So Close to Home

by Galen Surlak-Ramsey

  “Yeah,” he said. “Looks like it.”

  “Good, try not to fry them again,” I said with a grin. “I’m fond of having them around.”

  “…ota? Can you hear me?”

  Yseri’s voice was weak, and static crackled on the line, but hearing her speak lit a fire in my soul.

  “We can hear you,” Tolby said. “Where are you? A battleship has crossed into Kibnali space. We can’t stay much more than a few minutes.”

  “The prefab plant on the north side,” she replied. “But Empress isn’t with me.”

  “Where is she?”

  The answer to Tolby’s question came swift and from the Empress herself. The transmission was stronger, but like Yseri, she, too, was clearly embroiled in the fighting. “Barracks, south side,” she said.

  A pair of triangles suddenly appeared on my HUD, one at each end of the city. “Locations marked accordingly,” Daphne said. “These should be accurate within two meters.”

  “Outstanding,” I said. I sucked in a breath before exhaling sharply and adjusting my grip on the controls. “Sit tight, you two. We can grab you both in less than a minute.”

  I banked hard, and then the display to my right flipped from showing system status readouts to a pixelated view of the battleship. From its belly, several triangular objects shot out, leaving bright orange streaks as they headed toward the planet.

  “Multiple warheads detected,” Daphne said.

  “Warheads? What kind of warheads?”

  “The kind that shatters continents,” she replied. “Everyone who values the integrity of their bodies should take appropriate action. Estimated time to impact, two minutes, two seconds.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “They’re going to nuke everything?”

  “Not everything,” Daphne replied. “Their fleet will be safe from any mushroom clouds and associated blast waves.”

  “Why the hell would they do that? Aren’t their own people or constructs or whatever the hell they are down there?”

  “Goshun must be putting up enough of a fight that they want to end it quickly,” Tolby said. “This wouldn’t be the first time they nuked everything to end the battle.”

  “I thought you guys were the ones that did that, not them,” Jack said.

  “We only made the Last Act of Defiance when we were cornered on our homeworld and wanted retribution,” Jainon explained. “The Nodari don’t care if they blow themselves up. The fallen will rebuild and come back eventually, and far quicker than you would think possible.”

  “I was at Adrestia, remember?” Jack countered. “Not much can surprise me anymore when it comes to their regeneration capabilities.”

  Tolby growled, and I cursed under my breath, as I knew whatever he was going to say was going to be anything but good news. “Those warheads will never hit the ground,” he said. “They will be air bursts to maximize the devastation.”

  “That would explain some of the readouts I’m getting,” Daphne said. “Adjusting estimations to reflect time remaining until an escape must be made.”

  The countdown she had on screen flipped from a little under two minutes to less than thirty seconds. “What?” I said, leaning forward. “We’ve got thirty seconds to bug out?”

  “Correct,” she said. “This ship will not be able to accelerate fast enough to avoid the blast. Correction, you will not be able to withstand the acceleration that the ship is capable of that would be necessary to avoid the blast. Further correction, you will also not survive the sudden acceleration induced by the blast wave when it hits this ship, nor the immense transfer of energy.”

  “Get Empress,” Yseri said, cutting into the conversation. “If one of us has to die, it will be me.”

  “Belay that order!” Empress shot back. “Dakota, you will pick up Yseri and save our Empire, do you understand?”

  “Your Most High! I cannot allow that,” Yseri said.

  “It is not your decision!” Empress barked over the line. “Dakota, you’ve pledged yourself to the Kibnali Empire and to me. Do not abandon your oaths.”

  My mouth dried as my gaze fixed on the timer. I flew on autopilot, unable to decide. I heard Tolby and Jainon express their desires as well, or at least weigh in on the situation, but I was so detached trying to figure out what to do, their words passed through my ears. All I could think about was that stupid countdown and how unfair the positions was I was put in.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  To Orbit

  “Dakota!” Tolby roared.

