Tyche's Demons_A Space Opera Military Science Fiction Epic

by Richard Parry

  Show him, then.

  The Endless field came back on full at that moment. It might have been Hope in Engineering, or it might have been pure luck, but the ship jumped up, pressing her hard onto her acceleration couch. No clue on the exact acceleration on account of no instruments, but her spine said they were rising at maybe 3Gs.

  The Tyche broke above the clouds of dust and ash, nosing for the sky. El could see the spread of black smoke below them, fires cherry red, lightning arcing a bright white through it all. They rose, smoke pouring from the wings, the Tyche facing a new dawn as sun stroked the hull.

  “Fuck me,” said El. The station, or something like it, was falling towards them, fire sheeting off it. It was right above them, so she couldn’t see a trail of smoke, but that wasn’t good. It was bad, because the station would come down on them like a hammer made of pure kinetic energy. At least you’ll die quick.

  No. She would not die at all. She hadn’t been there for Price or Leo or Dot, but she was here now, sticks in her hands, souls in her care.

  First step was getting out from under the falling station. Easy math said, assuming they were under the middle of it, she had to fly at least half its diameter — six klicks — in any direction she pleased. Then, point the Tyche at the sky, and hope there was enough time to get high enough to see stars before the explosion of the station’s impact killed them all.

  El pressed the throttles to the stops.

  The Tyche felt like she wanted this, ready for the race, the tired climb on Endless lift a boring state of affairs. The ship leapt across the smoke clouds, gaining speed as thrust pressed El back onto her acceleration couch. El gave a little nudge to the sticks, encouraging a subtle gain of altitude while thrust pressed against her. The ship was shuddering and shaking, a hull made for starlight bulldozing through the atmosphere.

  A loop of the gravity cable swirled and coiled in front of the ship. El twisted the controls, the Tyche dodging the cascading cable. She spared a glance at the crust below, the city laid out like a patchwork quilt. So many people. So many people down there. El thought about Karkoski, and Chad, and wondered if they had a ride out. She hoped they did. There wasn’t anything she could do about it if they didn’t.

  After what felt like the right amount of time, but difficult to be sure as her gut wasn’t as precise a measure as she’d have wanted, she pointed the Tyche at the sky. The ship grumbled beneath her, wanting to be done with the drag of atmosphere against her hull.

  As they rose, the press of thrust so hard that breathing was a significant challenge — I make that 8Gs, thereabouts — she saw the station falling towards them. Pieces were breaking off, flaking away like fragments of charcoal. It was easy for her mind to be fooled on scale, as each of those pieces were larger than the Tyche by far. The station was shedding its skin as it fell, which meant the air had more than one thing she might need to dodge.

  “Falling,” gasped Nate.

  “Not blind,” she hissed back. “See. Them.”

  “Don’t kill us,” he said.

  She wanted to grin at him but turning her head would be a dangerous proposition. They rose higher, El pulling the Tyche in a long, curving arc up and away from the station. She wished for a moment the holo was online, so she could check her mental math, then she wanted to laugh, because if she could get something from wishes, she should have wished for not being fucking right fucking here.

  The Tyche rose, the moment when the ship passed the station on the way down as she clawed for the sky one memory El would take to her grave. The thin atmosphere looked like it was on fire around the station, trailing a column of char behind it, like a leash that tethered it to the hard black. Pieces of broken station followed, the Tyche shuddering in the superheated air as they passed.

  And yet, nothing hit them. She figured they passed the station about thirty klicks up, stratosphere around them like a very thin blanket, and then it was gone. Thirty klicks weren’t a good safe distance from a nuke, or at least El didn’t figure it as being safe, so she kept the throttles locked to the stops. The ship’s acceleration increased as air friction decreased, and it felt to El like she was strapped to the tip of a rocket that wanted freedom from the chains of gravity. Above her, new lines of light and fire traced across the heavens, warships fighting in the hard black, Earth’s mighty orbital cannon array firing against an enemy El couldn’t see yet.

