Shattered Sun (The Sentinel Trilogy Book 3) (20 page)

There were roughly twenty lances in all, plus four spears. They swung in two masses on either side of the harvester, which at last began to move out of orbit. It opened, and small ovaloid ships plopped out and ignited their engines. Batteries of energy weapons and bomb launchers warmed across the harvester’s bulbous head.

The lances resumed firing on the fleet, and
Dreadnought
again took damage. Energy pulses hit the shields above the bridge and along her flanks. More pulses struck the bombproofs housing the main batteries.

“Hold fire,” he said. “Let our friends do their work.”

One of the spears and two lances hit
Dreadnought
above the bridge, temporarily blinding the sensor array being fed into the main viewscreen. It went white.

“Damage to number six shield,” Simon said. “Remaining strength sixty-eight percent.”

The viewscreen returned to focus. There, ahead of them, was the ugly shape of the Apex harvester ship, approaching rapidly.

“Now!” Drake said.

#

Tolvern kept a wary eye on the second and third Apex fleets even as she focused on Drake’s forces entering the fray to her right. He’d sent in four cruisers and a handful of torpedo boats in an attempt to scatter the smaller ships so the rest of Task Force Alpha could attack the harvester. It hadn’t worked.

Instead, the lances and spears had traded blows with Drake’s cruisers, fought off the torpedo attack, and circled their forces around the harvester.
Dreadnought
went right at them, even as the enemy ships concentrated firepower on the Albion battleship. In return, Drake’s forces targeted the harvester.

The sky between the two fleets filled with missiles, bombs, pulse weapons, torpedoes, and cannon fire. Both sides were delivering and taking hard blows. Drake was under so much fire from the spears on his starboard that he sent his cruisers and corvettes to engage the ships before they overwhelmed him.

“We gonna sit here doing nothing?” Capp asked. “He’s getting pounded down there.”

“Keep your nerve, Lieutenant. We’re not ready until our torpedo boats are in position.”

She’d sent them on a wider arc than the other ships, which left them exposed and vulnerable, but kept the towed eliminon battery from whiplashing and killing the battery crew.

Meanwhile, the mood on the bridge grew tense thanks to the pending arrival of the second and third Apex fleets, which had been charging toward Singapore almost from the moment the Royal Navy entered the system.

The first of these two fleets was close enough to jump into the action, but it looked as though it were waiting for the other ships to catch up. When they did, they might go against the admiral, or they might leap right into the thick of Tolvern’s ships. Could she hold off twenty lances and two spears?

Possibly, depending on how well Lenol Tyn’s sloops acquitted themselves. The Hroom force sat below her, bunched like cavalry for a mass charge. The other ships of Task Force Bravo milled about nearby, and she almost sensed the tension of their captains and crew, waiting for her orders.

Capp touched her ear. “We got the signal, Cap’n. Them boats are in place. We’re ready to go.”

Tolvern called the gunnery and got Barker on the line.

“Make sure everything is preloaded. Things are about to get hot.”

“Aye, Captain. We’ll be ready for it.”

She ended the call. “All right, people, let’s win this thing.”

Tolvern flared
Blackbeard
’s engines twice, giving the signal to the other ships, then moved to join the fight.

Chapter Seventeen

Blackbeard
dove in from above, while
Peerless
stabbed up from below. Task Force Bravo’s three corvettes, five destroyers, and six torpedo boats punched straight forward, and the two frigates stood back a pace, hurling a barrage of missiles into the enemy formation.

Tolvern had doubted McGowan’s readiness to fight, had doubted the courage of the man’s entire task force, to be honest. Her doubts faded as the other captains and commanders executed perfect maneuvers, firing weapons and using their target baffles to dodge Apex fire, even as they closed with the enemy in orbit around Singapore.

Now, the Hroom came, too. A fleet of seventeen sloops of war, bunched into a mass charge, the kind that had struck fear into generations of Royal Navy captains. By themselves, Hroom attacks had more often proved destructive to their own fleets than to Albion’s, but all the same, she was glad to have them on her side.

