The Lost Stars: Imperfect Sword (35 page)

“Inform all surrendered units that they must report to me the status of any snakes aboard them,” Marphissa said.

“No response to warning shots,”
Hawk
’s commanding officer said. “Still accelerating all out. I can stay with HTTU 743 as long as you want, Kommodor, but— There are escape pods coming off.”

Marphissa watched as the transport’s entire complement of escape pods shot free in a staggered volley.

“We have communications with the escape pods,”
Hawk
reported. “They say the snakes on 743 have control of engineering and the bridge, that they have barricaded themselves into those compartments.”

“Transports don’t have citadels,” Diaz said. “The snakes must have improvised something.”

“That doesn’t leave us any choice,” Marphissa said. “
Hawk
, fire upon HTTU 743. Target main propulsion units.” She glared at her display, knowing that a substantial fraction of 743’s crew must be stranded aboard since there hadn’t been enough escape pods for the whole crew. She wondered if the crew had selected places in the pods in a disciplined and fair process, or if there had been bloody rioting at the pod bays as men and women fought for what could well be their only chance at life.

“Kommodor,” Diaz said. “From the reports from the surrendered transports, they each had three or four snakes aboard. Two transports say they took one of their snakes prisoner. The other snakes are all reported to have been killed.”

“Two snakes left alive?” she asked. “That’s odd.”

“Maybe they weren’t bad, for snakes.”

“Maybe. The snakes wouldn’t occasionally execute one of their own if they didn’t sometimes let someone with a tiny bit of humanity through the cracks of their selection system. Have word sent back to those two transports to ensure those two snakes are heavily guarded, under constant visual watch by multiple people, and cannot access anything.”

Hawk
had matched velocity to HTTU 743 and swung in directly astern, slamming shots at the transport that collapsed its relatively weak rear shields and went on to impact on 743’s main propulsion units.

Unable to accelerate anymore, but still moving at the same rate through space, HTTU 743 hurtled helplessly toward the distant jump point for Kiribati.

“Put a boarding party on him and find out the exact situation,” Marphissa ordered.

But as
Hawk
moved in to attach a boarding tube, thrusters fired on HTTU 743, creating vector changes. “We can’t get a boarding team over as long as the snakes can fire those thrusters and jerk the ship around,”
Hawk
’s commanding officer reported with frustration.

“All right,” Marphissa said. “Match vectors with 743 as best you can, then use your hell lances to hit his bridge. Hit him enough times to be sure nothing is left working on the bridge.” Which would also mean no one was left alive on the bridge, but that didn’t need to be said.

“I understand, Kommodor.”

Normally, hitting a specific place on an enemy ship was simply impossible when tearing past each other at fractions of the speed of light with engagement times measured in tiny pieces of a second. Simply hitting the enemy at all was an amazing achievement under those circumstances.

But with
Hawk
positioned near the crippled transport, matching speed and direction of travel, it was like shooting at a stationary target while also sitting still. And since the HTTU 743 was a Syndicate design,
Hawk
had a perfect set of deck plans for the transport, telling the warship exactly where to find the Syndicate ship’s bridge.

It took a lot to stop hell lances. The streams of extremely-high-energy particles went through most obstacles without hindrance, leaving large, neat holes in hulls, equipment, and any humans unfortunate enough to be in the way. With 743’s shields down, and with only the light armor that transports boasted,
Hawk
’s hell lances could pierce right through the transport.

The light cruiser fired again and again with merciless precision, tearing holes deep into HTTU 743 and completely through the transport’s bridge. Marphissa watched, trying not to feel sick at the thought of what was happening to everyone on the bridge of the transport. She managed to maintain her composure by switching her attention for brief periods to the process of her other warships’ intercepting, surrounding, and matching vectors with the eight troop transports that had surrendered.

“I need to rest my hell lances,”
Hawk
reported. “They’re overheating.”

“Understood,” Marphissa said. “Try to get a boarding party over again. Give me a link to whoever leads it.”

