Sovereign

by April Daniels

  It’s a tough threading-of-the-needle involving a change of altitude and a course correction that has to happen within a thirty-second window, but I manage to put the satellite down in the North Sea before turning and climbing hard to where another satellite will be passing south over Europe at about the time that I am scheduled to arrive. The plan is to keep hopping from orbit to orbit this way, and knock out Garrison’s entire network before he’s got time to launch a counterattack. Fighting in space is stupidly dangerous for a list of reasons that would take all day to explain.

  I get as far as Germany before I have to start fighting in space.

  • • •

  An instant before impact, I get a bare flash, a fuzzy outline behind and above me. I’m so focused on hitting my next waypoint that I don’t even have time to get curious before he blindsides me with a kick to the back of the head that jams my chin into my chest and throws me spinning off course. For the first few moments of the fight, I’m more confused than anything else. How the hell am I getting hit? Who is hitting me?

  Then I bite down and arrest my spin, turning with my hands up just in time to block another scything kick, and there’s Red Steel, his rust-colored silk Cossack shirt rippling oddly with his momentum in the vacuum of space.

  We catch eyes with each other, and I break out in a huge grin. Red has made his way as a mercenary since the Soviet Union fell apart. Garrison must have hired him to defend his satellites. Which means that I get to fight Red Steel, the greatest hero the Russians ever came up with.

  Excellent.

  And that instant of recognition is over, and now we’re in a faster, harder fight than I’ve ever been in before. If he’s got any doubts whatsoever about accepting a contract on a kid, he left them back on Earth. Punch meets counter-punch, kick meets pivot and riposte. It’s a complicated, nasty little fight, a hectic, dizzying swirl of dodges and counters as we each jockey for a superior position.

  We’ve both got an extra weak spot in this fight—the solar plexus. One good hit there will evacuate all the air from our lungs, and whoever loses their breath first will have to disengage and get back into the atmosphere as fast as they can. So we’re both hoping to protect ourselves, while at the same time trying to get in close enough to do unto others before it’s done unto us. And because we’re in space, there’s nothing to inhibit our movement in any direction. No ground, no buildings, hell, not even any clouds to hide in. Without the air to slow us down we accelerate faster and turn harder. And all of this is happening in perfect silence. You don’t think of fights as quiet, but they’re often just a bunch of grunts and slaps and thuds. This is even less than that.

  As I pivot up over him to get behind him for a sort of weaponized Heimlich maneuver, he sinks down and away, twisting to keep his front to me. When he loops wide, I come in tight on his flank. Earth and night dance around us, and I’ve completely lost track of my course. Altitude, heading, it’s all gone, there’s only this punch and the next one after it.

  Twice he goes to get his arms around me in a squeeze to clear my lungs, and twice I make him pay for it with headbutts and knee strikes. When I throw a hard, spinning kick at his head, he catches me by the ankle and snaps me like a whip. Tendons and ligaments all over my body scream. I curl up on myself, use my own trapped leg as a lever to slingshot in close and plant my kneecap in his nose with a crunch I can feel, but not hear. We go tumbling end-over-end, and somehow he’s gotten hold of my cape and whips me about in a tight circle. My cape tears away from my shoulders, and I go zipping away at the better part of a thousand miles an hour.

  This isn’t working. He’s got a reach advantage on me. Well, they almost always have a reach advantage on me, but usually I can mitigate it with speed or durability or pure, unfiltered aggression. Not here. Not with him. Everything I can do, he can match. Everything he can do, I scramble to keep up with. It doesn’t even seem like he’s getting worn down; he’s just got this focused look on his face like I’m a puzzle and he only needs to figure out how to unlock me. Time to change things up. Instead of turning to head back into the fight, I use the momentum he’s given me to boost hard away from him. Red Steel tosses my torn cape aside (Dude, not cool! That thing cost more than most people’s cars! You could at least tuck it in your belt so I can get it back after I’m done kicking your ass.) and powers after me.

  Crap. Without my cape I can’t escape this fight quickly. If I descend fast enough to escape him, I’ll burn up. If I descend slow enough not to burn, he’ll catch up and keep whipping my ass. Maybe he’d let me slow down enough to reenter the atmosphere without getting torched, but you know what? Screw that. I’m going to win.

