They found the cockpit, and Thurgood moved toward the captain’s seat.
“Don’t even think about it, blondie.” Priscilla grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back. She took the seat and started the fastest preflight check in history.
Thurgood took the co-pilot’s seat.
“Nope,” Priscilla said.
“What do you mean, ‘Nope?” Antarius asked as he vacated the seat.
She turned to Stendak. “Who are you?”
“First Officer Stendak.”
“Perfect. Have a seat and help me out.”
Stendak sat down at the controls while Thurgood got his dander up.
“I’m a captain,” he protested.
“Not on this ship you aren’t. On this ship you’re cargo. Your father is paying me good money to get you home safely. Plus, I hear you’re an idiot.”
“Take the guns, Anti,” Cason said as he strapped into his own gunner’s seat. “Vides, ditch the clown and take a turret.”
The clown armor opened up and the frozen soldier stepped into the cabin. “Ah hell, it sure felt good to be in a fight again. Got some of the rust out of my bones.” Once he was free, Giggles sealed itself back up and walked to a corner.
“Is that thing going to be there the whole time?” Thurgood asked.
“What’s the problem, rich boy?” Vides asked with a smile that bore no warmth. “Afraid of clowns?”
Antarius let the insult slide and looked nervously at the clown. “It’s staring at me.”
“Well, don’t let it affect your performance. Just ignore it and focus on the guns,” Cason said, and turned toward Priscilla. “Have you got a plan to get us past the blockade?”
“I do. I’m going to fly right past them as fast as this thing can go.”
“Interesting. And not at all fancy.”
“Sometimes fast is fancy enough.”
“You don’t think we should have a backup idea?” Cason asked.
“I’m hoping they’re a little preoccupied with obliterating the planet. Someone once told me there was opportunity in chaos,” she said with a smile.
“So, you’re basically stealing my rescue plan?”
The Oncilla flashed him a smile.
“Do you actually plan anything or do you make it all up as you go along?” Cason asked.
She replied with a wink and jammed the throttle forward.
The escort ship responded immediately by lifting off the landing pad and pulling the occupants into the seats.
Cason felt the blood rushing to his feet. His head felt four times its normal weight.
“Can you—” Priscilla started to ask.
“Found the dampeners,” Stendak said with the flick of a switch.
The pressure released him and he felt his head return to its normal weight. The effect lingered for a moment as he wondered just what the normal weight of his head was.
Free of gravity’s constraints, Priscilla pushed the ship harder and sped up into the atmosphere toward two of Shandor’s many moons. Twinkling light turned to artillery fire as they passed through the stratosphere and the full scale of the attack became clear.
“My God,” Antarius gasped as he saw for the first time the force that had destroyed his ship. “What madness is this?”
“How?” It was all Meena could manage to say.
Antarius pointed at his gunner’s screen. “There must be hundreds.”
Priscilla had no intention to count battleships. The passengers and that computer in Cason’s ear could do that. She pointed the escort ship toward the jump point and focused on the space ahead. For a moment, it looked like everything might work out.
“They’re hailing us,” Meena said.
The pilot was too focused on the point in space ahead.
“Ignore it,” Cason said.
“They might think it’s suspicious,” the first officer replied.
Priscilla’s eyes were glued on the viewscreen. “We’ll be out of here before they can do any—.”
“They’re doing something,” Vides interrupted. “At least a dozen birds just turned this way.”
“They won’t catch us.”
Cason focused on his gunner’s screen. Once-green signals of friendly ships turned red as they turned to intercept and readied their weapons. He wasn’t ready to arm the guns just yet. It would confirm to the approaching fighters that they were hostile. They needed to give Priscilla every second they could to get—.
“Eat plasma, you gray-faced bastards!” Antarius was practically standing up in his gunner’s seat, firing away with all four barrels. “You’ll pay for the deaths of Johnson and Ingman and Konditti and even Reynolds, you alien scum!”
It was no use telling him they were out of range. All Cason could do now was bring his own guns online and hope they could reach the jump point before he found a use for them.