  The atmosphere faded around them, blue tinging to black, stars visible against the dark. The trembling of the Tyche quietened, and with a chirp, the holo stage flickered into life. It filled with telemetry, causing El to look across the heavens, as if her naked eye could see what the ship saw. She kept the throttles to their stops. “Jump,” she gasped. “We need to jump.”

  “Not clear yet,” croaked Nate.

  “Don’t care,” she said. “Those things. We’ll die either way.”

  On the holo were multiple ships of a size and shape she was familiar with. She’d seen their like at Paloma, and just one had destroyed the Troy. Karkoski had brought a chunk of the fleet with her, a hundred warships arrayed in the night. Earth’s mighty orbital cannons were firing against the invaders, so many ships it made Karkoski’s hundred feel like a bad joke. The Tyche counted hostile targets, reported over three hundred at first scan, and went back for a second try.

  “What are they?” said Nate.

  “Death,” said El.

  • • •

  The stars were awash with fire.

  Around Earth as far as El could see, humanity’s starships were locked in a battle with an enemy she’d seen before. Polyhedral ships made of rock and metal were jumping in, numbers increasing, but as near as El could tell they didn’t need the numbers. They were just making sure.

  She asked the Tyche to zoom in on a battle near Luna. The Empire had set up a research station on the moon, after Nate and Grace and Kohl had delivered a nuke to an underground nest of Ezeroc, nestled under a skin of rock. A lone Empire destroyer was between the moon and an enemy ship. The Tyche’s LIDAR mapping showed the Flavia engaged in a pitched battle against a smaller ship than El had fought on the Troy, a mere twelve sides. It was tiny next to the one and a half klicks of the Flavia’s length. Railguns fired into the hard black, some scoring hits, some missing, but the enemy ship seemed to shrug the fusillade off, returning fire of its own.

  A bloom of light, a tiny sun born near the moon, and the Flavia was gone, reactors sundered by enemy fire. All souls aboard, lost.

  That was just one battle amid many. El kept the thrust on, trying to get out of Earth’s gravity well. Far enough away to start the Endless Drives and jump away from this madness.

  Nate said, “We’ve got to help them.” His voice was a wheeze against the pressure of thrust. “El? Turn the ship. Turn it toward them.”

  El said, “Not on your life.”

  “It’s. An order,” he said. “We’ve got to help.”

  “Can’t,” she said. You can order all you like, but I’ve got the sticks, and we’re not dying today. Problem was, coming out of Earth’s gravity well, there were plenty of sharks in the water, waiting for easy prey. There was no way one Old Empire heavy lifter would make a difference in that fight. They’d get underfoot, and without a transponder, they’d be blown out of the sky by friendly fire. Two sides gunning for you? Not Elspeth Roussel’s idea of a good time.

  The other small challenge with the cap’s orders? She wasn’t sure where to turn the ship. The sky was filled with starships trying to core each other’s hulls. The Empire comm net was down, nothing coming over the channel but static and the odd haze of shouting. The Tyche’s sensors said the sky was filled with active jamming, the only signals still working being line of site tight-beam laser. Signal lamps, like the galleons of old, sending messages across a sea of black and fire.

  The Tyche was building a model of the space above Earth. Which ships were engaged where. What the enemy’s movements were. It had nothing useful to say, concerned chatter as it
suggested SUPERIOR ENEMY ENGAGEMENT and advised TACTICAL RETREAT as a viable option. When enemy railguns fired, precision shots through the armor of carriers, the Tyche grew more concerned. ROUTES COMPROMISED, she said, ESCAPE VECTOR UNKNOWN.

  Well, fuck. If you can’t go around, go through.

  But where to, though? Think. If Earth was being stepped on by a foot of epic size, logic suggested humanity’s colonies in the solar system wouldn’t be all unicorns and rainbows either. Mars and Venus? No, they’d be first up as targets, the largest populations other than Earth anywhere in Sol System. Ganymede was a joke at the best of times, and there was nothing around Triton or Titan worth visiting twice in a lifetime.

  The holo stage promised ENDLESS SYSTEM COMPROMISED. There wasn’t much chance of more than one jump. She could throw them out by Pluto, wave at Charon as they passed, and see if there was safety out past Sol’s heliosphere. Darkness, not much radiation, and no people. Problem was? No shipyards either, and the Tyche was bleeding like she’d been the loser in a knife fight. No, a run out into the hard black would be a one-way ticket. No returns. No do-overs. No comeback from that flight.

