Rowan dropped the nukes.
The heavy bombs fell toward the planet's surface, guided by their own engines.
The last human starship, a clunky freighter, avoided the nukes by mere meters.
The human fleet streaked toward deep space at breakneck speed.
The nukes hit the planet behind them—just as the Rattlers prepared to slingshot in pursuit.
White light blazed across space.
Clouds of rock, dust, and atomic fury rose from the planet. The wall of inferno expanded across space. And the Rattlers slammed into it.
One by one, the scaly ships exploded.
Only a few Rattlers emerged from the wall of fire—charred, lifeless chunks of metal.
The human fleet flew onward into the night, leaving the planet—and their dead enemies—behind.
Rowan slumped in her seat.
"Hot damn that was cool!" she said. "Can we go again?"
Bay glared at her. "People died, Rowan. We lost ships."
She lowered her head. "I know. I'm sorry. But we won the battle. Let's celebrate that." She sighed. "I just hope we don't lose the damn war."
The fleet flew onward, licking its wounds. Already technicians were hovering outside the hulls, mending the breaches. Damage reports kept flowing in. Bay had been right. They had lost ships—six of them, each priceless, irreplaceable in the war effort. They had lost over thirty humans. Each loss was a tragedy.
Not many humans remain in this universe, Rowan thought. And we face billions of basilisks—and trillions of other hostile aliens. Every life is precious. All we can do is fight on.
Rowan left the gunnery station. She lifted her comm and broadcast her words to all her ships.
"Exodus Fleet! This is Major Rowan Emery, aboard the HDFS Byzantium. We suffered heavy losses. But we continue our mission. Our goal has not changed. Millions of humans are stranded across the galaxy, survivors of scorpion oppression. Now they face danger from the basilisks. We must bring them home!"
She glanced at Bay. Was she speaking platitudes? Did she sound childish, inexperienced? She was no Old Lion, after all, simply little Rowan. But Bay nodded at her encouragingly. Rowan continued her broadcast.
"According to our intelligence, twenty thousand human refugees, all survivors of the scorpion gulocks, have recently tried to reach Earth. The basilisks intercepted their flotilla. Our spies report that those twenty thousand are now imprisoned in a basilisk penal colony, which orbits the star Sirius. Conditions in the prison are harsh. Every day, hunger, thirst, and disease are claiming human lives. Our mission is to reach the prison—and free the refugees. We must then return them to Earth." She took a deep breath. "This mission is a hard one. Our weaver cannot create new portals for a while. We'll have to rely on good old-fashioned fuel n' fire. The enemy is powerful. Do not underestimate him. But we will overcome. Godspeed, warriors of Earth."
She ended the broadcast and took a shaky breath.
Bay nodded. "You did good."
She shuddered. "Sometimes I think public speaking is scarier than battles."
"There's an idea," Bay said. "Maybe we can challenge the basilisks to a speech-off?"
"Well, if I can deliver my speech about Doctor Who and Super Mario, I think our victory is assured," Rowan said.
They were silent for a long moment. They were both still shaky.
Banter, she thought. Humor. It's how we survive the horror.
They had both known those thirty dead men. Everyone in the fleet had. Everyone mourned.
And everyone wanted to save the twenty thousand at Sirius.
As they flew onward, Rowan thought of the war back on Earth, of the waves of basilisks assaulting the colony walls, of the enemy armada in orbit, just waiting to bombard the planet.
Rowan couldn't help but wonder: Will we be rescuing the refugees from prison—only to take them back home to a slaughterhouse?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
They floated through the darkness. Two humans in spacesuits. Lost in space. Hovering in the endless black.
"Tom, I'm sorry." Leona reached out to him. Their gloved fingers touched in the void. "When the basilisk blew up the ship, instinct kicked in. I activated my time twister. I pulled us out into space." She lowered her head. "I doomed us to a slow death."
Tom looked at her through his helmet's visor. The man she had seen during the battle—his face hard, his eyes pitiless—was gone. Once more he was the kind man she knew. The musician and shepherd.
"Look around us, Leona," he said. "What do you see?"
