by L S Roebuck
“I think we have a much better chance of surviving if we can get the Chasm operators off this waypoint,” Moreno said. “And I am growing tired of people questioning my decisions — and you should be especially wary of that, Ms. Macready. When the dust settles, you may be defending your actions in a court of law. Truly with your best interest in heart, I think it behooves you to remain silent for the time being.”
“I’ll go and get this ordinance in place then,” Wong said.
“Hurry,” Moreno replied. “If Kimberly gets the door open before you can punch a hole into space, we could lose everything.”
“On it, XO,” and Wong slipped out the door into the T-shaped corridor, ordinance in hand. He passed the turn that would take him out the hall to the hangar and instead proceeded forward into the conference room. Amberly could see Wong through the hall, now a hundred meters away, fiddling with his explosives pack and arranging it next to the plexiglass viewport, next to Jayden’s dead body.
Amberly turned away and looked into the security camera monitors. The hangar was utter chaos, and she saw her mom and what looked like a group of well-trained Chasm troops fiddling near the door that accessed the command center.
“Wong, what’s your status,” Moreno radioed to Wong, as he was just out of comfortable earshot.
“I need another two or three minutes to get the remote detonator set up,” he said. “I don’t want to be in here when we evacuate the air from this connecting hall.”
“We don’t have that long,” Moreno said. For an instant, she taught about asking Wong to manually blow the ordinance, sacrificing himself, to make sure the vacuum was created that would effectively keep Kimberly out. But she couldn’t do that.
Amberly watched her mother work, Kimberly’s hands flying over the virtual keypad in a near blur as she recoded her hacking device. Time was almost up.
Amberly slipped out the door and sprinted down the hallway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Raven One had assembled her strike team into a phalanx about 30 feet from the command center access door.
The Chasm leader was giving instructions about how to storm the hall. “Those of you with guns, shoot to kill, do not hesitate. If you are captured, Moreno will not hesitate to airlock you if we cannot free you. Get ready, I am about to use the hacking box. The door may only be open for a few minutes before they can countermand my hack and force it closed again. Ready?”
Kimberly turned to execute her hacking commands for a second attempt to open the door, when it opened of its own accord. In a smooth motion, she saw Amberly Macready, her favored offspring, slipping out the door and quickly closing it behind her, the indicator light flashing back to a green locked indicator.
“Amberly!” Kimberly shouted.
“Mom, we have to stop this madness,” she said, looking around at the half dozen weapons that were trained on her. “No more people have to die.”
“You may have been able to turn Dek,” Raven One said, “ and I should not have expected less from my talented daughter, but you will not turn me. Surrender now, and I will spare your life.”
“Is that what you told dad?” Amberly said, trying to start an argument and stall for time. “What lies did you tell him so he would go quietly into the night? Everything about you is a lie.”
“If I lie, it is only because I am willing to trade everything for the greater good,” Kimberly said waving a hand at her troops to approach her daughter. “Amberly, I could not be more proud of you. You’ve overcome so much and achieved success at such a young age. You have grown into such a beautiful woman. But I can’t trust you. You are the liar. You said you believed in our noble cause when you only selfishly hoped to save yourself. You lured Dek away from us with your feminine wiles — I know you don’t love him.”
“Mom… how—”
“Clearly, you value your own needs and friends over the common good. Don’t you see, everything is the State. I see now the fact that I foolishly let my emotions blind me to: There is no place for you in the new order.”
“Mother, let’s talk this over,” Amberly said, trying to say anything to throw her mom off balance. “I have so many questions. Let’s try to work this out. Just don’t do anything else drastic.”
Kimberly stepped forward, and gently kissed Amberly on the forehead.
“You are stalling for something. The time for questions is over. Time for you is over,” said Raven One as she pointed to a young Chasm operative, Monique, a tall coffee-skinned woman. “You. Kill Amberly. Now. Good-bye sweetheart.”
