C’mon, Commandos—cut their power. I thought about possibly losing the men and women on those ships.
“We have confirmed all corvettes are ours, as well as the destroyers and two cruisers.”
“Rick, have the Commandos abandon the cruisers unless they think they can take them. Marleen, get ready to line them up.”
***
Evelyn grunted as she helped replace an ammunition feed line to the massive cannons with two others. Get some footage of the Resilient, you thought; join the group of trainees, you thought. It’ll be like every other job you’ve done behind enemy lines, you thought. Evelyn Sparks chastised herself as the feed line was secured in place, George already rushing them to another damaged area.
“We’re replacing power relays to the shield generators,” George said, barely out of breath, whereas Evelyn thought that she’d run a marathon. The Resilient shook again. Those not connected to the ground through their Mecha’s boots went flying but George or one of the Commandos picked them back up.
“Up you get, ladies and gents. Those shields need work still.” George’s voice was forceful but not an order. Evelyn had found, in her five days with the Free Fleet, it wasn’t like other militaries. It was much more relaxed. There wasn’t someone yelling all the time and everyone was treated as equal and vital.
The ship shook again as the lead Commando changed direction. Another section of the ship had been exposed to space.
One of the trainees yelled out as they grabbed the wall to steady themselves, instead grabbing hold of a live wire. The Mecha went up in sparks and shorted its power cells as the extra power overloaded its systems.
George twisted and pulled some recessed handles as the Mecha opened and a scared-looking trainee emerged.
“You’re all good,” George said with an upbeat tone as Evelyn sprayed the exposed wires with sealant.
“Let’s keep on going, guys. We’re behind Donnal now,” George said.
Evelyn turned and ran after the rest of the squad. I hope this footage is worth it!
Highs and Lows
Henry just finished watching his Commandos fleeing all but two of the cruisers, heading away from the battle as shuttles were being scrambled to pick them up.
The Resilient’s guns hammered the cruisers, turning them into balls of light. It took no more than three hits to pierce the shields and armor, getting to the missiles underneath.
“We’ve taken Battle Cruiser Delta,” Commander Versai said over the commander channel before it returned to silence
One of the battle cruisers fleeing split as one of its power plants exploded. Another stopped as its engines blew out; the last one just stalled as Henry’s casualties list shot up.
Henry detailed six shuttles for the battle cruisers as reports filed in, names of people he knew passing in front of his eyes. He kept focused on the battle. “Verlu, you’re in charge of those four battle cruisers. I need to know what’s going on and if it’s safe for shuttles to land.”
“This is Commander Tully. Commander Verlu is dead. I will get those reports to you,” the Kuruvian said in dulled professional tones.
Henry felt as if he’d had his already weakened frame kicked out from under him. Henry let out a breath. I will think of you later, as well as all those who go with you into the dark.
Henry’s mind turned back to battle. “Very well, Commander Tully.”
He cut the connection as the battle cruisers still in the fight were bathed in missiles. Weapon systems went down as chunks of armor disappeared under the atomic wash.
The Resilient lost its shields for the final time, but it still fought with a vengeance.
“We’ve taken Battle Cruiser Echo,” Erkshaw reported.
Henry moved to the next report. Shuttles began speeding out of Hachiro, whose guns had gone silent since all the battle cruisers’ shields went down. The Resilient picked off the larger weapons as it rolled with its own hits.
“Damned girl’s built tough,” Henry grunted as fighters raked the battle cruisers. The shuttles did not make the journey unscathed. They arrived minutes after, having lost thirty percent of their number—seven hundred Commandos dead.
Henry walked through the safe areas of the dreadnought, getting to the shuttle bay that had already been appropriated and was loading Commandos.
“Commander, are you sure?” one of the protection squad said.
Henry looked to them. “This is the Free Fleet. We stand together.”
None of them said anything after that. They boarded the shuttle together. Henry thought it was the quietest shuttle ride he’d ever ridden. The ghosts sat with them all.
