by Drew Avera
Frustrated, Anki rose from her rack and padded across her stateroom. Each step her feet touched upon the cold deck until she found herself standing in front of the mirror. She looked at herself, the darkness around her eyes from a lack of sleep and disheveled hair falling off her shoulders. Her amber eyes reflected the pale light of the room as she looked at the woman she had become. Only three years of training had changed her from the soft teenager without a clue of how the world worked into a grown woman, chiseled muscle and confident gaze. At least she was once confident, now she could see the fledgling fear hidden behind her eyes and wondered if others saw it too.
She turned on the water in her sink and splashed it on her face, the cool water helping to liven up her senses. Truth be told, she was bored and had too much on her mind during the long periods of doing nothing. She trained several hours per day, but that didn’t fill the void of empty thoughts permeating her mind, affecting her sleep. Anki looked at the time and it was a few hours before the official start of the workday on the ship. But I was up and might as well do something to occupy her time, she thought. She dressed in the gray uniform left sitting at the edge of her rack. The two-piece uniform hugged her body, but not too tightly. It was like a firm handshake, snug and secure, but comfortable. Her boots completed the ensemble, the dull black leather ― running halfway up her calves tied tightly at the top ― came equipped with electromagnets for walking in zero-gravity. In theory, they were designed to aid in infiltrating an enemy ship by allowing the Marines to stand on the hull and breach the airlock without the need for a full EVA suit. The theory hadn’t been tested in an actual boarding, though, so the jury was still out on whether or not they were effective. Anki thought about the horror of the boots failing and a bunch of Luthian Marines floating away into the dark until their oxygen ran out. It’s not an ideal way to go out, she thought. Better to take the bullet than let the float kill you.
The gym was empty this time of night, which was a good thing in her opinion. Too many people were a distraction, and a cluttered gym didn’t allow for a very fluid workout. As a Marine Operative she was trained to operate solo instead of as part of a regiment. The isolation from others might have been difficult to handle for some Marines, but her withdrawn childhood had given her advantage to beat back the loneliness. If anyone was cut out for her line of work then it was Anki Paro and others who grew up in similar situations. She didn’t look back on her youth with regret, though. Anki had coped with the loss of her mother by retreating into her own mind. Her father was always there for her, but sometimes she had to be there for herself. She hadn’t wanted to burden him with the grief she felt at losing her mother. It occurred to her that she had never told him that.
Why do my thoughts always drift to my childhood or to my imminent demise, she thought as she climbed onto a treadmill. Running in uniform wasn’t very comfortable, but she made sure to train that way at least once a week. It didn’t matter how much endurance you had, if you couldn’t run in boots then you were more likely to die. War was a dance and you needed to have the coordination to move across the dance floor unscathed. It was a horrible analogy, but it was the one given her by her Marine Instructor during the long, arduous runs weighed down with all of her equipment. Of course, he said that from the relative comfort of running shoes and shorts. The treadmill escalated faster as her booted feet pounded against it. The electromagnets added a heft to each step that made her shins burn the faster and harder she ran. That burn crept up her legs and into her back over the course of the next few minutes reminding her why she only did this kind of workout every six or seven days. It sucked.
Exhaustion flowed through her body more efficiently than oxygen did, but she kept running, gasping for breath, panting for air to relieve the yearning in her lungs. She wanted to drink, but thirst was a motivator to run harder, to meet her goal. She could reward herself with deep breathing and quenched thirst after her workout was complete, she decided, watching the numbers rise on the treadmill. It was through the dull thudding of her heartbeat in her ears that she heard an announcement over the ship’s intercom system. The voice sent a chill down Anki’s spine.
“Onboard Seratora, this is the Tactical Actions Officer. We have entered an area previously known to be occupied by the Greshian Navy. We are in a high-alert environment. At this time, no further communications will be emitted until we are outside the threat environment. Only if our situation escalates will an announcement be made. Thank you.”
Anki hadn’t thought the Seratora could travel so fast, but here they were, in an area where Greshians had murdered the last remnants of a non-hostile world. Her heart beat hard in her chest and it wasn’t just the workout’s effects on her body. It was as if her anxiety was met by the real world and the taste of potent revelation was too much to bear. She took her water now, in hopes of washing away the taste of bile slowly rising from her throat. This is the real deal now, she thought.
No sooner than the thought crossed her mind she felt the recoil of the ship’s countermeasures deploying. What the hell? There was no alarm or anything to indicate the presence of enemy forces, she thought. The deck beneath her feet shook like a leaf on the wind. If not for the electromagnets on her boots, she would have been tossed through the air as the Seratora listed port at a hard angle; what had been in front of her was now above her, which was very disorienting. It was true what they said about relying on your training to get through an emergency situation. The repetition of every simulation she had endured over the course of three years rang clearly in her mind. Her reactions were nothing more than acute muscle memory firing impulses to known stimulus. The ship quaked, and she adjusted her steps; the ship listed, and the bulkhead became the new deck. All her responses were autonomic as she hurled her way through empty passageways, the magnets in her boots helping her maintain her footing.