This time no thrusters fired when
Hawk
moved in close to HTTU 743 and latched a boarding tube onto the transport.

Marphissa activated the link to the head of the boarding party from
Hawk
and called up a view from that person’s survival-suit helmet. She watched as breaching tape opened an access in the side of the transport where the boarding tube was attached, and as
Hawk
’s boarding party entered the transport.

“Got some dead,” the officer leading the boarding party reported tersely. “Looks like they were fighting over places in the escape pods. Only here, though.”

The transport was big inside, big enough to carry hundreds of ground force soldiers and their equipment.
Hawk
’s boarding party headed for the bridge to see what was left, the passageways of the transport spooky with only emergency lighting on and all atmosphere vented through damaged areas of the hull so that only the exact spot where a beam of light fell was illuminated, pitch-blackness reigning instantly beyond the margins of the beam.

Marphissa pulled herself out of her focus on that, concentrating once more on the bigger situation. “Do we send boarding parties onto all of the surrendered transports?” Diaz asked.

“No,” she decided. “We’ll have them go the planet, where
Midway
is waiting with all of the people in her crew to back up our boarding parties, and we’ll deal with all that there. As it is, we’re going to have our hands full picking up the survival pods from 743.” She tapped their current orbit, then a location in orbit about the habitable planet, waiting impatiently for the second it took for the automated systems to recommend a vector. Then she had to do it again because the automated systems had assumed only the warships were going back and had used accelerations based on that. After specifying this time that all ships here were going to the planet, the maneuvering systems produced a different vector that took into account the slower acceleration of the troop transports. Having spent way too much time shepherding around freighters, which made the clumsy troop transports look like sleek greyhounds of space, Marphissa didn’t waste any effort being annoyed at the extra time it would take for all of the ships to get to the planet.

“Kommodor, our landing party has established contact with surviving crew members of 743,”
Hawk
’s commanding officer reported.

Marphissa glanced at the small virtual window that now showed the leader of the landing party facing a group of transport crew members in survival suits.

“All of the snakes aboard 743 are dead,”
Hawk
continued. “Our fire killed everyone on the bridge, and while we were destroying the bridge, the crew members remaining aboard were able to get into the engineering control compartment and finish off the two snakes there. But they tell me the engineering controls are wrecked, and the entire main propulsion section aft was torn up when we shot out their main propulsion units.”

Great.
Marphissa glowered at the image of HTTU 743.
I have a big ship with no bridge and no engineering controls clumping its way toward the jump point for Kiribati.
“I need your estimate as to whether it would be worth the trouble to take that hulk in tow and get it back to the planet with us.”

She could tell the question had been relayed when every surviving crew member of the transport that she could see began shaking their heads with varying degrees of violence.

“They all say no, Kommodor. I agree,”
Hawk
’s commanding officer added. “From what our landing parties have seen, the 743 really is a hulk. The snakes burned out every system and circuit they could before they died, the hull structure took damage from our firing on it, and the power core is shaky because of something the snakes did to its controls.”

The other issues could have gone either way, but not a power core that was less than stable. “I want that power core rigged to self-destruct. Can you take aboard all of the surviving crew members?”

“Yes, Kommodor. It will be tight, but we can do it.”

“Keep them under guard until we can sort them out,” Marphissa said. “Set the power core to blow a half hour after you break contact with 743.”

“Only half an hour?”

“Yes. If something goes wrong, if it doesn’t blow, I don’t want to have to chase that ship halfway to the Kiribati jump point to catch it and make sure it is destroyed.”

Marphissa scanned her display again irritably. “
Hawk
can’t take aboard any of the crew members from the escape pods,” she told Diaz. “She’s going to be full of those who were stuck on 743.”

After glowering at her display for a moment, Marphissa tapped her comm controls. “
Gryphon
,
Eagle
, detach immediately, proceed to pick up escape pods from HTTU 743. Kapitan Stein on
Gryphon
is in command until your units rejoin our flotilla.”