  My suit buzzes with an incoming text from Doc. You’re off course. What’s going on? is printed in big yellow letters across my goggles. With a flick of my thumb I bring up the keypad pattern on my forearm and tap out a quick reply.

  Fighting RS. Talk later.

  Don’t fight, she texts back. Run.

  Can’t, I reply. Lost my cape.

  Even now that I know he’s here, Red Steel is barely a presence in the lattice. He’s more like an absence than anything else. I have to actually twist and look down between my legs, and yeah, he’s still with me, about a hundred yards back and crawling to close the distance. With these few seconds of peace in the middle of the fight, my body is starting to report on how much pain it’s in. My lips are stiff with frozen blood. My left leg is hanging limp, basically useless. A deep, formless ache sings about how hard he punched my kidney. And I’m tired too. This whole fight has been maybe two minutes long so far, and I’m already exhausted. Every time we get close, it’s like I’m holding on with my fingernails. One good punch. That’s all either of us need, and I’m getting less and less able to hold off his attacks.

  It’s hard to tell from this far away, but I don’t see him bleeding the way I am. My knuckles all ache already, and I’ve got no idea if anything I’ve done has even hurt him.

  No. Stop. Think positive, and get angry. He brought the fight to me, so I get to bring it back twice as hard. We’re evenly matched. Well, except for a few things, like how he’s faster and stronger and tougher and more experienced and all but invisible to my sixth sense. I mean other than that, it’s a total coin flip.

  Shit, no wonder the other Dreadnoughts always took this guy seriously.

  Fighting harder than him isn’t a great option. I need to fight smarter. I can beat him. I know I can. Garrison’s satellites are in a pretty low orbit, well below most other spacecraft. My plan, such as it is, is to drag Red Steel higher, into the zone where satellites are more common.

  More satellites mean more space debris. And I’m betting my life on the hope that he can’t see those little flying chunks of death as well as I can. I’ve turned west. We’re flying anterograde, directly into the oncoming swarm of satellites and debris.

  Bring him over New Port, texts Doc. I’ll shoot him down with an anti-orbital cannon.

  You have one of those?

  Not yet. Gimme ten minutes, she replies.

  In the lattice, I see a burning corona of momentum behind what looks like an astronaut’s hand tool. It’s coming right—

  —it snaps by me as I desperately pivot out of the way.

  By the time I think to look and see if it hit Red Steel, maybe a half-second later, it’s already miles behind us. Then a bolt slips by me so close it musses my hair, and I go icy with belated fear. My suit buzzes at my shoulder blades, and big red letters scroll across my goggle lenses: NAVIGATIONAL HAZARD—YOU HAVE ENTERED A KNOWN DEBRIS FIELD—DESCEND IMMEDIATELY—NAVIGATIONAL HAZARD—

  I squeeze my eyes shut and blot out everything but the lattice. There’s no room for fear; I’ve got to focus on pushing my perceptions as far out ahead of me as I can. Swirling currents of radiation skitter and dance off the Van Allen belt high above us. The night sky is alive with trailing, twisting lines of momentum. There, a screw—

  And as it’s passing, I grab its momentum
and pull it through my pattern. A hot buzzing behind my navel, like some cosmic string is being tugged through my guts, the heated crunch of my left ring finger breaking, and I’ve dragged it off its course and shot it right at that haunting void behind me. A half-second later I open my eyes to glance behind me, and Red Steel is twisting in the night, one hand clamped onto his shoulder where the screw hit him.

  Okay, yeah, so this is a game plan.

  Then he shoots me with his friggin’ eye lasers, and why the hell does he have eye lasers, that wasn’t in his file!

  Scalding emerald beams rake my chest and arm, my suit instantly going black and crinkled wherever they land. The pain is hot and instant, and I have to bite down on a scream that would have lost me all my air. His eyes glitter with emerald energy again, and I bank left before rolling right. Beams cut the sky where I was, and now the fight has reversed again. Glancing hits are bad enough, but if he manages to put those things on me for more than a moment, I have no doubt they’ll reduce my chest into cinders. Maybe these beams cost him too much to use casually, or maybe he just likes to keep them secret, but I get the feeling that his decision to use them signals he’s decided not to screw around anymore. An instant later I realize the fact that I didn’t know he had these might suggest that everyone else who’s ever seen him use them is dead.

