by M. D. Cooper
“Please, take me too. Please, I don’t wanna die here.”
“Oh for starssakes,” Alison muttered. “Up. In the cockpit.”
She stepped aside, and Illumine ran past, giving Jaka—whose face was turning beet red—a terrified look.
Alison followed her to the cockpit and then let go of Jaka. “I assume you can fly?”
He looked up at her, tried to squeak out a word, and then nodded mutely and climbed unsteadily into the pilot’s seat.
“Then let’s go,” Alison said, clamping her feet to the deck plate while Illumine sobbed softly as she pulled on her harness.
Once it was in place, Alison reached down and placed a hand on the woman’s neck, delivering a dose of her now-replenished nano into the woman’s body and rendering her unconscious.
“Thank stars, finally some peace and quiet,” Alison said with a smile.
* * * * *
“We’re close, Colonel Rika,” Shoshin said as the pinnace streaked over Cartegena.
Rika glanced at the Huro Girl, whose name turned out to be Hannah, and the woman nodded meekly. “Almost there.”
“Wait, what’s that?” Kelly pointed out the window as a pinnace rose into the air a kilometer away.
“That’s gotta be them!” Fred exclaimed. “Look, that’s the Huro logo on the nose.”
“He was supposed to wait for us!” Hannah squeaked. “The bastard didn’t even call out to check.”
Rika directed a cold glare at the woman, and her mouth clamped shut.
Shoshin didn’t need to be told to follow the other ship, and banked the pinnace sharply, turning toward the other craft, which flew a short distance and then disappeared behind a long row of apartment buildings.
Rika rushed to the ramp to see Jenisa and Kor already lowering it. The moment Shoshin had the ship over the street, the three jumped out and hit the pavement next to Jaka’s pinnace, only to witness a perplexing tableau.
Alison stood at the base of the pinnace’s ramp, holding a man in her right hand, the tips of his boots just barely resting on the ground.
Her GNR was extended and trained on a tall man, who stood next to a hovercar, holding a woman in his arms. Between them was another man, shorter, with dirty blond hair. Both his arms were outstretched, one palm raised toward Alison, one directed at the man holding Alice.
“Please,” Rika heard the man in the middle say, right as she hit the ground. “Please, don’t shoot, we can settle this peacefully.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Rika said as she approached.
Jenisa was on her right with her GNR trained on the man holding the woman, while Kor came around the other side, PR-111 aimed at the man in the middle.
Alison visibly sagged, and the soles of the man’s feet touched the ground.
“Sweet stars, it’s good to see all of you—you especially, Colonel,” she said, shaking her head. “I thought I was about to get it from more of this guy’s weird girls.” She gave the man she was holding a light shake, which caused him to whimper softly.
“Glad to see you, too,” Rika said, trying to keep too much jubilation from her voice until she knew what was going on.
Suddenly a woman rose from the car, a GNR of her own aimed right at Rika.
“How’s about we all lower our weapons,” she said in an easy drawl. “No need to get carried away, here.”
“Gloria,” the man in the middle hissed, looking over his shoulder. “That’s not helping.”
Two figures materialized behind Gloria, GNRs extended. “Yup. Really not,” Kelly said as Keli nodded.
Gloria raised her GNR and held up her other arm. “Look, we don’t need guns in play; you all out-muscle us. I just don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“Fair enough.” Rika lowered her weapon and gestured for the rest of her Marauders to follow suit.
“Kor,” Alison glanced at the AM-4, “I knocked Illumine out in the cockpit. Make sure she doesn’t fly off.”
“Illumine?” Kor asked.
“She’s like…the alpha Huro Girl.”
Kor chuckled as he turned toward the ramp. “Rad.”
“OK, for starters, I assume that’s Alice?” Rika asked, gesturing to the woman in the arms of the man next to the hovercar.
“Sure is,” Alison said with a sneer. “And this dickwad,” she gave the man she held a shake, “is Jaka Huro, her son.”
Rika’s helmet scan gathered vitals from Alice, ascertaining that the woman was awake. By the slight shaking of her shoulders, she could also tell that the lieutenant colonel was crying.
Rika nodded slowly, turning her focus to the man standing in the middle of the mess. “And you are?”
“Umm…I’m just Tremon. We’re trying to help this woman—Alice. Jaka has one of his thugs, a guy named Del, going after her.”
“Not anymore,” Alison said with a laugh. “Del kinda lost his head.”
“OK, ‘Just Tremon’,” Rika said, noticing that the man holding Alice had relaxed a hair at the news of Del’s demise. “I’m Colonel Rika of the Marauders. We’re here to bring Alice in.”
“I told you,” the other man said to Tremon. “This woman’s a trouble magnet.”
“You’re not wrong, there,” Rika said as Shoshin set their pinnace down a hundred meters behind them. “Jenisa, place the Lieutenant Colonel under arrest for dereliction of duty and mutiny.”
