Predator (Old Ironsides Book 3) Read online

  ‘I want all comm’s channels open when we drop into sub luminal,’ Harper said as he thoughtfully stroked one side of his moustache between his fingers. ‘But I want all shields up and plasma cannons charged. Compute an immediate egress course before we reach orbit. I want to be able to jump out of there in an instant if something goes wrong.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ Reeves replied briskly as he turned to relay the orders, one shoulder lower than the other where an Ayleean’s plasma rifle had found its mark years earlier during the Battle of Proxima Centauri. The shot had missed his lungs but evaporated half of his ribcage, however Reeves had always refused cosmetic surgery beyond what was required to keep him alive and comfortable. Harper reckoned the XO used his deformation to remind newer recruits that life in the fleet was a serious business.

  ‘Four minutes now,’ the navigation officer reported from his post to one side of the command platform.

  Harper looked at the navigation screen, the holographic image relayed from the navigation officer’s console. He could see Endeavour’s predicted path icon moving swiftly toward the Ayleean system, while nearby another icon denoted the predicted path and position of CSS Defiance. Both frigates had been diverted from their original missions after a priority signal from Polaris Station and CSS Command just before they had been due to jump into super luminal cruise for the Rim Colonies. The simple message, despite being of so few words, had instantly put Harper on edge.

  IMMEDIATE ACTION: AYLEEAN SECTOR, IFF LOST, CSS FORTITUDE. CONDITIONAL REPORT ON ARRIVAL.

  The second frigate, Defiance, had also been posted to the mission as a safeguard and would come out of super luminal sixty seconds after Endeavour and in a slightly different orbit, as he and Captain Lucas had planned before departing the Sol System.

  ‘Alert Status,’ Harper said calmly.

  Instantly the bright deck lighting turned red and an alarm horn sounded mournfully through the ship as the crew prepared for battle.

  Harper had not embarked on this emergency assignment expecting a fight, but he sure wasn’t going to drop out of sub luminal one planetary diameter from Ayleea without taking every precaution possible. None of the crew except for the officers knew that CSS had lost contact with the senate vessel Fortitude after it had arrived in the Ayleean sector. Instead, Harper had decided to inform them only that assistance had been requested by her crew in the sector.

  ‘You ready for this, Travis?’

  Reeves stood beside the captain’s seat and spoke quietly from the corner of his mouth, keeping his familiar tone from the rest of the crew. Harper looked up at the XO, who was standing with his hands behind his back but was leaning forward like a dog straining at an invisible leash.

  ‘You look like you are.’

  ‘I’m appalled that you’d think so,’ Reeves growled, but his eyes glittered with delight as he glanced at the captain. ‘At least we don’t have to do what Fortitude probably did and wander in here with our eyes closed hoping for the best, our hands shoved up our backsides. I’ll put fifty down in cash that the Ayleeans have reneged and are preparing for war as we speak.’

  Harper stared at the big screen before them, currently jet black, the frigate’s super luminal velocity rendering them devoid of information from the cosmos beyond.

  ‘I’ll take that bet,’ he replied, ‘and hope that you’re wrong.’

  ‘One minute to sub luminal,’ the navigation officer called.

  The somber wail of the battle status alarm changed to a simpler beep that alerted the crew to imminent deceleration. Reeves placed one hand on his control console nearby, favoring his lower shoulder as Harper gripped the armrests of his seat and prepared himself. Whoever was waiting for them on Ayleea would know by now that they were coming, the frigate’s gravitational bow shock by now detectable at its destination. Swift maneuvering and quick thinking were their only defenses, and Harper figured they would have little time to work out what had happened to Fortitude before they would have to leave the system at full power.

  ‘Thirty seconds…’

  Harper listened to the countdown as he made his last checks and saw four Phantom fighters ready to launch on the catapults down in the launch bays. The frigate’s shields were fully charged and the plasma batteries were ready to fire.

