The Armageddon Inheritance

There!

Colin flinched as HIMP Sekr blew apart. He didn’t know how many missiles that staggering wreck had absorbed, but finally there had been too many. Her core tap let go, and a halo of pure energy gyred through the carnage.

Trel followed Sekr into death, then Hilik and Imperial Bia, but nothing could stop them from reaching beam range now. Yet they were such terribly vulnerable targets, unable to evade, unable to bob and weave. If Dahak allowed them to wander, relativistic effects would fray his control. That was their great weakness: they couldn’t maneuver if they wanted to.

Now!

Hothan groaned as the beams Sorkar’s observers had reported raked out and their targets exploded like sulq in a candle flame. He had killed almost a twelve of them, but the others crunched into his formation, and his ships were too slow to flee. They could not even scatter as the battering ram of nest-killers clove through them. Their own feeble energy weapons came into play—some of them, aboard ships which lived an instant longer than their brothers—and they were useless. Only missiles could hurt these demons, and now they were so close his thunder was killing his own nestlings!

Yet he had no choice, and he clung to his duty pad, refusing to weep as his ships blazed like chaff in the Furnace.

Battle Comp suddenly clamored for his attention, and he dropped an eye to the computers’ panel.

“Weapons free!”

Jiltanith’s voice sounded over Colin’s fold-space link, quivering with the vibration lashing through Dahak’s hull, and fifteen more ships suddenly joined the fray. They didn’t leave stealth, nor did they close to energy range, but their missiles lanced out, striking deep into the Achuultani formation.

Lady Adrie

The ma

Colin had to back out of the maelstrom. His mind could no longer endure the furious tempo of Dahak’s perceptions and commands. From here on, he was a passenger on a charge into Hell.

Deep, glowing wounds pocked Dahak’s flanks. Clouds of atmosphere and vaporized steel trailed the mighty planetoid, and the rear of the sphere thi

Somewhere ahead of them were the command ships. The enemy’s brain. The organizing force which bound them together.

Hothan blinked in consternation. Battle Comp was never wrong, but surely that could not be correct?! Drones? Unma

But the data codes blinked, no longer informing but commanding. Somewhere inside that sphere of enemies was a single ship, its emission signature different from all the others, from which the directions flowed. How Battle Comp had deduced that from the stutter of incomprehensible alien com signals Hothan could not imagine, but if it was true—

Dahak staggered, and Command One’s lights flickered.

Colin went white as damage reports suddenly flooded his neural feed. The enemy had shifted his targeting pattern. He was no longer firing at the frontal arc of their formation; his missiles were bursting inside the globe! All of his missiles!

Their formation had become a sphere of fire, and Dahak writhed at its core. The Achuultani couldn’t see him, couldn’t count on direct hits, but with so many missiles in such a relatively small area, not all could miss. Prominences of plasma gouged at his hull, stabbing deeper and deeper into his battle steel body, but he held his course. He couldn’t dodge. He could only attack or flee, and too many enemies remained to flee.

Jiltanith gasped. How had the Achuultani guessed?!

But they had guessed. Their new attack patterns showed it. They raked the i

Dahak Two abandoned stealth and plunged into the space-a

They charged on her heels.

Colin gritted his teeth. They weren’t going to make it.

Then his eyes flew wide. No! They couldn’t! They mustn’t!

But it was too late. His people swept in at many times the speed of light, riding an impossible line between life and mutual destruction in an effort to save him. He dared not distract them now … and there was no time.

A whiplash of fresh shock slammed through Great Lord of Order Hothan. Where had they come from? What were they?!

Fifteen ravening spheres of gravitonic fury erupted amid his ships. Two blossomed too near to one another, ripping themselves apart, but they took a high twelve of his ships with them. And then the gravity storm ended, and a twelve of fresh enemies were upon him. Upon him? They were within him! They appeared like monsters of wizardry, deep in the heart of his nestlings, and their beams began to kill.

Twelve thousand humans died as Ashar and Trelma destroyed themselves, and another six thousand as massed fire tore Thrym apart, but the Achuultani had given all they had and more for their Nest.

They had stood Dahak’s remorseless charge, endured the megadeaths he had inflicted upon them, but this was too much. They couldn’t flee into hyper, but these new monsters had dashed in at supralight speeds—and they were fresh, fresh and unwounded, enraged titans within their flotillas, laying waste battle squadrons with a single flick of their terrible beams.

One such beam lashed out, and Deathdealer’s forward half exploded.

Too many links in the chain had snapped. There were no great lords, no Battle Comp. Lesser lords did their best, but without coordination flotillas fought as flotillas, squadrons as squadrons. Their fine-meshed killing machine became knots of uncoordinated resistance, and the planetoids of the Empire swept through them like Death incarnate.

Adrie

They fled at their highest sublight speed, seeking the edges of Operation Laocoon’s gravity net. And as they fled, they fell out of mutual support range. The ancient starships of the Imperial Guard, crewed and deadly—individuals, not a single battering ram—slashed through them, bobbing and weaving impossibly, each equal to them all when they fought alone.