  Now there’s a comforting thought.

  Flying backwards with my eyes locked on Steel as I weave and bob means I’ve got to split my attention between him and the lattice. Another hunk of debris is coming, but I notice it too late to grab its momentum and tweak it onto a collision course.

  Red Steel does not have that problem and stabs lasers at me again and again. There’s no real dodging a laser beam. So the only real way for me to not get toasted here is to beat Red’s reflexes, to be somewhere else at the moment he fires his shot.

  It’s a lot of fancy flying, with rolls, loops, twists, and hard turns thrown out one after another. Again and again, twin beams sear through the night to the left or right of me. Twice I get tagged again, and twice more I clench against the pain.

  My own counterattacks are not going as well as I hoped. He’s started his own evasive flying, so I don’t land another hit. Not every screw or nut I throw at him comes at the cost of a broken bone, but enough of them do that I’m seriously concerned about how I’d stand up against him if it came to a close fight again. I send a dropped screwdriver spinning at him end-over-end, and miss by dozens of feet—but the strain of altering its course breaks two of my toes. The adrenaline has finally arrived, and that helps with the pain to an extent, but every time I check myself in the lattice I can’t help but notice how efficiently he’s killing me with a thousand little injuries. Burn wounds here, strained ligaments there…

  Ready to fire, texts Doc. I look down, and we’re passing over the Northwest, the lights of New Port halfway between me and the curve of the horizon.

  He’s the one behind me, I tap back.

  Doc’s reply is a glittering cobalt beam that geysers up from the outskirts of New Port and turns the night pale with the intensity of its power. Half the metropolitan area gutters and goes dark by sections as rolling brownouts claim most of Washington state.

  Supercharged ions splash a glancing blow off of Red Steel before streaking up and away into the night. He’s knocked into a rough spin, and he’s hurt. His shirt has been burned away, his shoulder mottled red and black. But even as I start pushing toward him to finish this, he straightens out and cuts the sky with a broad sweeping attack. I barely twist away from the beams in time, and I’m forced to put more distance between us.

  How the hell do I beat this guy? He took a hit like that and kept going? My own attacks hurt me as much as they hurt him. There’s no advantage I can find, no strategy or cheat that’s going to steal a win for me.

  Hit him again, I tell her. If nothing else, Dreadnought must go down fighting. That, at least, I know I can do. One way or the other, this ends soon. Flying backward, face-to-face across a hundred yards, I square my shoulders for this one last effort. He sees that. Body language is hard at this distance. I think he nods.

  Recalibrating to a wide angle spread. I’ve got power for one more shot. Can you make it count?

  My fingers dance across the keyboard. I’m not sure how to tell her that I’m out of ideas, that the rage I rely on hasn’t shown up, that maybe I’m scared and I shouldn’t even be—

  Wait. There, ahead of my flight path, just at the very edge of my lattice perception and coming up fast. It’s huge, dark, and entirely cold. It’s been dead since a Nemesis fragment killed it two years ago. The largest single piece of space debris in history, a navigational hazard so massive NASA considered a mission just to pull it safely out of orbit.

  The Hubble Space Telescope.

  All at once, I understand how I’m going to win, and the thought of it fills me with dread. This is really, really going to hurt.

  Yes, I can make it count, I reply. Then I close my eyes and put all my attention into the lattice. Red Steel scores another hit up the side of my thigh, and I grit my teeth. The Hubble is big, and it’s tearing along at an almost unimaginable speed. With confidence I only half-believe in, I reach out and start to run the fingers of my mind over the shape of its momentum. The trick to this is to be gentle but decisive. Hesitation kills.

  There. That’s the main string, the blazing white weave in the pattern that holds its course together. The Hubble is coming up fast now, terrifyingly fast.

