Refusing Excalibur (28 page)

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Authors: Zachary Jones

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A chime on his comm got his attention. It was a message from the
Waynesburg
.

“Good morning, Captain Quill. What may I do for you?” Victor asked.

“You’re awfully relaxed for someone about to go on a suicide mission,” Harlan said.

Victor grunted with amusement. “I’m simply confident this will plan will work. There’s no way the Mohawkers will see this coming.”

“No, I doubt they could. Is your ship ready, Captain?” Harlan asked.

“As ready as she’ll ever be, thanks to the refit your father gave her,” Victor said.

“A reward for the years of good service,” Harlan said, “Since every other ship reports ready, I think I’ll send word to the tugs to get this rock moving.”

“Roger that, Harlan. I’ll see you on the other side,” Victor said. “Drinks on me when this is done.”

“I’ll hold you to that, so don’t get yourself killed, Victor,” Harlan said before closing the connection.

Victor settled back in his seat, trying not to fidget with anticipation. He was about to extract a final justice from Quintus Marsh for killing his brother.

Marsh was a distant second to Magnus Lacano on Victor’s list, but the Lysandran emperor’s time would come. It was just a matter of dealing with this particular problem first.

King Marsh had always been the Kingdom of Mohawk’s greatest weakness. It was more from fear of him that his forces fought the Alliance. Taking him out would end the war. Or at least that’s how Victor had explained it to the high councilor. He couldn’t exactly claim to being objective.

“We’re moving,” Fara said.

Outside, a fleet of tugs pushed against the asteroid with millions of tons of thrust, adding barely centimeters per second to its velocity.

By far the greatest challenge had been simply moving the rock to the jump point, and, even then, the tugs needed to fire their drives constantly to keep the thing in position.

Once the asteroid gained enough momentum to carry itself into the jump point, the tugs detached and flew away to join the massive fleet of Alliance warships loitering nearby.

Victor busied himself, checking the seals on his armored combat suit and the clasp that held his variblade to his thigh.

He repeated the procedure several times until Fara announced, “One minute to jump.”

Victor hit the intercom. “If you haven’t already done so, it’s time for everyone to put on your helmets.” He then closed the visor of his combat suit’s helmet and powered up the display.

Slowly the asteroid drifted into the jump point until its bulk filled the point’s imaginary volume. A flash appeared on the exterior monitors; then a slight shifting of the stars signaled their arrival inside the Mohawk system. All around the asteroid, the largest minefield Victor had ever seen went active.

“Oh, shit,” Victor said. More missiles than he cared to count swarmed toward the asteroid.

“
Oh, shit
? Did I hear you say, ‘
Oh, shit
’? Was this minefield not part of the plan?” Fara asked.

“It was. It’s just bigger than I expected,” Victor said.

“And that’s a problem?” Fara asked.

“It could be,” Victor said.

“Great,” Fara said.

The asteroid's walls were over five hundred meters thick in places. But the minefield had enough warheads to turn the millions of tons of silicate rock, and the ships contained inside, into molten slag.

As the missiles approached, the seismic sensors embedded in the rock spiked as kinetic rounds impacted the surface of the asteroid, adding fresh craters to its already craggy surface. The starships guarding the jump point were taking potshots at the rock. And why wouldn’t they? They probably had standing orders to shoot at anything that came through.

The innermost mines reached the asteroid thirty seconds after it jumped into the system. The nuclear warheads detonated, and all exterior sensors went dead save for the seismic and thermal sensors embedded deep in the rock.

The seismic readings went crazy as the asteroid’s surface was pounded like a drum by weapons fire, and the temperature of the rock rose.

Harlan Quill’s face appeared on the monitor. “Captain Blackhand, there are a lot more mines out there than we anticipated.”

“I know,” Victor said.

“There’s enough firepower out there to destroy this rock,” he said.

“I know.”

“Eventually this asteroid will melt and roast us inside it,” Harlan said.

“I know.”

“If you know all that, then you’ll understand if I blow the charges early,” Harlan said.

“Don’t do that!” Victor said.

“If we don’t get out of this rock before the outer sphere of mines hits us, we’ll get fried,” Harlan said.

“It will take several minutes for that to happen,” Victor said. “Just give it some time.”

“For what?”

“To see what happens,” Victor said.

“That’s pretty thin reasoning,” Harlan said.

“Look, if we wait till the last minute to break from this rock, it will be that much less firepower we have to deal with once we’re outside.”

Thoughts played out on Harlan’s face for a moment before he finally said, “Fine. I’ll hold off on blowing the charges but only for a few more minutes.” He closed the channel.

Victor let out a long breath, fogging the visor of his helmet. Even if they escaped into space, thirty light and medium warships wouldn’t last long against the enemy fleet outside. Not when the Alliance fleet wasn’t scheduled to attack through the jump point for hours.

He settled back in his seat and tried to relax while nuclear weapons detonated all around him. He could do little else other than watch the clock run out.

Yeah, good luck with that
, Victor thought. His anticipation from earlier had morphed into full-on anxiety. Like being trapped inside a burning house, only on a much, much larger scale.

He wondered if this was what it had been like for Gina and Alex in their last moments, futilely hiding inside an underground shelter as their world burned above them.

The thought almost made Victor break out in tears. He shoved it aside. Now was not the time for that.

The seismic sensors continued to spike, and the temperature of the rock climbed. The asteroid’s surface was hot enough to glow. It wouldn’t be much longer until the ships within melted. By then, Harlan would have to set off the charges embedded in the rock or risk having them overheat and rendered inoperable.