Amberly’s mother had called Amberly’s bluff, and Amberly was holding nothing. This was it, the end.
“Mom — I forgive you.”
She steeled herself, wondering in a moment about the pain of death and thinking about Kora and North and their God. Please accept me, she thought, and held her breath.
Monique raised her assault rifle and took aim at the redhead.
Then a spray of bullets made her dive for the floor.
“North!” Amberly shouted. Boro was just a pace behind North, and already taking well-placed shots with his stun pistol, rendering unconscious four Chasm troops in less than a half minute.
The sound of gunfire made the already anxious queue of people waiting to board the American Spirit panic and push all the harder into the gangway. Kimberly Macready scrambled up from the floor where she instinctively fell to avoid gunshots. The crowds overran much of her strike team. Things were not going as planned. It was time to make a bold play.
She leapt toward Amberly. North took several leading shots at Kimberly, but he was not in top form and missed what was otherwise an easy target. Kimberly tackled her daughter, drew a small hold-out pistol from a pouch under the red utility robe she was wearing. In a swift, smooth motion, Kimberly put an arm around Amberly’s neck and pressed the gun to Amberly’ head, positioning her daughter between herself and North.
“Stand back, North. Train your weapons elsewhere, or I will spread Amberly’s precious brains all over the deck,” Kimberly said forcefully and jabbed the gun painfully under Amberly’s jaw. Amberly winced. North did not take his sites off Kimberly.
Amberly knew if North surrendered, Kimberly would kill them both.
“Take a shot, North,” Amberly said, “Kill us both if you have to. She’s going to kill me anyway.”
“I can’t do that,” North said, his eyes starting to water, “I can’t take the chance I’d shoot you.” As he was talking, North side-stepped around hoping to get a better angle on Raven One. She countered by pulling Amberly back toward the command center access door.
“Careful now, North,” Kimberly said, with calm exuding in her voice. “I just want to get past that door behind me.”
“Shoot us! Do it. North. If you care about me, take the shot,” Amberly pleaded. “Don’t you see, if my mom dies, Chasm will die with her.”
“You move, I shoot,” Kimberly told North, as she pulled her arm from around Amberly and fished out her hacking box, the hold-out gun still firmly planted point blank range into Amberly’s head.
North’s aim was too unsteady for him to get an accurate shot. Behind him, North heard Boro engaging some armed Chasm agents in a firefight. North had kept walking in a circular motion, so most of his flank was covered by a damaged, overturned corvette.
“I can’t hold these guys long, North,” Boro said as he laid down some random stun shots. He hit a few Chasm troops, and some civilians in the crowd as well.
“I don’t have a clean shot,” North cursed to Boro.
“North, don’t let her through this door. End this now!” Amberly said. “My mom doesn’t think I understand sacrifice — but I do. I would not give my life for her faceless new order. But North, I’ll die for my friends — for Kora, for Lydia, for Skip — for you. End this, please.”
“Amberly? Amberly.” North’s finger began to tighten on his trigger.
Leo slammed the door shut to the access corridor leading to t
he conference room and further out to the hangar, looking to Moreno in the command well.
“Blow it,” she said.
Leo pressed the remote detonator and instantly a thunderous smack reverberated violently from the hangar to the command center. In the conference room, the floor-to-ceiling plexiglass viewport shattered into a thousand fragments that were blown out into space along with several chairs as the atmosphere in the hall leading to both corridor exits vented into space.
Jayden Adams’ body was pushed out into the void as well, and the blood that had escaped his body from the bullet wound in the head snap-froze as the coldness of space took over.
“Well, unless Kimberly Macready has learned to breathe in space, she’s not coming in that way,” Moreno said. “The only tactical option she has left is to retreat to the American Spirit.”
“If we can't get our fighters launched to defend Magellan, she could slowly take us apart with the American Spirit’s armaments,” Leo observed. “Are we only delaying the inevitable?”