  Her personal console blinked at her, Hope’s tiny sender icon in the corner next to one word.

  Cantor.

  Who the fuck was Cantor?

  El did a quick search of the Tyche’s database. Cantor, system-not-a-person, was way out there. Eight jumps easy, ten to be safe. Noted as a terrorist anarchy which didn’t sound good. Worse than that, it was bad. Was Hope fucking nuts? Cantor would have slavering humans, hungry for Empire blood. Those folks would—

  Slavering humans.

  No AI on Cantor. So far out, it barely had humans on it. But it might have equipment. An old shipyard, if they were lucky, and maybe even an abandoned Guild outpost from the terraforming days, if fortune was feeling tipsy.

  Okay. We’ve got a destination. We’ve just got to get there. With the sky full of so much hate and pain, making a jump was risky. Putting the Tyche through a stray railgun round at faster than the speed of light? Bad news. Space was big but initiating a jump in a war zone brought the odds of destruction above acceptable levels for any Helm. The other trouble El faced was her starship being good for maybe one jump. Not eight, and definitely not ten. It was a wildcard jump, the thing every rule book said you shouldn’t do. Pace ‘em out. Take stops. Make sure you knew where you were going next.

  All that could go fuck itself. They had one jump.

  Step one? Get away from Earth. Step two, get into the cool expanse of the hard black, leaving destruction behind. Step three, jump to Cantor.

  El keyed the Endless systems, preparing for the jump. Better to lock in the coordinates now, so they were ready later. Her holo blinked. FLIGHT COMMANDER DENIES JUMP.

  She tried to look at Nate, neck straining against the thrust. “You’re. Going to kill us.”

  “We’re not leaving them,” he hissed.

  He’d locked her out of the Jump system. The imbecile. Two seconds later, her holo blinked again. FLIGHT COMMANDER CLEARS JUMP.

  “Hang on,” rasped Nate. “What happened?”

  The little Hope icon on El’s console blinked again. Two words. Cantor, please.

  The Tyche turned under El’s touch, pointing her nose across the curve of Earth. A destroyer jumped in a hundred thousand klicks further out. The Tyche didn’t know her name, comm net still jammed, but the ship spewed fighter craft to engage the enemy. Pilots must have been in their ships, ready to launch. Skyguard were riding up into orbit on pillars of fire, ready to join the Navy in defense of their homes.

  El wanted to scream at them to run, to get away. There weren’t enough human ships in all the universe to deal with this enemy.

  A larger polyhedron, the Tyche suggesting twenty sides, popped into the sky ahead of the carrier. It was spinning in space, presenting a new face to the carrier constantly. Each face fired railguns as it turned into view, and as it turned away, launched torpedoes. The carrier fired back in kind, and El watched as the enemy ship danced away.

  That’s impossible. Most of her attention was on flying-and-not-dying, checking for debris or target locks on the Tyche. But the Tyche drew her attention to this detail, an enemy ship that must have exceeded 20Gs of thrust to slip out of the line of railgun fire. It did it again, and again. It was the kind of abuse that would turn humans into coma care patients, acceleration couch or no. At some point, you’d need to go in a direction of redout not blackout, and the acceleration couches weren’t made of magic and moonbeams. Whoever was on that enemy ship? They were immune to the effects of excessive thrust.

  All their data on the Ezeroc said they were, while tough as rocks, still influenced by physics. That meant these ships were being flown by machines. If El had needed final proof, she’d just found it. And she realized, no, you didn’t need final proof. You didn’t want more monsters in your life.

  An alarm on the flight deck holo suggested something in Engineering was shaking loose. New hull plating, stressing under the continued load of high thrust. Or it could have been a stray impact. Whatever, she needed to jump.

  Don’t notice us. Don’t see us. We’re a tiny, insignificant ship. Just a lifter. No weapons online. El breathed it. Felt it. Wanted it to be true.