  ‘Five, four, three, two…’

  Harper grabbed the seat rests a little tighter and then the bridge seemed to lurch backward, the light momentarily split into its spectral order as the main viewing screen flared with white light and then settled as Ayleea’s brown and blue, cloud flecked orb appeared before them.

  ‘Sub luminal, shields are up!’ the navigation officer called.

  ‘No sensor contacts!’ the tactical officer reported. ‘No weapon launches detected, no sensor spikes or large vessels nearby, captain!’

  Harper hesitated, watching as data spilled in from the system beyond. His eyes scanned the streams of information even as he saw the four Phantom fighters on the cats wind their engines up to full power, ready to launch at a moment’s notice.

  ‘Check our tail, visual scanners!’ Harper ordered.

  Instantly, tactical responded to the check for any vessels sneaking up behind them while sensor shielded.

  ‘Nothing detected in all sectors, captain!’ Reeves replied.

  Harper nodded. ‘Launch cats one and two, hold three and four in support.’

  Reeves relayed the order and instantly a pair of single seat Phantom fighters blazed down the catapult tracks and were launched out into space, their engines flaring with white flame as they accelerated away from the frigate.

  Harper rapped his knuckles on the arm of his seat as he watched the two fighters shrink to the size of metallic specks against the vast jungle world of Ayleea, and almost immediately the communications officer called out to him.

  ‘I’m detecting no emissions from Ayleea at all, but the readings are off the scale for interference on all frequencies. Temperature scans indicate continent wide forest fires and major damage to cities and urban areas.’

  A deep and sudden silence enveloped the bridge as all of the officers present absorbed what they had just been told.

  Slowly, Harper stood up out of his seat as he saw the image of the planet resolve itself before him. Features that he had taken for cloud formations revealed themselves to be immense swathes of burning forests releasing clouds of toxic smoke into the atmosphere. Cities glowed not with street lights but with flames, carnage wrought on a global scale.

  ‘Any ships in the area, any survivors?’

  The communications and tactical officers both scrutinized their displays for a moment, and then they shook their heads in unison.

  ‘The whole damned planet’s been ravaged,’ Reeves gasped, staring fixedly at the vast screen and the incomparable devastation before them. ‘We don’t have anything that could achieve that.’

  Harper clenched his fists and made his decision. ‘Ping Fortitude’s IFF transponder. Show me where she is.’

  Reeves froze where he stood. ‘That’s against protocol, captain. We’re in a combat situation. If we ping their transponder any vessel within the system’s going to know about it real quick.’

  Harper nodded. ‘I didn’t come here to fail our mission, XO. Dead or alive, we need to know what happened to Fortitude before we leave or the same thing might happen to earth. Ping the transponder.’

  Reeves sucked in a lungful of air and then he turned and nodded to the tactical officer. The lieutenant manning the station accessed Fortitude’s Identification Friend or Foe transponder frequency, and sent the signal. In an instant a spherical energy band raced out from the frigate at several times the speed of light, sweeping the planet and beyond in all directions as Endeavour’s sensors sought the automated return ping that would reveal Fortitude’s location. The signal was based on the same propagation of light’s wavelength technology that allowed communications between vessels across light hours in moments. Quantum fluctuations in the vacuum that also caus
ed the uniform attraction of the Casimir Effect allowed signals emitted at luminal velocity to accelerate exponentially, as they possessed no mass. The downside was that once emitted, there was no stopping them until they were simply broken up by the competing radiation of stellar bodies, black holes and other cosmological phenomena. A tactical “hello, here we are”, the signals also betrayed the presence and location of the emitting vessel.

  A loud beep sounded in the bridge the moment the signal had been emitted.

  ‘Contact, oh seven four, elevation niner two.’

  Harper’s eyes flicked across the main screen as the frigate’s sensors immediately began zooming in on a faint band of sparkling metallic debris orbiting the planet. Harper at once recognized the vast remnants of a great battle, or a great massacre, depending on how one looked at it.

  ‘That’s the Ayleean fleet,’ Reeves said.

