Contagion

by David Ryker

  Yeah, that might work. It was risky, damn risky, but I couldn’t see any other way forward.

  Funny how my life always ended up like that.

  But I couldn’t do it before the battle. I couldn’t disrupt things while so much hung in the balance. It might be safer to do it now, but then Foyle probably wouldn’t fly, there’d be disruption in the high command, and who knows what kind of infighting. No, I had to sit tight and take Foyle’s crap for another few days. At least he’d be giving his all in the battle.

  Who knew? Maybe he’d get killed. That would solve everything.

  Yeah, that would solve everything …

  I stopped again, a chill running through my entire body.

  Yeah. Why not? The man was a danger. Once the Centaurian threat was gone, he’d be nothing but a liability. The Nansen would be better off without him. People like him have a hole inside that needs constant feeding but that can never be filled. After he finished ruining my career, he’d turn on Commander Loftsdóttir. He’d ruin her somehow and take her position, and then God help us all.

  I could even see him maneuvering himself into a dictatorship on Terra Nova. He was just that selfish. Everything had to be about him, and everyone had to be beneath him. Setting himself up as some tin-pot dictator would be just his style.

  He was already building a political base. He was already one of the stars of the Nansen. While I got a lot of attention for leading the Shadow Fighters, I had a black mark against me for executing those three security people. Plus no one really likes a cop no matter how much they want a crime-free society. I was respected and admired, but I would never be truly popular. Foyle, on the other hand, had that right mix of bravado and skill to build a following. People felt tougher and cooler when they were bathed in his glow. If he got through the next battle and got onto a Shadow Fighter, his position as top dog on the Nansen would be secure.

  Maybe this was what R’kk’kar had been talking about when he said Foyle was a danger. Watching from outside, he could see the threat more clearly than I could.

  So killing him wasn’t just a way to keep myself safe, it would be for the safety of the commander, the Nansen, and the entire future of the human race.

  And it was actually a safer option than confronting Commander Loftsdóttir and trying to get him demoted. That should have happened ages ago. Maybe it hadn’t because he held something over her like he held over me. Maybe going to her would be walking into a trap.

  Yes, killing him was the only way to be sure he would stay silent.

  No one would suspect me because no one knew I had a motive.

  I couldn’t do it during the battle with everyone watching, but afterwards it would be easy enough. I had control of the security cameras. I could turn them off or replace the videos with shots of empty corridors. I could change the computer files so that no one would know. No one would see it was me, and everyone would assume it was the Biospherists. It might even prompt that Biospherist we woke up to make a move and expose the other plotters, literally killing two birds with one stone.

  So how could I do it? I could steer Foyle into a private meeting easily enough. Then I could brain him with some sort of club, or even tase him with a lethal dose of electricity. The tasers made very little sound. They couldn’t be heard behind a closed door.

  I stepped into a computer center, found no one in sight, and gave myself a good punch in the face. The new Mitch Ayers giving the old Mitch Ayers a wakeup call as to who was in charge. When the old Mitch Ayers still tried to wheedle his way into my thoughts, I gave him another punch, harder this time.

  That made me stagger back. I sat down, resting my bad leg, and let all those old, grim, familiar emotions wash over me. I rested my head in my hands.

  Murder. For a second I had seriously considered murder.

  Make no mistake, I know I’m a murderer. I’ve proven that plenty of times. Sure, I told myself I was only killing other criminals, I was only protecting a safe zone in a rough city. I was only bringing order to chaos. It wasn’t much different than the wars, right?

  Right.

  And wrong.

  The wars, as fucked-up and poorly managed as they were, at least meant something. Killing for Leo Franzetti had only been about money. Killing Foyle would have been for … what? Respect? Sex with Valeria? A job I wanted to quit as soon as we landed on Terra Nova?

  Fucking hell. I’d gotten so good at killing that I’d forgotten what I had originally been killing for. Now it had become an automatic reaction.

  A sound made me jerk my head up. A female scientist had stepped into the computer center, stood hesitating at the doorway for a moment, and was just stepping out.

  “Come on in,” I said, getting up and wincing as my bad leg gave me pain. “I was just leaving.”

  I hobbled to my quarters and stayed there the rest of the day.

  33

  This time the spy probes didn’t come back. We waited until they were 24 hours past due and knew that they had been found. There was no way the Centaurians could trace them back to us, but we would be going in blind.

  We decided to go in anyway. We didn’t have much of a choice.

  All the main fleet ships were fitted with nuclear missiles, as were some of the larger fighters. The Shadow Fighters didn’t have any, both because they were too small to carry them and also because we would be too busy fending off whatever the Centaurians would throw at the missiles. Yeah, we were going to ride shotgun again. It was so much fun last time, why not do it again?

