The Last Charge (The Nameless War Trilogy Book 3) (47 page)

“Auto pilot offline!” Crowe heard the Navigator scream as he savagely brushed blood off his visor.

On what remained of the holo display, a green line showed their intended course and a yellow line the course they were actually on, and the two lines were diverging. As she powered past the shattered remains of
San Demetrio
,
Mississippi
was already drifting off course. They were about to miss!

Slapping the release on his harness Crowe forced himself up and out of his seat. On full burn it was hard to pull forward toward helm. A sensor operator got there first and snatched at the helm’s manual control. Crowe grabbed the man by the shoulder and pushed him gently to one side.

“I have this,” he said and caught a brief look of gratitude from the other man as he elbowed what was left of the helmsman out of the seat.

“Damage Control,” Crowe called as he got them back onto course, “report.”

“Navigation sub-system has lost power and the Lazarus systems are looking for another link. Just give it a minute!” Craven shouted back.

Minute? Might as well ask for an hour, Crowe thought as he directed the ship back on course. On the helm display, the green and yellow lines converged and merged, then jolted apart as another impact shook the ship.

“Bridge, Damage Control. We’ve lost Engine Four!”

San Demetrio
,
Nolan
and all but two of the gunboats were now gone, leaving
Mississippi
and her last two escorts to charge into the maelstrom of fire. Crowe could hear the cruiser’s own flak packs starting to crack off in desperate defence. The tactical display showed the gate station was attempting to break out of the Lagrange point, but the thrusters along its flank were struggling to overcome the inertia of the station’s mass.

I’m going to die
. The thought went through his mind as clear as a bell. Without navigation, with the engine damage they’d sustained, there was no way
Mississippi
would fly straight. She could no longer hold a steady course. Not without navigation. Or hand at the controls.

The
Nolan
had gutted those Nameless fighters coming from astern but now those that had taken the long route were reaching
Mississippi
. The last two gunboats were picked off as the Nameless fighters swarmed in, through the fire of the gate station’s defences. But they weren’t the only fighters closing in.

Hoped for but not expected came human Raven fighters, arriving fast. As survivors of the lunar assault, there were no complete squadrons, just flights and remnants of flights. They launched themselves in, ripping at the Nameless. The alien formation fragmented as individual fighters tried to force their way through. Their guns and missiles stabbed out, gouging out fragments of armour and hull.

“We’re crossing the bail out point!”

“Navigation?” Crowe rasped.

“It’s not getting a feed from radar! We can’t get a lock!”

He glanced back at the bloodstained men and women of his crew. He couldn’t make out many faces. They weren’t looking at him or back towards the escape tubes. Every single one of them was bent over their stations. Only the dead had abandoned their posts. God, what a crew! Crowe opened his mouth to speak, to issue the order to abandon ship, knowing he wouldn’t be going with them.

“Coms, Bridge! Enemy beacon is still transmitting! We have a lock on!”

It took Crowe a moment to understand what that meant. They’d timed the assault to fall into the beacon’s active period but everyone always assumed the
Worms would shut down the moment the assault began. How could a race that so willingly wrote off lives and material be expected to do otherwise? But no, the beacon was still there, guiding in all that could hear it.

“Tie into helm control!” he roared.

A moment later he felt the control yoke shift under his hand as the autopilot took over.

“Ninety seconds to impact!” the navigator screamed.

“Guns to auto, everybody out!” Crowe shouted as he kicked out and away from the helm. “All hands abandon ship! All hands abandon ship!”

In an explosion of movement everyone was out of their seat and scrambling for the exit. As he reached the escape tube, before swinging himself down to the escape shuttles, Crowe glanced back at the scarred bridge of the
Mississippi
for the very last time. He saw the displays flicker as they updated readouts that no one remained to study. On the holo, the blip for
Mississippi
continued down the green line toward her destiny.

Goodbye Girl.

The hatches for the shuttle bays flew away as controlled explosions blew them off at the hinges. The shuttles blasted clear, accelerating down and away, their engines going full burn as the weapons computer opened clear channels in the defensive barrage. The Nameless ignored the fleeing craft, understanding that the crew of
Mississippi
had become irrelevant now. 

Alone and deserted, the cruiser continued to accelerate well beyond any velocity ever attained during her long life. The Nameless missiles now struggled to track the projectile hurtling toward them with the result that one after the other overshot, not turning in time to impact. Within her hull,
Mississippi
’s nuclear cargo awaited its moment.

