by Adams, David
Ling caught Liao’s eye. “Captain, the Tehran has jumped away.”
A cheer went up from Operations, muffled slightly by the slowly increasing volume of the Toralii weapons pounding on their hull.
[“Captain, Summer reports–and once again, I am paraphrasing her–that the shockwave from the Tehran’s departure nearly knocked her into space, but that our loaned jump drive has been hooked up. Four more minutes and it’ll be ready to go.”]
Already the hull temperature was climbing at an alarming rate. Liao gestured to Hsin. “Four minutes, everyone! We’re getting out of here in four minutes. Mister Hsin, relay this information to the Sydney and clear the jump point for them. Mister Jiang, retrieve our strike craft and Broadswords–combat landings. Have point defense cannons protect the hangar bay from weapons fire until they’re all aboard.”
“Aye aye, Captain–combat landings, all craft. Return to the Beijing and prepare to jump away.”
The shaking and pounding grew louder as the five Toralii ships decelerated, aligning themselves to appear just beyond the jump point. Liao gripped her rattling console. “I’m going to need Summer to work faster if we’re going to get out of here alive, Saara! Give me a time estimate!”
She watched the Toralii woman speak into her headset, marvelling at how collected the Toralii woman appeared. She was the epitome of calm, quiet professionalism, while everyone around her was shouting and getting carried away with the moment. Liao tried to draw upon her stoicism, forcing her voice to remain low and even.
[“Two minutes, Captain!”]
Liao nodded, glancing at Ling. “Is the Sydney moving towards the jump point?”
“Aye, Captain. Captain Knight reports that they are inside the Lagrange point and will be jumping in moments.” Ling spoke again after a brief pause. “The Sydney has jumped away, Captain!”
Another round of cheering. Liao gestured to Hsin. “Signal the Port side of the Hirakan–tell them to jump away while we protect them.”
Hsin relayed the message as instructed, then turned back to Liao. “Captain, it’s Garn again–he wants to talk to you directly!”
She didn’t have time for this. “Put him through!”
Liao tapped the talk key on her headset. “Garn, this isn’t a good time to argue about—”
[“Our port side jump drive is offline, Captain!”]
Liao’s blood ran cold. “Say again, Hirakan?”
A loud, rambunctious laugh echoed down the line. [“Captain, I think thy ears art blocked. I know thou heardst me! Our jump drive is gone. It took a hit while we were separating the ship!”]
She bit her lip. “How quickly can you evacuate yourself and your crew to the Beijing?”
Another laugh. [“Melissa, Melissa! There art no forces in the universe that could drag me away from this battle! The shaking of my ship and the roar of her guns echoes the bellowing of the gods–I’ve not felt so alive in months. Besides, Captain, you and I know there’s no time for evacuations.”]
“There’s always time,” Liao said. “You make time! You make what you want happen, and you spit in the face of destiny. Garn, you don’t have to die protecting some people you’ve barely met.”
Jiang’s voice cut into Liao’s conversation. “Captain, the Kel-Voranian ship has taken heavy damage. They’re venting atmosphere on most of the their decks and they’re not moving to the jump point!”
Liao pressed the talk key again. “Garn! Garn, listen to me–listen! I’ve already lost—” Her voice cracked and broke, thinking of how James had rammed the Toralii cruiser to save her. “I lost someone I cared about because they were defending me. I’m not going to lose anyone else! I’m ordering you to effect whatever repairs you can, then to move to the jump point and follow the Tehran to Earth.”
[“Thou art not my commander, Captain, and thy orders fall on deaf ears.”] There was a shout in the background, then Garn’s voice roaring once again. [“More power to the weapons! Continue firing!”]
“Garn—”
[“Captain, I am terminating this communication. May all your blades be bloodied!”]
There was a faint click as the signal ended. Liao tried to raise him again but heard only static.
Closing her eyes, Liao inhaled. “Saara, status on our jump drive?”
[“Captain, Summer reports work complete. She is moving back inside the ship in preparation for the jump.”]
Liao gave a low growl and nodded. “Get her up here as soon as possible.” Turning to Dao, she fought to keep the bitter edge out of her voice. “Mister Dao! Move us into the Lagrange point and prepare to jump the ship back to Earth.”
“Course laid in, Captain!”
Her headset crackled into her ear on the short range frequency. “Captain, this is Yanmei Cheung on the Archangel. Request permission to come to Operations to give my after action report.”