  I still wasn’t a hundred percent. My right leg and arm got sore after too long in the cockpit and my good eye hadn’t entirely compensated for my bad one. I’m sure Commander Loftsdóttir considered replacing me. That she decided against it as either a reassuring gesture of confidence in me or a lack of confidence in the alternatives. You couldn’t really have Foyle flying a primitive Earth fighter leading all the squadrons of Dri’kai Shadow Fighters. He wouldn’t be able to keep up. And Qiang, despite all his good points and being an equally qualified pilot as me, had never commanded more than a squadron. Equally good was one of the Subine pilots, but he couldn’t command because of communication issues. Coherent sentences are kind of important in battle.

  The day before we got to the Chordatid system, I visited Valeria. She had recovered enough that she was sitting up in bed with a touchscreen working on some obscure scientific problem.

  “Can’t keep a good woman down,” I said as I came into Medical.

  “Dr. Stark won’t let me work more than three hours a day.”

  “Welcome to my world,” I said, and kissed her. “You’re looking much better.”

  “Feeling better too. I do get tired, though, and my abdomen is killing me.”

  “Ask for a painkiller.”

  Valeria shook her head. “Muddles my thoughts.”

  “Doesn’t pain muddle your thoughts?”

  “I can work through that. I can’t work through drugs.”

  I smiled and kissed her again. There was a bit of a soldier in her.

  “What are you working on?”

  “A spray that will destroy the protective coating the Centaurians are using for their microbes. We’ll spray it on the outside of all our fighters and the entrances to the bigger ships. If we can crack the coating, the microbes will be exposed to vacuum and perish.”

  “But won’t the Centaurians just make a different coating, or a microbe that can survive in a vacuum?”

  “Yeah,” she said and sighed, looking at her screen. “And then we’ll have to develop something else.”

  The enemy makes a better weapon, and you make a better defense, and then the enemy makes an even better weapon and you’re back to the drawing board. And around and around it goes forever.

  Welcome to my world again, Dr. Sanchez.

  She gave me a serious look. “Mitch?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sorry I made fun of your idea of having a bar by the beach. After all you’ve been
through, you deserve an easy life.”

  I shrugged, looked away. “It’s okay. You’re talking about founding a university. My dream seems kind of petty and selfish after that.”

  She drew me close.

  “The Shelly Avram Sport Camp for Kids sounds anything but petty and selfish. Yeah, I heard about that. You’re a good man, Mitch. Don’t sell yourself short.”

  You wouldn’t say that if you knew how I got on board this ship. And once you do find out you’ll never say that to me again.

  But that was a battle for another day, a day I might not even see.

  We talked for a while longer and, sensing she was getting tired, I left. I felt dead on my feet too, but I had to run my team through yet another simulation. They had survived two battles now, and were calling themselves veterans, but I held no illusions. Most of my team were lucky amateurs with great ships.

  They did well in the simulation and I sent them to bed early. In the morning we would have a long fight ahead of us.

  In the morning, the battle started early.

  We flew into the Chordatid solar system in warp, planning to appear just above the stratosphere to achieve maximum surprise. I and all the fighter pilots were already sitting in our cockpits in the hangar of the Dri’kai flagship, watching the scene through the battleship’s external viewers. Like the last time, we went through the path the Chordatids had cleared through their Oort Cloud and outer solar system.

  And that’s where the Centaurians got us.

  Our first warning was when a Vlern destroyer blew up.

  It happened so fast I didn’t get to see what caused it. I was about to ask the viewer to replay the video when a Dri’kai cruiser right in my field of view got hit too. There was a burst of impact at the nose of the ship, then flames erupted all along its length and the back spouted debris.

  It wasn’t a Centaurian energy pulse, or a type of missile. The cruiser had run into something.

  General R’kk’kar’s voice came on the comm, but because we were in warp only this ship could hear.

  “The enemy have placed asteroids in our path! We are taking evasive maneuvers.”

  Fuck. Remember when I said no trick works a second time? We should have realized we couldn’t sneak into the Chordatid solar system again. The enemy had figured out how we did it, and deployed countermeasures.

  The other ships must have realized the situation at more or less the same time, because they all started dodging from side to side. A Skreet freighter took a grazing hit, the asteroid cutting a deep furrow along the port side that leaked air, equipment, and the tiny figures of the fluttering, intelligent birds, their wings gyrating as they died a quick death in the vacuum.

  I switched to the astronavigator’s view, and immediately regretted it. The entire path had been strewn with asteroids. None of them were particularly large, only a few tens of meters across at most, but at warp speed they were as fast and as lethal as bullets.

  The fleet spread out, our individual golden halo of a warp field separating into dozens of individual bubbles. The path the Chordatids had cleared into their solar system was several thousand kilometers across, as thin as a hair on an astronomical level, but wide enough that we should have plenty of room for maneuver.

  Unfortunately for us, the enemy had been busy. There were thousands of asteroids strewn across our path. Distances between them were vast, but they were arrayed in a scattered formation so that going between two put you all too close to the next one. Plus they were small enough that they were all but impossible to spot at warp speed.

  Another ship got gutted, and then a second one. Up ahead, I saw the telltale golden streak of some small ship going into warp.

  Shit. A scout, and with superior Centaurian warp technology. It was already fading into the distance. No way we could catch it.

