Evan Currie - Heirs of Empire

He glanced back at the baron and nodded, leaving Kennissey to issue the order to continue forward.

There really wasn’t much else they could do.

“So help me, if you don’t get your men under discipline, you’ll join the late, and unlamented, Captain Kim!” Corian raged, still immensely angry at the missed opportunity blown by the gunners who’d lost their nerve and opened fire too soon.

He took a breath. “Commander, draw them in. Hold fire until you have the bulk of the flotilla inside your kill zone and then eliminate them in one stroke. Focus on the transports. Cruisers are launching from the palace airfield now. They’ll deal with the rest.”

Corian closed the comm channel and turned back to the display that was still open to the Caleb Bar , watching as Mira secured the command deck.

“You are a pain in the ass, Delsol,” he said tiredly, shaking his head. “I should have killed you on the train.”

Mira glanced back in his direction. “I seem to recall you trying quite enthusiastically. It seems we both missed our coup, back then.”

“So it seems,” Corian ground out. “You have to know this is insanity. Even if you win, I have too much support in the Senate. You’ll split the empire.”

“You did already,” Mira countered. “We’re just making it public.”

“You’re damn fools,” he snarled. “You have no idea what you’re doing!”

“You speak like I should care,” Mira told him. “You’re a mass murderer. Did you really think that this would end any other way? Even if you had succeeded, sooner or later someone would have measured your back for a knife, and you knew that when you started.”

Corian snarled wordlessly then and closed the comm channel.

He couldn’t speak with that woman any longer and still retain any semblance of rational thought.

She flips all my switches like she mapped and installed them herself, he thought, his ire cooling. I damned well should have recruited her myself.

Mira watched the screen go black with a certain satisfaction, but she knew that the day’s work was only just beginning.

“Signal abandon ship,” she ordered, “and throw up every smoke alarm, fire alarm, and other alarm you can. I want as many people as we can dupe off this ship, five minutes ago.”

“Aye, skipper,” her comm tech said as he sat at the instrument console and started putting in commands.

There was a definite advantage to having the ship designer talk them through every step of the mission beforehand, but Mira knew that a lot of it was going to come down to the gullibility of the men on board. Well, that and how dedicated to Corian’s cause they were.

A reactor alarm should scare off all but the most fanatical, but this ship was Corian’s trump card, so she was concerned that the alarms alone may not be as effective as she hoped. If not, then they’d have to switch to the alternate plan.

In the meantime, with the corridor outside the command deck secured and her second team still holding the engine room, Mira turned to the instrument stations and peeked in on the battle that was just starting to heat up.

Cruisers were launching from the palace air base, a dozen already in the air and probably that many again ready to lift as soon as airspace cleared. Mira knew that they weren’t the threat, however. The local air base was deep in secured territory, palace and capital or not, so there just weren’t the numbers to really threaten the loyalist flotilla.

It was the ground-to-air defenses that would be problematic.

No one knew how many of them Corian had moved into the area, but it was a safe bet that he hadn’t skimped. Until they opened up, there was no real way to find them; the flotilla was about to start what was going to be a very bad day, but it was necessary.

Corian still had two legions near the palace, and it had to be assumed that they would be loyal to him. He wouldn’t have allowed any wavering loyalties this close to the capital. He wasn’t that stupid.

But he’s close. Just not quite that stupid, unfortunately.

“Sails in the sky!”

William looked out toward the palace and nodded as he spotted the sails now rising up over the city skyline. He looked over to where the baron was watching over the deck. “It may be time to put the transports down, baron. We’re going to need the extra sky shortly.”

Kennissey nodded. “Agreed.”

He nodded to an aide, who bolted off to relay the order to the commodore in charge of the fleet deployment.

“The field marshal will shortly have his work cut out for him,” William said, keeping his tone light as he glanced at Lydia.

She didn’t seem to hear him at first. Her eyes were focused on the ships around them as the first of the transports began to drop from the formation.

“The dying begins in earnest now,” she said softly.

William nodded. “That it does, Your Highness.”

The Pillar shook suddenly, a hammer blow rocking them hard, and the trio looked out to see plasma trace lighting up the sky around them. The fleet was firing back, almost straight down, but they could see smoke erupting from some of the ships that had taken heavier hits and several dropping along with the transports.

“It would seem that they were waiting for us to deploy ground forces,” Kennissey said, holding tightly to his seat.

William shook his head. “More likely they were waiting to box us in a little more, and we forced them to show their hand by landing too soon.”

Lydia looked at the two of them, eyes wide. “So this is a good thing?”

“Good?” William shrugged. “Debatable, I suppose. However, it’s likely better than what they’d planned for us.”

Kennissey nodded. “And in battle, Your Highness, that is often the best you can hope for.”

Plasma trace was slicing the sky from above and below as the fleet engaged in landing operations among heavy air defenses. Unfortunately for the defense stations on the ground, combat-rated ships were armored more heavily from below for just such reasons as this, which gave the fleet all the time it needed to set down dozens of transports, each loaded with a full century of warriors and arms.

As those men and women poured out, the heavy air defenses came under fire from the ground, which they were poorly equipped to defend against, since they were mobile systems generally intended to be deployed well behind the front of any given battle.

In short order, a ragged line of battle was strewn across the plains outside the city, centuries of armsmen and knights charging fortified locations as the plasma trace shifted from the skies to the ground. Above them, cruisers began providing close air support for each side while simultaneously tearing into one another as the two sides interpenetrated and it became almost impossible to tell them apart in the growing smoke of war.

Skimmers were not designed to fly against one another in such tight parameters, and, inevitably, sail lines tangled and ships began to drop from the skies, firing the whole way down.

War—real war—had descended on the capital.

“Positions being overrun across our air-defense line, sire!”

Corian snorted but didn’t say anything.

Of course the air-defense line had been overrun. It was an air -defense line. Certainly each of the mobile stations had some security, but they weren’t intended to be the first line of defense. The capital wasn’t supposed to be under siege by what appeared to be at least two legions plus air support.