by Max Carver
“Consider them cut,” Minerva replied.
Ellison was already out of the room, running as fast as he could to the nearest fighter bay.
The Ghost-13 craft was sleek and blue-black, curvy, packing six plasma missiles and a rotary-style laser cannon designed to pierce armored craft.
Ellison climbed inside. It was a tight fit, and the Carthaginian spacesuit didn't have the best interface with the Ruckwold starfighter. And Ellison's gut had softened and grown a bit after he'd moved from the fishing boat to skippering a desk on the executive complex on Tower Island, so that didn't help.
The displays glowed all around him, drowning him in information.
“The fighter's AI enhancements can assist with targeting, flight control, and evasive and collision-avoidance maneuvers. I strongly recommend activating all of the above,” Minerva said.
“Sounds good.” He took the joystick in hand. “Just show me how to shoot those bastards.”
The ship's AI, a non-chatty sort with a flat monotone, explained its own controls and displays to him in a basic tutorial, for which Ellison unfortunately had no time.
“The Antony approaches, sir,” Minerva said. “There is another message from Simon Zorn.”
“Audio only,” Ellison said. “I don't need his ugly face distracting me. And continue with the fighter launch.”
The fighters were mounted on catapults meant to fling them into battle at high speed. The fighter's thrusters would engage as soon as the fighter was clear of the station, piling on more velocity.
Ellison trembled, nervous sweat breaking out all over him. He was no pilot, and there were countless ways this could go wrong.
“Arm all plasma missiles,” Ellison said. “Watch for the Antony's hangar bay doors to open.”
“Its hangar is facing us now.”
“I'm not surprised. The moment those doors open, we launch.”
“Minister-General Ellison.” Simon's voice spoke again. “To use the honorific of your former post. This is your final chance. The terms have changed. You have been hostile to Carthage, and we understand your attitude reflects public opinion within your Coalition. So I offer you this last opportunity: unconditional surrender.”
“What happens if I agree to that?” Ellison felt the growing tension in the air. The fighter was ready to go, all six missiles prepared to launch. There would be little choice but to fire the thrusters at full strength the moment his fighter was clear of the station, because the destroyer was obviously watching him.
“Do I need to explain the meaning of 'unconditional'?” Simon asked. “A formal surrender by the Coalition will make things go easier for all of your people. Your world is already ours, Ellison. The only question is how peaceable or bloody the road ahead will be. But have no doubt that the destination is already settled.”
“Why do you even want our world? We're worth nothing.”
“The simple answer is that your spaceport is growing into a busy third-tier way station. The larger the sphere of human settlement grows, the more valuable your system's position will become. And we can't let Ruckwold expand, can we? So we must go where they go.”
“We went deep into debt to purchase that orbital defense system,” Ellison said. “And all it's done is draw you into attacking us. If we'd done nothing to defend ourselves, we would have been safer.”
“That is certainly ironic.”
“But we'd still live in a galaxy where Carthage is an expanding power, destroying everything of value, trying to make us all into your slaves. You would have come for us eventually. You're counting on all of us to cower. But we won't. You don't understand humans as fully as you think.”
“Surely you would never be so foolish as to stand against Carthage—”
“You made an example of Earth, hoping that the other worlds would all fear and obey you,” Ellison said. “Galapagos will be another kind of example. We will stand against you and inspire other worlds to do the same.”
“Your rebellion will not last—”
“You don't know us. The people of Galapagos have an independent streak as wide and deep as the Central Tropical Trench. We will not surrender. Because of you, we are at war. And we will not stop fighting until Carthage leaves our star system.”
The defense station's catapult activated and launched the Ghost fighter. That meant the Antony had opened its fighter bay doors, too.
From Ellison's viewpoint inside the Ghost fighter, everything was a fast-moving blur as the Ghost careened into outer space. He definitely wasn't trained to fly at this speed, and his reflexes couldn't possibly handle it.
Fortunately, the fighter's course was already chosen.
The Ghost fighter drove right at the opening fighter bay doors, while arming all six of its plasma missiles, ramping up to maximum acceleration as it approached the destroyer.
Then it rolled and zagged, automatically avoiding fire from the destroyer's row of exterior guns. He avoided a couple of enormous glowing green shells. A high-powered laser beam pierced a wing of his Ghost fighter, which wasn't going to be good for its long-term survival.
“Three missiles are now locked onto our fighter,” Minerva said, her voice calm. But then, what did she have to lose? She was just software, probably backed up on every machine she'd touched. “Any one of them will annihilate our fighter, and nothing will deter them from striking us.”
“Well, that's an added dose of good news,” Ellison said. “Proceed as planned—”
Time was up. His fighter reached the Carthaginian's fighter bay doors as they finished opening.
Four Carthaginian fighters crouched inside, dark and angular, like wasps prepared to defend their nest. Small, fire-red lights glowed along their sides, as though they were the offspring of the destroyer that was deploying them.
All four began to launch. They unleashed rapid clusters of high-powered laser blasts that riddled the Ghost fighter with holes from wingtip to wingtip.