Most of the Nameless missile platforms with a clear line of fire had exhausted their ammunition. For those that remained,
Mississippi
was now too close and too fast for them to track. Other missiles launched from Nameless warships far astern would not reach her in time. Instead it fell to the last few Nameless fighters to stop her.

They threw themselves forwards. In response,
Mississippi
fired the last of her flak packs and those of her guns that remained, blazing away. Her bows were ripped open as a fighter, itself riddle by gunfire, swerved in and smashed the bomb they’d named Faith, pitching its broken remains out into space. A missile slammed in amidships, through a weakened armour plate, speared in deep and killed the one called Hope. The last Nameless fighter impacted astern, all but tearing Engine Number One from its mounting.

___________________________

D for Dubious
lay broken at the end of the short furrow she’d dug in the lunar surface with her belly-landing. As she bounced awkwardly towards the rescue ship, Alanna looked back at her fallen mount and caught sight of a line of fire cutting across the sky beyond.

“Look!” she called out, prompting Schurenhofer to turn and see.

“It’s the
Mississippi
!” she breathed.

“Go on! Go on you beauty!” Schurenhofer shouted as she bounced up and down.

___________________________

On the bridge of
Mississippi
, where only the dead remained, the computer fought to control a ship on which shattered systems now outnumbered the functioning. With one engine gone and two more stuttering through their death throes,
Mississippi
’s stern began to fishtail. All down the flanks, her remaining thrusters fought to keep her on course.

They failed.

Mississippi
swung broadside onto her direction of travel. In another split second and her own engines would have pushed her off course, wasting her sacrifice but it had been enough. Side on, breaking up at she went,
Mississippi
, the ship that first encountered the Nameless, impacted the gate station.

And deep within her hull, nestled between the two fusion reactors, the last thermonuclear weapon, the one named Charity, detonated.

For the briefest moment, her hull bulged outward as the structure resisted the monumental pressures within. Then the cruiser’s reactors breached and in a flash
Mississippi
transformed into a vast white sphere of expanding plasma, obliterating the gate station, which added to the fireball as its reactors ruptured. Following the course of the dead cruiser, the expanding and deforming sphere consumed everything that got in its way until finally, its force spent, it dissipated. In its wake, it left nothing more than vaporised metal. 

___________________________

On
Warspite
’s bridge holo, two blips merged and disappeared.

“Sensors confirms, the gate station is destroyed, sir,” Sheehan said after a moment. “We got it sir, we got it!”

Lewis nodded slowly.

“That was the easy bit, Captain,” he said quietly. “Now the real work begins.”

Chapter Nineteen

Taken at a Run

22nd April 2069 

In the engine room of
Black Prince
, Guinness braced himself as the ship lurched violently back into real space. Even as they exited the jump portal, the cruiser was making a hard turn to avoid any missiles that might already be inbound. On the bridge, the Skipper would be calling for a full sweep. If the order came through for a crash spin up of the jump drive, then he’d know they’d found something or something had found them.

The austerities really weren’t suitable for this kind of sneak and peek work, but most of the fleet’s dedicated scout cruisers had gone with the Home Fleet. The little cruiser had one virtue for this sort of thing – expendability, although it was hard for Guinness to regard that line of reasoning with any kind of enthusiasm. Seconds ticked by but the main alarm failed to sound. After a minute the tone of the engines dropped as they throttled back and the atmosphere in the engine room lightened.

“All quiet on the Western Front,” remarked one of the petty officers.

___________________________

On the bridge, Berg frowned as the first sensor returns came in, revealing – well, bugger all really. Consisting of an elderly star and three profoundly uninteresting planets, the system had never warranted a name. In short, it was normally only worth going through to get somewhere more useful. Eight months previously, a deep space reconnaissance ship had spotted a Nameless space gate there. It could have been destroyed then, but the Nameless would simply have rebuilt it in a different location. Instead, along with the rest of the Nameless gate system, the gas giants they used for fuel and their forward supply bases, its location had been charted.

When the Second Fleet opened its grand offensive, they knew exactly where to strike. The supply bases were destroyed within forty-eight hours of the Second Fleet crossing the Junction Line, while the upper orbits of those gas giants usable for fuel were seeded with mines and torpedoes. Further up the space gate line, strike boats tore out entire stretches of the network, isolating chunks of the front line.