The Seratora was huge. In fact, in Anki’s mind it was bigger than huge, but that only meant she had to run harder to get to her station. She wasn’t entirely sure when the klaxon had sounded, but it was a nauseating ring in her ears now. Sailors and Marines were falling from their berthings, half-dressed and half awake. It was an emergency and their trainings was probably kicking into gear through their groggy minds as well. She passed several Sailors trying to access a hatch that appeared locked. Heat permeated from the bulkhead, blistering the paint around it. Instinct told her there was a fire on the other side; that it was dangerous to try and occupy that space, but she couldn’t draw enough breath from her fear to say anything. She watched in unrelenting horror as the hatch was finally breached by their combined efforts, only to have them devoured by the flames rushing through the new opening they had created.
There was no time to scream, no time to formulate a new plan. There was hardly time to run, but that was her only viable option as the flames licked closer, kissing the backs of her legs as she hurled herself through the tumbling ship. Another burst of countermeasures erupted beneath her, feeling as if the Seratora was retching. It was something her body had the urge to do as well, but stopping meant burning. Anki leapt across an intersection of passageways and slid down a ladder well, feeling the heat radiating above and behind her as if it were stalking her and her alone.
She had no idea where she was going, but following her instincts was all she had. Her feet fell heavily on the deck, the threat of flames left behind, but the compulsion to keep running pulsating in her mind like a warning. The Seratora fired something nearby, it didn’t have the same quivering sound emitting through the hull as the countermeasures had. Perhaps it was a torpedo or rail gun. Anki didn’t know, all of the sounds were all too familiar, for all she knew it was the sound of the Sera being hit, breeched and boarded by the enemy, and here she was unarmed and left to her own defenses.
She stretched her legs, opening her gait to move more distance in a shorter span of time. it didn’t matter that her legs were feeling flimsy, that her shins were on fire, her feet slamming to the deck like hammers. S
he had to run, to find a way off the ship before it went nova. She didn’t know how she knew it was coming, but it was the most sure she had felt about anything in a long time. With every other step the hull of the ship felt as if it were tearing open, spilling its guts into the dark. Even the air was feeling thinner where she was. Anki found the frame number of her location and checked her com-unit for the location of her transport, the only safe way she could escape in one piece ― if she was lucky. The com-unit pinpointed her location in relation to the transport. Horrified, she noticed she had been running the wrong direction, and now she could hear the sound of footsteps, a lot of them.
The armory, she thought, shifting through the options on her com-unit as fast as her fingers could fly over the screen. “That’s more like it,” she said, fighting back the want for hope. The armory was two decks up, but it was closer than the transport, and if the Greshians were boarding, then she needed a way to kill them.
She ran up the nearest ladder leading to the next deck. A dim emergency beam was the only form of lighting in this area of the ship and her eyes took a moment to adjust. She could still hear the footsteps echoing through the passages. It was a good sign to still be able to hear them; it meant this part of the hull wasn’t open to vacuum. Despite the lower quality air growing stale as it filtered through her lungs, she could at least be thankful for not having to worry about being sucked into the vacuum yet. No need to count your blessings when a curse is right around the corner, she thought. She kept running.
14
Brendle
Many thoughts go through a person’s head when they are being left behind. As Brendle watched the Telran take off, the dark gray steel disappearing behind clouds of exhaust and dust, he imagined the ship exploding, some cataclysmic defect finally rearing its head and bringing about the only justice the killer of worlds deserved. Of course, the fact that an explosion of the mighty Telran from his current position would ensure his demise as well came to mind, but he was dead anyway. He was just waiting for his body to catch up to the situation and comply with the actuality of known futures. Former Ensign Brendle Quin, traitor to the Greshian Empire, banished to a lonely moon in the Keshnarian sector, was a dead man.
Brendle pulled out the com-unit and tried to link up to the Telran, but his access was denied. He tried again and again, searching for a backdoor into the ship’s network, anything that would allow him to send a distress call. He knew before he even started that it was no moot point. That wasn’t a deterrent, though. He tried again with the same result: a black and red screen telling him it had failed to connect to a network. Brendle hissed in frustration, holding back the urge to slam the useless device to the ground and stomp it to pieces. He had known this would happen, but it didn’t alleviate the sting of being shut out. He tapped his jacket and felt the beacon patiently waiting for use. He knew the time would come where that would be his only hope, but he couldn’t afford to waste it now, not with the Telran floating above him, blotting out the sky. Ilium knew he had the com-unit and most likely closed off access to the network, but he had no idea about the beacon and the last thing Brendle needed was for his sole tool for at least trying to get off the rock to be muffled into uselessness by a vindictive son of a bitch like Ilium.