She slammed her finger against the talk key. “Can’t it wait?” she snapped.
“Negative, Captain.”
Rolling her eyes at Yanmei’s impatience, Liao squeezed the talk key so hard the plastic cracked. “Get up here, then—on the double. Meet Summer on the way up. I don’t care if she’s still half-naked and undressing from her little space walk, drag her up here by her hair if you have to. I want my Chief of Engineering.”
Yanmei’s voice crackled through the tiny radio. “Aye aye, Captain.”
Liao moved her hand on the black box and switched it off. She could afford no further distractions. Turning to Dao, she focused her eyes on the man. “How long before we are enough into the Lagrange point?”
“Thirty seconds, Captain.”
Liao nodded, a particularly heavy impact nearly causing her to lose her footing. “Good. The moment we’re inside, engage the jump drive and get us the fuck out of here!”
“Captain,” Jiang called, her tone charged with alarm, “The Hirakan’s reactors are overloading!”
Liao turned to her radar console, watching as the Toralii weapons fire came in streams like the drops of water from a hose–one fountain driving against the hull of the Kel-Voranian vessel and the other pounding at their own armour. There was a brilliant white flash as the reactors on their allies’ vessel cracked and broke, then a powerful shockwave rushed over them, throwing the crew of the Beijing to the deck.
When she clambered back to her feet, she could see that the spot where the Hirakan was moments ago was now nothing more than an expanding, white hot debris field surrounded by an equally large ball of spilled gasses and molten metal.
“They’re gone,” Jiang said, stating the obvious. A hush fell over Operations as the crew digested the news.
The Beijing glided into the jump point, and Kamal turned to Liao. “Captain, we’re in position to jump.”
Nodding, Liao reached into her chest pocket, withdrew the steel key, and moved to the jump console. Kamal moved around beside her, his key in his hand as well.
“Prepare for jump,” she called to the room. “Disengage artificial gravity in twenty seconds!”
Liao flipped back the protective plastic cover, staring down at the small keyhole. She fidgeted with the key in her hand, waiting for the gravity to be dialed down and for the familiar sensation of nausea to overtake her. In the background, there was a dull metallic groan as the hatchway to Operations opened. Liao looked up, seeing Summer push open the heavy door.
“Well, that was fun,” came Summer’s sarcastic, nasally voice as she moved towards her console, panting softly as though she’d been running, her voice laced with triumph. “Getting hung out on the arse end of a spaceship to get blown around by explosions and shot at by aliens. Brilliant.”
Liao purposefully looked back down at the jump console and bit back a biting retort. Summer’s attitude at this critical junction was aggravating, but she was who she was. Liao heard Yanmei’s voice from down the corridor and felt a somewhat unreasonable spike of anger. Yes, Summer was Summer, but for her head of Marines, Liao expected much better.
“That’s funny, I thought I was a little more senior than that.”
Liao’s heart stopped, her head snapping around as though she’d been punched in the face. The voice was deep, male, lightly accented and familiar. Standing in the threshold between the corridor and Operations, clad only in rags and covered in bruises, was a face she’d thought she’d lost forever.
Captain James William Grégoire.
Immediately behind him, Yanmei Cheung stepped through, grinning like a jackal. “Surprise, Captain. Our squad, by sheer dumb luck, were dropped in right next to their infirmary. With all the forcefields down, guess who we saw wandering around like a lost little…”
Liao wasn’t listening. Her eyes were locked on James’s. Time seemed to slow down as they stared at one another, Liao’s mouth agape. She had written him off as dead, a marker on the growing list of casualties the conflict with the Toralii Alliance had produced, but here he stood. Battered, weary, wounded, and with half his previously observed muscle mass, but alive.
Before she knew what she was doing, her feet were pounding on the deck, her hat flying from her head as she drove headlong towards the man, grabbing him roughly under his arms and drawing him into a crushing embrace. Her hands gripped him as though she feared he would slip away and vanish again. She felt his hands around her shoulders, holding her in a similar fashion, and for a brief moment there was nothing but silence as the ship’s computers counted down towards the jump.
And she wept, openly and unabashedly. She wept with relief, with joy, with giddy disbelief, her chest heaving as she emitted a weird, half-strangled noise that alternated between jerking sobs and joyous laughter. She pressed her face against his shoulder and poured it all out. The stress of living in space on a warship, the weight of having the fate of Humankind resting on her shoulders, the terrible emptiness that had gripped her every second that James had been absent from her life, the shock of finding out she was with child, the agony of losing Velsharn, the terror of her near miscarriage. Those emotions, bottled and contained for too long, poured out in an tide of feelings that not even Liao's considerable mental discipline could contain.
