The Prisoner of Eldaron: Crimson Worlds Successors II (31 page)

“Yes, sir,” came the reply, as sharp as a razor. The Black Eagle’s fleet didn’t see as much action as the ground forces, but the ship crews were every bit as elite as the line regiments. Many of the captains and senior officers had even seen service with Augustus Garret, and they had brought with them the skill and excellence they’d acquired fighting under history’s most brilliant naval commander.

It had been thirty-five years since Gavin Stark had used his secret stealth ships to devastating effect in the closing stages of the Shadow War. One of the undetectable vessels had managed to sneak into Mars orbit and launch the attack that devastated that world’s surface cities—and others had inflicted almost as much damage elsewhere. But the scientific marvels had all been destroyed during the war, and the secrets of their construction lost. For the next three decades, scientists and researchers had struggled to replicate the technical marvels, but all had failed. Until the Eagles’ chief engineer, the former Marine research chief who had developed half the technology used to fight the First Imperium, had finally made a breakthrough. Tom Sparks’ new technology couldn’t hide large ships or vessels operating above a maximum power level. But the Eagles had just proven conclusively that it worked perfectly on a small shuttle.

“Prepare to launch assault squadrons.” Darius took a deep breath. The Eldari were now blind, at least in space. The rest of the Eagle fleet could close without detection. And when the fighters went in, they would deal another blow to an enemy that didn’t yet know it was under attack.

“All squadrons report ready to launch on your command, General.”

Fighters had been a crucial component of the fleets that had fought against the First Imperium and the Shadow Legions. But they had mostly passed out of use by the small navies the former colony worlds had managed to maintain. The small attack ships remained highly effective in combat, but few vessels were large enough to support squadrons…and the immense maintenance contingents it took to keep them flying. Even Cain’s Eagle vessels only carried six fighters each, a fraction of the massive attack wings that had gone to battle with Augustus Garret. But the Eagles’ craft were highly advanced…and usually the only ones in a fight. And that made them doubly useful.

“
Eagle One
and
Eagle Two
…launch fighters. All other squadrons remain on standby.”

“
Eagle One
and
Eagle Two
, launch,” the captain repeated. A few seconds later, Cain felt the shaking, as
Eagle One
launched her half dozen birds.

He still stared at his screen, watching as the small symbols representing the fighter squadrons appeared next to the larger icons labelled
Eagle One
and
Eagle Two
. Major Darryk was at the head of the twelve small ships. The Eagle’s flight commander was one of the best at what he did.
The
best, Darius Cain believed. And he was leading this small strike.

The Eagles’ fighters weren’t going after enemy squadrons, nor even warships. Eldaron, by all accounts, had a strong army, but no navy to speak of. The Eagle fleet would establish total local space superiority the instant it reached the planet. No, the fighters were on a very special mission, one that Cain was sure would surprise his enemy…and clear the way for his Black Eagles to fight their way to victory…regardless of whatever trap the Eldari had laid for them.

He stared straight ahead, unmoving. He was here for personal reasons, but he’d pushed that aside now, clamped down on all indiscipline. He was cold, his mind clear, focused. There was no emotion…no fear, no hesitation, no pity for those he was about to attack.

Darius Cain was a man, one like any other in many ways. He wasn’t as immune to abuse as he liked to believe, the invective he knew was hurled at his name in the shadows of a hundred worlds. He felt hurt…and love and guilt and regret, the way any man did. His thoughts often wandered during the nights, images of the people of Occupied Space floating in his head, running, trying to flee from him. He wondered how many regarded him only with hatred…and fear. But those thoughts were not in his mind, nor gauzy images of a child and his father, years before on the snow white Atlantian beaches. Not now. He had cast aside his humanity…his iron discipline slamming down over every thought, every impulse. He was a shadowy revenant, a feral beast with one thought in his mind.

