The Deep Black Space Opera Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  Hep dropped to study him. Akari studied the readouts from the newly-charged engine core.

  “Power in the core is off the chart,” Akari said.

  “I need to get him to med-bay.” Hep pressed two fingers to Bayne’s neck. He pulled away them as a jolt of energy shot through him.

  “That will have to wait,” Akari said. Then, into her comm, “Captain, we’re ready.”

  Hep tried to find a pulse in Bayne’s wrist. He grabbed hold only to be shocked again. He dropped Bayne’s hand.

  The engine core lit up, and Hep felt like his insides were being squeezed. The feeling lasted days, an eternity. He wanted to scream, but he could not breathe. When the pain stopped, Bayne’s hand hit the floor. Not even a second had passed.

  “What just happened?” Hep said, trying to keep from vomiting.

  “Captain?” Akari said.

  “I need everyone on the bridge,” Mao said. “Now.”

  Unable to even touch Bayne, Hep knew it was pointless to attempt transporting him to med-bay on his own. He would return with a stretcher after he and Akari ran to the bridge.

  None on the crew turned to greet them as they entered. They stared out the viewport. At the battle. At the swarm of ships so thick it clogged space. They’d traveled all the way to the Black Line in the time it took to blink. It should have taken at least ten minutes.

  “Nice of you to show up,” a nasally and wholly unpleasant voice said over comms. “Now make yourselves useful and kill something.”

  4

  Mao had started to regret not having made a more thorough plan before rushing into battle. Maybe the reappearance of Drummond Bayne in his life was beginning to have a negative impact on him already. Mao shuddered at the thought.

  “Captain?” Delphyne was the first to look away from the carnage outside. “Orders?”

  He’d never seen a battlefield like this. Not even at the height of the warlord campaign. The swarm blotted out stars. It was so thick, it was impossible to calculate their actual numbers. “Where did the Void get all these ships?”

  The crew assumed it a rhetorical question. Byrne realized quickly that it was not. “I’m getting a lot of ship signatures,” she said. “It’ll take a minute to sort them out.”

  “Get to it,” Mao ordered. “If we can figure out what ships we’re fighting, then we can better prepare to engage. Delphyne, contact Dr. Elias. Tell him we have Bayne and we are bound for the Mjolnir. Then make the arrangements with Rear Admiral Klepper. We can’t afford to waste time with bureaucratic nonsense like prisoner transfer protocols.” He turned his attention to Bigby and Horus. “You two, clear us a path.”

  They both smiled as they manned the weapons systems.

  Mao looked at Akari. “Well done with the engines. Get back to engineering and make sure everything continues to run smoothly. You can brief me on what just happened later.” He looked at Hep, narrowing his eyes like something was missing. “Where’s Bayne?”

  “Passed out. Or, I think passed out. After he juiced the engine core, he collapsed. I couldn’t get him to med-bay because he electrocuted me every time I touched him.”

  “Of course he did. Get a stretcher and get him to Dr. Hauser. I assume he needs to be conscious for whatever Elias has planned.”

  Every member of Mao’s crew sprang into action, small pieces of the greater machine making the whole thing run. Leaving Mao to stand and watch the chaos unfold. He could not pull his eyes from the battlefield. So much was happening that his brain could only comprehend a tiny fraction. He felt overwhelmed, like standing in a room bustling with conversation. So many voices that he could not hear just one, could not pick pieces of dialogue out from the greater whole.

  Two starfighters drew Mao’s focus. They entered the Blue’s lane and spun to engage. Before Mao could issue an order, both ships exploded, followed quickly by victorious whoops from Bigby and Horus.

  “I’ve got Rear Admiral Klepper, sir,” Delphyne said. “He said, and I quote, ‘figure it out’.”

  Mao cursed under his breath. “Insufferable.” This was exactly why the chain of command existed, so that in times of chaos, there was a structure, an order, someone to lead the way. What happened then when the top of that chain told you in no uncertain terms to screw off? Despite his every hope to avoid it, he couldn’t help but wonder what Bayne would do. Admiral Jeska would be too busy coordinating the fleet, which was why Klepper was supposed to quarterback this. So, who else—

  A name flashed in Mao’s mind. It was a name he wished he could permanently erase, but he knew it was his best bet. “Delphyne, get Captain Calibor on the line.”

