by M. D. Cooper
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.”
A long silence stretched out, seeming to last minutes, but Ferris knew it to just be a few seconds. He was about to order the ships to fall back and blow the nukes on the last dropships—for whatever good it would do—but as he opened his mouth to order the retreat, a new voice came over the channel.
“This is Lieutenant Potter of the Marauders. All ships clear the swarm. I say again, all ships clear the swarm. I’m taking them out.”
“Potter? What the—how the hell did you get here?”
“By finding out that AIs can have nightmares. I have a load of RMs, so if you’d mind giving me some room—”
“You heard the lady,” Ferris announced to his fleet, and Halley banked the pinnace away, an elated expression on her face. “She’s got this covered. All ships fall back to the markers I’m sending.”
Ferris wanted to believe they’d won, to believe that the Falcon was safe, but the knot in his stomach wasn’t going anywhere until the mass cleared the Maltese Falcon without taking down the station—or hitting something vital on the planet below.
“Thank the dark stars,” came the response from one of the freighter captains, a sentiment echoed by a few others, and then the ships shifted to either side of the swarm, keeping the fighters bracketed between themselves and The Moon.
The signatures of twelve relativistic missiles appeared on his screen, drives flaring like new stars in the darkness as they streaked toward their targets, while the longbows continued their march from the moon toward the fighters, all of which were frantically scattering.
“That’s right, little roaches,” Halley muttered, a grim smile on her lips. “Run away, though there’s nowhere for you to go.”
Ferris supposed she was right. Borden was moving his Starcrusher toward the Nietzschean launch bays on The Moon. None of the stations in Iberia would allow those fighters to dock, and they’d lost both their capital ships in the system.
If they didn’t die from the longbows, they just might die in the darkness.
Though the previous half hour had sped by at breakneck speed, the single minute it took for the RMs to reach the rocks seemed like an eternity. Ferris had his knuckles to his lips as he watched the counter hit zero.
The missiles had reached relativistic speeds, and the force with which they struck the asteroids blasted them to atoms in brilliant flashes of light.
Then the light was gone, and so were the asteroids, little more than clouds of plasma and dust remained where once there had been terrible instruments of death, bearing down on the Maltese Falcon.
Ferris was examining the velocity and structure of the cloud, worried that the amount of dust could still damage the station, when two more explosions erupted in the leading edge of the dust cloud, removing any risk of it passing over the station.
“Shit, Potter, you did it.”
“It was nothing,” the AI replied. “You know…I just had to fly a ship though the dark layer with no special sensors while avoiding dark matter and keeping the Exdali at bay.”
“Exdali?”
“The things in the dark layer.”
Ferris let that sink in, as Halley asked, “How did you know to come, Potter? The Fury Lance must still be over four light hours away…they haven’t even seen those asteroids launch yet.”
“You can thank Colonel Rika. She got a message out to us using the ISF’s QuanComm blade.”
“Well, shit.” Ferris sank back in his seat, suddenly remembering how much his side hurt. “I guess it’s good to know she made it OK.”
“Were you really worried about Rika?” Halley asked with a laugh. “I bet if she’d stood on Tarxien tower in Cerulean, the Falcon would have fallen elsewhere just to avoid her glare.”
Ferris snorted, and then sucked in a sharp gasp. “Maybe you should get us back to the Torrent of Fire. I think I need to see a doctor.”
“You got it, Captain.”
NEXT
STELLAR DATE: 12.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Torrent of Fire, Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Rika’s ascent to the Torrent of Fire was delayed by the explosion overhead and the broadcasts from multiple sources that the Nietzschean attack had been thwarted.
Turning back to the surface before they even left the stratosphere, the two pinnaces returned to Cartegena, depositing the grateful locals on the street where they’d collected them less than twenty minutes earlier.
As the civilians disembarked, Tremon, Gloria, and Yakob silently stared at one another for several long minutes, privately arguing about leaving the ship.
Eventually, Rika gestured to the ramp. “Any day now. I have a fleet to get back to, I can’t sit here all day while you three argue like an old…whatever.”
Tremon gave the other two a quelling look and turned to Rika. “We’re staying, Colonel. I’d like to talk to you about something when we get to your ship.”
Rika nodded and signaled to Shoshin to take off. Then she turned back to Tremon and cocked an eyebrow. “My ship, or the Nietzschean cruiser my people are currently squatting on?”
“Well….” Tremon paused and glanced at Yakob, who shook his head vehemently. “To be honest, I suppose here is as good a place as any.”
“Tremon, really,” Yakob said, half rising as he gestured at Alice, who was laid across the seats two rows up. “Not everyone here—”
“My real name is not Tremon,” the man said, holding out a hand to silence Yakob. “It’s Kalvin.”
Alice let out a long groan from her seat. “Oh, you can’t be serious…that was legitimate intel? The fuck.”
“Kalvin?” Rika repeated the name, and then matched it with the resigned annoyance in Alice’s tone. “President Kalvin?”
Niki said privately.
She watched Yakob tense, the man prepared to defend his charge against a swarm of enraged mechs, while Gloria laughed softly.
“Well, there it is,” the woman said.
Tremon nodded as he gave Yakob a significant look—one that did nothing to take the tension out of the other man’s stance. “Once upon a time, yes. I suppose you’re going to want your pound of flesh from me.”
