Ragnarok: Colonization, intrigue and betrayal.

by Andrew Claymore

  “Oh.” He drew in a sharp breath. “Oh! Yeah, um… sure, there aren’t any spores where we’re standing but just don’t wander around, OK?”

  He set her down. “Who was that?” He nodded toward the growing ship.

  “Crew rumor pegs her as a cousin to Empress Tashmitum,” she said quietly. “Apparently, she’s just become quite powerful.”

  “Should we try to stop her or something?” What are you thinking? Will we throw rocks at her ship?

  “She’s done nothing to me or my family,” Gabriella answered dully. “At worst, she’s guilty of bad taste in mating partners.”

  She crossed her arms. “He’s alive?” she asked, looking over at Memnon, awkwardly posed in a half recline.

  “He is, but he’ll be dead in a few days, once the larvae eat their way through something vital. Should we help him?”

  She shook her head. “He sent people to kidnap me and kill my mother. Let him die here, food for worms, forgotten by his enemies.” Her voice was trembling.

  Kill her mother? Vikram wasn’t sure if she meant the attempt had been successful or not but he knew better than to ask. He stepped closer.

  She was facing away from him, shoulders shaking. Oh God, she’s crying. He automatically put a hand out to touch her shoulder. She seemed fine a moment ago...

  She spun around and buried her face against his neck, sobbing. Horrified, he put his arms around her. Do I say something? What could I possibly say that would help?

  They spent ages like that. It was hard to know she was in pain and still not be able to help. All he could think of to do was keep his arms around her, hoping that it would offer some slim comfort.

  “Sorry.” She leaned back and cuffed the tears from her eyes. “That’s been building up behind a dam for a while now. It’s just… I expected to feel something when I took revenge.

  “That piece of garbage is dying over there and I don’t feel any satisfaction at all. Mom is still gone…” She shook her head at the tremble in her voice.

  Neither of them noticed the rumbling sounds coming from the ship, at first. They both jumped at the explosion that blew out a section of hull above a buried, aft hangar bay.

  A dark blur emerged, the camouflage streaked where debris had scoured away the non-reflective coating. It settled lower and opened a boarding ramp.

  Small figures ran toward it from the wreck. “There was a corvette in there?” Vikram asked, astounded. “How did they get… Hey!”

  She’d taken his hand and placed it over the control module for his suit. Pressing his fingers against the release sequencer, she stepped back, grim fury displacing the sadness.

  “Sorry,” she said. “They’re traitors to the species. I’m not letting them get away but I need your suit.” She nodded toward the plume of smoke in the distance.

  “If there are any of our ships left, even any parts of our ships, I need to find them. There might be something I can use.”

  “Um, yeah,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the crash site. “I don’t know which ship for sure but I think it was the Kuphar… Hey!” he said again as she snatched the module from his chest, leaving him in his underarmor suit.

  She put the unit between her… He looked away with a gulp. The waterfall sound of nanites indicated that she’d initiated the suit.

  “If enough of the ship came down intact,” she explained, “then there might be some fighters aboard her. We just have to hope one of the squadrons was caught aboard her for a re-arm when she went down.”

  “And that they managed to finish the re-arming?” he asked, daring to look at her again. She was covered. He was mostly relieved but still a little annoyed at losing his suit.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” she urged the suit as it closed up to her neck. She opened a holographic HUD.

  “Recognize, Gabriella Morales of Earth. Second… Correction, first in line of succession.”

  She blew out a shuddering breath at something the suit had voice-projected to her inner ear. “Reporting Adelina Morales of Earth, first in line of succession, deceased.”

  She stood there, biting her lip for a second then nodded. “Release all security interlocks for this suit.” She looked at him. “Wouldn’t want colonists accidentally activating a fighter or anything,” she explained with a small shrug.

  She looked back at her HUD and started opening new menus. “They never even launched?” She selected an icon and it began blinking.

  “We’re in luck,” she told him.

  He was about to ask her what exactly she had in mind when the air slapped him on the side of the head. He turned in alarm, hands up, and she placed an armored gauntlet on his back.

  “Careful,” she warned. “You almost backed into those spores!”

  She turned and loped toward a lumpy black hole in the world that hadn’t been there a moment ago. The debris of the jungle floor was rattling in concert with the pulsing of its drive.

  She clambered up one of its dangling lobes and he could make out the steps set back into the… thing… now that he knew where to look.

  “You know how to fly that thing?” he asked her.

  “Yes” she shouted down.

  The fighter closed up around her and she settled into her seat. The rattling ceased as the whine of the engine increased and then she was gone.

  He stumbled forward as the surrounding air rushed in to fill the sudden vacuum. “OK,” he mumbled, looking up but seeing no sign of her already. He looked over to where the corvette had been loading up survivors.

  It was gone as well.

  “So, I’ll just hang here, I guess?”

  Gabriella raced skyward, her mind melded with thirteen tons of raw destructive force. The blue faded to black and she pushed out farther, past debris and bodies.

  She swung her nose about to face the planet as she backed away, looking for the tell-tale black spot that would indicate a corvette. She expected them to be careless.

