Red tribal drums played in the belly of one of my ships, The Evening Tide, beat through the speakers in a martial rendition of the Forbidden Song. A steady undulation of defiance as we roll toward the Sword Armada. I’ve never seen a fleet so large. Not even when we stormed Mars. That was just two rival houses summoning allies. This is the conflict of peoples. And it is appropriately massive.
Unfortunately, Roque and I studied under the same teachers. He knows the battles of Alexander, of the Han armies, and Trafalgar. He knows the greatest threat to an overwhelming power is miscommunication, chaos. So he does not overestimate the power of his force. He subdivides into twenty smaller mobile divisions, giving relative autonomy to each Praetor to create speed and flexibility. We face not one huge hammer, but a swarm of razors.
“It’s a nightmare,” Victra murmurs.
I thought Roque would do this, but I still curse as I see it. In any space engagement, you must decide if you’re killing enemy ships or capturing them. It seems he’s intent on boarding. So we cannot slug it out with them and hope for the best. Nor can we lure his fleet into my trap from the first. They’ll muscle through it and kill the Howlers. Everything depends on the one advantage we do have. And it’s not our ships. It is not our hundred thousand Obsidians I have packed in leechCraft. It is the fact that Roque thinks he knows me, and so his entire strategy will be predicated on how I would behave.
So I decide to overshoot his estimation of my insanity and show him how little he really understands the psychology of Reds. Today I lead the Pax on a suicide mission into the heart of his fleet. But I don’t begin the battle. Orion does, soaring forward ahead of me on Persephone’s Howl with three quarters of my fleet. They cluster in spheres, the smallest corvettes still four hundred meters long. Most are half-kilometer-long torchShips, some destroyers, and the four huge dreadnoughts. Long-range missiles slither out from the Gold ships and from our own. Miniature computer-guided countermeasures are deployed. And then Roque’s fleet flashes into motion and the black space between the two fleets erupts with flack, missiles, and long-range railgun munitions. Billions of credits’ worth of munitions spent in seconds.
Orion shrinks the distance to Roque’s fleet as Mustang and Romulus’s ships hurtle toward the southern edge—per Io’s pole—of Roque’s formation, attempting to hit the only vulnerable place on a ship, the engines. But Roque’s fleet is nimble and ten squadrons divide from the rest, orientating themselves so their bristling broadsides face the bows of the Moon Lord ships coming up from the planet’s south pole and rake them with railgun fire. A hundred thousand guns go off simultaneously.
Metal shreds metal. Ships vomit oxygen and men.
But ships are made to take a beating. Huge hulks of metal subdivided into thousands of interlocking honeycombed compartments designed to isolate breaches and prevent ships from venting with one railgun shot. From these floating castles stream thousands of tiny one-man fighter craft. They swarm in small squadrons through the no-man’s-land between our fleet and Roque’s. Some packed with miniature nukes meant for killing capital ships. Helldivers and drillboys trained night and day in sims by the Sons of Ares fly with squadrons of synced Blues. They slash into the Society’s war-hardened pilots led by ripWings striped with Gold.
Romulus’s force peels away from Mustang’s to link with Orion, while Mustang continues toward the heart of the enemy formation, preparing the way for my thrust.
We close to three hundred kilometers, and the mid-range rail guns open up. Huge barrages of twenty kilogram munitions hurtling through space at mach eight. Flak shields plume over the entire Gold formation. Closer to the ships, PulseShields throb iridescent blue as munitions crack into them and careen off into space.
My strike force lingers behind the main battle. Soon it will become a war of boarding parties. LeechCraft launching by the hundreds. Aggressive Praetors will empty their ships of their marines and Obsidians to claim enemy vessels, which they will then keep after the battle, per rules of naval law. Conservative Praetors will hoard their men till the last, keeping them to repel boarding parties and use their ships as their main weapon of war.
“Orion’s given the signal,” my captain says.
“Set course for the Colossus. Engines to ramming speed.” My ship rumbles under my feet. “Pelus, the trigger’s yours. Ignore torchShips. Destroyers or larger are the order of the day.” The ship groans as we hurtle forward from the back of Orion’s fleet. “Escorts keep tight. Match velocity.”
We pass the artillery ships, then the four-kilometer-long Persephone’s Howl as we emerge out the center of Orion’s front with the enemy like a hidden spear, now driving into the fifty kilometers of no-man’s-land, aiming for the heart of the enemy. Orion’s ships fire chaff, creating a corridor to protect our mad approach. Roque will see what I intend now, and his capital ships drift back from mine, inviting me into the center of his huge formation as they rain fire down on my strike force.
Our shields flicker blue. Enemy munitions sneak through the chaff and punish us. We return fire. Raking a destroyer as we pass with a full broadside. It loses power. LeechCraft pour out of it to try and slip through our chaff tunnel, but our escorts shred the small craft. Still, we’re hit by the guns of a dozen ships. Red glows around our shields. They fail in stages, local generators shorting out on our starboard side . Instantly, our hull is punctured in seven places. The honeycomb network of pressurized doors activates, shutting the compromised levels of my ship off from the rest. I lose a torchShip. Half a click off bow, a full barrage of rail-munitions rake her from stem to stern, fired by Antonia’s dreadnaught the Pandora.