The hunt has begun…

*  *  *  *  *

“Eagle strike force, this is Eagle Leader. Approaching final break point. All birds, confirm navcom settings.” Kevin Darryk had been a Black Eagle for eight years…and the first one to pilot a fighter. He’d been a rookie Eagle—but a veteran fighter jock—when Darius Cain’s mercenary company had launched
Eagle One
. And when that great ship began its first voyage, it carried six fighter-bombers in its assault bay. Darryk had been in the lead bird the first time that squadron launched, and he had remained the Eagles’ strike wing commander ever since…even as
Eagle Two
and its brethren expanded the fleet and the fighter group.

He’d struggled at times to attract experienced pilots. Few of the planetary navies maintained fighter corps anymore, and the cadres from his own day had been withered by the losses in the Shadow War and the Second Incursion. Casualties in all services had been bad in those conflicts, but the fighter wings had always taken the heaviest losses. There was no argument…any fleet commander would risk a bunch of four or five man fighters to preserve a battleline of dreadnoughts with a thousand crew on each. He couldn’t argue with the math, but he’d had to work his ass off to build up the Eagle’s fighter group…especially to the quality demanded of everyone who put on the black uniform.

He listened as each of the eleven other birds in the strike force acknowledged. The Eagles had sixty fighters-bombers in total, but only two squadrons had launched on this mission. Eldaron was not a naval power, and the few vessels it possessed would be no threat to the Eagle fleet, even if any of them returned from their pickets at the system’s warp gates. There had been a patrol at the Eagles’ point of entry, two frigates, old rustbuckets that had no place trying to engage anything like the Eagle vessels. Cain’s fleet had burst into the system, jamming all communications within 100,000 kilometers. Less than two minutes later, both of the Eldari frigates were balls of glowing plasma…and not a warning message had gotten through.

“Three, two, one…break.” Darryk gripped the throttle of his fighter, angling it hard and feeling the pressure of six gees slam into him as his ship’s engines fired, changing his vector as he entered orbit. The twelve birds of his command had executed similar maneuvers, and each of them blasted off in a different direction. They had their targets, and they all knew what to do. Darryk felt the tension he always did during an op, but his confidence was stronger. He’d trained these men and women, and he didn’t doubt they would complete the mission with the pinpoint precision it required.

“
Eagle One
C, here. Entering upper atmosphere now.”

“
Eagle One
D…entering atmosphere.”

They all checked in, one at a time, until finally, Darryk tapped the throttle and guided his ship downward. “Eagle Leader…entering atmosphere,” he said.

That’s all twelve. Time to do this…

His ship shook hard as it skimmed the thickening air. Darryk had piloted plenty of fighters in space, but very few in an atmosphere, where gravity and the thickness of the air presented the pilot with an entirely different set of issues. Few ships designed for use in space were streamlined and structurally-reinforced for deployment in an atmosphere. But Darius Cain had demanded his strike force be capable of both space and planetary operation, and Tom Sparks had made it happen. One of Darryk’s first lessons as a Black Eagle had been that Darius Cain gets what he wants…so the grizzled old pilot brushed off his rusty atmospheric doctrines and ran the Black Eagles’ crew through a basic training course.

“Eagle strike force…arm your payloads.” He turned slightly and looked back toward his gunner. “Arm the bombs, Stef.”

“Arming now, sir.” Stef Kross was young, much too young to have served during the Second Incursion, the last time large fighter formations had gone into battle. But she’d been so persistent, Darryk had finally given her a chance…and she’d proven to be a natural, a gunner who could beat the AI’s targeting nineteen times out of twenty. He’d been so impressed, he’d assigned her to his own fighter. And he had never regretted that decision.

Darryk just nodded, and he looked back to his screen.

Two minutes, twenty seconds
, he thought, staring at the plot.

He tapped the throttle, making a minor adjustment. He planned to put the two nuclear warheads exactly on target.

The ship shook again, harder this time. The atmosphere was getting thicker, and Darryk was bringing his bird in on a steep trajectory. He wanted to complete this mission and get the hell out…as quickly as possible. If that meant a rough ride, so be it. He knew the Eldari communications and scanning networks were supposed to be down, but he didn’t plan to take any more chances than absolutely necessary. The enemy might not have fighters, but his ships were going to pass barely two klicks from the ground…and the Eldari damned sure had surface to air capability that could blow his squadrons from the sky.

