by Jay Allan
And there was only one place left to get help.
He reached down, flipped the comm channel. He took a deep breath, and then he started to speak. “Clint…I’m going to need you to bring your ships back here…at flank speed.” A pause. Clint Winters didn’t need explanations or encouragement, Barron knew that. But he gave them anyway, at least of a sort. “We’re not going to make it alone, my friend, so do what you can to get here in time…”
* * *
“On me, all of you. Forget the wing organizations…individual squadrons, line up and lock on my coordinates. We’re going in now.” Stockton was staring at the screen as he spoke, his eyes locked on the center of the enemy line. He knew what he had in mind would be costly, deadly, that he was about to lead his pilots, at least those who had managed to launch at all, on a desperate mission. It was suicidal, he realized, to lead less than a thousand fighters forward, right into the mass of the enemy’s fearsome battle line. But by the time the entire strike force had made it out, it would be too late. Dauntless and the other battleships would be gone, or floating wrecks, and the battle would be all but over. As they had against the Hegemony, the squadrons had proven to be one of the most effective weapons the fleet possessed against a stronger enemy, and he had to get them back into the fight while there was still time.
Regardless of the risk.
He pulled back on the throttle, firing up his engines, breaking away from the location he’d held near Dauntless for over an hour. Having a bunch of random squadrons—and, in some case, parts of squadrons—following not a battle plan, but simply the nav beacon he was broadcasting, seemed insane. No, it was insane. But staying put and waiting, watching as the battleships of the fleet were destroyed one by one, was even crazier. No fight would kill his pilots as effectively as being stranded in space by the destruction of their landing platforms.
He took a deep breath, pushing back against the fear he could feel creeping in from all around. There was darkness, hopelessness, lurking on the perimeters of his mind. Stockton had a strange relationship with fear. His reputation was of a man who simply didn’t feel it, but he knew very well, that was a fiction. He’d been scared more times than he could count, but he’d always been able to push it aside, to turn it into something of a driving force. His confidence had always been immense, bordering often on arrogance, he knew, and crossing over that line no small number of times. But now, it was taking more conscious effort to stay the course, and he was beginning to realize that assurance, the ever-present belief he would somehow make it back from every fight, no matter how desperate the mission, was gone. He wondered if that was just the last vestige of his youth slipping away…or if there was something more sinister, more prescient, at work.
It didn’t matter. Organized or not, afraid or not, Jake Stockton was going to take his people in. He was going to get back into the fight, and do everything he could to help the fleet achieve victory, or at least to survive the battle.
His eyes moved from contact to contact, picking out the strongest enemy vessels, the battleships that appeared to be the biggest threat to the fleet. They would be the deadliest to his people, as well, but that was functionally irrelevant. If his pilots couldn’t help stave off defeat and save the fleet, they were all dead anyway. Deciding whether to die defiantly charging the enemy through a volley of missiles, or freezing to death in his stranded fighter after Dauntless was destroyed, was no choice at all, not for Stockton. And not for any of his people either, he suspected.
He watched as his velocity increased, and he continued checking each Highborn battleship, eventually picking out the eight strongest. They were massed together, positioned over forty thousand kilometers, dead center in the enemy line.
And they were blasting the hell out of the Confederation battleships, and the Hegemony monsters positioned to the port of Barron’s fleet as well. The combined fleet had already lost over twenty of its heaviest warships outright, and most of the rest shad suffered varying degrees of damage. Stockton was amazed at the volume of fire the ships of the battered line had managed to return, but he knew that output would begin to drop rapidly unless his people got in there and hurt those Hghborn ships. Now.
He upped his thrust, driving straight for the targeted vessels. A quick check showed him his people were following, just as he’d ordered. Their formations were disordered, but they were a damned sight better than he had any right to hope. The years of training, the examples set, not just by him but by the other heroes of the fighter corps, were paying off. He knew his people were scared out of their wits, but they had somehow managed to put that aside, even as he had, and focus on what they all knew they had to do.
The reduced size of the attack force would amplify the effects of the enemy defensive fire, he knew, but there was one saving grace. More ships would continue to launch as they were able and, with any luck, thousands more would come forward, perhaps in fragmented waves, but they would advance, nevertheless.
And just maybe, those things will run out of missiles. The Firstborn’s conventional point defense fire was no joke, but if the enemy’s supply of the deadly missiles gave out, his people would really make them pay.
“All ships currently with me, continue on course. All newly launched squadrons, form up around the battle line until more ships have assembled.” He didn’t want the rest of his birds coming forward in tiny, ineffectual packets. He would keep an eye on the deployment area, just to make sure none of his people got carried away. And he would determine who would lead the gathering ships forward.
His mind started racing, wondering who he could place in command of the subsequent waves. His first choice was Reg Griffin, but he wasn’t even sure she was going to make it back…and he couldn’t imagine, even if she did, that she’d be in any condition to launch again.
Officer’s faces began to pass in front of him, but without knowing who would manage to launch and when, it was impossible to make any choices.
