Serengeti Page 8

  “Dammit. I knew those bastards were still out there somewhere.” Henricksen looked straight into a camera. “Should’ve jumped away from here when we had the chance.”

  “Brutus—”

  An alert interrupted her—scans detecting a massive energy signature somewhere inside the group of DSR ships behind them.

  “They’ve brought another.”

  “Another what?” Henricksen asked her.

  “Aphelion.” Serengeti panned a camera around, searching the ships behind her until she spied the Aphelion’s long, thin shape, forking metal rod protruding from his nose, cobalt blue energy crackling wildly. She zoomed in and threw the image up on the front screen.

  “Damn. God damn,” Henricksen breathed.

  “Aphelion is firing,” Serengeti warned as a sparking blue orb separated from the Aphelion’s nose.

  “Shit. Warn—”

  “Captain! Parallax is firing!” Finlay shouted.

  Two massive balls of cobalt blue fire showed on the screens projected on the front windows, approaching the Meridian Alliance fleet from opposite directions.

  “Trapped,” Henricksen breathed in horror. He slammed a hand on a panel opening ship-wide comms. “Brace! Brace! Brace!”

  Serengeti flashed a warning to Brutus, who sent it across all channels. Not much help really, but it gave the fleet a few precious seconds of maneuvering before the Aphelion’s orbs slammed into them—one after the other, carving their way through the Meridian Alliance fleet.

  Ships exploded, disintegrating left and right. The orbs chewed through the fleets’ ranks, carving up metal, energy dissipating with each vessel they came in contact with. Parallax’s missile destroyed a dozen vessels before it finally fizzled out. The second orb—the one shot from the newly-arrived Aphelion—had a bit more staying power and kept going long after its partner died. So much energy, in fact, that it likely would have reached Brutus at the fleet’s center if it’d been better aimed. But the shot was hurried—sent off as soon as the DSR ships appeared—and fired at an angle that sliced through the fleet’s aft corner, taking out a handful of Titans and Auroras before wobbling off into empty space.

  “Sikuuku!” Henricksen called. “I want you and every other forward gun we have focused on Parallax. I want it gone, understand me? The gun, the ship, everything.”

  “On it!”

  Sikuuku pivoted, breathing a few words into his comms unit as he reoriented and started blasting away. Seychelles, on the far side of the fleet, added her fire and together the two Valkyries pounded away, slicing through the ships protecting Parallax, chewing them to bits. A few minutes of concentrated fire and the screening disappeared entirely, leaving the Aphelion wide open.

  “Gotcha, ya bastard.” Sikuuku hunkered down and blasted away at the Aphelion’s fork-nosed shape.

  Progress. Finally.

  But a quick check behind showed things weren’t going quite as well aft. After dumping its load, the second Aphelion slowed and drifted backward, hiding at the far edge of the newly arrived DSR fleet. And there it waited, recharging that murderous forced-ion gun, waiting patiently for a chance to kill more ships.

  Serengeti passed the news to Henricksen—he was not pleased—and then diverted her attention to a message from Brutus. A message containing a roster of ships, and orders Henricksen definitely wasn’t going to like.

  I don’t like ‘em either, Serengeti thought, and started to reply.

  Seychelles beat her to it. Don’t be an idiot, Brutus, the Valkyrie sent.

  Serengeti winced. Not the most tactful approach, but then, that was Seychelles—loud-mouthed and opinionated, blunt and direct but seldom diplomatic. Serengeti loved her to death.

  The landscape’s changed, Serengeti sent. We should be cautious in this. If we fall back—

  Stay on course, he sent back, tone curt and imperious, almost rude. Follow orders. Do it now.

  Fool. Seychelles wisely kept that opinion between Serengeti and herself. Watch yourself, sister.

  Seychelles closed the line as Marianas and Atacama acknowledged and came about, relaying instructions to the ships on Brutus’s roster.

  Serengeti passed the bad news to Henricksen and the bridge crew. “Marianas and Atacama are splitting off.”

  “What? Why? Where the hell are they going?” Henricksen demanded.