“Seems my sister is enjoying my ship,” Victra says.
Bodies erupt out of the torchShip’s bridge, but Antonia continues to fire on the much-smaller ship until the nuclear core of her engines implodes. Pulsing white twice before devouring the ship’s back half. The shock wave pushes our craft sideways. Our EMP and pulse shielding holds, lights flickering just once. Something huge slams into the ten-meter-thick bulkhead beyond the bridge. The wall bends inward to my right. The shape of a railgun munition stretching the metal inward like an alien baby. Our gunners rip apart the 1.5-kilometer destroyer that fired on us, loosing eighty of our railguns directly into her bridge. Two hundred men gone. We’re taking no prisoners at this stage. It’s staggering the amount of violence the Pax can deal out. And staggering the amount we’re taking. Antonia dissects another part of my strike force.
“ Hope of Tinos is down,” my Blue sensor officer says quietly. “ The Cry of Thebes is going nuclear.”
“Tell Tinos and Thebes helmsman to punch negative forty-five their midline and abandon ship,” I snap. The ships obey and alter course to ram Antonia’s flagship. She reverses her engines and my dying ships carry on harmlessly into space. One goes nuclear.
We’re outmatched and outgunned here in the heart of the enemy formation. Trapped. No escape. A sphere forming around us. I only have four torchships left. Make that three.
“Multiple deck fires,” an officer intones.
“Munitions detonations on deck seventeen.”
“Engines one through six are down. Seven and eight are at forty percent capacity.”
The Pax dies around me.
Roque’s MoonBreaker looms ahead. Twice the length of my ship, three times the girth . A floating military dock city eight kilometers long. With a huge crescent bow, like a shark with an open mouth swimming sideways. She retreats from us at the same pace we advance. Making sure we cannot ram her as she punishes us with her superior weaponry. Roque thought I would pull a Karnus. Try to slam into their capital ship with my own. That’s now impossible. Our engines are nearly done. Our hull compromised.
“All forward guns target their railguns and missile launchers on their top deck, carve us a shadow.” I pull up a hologram of the ship and circle the area of fire with my fingers, directing the fire as Victra gives commands to the fighter groups which we’ve held on to till now. The ripWings scream out into space. The Pax rotates to present her main gunbanks to the Colossus to open a broadside.
It doesn’t matter what we do at this stage. We’re a wolf pinned to the ground by a bear and it’s smashing our legs one by one, carving off our ears, our eyes, our teeth but keeping our belly nice and ready for a raking. My ship shudders around me. Blues rip out of sync, vomiting in the pits as the datanerves in the ships, to which they’re linked, die one by one. My helmsman, Arnus, has a seizure as the engines are shredded.
“ The Dancer of Faran is gone,” Captain Pelus says. “No escape pods.” It was a skeleton crew, but still forty die. Better than a thousand. Only two torchShips of my initial sixteen remain. They race around Antonia’s Pandora behind us, but that ship is a black, hulking monster. She shreds the fastmovers till they’re dead metal. And when escape pods launch from the quiet ships, she shoots them down. Victra watches the murder quietly. Adding it to Antonia’s debt.
Roque is inviting us to launch our leechCraft, drawing the Colossus closer to my dead ship. A kilometer away now. I accept the invitation. “Launch all leechCraft at the surface of the MoonBreaker,” I say. “Now. Fire the spitTubes.”
Hundreds of empty suits fire out the spitTubes as they would in an Iron Rain. Two hundred leechCraft launch from the four hangars of my ship. Spewed out in a stream of ugly metal, each could carry fifty men to pump into the guts of the MoonBreaker. Controlled remotely by Blue pilots on board Persephone’s Howl, they race fast as they can to cross the dangerous space between the two capital ships. And they’re wiped away before they make it half the distance as Roque detonates a series of low-yield nuclear warheads.
He guessed my move.
And now my flight of ships is nothing but debris floating between the two vessels. Emergency sirens flash on the ceiling of my bridge. Our long-range sensors are down. Our guns smashed. Multiple deck breaches.
“Hold together,” I murmur. “Hold together, Pax. ”
“We’re receiving a transmission,” Virga says.
Roque appears in the air before me. “Darrow.” He sees Victra too. “Victra, it is done. Your ship is dead in the water. Tell your fleet to surrender and I will spare your lives.” He thinks he can end this rebellion without putting us in the grave. The entitlement of it rankles me. But we both know he needs my body to show the worlds. If he destroys my ship and kills me, they’ll never find me in the wreckage. I look at Victra. She spits on the ground in challenge. “What is your answer?” Roque demands.
I bend my fingers crudely. “Fuck you.”
Roque looks off screen. “Legate Drusus, launch all leechCraft. Tell the Cloud Knight to bring me the Reaper. Dead or alive. Just make sure he’s recognizable.”