Suddenly the seismic sensors flatlined. Victor’s first thought was that the enemy had been destroyed by the detonations, but Victor was still getting other data from outside. The temperature of the asteroid was still rising but much more slowly.

“Oh,…I think they stopped,” Victor said.

Fara leaned around her seat to look back at him. “Stopped? Who’s stopped?”

“They stopped shooting at us!” Victor opened a channel to the
Waynesburg
. “Captain Quill, don’t set off the charges just yet. They stopped shooting at us!”

“Yeah, I noticed that. I guess they decided not to waste any more firepower,” Harlan said.

“What makes you think that?” Victor said.

“Because, before you hijacked my plan, I intended to send asteroids through to thin out the minefields on the other side. The Mohawkers may have guessed the same thing,” Harlan said.

“So it’s back to my plan then,” Victor said.

“It seems so, Captain Blackhand. Time to wait for the cavalry,” Harlan said.

With the external sensors blasted to component atoms, it was impossible to see what was going on outside but not hard to guess.

With its low velocity leaving the jump point, the asteroid would have been immediately captured by the gravity of Mohawk’s star and pulled in. The asteroid was falling toward the star and, not coincidentally, toward the orbit of the planet Mohawk itself.

It wouldn’t hit the planet; the jump was timed specifically so it wouldn't. Otherwise the Mohawkers would have no choice but to destroy the asteroid, and Victor didn’t want that.

What Victor wanted to do was to let the asteroid fall for a few hours and take them outside the defensive sphere of mines and warships surrounding the jump point.

And so Victor and his crew settled in as the asteroid, and the strike force of warships contained within, fell toward the star, gradually gaining velocity as they moved away from the jump point.

Fara leaned around her seat again and opened the visor of her helmet, smiling. “Looks like that luck of yours has held out.”

Bad luck was my luck leading to Gina’s and Alex’s death and the bombardment of my home planet, after my brother was beheaded. Seems I’m due nothing but good luck now
. He schooled his face and locked down those memories before facing Fara. “So it seems.” He returned her smile. “And to think, you were so doubtful about this plan.”

“Well, there’s still plenty of chances for this to go wrong. If we survive this, I’ll make you pay for it later,” Fara said.

Victor’s smile broadened. “I look forward to it.”

He called the crew to a lower state of alert to give everyone a chance to relax after the near-death experience at the jump point.

Three hours after the asteroid jumped into the Mohawk system, the mission timer hit zero. The Alliance fleet would be starting their attack.

A broadcast came from the
Waynesburg
. “All ships, in sixty seconds from my mark, the charges will detonate. Mark!”

The one-minute timer counted down. Victor did a final check of the ship’s systems to make sure weapons, shields, and propulsion all ran optimally.

When the timer hit zero, hundreds of carefully placed mining charges went off, and a section of the asteroid cracked open and blew outwardly.
Alex
's shields protected the ship from the backblast and debris. Empty space loomed where once was a wall of rock, along with the tiny bright blue dot of the planet Mohawk.

“Fara, punch it!” Victor said.

“Got it,” Fara said as the
Alex
leapt from its cradle and out into space, along with the other warships contained within.

Victor’s tactical display came alive with hostile contacts as soon as the
Alex
burst from the asteroid. The bulk of them were concentrated around the jump point, flashing with weapons fire. The Alliance fleet had jumped in on schedule, much to his relief.

The planet Mohawk itself was just over one hundred million kilometers away; the operation had been launched to coincide with the planet’s closest approach to the jump point.

Nearby weapons fire lit up Victor’s tactical screen. Four hostile destroyers were in close range. The way they wildly fired at the Alliance ships suggested they were more than surprised—they were panicking. Victor didn’t intend to give them time to recover.

Targeting the nearest destroyer, he said, “Fara, put us on an attack vector with my target and shoot it down.”

“You got it,” she said, turning the
Alexander
to aim the frigate’s spinal gun on the Mohawker destroyer, firing a burst that punctured the destroyer's shields and perforated the hull, wrecking the starship in seconds.

The other destroyers were similarly dealt with, though one managed to get a fatal shot off on a Mustanger frigate, the
Whirlpool
, before it was knocked out by the
Waynesburg
.

If there were any survivors in the wreckage of the
Whirlpool
, they would have to wait. The mission demanded the Alliance fleet move on their objective as fast as possible.

Fara formed up on the
Waynesburg
’s left wing as the cruiser led the flotilla straight toward the planet Mohawk.

The
Waynesburg
was one of two cruisers in the strike force. Along with the
Easton
and the eight destroyers in the fleet, they would suppress the planetary defenses from low orbit.

The nineteen remaining frigates, including the
Alexander
, would fly to the surface toward Mohawk’s capital of Norton. There they would drop troops directly on the royal palace grounds and then provide air support for them. Victor would be a part of the landing force.

Then they would break into the palace and kill King Marsh.

“You realize Marsh may not be there,” Fara said.

“Quintus Marsh weighs 150 kilos, Fara. He’s not the most mobile of people,” Victor said.

“There’s nothing that says he can’t stuff his fat ass in a sky hopper and move to another part of the planet,” Fara said.

“He’ll be there, Fara. Marsh is known to rarely leave his palace,” Victor said.

“I hope you’re right. It would look awfully silly for us to launch a suicide mission to kill him only to find he’s not there,” Fara said.