Thirty minutes later, the remains of HTTU 743 disappeared in a flash of energy as the ship’s power core overloaded.
Hawk
was returning to rejoin the flotilla, and
Gryphon
and
Eagle
were beginning to recover crew members from the escape pods, as Marphissa gave the order for the rest of the ships to head for Ulindi’s habitable planet.

—

DEFEATS
were always bad, but even victories could be messy.

This small portion of the surface of the habitable world orbiting Ulindi looked like some kind of construction site, sticking out as a dirt-shaded scar amid green fields and stands of trees. Drakon walked down the shuttle ramp and nodded to the local officials who stood nervously awaiting him. “This is it?” he asked.

“It’s one of the places,” a young man said, his voice trembling.

Drakon moved to the side of a fresh excavation, looking down at tumbled bodies still encrusted with the dirt that had recently covered them. The mass grave appeared to contain the remains of at least a few hundred men and women. “They look like they died a few weeks ago,” Drakon said, letting his disgust be clearly heard.

“Yes, honored—I mean, yes,
General
,” an older man said. “We knew there had been many arrests, that the snakes had been rounding up not only anyone they even slightly suspected but also apparently citizens at random to terrorize the rest of us into submission. But we thought they were being placed in labor camps.” His voice broke on the last words.

“Do you have any idea how many?” Drakon asked.

“Our records are a mess,” a woman said, sounding weary as well as sad. “The snakes detonated virtual bombs in all our databases and networks when it looked like they were going to lose. We’re back to paper and pens and trying to reconstruct the data from whatever unauthorized backups saved portions of the destroyed records.”

“At a guess,” the young man said, “we’re dealing with thousands of dead.”

“How about during the fighting?” Drakon asked. “How many got hurt while my forces were fighting the Syndicate and Haris’s forces?”

“Your . . . military losses . . . General?” the older man asked, puzzled. “We don’t know—”

“No,” Drakon said patiently. “Citizens. I understand most were evacuated from the city before we landed. How many got hurt during the fighting?”

They all looked shocked at a senior supervisor expressing concern for casualties among the workers and their families. “Not too many,” someone said. “Citizens were ordered out of the city you attacked even before the snake headquarters was bombarded.”

“They were afraid we would rise up and attack the Syndicate troops that were attacking you,” another said. “We had no weapons, we had no leaders, we couldn’t have done anything. But the snakes see enemies everywhere.”

“That’s funny, isn’t it?” the old man said. “They saved a lot of our lives because they thought we might be enemies and so forced us to leave the city before the fighting broke out.”

“Are there any leaders left among you?” Drakon asked.

The locals exchanged glances. None of them seemed eager to claim the title of leader or offer up any names. He knew why. They didn’t trust him not to also round up anyone who might be a leader among the citizens. “Listen up, all of you,” Drakon said as if speaking to his troops. “Neither I nor my soldiers intend staying at Ulindi. We had to get rid of Haris and the Syndicate because they were a threat to this entire region. But we aren’t going to rule Ulindi. It’s your star system. You need to put together a government to make decisions and plan and coordinate actions. You’ve had your fill of the Syndicate. One of your decisions will have to be whether you want to voluntarily align yourselves with Midway Star System. Nobody is going to be forced to join, but we’re trying to set up a mutual defense arrangement to protect the local star systems from the Syndicate, from warlords, and from the enigmas.”

They were staring at him again. One finally spoke. “The . . . enigmas?”

“You must have heard rumors of them even though the Syndicate did its best to keep them secret.” Drakon waved toward the sky. “An alien species, intelligent and hostile. They pushed the Syndicate out of star systems like Hina and Pele, and have tried to take Midway Star System more than once.”

“There have been rumors,” a woman confirmed. “You know this is true?”

“They’ve attacked Midway Star System. I’ve seen their ships.”

“You just came to get rid of Haris and the Syndicate?” someone else asked in a bewildered voice. “But if they are gone and you leave, who is in charge?”