Black Legion: 05 - Sea of Fire (31 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Light Cruiser ‘Drakonis’, Sea of Fire

The auletes shouted for the third time, desperately trying to be heard over the din of battle. Shot after shot exploded around the cruiser, but it was the screen of mines that caused the biggest problem. Three had detonated around a Hayastani cruiser, and the blast had triggered two more just a short distance away.

“Kentarchos, there’s an urgent message coming in via light signal from Antaeus. It’s Xenophon.”

Kentarchos Ezekiel Manus shook his head in frustration.

“We’re kind of busy.”

He looked away and then realized that the message would only have been sent if it had been deemed critical by Xenophon. He’d met the man plenty of times but was glad to have senior officers off his ship. There was nothing worse than being micromanaged in the heat of battle. A commander needed a flagship, not a cruiser.

“What does he want?”

Auletes Pradonis looked almost relieved.

“Sir, he has started the countdown to the final jump.”

He looked around for his second-in-command, Kybernetes Maxentius.

“You have the coordinates?”

Maxentius shook his head quickly.

“In the computer and ready for the sequence. One short hop to the edge of the border, and the second we will receive when we get there.”

The Kentarchos didn’t seem to like that last part. With communications out, there was no way to get detailed information sent and received between the ships. Light communication was slow and error-prone at the best of times. He looked ahead, but the myriad of targets made it almost impossible to determine whom exactly he was facing.

“Bring us around, and match course and heading with Xenophon. Keep monitoring his hull and look for the final signal. I don’t want to get left behind.”

Kybernetes Maxentius began to answer, but he interrupted to add just one final order.

“...Put down fire on those ships before they ram us! We won’t be jumping out of here with half the goddamn ship missing!”

* * *

Terran Titan ‘Valediction’, Sea of Fire

The mercenaries were brave to the last. Even as they were shot or cut down with blades, they still refused to back down. Their crashed boarding craft made it impossible to do so, but even as the Laconians tore them apart, they continued to fight, never looking for quarter. It was just as well, though, because Chirisophus was in no mood for offering it.

Block, twist, stab!

He chanted the words silently, acting out the movements as they had been drilled into him since he was just seven years old. He might have been a senior commander, the equivalent of the great nobility in the past, but he was still a soldier through and through. It was instinct and muscle memory, a way of fighting that he could have done half asleep or barely conscious from lack of food. Like all of his Laconian kin, he had been bested both mentally and physically all of his life. A lowly spatharios up through to a Dukas would be expected to stand in the phalanx and to fight. There was no distinction or honor in personal skill or glory. It was the collective, and that is why he took it as his personal duty to clear the command deck with his entourage right beside him.

Block.

A bayoneted rifle slipped past him and brushed his chest. The weapon slid along the layered plating, and he beat it aside with his left arm. The shield crackled and flashed as it pushed away the weapon and created an opening for him to attack. Unlike the light shields used by the other Terrans, the Laconian shielding was sufficiently powerful that it could even be used in hand-to-hand combat. He then pointed his right hand at the warrior’s face. A single burst from the carbine element turned the mercenary’s face to a red mist, and then there were just two left.

Attack!

Chirisophus leapt up into the air and brought his shielded arm down onto the head of the two remaining mercenaries. The impact was like a thunderclap, and both were thrown back against their boarding vessel. The shield vanished for a moment, as the surge had been so great that the capacitor would need to refill. It didn’t matter, though. The mercenaries were stunned, and Chirisophus was like a rampaging lion. As they struggled to defend themselves, he stabbed at them. One stab, then another until he was hitting like a hydraulic punch. They struggled to parry or to avoid the attack, but they came in so fast there was nothing they could do. He tore them apart until both slumped lifelessly to the ground.

“Get off my ship!” he growled.

Silence filled the command deck until the dull thud of gun impacts brought him back to the battle. Chirisophus looked around and was dismayed to see half of his comrades had fallen in the fight. Over twenty mercenaries lay bloodied and broken, but only one moved. One of the surviving Epilektoi walked to the fallen warrior. His armor was cut and dented, and blood ran down from a pair of holes in the man’s shoulder plating. He bent down and then stabbed the mercenary through the throat. Blood gurgled and bubbled from the wound as the last few seconds of life faded from his eyes.

Good, that is a valuable lesson for them. I hope for their sake they learn it well.

Chirisophus looked over to the senior officers further back that were still busily managing the battle. With so many ships in their vicinity, it was a fight that was almost too much to manage. Not for his crew, though. The Valediction was a ship that reflected the spirit of Laconia in every way. Tough and bristling with weapons, it made up for what it lacked in new technology with excessive firepower and double the armor that a Titan required.

“What of the enemy troops on the dorsal escape deck?” he called out.

Kentarchos Monsimm pointed above his head.

“The nearest spatharii are dealing with breaches on the upper decks. I have dispatched two squads to the dromon service area. They assure me the ship will be clear in the next minute. The ship is safe, for now.”

Chirisophus walked back slowly, carefully avoiding the pools of blood forming around those killed in the fight. The VOB system continued to show the bloody battle for the Sea of Fire. His armor flashed as explosions rippled in all directions, with friend and foe alike suffering in the carnage. Kentarchos Monsimm simply turned back to continue issuing orders to his hundreds of crew. The ship was under a constant barrage now, and many enemy vessels were moving in with a desperate rush to try and seize them as prizes, just as the mercenaries had attempted. Several squadrons of ships were still circling the Titan, and one group in particular had just changed to face them.

“My Lord, the Boubak is on an intercept vector,” said Jeane Coxand the senior tactical officer.