  Harper could see Ayleean warships strewn in orbit around the planet, their hulks glowing with escaping gases burning from internal fires. Debris littered the field, vast chunks of metal hull plating blasted from vessels after direct strikes now rotating in the deep chill of space and reflecting the dull glow of the red dwarf star at the center of the system.

  The cameras zoomed in further and finally Harper saw what he had been looking for.

  ‘There she is,’ he said.

  The shape of Fortitude’s hull emerged from the background debris, her slender lines and polished metal form at odds with the bulky, angular rust red hulls of the Ayleean fleet. At once Harper could see that she was intact and did not appear to have been fired upon.

  ‘Send the fighters in, one fast pass, not too close,’ he ordered.

  Reeves responded immediately. ‘Rebel Flight, fast pass on target coordinates being sent now, weapons hot.’

  ‘Roger, co ords received, Rebel Flight.’

  A second screen flickered into life, this one from a camera mounted atop one of the Phantom fighters’ fuselages as the craft swept in and accelerated alongside the debris field, the leading fighter’s exhaust plume visible ahead. Harper tried to prevent himself from clasping his hands together as he awaited the pass, and he saw the names Hackett and Goldberg on the roster beside the spacecraft.

  ‘Hackett’s part of Victory’s flight roster,’ he growled at the senior flight deck officer. ‘What’s he doing out there?’

  ‘Transferred by Captain O’Donnell,’ the deck officer replied. ‘I’m guessing his wingman put him up to it to avoid milk run duty on Victory.’

  ‘Something’s not right here,’ Reeves said. ‘Why would someone, or something, attack an entire world and then just leave it behind? You don’t conquer something and then abandon it like trash.’

  Harper frowned, agreeing with his XO but uncertain of whether they would ever be able to fathom the intentions of a species that they could not possibly yet understand when…

  ‘Rebel One, I’ve got visual.’

  Tyrone Hackett’s voice on the communications channel was laden with tension as the fighters rocketed through the gloomy debris field, beams of blood red sunlight piercing the orbiting forest of twisted metal, foggy veils of billowing gas and glittering clouds of ice fragments from oxygen vented by the ruptured spaceships.

  ‘She looks like she’s in one piece,’ Rebel One continued. ‘No plasma cannon hits, no hull ruptures that I can see. Slowing down.’

  Harper watched in silence as the fighters gradually slowed down. Through the clouds of fog and gas the captain could see the graceful hull of the senate vessel glinting, but it looked as though her metal was dulled, perhaps by the debris around her.

  ‘Ten kilometers,’ Hackett reported.

  Harper saw a veil of gas sweep across the fighters like a cloud, and for a moment they could see nothing beyond the gases swirling through the frigid vacuum and glowing a vivid red from the star light beyond.

  The clouds swept past and Fortitude’s hull re–emerged, and in an instant Harper’s guts felt as though they had broken free of their moorings and plunged into a cold abyss as he saw the thick layer of icy material entombing the senate vessel.

  Like a cocoon of ice, the material was not something that he had seen before with his own eyes but he had read the reports of CSS Titan’s encounter and like every other member of the crew he knew what he was looking at.

  ‘Rebel Flight, get out of there!’

  Even as the words fell from his lips Harper saw the icy tomb unravel itself like the petals of a grotesque and lethal flower to strike out at the passing fighters.

  ***

  X

  ‘Enemy!’

  The tactical officer’s cry filled the bridge of Endeavour as Captain Harper saw from amid the cluttered stream of debris orbiting Ayleea vast tendrils of what looked like ice emerge, as though a silent nest of gigantic, unthinkable creatures had stirred.

  The Phantom fighters turned hard to starboard and lit their engine boost, an emergency thrust reheat that diverted all available power for a limited time to the engines. Harper saw them turning toward Endeavour and a vast, seething wall of icy material surging after them.

  ‘What the hell is that?!’ the communications officer gasped, a woman on her first operational tour who had clearly not encountered anything like this before.

  ‘Rebel Flight, request fire support!’

