Starhold's Fate (Starhold Series Book 4) Read online

  “I believe the proper term is dislocated,” Nyondo said with a grimace. “My right arm is out of its socket.”

  Paruzzi punched at his console. “Doc Robinson to the bridge.”

  “Belay that,” snapped Nyondo. “My guess is Doc has more pressing concerns right now—I can hold on for a bit. Kelly, just help me back into my chair and resume your duties.”

  Another explosion from somewhere aboard the ship shook the bridge.

  “More missiles?” Nyondo asked, sliding back into the seat she shouldn’t have left.

  “A hit on the forward gun deck,” Paruzzi responded.

  The bridge power winked on and off, lighting and work stations flickering before they stabilized.

  “Mr. Lewis, return fire as best you can,” ordered Nyondo, “and show me tactical on the main viewscreen.”

  The holographic projector at the front of the bridge returned to life. Cameras from recon drones did their best to relay the scene outside the ship while icons and information scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

  “Holy shit,” muttered someone under his breath.

  Staring at the display, Nyondo wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment. “And now we know why that surgewave caught us off-guard.” Tactical icons revealed not one but two Vanguard battlecruisers—one of them almost on top of the Sarissans and the other trailing behind by nearly three-hundred thousand kilometers. As the information updated, CIC labeled the closest enemy Battlecruiser Alpha and the more distant one as Battlecruiser Beta.

  Nyondo admired the enemy’s ingenuity. “It must have hidden in some sort of sensor mask projected by those destroyers. The bastard was setting right there in the middle of them the whole time. When we killed the smaller ships, the camouflage for Battlecruiser Alpha evaporated.”

  “I concede it was clever, however it was done,” agreed Commander Paruzzi, “but now we have two battlecruisers to fight. The second one will be arriving in about ten minutes.” As they spoke, Electra was pouring missiles onto the newly exposed enemy vessel with Swiftsure turning to engage, but moving sluggishly.

  “What is our status?” asked Nyondo. “Damage control—give me an update.”

  “Portside shield generators are down,” answered Ensign McCue. “Ablative armor on that side of the ship is severely compromised—CIC estimates forty-percent damage. The belt plating and much of our reactive armor on the portside has buckled.”

  “What part of the portside, Miss McCue?” asked Paruzzi.

  “Sections fourteen through nineteen, sir. Nanite renewal is ongoing for the crystal plating, but it won’t be complete for another fifteen standard hours. As for the reactive armor, we need a spacedock to fix that.”

  “Take note, Mr. Hayes,” Nyondo alerted the helm, “we need to keep our starboard side to the enemy as much as possible.”

  “Battlecruiser Alpha is now three thousand klicks distant and moving toward to the planet, ma’am,” reported Hayes. “If we choose to engage, we’re going to have to chase her. Pursuit course, Captain?”

  Nyondo winced in pain as her shoulder begged for medical attention. “Negative, Mr. Hayes. Ordinarily, I’d put three Sarissan cruisers against two Massang battlecruisers and feel good about our chances, but we’re pretty beat up right now, and I see that Swiftsure has taken damage as well. Besides, we have assets on the field that haven’t been brought into play yet.”

  “You want to force a scenario in which you keep the enemy battlecruisers separated?” ventured Paruzzi.

  Nyondo nodded. “Exactly. Helm, set an intercept course for Battlecruiser Beta. Mr. Paruzzi, order Swiftsure and Electra to form up on us, then order our Jangsuvian light cruisers to break orbit and engage Battlecruiser Alpha. And Mr. Paruzzi… please have someone from sickbay come to the bridge.”

  * * * *

  The bridge lights flickered before failing completely. They were replaced by the dim, reddish glow of emergency lighting.

  “Systems are out all over the ship, ma’am” declared Commander Paruzzi. “Right now, we are almost exclusively on battery power. We will be going zero-gee soon.”

  From her damage control station, Ensign McCue added another bleak note. “Captain, life-support has failed over seventy percent of the ship.”

  Sunny Nyondo took a deep breath before speaking. “Mr. Hayes, anything on the engines?”

  “Negative, ma’am. Helm is still not responding.”

