Wrath of Angels, page 3
part #4 of Sins of Angels Series
“Knight … how can you commit so quickly to this? You’ve bounced from one thing to the next like leaving your old lives behind means nothing. Is it so easy for you to make changes in your life?”
Was that insecurity? Was she asking about him becoming a Sentinel, or wondering whether he’d leave her the same as she saw him leaving one mission after another?
He stalked over, grabbed her around the waist, pulled her in for a deep kiss. At last, he pulled away. “I was born for this.”
Literally. He’d been trained almost since birth to be a soldier.
He just hadn’t known the cause.
The Gibborim had taught him discipline and killer instinct. They had made him a weapon. Only now, finally, that weapon was aimed where it belonged.
Like Rachel, he would fight for things that mattered, not for corrupt governments or for himself. The Sentinels existed to protect mankind from any threat. In his whole life, he had never considered such grandiose concerns—and Rachel was right, he should have. Phoebe and those like her were heroes, fighting for something so much greater than themselves.
“You should be happy,” he said. “I’m finally seeing things your way.”
“Yup, yup. You’ve skipped the training, the education, the hard work and been promoted straight up to—”
“Never think I’ve skipped the hard work, Phoebe. My life has been nothing but struggle. Just because you had different struggles doesn’t mean—”
She held up her hands. “Right, sorry. Forgot about the whole ‘raised in a ninja school’ thing for a split second. It’s just … I worked most of my life to get here, you know? I mean, I get you just took a different road to reach the same place. But some of the others are going to resent you being promoted to such a rank without going to the academy on Hazaroth. It’s fine, though. I’ll help you get caught up on all the things you need to know. Like the benefits of certain activities in zero-G.”
“Wait, what?” That sounded interesting.
“Well, certain sections of the ship aren’t affected by the AG field. And we’re able to reserve time in those sections for … educational activities.”
He chuckled at the mental image. “Uh, you should probably put us on the list, then. I’m all about education.”
“Yup, yup. Believe me, I’ll be a great teacher.”
He nodded. “I should get up to the bridge.”
“Hey, Knight. You look hot in the uniform.”
“You too. I mean, you look even hotter out of uniform. Naked, I mean.”
“Yup. Got the innuendo the first time, big guy. And speaking of naked, you never really said anything about … you know.”
The Shekhinah? What the fuck could he say to that? He shook his head. Maybe, once, he might have agreed to share his DNA with any willing partner who’d line up. But now, with Phoebe … he’d turn away from a hundred women for just one. And the oddest thing was, it wasn’t even a hard choice.
“You don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Yup. Fine. Then neither do you. For the moment.”
Knight laughed and headed up to the bridge. Like the Logos, the Wheel of Law was a Tribulation-class Sentinel battleship, meaning its design was similar. Most of Knight’s time on the Logos was spent in the brig—or fighting against Sentinels—so it was odd to stride onto the bridge like he belonged there.
David had taken over the pilot’s chair, despite being a captain now. People always fell back where they were most comfortable. Maybe that’s why Rachel stood right beside him. She’d lost part of herself in giving up the Ark. Knight hoped she could find it again, the same way she’d eventually led him to himself. It was because of Rachel he could stand here, proud of the man he was. Of the uniform he wore.
She wore it too, and the form-fitting black armor looked good on her.
She turned to look at him and actually jerked back. “God, Knight! I didn’t even recognize you.”
David glanced at him too. “Aye, lad looks like a real soldier now.”
Knight gave David a mocking salute. And David returned it with a real one. He’d just saluted him. Knight. A soldier. He blew out a breath and folded his arms across his chest. Odd. Who would have thought such a small gesture of respect would matter to him at all? He shouldn’t care. But …
“It’s good you’re here, Knight,” David said. “We just got a message. Asherah has arrived in the Eden System, and they’ve begun landing troops there. It seems they intend to claim the planet for the Confederacy. Mizraim isn’t going to let that happen. I just spoke to Imperator Vibbard, and he’s authorized us to return to Eden.”
Knight caught himself looking to Rachel. He had fallen into the habit of turning to her in these situations. But she had placed herself under David’s command, and so had he. And maybe it was for the best. David had the training and command experience. It was what he did best.
And what Knight did best … well, he would do that when they reached Eden.
6
“Plasma weaponry is used found primarily among the Asheran military forces. These weapons fire a superheated ionized gas cloud that carries enormous thermal and kinetic energy and can overwhelm kinetic shielding even on Sentinel suits. Approach with extreme care.”
Sentinel Holy Mandate
EDEN SYSTEM, MILKY WAY
The Conduit route to Eden was well hidden. A single passage, always behind you, only reachable by a sudden sharp turn—a dangerous maneuver given the walls of the Conduit could shear through a ship’s hull.
No one knew what would happen if you breached the Conduit—the angels just said not to. Ever. That was part of the Second Commandment. Anyone who’d ever done it hadn’t returned to report what lay beyond.
Still, finding Eden the first time had been the real challenge. Now, David anticipated the hard cornering maneuver. No longer did it surprise his prophetic sense at the last microsecond. He jumped the Wheel of Law out of the Conduit gate on the edge of the Eden System.