She looked around her, but her mind was a storm, churning with fear and guilt. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, her lungs using up too much precious oxygen. She was still wounded—her leg broken, her body torn from shrapnel. It felt like only her tight graphene spacesuit kept her in one piece. She forced herself to breathe deeply. To look. To see.
"Darkness," she said. "Vacuum. No world around us for light-years. Death."
"Look again," Tom said. "More carefully."
Leona took another deep breath. She looked around.
And she saw the stars.
Millions of stars.
They were too distant to reach. But they were beautiful. The Orion Arm of the Milky Way spilled before them, glimmering blue and lavender. The Andromeda galaxy shone above. A distant nebula glowed indigo and gold.
Tears filled Leona's eyes.
"I understand," she whispered. "Even though we're lost in darkness, there is light. Even in the darkest night, there is beauty." She smiled shakily. "You're a wise man, Tom Shepherd."
He smiled back. "Thank you, Leona. Your words are beautiful. But I meant—look at the debris of the Cagayan de Oro." He pointed. "Do you see the engine floating there? Still intact?"
She frowned, tilted her head, and blinked at him. Then she looked back at the rubble of their starship.
There wasn't much left. The damn basilisks had blown her beloved starship into millions of pieces. But then she saw it. Tom was right.
The ship's azoth engine.
The pistons were gone. The exhaust pipes had blown out. But the heart of the ship—an object no larger than a human heart—still floated through the void, intact.
Or course it was still intact. It had to withstand bending spacetime—a force far more powerful than a mere chemical explosion.
"The azoth heart!" Leona said.
Tom nodded. "We don't have a ship. But we have an oar."
Leona ignited the thruster on her jetpack. She flew toward the heart. It was made of chemically-engineered metal, dark silver in color, no larger than her fist. She hit a button, and the heart opened. It was still there. Nestled inside. A lavender azoth crystal.
Leona breathed out in relief. "Tom, the crystal is still whole! A crystal that can bend spacetime. We can form a warp bubble! We can fly out of here! Even with jetpacks, with spacetime warped around us, we can fly faster than light!"
Tom laughed. "Brilliant plan. I wish I had thought of it."
Her cheeks flushed. "Sorry. I got excited." She grinned. "You're a bloody genius, Mister Shepherd."
"It's only fair. You saved my ass. So I'll save yours. Now let's build a raft."
They worked together. The azoth heart on its own would not suffice. They needed a power source, stabilizers, coolants, and many other components. Tom was a surprisingly good mechanic, quickly finding the right parts in the cloud of debris, kludging together what he was missing.
"How the hell does a shepherd know so much about engineering?" Leona asked.
Tom was busy rigging together cables and a battery. "This shepherd spent ten years in the Peacekeeper Corps. I spent a lot of that time fixing clunky old tanks and drones. Starships aren't that different."
Leona shoved aside a floating basilisk scale. "So you play the flute, kill aliens, save my ass repeatedly, and know how to build spaceships," she said. "Tell me you can cook and I'll marry you."
"Alas, I can burn cereal." Tom finally got the cables to attac
h, and a light ignited on the battery. "Aha! Here we go. This should power our little engine. It doesn't have much juice. But we don't need a large bubble."
They found a few chunks of bulkhead, and they jury-rigged them together into a crude deck. They bolted the engine to the back. When their work was done, they had a tiny spaceship—essentially just a raft, exposed to vacuum, but with a warship-class, state-of-the-art warp engine.
"What should we name her?" Leona said, patting the raft.
Tom thought for a moment. "Hope. The HDFS Hope."
"Oh," Leona said. "I was thinking more along the lines of Rafty McRaftface. But Hope works too." She grinned and climbed onto the raft. "All aboard!"
Leona and Tom lay down on their bellies, jetpacks still strapped on.
"Here goes," Tom said, reached down, and tugged a cable.
The battery activated.
The azoth heart began to glow. And spacetime began to curve.
The starlight twisted. Reality itself was bending, casting back the debris from the shattered Cagayan de Oro. Leona grimaced. The warp seemed to be squeezing her consciousness out of her skull.