  Serengeti moved the fleet’s schematic to the center window and highlighted the two blips marking Marianas and Atacama before panning the display a bit to show the trailing edge of the Meridian Alliance fleet. And then she waited, knowing Henricksen would see it in time. To her surprise, Finlay beat him to it.

  “Rear guard’s slowing.” Finlay’s fingers tapped against the panel in front of her, eyes flicking up and down, left and right, interpreting the data Serengeti fed her. “They’re coming about.” Pause and a frown, head lifting staring at the schematic in disbelief. “Sir. They’re leaving us. Moving off with those two Valkyries.”

  “He’s splitting the fleet?” Henricksen stared hard at the forward camera, wanting answers. “Where the hell did he come up with that idea?” he asked her, throwing his arms wide. “Punch through, form up, and come about—that was the plan.”

  “A plan that changed when the rest of the DSR fleet showed up.”

  “Agreed,” Henricksen nodded. “Plan’s gone all to hell. But splitting our forces and fighting a battle on two fronts is lunacy, Serengeti. You know that.”

  Of course she did, but Brutus was in charge. And technically the odds were still in their favor. That’s what the numbers said anyway, and Brutus—twelfth generation AI, the most advanced mind among them—was all about the numbers. The Bastion engineers purposely eliminated concepts like doubt, and fear, sympathy, and empathy from the flagship’s design, viewing them as failures—faults in the earlier AI models like Serengeti and her fellow Valkyries. The Bastions, Brutus includes, were all about cold, hard facts—odds and numbers, because that made for better decisions. Or so the AI designers said.

  “Can you talk to him?” Henricksen asked her. “Reason with him. Try to get him to see how abominably stupid this is?”

  Marianas and Atacama had already moved off, committing themselves to this ill-advised plan—and it was doubtful Brutus would listen, but Serengeti tried anyway. She sent a dozen different messages, but none of them received a response.

  The Bastion had gone dark. Guess he was tired of her objections.

  “Brutus is no longer responding to my hails.”

  And Marianas and Atacama were still moving, the gap between the divided Meridian Alliance fleet widening as the two Valkyries advanced on the DSR ships behind them. Too late to stop it now—all Serengeti could do was keep on firing and hope they somehow manage to get themselves out of this mess.

  She focused her attention ahead just as Trinidad lost his main gun. “’Bout fucking time!” Sikuuku yelled, and then pivoted sharply as Trinidad fired back, bringing its other guns to bear, focusing them all in on Brutus as the other DSR ships went silent.

  That’s odd.

  Serengeti panned her cameras around, trying to figure out what was going on. The snaking lines of Trinidad’s plasma cannons threaded their way through space, chewing their way toward Brutus, but for the space of five seconds, none of the ships around him fired. And then it all started back up again, missiles pouring out faster, more furious than before, the DSR ships targeting the Valkyries—Seychelles and Antigone on one side as Sechura took up Marianas’ vacated position behind Serengeti.

  Chatter erupted on the comms, messages flying back and forth between the Valkyries, other ships in the fleet querying Brutus, wondering what was going on. But Brutus just kept pounding away, stubbornly maintaining his silence as he lobbed missile after missile at Trinidad, giving back every shot he took.

  Ships exploded everywhere, flaring and dying on both sides. Casualty reports rolled in, detailing losses on both sides—crews vented, ships crippled or dead. Damage reports flooded the channels,
wounded ships firing away while their crews worked to contain breaches and fires. Serengeti herself had taken damage—holes punched through her triple-thick hull, a fire started in a forward compartment that the suppression units quickly put out—but Seychelles and Antigone took the worst of it. Seychelles was in the lead position on the port side of the fleet, her body half-blocking, half-protecting Antigone behind her. Plasma shots peppered her nose and sides, composite metal plating dented and buckled before finally giving way. Seychelles kept fighting anyway, ignoring the damage to her body as she threw railgun and plasma cannon fire back. In fact, she fired as long as she could, never slowing until her systems started to fail. She ejected her crew at the last moment, launching her emergency pods out into the chaos of battle in a last ditch effort to save their lives.

  Desperate maneuver, that. One an AI would only risk if there were no other option.

  Seychelles fired up her engines and broke formation, shooting ahead of the Titans and Auroras, putting herself at the front of the spearhead of ships in the main fleet.