He shoved the com-unit back into his pocket and cussed under his breath. He was forced into waiting and his best chance was to wait until the Telran faded into the stars, just another dim discoloration of the darkness. He watched the massive mechanical city grow smaller as each second passed. The Telran floated under thrust, defying the laws of physics that said a mass of her size could not take flight despite the low gravitational pull of the rocky planetary body. Usually, ships of that magnitude were constructed on stations already in orbit. The dark was a suitable place for such construction, especially considering how few people would die if a catastrophe were to happen. The stations held less than thirty-thousand Greshians, a far lower number than Greshia boasted with her seventeen-trillion inhabitants. That was the world he had left behind, bloated and angry. I shouldn’t be surprised at how much anger fueled my people’s pride, he thought as the fading lights of the Telran became tiny dots against the dark expansive sky. It was pride that made the Greshians want to reach for the stars in the first place, and pride that made them seek to conquer them all. There was no real gain in any of it, though. Greshian was still close to bursting at the seams as the population exploded. For every citizen sent out into the dark there were five more to take their place. Perhaps they were fighting for a better place to die.
Brendle walked away from his past, leaving the longing for home behind. He had no home, not anymore; even if he made it off this rock, he could never return to Greshia. Ilium had killed him without ever needing to pull the trigger. What kind of society breeds an individual like that, Brendle wondered. His family had its problems, but no one looked for a way to destroy another person’s life, at least he didn’t think they did so purposefully. But isn’t that exactly what his father had done by leaving his wife and young child alone? Falling back into thoughts of his childhood made his head swim. He inhaled a quick whiff of stale atmosphere and sat back on a boulder, eyes to the stars from whence he came.
He wondered if the stars in the Keshnarian sector were the same stars he gazed upon as a child on Greshia. The keys that allowed intergalactic travel had shortened the distance between sectors, but it was also disorienting. It was hard to know where you were in the Alorian Galaxy after so many jumps, and the maps did little to orientate a person’s sense of direction. If he didn’t know he was in the Keshnarian sector, then the stars would be indistinguishable from any others. The only variable was placement and luminosity; everything else was relative. It was that kind of perspective that made Brendle feel like a speck of dust on the wind. The Greshians were no greater than any other specks of dust cast amongst the stars, so why did they have the innate drive to spring forth and conquer? Some questions have no real answers, Brendle thought.
Through the haze of the cloudy sky, Brendle saw what looked like a meteor arcing across the black canvas of the dark. The tail of it was scorching as it flew upward, the sheen of it reflecting light in a way that most meteors never did. He watched as the trajectory of it shifted upward and realized it wasn’t a meteor at all, but a torpedo being launched from what must have been the Telran. “What the―” Brendle started to say as he stood up and gazed at the spectacle above. He lifted his hand, using his thumb and index finger as a square to determine if he could identify the target. The torpedo was the brightest light in the sky for several seconds as he strained to see beyond it. A moment later the torpedo detonated, sending scattered light ricocheting like a miniature starburst. Whatever it had hit was solid, Brendle thought, and metallic.
The initial blast was followed by dozens of smaller flashes. Brendle could see the bright firings of countermeasures deploying as more torpedoes launched from the first vessel. The light from the deployed armament framed the hulls of the large ships making them look like gods battling in the sky above. Brendle couldn’t hear the concussions from the exploding warheads, but with each flash he felt the devastation being wrought on the foreign ship. He could feel the cold touch of the trigger he would have squeezed to launch the assault he was witnessing like a phantom limb. The death being delivered so violently could have been by my hand, he thought, as he kept his gaze centered on the trajectory of fire. From his vantage point it looked as if the other ship had been approaching the moon, meeting the Telran halfway, but orientation was different in the dark than it was on the ground, feet planted in defiance.
More explosions tore at the hull of the incoming ship, lighting the darkness with fire. Brendle pulled his com-unit out and used the lens to magnify the view of the battle. He could make out the definition of the ships better, but couldn’t assess the damage very well. He watched as the unknown ship listed to its portside and wondered if it was from sustaining damage or if the countermeasures being deployed was causing the
ship to lean so heavily. It could have suspended thrust and is merely floating, he thought. That was when he noticed the rupture emanating from the belly of the ship, the tearing of steel accompanied by bursts of explosive material. He recognized the tactic. The Greshians had boarded the ship and were now scuttling it from the inside. The ship was as dead as Brendle was. They just didn’t know it yet.
15
Anki
The armory was stocked for war, but for a ground war. Everywhere Anki looked was high-powered weaponry designed to cut through body armor. The problem was that if it made it through body armor then the hull of the Seratora could be compromised. It’s hard to save a ship when you don’t take precautions to preserve it and Anki wasn’t looking forward to the air being sucked from her lungs by being thrust into vacuum. She needed something else at her disposal, something that could get the job done without risking the Seratora unnecessarily. Anki’s fingers ran along the cold steel weaponry, digesting each one’s makeup, use, and probability of being able to ward off the enemy in this constrictive environment. Nothing really jumped out at her as a viable option, so she settled for the high-charge kinetic weapon. It was convenient in the fact it didn’t need to be reloaded and was already fully charged. It discharged a blast of kinetic energy that, even though it was projected in orb form, wasn’t exactly a projectile. The discharge of the weapon came in the form of a force of energy passing through the atmosphere. It was enough to knock a person over, crippling them in some cases, while not running the risk of breaching the hull. It isn’t an ideal weapon to use in a combat situation ― it was more designed for policing― but it will have to do, she thought as she pulled it from its perch on the rack.
