The Round Table (Space Lore Book 3) (36 page)

One of the Vonnegan generals watching the scene from an Athens Destroyer must have called in every available Thunderbolt to clear the area of the Gur-Khan because they no longer made any effort to engage the Llyushin fighters. Instead, they dropped all of their gravity bombs and fired all of their proton torpedoes into the funnel. Of course, this made it easier for the Llyushin fighters to destroy their Vonnegan counterparts, but the Vonnegan general must have thought that was a sacrifice worth making if it meant opening the narrows. Groups of two or three Thunderbolts dived at the pass, unloading their entire ordinance, then unwittingly becoming missiles themselves after being shot out of the sky by Quickly or one of the other CasterLan pilots.

One after another, Thunderbolts exploded into the hidden gap between the two ridges that the Gur-Khan had created. There, they joined the wreckage of dozens of armored transports, two hundred armored mechs, and many more Vonnegan troopers.

Seeing that his fighters had become easy targets, the Vonnegan general who had ordered the Thunderbolts to change tactics now called in a group of Athens Destroyers to provide support. Six of the giant ships made their way across the far side of the planet’s surface until they appeared at the forest’s edge. There, they proceeded across the field—a trip that took the better part of a day to walk but that took the flagships only a few seconds. Each Athens Destroyer began unloading its cannons on two targets. The first was the pesky squadron of Llyushin fighters. The second was the narrows with the Gur-Khan fighters who were destroying half of Mowbray’s ground forces all by themselves. Too low for the Crown to be able to target them, they could at least ignore the famous CasterLan defense system.

As soon as the Athens Destroyers broke ranks and entered the fray, ten Solar Carriers did the same thing, forcing the Athens Destroyers to engage them rather than the ground forces. It was a matter of moments before Mowbray’s entire fleet of Athens Destroyers and Vere’s entire fleet of Solar Carriers, along with Kaiser Doom’s HC Ballistic Cruisers and Baron Von Wrth’s Mach-Z Cruisers and every other Round Table ship were all battling one another, only a short distance above the planet’s surface.

The sun was blotted out behind the enormous ships. The battlefield, previously filled with daylight and free of wind, became dark and stormy under the force of the giant ships’ powerful engines. Instead of a momentary eclipse, the darkness would continue as long as the two sides sought to destroy the other.

Dramatically larger than the armored mechs, Llyushin fighters, and everything else battling near the surface, the enormous starships crashed to the ground each time one of them took too much damage and its systems gave out.

During one such crash, a legion of one thousand Vonnegan troopers was crushed under an Athens Destroyer that fell on top of them. During another, a Solar Carrier crashed at the base of the capital wall. A section of it, two hundred yards long and hundreds of stories tall, came crashing to the ground.

And still the battle raged.

95

Further into the tunnel from which the Vonnegan troops had launched their assault on Vere’s bunker, Traskk was still advancing, tearing armor and limbs from anyone in his path. Pistol had taken up a stationary heavy blaster and was firing shots just over Traskk’s head, aiming at the tunnel’s ceiling a few yards further back in an attempt to cause a collapse. The majority of Vere’s forces were mustered in designated areas at the edge of the bunker, while others sent laser blasts and ion grenades out of the bunker’s opening to keep Vonnegan troopers from getting at them from the surface. Even after suffering Traskk’s full ferocity, Vonnegan troopers continued to stream forward from the darkness in overwhelming numbers.

Vere ducked under the vibro blade of an oncoming trooper’s staff blaster, kneed him in the sternum, disarmed him, and fired a shot from the blaster portion of the trooper’s own weapon into his chest plate at point blank range.

With the staff blaster in one hand and a traditional blaster in the other, she ran through groups of battling forces. She shot a Vonnegan trooper in the stomach with her blaster, then swung the glowing blade and cut down another. She blocked a blow from a Vonnegan trooper, their staffs clanging like a thunderclap, then shot him with the weapon in her other hand.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Traskk throw a trooper back down into the darkness of the tunnel. A group of five more Vonnegans circled him. Baring his fangs, he wound up with his tail, spun as fast as he could, and knocked all five of them into the walls or into other troopers.

