The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3) (23 page)

He died
with a single burst from Thorstein’s G-20.

The bay was
clear. Fenris turned to see Arnleif wave a two man team toward one of the
access doors. She turned to him and nodded. “Everyone’s here. We going straight
to engineering this time?”

Fenris
rolled his eyes. “What do
you
think? I don’t want to become known as the
ten-minute captain.” Engineering was the best place for a determined crew to
scuttle a ship and he didn’t want to suffer the same defeat twice running.

They turned
for the aft exit.

“Does that
mean you’re worried Captain Shelby might talk?” Arnleif inquired sweetly as
they jogged to join the warriors who were already lined up to pour through the
door.

Fenris
grinned good naturedly as his crew laughed. “I have a feeling I’m going to be
bound by that nickname for life,” he said with mock seriousness. “We’d better
seize this bucket in ten minutes so others will assume it’s the reason behind
the name.”

The door
slid open and Thorstein threw a shock grenade down the corridor. As the arcs of
electricity diminished, he led his team through the open door and down to the
first intersection. He fired one burst down the hall, shook his head and waved
the next team forward.

“Two of the
little delvers, but they scampered off,” he shrugged. “They don’t seem to have
any fight in them.”

The
delvers
,
Thorstein’s reference to the clever dwarvish miners of Midgaard legends, were
barely in evidence as they pushed toward the engineering section. They entered
the engineering section after a few brief encounters, never taking any fire.

Three enemy
in engineering yellow stood by the central control panels and they fell to a
hail of bullets. Fenris walked over to look down at the three corpses.
Where
is everybody?
he wondered. It felt as though the ship had little more than
an anchor watch aboard.
Are they that desperate for crew?

A voice
emanated from the panel in Dheema. “Confirm your orders, Commander.”

Fenris
looked at the panel. A self-destruct command was active and awaiting final
approval. The three engineers must have been on the verge of blowing the
engines or, at the very least, they were trying to work up the nerve. He
reached out and canceled the command procedure.

“The order
has been rescinded,” he replied in Dheema.

“Who is
this?”

“I am
Fenris, a leal warrior from the fief of Beringsburg.” He replied casually. “I’m
the new captain of this vessel. I would advise you to take your chances in an
escape pod. I’m in the habit of killing stowaways.”

There was
no response.

Fenris
looked to his crew, nodding at Thorstein. “Keep ten here to hold engineering.”
He looked to Arnleif. “I’m taking ten to seize the bridge. Take the rest and
clear the ship.”

H
arry almost lost his balance as the bridge shuddered again. The grav
plating glitched and his right foot suddenly came loose, only to fall back down
as the control systems corrected. A two-tone alarm blared throughout the room
and every helmet snapped closed in unison.

Harry
fought a growing sense of dread as the segments of his helmet snapped out of
their housings and locked together.

Humans, who
routinely evacuated the atmosphere of enemy ships during boarding operations,
always fought in full EVA suits. The life support sub-routines on all Human
vessels contained a command line that would activate every helmet within range
in the event of a hull breach.

“Damage
control?” Prouse roared, just seconds before Harry would have.

“Heavy
round made it through our shields, sir.” The young lieutenant was leaning over
a team of frenzied ratings who were working to sort the various automated
damage reports. “Straight through a hangar door on the bow, ventral port side,
and out the back end.” He looked to a monitor to his right. “Shrapnel has
caused some secondary damage…” One of his team was pointing at a section of his
monitor and the lieutenant nodded. “At least twenty-three dead on the hangar
deck and five Ospreys smashed, but we’re still fully operational.”

Because
there was such a huge empty space running through the center of Human carriers,
the
Salamis
had been spared the horrors of a heavy round tumbling
through the fabric of the ship, turning bulkheads into secondary projectiles.

Still, it
was damn lucky that the round had gone straight through. The
Riel
had
taken a deep hit from a smaller round and her engineers were desperately trying
to get her pitch drive back online. Failing that, she could still jump back to
Oaxes on her main drive. The
Revere
had taken a larger round and there
was very little left of what had been a frigate only moments before.

“It was a
main battery round from tango hotel-fife, sir,” tactical added.

“So we have
to write off that boarding crew,” Prouse rumbled. It was tango hotel-five that
had shot the nozzles off of a boarding sledge. “Give her a ten-bug spread.”

“Ten-bug
spread on tango hotel-fife, aye, sir.”

Ten more
streaks of exhaust marked the departure of the deadly weapons, just as a
brilliant flash appeared to starboard.

“That was
the
Roland.
” The tactical officer’s choice of tense was grimly
appropriate. The frigate was nothing more than a tumbling mass of parts.

“Two enemy
corvettes and one cruiser left,” Flemming mused as he examined the trace. He
suddenly tensed. “Good God!”

Harry
followed the British officer’s horrified gaze and took a deep involuntary
breath. “Belay that ten-bug shot!” he screamed, not caring that he was
bypassing the fleet captain. “That cruiser is ours now!”

“Issuing
the recall…”  a fire control rating yelled.

“Turn those
warheads on the last two corvettes,” Prouse ordered calmly, perhaps a gentle
rebuke to his screaming commodore, though he would doubtless be the first to
admit the situation had developed too quickly for the niceties of protocol.

The main
batteries of the
Nelson
hammered one of the corvettes, knocking her back
on her heels while the lighter rounds tore through the overloaded shields,
burrowing deep inside the lightly-constructed escort. A cloud of debris
streamed out the stern of the ship as the depleted uranium drove straight
through.

The Mosquito
warheads had been recalled and re-tasked, but two had reached the shields of
the captured cruiser and burrowed through. Fortunately, the shield hadn’t fully
closed behind them and they responded to command, turning inside the shields to
pass back out. They followed the rest of the swarm, but the hive mind of the
swarm assessed that the first three warheads penetrating the shields of the
final corvette would be more than enough for such a small vessel. The remainder
of the swarm turned and fled the pending blast.