“Timing is everything,” Moreno smiled at her subordinate. “Perhaps we are not as alone out here as we thought.”
Moreno turned to Thor. “Kimberly will shred the exterior of Magellan with the American Spirit’s guns. We’ll need to move all the civilians to the core areas and seal off everything outside the tube. Can you manage that?”
Thor nodded.
Leo looked at his infopad as a text message popped up.
“Marcos indicates his strike team has circled around and they are advancing into the hangar now.”
“God forgive me,” North uttered as he twitched on the trigger of his assault rifle. He was aiming for Kimberly’s arm, hoping to injure her and get her to drop her weapon. To shoot for the head was too risky, because just a few inches off, and North knew he could be taking Amberly’s life. He could never live with himself if he did.
North pulled the trigger the instant Leo blew the conference room window.
Kimberly was not expecting explosive sounds behind her and instinctively jerked, pushing Amberly forward slightly.
Amberly cried out in pain. North’s bullet had found a target.
“No!” shouted North.
The safety light on the door went from green to red, indicating the hull breach on the other side of the door and that it was unsafe to open. Kimberly cursed. There was no way she was going to be able to get into the command center now, with several dozen meters of lethal vacuum between her and her objective. Kimberly dropped her box and again seized Amberly, now pulling her toward the gangway.
Kimberly felt warm blood oozing out of Amberly’s torso.
“Don’t move!” North said, re-aiming his rifle.
“Why?” Kimberly mocked him. “So you can shoot her again?”
Suddenly, a cacophony of weapons fire erupted as Marcos, Tricia, Inon and Wong joined Boro in routing out the obviously armed Chasm agents.
“Everyone down!” Marcos shouted as he put some bullets in the ceiling. The crowd obeyed and hit the deck, except for some Chasm troops returning fire. But they were outmatched.
Kimberly drug Amberly as a human shield at an amazing pace toward the gangway. Marcos was completely surprised that woman of Kimberly’s size could possess such strength.
Kimberly spoke through her helmet radio. “Sparks, do you copy?”
The younger woman replied. “What’s going on?”
“Prep the American Spirit to put some distance between us and Magellan,” Raven One said. “I am coming on board. As soon as I am on the gangway, secure the Magellan side door. Also, have a medic ready. My daughter has been shot.”
“What about Dek? And Johnson? Adams? We still have dozens of agents on Magellan,” Sparks asked, afraid of the answer.
“Lucky break for them. They will be honored dead in the new Arara order.”
Kimberly pointed her hold out gun in the general direction of the Marines and laid down some covering fire, unloading the four-bullet capacity weapon, as she backed into the gangway tunnel pulling the wounded Amberly with her.
One of her bullets hit Tricia in the shoulder, and the Marine collapsed to the floor.
Monique and Alice Upton were covering Kimberly’s retreat. Alice threw down cover fire while Monique ordered the crowds in the gangway out of the way, waving her assault rifle and threatening them.
“Sparks, I’m in,” Raven One shouted into her radio. “Close the door now.”
When the door slid shut, a sense of desperation filled the remaining hundred or so people still on the hangar, and the frenzy increased.
Marco patched into the speaker system in the hangar and with an amplified voice commanded, “Everyone remain on the ground. This is an order under martial law.”
Inon let a few bullets fire harmlessly into the overturned Normandy to help Marco get his point across, and people started lying down on the ground.
Wong was speaking into his radio. “The hangar is secure. We have lots of wounded and dead here, we need all available medical assistance now. Tell Moreno that Tricia has been shot.”
North’s own radio buzzed. He sat on the floor, utterly spent, and held his helmeted head in his hands. He heard Moreno’s voice in his helmet. “North, report.”