“Good. It’s time they were involved in the fight. Bring us back between the fleet and the next layer of mines.”

He looked away and then back, as though something new had just occurred to him.

“And match their encoding.”

It didn’t take long for them to change their position, and as the lancing strikes from Boubak struck, the Titan did something none of the enemy ships had been expecting. Rather than firing at the Boubak, the ship fired its own heavy cutters at the newly arrived Hayastani ships coming from the other direction. Each shot was carefully calibrated to the exact wavelength, diameter, and duration of the Boubak. The first shots struck a heavy cruiser and flickered as they ran down its hull. Jeane Coxand held her breath as she waited, and then came the response. It wasn’t much. Just three blasts back at the Boubak.

“Come on, do it!”

Seven Carduchian heavy fighters moved on through the fleet, and the first two were knocked out by concentrated fire from a group of Median capital ships. Each of them was flagged differently, but all were clearly of Medes design. One by one, the heavy fighters performed lateral spins and opened fire on each of them, completely unaware that the Black Legion controlled only one. All of them returned fire, and two even put a burst into the flank of the passing Boubak. The Median battleship shrugged off the ill-considered attack and instead fired at the Titan. A dozen lancing strikes from its heavy cutters struck Valediction’s bow and penetrated through the plating.

“Breaches!” yelled one of the junior tactical officers.

That was the point when the Bactrian ships slipped through the second layer of mines. Four vanished in a series of flashes, and the Grand Battleship was engulfed in energy from a direct impact. Even the Boubak was temporarily affected, and her guns stopped their precision attack, just for a moment. When the flashes cleared, a large portion of Hayastani ships were mixed in with the Carduchian heavy fighters. Both sides blasted away at each other with no consideration for tactics or position in the battle. Now Carduchian fought Hayastani, and both fired upon any other ship not bearing their colors.

“Incredible,” said the Kentarchos.

Strategos Chirisophus moved alongside his commander and watched the ships from both Satrapies turn on each other. Some of the mercenary ships joined in; the rest withdrew to a single group of warships around the shape of the battleship Mithra.

“What?” he asked.

“Xenophon was right after all. His plan was deceptively simple. All we needed to do was get both forces into the Sea of Fire. Their mutual hatred far surpasses anything they feel toward us.”

He looked to his commander.

“We do not need to win this battle, just to survive it long enough to let them do the work for us.”

Chirisophus sneered at the mention of Xenophon, but uncharacteristically kept his mouth shut. Instead, he watched with amusement as the cruisers, frigates, fighters, and battleships of the Hayastani scattered at the suicidal assault of the Carduchians. As each minute went by, more of the small, but powerful craft arrived. He even spotted three of them ram one of the Hayastani cruisers in an attack that destroyed both the cruiser and the three smaller ships. The auletes contacted them both at the same time.

“Signal from the Antaeus.”

Chirisophus rubbed his chin.

“It says?”

“Jump,” answered the auletes.

Kentarchos Monsimm looked to his supreme commander with a hopeful expression and waited for his orders. It seemed an age before Chirisophus finally relented.

“Very well. Jump.”

That was all it took for the order to be sent to throughout the ship. Even as Valediction began to turn about, it was possible to see the flashes as each of the Terran ships left the carnage. Half had gone by the time they were aligned, and still the bloody border fight continued.

“Do it,” he said calmly.

With a gentle moan the massive Titan accelerated away, leaving nothing but the wreckage and ruin of the hour-long battle and hundreds of corpses. As they continued on through space, Chirisophus pondered what would be coming next. He knew there would be plenty of fighting left, but he also knew he would have to deal with both Dukas Xenias and Xenophon, a fight he didn’t particularly relish. He looked to Kentarchos Monsimm.

“Make sure the shields are ready. We will be needing them when we reach our destination.”

* * *

Light Cruiser ‘Antaeus’, Hayastani Border

The arrival at the border was perhaps the most harrowing journey Xenophon had ever taken. The course was complex, with a secondary waypoint halfway through to throw off pursuers. Now they were hurtling toward the point previously visited, the one place Xenophon knew for sure was safely outside the Sea of Fire. The first waypoint had been exactly where the prisoners had said, and for that Xenophon was eternally grateful to the Scythian. One wrong turn and they would have accelerated into one of the constantly moving arms of energy. He’d left Golnaz, the Carduchian squadron commander with the Kentarchos, just in case they needed any more information. Xenophon had also ensured that the Scythian was present, as a suitable incentive to provide quality information.

The ship had shuddered so much that he thought they might be destroyed on the journey, and on more than one occasion a number of the crew had been quite vocal on obtaining more information from the prisoner. The good news for Xenophon was that this last part of the journey gave him a short period of time to head to the medical bay. Their route was showing signs of the Sea beginning to thin, and the shaking had already stopped. He’d left Roxana and Glaucon to assist on the command deck and rushed down to see Artemas, with Tamara hot on his heels. It didn’t take long to make their way down the dorsal corridor to the medical bay and right to Lady Artemas’ bed.

Xenophon moved close to her side while Tamara caught the attention of the medical orderly.

“How is she?”

The two of them were waiting at the side of the bed, one of many inside the cramped medical bay. The room was circular in shape, and the beds faced out from the walls and toward the center where a small group of medics could tend to their injuries. The constant fighting in the Sea of Fire had taken its toll, and there were another seven crew being treated for gashes, concussion, and flash burns. Lady Artemas lay slightly upright with a variety of tubes connected to her arms. At the other side of the bed was the medical orderly, an older looking Terran, with a baldhead and standard military issue scrubs.