by Nate Duke
Gomez jumped back and quickly sat down straight on his seat. He fastened his seatbelt and glanced at Flanagan in fear.
Banner closed the cabin doors. “Younger brother,” he said. “Half-brother, actually. Father said that he didn’t have the soul of a widower. Nothing like a good old threat to get rid of an energetic kid.” He smiled to himself.
He hadn’t relaxed since we’d rescued him from the Cassocks. Perhaps he’d realized that command wasn’t easy for anyone, or maybe he’d decided to be nice to me so that nobody suspected him once I was found dead in my room.
In either case, I didn’t care. We’d faced the Cassocks, our ship was broken, and we needed to work together.
The speakers beeped with a warning: we were about to bump onto a solid object, but everything around us was dark like normal space, with a coat of stars many light years away. I turned on the reverse engines to slow down and avoid the object.
Banner sat up and turned on his co-pilot’s interfaces. He ran a scan of our surroundings, but we found nothing but static. Too much static to be real.
It didn’t give me a good feeling. I released one of our drones and set it to perform a close-range check of the area. It came up with several unidentified objects, much larger than the North Star. They were slowly headed to Aurora Port too slowly for typical ship speeds.
Banner’s eyes widened in fear and he gulped slowly. “Cassock ships aren’t this large,” he said. “It has to be a mistake.”
Drones didn’t make mistakes. If readings were anomalous, they performed a second reading before outputting any results.
We’d flown straight into an unidentified fleet, and it wasn’t friendly.
We needed to get back to the port before them and get ready for whatever they planned to do. Lucky that we were flying a shuttle, because we were small and nobody would consider us a threat. We’d have died if we’d flown the North Star.
Chapter 14
“Beat to quarters, Flanagan,” I said as soon as we got back to the port. “I want every crewman up and ready to fight. Gomez, tell port security to secure the main streets, prepare their defenses and perform a shields check. We’ll take over command during the fight.”
“But sir,” Gomez said, “we don’t even know if they’re friendly. They might just be flying by.”
“Ten friendly ships without hailing?” I said.
We’d encountered an entire fleet heading straight in our direction. The Navy’s regulations required captains and commodores to warn before approaching a spaceport to avoid raising any alarms during their approach. The only exceptions occurred whenever a ship had communications problems, but they had to make themselves visible to sensors and to human eyes and remain at an adequate distance until a port delegation boarded them to provide a temporary communications system.
I didn’t care what fleet the ships belonged to, but the North Star had been boarded by Cassocks and we hadn’t detected them. Those ships used a similar cloaking technology.
“Won’t this annoy Lady Elizabeth?” Banner asked. “She won’t like it if we start taking her father’s place. The governor’s supposed to lead battles to defend his port, and his family is in charge in his absence.”
“The governor’s gone missing,” I said. “He’ll like to come back to the port instead of finding its ruins. Lady Elizabeth can’t lead the defense against ten ships.”
Or more. We’d detected ten by setting our drones to scan the area, but more could come later or before. We were blind to their technology, so they could hide wherever they liked and we’d only detect a fraction of them.
I’d felt awesome after defeating the Cassock frigates, but it was starting to sound like a lucky move now that another battle approached. How was I supposed to take command of a civilian spaceport and a broken ship of the line and fight ten enemy ships that I couldn’t even see?
The men expected me to lead them, though, and that’s what I was going to do.
I got rid of Kozinski and York and told them to fetch all our men who could be hiding in taverns and whorehouses. The pair knew all the special ladies in town better than anyone else, and they’d find my men. If they stayed around, they’d keep asking questions and blaming each other for everything.
“Banner,” I told the lieutenant, “fetch our pilots, recruit the port’s security men who have received flight training, and get anyone who knows how to fly a fighter. I need two squads of fighters and shuttles.”
“Do you plan to make me fly against the enemy?” Banner folded his arms and raised an eyebrow at me. “What can a team of wasps do against ten mammoths?”