They were almost there when another ship joined the fleet. The battleship appeared out of hyperspace directly in their path, and Priscilla barely had time to swear before throwing the ship into a dive to avoid colliding with the massive craft.
It didn’t take long for the new arrival to read the situation and bring its own guns into the fight. Plasma blasts beat against their shields as more fighters sprang from the ship’s bay. More dogs in the fight.
Cason and the other gunners began firing. The ship was better armed than the Ratel had been, but they were still outgunned a hundred to one. The enemy fighters proved all but impossible to hit. This had less to do with the fighter pilots’ skill and more to do with the impossible maneuvers the Oncilla employed.
Every time Cason managed to get a fighter in his sights, she would throw the ship into a spin, dive, climb, slide or all of them at once and he would lose his target. Thankfully, it was making it difficult for the enemy to land anything more than a lucky shot.
“Dammit, woman!” Vides shouted. “How do you expect me to hit anything when you’re flying all crazy like this?”
“You want me to hold still so they can hit us?”
Thurgood took Vides’s side. “I need revenge. And I’m not getting it this way!”
“You two, shut it,” Stendak said. “Keep doing what you’re doing, master thief.”
“I’m afraid I’m running out of room to do it.”
The fleet had started working together to bring the rogue escort ship to bay. More fighters had joined the chase, and the capital ships were coordinating an effort to box them in. And it was going to work.
“These guys are good,” Antarius said. “Honestly, I was hoping they’d suck. You know, really overconfident in their forces. I was hoping we could use hubris against them.”
“What is hubris, Captain?” Stendak asked.
“I know what you’re trying to do, Stendak. And it won’t work. I’m far too cunning to fall for hubris myself.”
The fleet was well trained and well coordinated. The larger ships began closing the box and the smaller ship soon found itself trapped.
The men stopped firing and Priscilla brought the ship to a stop. They faced a thousand guns on a hundred craft, and they were all closing in.
“We’re going to need that plan B, I think,” she said. “I can’t outfly that much metal.”
“What do we do now?” Vides asked. “I’m not one for giving up.”
The console in front of Stendak lit up. “They’re hailing us again.”
“Put it on the screen,” Antarius said as he unbuckled his harness and stood up.
The Rox Tolgath’s face appeared on the viewscreen. He was smiling. “Captain. So good to see you again.”
“The feeling is hardly mutual, Malbourne.”
Angel spoke in Cason’s ear. “I’m getting a signal.”
Cason turned away from the screen and masked his face before speaking. “Is it the Alliance?”
“No,” Angel said. “It’s something else.”
“I must say your escape attempt was valiant, if not foolish. You made it
farther than I expected you would.”
“That’s because I’m more amazing than you gave me credit for, Malbourne. Because you’re full of hubris.”
“You really have no idea what it means, do you?” Meena whispered.
“Silence, Stendak. This alien and I are talking one officer to another.”
“I must admit you have gone up in my estimation, Thurgood. But blind determination and luck won’t be enough. We have amassed the largest fleet in the Known. You are nothing compared to our might. You’re like an insect screaming into the wind. A child throwing rocks against a beast.”
“There’s a lot of power in a rock, Malbourne.”
“Of course,” the Rox Tolgath said with a laugh. “Is this a lesson you learned in the arena?”
“No,” Thurgood said. “It’s something I learned from my father. Now, I’m about to let you go, but I just have one more thing to say to you, you gray-faced coward.”
The insult made Malbourne smile as the alien commander closed his trap. “What is that, Captain?”
“Shukarigi,” Antarius said with a smile of his own.
A meteor collided with the capital ship in front of them, and the rear end of the cruiser exploded in a ball of fire as the giant rock went spinning off toward the rest of the fleet.
Malbourne turned as the room around him went red with emergency lighting and a dozen alarms. Then the screen went black.
Another meteor broke through a battleship and swept up three of the fighters as Antarius dove for his seat and grabbed the harness. “Punch it, lady. We don’t want to be here.”
Priscilla grabbed the controls, and the ship leapt forward as more asteroids came flying toward the enemy fleet. Ships exploded, crashed into one another or did their best to get out of the way as asteroids filled the space above Shandor.