  For the last hour, Nyondo’s three damaged cruisers had been engaged in a savage fight against the Vanguard vessel which they branded Battlecruiser Beta. The Sarissans had an overall firepower advantage, but the speed and adroitness of the enemy ship was making victory elusive. Closer to Serrat IV, the Jangsuvians had already dispatched Battlecruiser Alpha in surprisingly rapid fashion. Now, the three surviving light cruisers were speeding to reinforce Nyondo’s group, but they were still precious minutes away.

  The Massang battlecruiser was slowly succumbing to the Sarissan force, but it was still dangerous. Minutes ago, another surgewave had been fired at Tempest, with Nyondo’s ship absorbing a crippling blow. The energy field struck viciously into the stern compartments—home of the heavy cruiser’s engines and reactors.

  “What’s our current velocity, Mr. Hayes?”

  “Still making about three percent of pulse, ma’am.”

  “Do you have thrusters?”

  “Aye, ma’am. Thrusters are still operational.”

  “Good. Supplement our inertia with thrusters. Maybe we can make it out of enemy weapons range long enough to implement repairs and get back into this fight.”

  “Captain, we still can’t raise engineering,” Paruzzi reported from his station, pausing to press an index finger against his earbud. “Wait, we have them now. Commander Huang for you ma’am—audio only.”

  Nyondo jabbed at a control on the arm of her command chair. “Huang—report. What’s your status?”

  A ragged, desperate voice crackled through the speaker. “Captain—I’m sorry, but engineering is a mess. That last surgewave hit us—it hit us hard… I—I have a lot of dead and wounded down here. Mostly dead, ma’am.”

  Nyondo flinched at the news, absent-mindedly reaching across her body with her good hand. She clutched at the brace Doc Robinson had put on her upper arm after he popped it back into its socket. Between battles the Hospital Corpsman had paid a quick visit, treating the captain briefly in her star cabin adjacent to the bridge.

  “Huang, we have damage control teams on the way to help,” she said, trying to calm her Chief Engineer. “Can you get us any power—we’ve lost it shipwide. Engines would be helpful, too.”

  “Captain, you have to listen to me,” said Huang in a frantic voice. “You don’t have power because all the couplings have been blown to bits, but we have a bigger problem. Our reactors are still on. When the power couplings failed, the reactors should have gone into an automatic shutdown sequence, but they didn’t. That last surgewave—it fused the energy intermix chamber. You understand? Fused it. The reactors are all running hot and we can’t shut them down. This ship is going to explode and it can’t be stopped. We have forty, maybe fifty minutes before Tempest blows up!”

  “But, there must be some way to stop it.”

  “Nothing can stop this—nothing. Most of my people are dead, but even if I had a thousand engineers, it wouldn’t matter. In less than an hour this ship is going to blow.”

  She looked over to Paruzzi, who spoke words he plainly didn’t want to say. “Captain, we have no choice.”

  The comm line with the Chief Engineer was still active. “Huang—evacuate the engineering deck. Get your people out of there now. If you get a radiation leak, those emergency bulkhead doors will drop, and you and your people will be trapped. Go!”

  She reached to activate the shipwide intercom. “Attention all hands, this is the captain speaking. Abandon ship. Repeat—all hands move immediately to the life pods and abandon ship.

  “Mr. Paruzzi, contact Captain Tip
pett aboard Electra. Instruct her to assume command of the flotilla. Alert all friendlies to keep clear of Tempest due to the pending explosion. Comm Officer, establish a secure laser link with Electra and upload our recorder data and logs.”

  Within ten minutes, the bridge was almost empty. Life pods were launching in all directions and quickly thrusting away from Tempest, moving in the general direction of Serrat IV. Even though it seemed like Electra and Swiftsure were close to victory over Battlecruiser Beta, Tempest’s survivors were taking no chances. Rumors were running wild throughout the fleet of Massang prisoner atrocities such as vivisection and flaying. Many spacers felt that taking their own lives would be preferable to being captured.

  Before they departed, Paruzzi and some of the senior officers were sweeping the decks as best they could to make sure no one was being left behind. Only Nyondo and Specialist Kelly remained on the bridge. The XO had ordered Kelly to assist her in getting to a life pod.