  WEAPONS LOCK. The Tyche said LIDAR was painting her hull, torpedo guidance systems locked on. Ahead, a destroyer shattered in two, the middle section sheared through by beam fire. El pointed the Tyche at it. Behind the broken destroyer, she could see nothing but space and stars.

  TEN SECONDS TO IMPACT.

  Alarms were blaring across the flight deck about the incoming torpedoes, then the Tyche noticed where they were headed.

  BRACE BRACE BRACE COLLISION WARNING BRACE BRACE BRACE.

  “El?” said Nate. His voice was as flat as a crepe, all the air squeezed out of him by continued thrust.

  Just like threading a needle, thought El. A needle that’s on fire, and in pieces.

  FIVE SECONDS TO IMPACT.

  The broken Empire destroyer was approaching fast. She could make out the details now, exposed decks, smaller blooms of fire as atmosphere vented. The writing on her prow claimed her the Nightingale.

  THREE SECONDS.

  TWO SECONDS.

  El was breathing fast, huff-huff-huff, panting as sweat streamed back from her face, the thrust making it run off into her hair. She could see a wider hole through the hull halves, between what her mind in a giddy moment said were decks five and six. It looked like a sustained drill of railgun fire had cored the Nightingale before beams cut her in two. The hole was big enough to fit a very, very small ship through. Something much smaller than the Tyche.

  ONE SECOND.

  They popped through the Nightingale’s corpse, emerging from the far side like a cork from a bottle. The torpedoes behind them impacted on the Nightingale, leaving them free and clear.

  The hard black. Five seconds after leaving the ruins of the Nightingale, the Tyche chimed. READY FOR JUMP.

  She hit the jump controls. El wasn’t sure if she’d got it right, whether they’d hit something on the trip, or even if she’d got the math right in her hasty plotting. If she had a little more time—

  Her face, tight from so many Gs, sweat running like tears. Hundreds of thousands of lost souls over Earth, reaching for her in her cowardice as she fled. The people on the planet below, running for their lives. Space full of fire and payed forward justice, machines come to take a world away from their makers. The pure thrill of acceleration, impossible, unbelievable acceleration. She couldn’t feel it. She was it. She was everything. She was the universe.

  Stars stretched, made points of light that streaked past the Tyche’s cockpit.

  They jumped.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MURDER. THAT’S WHAT Nate wanted to do, right here, right now. He could still see in his mind’s eye the bright flashes of ships as they were destroyed. And, to be fair, his retinas also carried blooms of light and color where th
e Tyche’s windscreen didn’t cut out enough flare.

  Speaking of windscreens, outside the Tyche was hard black, an expanse of starlight, a blue-green world far enough away it looked the size of a rock melon. The Tyche’s holo stage was bright with remembered combat, telemetry updating as it scanned space. Nate imagined the ship wondering, as he did, where they were, and how they’d got here. He could hear the ship chirp as it tried to find allied vessels. It knew, as he did, that you didn’t run from your friends. Your team should jump with you. Shoulder to shoulder, a line of bright light in the hard black. The Tyche came up with empty on her search for transponders. All she got was the ping back from Cantor station. Fucking Cantor, for fuck’s sake. A pox-ridden shit hole on the far side of the stars. So far away from Earth, home may as well be a forgotten memory.

  It would be, now. While the jump felt instant to Nate, hours upon hours passing as they jumped light years beyond counting. The battle over Earth would be lost by now. Even if they jumped back, there’d be nothing to jump back to except debris. Not even screams would echo on the comm net.

  Your Helm disobeyed a direct order.

  His metal fingers clicked as his hands clenched. Nate said, “El.” He thought he said it nice and calm, but his voice cracked on the short syllable.

  She looked at him, face so pale it was almost translucent. “Now, Cap. It was the only way.”

  “You … disobeyed,” said Nate.

  Her chin set, just a little, eyes frightened of what she’d run from, just as she was frightened of what he was about to say. “Aye. You know it was the only way.”

  “If we’d stayed, we could have helped,” he said. He flung an arm, pointing at the stars. He didn’t know if that way was where Earth lay, fires no doubt blooming across the crust. “They’ll all be gone, now.”