Rika glanced at the other mechs on the pinnace. They all still wore helmets—not revealing their expressions—but maintained neutral or indifferent postures.
“Kalvin,” she said with a soft laugh. “I don’t think any of us care enough about you one way or another, at least right now, to demand any sort of recompense. So far as I’m concerned, you’re a useful asset. Maybe when Genevia is re-established, we’ll do fun things like have war tribunals—though I’d like to keep those focused on the Niets as much as possible.”
Kalvin glanced at Yakob. “Told you so. These mechs are honorable and upstanding.”
Kelly barked a laugh, and Rika couldn’t help but chuckle softly.
“Let’s not get carried away, Mister President.”
“Guh, please, I’m no one’s president. In fact…could you call me ‘Tremon’? I like him a lot more than Kalvin.”
For a moment, the request sounded ridiculous to Rika, but she knew what it was like to live with the shadow of the war always looming overhead.
“Of course, Tremon.”
“Of all the people to run into on some shitty street,” Alice muttered, and Rika turned and walked toward the woman.
“Go ahead, Lieutenant Colonel. Say another word, see what happens.”
To her credit, Alice didn’t even breathe loudly, and the rest of the trip up to the Torrent of Fire took place in complete silence.
Except for when Kelly fell asleep and began to snore.
* * * * *
“Well, you did it again, Rika,” Chase said as they stood in Captain Aleena’s ready room, a space decorated in strident red and black, with strange abstract artwork on the walls.
“Did what?” Rika asked. “Nearly got killed?”
Chase snorted as he leant back against the former captain’s desk. “That’s sort of a given, though from what I saw, you were barely in any danger.”
Rika thought back and realized that Chase was right.
“Huh…I guess ‘nearly died’ is such a default response, I never thought of any other. Now, Ferris…. He’s the real hero of Iberia. I heard his speech. I won’t lie, I got a bit teary.”
“Yeah, he did well. Granted, he’ll tell you Potter’s the hero here. Though, if Borden hadn’t gotten to The Moon and disabled their main beams, the Niets wouldn’t have used their backup plan of sending in those rocks.”
Rika laughed and stretched out a hand, clasping Chase’s and pulling him upright once more. She drew him close. “Guess we’re just heroes all around.”
“Go us.” Chase chuckled as he slid a hand around Rika’s head and drew it forward, their lips nearly touching. “I feel like we need to celebrate.”
“Do, let’s.”
Their lips met, and Rika breathed in Chase’s scent, which she realized was more the scent of mech than man, after his transformation. Strangely, she found that she preferred it.
* * * * *
Malta and the space around it was a mess—though a rather beautiful ring consisting of dust from the asteroids was forming around it.
In the end, more people had died from defending against looters and getting trampled trying to get to maglevs leaving Cerulean than in the actual combat fought to free the system.
Rika nodded absently as she strode through the ship to her offices. Halfway there, she decided that she really didn’t want to be alone, and made her way to the galley instead.
When she entered, she saw the very last thing she expected: Tremon sitting in the midst of a group of mechs, talking to them about what they’d been through in the war and afterward.
The man seemed genuinely interested in them, in what had happened during and after the war, and was offering heartfelt apologies to each and every person he spoke with.
As she approached, he looked up and gave her a tired smile.
“Thank you for bringing me to your ship, Colonel Rika.”
“Not sure where else I would have brought you,” she replied with a casual shrug. “I’m just glad that we all seem to be getting along so well.”
Keli was sitting across from the former Genevian president, staring intently into his eyes.
>
“You’re right, Rika. I thought I’d be angry; want to kill him if I ever saw him. Funny how things don’t always go the way you’d expect.”
“Well,” Tremon shrugged as he glanced over at Shoshin and Crunch, who stood nearby, fully armed and armored. “I think I may actually be under some sort of arrest.”
“A bit,” Rika allowed. “Technically, under both Septhian and Theban law, the perpetrators of the Genevian mech program have been declared war criminals.”
“Is that the law we’re under out here?” Tremon asked. “Are you not re-establishing Genevia?”
Rika could tell that despite what she believed to be real sincerity, Tremon couldn’t help but fall back on his demagogue ways, asking leading questions to get the right—or wrong—answer laid out before the waiting audience.
She looked around at the mechs. “Who are you?” she asked them.
Not shouting, but in one voice, the mechs said, ‘Marauders’.
“Whose Marauders?” Crunch called out from where he stood at the edge of the group.
“Rika’s Marauders!” the mechs shouted this time.
Rika felt a smile grow on her face that nearly split her cheeks.
“Please understand,” she said to Tremon. “I care about Genevia, or I’m learning how to again, at least. But we have a mission. And we’ll not falter in executing that mission. We’re to strike at the very heart of Nietzschea and cut it out. There can be no Genevia while there is a Nietzschea.”
“And what of Iberia?” Tremon answered. “Will you just leave it in disarray? They have no governor—that Nietzschean-appointed fool fled the moment it appeared the Niets had lost.”
“We’ll stay for a few days,” Rika replied, glancing at the faces around her. “But I’ll tell you now what I’m going to tell the people of Iberia tomorrow. The Genevian people must remember what honor is. They must honor one another, and stand together. They must help and not harm one another—no matter what they may think of their neighbor, and no matter what slights they’ve experienced in the past. If they can do that, they won’t need mechs propping them up. They can stand on their own.”