  “Specialist, I still have a few minutes of work here. Your presence would be much more useful somewhere else, say sickbay. I’m sure Doc Robinson would welcome another hand to help with moving patients to the life pods.”

  The crewman scrunched his face in uncertainty. “I dunno, ma’am. Mr. Paruzzi said to stay with you.”

  “Mr. Paruzzi isn’t the captain, is he? Lay below to sickbay and help with the wounded. That’s an order.”

  “But, ma’am, I—”

  “An order, Kelly,” she said firmly, then softened her tone. “Look, I screwed up my shoulder, not my legs. I appreciate the concern but I’ll be all right. Now, go help Doc.” Grudgingly, Specialist Kelly withdrew.

  Her shoulder was throbbing. She had lied to Kelly—there was no more to be done. Truth was, she just wanted to be alone. Alone with her pain, alone with her ship, alone with the rest of her life.

  Nyondo noticed a rank smell developing. The life support system was no longer producing and circulating fresh air, and a sour stench was beginning to ooze onto the bridge. Given time, the ship would begin to turn cold, except that Tempest didn’t have that much time remaining.

  Nyondo got up from her command chair and thrust her good hand into her left trouser pocket, fishing around for the capsules Doc Robinson had given her. In his haste, he had given her three, or maybe it was four of them.

  “These will relieve the pain, but they are pretty strong,” he’d said. “No more than one every six hours. They work fast and are going to make you sleepy, so either relinquish command or wait until later before you take one.”

  She walked over to the tactical station. Looking into her hand, she examined the four pills, then quickly slapped them all into her mouth, washing them down with old coffee from a no-spill mug left behind by Lieutenant Lewis.

  Nyondo swallowed hard and gazed around the empty bridge. A sense of relief washed over her. For the first time in many years, she had made a decision that affected her and her alone. No one else would pay a price if she miscalculated, no family on a distant human world would suffer if she was wrong.

  The abrupt voice of the ship’s AI startled her. “Warning—failure of artificial gravity imminent.”

  Nyondo started to sit at the tactical station, but instead moved to her right and sat down at the helm console. Using one hand to strap herself in, a flood of memories rushed over her. The helm was her home, the place she had been the happiest. With her dear friend Taylin Adams on her right and Pettigrew at her back and in command, they were the best of times. Mullenhoff, Swoboda, and all of the others. Grand and wonderful days before this bloody war, and the one before that, and the one before that. Before…

  Sunny Nyondo felt her body trying to float. The artificial gravity must have indeed failed, at least it felt like it had.

  “Ship,” she called out to Tempest, perhaps for the last time. For a split second, she forgot what she wanted to ask. “Oh, yeah. How many of the crew are still on board?”

  “Internal sensors are offline.”

  Ship must be confused.

  “No, no, I mean how many people are still on board—you know, the crew. My crew.”

  “Unable to determine. Internal sensors are offline.”

  “It’s a simple question, Ship. I just wanna… You know, it’s OK. Forget it.”

  Her eyes were heavy but her body was light. Nyondo didn’t feel like arguing. The struggle just wasn’t worth it. Closing her eyes, she would just rest here in her chair for a minute, right where she belonged. Just a little rest and it would all be OK. It would all… be…

  3: Comrades

  Outskirts of Bakkoa City

  Planet Earth

  A pleasant breeze cooled the summer evening along the Dordogne River. In ancient times, this place had been called France, but in the twenty-sixth century it was known as Bakkoa Province.

  “Just one more,” Chaz Pettigrew said to the man lifting the bottle. “It wouldn’t do for an Admiral of the Fleet to be seen crawling onto that starliner tomorrow morning.”

  Soft outdoor lighting and wonderful weather set the perfect atmosphere for an evening of dinner, drinks, and amity. He and his friends were enjoying the courtyard, centerpiece of their beautiful home which sat overlooking Bakkoa City, capital of the Earth Federation. The inviting Neo-Grange house rested on a slight rise across the river from town and was bounded by four hectares of forested land for privacy.

  Pettigrew tried to imagine himself living in a place like this. It was a beautiful setting, but would this ever be right for him? Space had been home for almost half his life now and he found himself occasionally gazing skyward just to make sure the stars were still in their proper places. Looking up at them was somehow comforting.