“We have missiles launched for Hachiro.”
Henry checked his locking bolts as the shuttle was buffeted. Then again, but this time as if by the hand of God.
I’m getting too old for this shit, anyway, he thought sadly as he felt blood on his face and darkness taking over.
“Not the best time to be napping, CAMC!” a squad commander said as Henry was jolted awake with Wake-Up.
“Update,” Henry barked. He was inside another ship with other casualties.
“Take a few minutes first,” a medic said.
“That’s for the dead, and I ain’t one yet.” Henry stood, feeling woozy. The squad commander braced him as he regained his footing.
“Thanks,” Henry said. His HUD blinked an incoming message from Bok Soo.
He accessed the channel, sounding as bad as he felt.
***
Rick’s voice cut through the noise of battle as I tried to find a way to use my forces to inflict more damage.
“The shuttles leaving the dreadnought were hit by the missiles. Hachiro’s breached in multiple areas.”
My insides twisted. I wanted to roll into a ball on the floor and make everything just disappear. Tens of thousands had died. People I had known. People I had trusted. And still more would die. Instead, I nodded, iron resolve filling me. I couldn’t dwell on the past. I had taken up the mantle of CFF, and I would execute it to the best of my ability until I was dead.
“Commander Ilru reports that BC Foxtrot is taken,” Comms said.
Rick came in after: “Golf has multiple breaches. It is believed that it will be taken shortly.” His voice was gruff from talking so much for so long. “Bok Soo is on the shipyard and has made contact with the Kuruvians there who have already cleared it,” he finished.
I looked to him and nodded before looking at the plot. He took a deep, long drink of his water, calming his trembling body.
So, we’re going to win, just not yet. The Resilient’s own guns had gone silent for fear of hitting a shuttle, meaning we had rolled to present our spine, the most heavily armored part of the ship other than the belly. Our shields were still down.
“Battle Cruiser Charlie has just purged all of their atmosphere. I’m detecting strange power fluctuations across the ship,” Sensors said.
Resilient’s voice came over the bridge. “They’re combining all of their computers and processors together in order to get some fighting ability back.” She sounded almost scared.
“How is that bad?” I asked.
“It could spawn an AI, an AI that could be for us, against us—care or not. It could just blow itself up, using its missiles to take all of us with it.”
“Why the hell would they do that?” Rick asked.
“Final resort. If they die, might as well take some with them.” Resilient sounded almost angry, very different from her normal, calm, almost motherly voice.
“Comms, order all ships to disperse!” I barked. “Helm, do what you can to push us back, but keep our spine aligned with them. Shields?”
“I’m working on it!” the harassed shield operator said as every ship that could made to move away from the battle cruiser.
“I’m going to send it an information kernel. Hopefully it will allow it to understand what is going on and what it is,” Resilient said.
I nodded and took a sip of
my water. Don’t let them see you sweat and they won’t either. You’re their leader and rock. If it was easy, everyone would do it. Long minutes ticked by, then ten minutes.
“Hello, my name is...Lare.” The voice was very electronic, slow, and pronounced the name Lare like larè. I waited for it to continue, but it stopped.
“Hello, Lare. What are your intentions?” I asked, as if talking to a newly made AI was a daily thing. Sure, I spoke with Resilient, but after the lessons I’d had as well as the answers Resilient had given me, I was aware new AIs were as dangerous as the resources at their disposal. One with a mostly functioning battle cruiser was quite alarming.
“I want to learn what I am. My...mother says she will help me.”
“Can I retrieve my men from you?”
It took some time before it replied. “Yes. I will also be willing to trade time with my shuttles for repairs that I am in need of.”
“We’ll sort that out in time. I’ll have shuttles there shortly.” I looked to Rick, who began cutting orders.
“Very well. We shall. Talk. Again, Commander Salchar.” Its sentences were broken up, as if it had to think of each next word it was going to say.
