Finest Hour (The Exiled Fleet Book 3) Read online

  Finest Hour

  The Exiled Fleet Book 3

  By

  Richard Fox

  Copyright © by Richard Fox

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.

  ASIN: B07YM4XFP9

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  Read The Ember War for FREE

  CHAPTER 1

  Commodore Gage stepped out of a lift and onto the Orion’s bridge as battle-station sirens wailed. His Genevan bodyguard, Thorvald, brushed past him, the larger man’s armored bulk blocking Gage’s view of the crew as he made his way up to the holo tank on the command dais.

  The ship’s XO, Price, was already at the tank. She brushed her blond hair back from her face and held it, her other hand on a helmet resting on the circular control panel around the hologram showing New Madras and the local void. She glanced at Gage’s helmet, waiting for him at his station.

  “Protocol.” Gage tapped his helmet with one hand while the other jabbed at icons within the tank. Indus ships vectored red diamonds blinking not far from the main star fort protecting the northern hemisphere.

  He had to lean back to see around Thorvald, who’d put himself between the commodore and the crew, and the rest of the sailors had yet to don their helmets before void combat. “I’m in command. I button up last. What’s everyone waiting for?”

  “Protocol,” Price said softly to keep her words just for Gage. “You’re Albion’s regent, sir. I mean ‘sire.’ By tradition, everyone is to ensure that the royal family—or their representatives are to—”

  “Blast it.” Gage put on his helmet and keyed the air seals. His ears popped as the void suit beneath his uniform locked onto his helmet and stale air wafted over his face. Price took the cue and followed suit. He heard the snap of more helmets being donned, but could only see the rest of Thorvald’s back.

  “Take your place by the lift.” Gage rapped knuckles against the dragon-scale-like armor plates on Thorvald’s suit. “The crew is no threat.”

  “Apologies.” Thorvald turned slightly, the front of his helmet closed and modeled after a medieval knight’s. “The AI within my suit is…insistent. The bonding process has been—”

  “Later,” Gage snapped. “There’s a battle unfolding and the crew needs to see me ready and unafraid. Can’t do that if I’m peeking over your shoulder. Move.”

  Thorvald stepped off the dais, taking up a position by the lift doors and shifting a carbine off his back to hold against his waist.

  “We’re going to have a discussion on what me being the regent means aboard this ship. After the current crisis. Fleet status?” Gage shifted the holo view to the star fort Amritsar. The structure was shaped like a compass rosette—four long planes studded with weapon batteries around a squat inner ring, but with two more up and down the z-axis (north-south in Albion naval terminology). Plasma cannons lit up with heat from the ship’s passive scans, but there was no telemetry data coming from the guns to know which direction they were facing.

  Gage frowned. Squeezing the fingertips of one hand together, he poked them into the fort and popped his hand open. The command should have displayed all information feeds coming from the fort, but he got a red error message instead.

  “All ships have made the transition from slip space,” Price said. “Forming a standard battle line with shields oriented toward the Daegon incursion.” She poked hard on a screen and mumbled a curse. “The data for which just shut off. In fact, none of the Indus channels are…they’re broadcasting, but we don’t have the crypto to read any of it.”

  “Even in the void there’s a fog of war,” Gage said. “Have the fleet hold a screen formation over the planet but don’t join shields into a wall just yet. Have the Hephaestus position between us and New Madras. We can’t afford to lose her. Let’s get a better picture of this battle before we lock down for a fight.”

  He brought up data feeds from his fleet and added them to the holo. Sensor feeds from the Fairbairn flashed with priority traffic, and he swiped it up and into the tank. Up came video of Daegon ships—the distinctive linked-diamond hull sections in stark contrast to the Albion and Indus vessels—firing in several directions at once. One Daegon ship, one of their smaller destroyers, took a direct hit at the join between the first and second hull sections and snapped apart, flames grasping at the void as the internal atmosphere bled out.

  “These are all escorts,” Gage frowned. “Where’s the battleship-sized command vessel?”

  “We’re not reading anything of that size…wait a second.” Price shifted the holo up and a gold square pulsed along a projected flight path from the Orion to Theni City. “Cobra squadron is escorting Prince Aidan. We don’t have any identify friend-or-foe transponders from the Indus. If we don’t have theirs, they don’t have ours.”

  Gage’s face went pale as he realized his mistake. Assumptions were the mother of all foul-ups, and he’d assumed the Indus and Albion IFF would remain linked after his first contact with Admiral Chadda, the New Madras military commander.

  Without the right IFF transponders, the fighters of the Cobra squadron would appear as blips on New Madras defense screens. Even if the weapon batteries did a visual check to ensure they weren’t firing on their own ships that might not be broadcasting IFF due to battle damage or other malfunctions, the Albion Typhoons didn’t look much like the Indus Chakram void fighters. It would take only one scared weapon crewman to panic and assume the new, unfamiliar ships were the enemy.

  “Let me guess,” Gage said, “we lost IFF the second the Daegon arrived in system.”