General Cain wouldn’t have given the authorization if the enemy networks were still active…

He believed in Darius Cain, and he knew the veteran mercenary cared deeply for his soldiers. But he also knew this mission was different. The normal rules didn’t apply. And if those ground batteries still had tracking capability…

One minute…

He looked down at his screen. The course was perfect.

“Alright, Stef…coming up on first target location.”

“I’ve got it, sir.” He could see her in his peripheral vision, working the controls, adding her gunner’s intuition to the AI’s plot.

“Thirty seconds…the ship is yours, Stef.”

He leaned back in his chair, looking out the cockpit of the fighter. It was night over this side of Eldaron, but he could see the twinkling lights of a city below. His eyes panned to the scanning screen. Still nothing. No incoming attacks.

He couldn’t help but smile. He didn’t know how Darius Cain had managed it, but he knew the Eldari com systems were a mess. If they weren’t, he’d have half a dozen rockets on their way up to blast his fighter to atoms.

He felt the ship pitch slightly as Kross applied a tap of thrust to position for the drop. Another few seconds passed, and then he felt it. The sudden lurch as the five megaton warhead blasted out of the fighter’s bay and into the Eldari atmosphere.

He leaned forward and hit the throttle, firing the engines again at six gees. That bomb had a twenty second detonation timer…and Darryk wanted to be as far away as possible before it blew.

A blinding flash turned night briefly to day…and a few seconds later, the fighter shook wildly. His hands were on the throttle, correcting the ship’s course to account for the shockwave that had just hit it.

“Alright,” he said as he brought the gyrating fighter back under control. “Three minutes to second target…and then we can get the hell out of here.

Well, if the Eldari didn’t know we were here before…they damned sure do now
.

*  *  *  *  *

“It was a nuclear detonation, sir. An airburst. We’ve got runners coming in, reporting on several similar explosions.” The colonel was tapping at the side of his headset. “Still no communications…even the land lines are out now.”

The Tyrant’s was in his office, just off the main floor. The palatial room had a movable wall that closed it off from the command center, but it was fully retracted now. The Tyrant sat at his desk, watching his officers trying to manage the crisis…without scanners or communications. It was the Eagles, it had to be. His trap was ready…his well-laid trap. But now it was
his
people panicking, running around like ants after somebody kicked the anthill.

“Are they missing their targets?” The Tyrant stared at the colonel, his eyes burning into his subordinate like two lasers. “They seem to be random airbursts…mostly over rural areas.”

“No,” came a voice from outside the office. “They are not missing. They are hitting exactly where they intended.” The Tyrant heard footsteps, heavy combat boots rapping on the polished floors of the command center, and then General Omar Calman walked into the room. Calman was the Tyrant’s senior general, and the overall commander of his forces. He was also one of the few Eldari who could stand up to the planet’s ruler and not languish in fear at the Tyrant’s fluttering eyelash.

“General, it is about time. I called for you when this all began.” There was an edge to the Tyrant’s voice, but it wasn’t as hard as usual. Eldaron’s dictator had been nervous about facing the Black Eagles, even with a ten to one advantage in numbers…but now he was downright terrified. He knew Calman was a skilled general, and he needed his commander in place now, directing the defense of the planet, not worrying about covering his ass.

“I never got any message. The com lines are down everywhere. I can’t even get a report from units in the field.”

The Tyrant turned and looked around the command center with a disgusted look on his face. “I want communications restored, and I mean fucking now!” His voice was coarse, his fists clenched at his side. The men and woman all around him stared back in abject terror. But not one of them offered a suggestion on how to proceed.

It was the inevitable byproduct of totalitarian rule. The room was filled with friends and relatives of highly-placed officials who had lobbied for prestigious posts for their sons and daughters and other dependents. Skill had been far from the first prerequisite for an appointment to the Citadel’s command staff, and now it was showing. These people had prospered by exercising caution, and by pandering to the egos of their superiors and their ruler…not by making any daring suggestions.