The channel ended as Resilient came back.
“I will see that I educate him on matters. If he does not join us, then I will point him in the direction of the AI league.”
“Very well.” It was a strange feeling; we had gone from battle to dealing with the basic birth of something new.
“Comms, fleet-wide.”
“You’re on.”
“Consolidate and report. There will be a docking rota to offload prisoners and Mechas soon.” I cut the connection as I began to look over the damage as well as the lives lost.
I hope this never gets easier. I looked at names, not numbers. It was much too easy to think of them as cold statistics. Something that I never wanted for any of my people.
Tallying the Win/Loss Column
Bok Soo rushed in with the second wave of Commandos. Not by his own choice, but he’d accepted it as gratefully as possible. The battle was almost done. BCs were trying to flee. It seemed the Syndicate fleet had finally given up.
Why couldn’t the bastards have done that at the beginning? he thought as the Commandos jumped across the exterior of the shipyard.
“We’re making entry into Factory Ship Echo,” Amarr announced.
Bok Soo kept jumping across the struts of the shipyard as he got within a few hundred meters of the ship.
“Uh, sir, you should come and see this,” Amarr said.
Bok Soo was at Amarr’s position a few moments later. He was met with grinning armored and armed Kuruvians
“Well, hopefully you lot will have some interesting ideas for this shipyard. The last group, well, they just wanted to fill their pockets and kill innocents,” one of them said, his rail gun pointed to space as the others kept their weapons trained on Bok Soo and his people.
Bok Soo slung his weapon as he grinned, despite the battle that raged a few hundred kilometers away. “Damn, Kuruvians in Mechas! Hah! I don’t think we have more than twenty Kuruvian Commandos. I’m Bok Soo.”
“Shrift said you would be coming.”
“Oh wait, that reminds me.” Bok Soo pulled out his data pad and flicked through things. “Nope, no, no, not that, must be in here. Ha-ha, gotcha!” He gave the pad to the Kuruvian. “Shrift said that his brother would know the alignment, or something like that.”
The Kuruvian nodded. He held his rail gun in the crook of his arm as he typed something in. Bok Soo couldn’t hear the data pad through the vacuum of space, but a few minutes later the Kuruvian nodded.
“Very well. We have taken all of the factory ships. My name is Silly, brother to Shrift.”
“Good to meet you.” Bok Soo opened a channel to the commanders and pilots. “The natives should be on our side. Don’t slack, but it seems we’re not needed here. Pilots, prep to get us back to Hachiro. I’m going to leave Amarr here with two hundred Commandos. If you aren’t picked, you’re coming with me.” Bok Soo cut the channel. “All right, Silly, well, I have a battle to get to, so if you’ll excuse me?”
“Certainly. We will be waiting.”
It was a half hour later that the Second Battle for Earth ended.
“What do you want me to do?” Bok Soo asked Henry. His voice was rough, as if the galaxy had crushed him.
“Get back to the station. We’re going to need it functioning as soon as possible.”
“Sir.” Bok Soo wanted to say more, but he knew that Henry was still on the job. Later, Bok Soo thought as he sat in silence, watching the casualty list scroll down his HUD.
Oh Rosa. He bit his lip as pain and sadness filled him. Verlu too. He remembered their names, thinking of them as they’d laughed and lived.
“I’ll see you in the dark, brothers and sisters,” Bok Soo said into his helmet. He hung his head, laughing sadly and happily—sad to have lost so many friends, but happy that he had known them well enough to call them friends.
Silly broke him out of his reverie as his helmet’s earpiece came to life. Bok Soo accepted the call.
“I need your scans of the asteroid belt so I can figure out the best place to put the shipyard.”
“Why don’t you put it next to Hachiro, then we’ll get the resources shipped from the belt?” Bok Soo said, feeling emotionally drained.
