The Night's Dawn Trilogy (138 page)

Myoho
and its blackhawk disappeared from the display.
Granth
and
Ilex
both fired a volley of combat wasps at their respective prey.

Haria
’s masers began to fire as the remaining submunitions closed on it. Small vivid explosions peppered nearby space. Rail guns
thumped out a stream of steel spheres which formed a last-ditch kinetic umbrella. Eight surviving submunitions drones detected
it, three of them were gamma-pulse lasers. A second before they struck the umbrella they fired.

Large oval sections of the frigate’s hull turned cherry red under the radiation assault. Molecular-binding generators maxed
out as they fought to keep the monobonded silicon’s structure intact. The energy-dispersal web below the silicon struggled
to absorb and redistribute the intense influx. All the sensor clusters either melted or had their electronics burnt out by
the gamma-ray deluge. Replacement clusters rose immediately; but the starship was blind for a period of three seconds.

In that time the remaining five submunitions hit the kinetic umbrella. They disintegrated instantly, but hypervelocity fragments
kept coming. With the sensors unable to see them and direct the frigate’s close-range weapons they struck the hull and vaporized.
The binding generators, already heavily stressed, couldn’t handle the additional loading. There were half a dozen localized
punctures. Fists of plasma punched inwards. Internal systems melted and fused as they were exposed. Fuel tanks ripped open
sending hundred-metre fountains of vaporizing deuterium shooting out.

“
Bellah
, assist, please,” Commander Kroeber ordered. “Rescue and recovery.” The stricken frigate’s emergency beacon was howling across
the distress bands. The life-support capsules should have easily withstood the strike. Even as he requested more information
from the computer the sensor image showed him ion thrusters firing to slow the frigate’s wayward tumble.

With all of their combat-wasp stocks exhausted in the first salvo,
Datura
and
Cereus
were left with only shortrange masers to defend themselves against the assault from the frigates’ drones. The electronic
warfare barrage was unrelenting as the drones closed at twenty gees, defeating the starships’ sensors. The two mercenary starships
exploded within seconds of each other. A cheer went round the
Arikara
’s bridge. Meredith felt like joining in.

“Admiral, another blackhawk is leaving orbit,” Lieutenant Rhoecus said.

Meredith cursed, he really couldn’t spare another voidhawk. A quick check on the tactical display revealed little information,
the blackhawk was on the other side of Lalonde from the squadron. “Which is the nearest voidhawk?”

“The
Acacia
, Admiral.”

“Can they hit it with combat wasps?”

“They have a launch window, but estimate only a thirty per cent chance of success.”

“Tell them to launch, but remain in orbit.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“
Bellah
reports survivors from the
Haria
have been detected, Admiral,” Commander Kroeber said. “They’re matching velocities.”

“Good. Hinnels, has there been any reaction from the Juliffe cloud bands?”

“Nothing specific, sir. But they’ve been growing wider at a constant rate, the area they’re covering has increased by one
and a half per cent since we arrived. It adds up to a respectable volume.”

Another combat-wasp battle raged high above Lalonde’s terminator as the drones from the
Granth
encountered defences fired by their prey. Then the blackhawk vanished down a wormhole interstice. Three seconds later
Granth
followed.

“Damn,” Meredith muttered.

But the
Ilex
was having better luck. Its combat-wasp salvo had forced the blackhawk it was chasing to flee back down towards the planet.

The Admiral requested a channel to the
Gemal
. “We shall be boarding you first, Smith. Any resistance and the marines will shoot to kill, understood?”

“Yes, Admiral,” Terrance Smith replied. “Have you received any updates from the teams you landed?”

“Not yet. I expect most of them were sequestrated,” he added gloomily.

“Tough. I want you to broadcast a message that their mission is over. We will pick up any survivors if at all possible. But
none of them is to attempt to penetrate under the cloud, no hunting of enemy bases. This is now a Confederation Navy problem.
I don’t want the invaders antagonized unduly.” Not while my squadron is so close to that bloody cloud, he finished silently.
It was the sheer quantity of power involved again. Frightening. And the berserk way the hijacked ships were behaving didn’t
help.