"We must be crazy!" she said.
"This shepherd spent ten years in the Peacekeepers Corps," Tom said.
The starlight whirled. The raft creaked.
"Even though we're lost in darkness, there is light," Leona said.
The basilisk laughed, belly torn open, revealing the explosives within.
"The mighty Ssstchkssshs race will rise," the creature said. "The goddess Xerka will rule the galaxy. Humanity will perish!"
Leona clung to Tom as he carried her from the mountains. As death rained on her wedding. As reality broke and morphed around her.
"Tom, it's tearing us apart!" she cried.
He looked at her. He was younger. His hair black instead of silver. His face smooth. He frowned, standing among his sheep.
"Who—" the young shepherd began.
The sheep blurred around him.
The stars stretched into starlines.
The raft streaked forward, encased in a bubble of spacetime.
"It's working!" Leona said. "It nearly broke my brain—but Rafty McRaftface is flying!" She laughed. "You did it, Tom! You're a genius! You—" She frowned. "Tom?"
She looked at him and her breath caught. Tom had tears in his eyes. His head was lowered, his fists clenched.
"Tom?" Leona gently touched his shoulder.
For a long moment, he was silent. The starlines streamed around them.
"I'm fine," he finally said. "Warped space … showed me things. Things I wished I could forget."
Leona held his hand.
"I understand," she whispered.
But did she? Leona had liberated a gulock. She had seen the devastation within. The starving, naked, tortured prisoners. The flayed bodies. Hell risen into reality. She still suffered nightmares—and she had been there as a soldier, a liberator.
Tom had suffered in a gulock as a prisoner.
Tom had been stripped naked, beaten, tortured, scarred. Seen his family flayed and burned.
Did the warping spacetime show him that past again?
"I'm sorry, Tom," she said. "I can't even imagine what horrors you saw in the gulock. But I'm here for you. If you want to talk about it, I'm here."
His eyes filled with pain. "It wasn't about the gulock. Not this time. It was something earlier. Something from my service in the Peacekeeper Corps. Something I did. Something I'm ashamed of. Something that …" He looked away, and his jaw tightened. "No. I won't talk about it. Not yet. Maybe not ever."
"I understand." Leona leaned her head against his shoulder. "I'm here for you without words. Just with comfort. We're all here for you."
"Leona." He looked into her eyes. "And I am here for you. For your father. For humanity. That is what gives me meaning. That is what keeps me alive. That has always been my purpose. To be a shepherd."
She squeezed his hand. "Sometimes the shepherd can lay down his crook. If only for a while."
They kept flying, moving many times faster than light. They didn't have much battery power. They didn't have much oxygen. They had no food or water. According to the maps on Leona's minicom, the nearest star was called Oridia. She knew nothing about it. Only that it was two days away. It would be a hard flight. They were both still wounded. They had no food or water. They would barely have enough air.
But it just might be possible.
They flew toward that distant star.
Right now, it was up to luck. If only lifeless rocks or gas giants orbited Oridia, they would die. If they found a habitable planet, there was hope.
They flew through the darkness. Gliding through the infinite black.
Hour after hour.
A day.
Another day.
The time passed in a haze of pain.
Their battery began to give out. The raft was dying. The oxygen was all but gone.
On their last drops of power, they glided into the alien sun system.
And they found their luck.
Eight gas giants, lifeless and searing hot.
One terrestrial world in the Goldilocks zone, rich with air, blue with water, green with forests. Oridia Gamma. An island in the cosmic ocean.
On their metal raft, Tom and Leona rowed to this galactic shore. Their spacesuits were armored, built for battle and space-jumps. Like two outcast angels, they fell from the sky.
Fallen angels? Leona thought as she activated her jetpack, as she glided toward an alien shore. No, we will not fall from grace. We will not accept exile. We rose from the water and soil of Earth. We are not fallen angels. We are risen apes. And we will find our way home.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Rowan stood on the deck of the Byzantium, hands behind her back, staring at the hot desert world ahead.