Priscilla shot forward and took the ship through a meteor-sized hole in a frigate. They emerged on the other side of the blockade with a line of sight on the jump point. The space there was filling with Thurgood Industries tugs. The small ships were popping out of hyperspace every few seconds, hurling their cargo toward the enemy fleet and retreating as fast as they had appeared. It was several fortunes worth of rock that had been brought to bear as a weapon of war.
“You’re getting a call,” Angel said, and passed it through.
“This is Maze,” he said.
“The name’s Derrik.” The voice was gruff but confident. “The boss sent us to help. You got the kid?”
“We do,” Cason said as he watched the captain struggle to buckle his harness.
“Good, because we are about all out of rocks,” Derrik said. “Go ahead and jump. We’re right behind you.”
“Thank you, Derrik.” Cason ended the call. “We should be clear to jump.”
Priscilla nodded and sped for the jump point. Once they reached the coordinates, the computer took over and catapulted them toward home.
Epilogue
Harius Thurgood swirled the drink in his glass. Long ago, someone had told him that it allowed the drink to breathe and develop a fuller taste. He did it because he was relaxed and comfortable wherever he chose to be. And he wanted everyone to know it.
“You promised me you wouldn’t do anything stupid,” Worra said. She stood in front of a window overlooking Angora.
The city had changed since he was here last. In that time, a dozen worlds had left the Alliance and joined with the new power that came to light on Shandor. Earth was no longer the only game in town. Allies were now enemies. Alliance offices across the city were now diplomatic fronts for those that had thrown in with the bastards who had dared kidnap his son. The whole galaxy had changed in an instant.
He studied the city through sad eyes, but he knew there was nothing that could have stopped the exodus. Earth had been the only power for too long. It was bound to happen eventually. And he preferred an outside threat than one trying to topple the Alliance from within. He liked knowing who his enemies were. It made things simpler.
“I didn’t do anything stupid, Worra.”
“You started a war,” she said.
“War was upon us. I, at great expense to myself, bought the Alliance time. With the damage Thurgood Industries wrought on their fleet, we may have earned ourselves a fighting chance.”
She folded her arms and snapped, “The Alliance is collapsing.”
“That’s a little dramatic coming from the chair of our security council, don’t you think?” Harius stood and walked across the room to the window. He could imagine the frantic scrambling that was happening as allegiances changed overnight. It was a lot of paperwork at the very least. “The Alliance is consolidating. We’ll know who we can really trust now. Fairweather friends are no friends at all.”
Worra was done arguing. He’d known her long enough to see that. He had a lot of respect for the woman, and she was exactly where they were going to need her. It was the politician in her he hated. But she put the politics aside and joined him in staring out the window. “Do you have any idea what is coming for us, Harius?”
A world of hurt. An unknown enemy. Hard times for a people that had grown soft. It was a lot of terrible things. But those weren’t things that anyone needed to hear right now, so he finally decided on a more optimistic description. “Competition.”
“Competition?” Worra asked with a fair amount of sarcasm. She had always been skeptical. It made her good at her job.
“Competition is a good thing, Worra. Competition brings out the best in people.”
“And the worst.”
“Undoubtedly. We’ll just have to be better at the ‘being the best’ part. But we shouldn’t be afraid to be better at being the worst either.”
“We’re outmatched, outgunned, outmanned… is ‘outshipped’ a word? You struck a mighty blow, but do you really think we can win?”
“I’m betting on our side,” Thurgood said. “And I never pick a loser.”
The sun was setting over the Pacific, and it cast a momentary shade of peace across the city. The ships entering the harbor appeared to slow in the orange and red palette. But it wasn’t long before the dark would come and everything would be covered in uncertainty.
Thurgood set his glass on the desk and moved toward the door.
Worra stopped him.
“Harius,” she said. “If we’re going to win this thing, we’re going to need all the help we can get.”
He smiled and nodded. “I’ve already got my best people on it.”
THE END
If you liked how he treats space, read Benjamin Wallace’s bestselling post-apocalyptic comedies, the Duck & Cover Adventures.
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Copyright © 2020 by Benjamin Wallace.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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