He turned his eyes back to the forward scanners, to the enemy. His attack force was about fifteen minutes from entering Highborn firing range, and about thirty-five from closing to their own launch range. That twenty minutes would be the test, the fiery gauntlet his pilots—and he—would have to survive before they could strike their next blow for the fleet.
Twenty minutes of hell…before they could release their own version of damnation on the enemy.
* * *
Tesserax sat still, stonily silent as he watched the battle continue to unfold. Losses had been heavy, considerably higher than his most pessimistic projections, but his forces were winning the battle, nevertheless. He would have to explain the casualties, answer uncomfortable questions about why the enemy had proven so much more difficult to subdue than he’d estimated. But at least he would have the victory, and the fact that none of the pre-campaign estimates had indicated the humans would be so effective in battle, nor that those from farther out on the Rim would so quickly and aggressively ally with the Masters and their minions.
He would have the Hegemony capital as well, and after that prize was taken, he was confident the Hegemony, and rest of the nations occupying the Rim sectors of the old empire, would quickly fall.
It is the small craft that have most upset the calculations. They have inflicted damage far in excess of any previous estimates, and they had blunted the strength of our main attack by taking so many ships temporarily out of the line.
His mind analyzed the tiny vessels—fighters, the enemy seemed to call them. They were small, maneuverable, difficult to target, at least in the vast numbers necessary to blunt their assaults.
The scouting reports on Hegemony space had not indicated any such weapon system. The attack craft were something new.
Or something from deeper on the Rim…
Tesserax had been in favor of more extensive scouting operations, and he was on record as such. That, too, would aid him in making his case. It had long been clear there were provincial successor states to the empire
farther out, and even that the more distant systems had escaped the worst of the empire’s fall. The Hegemony had been built largely on the ruins of imperial worlds, but it now seemed likely the Rim nations had held onto at least a diminished version of imperial civilization and science, one that had never fully fallen. They had likely lost considerable technological knowledge and capability, but they had clearly retained significant power and capability.
The non-Hegemony ships are the weaker, the least sophisticated, perhaps the result of the deep Rim lacking its own high level technology base in imperial times. When contact with more central systems ceased, they settled into their own, lesser, technology level.
Yet, they are the ones with most of the small craft.
That was a fact he would have to consider. The Hegemony was the more advanced power in the alliance he was facing, but perhaps there was something else on the Rim, something the empire had lost, that the Highborn had been created to replace. The drive that had forged the old empire, the need to fight, strive, claw for advancement. The Pax Imperia had removed such pressures from human development, with ultimately disastrous consequences, but perhaps, those on the Rim, constantly fighting with each other, struggling to regain lost knowledge…perhaps they had regained what mankind had lost.
He would have to consider that at greater length when the battle was over.
The Hegemony railguns were a danger as well as the Rim fighters, but one he’d expected, planned for. The materials of his hulls, and the release of the Sigma-9 radiation waves to block targeting systems, reduced the danger from the enemy weapons. The Hegemony main guns hurt when they hit, even his ships, but they had trouble targeting the Highborn vessels. The small craft, on the other hand, pushed forward to insanely close ranges, ignoring losses as they did. At distances measured in hundreds of kilometers or less, something Tesserax had never seen or imagined in space combat, the tiny ships had little trouble locking their weapons onto the targets.
And with hundreds, even thousands of them coming in wave after wave, the damage they inflicted mounted up.
Worse, they had focused on his battleships, on the heavy units transferred from the primary front. He couldn’t lose those ships, not many of them—though he’d already lost seven, all to the bombers, at least in part.
We have to match that ability. Somehow. He thought, his mind operating at many times the speed of a human brain. He analyzed, and he considered how best to proceed. He hadn’t developed a finished plan yet, but he had the kernel of an idea.
“Scanning control…when the small craft attack again, I want a full analysis. Monitor their formations and communications. I want the command units identified and isolated. Is that understood?”
* * *
“Mother…I got in. The Academy accepted me. I’m going to be a pilot…” Reg Griffin’s voice was weak, barely audible, but then, there was no one there to hear her delusional words anyway. It was years earlier, at least in her mind, twisted by lack of oxygen, struggling with the approach of death.
The remembrance of the day she’d found out the naval academy had accepted her application had always been a happy one, recalled just then perhaps by her mind’s own defense mechanism, to ward off the fear and despair clarity would surely bring. But it had failed, and the satisfaction drained away as other recollections forced their way in, thoughts of her home as a child, of her mother’s face, tears streaming down them. Her mother never knew Reg had been there standing outside the room that day, watching the tears and the utter sadness of a woman who’d tried valiantly to put on a brave face in front of her daughter, and to support the dream that to her was a nightmare.
This is what she feared those years ago…her daughter, her only child, gasping for her last breaths…dying alone, far from home…
She tried to pull herself back from the hallucinations, but then a single clear thought asked a simple, one word question.
Why?
Why reach for clarity?
There was nothing she could do. She would never see her mother again. Her death so far from home, in the depths of foreign space, would not only be her failure to be there for her comrades as they fought the rest of the desperate battle, it would also be the ultimate realization of Amanda Griffin’s fears, the final blow, one last grief to a woman who’d seen her daughter all of three times in the last ten years.
