by Kali Altsoba
Magda let’s it go on in silence for awhile longer, then breaks off the action.
“Cease fire.”
With the last petty and pitiless destruction and revenge over, with the ruins of Raule falling behind and out of gunnery range, there’s no enemy left between Alpha and the LP.
Alpha is wounded but alive, as Émile Fontaine at the Navigation Station on Resolve locks the jump coordinates for RCW-138 in the quantum-dyogram that links all five ships of the flotilla to one jumpmaster. He turns sharply on his heel and looks admiringly at Magda Aklyan.
“You did it, captain.”
“We did it, Mr. Fontaine.”
“Yes ma’am, all of Alpha.”
“But we’re not done yet.”
“No ma’am.”
“Where are those Zerstörers?”
“Seven contacts 1.4 minutes aft, relative to our own speed and position.”
“And real time?”
“They’re at least 40.5 flank speed minutes from the bohr-zone.”
“Good. That means they can’t catch us before we pass over the rim. But we should jump hot as planned. We can’t afford to slow in order to glide into this one.”
“Agreed captain. All is ready. Jump-codes are loaded.”
“All ships. Reform in line astern behind your flagship, Resolve.”
Ten seconds.
Twenty seconds.
Forty seconds.
“All ships are astern of your flag, captain.”
“Mr. Fontaine, reconfirm quantum codes. Be ready to bohr-the-system in twenty minutes.”
When briefed on her mission by General Constance, Captain Magda Aklyan seriously doubted that she’d ever get to this point. Ever make it past the cruiser-heavy Kaigun orbital patrol over Genève. Ever avoid pickets lined up at Lagrange points all the way to the L2. Yet here Alpha is, limping to the L2 but intact. About to jump into exile, to make permanent war.
‘Well, intact if you don’t count four ships I lost along the way. Is François dead? Did any Beta ship get out? Are they all just drifting dust? Maybe someone got out, and like us is running for sanctuary and an uncertain future in far-off and farfolk systems.’
She still has three escorts and the two critical troopships, flying tight and making ready for a hot-glide into the deep bowl of the leeside L2. She looks over to Émile, glad to have him beside her, proud of his abilities. Also needing the young man’s affirmation in a way that surprises her.
“First Officer, all things considered, might we say that this was a good day?”
“Yes ma’am. A better day than we had a right to expect. We beat the odds.”
“The losses at the berm to get us here … were they worth it? Speak your mind, Émile.”
Her use of his prénom is unusual. First time she’s done it, actually.
“Yes ma’am, I think they were. This is war. We would all do the same, I think. Sacrifice for Krevo to get the Exodus ships away. Some of us may have just done so. Beta group, I mean.”
‘Damn, he’s not shy about speaking hard truths.’
“Thank you for your candor, Mr. Fontaine. I suppose only time will tell, but we’re not done yet. We’ve not made sanctuary, and there are seven Zerstörers chasing us and closing fast that may still choose to follow us through the jump. In that case, we’ll be in an even harder fight than the one we just finished.”
“Yes ma’am, we will. And in less than 30 minutes now.”
She activates Bridge-to-Bridge coms and gives the order, trying not to dwell on where she’s taking them next. After all they’ve been through already. After surviving ‘The Gauntlet,’ as Émile will dub the fight in his log, naming the hard escape by the little flotilla that ran against all odds from Genève past the Wasp, then down to the L2 where it’s now power gliding to a jump.
‘After all that, I’m must take them to Boca do Inferno, into the “Mouth of Hell.” May the gods forgive me, for my ships and crews may not.’
“Attention all ships. Black-out conditions. I want light-seals on Main Scuttles and every side scuttle and viewport. Shut down all light detectors and outside viewers. No one is to be within two meters of a scuttle or screen. Bridge personnel, don luminosity protectors now.”
Thirty seconds.
Two minutes.
“We’re over the edge of the Lagrange area, ma’am. Gravity echo detected. Folded singularity identified. Jump-codes confirmed and locked in. Resolve’s quantum-drive has all navigation.”
“You have the helm, Mr. Fontaine. Take us into the singularity.”
***
When they come back into the prisoner’s cell he hears it in their voices, quaking with fear, with fury and engorged rage. And he knows that he’s won.
The tale of his courage will never be told. He knows that it will die here in this cell and with General Constance who lies bleeding and torn outside the Berm Gate. Beaten and burned and crippled, he’s an utter ruin of a man. But he’s not bowed or broken. He’s content, feeling in their blows and hearing in their impotent rage that his general’s plan has worked. Alpha has escaped.
He smiles through torn lips and broken teeth as he bites into his cheek, ingesting a suicide flake hidden there from cavity searches, releasing a tiny poison microdot masked with artificial DNA that mimicked his own to fool RSU doctors and guards.
It tumbles in a lump of pulpy tissue onto his tongue and dissolves, instantly sending complex poisons coursing through his blood, to reach his stomach and lungs, to stop his heart and seize up his brain. Guards alerted by frothing blood around his mouth can’t get to him fast enough to stop this brave man’s escape from their cruelty. Can’t prevent him dying a free man.
His tormentors and interrogators will think little of him from now on. Just another dead prisoner. One of tens of thousands they execute and burn and dispose of after the high berm is breached and Toruń is partially put to the sack. They lack the imagination to understand him.
They don’t know. They can’t understand. They would never believe what this lone man’s last act of defiance and the broken, bloody nobility of his sacrificial death means. For it means so much more than their crude and unfree imaginings can conceive or reach. It means everything.
Just as Amiya Constance’s death and the sacrifice of all those soldiers at the berm means so much more than military victory or defeat on one not-so-important agrarian world. More than gray men know or believe as they scuttle sideways in crab service to an oily tyrant who smells of plots and conspiracies and insecure vanity, of murder and lust and spiced snuff.
They think and believe that they’ve won the war on Genève and across all the Krevan worlds. They have no idea that they’ve only won its first and smallest battle. No idea of what is coming to Orion, of what has been unleashed by what they’ve done and will do on Genève and the other conquered worlds that were once the peaceful and neutral United Planets of Krevo.
The prisoner’s death, and Amiya’s, and Jarred’s, and all the others, means the war that Pyotr thinks he’s won will now go on and on. That more Krevans like the lonely prisoner and Amiya Constance, more fighters and crews like those of Alpha and other Exodus fleets leaving all the Krevan worlds, will somehow find a way to make war against the Imperium, forever.
Jan and Zofia and all Krevans will make war until it courses up and down all Orion. War until they can stop wandering far-off seas and alien worlds to return home with armies at their side, engorged with atrocities remembered and repaid in kind, full of hate nursed and matured in exile. War across all Orion, until...
Ulysses returns to kill them all.
Coming Next
Volume III
The Orion War
Jahandar
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