The fighting in that first seventy-two hours had been savage. As a result, fully a quarter of the Second Fleet’s combat strength was either lost or limping back to Earth, their war over. But if it had been bad for Battle Fleet, it had been worse for the Nameless. With their forward positions cut off and overwhelmed, they began to fall back.

Eight months ago the gate had been orbiting the second planet of the system, right on the Blue Line. Now there was a noticeable lack of anything resembling a gate. The Nameless could and did move gates within a system, so it might now be somewhere in the outer reaches.

“Engines to standby,” Berg said, “let’s give the passives the best chance of spotting something. Navigator, give me a location in system that will cover our current blind spots.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Berg waited patiently as the sensor operators sorted through the readings from the passives. It was uncomfortable sitting out here alone, to be confronted by nothing. It really was the worst of both worlds. If they’d met too much opposition defending the gate, then she could have ordered an immediate retreat. If their enemy had been in
Black Prince
’s weight class, then they would have piled forward to take out the gate before jumping away. Instead they had to stooge around, painfully aware that if there were Nameless ships somewhere in the system, they were being given ample time to detect and attack them. But if they were attacked – well, then they’d be doing their job.

There was no way to know how the Home Fleet’s attack on the Spur had gone – too much distance and not enough time. But assuming it had been successful, the Nameless would now be cut off from their home bases expending munitions they couldn’t replace. What would the effects be? Well, that was anyone’s guess.

“Contacts! Contacts bearing three, four, three dash zero, two, two, range, seven light minutes. Contacts appear to be one vessel and a space gate. It’s inside the mass shadow of the innermost planet.”

“Well done,” Berg said.

At such range the contact was faint and indistinct. The sensor operator had done well to tease as much out of his equipment.

“Navigator, make calculations for immediate jump, go to combat alert,” she continued as she buckled herself back into her command chair.

Black Prince
came out shooting as she dropped back into real space but met nothing coming the other way. Berg waited eagerly for the first radar returns. The planet was small, roughly half way between the size of Mars and Earth’s moon. The distance between the planet’s Red and Blue Lines was only marginally wider than plasma cannon range. Which made it a vulnerable position for the fragile Nameless ships.

“It’s a scout, ma’am,” Sensors reported as the blips appeared on the main holo, “and a space gate.”

The scout was at rest close to the gate, clearly there to provide protection.

“Something bigger would be nice,” she said “but beggars can’t be choosers. Point Defence, batteries to standby. Fire control, prepare to receive fire.”

As
Black Prince
moved in, Berg studied the holo intently. Any moment now, she thought to herself. Tactical I.D’d the scout as one of the newer versions that had sacrificed two of its general-purpose launchers for a second cap ship missile launcher. But they still didn’t carry many of the large ship killers. Its best chance of getting one past
Black Prince
’s flak guns would be to put out those it had, as fast as possible. With such a shallow mass shadow,
Black Prince
would need only seven minutes to reach maximum plasma cannon range.

The scout’s engines came online – that was a fast reaction – and immediately it began to perform unexpectedly. Rather than stand fast directly in their path, Berg expected it to begin to angle out and away from the gate, trying to build up velocity to run for it and also pull them away from the objective. Instead it turned sharply and headed directly for the gate, which turned to face the oncoming ship and came online. Stranger still, the scout’s missile ports, which had opened as soon as
Black Prince
arrived, now closed again.

“Bridge, Coms. Enemy ship is transmitting on an FTL frequency. Transmission has ceased.”

“
Scheiße
!” Berg swore, “It’s an ambush! Helm, come to starboard, forty degrees. Navigator, give me jump out calculations!”

The momentum they’d already built up continued to propel them towards the planet. Even with their engines at full power, they’d need another twelve minutes to get out of the mass shadow. Any second now, Nameless ships could start dropping in around them.

“Communications, prepare to launch message drone!” Berg ordered.

That was all she could do until she knew where the Nameless were coming from. The scout was still moving towards the gate, around which a blue vortex had completely formed. Without hesitation, the scout passed through and disappeared. Then abruptly the gate exploded.

“What the...?” Berg exclaimed. “Sensors, was that deliberate?”

That was probably the wrong question to ask. The sensor operators should have been searching for signs of Nameless jump ins, but an answer came immediately.

“Captain, detonation was consistent with a deliberate fusion reactor self-destruct.”

Berg remained on the edge of her seat as she waited for the ambush that her instinct insisted would come, but as the ship neared and passed the Red Line, nothing happened. Why the hell destroy their own gate without making any attempt to defend it? Against her instinct Berg delayed jumping out. For an hour
Black Prince
accelerated away from the planet in real space, waiting for any other sign of the Worms. But there was nothing. With the gate gone their mission was complete, but in a deeply unsatisfying way. As they spun up for their jump out, the navigator turned to her.