Immediately, a swarm of tiny, pyramidal ships swarmed over them, all maneuvering thrusters and plasma cannons—an Asheran design. The Sentinel battleship Resplendent Glory, the cruisers Ebullient Corona and Eternal Light, and several destroyers were engaged with an entire fleet of Asheran ships—including three Leviathans.
They’d come as soon as they were able, but already David’s people were hard pressed.
“Angels above,” Phoebe swore.
“Take out those drones!” David said. He jerked the flight stick to try to dart behind an icy planetoid on the system’s edge.
His scanners showed one of the leviathans breaking off to pursue the Wheel. Good. Any ships they diverted from the Sentinel fleet would aid his beleaguered mates.
“It looks like ten Asheran cruisers,” Rachel said. David had assigned her to scanners, and she took to it quickly.
“Prep the ion cannons. Soften them up with a barrage of pulse fire.” The pulse cannons would do a good job of tearing through the kinetic shields, and without those, an ion beam would burn through the leviathan hull like paper.
The leviathan crested around the edge of the moon.
“Incoming missile barrage!” Phoebe said.
“Laser batteries, take those out.” A Tribulation-class ship had thirty defensive laser batteries, operated by three different crewmen.
David could afford to direct his attention elsewhere—like piloting the ship and a squad of drones.
The lightning-fast drones were small, unmanned fighters—ideal for shooting down missiles or raining MAG rounds on the enemy hull. David steered them right for the leviathan. They needed a quick kill. They needed a statement.
The Asherans thought they could come in here and intimidate the Sentinels. Eden was in the Milky Way, deep within Mizraim space. An invasion like this was bold—and he intended to show them it was too bold.
Turrets on the leviathan turned on the drones. A stream of plasma toroids spewed from the turrets in a crisscross that blanketed the sky. Drones disappeared from his screen faster than David could blink.
Defensive plasma batteries? That was new. The Sentinels’ intel on Asherah was woefully dated.
“Phoebe, bring the ion cannons to bear.”
The leviathan had tried to dodge her barrage of pulses, but most struck home, and there was no shooting those down.
“They’ve prepped their own ion cannons!”
Too much going on. David was coordinating the battle and flying his own ship. No wonder captains like Waller preferred to stalk the deck and think while a battle raged. Still, it was his ship to command, and David’s flying was worlds better than the next best pilot he had.
David banked the ship, trying to get the planetoid back between the two ships. But there was no bloody way it would be enough.
The ion stream rocked the Wheel of Law, its beam an afterimage before David ever felt the explosion shockwave through the hull. His console flashed as kinetic shields failed all over the Wheel. Secondary explosions cascaded along the ship, breaching multiple decks.
Shite! Shite! Shite!
A dozen hull breaches, probably hundreds dead.
“Where are those ion cannons, Phoebe?”
“I’m trying! We lost a power relay. I’ve only got two working cannons, and they’re on the starboard side.”
That he could do something about. He sent the Wheel into a roll. It meant opening their keel to a broadside of MAG rounds—which were devastating without their shields—but he saw no choice. They needed to make this leviathan bleed. Now.
“Missile tubes 101 through 200, full barrage! Phoebe, fire the ion cannons the moment the missiles hit.”
As expected, the leviathan defensive batteries concentrated on the incoming missiles. The antimatter warheads would cause serious damage if they impacted, but nothing like ion cannons. That gave David time to complete his roll and bring the starboard broadside to bear.
Phoebe fired the cannons. The ion stream was a blue-white beam that, if you didn’t know better, might look like a laser. But it fired ions at near the speed of light. The beam slammed into the leviathan as subatomic particles superheated the hull, boiling through the metal instantaneously and igniting a cascade of explosions along her length.
A power relay on the Wheel blew out. Ion cannons used too much bloody energy.
“I’m reading multiple hull breaches on the leviathan,” Rachel said. “But it looks like they’ve still got some shielding.”
What the holy universe? He’d fought a leviathan a few months ago, and it hadn’t been this tough. These ships had had some upgrades recently, it seemed.
With current power levels, they’d never be able to use the ion cannons.
David swallowed. He needed to end this as quickly as possible.
“Prepare MAG cannons for close firing. We’re going to strafe them.”
He accelerated as rapidly as he could, diving the Wheel of Law right along the leviathan, barely five hundred meters apart. Enemy drones tried to intercept, but the Wheel’s own drones kept them at bay.
“Sir, the plasma batteries!” Phoebe shouted at him.
“Aye.”
The leviathan’s defensive batteries ripped into the Wheel’s hull, tearing open more breaches. His maneuver was off rotation. Battleships didn’t strafe one another for just this reason. Defensive batteries were powerful short-range weapons designed to shoot down enemy missiles, but they could rain fiery hell on a ship foolish enough to draw in range.
But desperate times called for an off-rotation plan.
Phoebe worked frantically, as he knew she would. The Wheel’s own laser batteries carved slices out of the leviathan and MAG rounds pounded through the enemy ship.
When a large enough breach opened, she aimed an antimatter warhead inside the leviathan—a near impossible shot.