  The name seemed to put a bad taste in Delphyne’s mouth. “Aye, Captain.” Her eyebrows arched, surprised by how quickly he responded. “Here’s Calibor, sir.”

  “Captain,” Mao said, “I need your help.”

  “Anything, Captain Mao.” His eagerness was off-putting. Not long ago, Mao and Calibor had been enemies. Calibor had served as Jeska’s XO when she was captain of the Illuminate. A pain then, but sufferable. He inched closer to intolerable when he was promoted to captain after Jeska became admiral. He became loathsome when he chose to be the lapdog of Colonel Maria Tirseer. He was unaware of her overarching scheme to usurp total power of the United Systems, but his ignorance did nothing to redeem him. The only reason he was not in the brig right now was because they needed every able-bodied sailor for the fight against the Void.

  “We have the asset, and we’re bound for the Mjolnir.”

  “Excellent,” Calibor said. His excitement thinly veiled the still prominent disappointment underneath. He had wanted to assist in the mission to retrieve Bayne, but Mao convinced Jeska it would have been bad for unit cohesion.

  “I need Dr. Elias in the level one starfighter hangar bay, ready for pickup ASAP. I don’t even want to engage docking clamps.”

  “I’m on it, Mao.” Something unspoken lingered in the air. Calibor’s grinding teeth could almost be heard through the comm.

  Finally, Mao ended the call and turned his attention back to the fight. “How close are we?”

  “The Mjolnir is just there,” Delphyne said, gesturing to a mass in the upper left quadrant of the viewport. “But we don’t have a clear lane.”

  Mao squinted, trying to distinguish one ship from the next, but it looked like one black mass pocked with the occasional glint of metal.

  “Working on it,” Horus said. “But it’s like shoveling water.”

  Bayne’s voice sounded in Mao’s head. It was too excited, giddy at the suggestion it just made. Even as a whisper in Mao’s head, Bayne was still the kid who liked to throw lit matches at people’s feet.

  Mao radioed engineering. “Akari, how possible is it to redirect power from the engine core to the weapons systems?”

  Delphyne’s head snapped around, a look on her face like a schoolteacher who just heard swearing in the back of her classroom.

  “Very possible,” Akari said.

  “And the likelihood that it will tear the ship apart?” Delphyne added.

  A moment of silence. “Forty percent,” Akari finally answered. “Our weapon systems should be able to handle the output in small doses. I can syphon enough energy for one shot at a time. That should keep everything from overloading.”

  “I’m hearing a lot of ‘should’,” Delphyne said.

  “At this point in the game, I can live with a sixty percent chance we won’t die,” Mao said. “Power up the first shot.”

  Horus jumped out of his chair. He bounced on his heels, hands waving. “Can I do it? Please?”

  Mao sighed. “Fine. Cut us a path, Mr. Horus. Bigby, hold fire. Once Horus fires, he’ll be offline. That’s when you make sure our new lane stays clear.”

  “Aye,” they both said.

  The bridge crew held their collective breath, some out of fear that the strange energy about to pulse through the ship would atomize them, some out of excitement that they get to push the button that
makes a really big boom. Akari began the syphon. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. The ship didn’t rattle. Nothing melted or sparked or shut down. The calm was off-putting.

  “Syphon complete,” Akari said.

  “Make it count, Mr. Horus,” Mao said.

  “Oh, it’s gonna count.” Horus raised the manual targeting system. The screen lit up with activity, the reticule highlighting hundreds then thousands of enemy ships. He aimed for center mass, the thickest part of the swarm between the Blue and the Mjolnir.

  “Captain,” Byrne said. “I need to—”

  “She’s away!” Horus yelled as he pulled the trigger.

  Again, a feeling of anticlimax took the bridge. A light built off the bow, no different than any other attack, but it kept building. Over milliseconds that felt like minutes, the light grew. And then it exploded. The viewport washed in a brilliant white flash, a terrifying flash that Mao had seen before, coming from his former friend Sigurd. The light faded as quickly as it’d come. The result of the blast was just as jarring as the attack itself. A clear lane had appeared, littered only with occasional debris.