“Sting them, track them, and blow up every satellite in the area as soon as they get close to them. We might not be able to fight, but no ship likes to fly by a nuclear explosion.”
“That’s mad,” he said flatly. “Each of those satellites costs millions. You can’t blow them up even if you’re defending the port. The government won’t like it.”
“Would you like to fly the Star back to Earth and hope that we’re lucky and get away?” I asked. “Have a better idea? I’m all ears.”
Banner’s face turned from rage to resentment, and then to resignation. He’d finally realized the chain of command and knew that he had no choice but to cross his fingers and hope that I didn’t kill everyone aboard the port.
“Fighters?” He nodded, realizing the gravity of the situation. In the last battle, he’d been captured without even realizing. His body tensed. He wanted to stay aboard the port to be safer and avoid entering another Cassock ship. He had no other option. He let out a long, resigned sigh. “I’ll do my best.”
“Try to do better than that, Banner,” I told him. “I know where you end up when you do your best.”
He sneered at me, looked down at my clean yet weathered boots, and curled his upper lip at me before leaving.
He’d have gotten in trouble for that sneer if he hadn’t been the only senior officer under my command. I couldn’t afford to lose his help.
Once everyone was assigned to work, I summoned my engineers, told them to forget about the North Star, and asked them to make as many explosives as they could. We couldn’t create artificial shields for the port or improve our defenses, and we couldn’t build a wall like ancient civilizations had done to protect themselves from attackers. We were defenseless; our only way to fight back was to blow up silly satellites whenever the enemy got close to them.
Airborne fights suck, but space fights suck even more. You can’t hide, you can’t fly away, and you don’t even have proper clouds to break eye contact with the enemy.
“This won’t work, sir,” Gupta said. He was one of my top engineers and he’d even gone to a real college. He was blunt enough to demoralize everyone with his pessimism. “How do you plan to bait the ships to get close to the satellites?”
“Wasps.” I said the first thing I could think of. I said it confidently so that everyone thought that I’d lost my mind. Nobody asks you to explain things if you’re mental, and they try not to contradict you in case you turn violent.
Gupta squinted his eyes, tried to understand whatever I’d said, and eventually gave up and kept working.
I don’t like acting mental, but it was the easiest way to save hours of explanations. Have you ever tried to get engineers to solve something quickly? It rarely happens, and they get scared and ask even more questions before a fight. And yes, I was an engineer and that’s exactly why I knew what to expect of them. Engineers aren’t suited for battle, that’s all.
With some luck, we’d get enough explosives and a couple of nuclear heads as a surprise. It wasn’t enough to fight so many ships, but Cassocks aren’t stupid: if they think they’ll lose too much in a battle, they’ll retreat.
That is, hoping that our enemies were Cassocks. We hadn’t seen their flag. Or any part of them, actually. They were invisible to our sensors and to our eyes.
Chapter 15
The men deployed the explosives before we det
ected any signs of approaching ships. The attackers’ movement had been so slow that we waited for two days without getting any sign of the siege. I didn’t get many chances to sleep; I was too tired and too nervous about the upcoming fight.
This wasn’t about dying or surviving; it was about helping the men survive. One bad choice could cost many lives, and there was no going back, no second chances. Banner had suggested taking half of the men aboard the North Star and hope that the invading fleet ignored them. They’d be able to get back to Earth and maybe even ask for reinforcements. Unfortunately, the North Star wasn’t fit to fight or to fly, and we’d have a greater chance of survival if we all fought together.
We’d brought some of our equipment from the North Star to the port’s bridge to feel more at home and control the entire region from one central spot. Banner had rehearsed his flanking movements aboard fighters with the pilots, and Flanagan had recruited everyone who knew how to shoot long-range weapons. We lacked many drones and engineers to control them. We needed more time.