“That should work. Didn’t think of it because the Syndicate made us weld the miners and refineries onto the yard. Also, I need to talk to someone about what my people can expect.”
Bok Soo gathered himself. “You will be civilians and will receive payment according to the skills the individual possesses.”
“With these civilian jobs, how will they be different from our current?” Silly asked.
“Well, you wouldn’t be allowed to work on warships or on design teams for new ships...”
“Designs for new ships?” Silly almost squealed.
“Yes, we’re not going to keep on using the same old designs. We might not have numbers or hulls, but we’ve got skills, lots of know-how and ideas.”
“May we contact you privately and have time to decide?”
“Sure.”
“In the interim, we will have the station begin deploying itself.” Silly said something into his helmet as parts of the yard began unfolding and others were detached. A veritable army of drones moved pieces bigger than corvettes into position.
***
The fleet was in a state of mourning, and I was dealing with governments who were demanding to know when aid was coming. They did not care for our losses or the issues that we were dealing with. We had finally agreed to a contract. I was very tempted to rip it apart.
It had been two days since the battle had ended, yet we had only just finished recovering all of the personnel in space, Free Fleet and Syndicate.
The Mechas were being taught the reality of the Planetary Defense Force with limited effect. The yard was still opening up. The Kuruvians had transferred the Syndicate personnel over to there, yet I was thinking that I’d have most of them working under the Kuruvians’ purview.
The Kuruvians had split sixty-eight to thirty-two in favor of joining the Free Fleet. Rick was taking care of all the civilian appointments as well as positions within the fleet.
Now that all of the people had been accounted for, there was the issue of dealing with the corralling of ships and having my engineers crawl over them, assessing what was good and what was not.
I’d sent a request to Monk for additional personnel. It should have reached him by now through our still expanding faster-than-light, or FTL, network.
I stopped checking my pad as I walked into the shuttle bay of the Resilient, where Mecha storage containers waited. Each of them carried a fallen Commando or their battle suit.
Not even Eddie had challenged me on the containers, which were a significant use of resources.
I tucked my pad away. Everyone was in the shut
tle bay.
I looked to the men and women around me. They were great and strong people. More than one of them was crying. I let my sadness creep into my voice, allowing a small trickle, but continuing to force my mask of Salchar to stop the tide of emotion. I looked at the Mecha containers that held people I’d eaten with, fought beside, and trained with.
I took a deep breath. “We have come far, yet it has only been through terrible circumstances. I wish it wasn’t, but the Free Fleet was born from battle, and it is what we must do to stop the Syndicate from continuing their reign of terror and piracy.
“That does not mean that we can’t feel sadness. These people who have given their last breaths did so in the service of the Free Fleet, for their brothers- and sisters-in-arms. They came with us into the dark and the dark has claimed them as its own.”
Determination burned in my chest. “Yet their deaths will not go unanswered. As the Syndicate can only communicate with us in terms of pain and death, we will eradicate them and their name from this galaxy. It is up to us now to create something for our brothers and sisters to be proud of!” I paused as sadness and loss colored my tone.
“I know many of you will feel sad and angry. Use those emotions. We must move forward, becoming a force that makes the Syndicate quiver in fear. Remember the names of those you have lost, and tell their stories. They live through us.” I looked to everyone in the bay as I nodded sadly. “Now we commit their physical bodies to the sun and light as we remember their lives and the memories we made with them.”
Pictures flashed over screens as every person who had died was shown to their fellow brothers and sisters. The containers were pulled into the air before gliding out from Hachiro and the ships of the Free Fleet. I stood at attention, holding two fingers to my head as the containers left the Resilient, followed by several other ships and Hachiro. The containers floated together, becoming one mass as they drifted toward the sun, all of the fallen facing their future together as one.
I dropped my hand and I let my face fall. When I regained my composure, I drifted out to the mess. Watching the roll of faces across the screens made me smile sadly at the memories the faces brought.
Free Fleet Box Set 1 Page 69