One of the enemy spears drifted away from its supporting lances as it went after
Peerless
. That left its engines exposed to
Blackbeard
’s guns.

“Target that spear,” Tolvern ordered.

“Aye, Cap’n. We’ll settle her good.”

They fought off a lance swooping in from port, which broke off under fire, then was chased away by a pair of torpedo boats.

Tolvern brought
Blackbeard
up behind the spear, which was trading blows with
Peerless
, the two sides only a few dozen miles apart.

“Hunter-IIs on my command,” Tolvern said. She waited as her ship swung to. “Fire!”

Four torpedoes burst from their tubes. They targeted the spear, accelerating as their engines engaged. The enemy ship turned its attention toward the oncoming weapons, but too late. The first two torpedoes detonated under energy pulses, but the other two slammed one after another into the enemy’s engine shields. A secondary explosion burst out the underside, and the spear turned clumsily away, engines sputtering.

Blackbeard
and
Peerless
pinned it in place. McGowan’s ship got off the first broadside, but Tolvern’s hit harder. Working together, they cracked the spear open like a nut in a vise. It died via explosive decompression, holes venting along both sides.

McGowan sent a short video message. “Thanks for that, Tolvern. I thought I was done for. Be careful with those spears—they hit hard.”

“Was that humility in his voice?” Tolvern said when the message ended. “I think it was.”

“I still say he’s a piss nozzle,” Capp said.

“But with a definite reduction in piss. We’d have to query Jane to get an exact percentage.”

Capp grinned at this, but before she could answer, Smythe called over from the tech console. The first of the two remaining waves of hunter-killer packs was arriving.

Task Force Bravo had nearly fought its way to the battle surrounding the harvester ship.
Dreadnought
and the harvester were hammering at each other, both sides landing blow after blow, neither backing down. The rest of Task Force Alpha had its hands full with the remaining lances and spears, which fell back toward the Apex mother ship to protect it.

Night had fallen over this hemisphere of the planet. The continental mass below was nearly black, except for several glowing red spots that indicated massive forest fires, the smoke of which had been visible during the day in huge plumes. But no lights of civilization stood out to mark cities. If there were electricity in isolated pockets, the people had the sense to observe complete blackout conditions.

If Tolvern didn’t know better, she’d think Singapore uninhabited. But Koh insisted there were still millions of Singaporeans in hiding, living their furtive lives while they waited for the buzzards to seek them out in their caves and mountainous redoubts. To gather them for the harvest, to finish extinguishing Singaporean civilization and devour the remnants of its people.

Were there people on the surface looking into the night sky and watching the flash of lights, the debris that plummeted burning to the earth as ships caught fire and were dragged down to their final destruction? Was there a stirring of hope, unfamiliar after all these years of living in terror and hopelessness?

Two of Tolvern’s corvettes came under fire from the newly arrived enemies, and this forced her to respond. Not to stop the enemy, only to make a plausible effort to deflect them before they burst into the battle. She sent her torpedo boats on a delaying sweep and ordered her frigates to target the lead lances in the formation.

Throughout the battle, one of Tolvern’s torpedo boats had lingered behind, out near where the frigates remained behind a pair of destroyers. The torpedo boat pulsed its engine, as if having trouble achieving full power, but this was just a feint to conceal its cargo. One of the approaching lances went over to investigate, perhaps eager to destroy a small ship that appeared to be struggling. Before it could arrive, the torpedo boat burst into motion and charged toward the battlefield.

“Smythe, a broadcast to the fleet.” When he’d opened a channel, Tolvern sent the information they’d been waiting for. “Buckle yourselves in. Here’s where it gets interesting.”

That was their signal. Crew on the bridge (and hopefully throughout the ship and the overall fleet), strapped themselves down. Smythe and Lomelí brought down the antigrav.

There was a moment of disorientation, where the entire universe seemed to be tilted on its side. The torpedo boat lumbered through the fleet, dragging its cargo behind it. Inside that cargo, three men, Singaporeans, who’d been living in a confined space on short rations and water filtered from their own urine. Waiting to be flung into battle, used as a weapon and then, if they were fortunate, picked up. But prepared to die otherwise.

