Authors: Tony Gonzales
That’s just plain stupid or stubborn,
Admiral Freeman thought.
A contact only identifying himself as “Minmatar Nation Command” replied.
“Attention Federation forces,” he said.
“We cannot verify your intentions.
Do not approach this position or we will fire on you.
We will send help for your fallen comrades.”
That the Minmatar commander didn’t even bother to state his name showed how far the two erstwhile allies had drifted apart.
More tellingly, several Republic Fleet ships in the main group were clearly in trouble and starting to drift out of control; their flagship, a Hel-class carrier, was taking a horrible pounding.
Time was wasting.
“With all due respect, Commander, it doesn’t look that way from here,” Admiral Freeman said, looking away from his screen momentarily.
“We’re coming whether you like it or not.”
When he looked back, a second Imperial task force—about 120 warships in all—warped into view, directly between him and the Republic Fleet ships.
According to his HUD, Grand Admiral Kezti Sundara himself had just joined the field, at the helm of an Avatar-class titan.
* * *
VINCE WASN’T KNOCKED OUT COMPLETELY
, and he had enough wits about him to know that whoever got up first was probably going to win this fight.
By the time he managed to push himself up onto his knees, he realized his chances didn’t look good.
Grabbed by his own vest collar, Vince was hurled across several meters of open silt into the rock face of the ledge they had just tumbled down.
He was peripherally aware that the Blackjack had crashed just sixty meters from here, and that Federation soldiers were starting to crawl out from the wreckage.
His head whiplashed off the stone, and his stomach exploded with pain; the air was expelled from his lungs as she unleashed a flurry of incapacitating body blows.
Her fists felt like they were made of cement, so fast that, even with his augmented reflexes, he couldn’t react to them in time.
Unable to retaliate, she threw him facedown into the gravel.
Vince glanced up for a moment and saw six Katmai speed bikes pull up to the wreckage; their drivers and passengers quickly disembarked and began assembling weapons.
Three of them were arming shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile launchers, and all had their eyes on him.
Vince felt the assailant’s knees drive into his side and neck.
He winced as his wrist was twisted over and pushed high up his back.
“You are my prisoner,” she said, forcing him up to his feet.
“Do not resist again.”
The warm downwash of a gunship’s ion turbines kicked up a plume of silt; an unrecognizable craft uncloaked right above them, gently landing a few meters away and blocking his line of sight to the Federation troops.
Then the pulse tracers rained down.
A dashed line of reddish white streaks fell across the idling gunship and presumably the Blackjack wreck behind it.
He couldn’t see if they found their mark, but there were strange glows where the rounds impacted the assassin’s craft.
Other than some thermal scarring, there was no apparent structural damage.
The assassin hurried Vince farther toward the ramp that had lowered as the craft idled.
He tried falling to stall their progress, but he was yanked up by his immobilized arm so hard that both of his feet came off the ground.
Arching his back in anguish, he saw the bluish white plasma contrails from three antiaircraft missiles as they streaked upward and veered abruptly in the direction the pulse fire came from.
Vince and the assassin were flattened by a deafening explosion; he lost consciousness.
The wretched smell of burning flesh awakened him.
His leg was covered in smoldering debris; in fact, he was surrounded by an inferno.
The crackle of automatic-weapon fire raised his senses to full awareness; the nanites in his bloodstream were doing their part to keep him alive.
The assassin’s limp body lay on top of him; it rolled off as Vince pulled himself upright.
She had been shredded by fragments; ironically, her body had shielded him from the worst of it.
There was no blood—instead, a whitish gray viscous substance was frothing at the edge of her wounds.
Her expression remained disturbingly pleasant.
Whatever she was, Vince hoped he never ran into one like her again.
There were now three downed gunships within one hundred meters of each other.
The Vex had clipped the assassin’s gunship as it crashed; a secondary explosion after impact had blown both crafts apart.
Several dead soldiers lay strewn about in the wreckage.