  “Take us through!” Mao shouted, an act as jarring as anything else.

  In the chaos, no one seemed to notice who had taken the helm until now. “Aye,” Wilco said, delight in his voice. He rocketed the ship forward, maneuvering deftly past the first obstacle in their path—the carcass of a ship that was neither Navy nor Syndicate but felt familiar.

  Mao did not allow himself to be distracted. “Bigby, keep us clear!”

  “Aye, Captain.” Bigby locked onto a pair of starfighters charging for them from the port side. He shot them out of the sky before they could fire a shot. He fired several more shots, taking out a half-dozen ships in as many seconds. But he was not fast enough. The lane began to collapse.

  “How much longer until we can fire again?” Mao said.

  “Thirty seconds,” Akari answered.

  “Mr. Wilco?” The words tasted sour in Mao’s mouth.

  “Aye. Don’t worry about me. I can do this all day.”

  “Just try to keep the rest of us alive in the process, if you don’t mind.”

  “No promises.” Wilco laughed as he put the ship in a barrel-roll. He weaved through a mass of starfighters that looked to be putting themselves intentionally in the Blue’s path, using themselves as roadblocks.

  “Sir, I think you need to see this,” Byrne said, voice tightening.

  “Is it pertinent to our immediate survival?”

  She hesitated.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” Mao said. “It’ll have to wait. Akari?”

  “Fifteen seconds.”

  Horus was out of his chair again, bouncing on his heels. He muttered to himself, looking like an excited child in a toy store. Bigby was as focused as Mao had ever seen him, monitoring several displays at once, blasting dozens of ships in seconds. Wilco, as much as it pained Mao to admit, was an excellent pilot. He rivaled any of the helmsmen Mao had sailed with previously. When all was done, if Wilco wasn’t in a brig or hanging from someone’s gallows, he would make an excellent addition to any Navy ship.

  “Goddamn, this thing flies like a peach,” Wilco shouted, reminding Mao that it wasn’t skill alone that made one suitable to serve in the Navy.

  “Ready,” Akari said.

  “Fire!” Mao shouted.

  Horus dropped into his chair, aimed again at the center of the swarm, and fired. They expected the burst of light now and adapted to the force. The lane was clear again.

  “That should get us there, Captain,” Wilco said. “They ain’t pulling together fast enough to block me this time.”

  Bravado aside, Wilco was right. The attack scattered the swarm of Void ships enough to give the Blue a clear opening to the Mjolnir. “Tell Calibor we’re seconds away from docking.”

  “I’m in the level one hangar bay,” Calibor said. “Elias is prepped and ready to transport.”

  Mao smiled but couldn’t bring himself to speak his appreciation.

  The Blue banked hard to starboard, swinging around in an impressive docking maneuver. Now lined up for a straightforward approach, Wilco eased the throttle forward, knowing when bravado would get you killed and restraint meant victory.

  Unfortunately, the Void had no such hesitation. A Void ship shot past the Blue and stabbed like a spike into the Mjolnir’s hangar bay. Clouds bled from the behemoth ship as its atmosphere was sucked out. Shards of metal, starfighters and the people meant to pilot them were jettisoned into space The Void ship became inert. It was a suicide mission, if those walking-dead monsters were capable of such sacrifice.

  “Calibor?” Mao’s voice hung in the air. “Do you read?”

  Broken words responded, shards of a voice. They soon melded together into the shattered voice of Calibor. “Get…now! Void soldiers…all over!

  “Get us in there!”

  Wilco forgot his budding sense of caution and charged forward. With another impressive banking maneuver, he passed by the Void splinter and skated into the fractured hangar bay with only minimal hull damage. He fired the rear thrusters and barely came to a halt before slamming into a row of starfighters.

  The bay was chaos. Void soldiers poured from the splinter, marching like puppets in neat lines, blasters firing indiscriminately.

  “I’m on it,” Hep’s voice sounded over the comm. The gangplank lowered and Hep was soon visible, sprinting across the hangar bay. He dodged and weaved through the blaster fire, making no effort to fight, only survive.

  Mao followed Hep’s trajectory and saw where the young boy was headed. Calibor was barely standing, blood staining his uniform and streaming down his face. Behind him, cowering like a kitten, was Dr. Elias. A detachment of Void soldiers broke away from the main contingent, which seemed to march without destination, and made straight for Calibor.