  The Deathstalker had tried to settle into orbit before the crash, indicating they’d gained the upper hand against the defenses. The traitors would feel safe in a standard orbit while they spooled up their path engine.

  Her HUD was picking out possible contacts but dismissed them just as quickly as larger chunks of what had been defensive corvettes. Then it found what she was looking for.

  Her lips peeled back in a silent snarl as she fell back toward her target. She spun up both her missiles and sent them directly at the ship.

  In an instant, they’d sketched a pencil line of exhaust vapor toward the corvette. It was like switching between two still images.

  One second, the corvette was intact, preparing to path out. The next, a thin trail from Gabriella intersected the ship and the planetward side was a tangle of debris and a spear-point of exit-plasma that lanced deep into Ragnarok’s atmosphere.

  Growling now, she pressed closer, crossing thousands of kilometers in a blink. She went to guns.

  She could see bodies caught in the planet’s well. She knew the damage control teams would be working frantically, chasing the unlikely hope of repairing the engineering section she’d targeted.

  She fired into the hull, starting at engineering and working her way forward. She slid sideways, orbiting around to the ship’s bows where she held position on her enemy’s main axis.

  She kept pouring fire down the corvette’s center-line, tearing the main bus to shreds. Bulkheads and stanchions were easy to repair but the bus was where the conduits, tubes and wiring lived. They could only be repaired by a skilled linesman cutting out the damaged sections and meshing in new lengths.

  She ran out of ammunition and her barrels were probably cooked as well. She screamed her rage at the ship, falling silent as she finally released the firing circuit.

  The barrels spun down as she sat there, breathing heavily, staring at her enemy. Then the ship finally seemed to answer its helm. It swerved to her starboard but it wasn’t trying to sneak around her; it was giving up the st
ruggle against gravity.

  The renegade corvette slid down against the jumble of parts she’d blasted out with her missiles. The hull was attempting to knit that debris back into the ship as it fell but it was little more than a symbolic gesture, at this point.

  Gabriella followed the ship down, finally backing off when it started getting hot. She slowed her descent, though she’d already scorched off her stealth coating of carbon nanotubules.

  The corvette, the Edged Star, Gabriella remembered, was burning as she fell. Various chunks were tearing loose now and she nearly missed the fact that three of them were escape pods.

  “System,” she commanded, “track those pods. I want to know where they land.”

  One of the pods was spinning so hard there was practically zero chance anything could survive the forces inside. The other two would come down with the Edged Star, within three hundred klicks of the city.

  She watched as the ship hit the dense jungle, far down-valley from the colony. The impact was hard, gouging a deep rift in the ground for at least a half kilometer.

  There’d be no survivors after that. The pods landed within a three-kilometer radius of the main site.

  Gabriella cursed quietly and turned back to the wreck of the Deathstalker. “Unknown pilot, this is Hooligan Actual. Identify, over,” an angry voice said in her ear.

  “Identify,” she repeated, “Morales, Gabriella. You’d better have a damned good reason why you’re not in the air right now, Hooligans.”

  “My lady…” There was a pause, probably while he waited for the voice-print to confirm. “My lady, we’ve been in a crash…”

  “I was in a crash as well, Hooligans,” she replied with the slightest hint of censure. “You’ve clearly got functional fighters, already armed, and a planet to protect.”

  “Ah, yes. Well, we…”

  “How many of your pilots are fit to fly right now?” she asked, surprised at her own calm.

  “Ah, I’ve accounted for seven so far.” There was the sound of muffled shouting. “I’ll get us up there right away.”

  “Good.” She shared her scans from the crash of the Edged Star. “See if you can spare one bird to search for survivors. Two pods made it down intact. Exercise extreme caution. They’re traitors.”

  “Traitors… Understood, my lady.”

  She continued toward the wreck of the Deathstalker. She didn’t necessarily feel better, after taking revenge, but she did feel… different.

  She realized she might not have been entirely fair with the Hooligans’ squadron leader. Sure, she’d been in a crash but she also had a pretty strong personal motive for staying in the fight.

  She smirked, pretty sure what her aunt would tell her. If you accidentally show good leadership, she thought, don’t screw it up with an admission.

  Ragnarok was currently vulnerable. The attack was over and another was unlikely for the near future but that didn’t mean they should just leave the door wide open. Even a half squadron getting out into the black to watch for danger was a good start.

  A warning chime put her heart into overdrive and new icons appeared in her HUD. They blinked green, indicating friendlies.

  Fighters? She blinked and checked a second time, then realized the Universe might just be offering a break to the folks of Ragnarok.

  There were two other squadrons based on the Kuphar, after all. Some of them must have survived. Maybe Hennessy was with them. He’d made no secret of his plans to lead with one of the squadrons.

  Thank God someone senior can take the reins here, she thought, breathing a little easier.

  She frowned. Why is nobody calling them? The Hooligans are busy prepping to launch from a crashed carrier…

  She muttered a few words that even her aunt would probably have disapproved of, then opened a channel. “Inbound callsigns, this is…” She racked her brain for something appropriate. “...Orbital Control, Ragnarok. Identify.”