Peering around the corner of a twisted fuselage, Vince saw a vicious firefight under way.
Paladins were advancing on the downed Blackjack.
Survivors in the wreckage were returning fire—though not as many as before.
One of the Katmai bikes was lying on its side just twenty meters away but exposed to gunfire from both sides.
The Federation soldier who had been riding it was badly wounded and was attempting to crawl back toward cover.
Vince ripped one of the nanite canisters from his vest and plunged it into his leg.
Hyper-rejuvenated, he sprinted toward the speed bike and slid for the last two meters.
Every object in his vision turned white at the edges; he felt as though he were moving twice as fast as usual.
Vince hoisted the Federation soldier in a fireman’s carry, then lifted the speed bike upright.
Its ion turbofan roared to life and the vehicle rose several centimeters off the ground in a sustained hover.
Had he still believed in God, he would have thanked Him.
He launched himself and the bike forward in one frictionless heave, just as Paladin beam fire began tracking him.
He circled behind the Federation wreck, leaving the wounded soldier close to his comrades.
Then he pushed the throttle as far as it would go, accelerating to two hundred kilometers per hour in less than a second, racing west toward Core Freedom.
33
THE BATTLE OF PIKE’S LANDING
Muryia Mordu was no stranger to killing.
During the span of his origins as a soldier to leading the most recognized mercenary corporation in New Eden, many souls had died at his hand.
Strangling, stabbing, shooting, smothering, detonating—whatever the method, they all elicited the same primal rush.
Nothing else came close to making him feel so alive as mortal combat.
He was not proud of this fact, even if he could admit that such brutal enthusiasm earned him a successful career.
His thirst for combat continued when he became a capsuleer.
Mordu, presently suspended in the viscous fluid of a starship pod, conceded that the immortality afforded by this arcane technology marginalized the “thrill of the kill”; after all, nothing could ever replace watching the life leave someone’s eyes.
But the thrill of the
verge
of combat—when one knew it was coming, as it was right now, remained exhilarating.
This was the moment that all fighters lived for, when everything hangs in the balance, and history is as yet unwritten.
In this fraction of a second, tunneling through the fabric of spacetime in the belly of a
Wyvern-class supercarrier
accompanied by an entire fleet of machines capable of untold destruction, Mordu was in his element.
The significance of what they were doing was immaterial; there was only the joy of charging into battle, of jumping into the unknown with a band of warrior brothers and an invincible heart.
And as always, he was unafraid to let his peculiar brand of humor show during the most perilous of times.
Pardon the intrusion, you Amarrian cunts!
he declared on the command broadcast.
This won’t hurt a bit.
Mordu’s pulse accelerated as the warp cone began to disappear, and Pike’s Landing grew until it occluded the Amamake sun completely—and then, instead of just the Core Freedom space elevator, as he had expected, something else sprung into view that shouldn’t have been there at all: an Avatar-class titan perched over a sea of gold-hulled warships.
His excitement quickly transformed into dread.
In naval combat doctrines, the Avatar was grossly understated as a “supercapital” vessel.
At fourteen kilometers long from bow to stern, the Avatar was built for the express purpose of swiftly decapitating opposing fleets with its colossal beam weapon, aptly called “Judgment.”
The ship was literally engineered and built around this technology: It could destroy a capital ship with a single blast.
Mordu and his fleet were about to emerge from warp directly in front of one; and to make matters worse, the Imperial fleet at Pike’s Landing was clearly much larger than their intelligence had shown.
But this observation was a mere footnote to the more pressing concern of maneuvering his own ship out of harm’s way.
By the time the sublight engines of the Wyvern finally engaged, the Avatar’s golden armor was less than a kilometer away.
Collision alarms screamed over the comm channels, as the shields of the two capital ships began to interact in a brilliant, pulsing coruscation; epic bursts of electrostatic arcs leaping from both vessels as they soared past each other.
The Wyvern was strong enough to withstand it.
He knew that a good portion of his fleet wouldn’t be so lucky.