“Do we count this one as a win, Skipper?”

___________________________

For the ships that had been dispatched on independent missions, the rendezvous point was beyond the heliopause of a system seventy light years from the Junction Line. Most of the Second Fleet was already there when
Black Prince
jumped in. Berg was surprised to be summoned to the drop carrier
Overlord
. They were safe here in interstellar space, where the Nameless couldn’t reach them. Nonetheless, it was unusual for the Admiral to order a gathering for a face-to-face meeting or briefing.

Overlord
was one of the fleet’s two big drop-carriers, designed to carry the fleet’s marines into action, although after the defeat at Landfall, she could comfortably have accommodated every surviving soldier on her own – with room to spare. She also had many spare shuttle docking points. The shuttle from
Saladin
, Berg’s divisional flagship, was docking in one of them as she arrived. Commodore Dandolo was waiting for her beyond the airlock.

“Sir,” she said, saluting him.

“Captain, glad to see you back,” he said offering a hand.

“Thank you, sir,” she replied, “although I’m at a loss to know what’s going on.”

“You aren’t the only one,” Dandolo said as they made their way toward the centrifuge. “I’m a low man on the totem pole but I have heard that you aren’t the only one to have come across spontaneously exploding gates.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, indeed,” Dandolo agreed. “It appears the mighty wish to have a confab.”

Overlord
was probably the only ship in the fleet with a compartment large enough for the Second Fleet’s senior officers. They weren’t all there. Several ships were still out on missions and no one below the rank of captain was present but even so, the compartment was crowded and stuffy.

“Your attention please,” Admiral Fengzi said from the head of the room, thumping the podium. “Alright, let’s get this going.”

“Time is short,” he continued once the room had quietened down. “First off, over the last few hours those ships that were dispatched to strike at targets in the enemy’s rear areas have been returning. Their reports have painted an unexpected picture. Some of you will be aware that in the last few days, the enemy has apparently changed their strategic and tactical priorities. Reconnaissance boats from the strike carriers have detected wreckage at locations that we know were previously sites of enemy space gates, but had not yet been attacked. Furthermore, the cruisers
Herald
and
Black Prince
have directly observed Nameless warships retreat from combat without firing.”

Fengzi paused and activated the holo beside him.

“This is the gate network as we knew it when this offensive began.”

The display showed a starmap with red dots indicating those systems known to have gates.

“This is the network as we know it right now.”

A massive swathe of red dots disappeared.

“Jesus, that must be about twenty percent,” Berg murmured to Dandolo.

“Those are just the ones we’ve checked in the last five days,” Fengzi continued. “Additionally, the supply dump at this system, which was listed as a priority target, was being evacuated when the cruiser
Ganges
passed through. Vice Admiral Gordon decided to mount an attack without waiting for the rest of the fleet, a decision I agree with, but by the time his squadron arrived ten hours later, there was nothing but a few empty cargo containers.”

“My staff and I have analysed the information and the only reasonable conclusion we can draw is… that the enemy is in full retreat.”

A congratulatory murmur went round the room, but was abruptly cut off as Fengzi loudly added: “And that is a problem. Our mission, for those of you who appear to have forgotten, was to keep up the pressure on the Nameless, to keep hitting them, to keep forcing them to hit us – something WE ARE NOT DOING if they retreat out of contact.”

“Can we take it from this, sir that Admiral Lewis and the Home Fleet have successfully put in their attack?” asked another officer.

Fengzi looked like he’d bitten into something that gone off but nodded sharply.

“Yes, Admiral, it seems your husband and the First Fleet has been sufficiently successful in their attack to force a reaction from the Nameless. That would mean that, as hoped, they have been cut off from their home bases. This is obviously a good thing but what’s less good is that they have reacted quickly and decisively. If the Nameless are in full retreat, then they have abandoned in a matter of days all the gains it took them two years to achieve.”

“Most of those gains are just empty space, sir,” observed Admiral Gordon.

“True,” Fengzi agreed. “But there is the infrastructure they have built in that time – now they are destroying gates and moving back the supplies they previously made a considerable effort to move forward.”

“They still have Landfall,” Berg murmured.

“Yes, Captain Berg,” Fengzi said, apparently hearing her, “they also still have Landfall.”