  It was clear then that it was no coincidence the Void ship had speared into the hangar bay just seconds after Calibor announced that Elias was there. The Void could monitor encrypted Navy comm channels.

  “Use the small bow guns to keep them clear,” Mao ordered.

  Both Horus and Bigby switched their tact, manning the manual small arms, mowing down swathes of Void soldiers. Hep reached Calibor. Calibor pushed the mewling Dr. Elias toward Hep and gestured for the two to make for the Blue. Hep looked like he was appealing to Calibor to go first, but the captain just swung his arm, dismissing him.

  Hep, sword now drawn, hauled Elias away. Calibor braced himself against a stack of fuel cells. Even from the bridge, Mao could tell Calibor had lost too much blood. His vision was probably dimming, his limbs going cold.

  “Calibor, make for the Blue,” Mao said. “We can cover you.”

  “I’ve got a hunk of shrapnel the size of your ego in my gut, Captain,” Calibor said with a laugh and a wet cough. “I’m not going anywhere. But neither are these things. Get Elias out of here. Do whatever you have to do. End this.”

  “What do you intend to do?” Mao said. “Calibor, answer me.” He did not respond. “He’s talking to someone. Find out what channel he’s using.”

  Delphyne scanned the Mjolnir’s internal frequencies, and then broadcasted Calibor’s communication over the Blue’s comms.

  “Seal off the hangar bay,” Calibor said, his voice like a bark. “Then, when I give the order, you release the temporary seals on the hull.”

  “But, sir—”

  “I know! Just do it, goddammit!”

  “But you and the others will—”

  “I said I know!” Calibor shouted. “It’s us or the entire ship.”

  Fire spread through Mao’s chest. He’d never thought of Calibor with anything other than contempt. A sycophant. The very sort of man that drove Bayne and Delphyne away, the sort of man who poisons the institution from the inside.

  “The unmanned starfighters,” Calibor said. “Activate the self-destructs. I’ll be damned if these Void scum use our own ships to kill good sa
ilors. Maybe…” A coughing fit took him, a thick, wet cough. “Maybe we’ll take a few of them with us.”

  The fire spread to Mao’s face. It burned hot with shame. With pride.

  “Mao?”

  Mao jumped at the sound of his name, spoken so weakly by a man he’d long ago written off as useless. “Yes?”

  “Tell me when the kid’s on board. I got…I got a plan. Something I think…I think Drummond Bayne would like.”

  Delphyne acknowledged that Hep and Elias were on board.

  “We have them, Calibor.”

  “Then get out of here.”

  Mao swallowed hard. “Fair winds, Captain Calibor.” As the Blue turned, Mao’s body stiffened and then began to shake, like he’d been dipped in ice water and left to freeze. Every derogatory thought he’d had about Calibor came to mind. Bigby and Horus laid waste to dozens of Void soldiers on their way out. They watched dozens of Navy pilots race to their starfighters and rush through the launch procedures. They were trying to save as many ships as possible, trying to keep a massive portion of the starfighter fleet from being sacrificed.

  The Blue shot out of the hangar bay and immediately engaged in evasive maneuvers. Mao closed his eyes and waited. He couldn’t bear to watch the monitor, the explosion, the sudden burst and just as sudden cease of activity, like the people who just died only warranted a blink of acknowledgement, a flick of the wrist to wipe them from the world.

  A flurry of calls came. Delphyne sorted them. Both Klepper and Jeska wanted to talk to Mao. The captain lowered his head. Even his moment of silence for a fallen comrade would need to be cut short.

  “Take us around,” Mao ordered. “Get us behind the Mjolnir.” I need a moment to breathe, he thought. He said, “We need to regroup and plan our attack.”

  5

  Hep didn’t realize he was digging his nails into Dr. Elias’s arm until the doctor slapped his hand and made a hissing sound, like a scolding teacher. He released his grip on Elias and fell onto his butt. He scooted back and pressed himself into the wall of the cargo bay of the Royal Blue. Nearly dying had been a regular occurrence for Hep for years now. As had watching friends die. Not that he would have considered Calibor a friend…