  I snapped back into my seat. I didn’t know what the right thing was to do, still, but I knew what I was being told by the one who I pledged my service to. All I could do was hope and pray Yseri would understand—that the others would, too. Maybe then after all that, I could come to peace with it myself.

  Gah! Why couldn’t I have been tasked with a more straightforward choice? Anything would’ve been better, except for trying to figure out why I’ll keep checking the fridge as if food I want will magically appear.

  “Stand by for extraction, Yseri,” I said, my voice sounding unnaturally calm in my head. “On you in ten seconds.”

  “No!” she shouted. “I’ll shoot myself if I must! Get Empress!”

  “Then your death will be for nothing because I’m coming to you on her orders,” I replied. “I am her fang and claw.”

  I threw a glance at Tolby, who nodded at me approvingly. Even Jainon, who wore a pained expression on her face, gave a slight nod as well. I pulled back on the throttle as we got to the south edge of town. The Nodari saturated the area and poured out of the buildings. Below, swarmlings ran through the streets, but they fell in great numbers to pockets of Kibnali resistance.

  “On those guns, Jack!” I ordered as I brought the craft down and dropped the ramp.

  The words weren’t needed, and he relentlessly fired into any Nodari group he could see. Swarmlings and scouts vaporized under his fire, and chunks of buildings blew apart as he raked his stream of cannon fire into the Nodari taking cover in the Kibnali structures.

  “Yseri, get in here, now!” Jainon yelled.

  I glanced to the monitor and saw her dart out from one of the buildings. She ran with a limp and instead of the rifle she had had before, all she was armed with was a pistol that she used to pop shots off to both sides. A few of the Kibnali soldiers who we’d rescued earlier ran out and provided covering fire. I wasn’t sure who or what they were shooting at given the plethora of targets, but the return fire from the Nodari was minimal, so they must’ve been effective.

  As soon as Yseri and the other Kibnali started up the ramp, I had it raised. They were probably barely inside the belly of the ship when I pulled the nose up and started to go.

  “You guys strapped in yet?” I called back.

  The reply took several painful seconds. “We’re good.”

  Those were all the words I needed to hear before pushing the throttle all the way to the stop. True, we had about three seconds to spare, but since Daphne had fudged calculations before, I wasn’t about to trust it was completely accurate.

  “We’ve got her, Empress,” I said, knowing the matriarch would want to know. “Do you have any other wishes?”

  Those last words put a lump in my throat, and as a monitor flipped to the rear display and showed the city shrinking behind us, I had a hard time focusing due to the tears in my eyes.

  “No, Dakota,” she said. “I am honored to have been a part of your life. You are my proudest Ralakai.”

  “May Inaja bless you with good fortune, Empress,” Jainon said, her voice cracking.

  “May her luck be your luck,” the matriarch replied.

  Jainon tried to eke out the rest, but her voice caught in her throat. All she got out was, “We will—”

  And then the sky turned white.

  Like a rowboat tossed at sea by an angry storm, our craft bounced through the air as the shockwave battered us around. I fought with the controls to keep us from crashing, and t
hree times I overcorrected so much that we nearly drove through the planet’s crust and ended up getting a tour of the mantle.

  “God, that was too close,” I said once I’d stabilized our flight.

  “Maybe it’s too early to be asking, but how are we getting home?” Jack said. “There’s no way the webway survived that.”

  “This ship is equipped with hyperspace drives that operate on similar principals to our own, albeit much more efficiently,” Daphne said. “Using them, we could travel to another Progenitor planet and—oh, will you look at that. Now that’s something unexpected.”

  “There had better not be a fire in the engine room,” I said.

  “No, look,” she replied as the status screen to my left switched. Whereas it had once been displaying ship information, it now had a chart of the immediate area for the solar system. The planet was clearly labeled, as were icons for the wormhole and the three Nodari ships, which were in low orbit. Beyond that were the two moons, which was expected, but on the far side of the outer one, four green triangles were on display, and said triangles were slowly closing in on the planet.