"Anubis," she whispered. "Dreaded penal colony of the basilisks. If there's a Hell out here in space, we found it."
Bay stood beside her, wearing body armor, Lawless slung across his back.
"The damn aliens never imprison us on any nice tropical worlds, do they?" he said. "No coconuts or pina coladas for us pests. Just frozen wastelands or fiery hellholes."
"How inconsiderate of them," Rowan said.
Bay nodded. "I do think this calls for us to kick their asses."
The Byzantium raced toward the world, passing through the searing white light of Sirius, the local star. The rest of the Exodus Fleet followed, over eighty vessels. Only a handful were warships. This was a mission to ferry human refugees home, not fight battles.
But a battle it would be. The basilisks were keeping humans penned up here. And Rowan would fight for every one.
She got on her comm, broadcasting her words to her fleet.
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We'll be making our descent toward Anubis within the next few minutes. Weather is a scorching inferno with a 100% chance of hostile basilisks. We hoped you enjoyed your flight aboard Operation Exodus. Please don't forget your overhead luggage, especially if you packed light artillery, and—"
"Give me that." Bay snatched the comm from her. "Crazy hobbit." He cleared his throat. "Soldiers, we're about to reach Anubis Penal Colony. On this world are twenty thousand imprisoned humans. Their only crime? Trying to reach Earth. These folks already survived a scorpion gulock, only to end up here. Our sensors detect a basilisk fleet on its way to engage. This is war. Godspeed, warriors of Earth."
Rowan saw them now. A hundred basilisk warships swooping in.
Big ones.
Rowan took the comm back from Bay. This time she directed her broadcast to the enemy fleet.
"Basilisk fleet!" she cried. "This is Major Rowan Emery of the Human Defense Force. Stand down! We do not seek battle here. We've come to take the refugees off your hands. Pose no resistance, or we'll be forced to—"
Laser beams came flying their way.
Rowan groaned.
"So much for negotiations," she muttere
d, then cried out, "Mirrors up!"
She hit a switch. Metal slats pulled back on the Byzantium's prow, revealing the hidden mirrors. Across the rest of the human fleet, the other ships revealed their mirror armor too.
The lasers hit them.
Some beams slammed into the ships' underbellies or tops, burning through hulls. But most hit the mirrors on the prows—and flew back toward the enemy. Explosions rocked the basilisk fleet.
"Prows forward!" Rowan cried. "Ships, prows to the enemy!"
They arranged themselves more carefully, protecting their weak spots. When the lasers flew again, every beam hit a mirror.
Holes tore through the Rattlers.
Rowan pointed forward. "Fire!" she roared.
The human fleet opened fire.
The missiles streaked toward the enemy. Explosions rocked the Rattlers, knocking them back.
"Firebirds, charge!" Rowan cried.
The hangar doors opened on the larger ships. The starfighters emerged—only five of them, a single squad, but it would have to do for now. They streamed forth, firing their missiles. The heavier warships followed, cannons pounding.
The Rattlers flew closer. Their laser cannons retracted, and new guns emerged from their hulls.
The enemy opened fire again.
This time the Rattlers fired spinning balls of scales like dragon eggs.
What the hell? Rowan thought.
"Destroy those eggs!" she cried. "Fleet, destroy them!"
She opened fire, aiming the Byzantium's guns. But the spinning eggs were fast and agile, whizzing between the projectiles. They rolled closer. Rowan screamed, firing in a fury. The Firebirds stormed, spraying bullets at the scaly balls, missing every one.
Rowan braced for impact.
The eggs slammed into the human fleet.
Light flared.
Explosions rocked the Byzantium.
Rowan fell and hit the deck.
Klaxons wailed. Viewports shattered. Rowan felt blood drip down her forehead. She reached up blindly, grabbed a dashboard, and pulled herself up.
The assault had shattered the bridge. Computers lay sparking. Only one viewport remained. Bay was lying on the floor, unconscious.
Just as bad—the mirrors protecting the Byzantium had shattered. They had shattered across every human ship.
The War for Earth (Children of Earthrise Book 4) Page 14