  Suicide run.

  “No, sister,” Serengeti whispered, sending a desperate plea via sub-space message.

  “Goodbye, Serengeti,” she sent back. And then Seychelles surged forward, engines wide open, every last gun trained on Parallax, chewing through the ships protecting him to get at the Aphelion.

  The counter wound down, ticking off time, showing five seconds before the Aphelion’s gun was fully charged and ready to fire. Seychelles broke through, hull plating ruined, main gun spewing out long lines of plasma fire aimed at the fork-shaped metal rod sticking out of Parallax’s nose.

  “Parallax firing!” Finlay called.

  Seychelles’s shots connected, sheering away Parallax’s gun in the second before it spat its swirling cobalt orb out. Bolts of electric fire arced in every direction, crackling along the shattered remains of the Aphelion’s gun, sparking brightly off his metal composite hull. The fire raced backward, consuming the Aphelion’s body, and then Parallax exploded in a bright blue flare, taking poor stricken Seychelles and half a dozen DSR vessels with him.

  “Seychelles,” Serengeti whispered in heartbroken sorrow. “Seychelles.”

  “Gone,” Finlay breathed, staring in shocked dismay. “I can’t believe she’s gone. I thought—The Valkyries—I thought they were invincible.”

  “No such thing, Finlay.” Henricksen looked up, eyes locking onto a camera. “Anything can be hurt. Anything can die.”

  Even a tenth generation combat AI like Seychelles, or Serengeti.

  “How did this happen?” Finlay whispered.

  “She’s gone, Finlay, and that’s an end to it.” Henricksen grimaced, nodding an apology to Serengeti’s camera. “Now tell me about her crew. Give me status on those lifeboats.”

  Finlay didn’t seem to hear him. She just sat there, staring at the display in disbelief as the mingled remains of Parallax and Seychelles drifted away. “They killed a Valkyrie.” Fear in her voice now, in the wide-eyed way she stared at the bridge’s windows. “How could they kill a Valkyrie?”

  “Finlay!” Henricksen barked, making her jump. “Focus, Finlay. Seychelles is gone but she saw to her crew. Now where are they?”

  Finlay half-turned, face pale beneath its smattering of freckles, mouth opening and closing as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t quite get the words out. “I don’t—I don’t know,” she managed, shaking her head.

  “Then find them,” Henricksen told her. Soft voice now, but every bit as commanding. “We can do that much for Seychelles at least.”

  Finlay sucked in a breath and nodded. “Aye, sir.” She faced back, hands settling somewhat uncertainly on the Scan station in front of her, fingers pecking at readouts and displays, moving faster, more confidently with each passing second. “Where are they?” she muttered, searching the confusion of ships’ signatures.

  Hard to find anything with all that electronic chatter out there—lot of data to parse through, and Seychelles loss had rattled her, making it hard for Finlay to focus. Serengeti reached into the Scan station’s panel to help her, carving off the cluster of blips marking Marianas and Atacama, the rest of the Meridian Alliance ships that went with them, and throwing that data into a separate window. They didn’t have time to deal with that right now. The battle behind them was in full swing, ships exploding left and right, but so far the Meridian Alliance had the upper hand. Fewer ships in this second DSR fleet, and the Aphelion the only real threat in the bunch. Serengeti’s sisters had that conflict well in hand, so she pushed the scene aside and focused on the sea of ships and debris and electronic signatures in front of her, parsing through the chaos in search of the locator beacons attached to Seychelles’s lifeboats.

  Ten pods ejected before Seychelles went down, and even Serengeti, with all her sensors and arrays and high-tech systems, had a hard time finding them. The chaff scrambled her scans, rail gun fire and plasma rounds that rattled against her hull, damaging sensors, causing feeds and relays to flicker and go dark. But she found a pod eventually, and another, and another, highlighting each one on Scan’s display.

  “Finlay,” Henricksen called impatiently.

  “Six, sir. I count six of ten pods that ejected.”

  “Six.” Henricksen scrubbed at his face. “Six. Dammit.” He sighed heavily, eyes flicking to the camera in front of him. “It’s a wonder any of them made it. Can we get to them?”