  “More Nodari?” I said.

  Jainon, who had a similar display showing at her station, manipulated the controls. “No. That’s 39th Flotilla. The reinforcements Goshun sent for.”

  “Can they do anything?”

  Jainon’s ears went flat. “Doubtful. Originally, they were sent here to investigate when contact had been lost with the planet. They were never heard from again.”

  “But that was then,” I said. “This is now. Like, a different now.”

  “They’ll still be torn apart if they engage,” Tolby said.

  “When they engage,” Jainon corrected. “They won’t abandon those on the surface, especially since this is the first contact the Empire will have had with the Nodari. They won’t know any better.”

  Frustrated, I gripped the controls. “But there’s no one left on the surface!”

  “Something, sadly, they are unaware of,” Jainon replied.

  “Can’t we do something?” I asked, but deep in my gut, I had the dreadful feeling I already knew the answer.

  “Yeah, Dakota, we can leave,” Jack said, jumping in. When Tolby and Jainon shot him a glare, he didn’t back down. “Look, I get it. I really do. Those are your kin. But let’s be real. There’s a massive Nodari fleet about to pop into this sector, and this isn’t a hill I want to die on.”

  “We can’t do nothing,” I said. “Can we at least tell them to turn around? Put you onscreen to testify? Or all the other Kibnali marines for that matter we’re toting around?”

  “I’m happy to report that I should be able to fine-tune the comm system in approximately four minutes and forty-two seconds, give or take a few nanoseconds,” Daphne replied.

  Jainon checked the screen in front of her and hit a few of the controls to bring up more data on the situation. “They’ll be in combat by then,” she said. “Which means they won’t last much longer than that, especially when the rest of the Nodari fleet comes through that wormhole.”

  “They won’t warp out?” I asked. “Surely it won’t take them long to realize the colony is nothing more than a crater.”

  “Nodari battleships have interdictor generators on them. Anyone caught in their field will be stuck in real space until the ship or those generators are destroyed,” Tolby said.

  “Can’t they take down the battleship?” I asked. “I thought you guys had a kickass navy.”

  “We do,” Tolby replied. “But it took several battles for us to make adjustments to our weapons for them to be effective.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Daphne said. “You’ll be able to have one last chat with your Kibnali friends before they die a glorious death worthy of any fleet. You can assure them their tale lives on for future generations to come.”

  Jainon pressed her lips together and growled. At first, I thought her reaction was directed at Daphne’s accidentally insulting, cheerful tune, but I soon realized where it was really aimed. The Nodari. “Those generations are numbered,” she said.

  “As much as it pains me to say so, Jack is right,” Tolby replied. “For whatever reason, the gods have set this upon us, and the flotilla will be lost. Furthermore, after having personally witnessed Dakota’s gigantic mess she created at the museum trying to rewrite history, we’re best to leave while we can.”

  “Hey! That wasn’t my fault!”

  Tolby raised an eyebrow.

  “Okay, some of it was my fault,” I said. “But you can’t blame me for wanting to hop around time when a portal device literally ended up in my lap. It’s not like it came with a warning label that said, ‘do not hop spacetime.’”

  “Curator warned you,” Tolby replied.

  “He wanted to die anyway,” I said. “He doesn’t count.”

  “Tour Guide also said not to.”

  “Okay, one guy did.”

  “And Master of Records,” Tolby added.

  “Yeah, well, he doesn’t count either. He talked funny.”

  “Dakota, literally everyone we met who knew anything about that artifact said not to use it,” Tolby said. “Regardless, saving the 39th Flotilla, even if we could, would be pointless in the war. It’s an extreme risk with no gain.”

  For the next few moments, I stared at the scanners and watched the Kibnali ships approach the planet, clueless as to what they were about to get themselves into. My throat tightened. As much as I wanted to change the outcome of what happened here, I knew Tolby was ultimately correct. Even if our intervention didn’t create a massive paradox backlash that sent our atoms scattering across the universe, saving those few ships that had been sent to investigate would never tip the balance of the war. The Nodari were legion.