  “That’s…that’s correct, sir. We’re trying to hail the Amritsar, but all we’re getting is noise,” Price said.

  “They switched encryption without telling us,” Gage said. “We had this problem during the Reach War. They mentioned this at the academy—how they…should work. Keep hailing the Indus.”

  Gage opened a channel to the Cobra squadron commander, call sign Marksman.

  “Cobra actual, we’ve got a slight situation here,” Gage said.

  “Would that be the lack of IFF, Commodore?” Marksman’s head and shoulders, his face obscured by his helmet, came up in the holo. “Because the pucker factor’s been especially tight since we noticed. Getting shot down by Daegon’s one thing. Getting hit by ‘friendlies’ is downright embarrassing. Especially since we’ve got—”

  “Hold your course for Theni City,” Gage said. “You’re expected. I’ll have this commo issue sorted…Fly casual.”

  In the holo tank, dozens and dozens of torpedo icons sprang from the Amritsar and arced toward the Daegon ships.

  “Too many,” Gage said. “By our sensor count they just emptied every tube on that fort.”

  “Overkill.” Price nibbled her bottom lip. “Indus systems are notoriously out-of-date. Why would they release a death blossom like that?”

&nbsp
; “Because they panicked,” Gage said. “And the Daegon were counting on it. Any response to our repeated hails? Didn’t think so. No time for subtlety. Guns!” Gage shouted.

  “Sir!” came back from the targeting section.

  “One plasma shot, forward battery two, firing data coming from my station.” Gage tapped a pad, then dragged and dropped a file onto the gunnery section’s icon.

  “Sir…the target is the Indus star fort,” the gunnery officer said.

  “Commodore,” Price said, frowning, “there’s a lack of subtlety and then there’s…poking the proverbial bear.”

  “We are firing at the fort,” Gage said, “not on the fort. Important difference. The round will just miss their shields. Engage.”

  The gunnery officer paused for a moment, then shrugged.

  Gage felt a slight tremor through the deck plates and watched the holo as the bolt streaked away from the Orion, past the fort, and into the void. The round would dissipate into waste heat and photons before it cleared the orbit of the outermost moon.

  “We’re being hailed.” Price nodded slowly.

  “Figured that would do it,” Gage said. “To me.”

  A window slid up in the holo of a man in a blue and yellow vac suit, his face visible through a clear visor, his beard scrunched to his face by smart wires, a helmet with a large metal ring askew over one side of his head.

  “Admiral Gage,” Chadda said. “Did your ship have a weapons malfunction? Or did your IFF systems not…” His brow furrowed as he glanced down, then he turned to speak terse-sounding Indus over one shoulder. Looking back at Gage, his face slightly flush with embarrassment, he said, “We didn’t update our crypto measures with you when the Daegon entered the system. Standard practice for us. Sharing with allies is not as standard.”

  “I gathered as much,” Gage said. “Now that I have your attention, can we fix this problem?”

  Chadda nodded quickly and waved a hand at Gage. New data feeds slowly populated the holo tank.

  “You’ve got an entire squadron of fighters en route to Theni?” Chadda asked.

  Gage’s eyes hardened. “A number of critically wounded in need of medical care our ships can’t provide,” Gage said. “And I thought the sight of Albion fighters overhead would show our joint resolve, decades of friendship between our people, to the citizens of Theni.”

  Price leaned back slightly, surprised to hear the Commodore lying.

  “Yes, excellent idea,” Chadda said. “With this victory, Albion allies in the skies above, this will go a long way toward settling the near panic the planet’s been in for the past few days.”

  “I don’t believe this fight is over,” Gage said. “We’ve fought the Daegon before. They’re not afraid to take casualties. What you destroyed weren’t their ships of the line. Keep your ships on high alert until—”

  “Ashtekar particle spike!” the conn officer shouted. “Locus over…the northern magnetic pole. It’s skewed off normal, Commodore. They’re coming in over the ocean a few hundred miles from Theni City.”

  “So close to the gravity well,” Chadda said as one hand went to stroke his beard and bumped off his visor. “That’s impossible.”

  “We saw this when they assaulted Albion,” Gage said. He twisted the globe in the holo around and laid a quick intercept heading for his fleet. “My ships can be in weapons range in minutes. I suggest you vector the battle group you have over the equator to engage from the south. We’ll have them in our cross fire.”

  “I am quite capable of defending my own skies, Commodore.” Chadda paused. “And I agree with your suggestion. IFF has synced. Any strikes on my ships or soil from Albion guns will not be excused so lightly as the last time.” He wagged a finger at Gage and the channel closed.

  “Yes, he has this well in hand,” Gage deadpanned. “XO, reorient the fleet to a lance formation. Orion at for fore.”

  “Aye aye,” Price said and the ship lurched ahead toward the slip-space exit point forming over New Madras. The rest of the fleet formed into a cone with the carrier as the point. “Why did you lie to him, sir?”