Her attention came back to her own area of the bunker when a laser blast singed the tip of her hair. She scanned for the shooter and found the Vonnegan trooper coming at her from the side. She leveled her own blaster and hit him directly between the tinted lenses of his helmet.

Yelling—a familiar voice. Looking around, she realized it was Morgan’s voice. The only faces Vere recognized, however, were Pistol’s and Traskk’s.

“Hello?” Morgan said. “Is anyone there?”

Only then did Vere realize the voice was coming from the comm device on her wrist.

“Morgan?” Vere asked. “Where are you?”

True to form, Morgan didn’t waste time asking how the battle was going above ground. Instead, she got right down to business: “I’m at 23, 37, point 6731, approximately one hundred yards below ground. I need a bunker buster at 23, 38, point 6300.”

Vere looked up just in time to see the glowing blade of a Vonnegan staff blaster coming down at her, missing the front of her face by inches. She slammed the end of her own staff blaster on the trooper’s foot, then kicked him in the stomach. As he hunched over, the wind knocked out of him, she brought an elbow down on the back of his neck.

“Hello?” Morgan said.

Vere brought the comm device back up to her mouth. “There’s a war going on up here, Morgan. We’re kind of busy.”

A display screen showed an Athens Destroyer that must have lost control of its navigation system because it was drifting off toward the mountains on the far side of the forest. As it did, a trail of thick black smoke trailed behind it.

“Just relay my message to the Solar Carriers. I need that bomb right now.”

“Morgan—”

On one of the other bunker displays, Vere saw a Solar Carrier overhead breaking in half after being hit by a series of proton torpedoes across the main part of its frame. Half of the ship drifted off behind her and would soon crash into some part of the capital. Hopefully everyone there was already in a safe place. The other half of the giant vessel was falling right toward where they were all fighting in the bunker.

“Move!” Vere screamed to everyone around her.

No one, neither CasterLan nor Vonnegan, knew what she was talking about but they all understood the urgency in her voice and began to run, friend and enemy following her out of the bunker.

“Vere?” Morgan said. “I need—”

“I know,” Vere snapped. “Damn it, I know.”

“Vere—”

“It’s coming,” she called behind her as she got out of the bunker and was out in the open, still running.

Some of the Vonnegan troopers stopped as soon as they were back out in the open fields. Either they didn’t want to risk another Vonnegan seeing them run alongside CasterLan soldiers or they knew they were outside the area where the front half of the Solar Carrier was going to crash.

Vere kept running, though, and prayed that the CasterLan soldiers behind her did as well. The Vonnegan troops didn’t realize it yet, but avoiding the impact zone was the easy part. It was the residual force of the impact that would kill anyone close to it. And surely enough, further away than anyone else, she turned in time to see Vonnegan troopers who thought they were safe, getting flung a hundred yards by a tidal wave of rock and dirt as thousands of tons of Solar Carrier crashed into the planet.

Before the ship had impacted, she would have been worried that the bomb Morgan was requesting was going to hit too close to her own forces. Now that the Solar Carrier had wiped out the forward bunker and any organized resistance near it, she went ahead and relayed Morgan’s request to the command center.

Although she didn’t hear the relayed signal, her request would be forwarded to the nearest Solar Carrier within seconds. Which meant in a matter of moments, the ground was going to start shaking and trembling again.

96

The scene was unlike anything Quickly had experienced. In all of his years as a pilot in battles and reconnaissance missions, he had never before witnessed anything like what was happening above Edsall Dark.

The Thunderbolts, the Vonnegan ships he had faced off against more than any other, had given up on attacking the Llyushin fighters and were blasting everything and anything they could target within the dust and fog that engulfed the Gur-Khan’s narrows. Obviously, it was the only way they hoped to clear a way through and enable the ground forces to get to the capital wall.

It had never been so easy to shoot Thunderbolts out of the sky. If Surrey were still there with him, Quickly was sure he would have heard a running commentary from his friend about how the Thunderbolts were just as easy to shoot as usual.