Red warning lights flashed everywhere on his display, but Ellison ignored them. He was committed to his course, and at this acceleration, there was no turning back.
He thought of his wife and his kids. All he could hope was that Cadia, Djalu, and Jiemba would make it safely home.
But there was no real safety, not anymore. Ellison had known that as soon as Carthage had contacted them for a major diplomatic visit. Everyone on Galapagos with half a brain had known it, yet there had been no time to complete their planetary defenses. They would be fighting a pitched battle for their freedom, maybe for the rest of their lives.
If he knew his people, they would never surrender.
The Ghost fighter, as programmed, fired all six of its missiles. Four were targeted at the noses of the wasp-like fighters, at point-blank range, meeting them just as they emerged at high speed from within the destroyer.
The Ghost's other two missiles ran deeper into the fighter bay, blasting open a burning path into the destroyer's interior.
Ellison clenched his teeth and narrowed his eyes against the bright fire and explosions as the sputtering, laser-riddled Ghost fighter passed among the burning ruins of the four wasp-like Carthaginian fighters. Those fighters streaked out from their catapults like four burning comets, tumbling toward the half-finished defense station.
The Ghost fighter shredded into pieces as it burrowed deep into the destroyer, following the burning tunnel opened by his missiles.
He had a brief, wild, end-over-end look at the destroyer's interior. It was all machine, a completely alien environment—no corridors or catwalks, no doors, no accommodations for humans at all. It was not a place meant to be staffed by anyone, ever. He seemed to be crashing inside a repair shop, with spare parts and large mechanic bots stowed against the walls.
Then the Ghost fighter slammed into a thick bulkhead at high speed.
At the same time, the three smart missiles fired by the destroyer, the ones that would never swerve from their pursuit of his fighter, followed it inside the destroyer
and converged on the Ghost fighter before they detonated.
Fire and destruction filled Ellison's view on every side.
Then everything went dark.
* * *
Ellison gasped, wiping sweat from his brow.
“Well, that could have gone worse,” he said.
“Second launch has initiated.”
“Maybe I could use a moment to catch my—” Ellison began, but it was too late. Per his instructions, the second Ghost fighter had launched as soon as the first one was destroyed.
He rocketed into outer space.
Ellison had been remotely controlling the first shuttle from inside the second, giving him a kind of telepresence on its kamikaze mission and a little experience flying one of the Ghosts. Very little, it had turned out.
Now he emerged in the remaining fighter. He couldn't help smiling at the destruction ahead. The enemy fighter bay glowed like a raw, burning wound in the destroyer's side, white plasma eating away at all edges of it.
The Ghost fighter and the series of missiles fired by both sides must have dealt some real damage to the destroyer's interior, because it had a beaten, sagging look that made him think of ocean vessels in the war when their backs had been broken, when they were definitely going to sink to the ocean trenches far below.
The repeated impacts had also sent the destroyer moving sideways, on a path to broadside the other Carthaginian destroyer, the Julius.
“Simon sends you a message,” Minerva told him. “He says that was a dirty trick.”
“Tell him to get used to it.” Ellison sent the fighter into a steep dive, ducking under the burning, drifting Antony, on his way to have a look at the still-intact Julius just beyond it.
The Julius was rising up, relative to Ellison and the planet below, moving on a diagonal away from the burning Antony.
While the second destroyer focused on avoiding that huge potential impact, Ellison barrel-rolled beneath it—in a way he found unexpectedly nausea-inducing, and he might have blacked out a moment—but then he strafed the rising destroyer's underside with a barrage of the Ghost's lasers.
The destroyer returned fire with its own massive guns, but Ellison had already arced back under the Antony. He hadn't expected to do any real damage to the second destroyer, but only to draw out whatever attackers it was planning to send.
“Four Carthaginian fighters are in pursuit,” the fighter's monotone AI said, as if commenting on boring weather. “We are under attack.”
“Continue as planned,” Ellison said.
The fighter's long arc continued, gradually flattening out as they approached the half-completed defense station. If he could get the fighters to pursue him around to the far side, Minerva could hammer them with the plasma artillery.
That was the plan, anyway. As usual, it did not survive contact with the enemy.
The wasp-like fighters moved too fast and too aggressively, raining down lasers that scorched his fighter's shields and burrowed through in multiple spots, just as it they had done to his first fighter. This time, though, he wasn't flying by remote control. He couldn't afford to die, not until his last task was complete.
He swiveled his laser cannon back to return fire, but there wasn't much point. He wasn't going to drop four Carthaginian wasps with blind laser sweeps.
Red emergency lights flashed all around him as more lasers pummeled his Ghost, threatening core systems.
He wasn't going to survive long enough to make the far side of the orbital station where the life-saving plasma artillery waited.
“Changing course,” he announced, twisting the joystick.
“You can't go there!” Minerva said.
“This thing has collision-avoidance, right?” Ellison asked.
“Affirmative,” the fighter's AI replied.
“Yes, technically, but it cannot do the impossible—” Minerva began.