  “Trust is in short supply,” Gage said. “We just killed one Faceless assassin that was murdering his way through my crew to Prince Aidan. I don’t know if everyone around Chadda can be trusted. As such, the fewer people that know where the Crown Prince is, the less of a chance the Daegon will know where to go after him. I’m quite content to have the enemy think Aidan is aboard the Orion. He’s safer that way, even if we—as a result—are not.”

  “You think Ambassador Carruthers can keep it a secret?” Price asked.

  “Our diplomatic corps aren’t fools,” Gage said. “And she understood my instructions when I spoke to her over a secure line.”

  “And the Cobra squadron…”

  “Will remain in Theni City as a gesture of goodwill…and to evacuate Aidan should the need arise,” Gage said.

  “Rather adept of you, sir,” Price said. “Tolan would be impressed.”

  “Speaking of, where are he and the Joaquim?”

  “Made slip space back to the Kigeli Nebula a few minutes ago,” she said. “There’s no quick way out of this system to anywhere else since all the New Madras nav buoys were sabotaged prior to our arrival. Tolan’s ship made a back plot over our way in just before the lay line collapsed.”

  “And he took most of the pirates we had in the brig with him,” Gage said. “One less headache to deal with.”

  “Slip arrival!” the gunnery officer called out.

  In the holo, dozens of Daegon ships materialized. Gage ceded targeting authority to his bridge officers and concentrated on the tactical problem unfolding before him. Again, the Daegon had sent through their smaller, less capable ships. They’d come through slip space in an irregular formation, none close enough to support the others with their shields.

  “Sloppy,” Gage said. “Damn sloppy.” He zoomed in on one of the ships and found open hangar bays on the diamond faces. A shape blurred out of the hangar and Gage zoomed back out and tagged the exiting object. It vectored toward a city on the coast of the northern ocean.

  Hundreds more plots erupted from the Daegon fleet and followed the same path.

  “It’s an invasion fleet,” Gage said and opened a channel to Admiral Chadda. “Amritsar, target the carriers and destroy them before they can unload everything. Easier to kill their soldiers aboard ship than when they get to the ground.”

  Chadda spoke quickly in Indus to someone offscreen, and a chorus of panicky voices answered.

  “Our torpedo systems…aren’t back online yet,” he said hesitantly. “Our magazines suffered a number of malfunctions. We overloaded their capabilities when we wiped out their initial force.”

  “Which is what our Daegon enemy anticipated,” Gage said. “My fleet will be within firing range soon. We’ll do our best to stem the tide.” He muted sound and video on the channel to Chadda and looked through the holo to Price.

  “XO, ready a full torpedo salvo. Target the troop carriers,” Gage said.

  “Aye aye.” Price worked commands into her panel as Gage zoomed the tank in on Aidan’s shuttle heading to the planet. The Daegon force was close to the Crown Prince and icons for Daegon fighters appeared around their ships.

  “We’re low on torps, Commodore,” Price said. “Targeting solution is working through the fleet but if we lose them all, we’ll—”

  “Make the same mistake the Indus just did,” Gage said. “The irony isn’t lost on me. But the Daegon don’t know how many torpedoes we have left. The throw weight of that star fort is known. We need to appear as dangerous as possible, Price. Gain and maintain their attention so they don’t try for the shuttle.”

  “We could recall them…”

  “By the time they make it back we’ll be in the thick of the fight.” He shook his head. “There are no good options here. Just less-bad decisions to make.”

  More and more drop ships and landing pods shot out from the Daego
n ships, their lethal cargo raining down on the coastal city. Gage watched as enemy craft blinked out of existence as ground defenses engaged, but with each passing minute, more and more invaders made it to their beachheads.

  “We’re at the outer edge of effective torpedo range,” Price said.

  “Fire at will. Let our destroyers off the leash, have them interdict the Daegon landers. The rest of the fleet closes to cannon range to finish off their ships,” Gage said.

  The Orion shuddered as weapons blasted out of launchers. The torpedoes accelerated straight off the dorsal and ventral tubes, then curved toward the Daegon troop carriers. More torpedoes from the fleet’s cruisers and frigates joined the swarm and alert icons pinged next to each ship: empty torpedo magazines.

  Gage skewed the holo to one side, checking on Prince Aidan’s progress. The shuttle’s position slowed from its projected course, coming almost to a standstill.

  “What the hell…” Gage tapped a screen to open a channel, but the connection didn’t go through.

  “Commodore,” Price said, snapping the holo back to show the entire battle. Albion torpedoes hurtled through a swarm of counter fire from the troop carriers. Gage swallowed hard as more than half were destroyed before they could begin their terminal acceleration. The remaining weapons sprang forward, like the closing jaws of a trap, and hit home.

  Daegon ships fell out of formation, bleeding air and broken hull fragments as they succumbed to the planet’s gravity. One carrier kept disgorging drop pods, but haphazardly, sending troops into the void or on trajectories through the atmosphere that guaranteed they’d burn to a crisp before they ever made it to the ground.