My eyelids were heavy, but I remained standing by the spaceport’s bridge. I hadn’t slept for over 20 hours, expecting the enemy to arrive as soon as I fell asleep. I worried that I’d wake up to another boarding from the Cassocks. I wanted to notice the ships approaching and to stand a chance to fight against them.
Banner joined me in the bridge and looked at the empty radar screens. “No sign of movement?” he said.
“Just the minor static we’ve heard all along,” I said. “It’s getting louder.”
Banner nodded. He looked much more awake than me; he’d probably sneaked a nap between one watch and the next.
Our voices broke an artificial silence that everyone was keeping. The men didn’t joke or talk to each other; they silently stared at their screens, hoping that our drone readings had been wrong and that we weren’t living our final days. The wait froze my blood and kept me alert, but stress and tiredness taxed my body. I didn’t know how long we’d have to wait before sleeping once more.
The faint signal that could’ve come from the governor’s ship had given us enough time to prepare for the attack. I’d been close to ignoring it, and it wasn’t reassuring. What if captains have a gut instinct and feel those things? Or was command a matter of investigating every possible sign before discarding it as a threat?
“You need some sleep, Wood,” Banner told me. “Won’t be of much use if our commanding officer is falling asleep in the middle of battle.” Was it a snide remark, or was he serious? “I can cover for you for a few hours and give you a call if something changes.”
Was he showing loyalty towards his commanding officer? Coming from Banner, I expected him to leave me asleep to get the fame and glory if things went well, and to wake me up if they didn’t.
Still, I needed to sleep and he could take care of the port for a few hours. Nobody was going to miss me unless we started hearing explosions. I thanked him and told him to wake me up at the smallest sign of attack, even if the enemy ships started orbiting around us.
“Keep the port afloat while I’m out,” I told him, “and don’t send a midshipman to wake me up. They’ll get distracted.”
Banner nodded and acquired his classically overexaggerated officer’s pose, looking ahead but without seeing anything in particular.
Hopefully, this time he’d realize if the Cassocks attacked us while he was in charge. Not noticing twice in a row would be an awful sign of his skills as an officer.
Chapter 16
“They’re here, sir! They’re here!” Gomez’s screeching and clapping in front of my nose brought me back from sleep. “There’s over a dozen ships, maybe more! And we can’t see them! They’re invisible, just like last time.”
Curse the kid. How had he broken into my cabin?
“Sorry to interrupt your sweet dreams,” Banner said through the intercom’s speakers in my room, “but they’re here, Wood.”
“Yes, sir! They’re here!” Gomez ran towards the intercom and pressed it. “He’s waking up, sir. He’s almost up. We’re on our way.”
“You aren’t supposed to be here,” I said.
“I know!” Gomez said with a wide grin. He talked very quickly, as usual. “You’d locked the door, but Flanagan’s taught me a couple of tricks to disable locks, even if they’re high-security. Did you know that he was a famous bank robber? He’s broken into a bunch of banks, and he was dumped here to avoid jail. Breaking into rooms is really easy once you get the hang of it. Want to learn someday, sir?”
I groaned and tried to push him away, but he was running excitedly around the room and turning on the artificial windows to emulate daylight. He took my double-breasted jacket and threw it onto the bed, but it landed on my head.
I sat up and put on the jacket. I’d gone to sleep wearing my shirt and pants to waste as little time as possible, and I hadn’t even taken my boots off.
Once ready, I headed to the port bridge. Gomez followed after me and didn’t give me a second to breathe.
“Isn’t this exciting, sir?” Gomez ran to my desk, grabbed my tablet and handed it to me before following me out of the room. “This is like the most exciting moment in my whole life. I’ve never fought against a dozen Cassock ships, you know? And I’ve never seen any invisible ships. Why are they invisible? Are they using cloaking systems, or is this something else? Can you imagine if we hadn’t noticed their static? Or if the governor hadn’t disappeared?”