“I’m not sure I can guarantee that, Admiral,” Smith said.

“Why not?”

“I issued the team leaders with kiloton nukes. It would give them a fall-back in case the starships were unable to provide
strike power. I was worried the captains might balk at bombarding a planetary surface.”

If it hadn’t been for the fierce gee force Meredith would have put his head in his hands. “Smith, if you get out of this with
your life, it won’t be on my account.”

“Well, fuck you!” Terrance Smith yelled. “You Saldana bastard, why do you think I had to hire these people in the first place?
It’s because Lalonde is too poor to rate decent navy protection. Where were you when the invaders landed? You would never
have come to help us put down that first insurrection, because it didn’t affect your precious financial interests. Money,
that’s what you shits respect. What the hell would you know about ordinary people suffering? You were born with a silver spoon
in your mouth that’s so big it’s sticking out through your arse. The only reason you’re here now is because you’re frightened
the invasion might spread to worlds you own, that it might hit your credit balance. I’m doing what I can for
my
people.”

“And that includes nuking them, does it?” Meredith asked. He’d been subject to anti-Saldana bigotry for so long now the insults
never even registered. “They’re sequestrated, you cretin, they don’t even know they’re your people any more. This invasion
isn’t going to be beaten by brute force. Now, you will broadcast that message, make the mercenary teams turn back.”

The tactical display sounded an alarm. A broad fan of curving purple vector lines were rising high over Wyman, Lalonde’s small
arctic continent. Someone behind the planet had launched a salvo of fifty-five combat wasps.

“My God,” Meredith muttered. “Lowie, what are they aimed at?”

“Unclear, Admiral. There is no single target, it’s a rogue salvo. But from the vectors I’d say they were seeking to engage
anything in the thousand-kilometre orbit…Bloody hell.”

A second salvo, of equal size, was curving round the south pole.

“Jesus, that’s a neat pincer movement,” Joshua said. At some ridiculous private level he was delighted he didn’t need any
intervention from his neural nanonics to remain calm. He felt his mind function with that same cool reserve which had manifested
itself back in the Ruin Ring when Neeves and Sipika appeared.

This is me, what I am: a starship captain.

The
Lady Mac
’s three fusion drives came on almost without conscious thought. “Stand by for combat gees,” he warned.

“How many?” Sarha asked nervously.

“How high is up?”

Other starships were getting under way, retracting their thermo-dump panels. Three of them launched combat wasps in a defensive
cluster formation.

“Remain in orbit,” Smith ordered over the command net. “The navy squadron will provide us with protective cover from the salvo.”

“Like bollocks they will,” Joshua said. The squadron was still four minutes from orbital injection. A sensor scan revealed
blackhawks and voidhawks alike racing up for a higher altitude; the slower Adamist starships were following, with three exceptions,
Gemal
one of them.

The gee force in
Lady Mac
’s bridge passed five gees. Ashly groaned in dismay. “My bones can’t take this.”

“You’re younger than me,” Warlow countered.

“I’m more human, too.”

“Wimp.”

“Castrated mechanoid.”

Sarha suddenly noticed the trajectory Joshua had loaded into the flight computer. “Joshua! Where the hell are you taking us?”

Lady Mac
was rising above the equatorial plane at seven gees, decreasing altitude at the same time.

“We’re going under them.”

“This trajectory is going to graze the atmosphere!”

He watched more of the mercenary starships launching combat wasps. “I know.” It had been an instinctive manoeuvre, opposing
every tactic program in the flight computer’s memory core; they all said altitude was the key in orbital combat situations,
giving you more room to manoeuvre, more flexibility. Everyone else in the little mercenary fleet was clinging to that doctrine,
escaping from Lalonde with fusion drives operating way out on the limit. “Dad was always telling me about this one,” he said
in what he hoped was a confident manner. “He always used it in a scrape.
Lady Mac
’s still about, isn’t she?”

“Your bloody father isn’t!” Sarha had to datavise, she couldn’t expel enough air from her lungs to talk. The acceleration
had reached nine gees. She hadn’t known even
Lady Mac
could produce that kind of drive level. Every internal membrane supplement had turned rock hard. An arterial implant at the
base of her neck was injecting oxygen into her bloodstream, making sure her brain didn’t starve. She couldn’t ever remember
having to use it before. Joshua Calvert, we are not a bloody combat wasp!