At the same time, though, the Athens Destroyers had moved in to combat the Llyushin fighters at close range. It was something the much larger ships weren’t designed to do, so they also focused their laser cannons at the capital itself. But this had only enticed the Solar Carriers and all of the other Round Table’s navy vessels to descend closer to the planet’s atmosphere and begin unloading barrages of every kind on the Vonnegan flagships.

One Athens Destroyer, already tearing apart from massive structural damage, took a dozen more blasts from as many allied starships and broke into so many pieces that there was barely any identifiable debris by the time all the wreckage hit the ground.

A Supreme Athens Destroyer set a course for the space directly above the capital. Its captain apparently wanting to retreat and avoid taking direct fire, but forgetting that the only safe direction was backward. The enormous flagship only made it to the second layer of the planet’s atmosphere before the Crown—the mighty five-pronged cannon atop the capital—swiveled to face it and wiped out all of its systems with a single ion blast. Then, with its second shot, the Crown caused so much damage that every viewport, exhaust port, and opening on the Supreme Athens Destroyer was vaporized. And finally, with the third shot, the vessel, already a useless shell of atomized steel beams, was reduced to burnt scrap metal, tumbling back down toward the planet’s surface.

In all his life, Quickly never thought he would see such a scene above the place he called home.

The list of things he had never witnessed before didn’t end there, however. The next Solar Carrier to launch a projectile didn’t aim it at an Athens Destroyer or any other Vonnegan vessel. Instead, it headed directly toward the planet’s surface. It was longer than any other torpedo or missile he had seen fired during the battle. Segmented into three sections, each as long as an ordinary proton torpedo, the projectile rocketed toward the fields below. The front and back sections had a gold hue. The middle section was completely black.

Although Quickly had never seen one fired during battle, he knew exactly what it was. A bunker buster. As he watched, the highly specialized bomb flew toward the ground, leaving a trail of gray smoke behind it.

When it hit the ground, there was no explosion, only a puff of dirt. Anyone who didn’t know what the projectile was intended to do might have thought it was a dud. Quickly, however, knew it wasn’t supposed to explode until it got to a predetermined distance underground. It was the same type of bomb that, years earlier, had killed Firebrand the Heinous after the warlord had locked himself in a fortress half a mile below the surface of a moon colony.

Another second went by without an explosion. Then another. Finally, when the bunker buster did detonate, the ground swelled in a hemisphere, exploding upward as if a giant balloon were being inflated under the field. After the underground explosion had dissipated, the ground fell once again, sending shockwaves of energy out in every direction and a crevice where the planet had been flattened.

Quickly hoped there were no CasterLan troops in the underground tunnels anywhere near where the bomb had exploded. If there had been, they were all dead now, along with anything else in the blast radius.

97

The dead Fianna was Morgan’s only indication that she was in the right tunnel. No matter how far she went, though, she found no other trace of Mowbray or the other eight guards. All she could do was keep running and hope she caught up to them.

“Mowbray!” she yelled again. The word echoed over and over.

Another hundred yards further through the tunnel, the ground began to shake with the intensity of a severe earthquake. Further ahead, too far for her to see or hear, a projectile had hit the ground, carving a path a hundred yards into Edsall Dark’s belly. Morgan was knocked off her feet. Her ears were ringing.

She was halfway back up to her feet—one hand and one knee still on the ground—when a wave of dirt and dust came blasting through the tunnel, knocking her down again. One hand kept her braced on the ground. The other held the straps of her breathing mask to her face until the force of the explosion had passed.

The bunker buster that she had requested had gone off. After the tremors faded, she was back up to her feet, racing forward once again. Only two minutes later, she came across the spot where the bomb had detonated. On the far side of the blast, under an immense heap of rock and rubble, were the remains of two more Fianna.

Then, ahead in the darkness, she saw his faint outline. The Vonnegan ruler.

“Mowbray!” she yelled, this time with excitement in her voice. A smile spread across her face.

Mowbray turned to see who was calling him. Then, either dismissing her ability to threaten him or else being focused only on his goal, he turned and continued forward through the tunnel. As he did, the six surviving Fianna formed a circle around him.