“Why don’t you relax for a while, Gomez?” I told him. “And stop eating sugar.”
“I haven’t eaten sugar this time,” he said. “I’ve drunk soda, lots of it. Did you know that local restaurants don’t charge you if you’re in uniform? And you get a bunch of pretty women sitting on your lap. Not sure why, but York held hands with one of them. And Flanagan left with three of them. Is he going to marry them?”
Banner had sent him to me to get rid of the kid for a while, but he sometimes got too difficult to handle. I was going to pay Banner back with the same coin: Banner needed a copilot for his fighter, and he might as well find it in Gomez.
“Quieten down, Gomez,” I said.
“Yes, sir.” Gomez saluted at me and continued hurrying after me. He spoke just as fast as before. “Is it because I keep talking so fast? Because I can talk slower too if you like. I just don’t like talking slowly because I get idea jams in my brain. Know what idea jams are? They’re like traffic jams, but with thoughts, and you say silly things because you skip the odd word or sentence.”
Ugh! Did he ever lose his voice? Or fall asleep? Kids are supposed to sleep a lot, but Gomez was always running around and annoying everyone.
We were under an imminent attack aboard a civilian spaceport which wasn’t ready for battle, and one of our few officers remained on a sugar high. If the Admiralty judged the North Star’s acting captain by the men who served under him, I was in trouble.
Chapter 17
We’d deployed the port’s satellites and my engineers had added explosives to most of them. We’d put nuclear surprises to show our lack of sympathy towards sneaky Cassocks who try to defeat us without battling. If any visible or invisible ships got close to them, they wouldn’t like the result. We also had a few long-range cannons, but we couldn’t shoot blindly until we detected the enemy.
Banner had taken the pilots aboard the North Star’s fighters. The port’s fighters were supposed to be more modern, but nobody had performed the routine check-ups for many years, and I wasn’t going to lose half of the men to depressurization or to engines that stopped working and left them in the middle of space.
Lady Elizabeth’s father had trusted his relatives and friends too much with important jobs. Nepotism rules the world, but one or two people out of ten need to know what they’re doing, or you end up risking too many lives. Some captains didn’t take care of their ships, but O’Keeffe had kept everything in shape. I’d read the Star’s maintenance logs and they gave me much more reassurance than the port.
> What? Did you expect me to dump Banner and everyone I disliked aboard a broken fighter and wait until they died? As tempting as it sounds, I needed them to flank the Cassock ships and to be ready in case our satellites weren’t enough. We’d loaded the fighters with a special corrosive foam to destroy outer hulls. The fighters would have to fly quickly and release the foam once they got close enough to the Cassock ships. With some luck, the foam would disable the cloaking and blind their sensors, giving us an advantage. If the system worked, we could always use a similar method as a permanent orbiting radar system.
This battle wasn’t about facing a dozen ships; it was about facing them, making them retreat, and deterring them from returning ever again. We needed them to keep out. They’d been very aggressive towards the North Star and we’d been close to losing the ship and the entire crew. I wasn’t going to let them think that they could crush our ports too.
The radars’ constant scanning kept everyone in silence. I’d asked Gomez to go to the hangars and gesture at the ships once they arrived. Nobody would arrive until after the battle, but I needed him entertained.
“They’re still waiting, sir,” one of my engineers said.
I told them to turn on the communications systems and attempt to establish a direct connection with one of them. None of the ships accepted the signal; they still expected to be invisible to us.
I sent them a pre-recorded message anyway: I told them that they were entering port space and that they had to retreat immediately unless they wanted us to open fire. I told them that we were well-protected by some of the Navy’s best ships and ready to use them. They acted deaf.
York and Kozinski were guarding the bridge in case we had any anti-militaristic heroes. I don’t have any problems towards pacifists, but it’s easier to talk about peace once you’re safe after battle. Breaking into the bridge and disabling our controls was hardly a good way to debate.
