Dark Space: Avilon (37 page)

Chapter 29

H
igh Lord Kaon stared open-mouthed at the bird’s eye view of the battle on his star map.

“They still fire on usss!” Lady Kala hissed. “We must flee!”

“Flee?” Kaon was incredulous. “Their fleet is disabled in our midsts! They have but one warship left, and you wish to run away, as if they defeat
us?
”

“We have lost two command ships, and they are killing a third!” Lady Kala shrieked.

Before they could argue any further, Queen Tavia’s visage appeared, hovering in the air in front of them. Her red eyes gleamed, and her black skin wrinkled. “My Queen,” Kala said, bowing her head.

“Kala, have your clusters jump into the nebula and follow them in.”

“The nebula?”

“It is where the enemy hides.”

“We shall lose contact with each other if we follow them.”

“Yess,” Queen Tavia hissed. “But with more of us looking, it will be harder for them to hide, and we need only stumble upon them with one command ship to deal with them effectively. They shall not remain hidden for long.”

“For glory, My Queen.”

“For Shallah,” the queen replied.

* * *

Atton’s threat detection system screamed a warning, and he threw his fighter into an immediate spiral to dodge incoming fire. Bright purple streaks of Sythian lasers and missiles went racing by on all sides, creating a tunnel of flashing lights.

Speakers crackled to life beside his ears. “Gold Squadron, take evasive action!”

Atton glanced at the star map and grimaced. The nebula was a mess of streaking missiles and swarming enemies. Three squadrons of Shell Fighters buzzed around them like flies. As he watched, another squadron came swirling out of the nebula to join them.

“How are they finding us?”
He knew there were a lot of enemy fighters out there, but this was ridiculous. Space was
vast
.

A warning siren sounded close beside Atton’s ears, and he realized the enemy was targeting him. He dropped a cloaking mine and went evasive. Seconds later the inside of his cockpit flashed with the bright orange light of the mine exploding in his wake. The simulated roar of the explosion reached his ears, and two shell fighters winked off the map.

Mentally targeting the next nearest enemy, Atton pulled up hard and toggled his lasers for an automatic firing solution. Both lasers fired up at a 60-degree angle, shooting at his target before it even came into view. By the time he saw his target, its shields were sparking and failing, its thrusters peeling open like mechanical flowers.

Then the Shell’s reactor went critical. A blinding flash of light lit up the inside of Atton’s cockpit with a deafening
boom
. A speeding wave of shrapnel hissed off his shields, and then he was through the expanding cloud of debris and cruising toward a group of over a dozen Shells, all of them facing him and firing a steady, sparkling stream of Pirakla missiles. Before Atton could so much as twitch, those missiles went streaking by him and slammed into the
Dauntless.
The simulated
booms
of explosions rumbled distantly through his cockpit speakers.

“Let’s see if we can make them blink, Iceman!” Caldin called out. Then came a
roar
and a bright golden glow of thruster emissions as her fighter went racing past his, looping and spiraling rather than heading directly toward the enemy.

A split second later, bright explosions blossomed in the distance, and six of the approaching Shells vanished in consecutive fireballs.

Finding another group of enemies on the grid, Atton followed Caldin’s lead and tagged them with his own compliment of Thunderbolt
missiles. He launched four in quick succession and five more Shells winked off the grid.

Atton was tempted to gloat, but with hundreds of thousands of enemy fighters still out there, it didn’t seem to matter how many they killed—

It would never be enough.

* * *

The deck shuddered and shook with a simulated roar of Pirakla missiles exploding against the
Dauntless’s
hull. Return fire rumbled, the battleships’s laser batteries flashing out in raging torrents and slicing enemy fighters in half. For every squadron of Shells that they killed, another one came racing in to take its place.

Hoff grimaced. It wasn’t what he’d hoped for, but so far the nebula was doing its job. The Sythians had yet to amass a deadly force against them.

“Sir! The Sythian fleet just jumped away,” the sensor operator reported.

Hoff blinked. “They ran?”

“I’m not surprised,” Tactician Okara said.

Hoff glared at her. She may as well have said
I told you so.

Then, moments later, the sensor operator exclaimed. “Contact! Dead ahead! Five Sythian cruisers.”

“Range?”

“Twenty-two klicks, sir.”

“Get me a visual!” Hoff bellowed. The main forward viewport shimmered, and a group of five Sythian cruisers appeared, dark shadows lurking within the flashing gray clouds of the nebula.