The enemy seemed to understand. They broke from engagements to chase after the torpedo boat.

“Protect that ship!” she shouted.

Corvettes rushed to the torpedo boat’s defense. Frigates rained missiles on attacking enemies. Destroyers maneuvered to block lances from jumping.

Within moments, the entire fleet—Task Forces Alpha and Bravo together—had wrecked their carefully placed formations, and all was chaos. But they fought off the enemy and protected the torpedo boat and its precious cargo.

The small ship was a few thousand miles from the planet when it came to a halt and swung its backside around until it had completely reversed directions. The eliminon battery kept soaring past, and at the last moment, the torpedo boat cut the tether and let it fly toward
Dreadnought
. The battleship turned one of her auxiliary engines toward the incoming eliminon battery, and the blast of plasma slowed the battery further until it fell into orbit between the battleship and the harvester.

A giant hand shoved on Tolvern’s shoulders and chest, and she sank into her seat with a groan. Her head was so heavy it felt like it had been replaced with a granite stone, and she lifted her eyes to the viewscreen with effort.

The enemy ships were out of control. Two lances hurtled toward Singapore. Unable to change trajectory, they skipped over the top of the atmosphere like stones across the surface of a lake, then went spinning off into space. Another lance, slightly lower in the atmosphere, fell burning. Yet another continued straight at
Dreadnought
’s cruisers, which had gathered in support of the battleship, joining their guns in attacking the harvester. Other enemy ships sat dead, barely drifting.

The harvester continued firing through all this, and though Tolvern’s brain felt scrambled and sluggish, she realized with horror that it must be immune to the gravity sphere around the eliminon battery. But within two or three seconds, the bombs and energy pulses diminished, then died.

Drake appeared on Tolvern’s personal console. His eyes squinted as if against a terrible headache, and he pressed his lips tight together.

“This is a general message for the fleet. All firepower on the harvester ship.”

The human ships began to move sluggishly. Lenol Tyn’s sloops, too. Continuing as a pack, the Hroom changed trajectory and came at the harvester. Serpentine batteries fired a mass of bomblets that corkscrewed toward the massive enemy ship.

Tolvern gave orders to the gunnery.
Blackbeard
pulled alongside
Peerless
, and the two cruisers decelerated, then swung about to present broadsides. The harvester loomed, a monstrosity that seemed as large and indestructible as a mountain.

Meanwhile, three of the four cruisers in Task Force Alpha—
Repulse
,
Richmond
, and
Formidable
—came in from below.
Zealand
, the final cruiser in the fleet, finished destroying a lance blocking its path, then moved to join.

Soon, all six cruisers were unleashing hell on the harvester ship. Torpedo boats howled in from the flanks. Mark-IV and Hunter-II torpedoes rolled out in waves. Corvettes and destroyers came up from below. The sloops of war rumbled past, and hundreds of small bombs lit up the exterior of the harvester. Four frigates launched waves of missiles.

Dreadnought
had paused, seeming to catch her breath after trading blows with the harvester, but now her main guns thundered. Cannon fire crashed into the enemy ship, and explosions lit up along the warty protuberances. It seemed impossible that anything could stand up to this punishment, but when the barrage ended, the harvester ship was still in place, barely scarred from the assault.

Tolvern had given commands to the ship’s AI to time the eliminon battery and warn her when they would lose its effects, and now Jane’s calm voice sounded on the com link.

“Two minutes estimated until the collapse of the gravity shield.”

Damn it!
 

“Where the hell are my cannon?” Tolvern said. “I need another broadside,
now
.”

Even before the words had come out, the cannons fired.
Zealand
and
Richmond
fired at the same time. The torpedo boats made another pass, and the Hroom swooped back into the fight.

Something was happening where the bulbous head of the harvester began to narrow. Gases jetted out, and when Smythe zoomed the viewscreen, it showed fire, burning in a gaping hole, where oxygen ignited as it vented into space. Tolvern could scarcely imagine the shields and bombproofs the buzzards must have to survive such a pounding, but the fleet had finally broken through them.