  “What if…” My voice trailed as my vague thoughts began to gel. I gnawed on my lower lip as my hands readjusted themselves on the controls.

  “I know that look,” Tolby said, sounding both wary and amused.

  “As do I,” Jainon said. “You have the warrior’s spirit.”

  “Well someone fill me in, because apparently, I’m just a guy that doesn’t know what everyone else is thinking,” Jack said, throwing up his hands. “I’m not a mind reader.”

  “What if we save the fleet here and take them with us?” I asked. “History would still say they’re lost, but they’d be safe with us in the future, back in the Milky Way.”

  Jack looked at me with more shock than if I’d hit him with a cattle prod hooked up to a fusion reactor. “Take them through the webway with us?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re Kibnali, Dakota!” he said, drawing looks of ire from both Tolby and Jainon. “Look, I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade, and no offense to our reformed furry brethren, but you’re talking about bringing warships crewed by the old guard, the Kibnali who sought to subjugate any and everyone, and that’s assuming we even survive.”

  Nervously, I drummed my fingers on my leg. He did have a point. Then again, we were already toting around a platoon of elite Kibnali soldiers. I glanced at the monitors again, unsure of what to do. The only thing that was crystal clear was the fact that we were running out of time. “Future us will just have to deal with that later,” I said. “Daphne, how long till we have comms?”

  “Two minutes,” she said. “They will be engaging the Nodari in half that.”

  I nodded and pushed the flight stick to the side, bringing our ship around. “Then I guess we better get to work,” I said. “Tolby. Jainon. How do we take this battleship out?”

  “With the rotary guns on this ship? I don’t think we do,” Tolby said. “Not before the rest of the hive fleet gets here, at least.”

  Hoping he was wrong, I looked to our bubbly AI for confirmation. “Any insights from ship records or the archive cube, Daphne?”

  “Yes, I am pleased to report that Tolby’s assessment is indeed accurate, but I’m also pleased to report that you have two other
things at your disposal that may help.”

  “An antimatter cannon capable of vaporizing a small moon?”

  “Oh, do they make those?” she replied. “That would be handy. Let me check. Hmm…that’s not it. No…wait. Oh, never mind. Wait…wait…Yes! Score!”

  “We do?”

  “No, but I found something else that you’re going to love,” she said. “I would’ve noticed it sooner, but the code in here is a mess. Toilets look like radar arrays. Weapon controls look like the thermostat. And by the Planck—if I may steal some of Tolby’s euphemisms—and I’m still not sure what this one thing does, other than it’s definitely not the food replicator. Or the night light. Or the—”

  “Out with it!”

  “I’m pleased to say that the Progenitors who previously owned this ship had purchased an extended warranty,” she replied. “Isn’t that great?”

  “That’s not great, Daphne! That’s stupid!” I shouted. “We don’t have time for nonsense.”

  “You only think it’s stupid,” she said. “Do you know why they purchased it? Well, I’ll tell you. They wanted extra coverage for the onboard portal device. Apparently, they were worried the lattice matrix might shatter and wanted the ability to bring it back to any pre-approved Progenitor repair shop and have it swapped out for free.”

  I perked. “We have a portal device built into the ship?”

  “We do! Isn’t that wonderful? I thought that would improve your mood.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “I told you, I’m still figuring out what everything does, and this was the first opportunity I had,” she said. “The device has limited functionality, I’m afraid, compared to your handheld version. I believe the tech installed here was a precursor to Pakjep.”

  “You mean Jakpep,” I corrected. “That was the name of the artifact at the museum.”

  “No, the records definitely say Pakjep,” she said. Daphne chuckled. “Or maybe I’m dyslexic.”

  “Hey!” I said perking. “The one on this ship must’ve been the one I used before back in the facility!”

  “When?” asked Jack.