Six Legion heavy assault cruisers slammed into the Avatar’s powerful shields, each vanishing in a fiery bubble of plasma.
The white-hot fragments that made it through impacted the goliath vessel’s armor and scattered away like so much junk.
This was not the first time he’d jumped into a tactically unfavorable situation.
But he never expected to see the warships of three different nations at once.
As beam fire erupted all around the Wyvern, Mordu took stock of Republic Fleet and Federation Navy ships all in the same battlefield—and as far as he could tell, all attacking the Imperial Navy.
The Legion had just jumped into the middle of a huge naval engagement whose political calculus he just couldn’t process.
Before he could determine if he was in any danger of being shot at, the Avatar’s Judgment beam lashed out and incinerated a Republic Fleet carrier.
The pack of Legion interceptors who happened to emerge from warp directly in front of the titan as it fired simply disappeared.
If not for the Federation Navy and Republic Fleet ships, he would have ordered a retreat immediately.
But despite the slow start, he still liked his odds.
“Hawkeye, you’re warping in hot,” he warned, as a pack of Amarrian fighters descended on the Wyvern.
“Korvin, I’m sorry, but there are Federation ships here.
We’re going ahead as planned.”
* * *
KORVIN LEARS WAS APPROACHING
Pike’s Landing from a different direction and briefly considered the possibility that the Federation was there for the same reason as Mordu’s Legion.
That was certainly easier to accept than the notion that they’d sent an entire task force just to collect the bounty on his head.
Either way, it didn’t change anything.
“Copy that, Mordu.
We’re a go,” he said, as Pike’s Landing rushed into view.
The Moros emerged from warp so low to the surface—just 145 kilometers up—that mountaintops and thick cloud formations would have dominated Korvin’s perspective of the planet if it weren’t night down below.
The occasional flash of lightning broke what was otherwise a vast, black surface framed by a backdrop of stars.
The
Morse,
five of the Longbow dropships, and its ring of destroyers emerged from warp behind him, perfectly arranged in formation.
The gigantic Avatar, portions of its length lit by intermittent flashes of space combat, was clearly visible a thousand kilometers overhead.
The Federation task force, with its flagship Nyx-class supercarrier, was just two hundred kilometers to his right.
Surface-missile radar bands swept over the ship.
It was time to focus.
“Radar track,” Miles warned.
“Stackfire launch!
Three vampires; intercept course; ETA four minutes.”
“Roger,” Korvin said.
For the time being, he was leaving his life in the hands of the
Morse
crew—which under different circumstances he might have considered insane.
He turned his attention to the planet’s surface, where the lights of Core Freedom were just breaking the horizon.
As braking systems slowed the dreadnought’s speed, high-resolution tracking cameras on board were already picking up surface targets in thermal imaging.
People—soldiers, Korvin assumed—could be seen clearly, even from this range.
The demons that had haunted him for so long returned, because he was about to murder by numbers once again.
“Stand by for surface bombardment,” he announced.
“Fire mission target designation one through four, proximity-fuse plasma charges.
Fire.”
The Moros shuddered as four magnetically accelerated slugs erupted from their siege cannons at nearly fifteen kilometers per second.
“Impact in ten seconds,” he said.
“Longbow, stand by.”
Korvin saw the dropship bay doors on the
Morse
slide open; then the battlecruiser rolled gently onto its side.
“Solid track on incoming vampires.
Guns guns guns!”
Miles shouted.
The Catalyst-class destroyers, with eight railgun turrets apiece, spat out a wall of lead charges.
Three silent bursts of light blossomed twenty kilometers in front of them.
“Targets neutralized,” Miles said.
Korvin smiled, tracking the progress of his own shells.
The colony’s Cloudburst antiair defenses couldn’t catch the rounds in time; their velocity was just too fast.
“Surface impact in three, two, one … mark.”
Several milliseconds before impact, the shells began their catastrophic conversion from solid-state to plasma.