  Within a few minutes, and sustaining the loss of another ship, we made it through the system’s Oort Cloud and outer planets. The Chordatid home world rushed up into view. Within the blink of an eye it went from a distant orb to a looming planet and I felt the disorienting tug of coming out of warp.

  “Let’s do this, people,” I said into the comm to the assembled squadrons. “We nuked their installations before, and we can do it again.”

  The hangar bay doors started to open. I peered through, searching for targets and incoming fire.

  But I saw nothing.

  I didn’t have time to switch to the battleship’s external scanners. I was already hitting the thrusters hard and shooting out between the still-opening doors.

  I flew into open space, the fleet arrayed behind me …

  … and no Centaurian fleet to meet us.

  “Where the hell are they?” Foyle asked as he came out.

  “General R’kk’kar, what are your orders?” I asked.

  The answer took a couple of seconds to come, and when it came it came from the commander of the Chordatid delegation, a being whose name my vocal chords could not pronounce.

  “Continue with the mission. Destroy the planet.”

  I looked at the planet’s surface and I saw why.

  The ocean was patched with the rust-colored stains we had seen before, but far larger, as if the entire world was rotting away. A good quarter of the water was covered now. At the center of the larger stains pulsed large black patches.

  Damn. We hadn’t been gone that long. How could they have done this so quickly?

  “Target the black centers of the larger stains with the largest missiles,” General R’kk’kar ordered. “Any remaining missiles go for the smaller patches. We will save some for the other side of the planet.” He then gave out coordinates for each missile battery and said, “Separate squadrons to guide them in.”

  I gritted my teeth. We’d be divided up wide, unable to support each other. But we had to get them all, then go around to the other side of the planet and do it again. It was the only way to wipe this stuff clean.

  This open attack pattern also left us vulnerable to counterattack. I guess R’kk’kar hoped to get in and get out quick, because I’m sure he wasn’t any more fooled than I was. Just because we couldn’t see the Centaurians didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  Like before, the Shadow Fighters roved out ahead, getting some distance between themselves and the supporting fleet. Within seconds we were spread far and wide, the more common fighters splitting up to support us. The fleet stayed as a cohesive unit, each ship being assigned a detachment to provide covering fire to.

  We wasted a precious couple of minutes getting into this new battle formation, with me casting nervous glances at the planet all the while.

  They must be watching, I kept thinking. They must be planning something.

  They were.

  I saw movement in the atmosphere below, tiny dots arraying themselves over the rust patches. They were too distant for me to make out, but I figured they were more of those flying fish, or something new and worse.

  Then came the next hit. From around the rim of the planet came several formations of the clam fighters.

  I blinked. There were so few, perhaps only half the number we had fought in the last battle. Where were the rest? And where were the whaleships and balloons?

  Our ships launched their missiles. Despite the last-minute change of formations, each ship managed to launch their missiles to align with the correct group of fighters. My formation got a barrage from the Dri’kai flagship. I couldn’t help think of the irony of my one alien friend launching hundreds of megatons of death at me.

  At least he wasn’t trying to get me to mate with Valeria in front of him.

  We adjusted speed to get the missiles alongside. We had three large ones, spread out to make it harder for those flying fish to gobble them up. It also made it harder for me and my nine wingmen to keep them protected.

  “Clam formation coming at us from five o’clock,” Corporal Chen said.

  “I see it,” I replied.

  They scudded along the upper reaches of
the stratosphere, ready to cut us off. The flagship crew spotted them and fired some fast-moving smart missiles at them.

  “When will those missiles hit the clam fighters?” I asked the computer.

  “In thirty-eight seconds.”

  “When will we intersect with their vector?”

  “In forty-two seconds.”

  “Nice.”

  “Question not understood. Please rephrase.”

  “Shut up.”

  God, I hate computers.

  To my left, Foyle’s group and a Skeet and Vlern squadron were heading off a threat to our flank, while two Subine destroyers had moved ahead of the main fleet to protect our right. They were supported by an array of smaller ships and fighters of their own people. While we had their ace fighter pilots with us, given the communication problems with that race, it was best to give them their own sector of the battle and leave them to it.

  An array of fighters came close behind us, at their forefront a few of those weird transparent spheres manned by the Chordatids. I couldn’t imagine what was going through their minds at the moment.

  We descended fast, the stained ocean world growing in our viewscreens. In the last few seconds before I engaged with the Centaurian formation that blocked our way, I saw with horror that we were not their main objective.

  Most of the formations did not break apart to engage individually with our fighters like last time. They didn’t even try to intercept them. Instead, they kept formation, the shimmering green rays suddenly lighting up between them.

  The lead formation fired with all its combined power. A thick line of energy shot across the heavens to hit a Vrimjlen missile battery. The battery broke in half, its superstructure shattering, its hull rocked with dozens of minor explosions as engines and power supplies got overloaded and lit up.

  Then another Centaurian formation fired. I hissed through gritted teeth as the ray shot right for the Nansen.

  It missed by a hair, taking out a Vlern freighter behind it, the smaller ship breaking into a million fragments.