Crippling explosions cascaded through the Asheran ship as David jerked the Wheel away, peeling off.
The leviathan detonated, the explosion scorching the planetoid.
He breathed a long sigh.
“Casualty estimate?”
David was already scanning the comm logs for how the rest of the Sentinel fleet was faring. Not good.
“I …” Rachel stammered. “I think we may have lost as many as two hundred crewmen …”
Two hundred? Angels above, what had he done? His first battle as captain had also become the biggest disaster of his career. Two hundred Sentinels dead. They had taken down the leviathan, but the Wheel of Law bore severe damage throughout and he’d just lost near a third of her crew.
And there were still a dozen Asheran ships out there—apparently with a technological edge.
7
“Tonight on Truth or Heresy: Who are these conquerors from beyond the known galaxies? Are they the angels returned from the Vanishing, or is this just an Asheran plot to defame the angels? Retired Sentinel General Rufus Reis and NRU’s Professor Julia Levine lay out the case each way.”
Suzanna Wallach, Mazzaroth News Network
EDEN SYSTEM, MILKY WAY
David had given the crew several minutes to get the ship back in order before steering them toward the greater battle. Rachel could feel how much the wait had pained him, but, in all honesty, she doubted it was enough time. The Wheel needed days to repair, not minutes to patch a few breaches and reroute a few power relays.
Knight stood by her side, and she could feel tension wafting off him. He felt useless, and she knew the feeling. Manning the scanners might have been important work, but after controlling the awesome power of the Ark, it felt insignificant.
“I can feel the holes in the ship,” he said.
She glanced at him. She wished they’d had more time to map his psionic potential. They didn’t even really know what rank he was. His telekinetic ability seemed to give him an intuitive spatial sense. What else would it let him do? How far could he reach?
Theoretically, all psych disciplines were measured from rank one to seven. Rachel had never heard of a rank seven teek. Could Knight be that strong?
“See that ringed planet there? Can you feel that?”
Knight closed his eyes a moment, then shook his head.
So nothing beyond his immediate vicinity, then. “Okay, don’t worry about it. What else can you feel?”
He shook his head again. “That’s it.”
Well, it was a start.
“We’re going back in,” David said. “Brace yourselves. We’re going after that Asheran cruiser engaged with the Eternal Light. I want a tight barrage of missiles followed by concentrated pulse cannon fire. Take them down before they even know what hit them.”
David’s guilt, anger, and fear almost choked her. It wafted around the bridge like a cloud of darkness, threatening to swallow her. It ran so deep she had to look around to see if anyone else was affected. But she was the only empath on the bridge, and she alone bore the weight of such burden—or shared it with David.
She rose from her seat and stalked over to whisper in his ear. “What happened is not your fault, David. It’s war, and we were caught off guard.”
“Take your station,” he whispered back.
“David …”
“On scanners, Lt. Jordan!”
She flinched and started back for the console.
“Rachel,” Knight said. “I think you’d better see this.”
She dashed over to examine the screen. Another fleet had jumped through the Conduit gate. A brief scan identified them as Jericho and Zebulun—what was a mining company even doing with warships?—ships, a battleship and seven cruisers.
“Conglomerate fleet behind us!” she shouted.
David ground his teeth so loudly she could hear it from four meters away. “Bloody void. Continue with the planned strike. Let them come to us.”
He steered them toward the Asheran cruiser. As soon as it realized they were closing in, the foreign ship tried to make a break for it. But there was no outrunning the Wheel.
“Good morning, boys,” Phoebe said. “I’ve got your breakfast right here.” She launched missiles from forty tubes at the cruiser and followed it up with pulse cannons. Such concentrated fire broke past the enemy drones and kinetic shields in seconds. Pulses shredded the cruiser, and a moment later, it detonated like a small star.
Almost instantly the explosion began sucking itself back in. The singularity drive was consuming the ship. David steered the Wheel clear of debris. Get too close, the singularity would eat them too.
A cruiser was only a stage down from a battleship, but it seemed there was a galaxy of difference between a leviathan and a cruiser—at least when it came to standing up to concentrated fire from a Tribulation-class ship.
Rachel blew out a breath and tried to focus on her assigned task. This was what they were here for. Fighting this war. Except she was no soldier. She’d signed on to the Sentinels out of desperation—there seemed no other road left for her.
David believed it his duty to save Mizraim from the Asheran invasion. And Rachel’s own actions might well have precipitated this war—uncovering the Ark and then Eden. She’d been a fool, though, to think that responsibility somehow meant she’d be able to do anything here.
Knight might have belonged on this ship, but she didn’t. She’d done what she set out to do—found the secrets of the angels. Look where it had led.
People were dead, and humanity no better off.
She shook herself. God, was that David’s despair sinking into her? If she weren’t careful, she’d drown in it.
Focus on the task.
Her mind was her mind.
She stared at the scanner. “I … the Conglomerate ships will be able to join the battle in approximately two minutes.”
“Signal the Eternal Light.” David pointed at an enemy cruiser. “We’re taking that one out together. We need to thin their ranks before the reinforcements arrive. We’ll draw the enemy fire, and the Light can move in for the kill.”