“Gunnery! Open fire!”

“Yes, sir!”

Bright orange fireballs lit those shadows on fire as quantum-launched ordinance wreathed their hulls in fire. Fat white beams of light lanced out from the
Dauntless,
filling the air with a resonant
hum.
One of the Sythian warships exploded, followed by another, and then two more. The last one died with a titanic
boom
that rattled through the bridge speakers. Moments later, a wave of debris
hissed
against their shields.

Then the deck shuddered violently.

“What was that?” Hoff asked.

“Nebular ice, sir!” the sensor operator replied. “With everything going on our gunners must have missed intercepting it.”

“Damage report!”

“Breach on deck six,” engineering replied.

“Seal it up. Gunnery! Tell your crews to wake up!”

“Yes, sir!”

Hoff sighed, watching as the remaining enemy contacts on the grid—all of them Shell fighters—were torn apart by the
Dauntless’s
fighter screen.

“That was close, sir,” Okara said.

“Let’s hope no one saw those cruisers exploding.”

The nebula grew calm. X-1 Interceptors flew back to point and flank positions.

Minutes passed.

The nebula impaired their sensors enough to hide all but the largest of the enemies ships—their thirty-kilometer-long behemoth-class command ships. Hoff was about to order his gunners to open fire on the next nearest one, when something happened.

One of those behemoths jumped in right on top of them. It opened fire, and a dazzling wall of pirakla missiles came spinning toward them.

“Helm! Evasive action! Gunnery—give that ship everything you’ve got!”

White-hot beams lanced out,
humming
through space, and drawing fiery lines across the enemy cruiser’s bow. Explosions peppered its hull as quantum-launched torpedoes reached their mark.

“Enemy shields at 82%!”

The enemy missiles drew near, and it became hard to see past all of the bright purple halos they cast in the nebular clouds.

“Brace for impact!” the sensor operator yelled.

Dozens of impacts roared against their hull, some of the noise simulated, some of it real. Bright purple lights strobed through the bridge as missile after missile impacted on the bow of their ship. Fire sprang up in a dozen places. Damage alarms wailed. The deck shuddered and shook.

“Forward shields at 25%! We have hull breaches on several decks!”

“Equalize shields!” Hoff roared. “Helm! Roll over and show them our keel.”

“Yes, sir!”

Hoff watched the enemy cruiser on a display that was part real visual, part rendered. The command ship’s hull gushed debris from ragged, molten craters all along its length. Those craters flashed brightly from within as the
Dauntless
launched more ordinance, straight past their shields and
into
their exposed decks. The port side of the command ship buckled and appeared to liquify as a raging ball of fire tore it apart from within.

Then, suddenly, the entire ship
bulged
, as if trying to contain a mighty flood. A second later it flew apart with a deafening
boom.
Hoff was blinded by the explosion. The deck rocked under their feet as the shockwave hit. The debris were too dispersed to do much damage.

Hoff sat in his command chair, blinking and slowly shaking his head. “We didn’t kill them,” he said.

“No, sir! They appear to have self-destructed.”

Hoff grimaced. “They sacrificed themselves to call for reinforcements.”

Okara turned to him. “We need to get out of here.”

“Helm! Calculate a jump back to Avilon.”

“Too late,” Okara whispered.

The grid came alive with enemy contacts jumping in on all sides.

* * *

Atton saw the Sythian command ship detonate, spewing white hot flecks of molten alloy in all directions. Then the shockwave hit, and his shields hissed loudly with the assault.

“What was that?” Gold Two asked.

“They just did our work for us,” Atton replied. “They blew their reactor.”

“Why would they do that?” Gina asked.

“It’s a beacon,” Gold One said. “We’re going to have company again real soon.”

The Chevalier was right. Hundreds of fighters came swarming out of the Nebula from all sides, followed by dozens of Sythian cruisers and battleships jumping in.

“Here they come!” Gold Five said.

Two squadrons of Shells angled toward them.

“Tag your targets! We fire on my mark,” Gold One said.

Atton tagged a pair of enemy fighters. His threat detection system screamed a warning and half a dozen Pirakla missiles spun out toward him.

“Mark!” Gold one said.

Atton pulled the trigger. Something
clunked
as his missiles shot away.

Explosions blossomed against the nebula, and a whole squadron of enemy fighters vanished.

“
Ruh-kah!
” Gina cheered, uttering the old Imperial battle cry.