  Frank Carr refreshed Pettigrew’s glass and poured another for himself. “Pacing yourself, that’s the key,” his host said while shooting his wife a wry smile.

  The dark-haired beauty tossed back her head in amusement. “Pacing, my ass,” Etta Sanchez joked. “When it comes to Frank and whiskey, the pace is almost always a wild sprint.” Carr picked up a nearby cloth napkin and playfully flung it at her as the three of them laughed.

  Pettigrew’s visit had been brief. Considering it was the first leave he had taken in years, he was pleased to be away from it all—if only for a few days.

  “I want to thank you both for putting up with me.”

  “Are you kidding? It’s not even been a week. We wish you could stay longer,” said Carr, raising his glass in a sincere salute.

  Sanchez echoed her husband’s sentiment. “I had really hoped you wouldn’t have to leave this soon.”

  “Regrettably, the message from Central Command was very insistent. It seems Fifth Fleet just can’t do without me,” Pettigrew groused, taking a gulp of Old Oakfield. “And Etta, thanks again for being my personal pilot this morning.” Turning to Carr, Pettigrew beamed as the whiskey started to kick in. “This woman can really fly. I think she was showing off a little for me today.”

  Earlier, Sanchez and Pettigrew had borrowed a shuttle from the local EarthFed space base where she was a flight instructor. After a quick hop into planetary orbit, they arrived at the main naval spacedock where they were greeted by the head of Earth military forces, Fleetmaster Maria Rhaab. The Fleetmaster had invited them to tour the newest and biggest warship in human space, the EarthFed titan-class Vanquisher.

  “Sorry I missed out,” said Carr, who had remained dirtside tied up with work. “That new ship is quite the topic of discussion around these parts. I’d like to have gotten a look at her.”

  “It’s unbelievable that anyone could build a ship that big,” observed Pettigrew. “It’s even bigger than the titan you guys blew up at the First Battle of Earth. By the way,” he continued, turning to Sanchez, “I noticed no one said anything about that on our tour today.”

  Sanchez squirmed. “And thank the Many Gods they did not. Looking back on it, I almost feel guilty for that whole episode.”

  “I don’t,” Carr said brusquely. “If you w
ill recall, at that time they were trying very hard to kill all three of us.”

  Sanchez leaned forward, placed her drink on the table, and clasped her hands together. “I know, but look at everything the New Earthers have done for humanity since. They terraformed this planet back to health after our ancestors ruined and abandoned it. They have allowed us and thousands more to settle here, to make new lives for ourselves. They have freely shared their technology with other human starholds. And even after all of that, I still feel bad for them—sorry for them.”

  “Sorry?” asked Pettigrew wearing a puzzled expression. “I don’t understand. In what way?”

  Sanchez took a sip of her drink. “The New Earthers came here from the Otherverse to escape what seemed to be inevitable death at the hands of the Adversary, the aliens rampaging through their galaxy. Now, we are at war with our universe’s version of those same aliens. These people just traded one set of monsters for another. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

  Carr pushed back from the table and crossed his legs. “Chaz, regarding the New Earthers—these people are scared to death. There are all sorts of rumors about an armistice, about peace negotiations with the Massang. Any truth to that? The people that work for me keep asking if Etta and I know anything, but clearly we don’t have the connections we used to.”

  Since they both retired from Sarissan military intelligence, the expatriate couple had been living the quiet life on Earth—quiet, that is, compared to their former life as spies. Carr now operated a business recovering historical artifacts from the ruins of pre-Diaspora cities. Sanchez taught aspiring EarthFed military pilots how to fly, although Pettigrew was sure none of her students would ever be the pilot she was.

  Chaz Pettigrew tried to put resolve behind his words. “There is nothing whatsoever to any talk about a ceasefire or negotiations. This war can only end one way. We have to win—for all our people who have already died in this bloody mess, not to mention the millions who perished on Kolo Khiva. I have it straight from the Empress herself. She said that—and I quote—'there is no way we’re letting these bastards off the hook.’ Her words, not mine. Tell that to your New Earther friends.”