  She kept flying back to where she’d left the young colonist, listening to static for what seemed a very long time. “Orbital Control, this is Dice Actual. Who is this? O.C. Rag was on the Kuphar.”

  She felt like cheering. The defenses were looking a lot better with every passing minute.

  And it represented a lot of details to work out that had nothing to do with her own personal tragedy. She was inclined to see the distraction as a good thing but who was she in all of this? Do I have any place telling these guys what to do?

  She allowed herself a mirthless chuckle. Back home, not a chance. Out here, though...It was, technically, her responsibility as first in line after Luna and Gleb.

  And anyway, she could probably leave most of that to Hennessy, when he made his presence known.

  “Dice, this is Lady Gabriella Morales. The Hooligans are working to get a few fighters up for a CAP. I need you to get down to their location and see how much of the hangar is still intact while they fly cover.”

  “Are you kidding…” The voice went silent just about the time her voice-print would have come up in his HUD. “Nergal’s balls!” he exclaimed. “Pardon, my lady but it’s just…”

  “Never mind about that,” she cut him off. “Just get to what’s left of the Kuphar. Help with the wounded and get a party to work assessing what we have left.”

  Her training as a fighter pilot and all of the political, technical and operational modules her aunt had insisted on cramming into her brain came bubbling to the surface as she wondered what to do.

  It was all there, in her head. She could fight against it or use it.

  “I need to know what’s left of the ship. Can we re-arm fighters? How many birds and pilots do we have? It’s gonna be a week, at least, before we see any help from home, so let’s get some plans in place.”

  Vikram tensed as he saw the fighter approach. It was easier to see than when it had left. The hull was still black but it was scorched clean of its stealth coating. The details were now visible.

  It came in gently, for a fighter. No violent rush of air this time, just a rumble in his guts as it cycled through the lower power levels.

  Gabriella opened the cockpit and leaned out, looking at Vikram just long enough to make him uncomfortable. “I think,” she said carefully, “that I have a good idea about why you’re up here in the middle of a battle.”

  She turned to gaze off into the jungle, looking toward where Vikram had been found unconscious. “I heard something when I was still in orbit, something in my mind.”

  “A voice?” Vikram asked her. “Kusha?”

  “You’ve met her?” She looked at him sharply.

  “No.” He shook his head. “But I think it’s time to try.”

  “What do you know about her? How do you know her name?”

  He shrugged. “I barely know anything. She just seems familiar. This feels right…”

  “Said every fish before biting the hook,” she said wryly. She slid down the sponson to land with a dull thud on the jungle floor.

  “I have no guarantees we aren’t talking about walking into some kind of alien trap,” Vikram admitted, “but I don’t think that’s the case and I’m not willing to ignore it any longer.”

  “Shit,” she said wearily. “What a godsdamned week. I was just wishing I was back home in Cali, reading some meaningless novel.”

  “About a young woman in an impossible situation?” he asked.

  She sniffed in what could almost pass for a laugh. “Alright, smart-ass. Lead the way.”

  They walked through the dappled light in silence for a while. The jungle around them sounded removed. All of the chirps, squeaks and screeches were still there, but it sounded like Vikram’s ears were under water.

  Her voice was clear enough, though. “It’s funny how I can just take over the defenses because it’s my responsibility but I have trouble taking this walk through the trees.”

  “Well, you probably have the training in here.” Vikram tapped his own forehead. “That would lay out why you need to take char
ge and explain what you need to do. This…” He gestured ahead. “It’s a mystery.”

  “I have no idea what we’re doing,” she admitted.

  “Sometimes doing is enough,” he said. “Understanding can come as we go.”

  He stole a glance at her. What must it be like? All that privilege and responsibility for someone who wasn’t born to it… He looked ahead as they came into the clearing.

  “Well,” he said, slowing his pace, “that’s new.”

  There was a newly cleaned area around the space where he’d previously been found unconscious. He’d known there was some kind of metalic structure underneath but now something had cleared away the jungle debris.

  In the center was a round platform, slightly raised and ribbed around the edges. A faint line marked a circle in the middle and there were odd characters etched there.

  “I think we just step on,” he said.

  “OK.”

  He was surprised to feel her hand seeking his. He took hold but then she shook her hand free.

  “Sorry,” she said with a grimace. She deactivated the armored gauntlets and took his hand again. “Is this ok?”

  “Yeah,” he said in what was nearly a croak. “No problem.”

  They stepped on the platform and moved to the center.

  “So,” she began, “whoa!”

  He actually heard her reaction before noticing the change. They were inside a large room. “I was kind of expecting an elevator,” he said.

  The space they found themselves in was a round room, about twelve meters high and twenty in diameter. Beams sprung up from the floor at three-meter intervals, curving up the domed ceiling. They were made of an almost metallic material, like a tarnished bronze with a cloudy transparency. The surface was etched in geometric patterns.

  “Kind of looks like Babilim,” Gabriella whispered.

  Vikram wasn’t sure why but that was both interesting and frightening at the same time. He gave her hand a squeeze and she returned the gesture, darting a quick little smile his way.

  The central pad they’d appeared on was circled by a stairway that sank into the floor. There was nowhere else to go, so they started down.