“I shot Amberly. Kimberly escaped. My God, what have I done?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
After three days of continued assault from the American Spirit’s main plasma-based guns, the exterior of Magellan suffered from dozens of hull breaches. Plasma weapons were not as damaging as traditional ordinance weapons or high-energy lasers. Still, with enough time Moreno knew the American Spirit would be able to critically compromise Magellan beyond repair.
Moreno looked over to Thor, who had taken up a semi-permanent station just behind the command well.
“I’m not sure how much of Magellan will be left for you to govern when we suspend martial law,” she said dryly.
Chief Engineer Zelma walked into the command center. His eyes were dark and his white hair was completely unkempt. “Rita, we need to think about evacuating the command center and move to the center core with everyone else.”
Moreno ignored him and spoke to Tricia, who was monitoring a diagnostics station. “What is the battery reserve life?”
“It’s not good,” Tricia reported. “The American Spirit has managed to damage nearly three-quarters of the reserve batteries. I think about 10 percent of them are deep enough in the waypoint to be safe from the plasma gun’s maximum penetration.”
“We’re making sure to use the batteries that they can reach first, while we still can,” Zelma reported.
“She’s going to freeze us out,” North said. “Once the power is gone and we are all dead, she can come in here and destroy the place over our lifeless bodies.”
“She knows, doesn’t she?” Moreno said to no one in particular. “Macready knows it’s coming. That’s why she’s focusing on the batteries and hasn’t finished off the reactor yet. She wants to make sure we are dead before they get here.”
“What’s coming? Before who gets here?” North asked, puzzled. “We’re lightyears out in space. No one is out here except us and them.”
Moreno smiled, but didn’t answer the question. “Any new communiqués?” Moreno looked over to Skip.
“No, the transmissions are still jammed. It was lucky we were able to get out a transmission when the jammer was briefly down,” Skip said. Moreno had asked Skip, whose full-time job was monitoring transmission traffic and news aggregation, to move over from the communication center to the command center. Still, there weren’t many communications to monitor. In the brief window of just a few hours that the signal jammer had been turned off on the American Spirit, only standard news transmissions and other historical data from Earth had been received — messages that were sent eight years ago. The Magellan did manage to get off a distress signal, but it would be six months before it would reach Waypoint Gilbert, Magellan’s neighbor on the Earthside — and it proba
bly wouldn’t matter if it reached Waypoint Cortes, as that station was likely already under Chasm control, or destroyed under Scorched Earth protocol.
One unique message had been received, encoded from the supply ship Magnus, which was believed to be a half light year away. The communication was a simple text that read: “We will arrive in six.” The message didn’t make sense, based on the positional data they had on Magnus. Skip said the message must have been some sort of error, but Moreno also had another theory she did not share.
“Next time they build a waypoint, they need to build some guns into the thing,” North groused.
Once Raven One had control of the American Spirit, she immediately targeted the Magellan hangar, leaving damage so severe that launching weaponized corvettes, Magellan’s primary defenders, was impossible. Moreover, the pilot corps had been decimated too, with both the senior officers, Jindal and Twig, and more than three quarters of the pilots, losing their lives at the hands of Chasm terrorists.
“Chief,” Moreno called out to Zelma, “Assuming Macready takes out the batteries next before she tries to destroy the command center, how long do we have?”
“Well, at the rate of her plasma fire, it would take her at least four or five days to puncture through, now that we’ve reinforced the conference side wall,” the engineer said.
“We’re staying put for now; if I am correct, we’ll want to be ready for Magnus.”
“Ready how?” North asked. “Even if the Magnus was close, there is no guarantee that they could do anything to stop the American Spirit.”
“Let me tell you a story that Anderson once told me,” Moreno smiled as she leaned back in her chair. “About 20 years ago, senior Marine officers on Magellan were briefed on a plan to build a deep space warship, the first-of-its-kind. Apparently, Waypoint Command suspected the potential of an uprising. If Chasm has been generations in its development, perhaps it’s possible that 30 or 40 years ago, some intel on the operation leaked.”