Tremon’s shoulders slumped as Jenisa all but skipped toward the man who held Alice. “Damn, and here I thought I was helping,” he said.
“Good riddance,” the other man muttered as he handed Alice over to Jenisa.
“Tremon, how did you, Gloria, and your other friend, here, get mixed up in all this?” Rika asked.
Tremon watched Jenisa carry Alice to Shoshin’s pinnace. “That’s Yakob. He and I were just trying to do the right thing when we saved her.”
“We need to go,” Yakob said, gesturing to the hovercar. “There’s not much time.”
Gloria turned to Yakob, her eyebrows halfway up her forehead. “Yakob, don’t you realize who this is? This is the woman that is liberating Genevia. Where else are we going to go but with her?”
“I can think of a lot of places,” Yakob said, eyeing Rika suspiciously.
“Either way, that car’s not going to get you far enough,” Rika said. “Not if the station really does come down. We have room, though. Come with us.”
Over the past several minutes Rika had noticed a few people appear in the doorways along the street. None had made a threatening move, and she’d paid them no more heed than necessary as they’d watched the scene unfold.
At Rika’s words, a woman called out, “Please, I have children. We have no way to get out. The feeds said the maglevs were backed up and there’s…no hope.”
Tremon gave Rika an imploring look. “We’ll go with you, but you have to help these people.”
Rika counted thirty-three desperate-looking people who had crept out onto the street. She gave Tremon a curious look, wondering why he’d demand she help everyone else to get him to come along.
Not that it mattered, she wasn’t going to turn anyone away
“OK, folks. Hurry. We don’t have much time.”
FINAL COUNTDOWN
STELLAR DATE: 12.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Event Horizon, Cerulean Shipyards, Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
“Mona!” Saris called over her shoulder. “Have you got those forward beams back online yet?”
“Almost, Lieutenant,” the woman said without looking
up from her console. “This freakin’ ship is like a relic. You’re lucky I spent a week working with the mechs on the Undaunted on this backward tech, or we’d be outta luck.”
“I’ll have to put you on repair rotations more often,” Saris said with a raised eyebrow. “Good for the team.”
“Or you could do one,” Mona muttered.
Saris pulled the destroyer out from amongst a series of cargo nets in the Cerulean shipyard. Scan caught sight of their pursuers, and Saris was glad to see that the final seven fighters they’d drawn off were still with them and hadn’t returned to the battle around Ferris’s ragtag fleet.
“What was that, Sergeant?” she asked, suddenly realizing what the other woman had said.
“Eh? What?” Mona asked.
“Funny.”
“Oh baby, we’re ready to rock and roll!”
The Event Horizon’s chaotic route through the shipyard had caused the pursuing fighters to follow the destroyer single-file, stretched out over several kilometers. With the twisting path Saris had taken amongst the hulls and cargo nets, the enemy ships had only gotten off a few shots, but Saris knew that when they reached the far side of the shipyard, all that would change.
Luckily, with Mona’s repairs, it would change in the Marines’ favor.
Seconds later, the Event Horizon burst into clear space, and Saris punched the rear starboard thrusters, spinning the ship around, its straining dampeners barely keeping them in their seats as she fired the port thrusters to halt the motion.
“Eat this, suckers!” Mona yelled, firing the four functional beams.
Two struck one fighter, and then two hit another. Both enemy ships died fiery deaths just two seconds later, and Saris let out a cry of joy.
Then three of the enemy craft burst through the expanding clouds of plasma and debris, two firing beams at the nearly crippled destroyer, while the third launched a pair of missiles.
“Charging!” Mona called out. “Three, two, firing!”
The Event Horizon’s beams lanced out again, this time one pair focused on the missiles, while another pair targeted the ship that had fired them. One missile made it past and splashed against the shields, its kinetic energy barely absorbed by the grav field, but the fighter that had launched them didn’t move fast enough, and one of the beams tore right through its cockpit, and the ship was no more.
“Down to four!” Saris cried out in triumph.
“We’ve drained the batts,” Mona said in worried tones, glancing at Saris. “Must have been an error in the capacity measurements.”
Saris wasn’t surprised. The Event Horizon was on its last leg, barely more than a glorified troop transport at this point. Enough to keep the locals in line, but as evidenced by its inability to hold off less than two dozen equally ancient fighters without falling apart, not much else.
The old ship groaned as the thrusters fired, turning it around once more, while the main engines’ grav field distributed the payload that Kali had pushed out into space.
For a moment nothing happened, and Mona asked. “Were those limpets all duds? Please don’t let them be duds.”
Then one of the fighters exploded, followed by another, causing Saris to let out a cheer, while Mona screamed out a string of obscenities at the Nietzscheans.
By some miracle, the final two fighters turned away, apparently deciding not to follow in the footsteps of the rest of their squadron.