  Doc fires again. The lattice is lit up with a swirling corona of electrons pouring off the front of the cannon shot as it blazes up from the surface. This shot is more shotgun than rifle, a dozen smaller beams rising in loose, random formation. Most fly harmlessly into the void, but some of them slash hard against Red Steel and batter him around. By themselves, not enough to do much but drag this out.

  Another half-second to double-check my feel of the telescope before I grab its momentum and heave—

  It’s like no sensation I’ve felt before. The hot, buzzing thrum of power is more energy than I’ve ever channeled, and at these speeds, it’s not simply a difference of scale, it feels like a phase change between ice and water, between water and steam, between steam and plasma, but all of that compressed into a single still moment. For a moment, just a moment, I’m back where I was on that day I changed. I can see everywhere. I understand everything. Life is beautiful. We are all beautiful, all one, all linked in a joyous harmony. Even as I’m realizing it, the epiphany is fading.

  —the Hubble off its course, and I haul it down and to the side by a few crucial degrees. By reflex I’m squirting up, up, out of line with Red, and the Hubble is already here, from a dot to a colossus in the time to blink an eye.

  Red Steel encounters the Hubble Space Telescope the way a baseball encounters a home run derby. The telescope disintegrates into flayed sheets of aluminum and a huge constellation of shattered glass. Red goes spinning away, completely out of control and shooting towards Earth.

  My back screams, every muscle between the bottom of my skull and the top of my pelvis howling in outrage. Smothering clouds of fatigue try to blot out my mind. For a moment, I think I’ve lost consciousness.

  Almost over. I can do this.

  With one last hard push I blast after him, crash through the spiraling debris, and get ready to finish this.

  When I catch up with Red Steel he’s still whirling in all three directions, and still he somehow feels me coming and greets me with an emerald blast. My chest, neck, face light up with pain and then impact. I punch him like an angry god, the kind of punch that would shatter windows for a dozen yards in every direction if we were down on Earth. Again, and again. He gives me one on the chin, and I knock aside the follow up. My left leg is stiff with pain, but I wrap it around his neck and use my other ankle to lock it down so I’ve got him pinned. His eyes start glowing, and I clap my hands over his face just as he fires. My palms light up with scalding agony, but what hurts for
me is torture for him, his whole body convulsing as the energy is reflected back into his skull.

  We’re falling now, our orbital momentum almost completely wasted. This is it, no turning back now, so I shove aside my fatigue, shake off the pain, and burn away our altitude as fast as I can. His hands come up to claw at me, to punch my wounded thigh, to try and peel me off him. The initiative is mine now, and if I lose it I die, so I ignore my broken fingers, switch to open palm strikes, and rain punishment down on him.

  But it’s not until the first wisps of the atmosphere start to flame off his back that he realizes how much danger he’s really in. My smile is tight and savage, my protective anger finally here at last.

  You took my cape. You took my heat shield.

  That’s okay.

  I have you.

  With one hand I hold his head in place, and with the other I throw a punch that comes all the way up from the root of my spine. His eyes, now milky with cataracts, roll up in his head, and for just an instant, Red Steel goes limp. An instant is all I need to unhook my ankles, roll him between my thighs, and get his arms twisted up behind him in a lock. He squirms and bucks, tries to turn this against me. Too late. Far too late. Clawing for every ounce of speed I can, we head down, down into the atmosphere.

  Orange and red whispers grow to flickers. Flickers grow to torches. The silence of space gives way to the roar of reentry. We enter a tunnel of fire that drags behind us for miles. With one last spasm he tries to get away from me, and I can feel his flight pushing against mine, trying to shove him in any direction, anywhere that will get him away from the pain, but I’ve got momentum and gravity to add to my own strength, and it’s no use. His resistance shudders, collapses. He goes limp in my arms, his legs kicking and jerking against the howling plasma.

  The flames pull away from us and we’re down in the atmosphere, hurtling toward the ocean. When I poke my head over Red Steel’s shoulder, I spot a small island, mostly rock and sand in dark, chopping water. I bank us toward it. He’s starting to stir, and the last bits of his charred hair are flaking off in the blasting wind. I redouble my grip on his arms and push on as hard as I can.