The Dactari
shield closed behind the third warhead and one and a half megatons of force
flattened the flimsy ship against its own shields for the briefest of moments
before the shield generators were crushed. The blast was unleashed, reaching out
to consume four warheads at the back of the fleeing swarm. With their trigger
mechanisms vaporized, the fissile material refused to ignite, preserving the
remaining sub-munitions.

And the
battle was done.

Harry
realized he had been holding his breath. He began taking a series of quiet,
shallow breaths, hoping it would go unnoticed.

“Launch
shuttles to search for survivors,” Prouse ordered as he walked around the trace
table. “Fire control, redeploy the remaining warheads as a minefield. I want a
screen to cover anything that drops out near that singularity.” The only
vessels passing through this area were from the Republic, which automatically
made them the enemy.  

Prouse
extended a hand. “My congratulations, sir! It was a damn good plan!”

Harry took
the proffered hand. “The best plan is little more than a lame excuse unless you
have good people to pull it off. Your crews do you credit, Captain.”

Prouse
nodded. “I couldn’t ask for better.”

“What’s our
bill?” Harry asked, a little more brutally than he had intended.

“We’ve lost
the
Revere
and
the
Roland,”
Prouse sighed. “The
Riel
is on her way back to Oaxes. She might have her pitch drives operational by the
time she gets there.”

“And we
took four cruisers and six frigates from the enemy,” Harry added. “That leaves
us with almost fifty percent more ships than we left Oaxes with.”

“More than
a fifty percent increase in combat power,” Flemming put in, “when you look at
the high proportion of heavy cruisers captured.”

“They’re
hardly combat effective with only fifty men apiece,” Prouse corrected. “They’re
moving away from the singularity at full pitch and it’ll be a good seven
minutes before we get them out of here. Once we all get home, we can fill out
the crews and run some training scenarios.”

Harry had
no doubt that Prouse would hammer the new Marine crews until they could match
any ship in the Alliance fleet. He let his mind wander back to Oaxes. He had no
reason to believe that Haldita would be any less corrupt than the other fringe
satraps. It was a corruption so old, so entrenched over the centuries, that it
was looked upon as normal practice.

Haldita was
almost certainly skimming from the planetary revenue. He would have been
passing a major portion of that to the regional
ganzabar
,
a finance official who would oversee the revenues of up to ten satraps,
skimming some of the unofficial funds for himself before handing the rest over
to the consuls, who used their share to fund re-election.

Now that
the Republic’s
ganzabar
was out of the picture, he
wondered how much Haldita would try to skim. He was almost certain to make some
attempt to increase his personal wealth in the chaos of the coming months.
Whatever arrangement emerged from the shakeup, it was likely going to signal
the shape of things to come.

“Shuttles
coming back,” an operations officer reported. “Thirteen survivors from the two
ships. Only the ones who tumbled out of breached compartments survived.” The rest
had been thrown about inside the vessels as they came apart. Only a lucky few
had managed to find themselves in the midst of a parting seam, missed by jagged
shards of metal and carbon as their ship disappeared around them.

“Very
well,” Prouse replied. “We’ll leave the
Potomac
here as a picket and
fall back to…"

“Distortion
alert!” sensor called out. “Enemy ships. Arriving inside the mine field.”

Harry
turned to the trace. “More than forty ships,” he muttered.

“And look
at them,” Flemming added. “They’re instantly moving into formation – into an
all-around defense.”

“Like
watching a damned cat land on its feet,” Prouse said. “These boys know what
they’re doing, even after a surprise dropout.”

“How long
till our prizes can jump?” Harry asked.

Prouse chewed
on his lower lip. “Still three minutes, give or take, until they escape the
effects of the singularity.”

“And we’re
less than a half minute ahead of them,” Flemming warned. “Assuming we’re going
to have the good sense to run for it.”

Harry
caught Prouse’s eye and saw agreement there. “Yes, Commander, we are going to
take our winnings and go home.” He grinned suddenly. “Gentlemen, it might be
worth mentioning that we are currently being pursued by a force of ten
Republic-built warships.”

Prouse
looked at him for a heartbeat and then nodded his approval with a chuckle.
“Signal the fleet, including the prizes,” he ordered. “We’ll be firing at the
prizes, but nothing bigger than the Vulcans are to make contact with their
shields. Try to miss as much as possible.” He was about to change the scale of
the upper trace but stopped and turned to the communications officer. “Make
sure the prizes don’t reply to that signal. Use best encryption, and tell the
prizes to wait until jumping before they disable the logistics transmitters.”

“We’re
about to take some fire from one of our captured cruisers,” tactical advised.
“It’s coming from their forward point defenses.” The point defense system
employed rapid-fire rail guns of a small caliber. It was doubtful they would ever
penetrate combat shielding.

“Make a
note of which captain that is.” Prouse turned back to Harry. “Shows a fair bit
of initiative, that one. He’s helping to create the effect we’re going for
here. I’m of a mind to help that along.” He turned back to his bridge staff.
“Evacuate all compartments aft of alpha sixty five,”

Harry
raised an eyebrow as his fleet captain turned back with a grin.

“I’ll
simulate a shield glitch and let a few rounds in. If our new arrivals are as
proficient as we think, they’ll expect us to be taking some damage.”

R
eis mastered his anger and assessed the situation. They had been forced
to flee from Tauhento only to tumble out of distortion halfway to Gaemhaeg. The
cause was obvious enough. The enemy had created an artificial singularity to
trap a Republic force. Even though they were outnumbered, the
Rebublic
ships seemed to have gotten the better of the
engagement and they were chasing the Humans off.