  Hackett’s voice was high pitched with tension.

  ‘Plasma batteries one through four, fire now!’ Harper roared.

  Endeavour trembled as four of her huge plasma batteries thundered a salvo of glowing blue–white charges that rocketed away toward the growing icy mass reaching out from the debris field. Harper could hear the recoil from the four meter guns echoing like distant thunder through the frigate’s hull.

  The shots raced past the fleeing Phantoms and plowed into the icy mass behind them. Harper saw the enormous tendrils of material blasted apart in blossoming explosions that illuminated the darkened debris field around them, saw the specks of the two fighters silhouetted against the detonations as they raced for safety.

  And then he heard words that struck fear into any starship captain coming from Lieutenant Hackett’s fighter.

  ‘Endeavour, enemy astern!’

  Captain Harper barely had time to turn to shout an order for evasive action when Endeavour suddenly lurched forward as she was struck by a blast of unimaginable force. The entire ship shuddered and the lights inside the bridge flickered out as panels were blasted from the ceiling and showers of brilliant sparks exploded from the walls and control stations.

  Harper tumbled down off the command platform and smashed into a console, felt bright pain lance his shoulder and neck as his collar bone snapped and he collapsed onto one knee. His lungs convulsed with the pain and he stared for a moment into empty space as his brain struggled to maintain coherent thought. The blood red lights flickered on again and revealed a scene of absolute carnage around him.

  ‘Full power!’ he yelled, his voice twisted with pain. ‘Get us out of here!’

  Harper looked up at the engineering station and saw that the lieutenant there was sprawled across the deck, his eyes staring lifelessly back at Harper and his tongue hanging in shreds where his teeth had bitten through it. Half of his face was a scorched mess and a tangle of shredded metal shards were poking from the dome of his skull where they had penetrated his brain and killed him instantly.

  ‘Pulse engines are out, captain!’ somebody warned him.

  ‘Shields are down!’ the tactical officer yelled. ‘We’re disabled!’

  Harper looked desperately for his XO and saw Reeves slumped against the side of the command platform where he had been hurled after the initial blast. His eyes were closed, his features slack and his right hand was crumpled where the impact of his landing had snapped the fingers back on themselves.

  ‘Tactical, report?!’ Harper cried out.

  ‘Enemy, rear!’ the tactical officer shouted. ‘No signals except massive energy readings. We’ve lost power to
all stern guns.’

  Harper staggered to his feet, cradling his right arm in his left and wincing at the pain as he turned and looked at the screen. ‘Show me,’ he gasped.

  The screen flickered and then showed the view astern of the frigate.

  Harper’s guts convulsed as he saw behind them an immense craft, larger than anything he had ever seen. Her hull was adorned with two huge strakes upon which were mounted what looked like engines at one end and tremendous cannons of some kind at the front. Atop her hull was a forward facing bridge construction that was larger on its own than any two CSS capital ships. The hull was sleek, streamlined and yet oddly out of perspective, as though viewed in a mirror that had warped the image. The hull plating was an odd color, somewhat camouflaged but not appearing to be made of anything that Harper could recognize. The vessel loomed over the stricken frigate like a bird of prey over a tiny, injured sparrow.

  ‘Can we jump?’ Harper gasped.

  The tactical officer glanced at his instruments and a brief glow of hope appeared on his features. ‘Yes, only once or twice but we’ve got enough power to do it. The enemy vessel is charging weapons again!’

  Harper looked at one of the few remaining tactical displays and saw the Phantoms rushing in to land. In an instant, he knew that they wouldn’t make it.

  ‘Jump,’ he uttered, hating every word. ‘Jump now!’

  The tactical officer didn’t hesitate.

  Endeavour trembled as the ship’s power was diverted to her Higgs Drive and a moment later the light from the viewing screen flared brilliant white and then plunged into blackness. Captain Harper felt fresh pain behind his eyes as the view of the bridge shimmered and the frigate jumped directly from orbit into super luminal cruise.