  Finlay consulted her screen, comparing their location to that of each of the pods, taking into account the ships and debris between them.

  Too much distance, too much chaff.

  Finlay closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands.

  “Finlay. Talk to me,” Henricksen snapped.

  “No,” Serengeti said, saving Finlay the heartache. “They’re too far away. Too many ships, too much fire between us and them.”

  Henricksen flushed angrily. “So we’re supposed to just leave them out there? That’s crap, Serengeti.”

  “I have no intention of leaving them. We can’t get to the lifeboats, but there are others in the fleet who can.”

  She checked the schematic and passed the pods’ coordinates to the other ships in the fleet. Acknowledgements came back—Tsunami and Zephyr, and a half dozen other small ships shuffled about before moving off line to intercept Seychelles’s escape pods.

  Henricksen nodded his thanks to the camera and then thumbed ship-wide comms open to address his crew. “Alright. Listen up!”

  Serengeti cringed as Henricksen’s voice echoed across fleet-wide comms. A mistake, she thought. It has to be a mistake. Even Henricksen wouldn’t be that bold.

  Brutus led this fleet—not Serengeti, certainly not her human captain—and only Brutus addressed the ships en masse. She flashed a private message to Henricksen’s panel, letting him know about the error.

  Henricksen saw it and smiled, eyes lifting to the camera. “Oops.”

  Totally unapologetic. He’d done it on purpose.

  “You cheeky little monkey.”

  Henricksen shrugged and temporarily shut down comms. “Fleet’s in turmoil, Serengeti. We need to bring it back together.” A nod at the schematic on the front window, the two battles raging on two different fronts. “And we need to do it soon.”

  “What do you suggest we do?”

  Henricksen reached to the mash-up panel in front of him and started adjusting ships’ positions, running scenario, mapping out a plan of attack that moved Serengeti to the fore with Antigone and Sechura, using the more heavily armed and armored Valkyries to bust through the line and take Trinidad out.

  A bold plan, and definitely risky. Not at the stratagem Brutus had laid out.

  “Brutus won’t like it,” Serengeti warned.

  Henricksen shrugged again, obviously not caring. “It’ll work. Trust me,” he said, tipping a wink at the camera. Serengeti started to object but Henricksen thumbed comms back over and spoke right over her. “This is Henricksen on
Serengeti. Parallax is gone and Seychelles with him. So while Marianas and Atacama make mincemeat of the Aphelion’s cousin back there and the rest of those wrecks he brought with him, we’re going to bust through this line and tear holy hell outta that Heliotrope Trinidad. The Valkyries—”

  “Serengeti.” Brutus’ grating voice echoed over fleet-wide comms, drowning Henricksen out. “You are to hold position with the other Valkyries.”

  An order—no doubt about it, with the entire fleet as witness. To disobey was to invoke mutiny, creating a schism in an already divided fleet. But she couldn’t let this go.

  A long-ignored sub-mind flashed a warning, pulsing insistently to get Serengeti’s attention. She dismissed it, pushing the sub-mind to the background while she sent Henricksen’s battle plan to Brutus, using a private channel in the hopes he’d hear her out.

  Brutus deleted the message without even opening it. Deleted it and kept going, as if nothing had changed. As if the second fleet of ships behind them didn’t exist, and Seychelles hadn’t exploded before their eyes.

  Bastard. Seychelles is dead because of you. You’re so full of pride you won’t even listen to reason.

  Serengeti opened a channel, hesitated, thinking through the ramifications of what she’d be doing, and belatedly shut it back down. “Acknowledged. Holding position,” she sent, and then flashed an apology to Henricksen.

  Henricksen glanced at the message and shrugged. He’d seen enough battles to know the score—knew when to question authority and when to fall into line. “Remind me when this is over to have a word with Brutus’ captain,” he said, glancing upward at a camera.

  “I’m not sure—”

  Serengeti broke off as the sub-mind’s warning flared to life again. What now? she wondered, acknowledging it this time, turning her eyes to the blip it had been watching off the starboard bow.

  Osage.

  In the heat of battle, she’d all but forgotten about the poor, stricken vessel. It was closer now—much closer—but still more than four hundred kilometers out.