The spherical antiair batteries surrounding Core Freedom—along with the soldiers seen patrolling outside of them—vanished in fireballs two hundred meters in diameter.
“I confirm four direct hits,” Korvin announced, scanning the damage wrought by the bombardment.
The crater at each impact site was more than ten meters deep; the Cloudburst battery destroyed in the mountainside started a massive avalanche.
The Core Freedom elevator platform was visible now; the Avatar was just above it, still surrounded by intermittent pulses of light.
A pack of Imperial fighters had broken away from the main fleet and was vectoring toward their position like a swarm of angry wasps.
“Longbow, you’re clear to start your descent,” Korvin said.
“Try to keep those elevator cables between you and the colony for as long as you can.
There are mobile AA sites tracking down there.”
The five gunships began pitching downward slightly as they aligned their approach.
“Roger that, Korvin.
Nice shooting,” Jonas said.
“We’re starting our run now.”
* * *
THE PANTHER-CLASS GUNSHIP
aboard the
Morse
was painted in the same blackish red hues as the surface of Pike’s Landing, with the seal of Mordu’s Legion prominently displayed on each of its three tail fins, though with its adaptive camouflage fuselage, it was doubtful that anyone on the ground would notice.
The craft was carrying enough solid-state fuel to power her twin Roden Shipyards “Vectorex” plasma engines for the trip to the surface, a trip back into orbit, and about twenty minutes of hard atmospheric maneuvering in between.
For an orbital gunship, the Panther was small—much more so than the other gunships of Longbow squadron, with a span of twenty meters.
A 30mm cannon mounted beneath the nose was the craft’s main armament; two 20mm turret cannons were mounted beneath each wing.
The current cargo configuration was for three passengers; the rest of the hold was occupied by a CRU and just about every conceivable piece of medical equipment Gable would need to keep Vince alive.
The overhead section of the cockpit canopy was a transparent polymer alloy so pilots could see what was above them when docking in hangar bays or maneuvering during combat.
Unfortunately, this feature had Gable on the brink of chunk-spewing nausea, since directly above her head were the dark cloud peaks of Pike’s Landing.
The
Morse
had flipped completely over to position the Panther for atmospheric entry, and Gable’s entire perception of up versus down was completely askew.
Gable’s first serious problem of the evening began as she felt herself “falling” upward.
“Blake, we’re clear,” Jonas radioed, as the Panther slipped out of the
Morse
’s hangar bay.
“Take care of her for me.”
“I’ll be fine, thanks for asking,” Miles interrupted.
“You guys just hurry up down there.”
“The
Morse
is in good hands,” Blake reaffirmed.
“Good luck, Captain.”
Gable shut her eyes, struggling to control the sensation of her stomach rising up to her throat.
“Rotating alignment for entry,” Jonas said, flipping the Panther over and orienting its belly with the wide horizon below.
The blackness of space was already turning deep blue; for all intents and purposes, they were now free-falling, and everything that wasn’t secured was starting to float.
When she reopened her eyes, Mack was staring at her with a childlike grin; two of his toy soldiers were drifting in front of him.
He gave one a gentle flick, sending it tumbling end over end through the cabin.
Gable’s hands barely covered her mouth in time, and the imperfect seal allowed streams of vomit to spew out from between her fingers.
Some of the projectiles collided with the somersaulting toy, making Mack break into a wheezing guffaw that, if one didn’t know about his disfigurement, could only seem a medical emergency.
“Oh, man, you didn’t take the pills I asked you to?”
Jonas grimaced, glancing over his shoulder to see if any of the gunk was on him.
“Where’d all that land, anyway?”
Gable was too miserable to answer.
The cockpit was bathed in a reddish white glow; they were now burning through the upper reaches of the atmosphere.
“You okay?”
Mack asked.
“I’m fine,” she muttered, fidgeting with her tactical vest.
The body armor didn’t fit properly and was extremely uncomfortable.
Pockets filled with equipment lined her belt, chest, and shoulders, and she had no idea what any of it was.