I’m sorry, Mother…sorry I have to leave you, sorry I didn’t come home more often…
It was too late. There would be no time. No chance to undo the hurt, even to say goodbye.
Death would be a relief in ways. She wasn’t sure if that was her mind’s construct, a way to ward off the fear…but she stopped resisting. It was over, and she would take any comfort she could get in her final moments.
Then she heard something.
It was distant, hazy, and she ignored it. Just another delusion, the mind of a woman crossing death’s threshold, flailing around in its final struggles.
She heard it again. Louder. And clearer.
“Commodore…do you read?”
She stumbled through the misty haze, trying to find the way back to the clarity she had so recently forsaken. Her oxygen deprived mind was lost, her perception distorted. Yet, something in her drove her forward.
Her hand slipped out from under her leg. She’d placed it there for what remained of warmth in the frigid cockpit. She was shivering, and she struggled to keep her hand steady enough to hit the comm controls. It took a few seconds, and three or four tries, but she finally managed it.
“Griffin….here…” The words echoed in her mind as some level of focus returned. But she wasn’t sure how audible they were. She didn’t even know anyone had heard her until the voice on the other end responded.
“We’re three thousand kilometers behind you, Commodore. We’ve matched your vector, and we’re coming in, decelerating to link up with you. Estimated time to dock, three minutes.”
Griffin understood…and she didn’t. The ‘three minutes’ floated in her mind, and somewhere, somehow, she understood. The rescue boat had come, they had found her, against all odds.
I don’t have three minutes…
They had found her…but too late. Too late my the slimmest of margins. It was one last cruel blow, and she could feel the tears streaming down her face as she slipped into oblivion.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Free Trader Pegasus
Somewhere in the Badlands
Year 323 AC (After the Cataclysm)
“This is incredible, Andi. I can’t even believe what I am seeing. I’ve known about the Cataclysm my whole life, of course. But we’re actually reading an account of what caused it…or at least one of the causes.”
Andi was staring down at the screen in front of her. Sy’s words pulled her attention away, slowly. “I’m sorry, Sy…what was that?”
“Exactly. It’s hard to pull away from it, isn’t it? We’ve always thought of the Cataclysm as this terrible event, as the end of the empire….but it was always vague, lacking in specifics. But now, we’re actually reading accounts of how it came to be. We’ve got more information here on the empire’s collapse than every scholarly study done in the last century…combined.”
Andi nodded. “I think you’re right. We spent a lot of time scavenging for imperial artifacts, but I’m surprised now how little I really thought about the events that brought about the Cataclysm. It’s easy enough to say the empire declined and collapsed, and maybe that would have happened eventually anyway…but now we can see that much of it was deliberately instigated. It’s hard to imagine a group of nobles and other imperials actually trying to hasten the empire’s decline.” She paused. “Though that’s not entirely fair, is it? It’s becoming clear they were trying to save the empire, not destroy it. We see enough pointless futility in our own society, unproductive lives, people as puppets, dancing on the strings of those pursuing political power. Imagine what it must have been like after ten thousand years of prosperity, of stab
ility. People lost their ability and their drive, Sy. The empire was dying from the decay of its society, from its people sinking ever deeper into pointless irrelevancy…and then the one group that tried to save it, in their own misguided way, pushed it over the edge.” Andi had gone a bit too far, she realized, or at least she’d inserted some of her anticipation and supposition on top of what they had translated.
“We have to keep going, Sy…we need these answers.” She could feel the fatigue trying to close in on her, but she fought back against it. She knew Sylene had to be every bit as as exhausted, but they were just beginning to learn about the Highborn…and Tyler would need everything she could give him if there was to be any chance of victory. The thought that Tyler and the fleet were battling those who very well may have brought down the empire itself—or at least contributed to that historical catastrophe—made it impossible for her to stop.
“I’m with you, Andi. You couldn’t drag me away from these files.” Sy looked over at her friend, and the two exchanged glances. Then, almost as one, they turned back to their screens without anther word, and they slipped back three centuries once again, to the last days of the old empire.
Andros Estate
Planet Samara
Tirion Vega System
Year 11,699 IR (Imperial Reckoning)
Year 35 BC (Before the Cataclysm) by Confederation Calendar
358 Years Ago
“We have become closely watched, my friends. Our plan has proceeded as intended, but the costs have exceeded even my most extreme estimates. The empire is moving closer to the level of disorder and destabilization we require, but I fear that the secret police have learned at least some of what we intend. No doubt they suspect more typical methods of seizing power, and they lack the specifics of Project Obsidian, though even that is simply conjecture.” Andros was downcast, his voice heavy with fatigue and concern. He had been the driving force of the project, ever since his grandfather’s death. He considered it the ultimate act of patriotism, despite the realization that to the imperial authorities, it was nothing less than base treason. And now, he was beginning to worry his efforts would lead him not to ushering in a new age of empire, but rather to the scaffold.