“Look, it’s very simple,” he explained, trying to sort out the logic in his own mind. As usual, rationality was trailing well
behind impetuosity. “Combat wasps are designed for deep-space operations. They can’t operate in the atmosphere.”

“We are designed for deep-space operations!”

“Yes, but we’re spherical.”

Sarha couldn’t snarl, she would have dislocated her jaw bone; but she managed to grate her teeth together.

Lady Macbeth
flew over the Sarell continent in forty-five seconds, arching down sharply towards the brown and yellow volcanic deserts.
She was three hundred kilometres in altitude when she passed over the northern coastline; the north pole was two and a half
thousand kilometres ahead. Seven hundred kilometres above, and four thousand kilometres ahead, the combat wasp salvo spotted
her. Six of them abruptly altered course and dived down.

“Here they come,” Joshua said. He fired eight of
Lady Mac
’s combat wasps, programming them for a tight defence-shield formation. The drones leapt upwards at twenty gees, scattering
submunitions almost immediately.

Aft sensors showed the starships in orbit behind and above were releasing more and more combat wasps. Even the
Gemal
was breaking out of its thousand-kilometre orbit, the old colonist-carrier could only make one and a half gees. And there
was no escort, Joshua saw sadly. Far away to the east, barely above the horizon, there was a volley of explosions followed
by the unmistakable larger smeared detonation of a starship. Wonder who that was? It didn’t seem to matter much, only that
it wasn’t him.

“Melvyn, keep monitoring the grav-detector satellite data. I want to know if any ships start jumping outsystem, and if possible
where to.”

“I’m on it, Joshua.”

“Dahybi, I can’t believe the voidhawks can keep jamming our nodes with all this going on, the second they slip I want to know.”

“Yes, Captain.”

The sensors showed Joshua the attacking combat wasps releasing their submunitions. Particle beams lanced out from both swarms.
“OK, everybody, here we go.” He shot an order directly into the drive deflector coils, and
Lady Mac
lurched downwards.

Meredith Saldana caught the crazy flight vector developing and datavised a request into the tactical situation computer for
confirmation. The vector was recomputed and verified. Half of the squadron’s frigates would be unable to produce a nine-gee
thrust. “Who’s that idiot?” he asked in reflex.

“
Lady Macbeth
, sir,” Lieutenant Franz Grese said. “None of the others have triple-fusion drives.”

“Well, if they all suicide on us I shall be a very happy man.”

It wasn’t looking good. He had already changed the squadron’s operational orbit from one thousand kilometres to two thousand
three hundred, which would give them a superior look-down shoot-down position—but only if the mercenary ships stayed put.
Injection was in ninety seconds. Combat wasps were being launched at a prodigious rate from the mercenary fleet. Intelligence
and tactics programs couldn’t say which were defensive and who was attacking whom. Each of his squadron’s ships had launched
a defence cluster salvo.

One of the voidhawks exploded with appalling savagery, and the victorious blackhawk skirted its roiling debris plume to vanish
into a wormhole interstice.

“Who?” he asked Rhoecus.

“
Ericra
, but they saw the combat-wasp barrage approaching.
Ilex
has their memory patterns safe.”

Even now, after all the truths he had seen in his cosmopolitan life, Meredith felt the old twang of prejudice. Upon death,
souls departed this life for ever. It was the Christian way. They were not to be ensnared in a mockery of God’s living creatures.

You can leave the Kingdom, he acknowledged jadedly, but it never leaves you.

Go in peace
, he prayed silently for the dead Edenists.
Wherever you roam
.

On a more pertinent level he was down to six voidhawks.

“Combat wasps have locked on to the
Gemal
, sir,” Clarke Lowie reported.

The gee force on the bridge was reducing rapidly as the
Arikara
slid into orbit.

Thank Christ for small mercies, Meredith thought. “Commander Kroeber, squadron to engage all combat wasps launched by the
mercenary fleet. We’ll sort out who’s friendly and who isn’t when events become a little less immediate.”