“Oh no you don’t,” Saris said through gritted teeth as she brought the destroyer around once more, praying it would hold together just a few minutes longer as the deck bucked violently under their feet.
“Charged!” Mona cried out and fired the beams at the fleeing attack craft.
Only three fired this time, two striking one of the fighters’ engines, causing a small explosion, and the ship went dark as it tumbled through space.
The other fighter made it away unscathed.
Saris fired the main engines again, attempting to pursue, but the ship lurched and began to slew to the side. Her board lit up with an alert that the starboard engine had lost its fuel supply. Then the port engine sputtered out, a control system error showing up on the engineering console.
On the main display, the countdown showed only ten minutes left before the asteroids hit the Falcon. Below that, the holotank laid out the battle, which still raged around the group of asteroids.
The three tugs that had joined in had shifted the first of the large rocks, but one of the allies had taken damage from a fighter, and the other two were still hooking onto the smaller asteroids. Ferris’s pinnace and the few other ships that had joined in to help were still struggling against the bulk of the fighters.
“Damn,” Mona whispered. “There’s no way….”
“It’s not over yet,” Saris whispered. “Colonel Borden might still reach his objective.”
THE FERRYMAN
STELLAR DATE: 12.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Fury Lance’s pinnace, near Maltese Falcon, Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
“I swear,” Ferris muttered. “If Vargo ever asks me to ‘do him a solid’ again, I’ll tell him where he can stick his solids.”
“You’re doing great,” Halley said as she fired the pinnace’s beams on one of the fighters, jinking the ship to avoid the small craft’s retaliation.
“I know I’m doing great,” Ferris muttered as he managed to settle another of the dropships on one of the five-hundred-meter rocks. “Blowing it in ten!” he called out to his ragtag fleet while shifting his focus to the next rock.
The tugs had moved the first big daddy and shifted two of the smaller ones. He’d blown two more of them—though the debris field would still pass dangerously close to the Falcon—and this would make a third.
That still left six rocks, and two of them were the big daddies. Though they had twelve minutes before impact, they only had seven to get the big daddies moving, or they’d still clip the station.
Ferris was considering moving all his resources to the big ones, but most of the Nietzschean fighters had moved back to guard them, knowing that so long as those two rocks hit the Falcon, the station was done for. It may not fall fast enough to land on Cerulean, but it would still come down.
He was about to order his ships to make the run on the fighters anyway, when a message came over the shared channel.
“This an invite-only party, or can anyone join?”
“Colonel Borden?” Ferris asked, knowing he sounded like an idiot for simply saying the man’s name.
“Damn straight it is. I have this lovely thing called a Starcrusher, and some caring soul left thirty-six longbow missiles in it. I don’t know if they’ll all make targets that far out, but what should I focus on?”
“A Starcrusher and longbows? Fuck, Colonel, did you find a leprechaun down there, too?”
“Hope not. Because we killed pretty much everything we came across. Targets?”
“The fighters in the rear,” Ferris said quickly, and a moment later, the colonel signaled a successful launch of thirty-three of the longbows.
“We’re going to walk this thing over to the launch bays and see if the Niets left us any rides. Hope it helps.”
“It does, trust me, it does.”
Though Ferris did his best to be effusive in his thanks, he worried that the colonel’s help wouldn’t be enough.
He tagged the longbows on the holodisplay. The quick and nimble missiles didn’t pack enough punch to move any of the rocks, but they were perfect for taking out fighters. He noted that it would take them five minutes to close the distance between The Moon and the targets, but already some of the Nietzschean craft were fleeing—eleven in all—leaving only eight fighters remaining.
Fuck, maybe we can get the big daddies, after all.
He directed his final three dropships to one of the big daddies, while the two remaining tugs moved to the other, the police patrol ships and freighters escorting them in.
Beams, light kinetics, and a few small missiles streaked between the ships and the remaining fighters, but none suffered severe damage. The tugs were about to settle on the largest rock, when suddenly the eleven fighters that had left the fight turned back and made a beeline for the tugs.
“Shit!” Ferris swore. “I’m such an idiot!”
The two police ships opened fire with their beams, attempting to drive the fighters back, and one of the Niets lost an engine, spinning away into the dark, but the rest launched their remaining missiles at the tugs.
Every ship in Ferris’s fleet did their damnedest to hit those missiles, and a few beams even stretched out from the Torrent of Fire, playing across the three hundred thousand kilometers between the cruiser and the battle, but it wasn’t enough.
The missiles hit, and the tugs were gone.
Even as Borden’s longbows bore down on the fighters, Ferris felt despair welling in his chest. There was no hope for it. The rocks would hit. The station would fall.
“Fuck!” he screamed, slamming his hand against the console, hitting it again and again, beating on it with both fists and cracking the display. “Motherfuckers!”
Halley reached out to touch his shoulder, and he shrugged her hand away.
“Don’t say it.”
