackfire warheads produced a kiloton of explosive force apiece; the
Doystoyov
’s shields would redirect or absorb 80 percent of those blasts.
But the remaining energy would translate directly into “drag” that could knock the ship off course.
At this altitude and speed, such an event would be catastrophic.
The captain had planned to be out of harm’s way before the planetary defenses of Pike’s Landing could do anything about the orbital strike.
Now his weapons officer informed that the first missile salvo from the Mordu’s Legion battlecruiser would hit just a few moments before the heavy beam fired.
Then the Stackfires would arrive.
The captain ordered his bridge to prepare the engines for maximum power output, and then he sounded the collision alarm.
* * *
GABLE JUST HAPPENED
to be looking in the direction of the northwest vehicle hangar when the beam lashed out from the sky.
Striking the center of the hangar, the beam raced along the damaged, reflective alloy on the rooftop and exploded violently.
Some of this energy blasted inside, superheating an ammunition store and igniting secondary explosions as the beam ran off the structure.
The impact of the beam on unshielded silt and rock flash-heated it to thousands of degrees Celsius, causing it to explode, hurling fiery debris in all directions.
Gable, standing just over two kilometers from the beam as it raced off the base, was seared by extreme heat first, then thrown as the shockwave slammed into her, Mack, General Kintreb, and their escorts.
Time seemed to slow down.
Gable could hear a rising pitch in her ears; she was numb and utterly disoriented as her brain rushed to assess damage.
Her survival instincts informed her that she was injured but not incapacitated and that she needed to gather her bearings quickly to survive.
Mack’s disfigured, smiling face was hovering above hers.
General Kintreb was alive, barking orders between heaving, wet coughs.
Some of the Valklears were mortally wounded; their moans became cries as they realized the extent of their injuries.
The smell of blood and ionized air filled her nostrils.
“On your feet, Lifegiver,” she could hear Mack say.
“Bad people coming.”
* * *
THE
DOYSTOYOV
CAPTAIN BELIEVED
that the beam had largely missed and that his crew members were about to lose their lives for nothing.
The first missiles fired from the
Morse
struck the
Doystoyov
’s shields a second apart from each other.
Although the explosive damage was largely absorbed, the impacts induced a slight yaw in the dreadnought’s attitude.
This exposed more surface area to the ship’s forward vector, increasing the atmospheric drag caused by the shield profile, which in turn exaggerated the yaw rate even more.
Maneuvering thrusters powered by the
Doystoyov
’s reactors fired to compensate.
When they did, the next volley from the
Morse
struck, invalidating the thruster firing-sequence solution applied for the previous salvo, which resulted in several degrees of unwanted downward pitch to the craft’s flight attitude.