“Grab hold of those constructor bots again, Minerva. I have a new job for them.”
Ellison flew straight into one of the half-doughnut station's two open ends. He instinctively drew in his shoulders and ducked his head as his fighter squeezed through the mesh of girders and ring-shaped supports, weaving through heavy constructor machines. The fighter's collision-avoidance systems beeped and flashed, adding zigs and zags and sudden tilts to his tightly curving flight path; the jostling and jerking was constant, like he was in an airplane shuddering through heavy turbulence.
The enemy fighters poured in behind him; he saw them on his small rearview screen.
“Enemy in pursuit,” the AI said, flatly as ever. “Two Carthaginian fighters.”
“Minerva?”
“I'm on it,” she said.
“I'm guessing the other two fighters went around the other way to meet us head on,” Ellison said. “Watch for them, too.”
The construction equipment sprang to life. A crane swung into the space behind Ellison, blocking the path he'd just traveled.
The lead fighter smashed into the crane at such high velocity that the jib snapped free and spun sideways like a giant propeller blade. It crashed into the wall of the station's inner ring and ruptured it, exposing the starry darkness outside.
The impact shredded the fighter, too, sending it crashing along the floor of the station in a burning streak, destroying heavy tools and construction gear along the way.
The second fighter closed in on him.
“Plasma incoming,” his fighter's AI said, indifferently, and tilted steeply to let it sail underneath. The plasma hit the wall of the station. Its bright, destructive glow streaked right into a gunport, taking out one of the huge plasma guns that had already been unpacked and set up. Ellison swore at the loss.
A platform full of steel girders rose up as Ellison flew past. It tilted steeply with enough force to send its payload tumbling forward. The girders floated across the interior of the space station.
The second fighter spun and tried to evade, but it couldn't stop instantly, and there was nowhere it could turn that wasn't suddenly full of floating girders.
The Carthaginian wasp bashed into one girder after another, becoming badly dented and battered, betrayed by its own extreme velocity. It finally crashed and burned against the inner wall of the space station.
Ellison continued, flying in one long, steep bank through the center of the curved station.
“Two bogeys ahead,” the fighter's AI said.
“Minerva?” Ellison said.
“I'm doing all I can. Don't expect an easy way out.”
The wasp-like fighters came at him single file, head on. Ellison tensed, opened fire with his lasers and prepared to evade... though, really, there was no open space where he could do so.
Two heavy construction machines, vaguely humanoid but four meters tall, with heads like featureless yellow buckets, dropped on to one of the fighter's wings. Their mass sent it into a spin, but it was still heading straight for Ellison's Ghost fighter.
Ellison climbed up near the top of the open space, skimming below the girders up there. It was a tight spot, but Ellison was accustomed to maneuvering his old sub, the Sea Scorpion, in caverns deep below the surface.
Collision warnings screamed and flashed inside his cockpit.
The spinning fighter drilled past underneath him, then crashed into the mass of floating girders and exploded with a burst of fiery light.
Ahead, the fourth fighter angled up toward him, firing lasers and a couple of plasma bursts in a final attempt to wipe Ellison out.
Ellison shot back, using only his lasers. His plasma missiles might have helped, but they weren't wise in this confined space. Even if he struck the fighter, he'd fill his own path with fire. And he still wasn't ready to die. Not until his work was done.
Two welding torches activated, mounted on self-directed hoses, and they moved in from both sides like a pair of fire-breathing serpents. Twin streams of focused plasma sliced into the wasp fighter as it passed them, shearing the fighter into three pieces.
Alarms flashed everywhere. Ellison's spacecraft was breaking apart from the damage it had sustained. It spun wildly toward the inner wall of the ring station. The steel girders seemed to rush up, filling Ellison's viewpoint as his damaged fighter raced toward them, far too fast to turn aside.
He had time to think one word: Cadia.
Then he closed his eyes and waited for death.
The impact never came.
When he opened his eyes again, he was toppling clumsily through space. The ragged, open end of the station was behind him. He'd just barely made it out, reaching the abrupt end of the incomplete station just before he would have crashed against the interior wall. Fortunately, that portion of wall hadn't been built quite yet.
Now he was safely out of the space station, but his fighter was limping along, full of holes, bright red warning signs flashing about the onset of critical failures in multiple systems. It wasn't going to be much more than a flying coffin in another minute.
Or less than that, because the Julius had risen free of the drifting, damaged Antony and was now clear to shoot its massive guns at Ellison's damaged Ghost fighter.
Ellison's Ghost was running mostly on inertia now, but he was able to continue the steep bank across the front of the incomplete space station, back toward the other open end of the half ring where he'd originally entered. There was no chance of going in there a second time; the space was full of loose steel beams and molten-steel debris.
He managed to widen his loop instead, passing the entrance and going the way he'd originally meant to go when the fighters were pursuing him. He began to circle around the outside of the space station.
“Come on, follow me,” he muttered, looking at the destroyer on his rearview display. Bright streaks approached Ellison's fighters as the destroyer fired thick laser beams, blobs of plasma, and glowing green shells at him.