It wasn't Commander Liao, Captain of the TFR Beijing, decorated war hero and savior of humanity who stood in full view of the women and men she commanded in battle, crying shamelessly into the tattered rags that served as James’s clothing, but a woman named Melissa; a Chinese woman with a Greek name who had finally earned a chance to hold the man she loved.
She felt herself being lifted up–the gravity was switched off in preparation for their jump–and the two floated away from the deck. She didn't look at anyone, didn't try to justify or excuse herself, or hold anything back. She merely buried her face into James's shoulder and sobbed. Her mind spun, flailing uselessly as it tried to process what had happened. Surely it was impossible, surely it was all just a dream.
For the first time since she had come into space and experienced weightlessness, there was absolutely no nausea or sickness or discomfort as gravity loosened its grip and the two of them–arms gripping each other as though they would never let go–floated gently in the air. With a tear-stained sideways glance, Liao saw Summer taking the captain’s place at the jump console, the redhead seemingly pleased to be finally be able to use the technology she had helped build.
Summer nodded energetically to Iraj, and the two of them turned their keys. The barrage on the hull of the Beijing disappeared with a silence so abrupt it seemed impossible, quieted by the disappearance of the Beijing as it leapt away from Cenar and back to Earth.
She knew her work was not yet done, and their arrival back on Earth would be anything but peaceful and relaxing, but she didn't care. With her child's safety secured, all she cared about was that after enduring countless trials and suffering terribly, James was home, and she was in the arms of the man she loved.
Epilogue
“Survival”
* * *
Near the wreck of the Giralan
Karathi
Ben was rarely surprised, but he was not expecting the two-metre drop through the atmosphere of Karathi–a short amount of time for a Human, but an eternity to a synthetic mind–to be over so quickly.
All that time spent living with biologicals had taught him to occasionally think like one, he mused, as his drone body crashed into the unyielding desert sands, his datacore thumping into the ground just beside him, the spherical jump drive landing nearby and beginning to roll down the side of the dune.
“Oh, no, you bloody don’t!” he shouted, reaching out with a clamp to grasp hold of the device, pulling it back towards him. His articulators strained with the effort, claws digging into the sand for purchase and scrabbling as he tried to avoid being pulled along with it.
Fortunately, the device stopped rolling and Ben, slowly and carefully, began dragging it towards the ruined Telvan ship that had been his home for decades.
Although he had previously told Liao that nothing could possibly bring him back to Karathi, the situation had now changed. The Giralan was in terrible repair, and most of the systems required to support life had been removed–artificial gravity, atmospheric processors, sublight engines. The ship couldn’t move nor sustain anyone aboard it, so it was stationary, to be slowly buried in sand over the years. It was, for all intents and purposes, useless to everyone.
But for a life form that didn’t breathe or suffer in zero gravity, a spaceship only needed to be able to keep out solar radiation–which his datacore was hardened against anyway–and to function as a platform for weapons.
The ship would need weapons, but he knew where he could trade for them and get more material for repairs. His artificial mind began working through an inventory of the ship’s contents, auditing them and collecting a tabulated list ordered by value.
The jump drive that could move outside of voidwarp points, however, was the most valuable thing that he could add to a ship that couldn't move. After all, who needed sublight drives when a ship could just jump wherever it wanted to, unimpeded? Who needed armour when one could just disappear before the missiles arrived?
He could see it in his mind; a perfect simulation of his ship appearing above the Telvan worlds, immediately dispensing worldshatter barrages and then vanishing as quickly as it had arrived. He would be undetectable, unstoppable, and invincible. And he would never tire. He would never rest. He would never sleep. He would never grow bored, old, or remorseful.
Liao believed Ben had drank his fill of revenge, but now that the construct had the jump drive and a new plan, his work had barely begun.
Now it was Ben’s time, and the Giralan would sail again.
* * *
To Be Continued in “Lacuna: Spectre of Oblivion”!
The Lacunaverse
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Novels
Lacuna: Demons of the Void
Lacuna: The Sands of Karathi
Lacuna: The Spectre of Oblivion (December!)
Short Stories
Magnet
Imperfect
