by Nick Cole
“Balderdash!” barked the general. “Listen here, Captain… uh?”
“Thales,” prompted Thales.
“That’s right. Thales. The thinker. Well, bonehead, if this isn’t a full-scale attack, then your career is over. And truth be told, son, we haven’t had high hopes for you. You don’t even look like an officer.”
It was at that moment that some gunner in one of the batteries began to fire back at the wave of incoming tri-fighters now swarming over the base. The look on the general’s face changed from venomous outrage to shock and horror in an instant.
Thales cut the link, pulled on the ridiculous, wide-flaring gunnery helmet—its odd shape supposedly provided better hearing protection for those who operated the high-intensity quad turrets—and grabbed a blaster rifle off a rack. By the time he left the armory, gunners and officers were flooding into the halls, racing for their stations. Thales noted that very few had decided to suit up as per artillery defense SOP.
They’re relying on the blast doors, he thought. He’d railed against this false trust in something that couldn’t stop hard vacuum from killing those on the wrong side of the door. Many had argued back at him that the Repub now had force field technology systems that could be hard-wired throughout ships to immediately seal as soon as breach occurred. Thales’s reply had been, “Yes, that’s true.” Except that, one, none of that tech had actually been implemented, other than a coming-soon campaign waged by the House of Reason; and two, if power systems failed on the ship, or even within that section, then the force fields couldn’t activate. And usually, during battle, power was a tricky thing at best once you started taking internals. Alas, very few listened, and his constant preaching had actually— and he knew this because he was honest with himself about his career—negatively affected his chances of further promotion.Now he ran for all he was worth to get back to Battery Four, which he’d just inspected before discovering the horror show in Deep Sensors.
He arrived beneath the ladder that led up into the tower, atop which the squat hexagonal turret rotated and fired. He could hear the coolant rattle and hiss, indicating the battery was operating as it should. And above all this he could hear the muffled shriek and whine of the quad blasters, their tom tom cadence chasing down whoever was attacking.
It was a long climb up into the turret, sweating inside his armor, and hearing the strange ominous BRAAAAAAAAAAAAP coming from the airless skies over the moon didn’t make things easier. And because he was an amateur historian of the Savage Wars—he’d written his university thesis on Historical Gunnery Tactics of the Savage Wars and was a firm believer in the lessons he’d learned studying that apocalyptic conflict—he recognized this sound as the report of a weapon consistent with that time.
Slug throwers.
If it was pirates, they’d hang for sure.
With one more rung to go before he reached the security landing that would allow him access to the turret, some of the clues he’d been working out in his ever-spinning brain began to make more sense. Could this be another Savages outbreak?
Had to be.
He’d always suspected it could happen again. Even though the House of Reason had gone to great lengths to make sure everyone knew it couldn’t. That it never would, ever again. No one knew how many of those old light-hugger colony ships from fabled Earth had been lost out there in the darkness of sub-light speeds before the advent of the hyperdrive. Way out there in the dark, with years upon years to perfect their perfectly mad societies…
Of course, this had to be another outbreak of Savages.
Too bad for them, thought Thales, because they just walked into one of the most heavily armed Republic ports this side of Fleet Headquarters at Baltrado Maroon.
He found the security door to the turret wide open. In combat it was supposed to have been dogged shut and locked from the inside. Code pass sign and counter-sign to enter, with the sergeant on duty carrying an assault blaster. He found none of that as he keyed the pneumatic hatch and climbed up the last narrow rubber-lined conduit into the turret proper.
He did find three gunnery crewmen at their stations, manning the massive air-defense gun system. The gunner sitting in the targeting chair, the spotter at the sensor station, and the sergeant watching everything—with nothing in his hands. No blaster rifle as per SOP. In fact, his hands were in his pockets.
And then Thales heard the ominous howl of an enemy fighter coming close, and that sudden lethal BRAAAAAAAAAP BRAAAAAAAAAPPPPPP that sounded more intimate and personal than all the rest Thales had heard up until this point.
Hundreds of rounds punctured the turret. One smashed through the sergeant, who was instantly sucked toward the roof. The gunner avoided being hit, but he died anyway, as he wasn’t in armor and he too was pulled from his chair—a chair he should’ve been strapped into, according to protocol.
And that was the last thing Thales saw before he dropped back down into the access conduit to avoid being holed. His suit gave him a vacuum exposure warning, and he knew that everybody in the turret was dead. None of them had been in armor.
Some thinking part of himself was telling him to crawl back down the conduit and get to safety. And then there was that other part that reminded him he was a gunnery officer in the Republic Navy. And that even if the crew had been killed, it was his job to see if the gun system was still in operation—and then to operate said gun system to the best of his ability until relieved of his position.
Reluctantly, and still covered in cold sweat, yet determined, he climbed back up and out onto the deck of the turret. He struggled to his feet and staggered toward the gunner’s chair, once again reminding himself he needed to get in better shape.
As he slid into the gunner’s chair, he performed a systems check. Other than a coolant leak that was currently not a danger to further operation, the gun was still functional. He connected his targeting software to the turret’s limited AI and charged up the gun for action.
He hadn’t acted as a gunner since his officer basic course in artillery, but he knew what to do. And he remembered some acid-voiced NCO telling all the newly minted junior officers that the gun could be operated by a child.
Targeting engaged.
Gun to power.
He acquired several targets and spent a moment studying the strange alien fighters in the spinning holographic display. All the normal intelligence that accompanied such targets was missing, and instead small electronic question marks blinked back at him. Thales was still convinced that this was some kind of Savage Fleet come in from the deep dark. Some colony ship that had developed an alternative form of technology and design in their almost thousand-year flight.
Then he took aim at one and began firing. He pushed away all the ramifications presented within the history of his mind, and instead chose to simply kill them as best he could.
He knocked down three ships in fairly short order. It was just like the games he’d loved to play as a kid. Games about math and trajectory combined with intuition. He’d always questioned why he’d been assigned to Artillery after taking the Republic’s mandatory testing assessment. He’d secretly wanted to be a legionnaire officer, though even he knew that he didn’t exactly scream Legion material. But now he was seeing, once more, why their assignment had been right.
Three minutes later he got a comm from main gun fire control.
“Captain Thales. This is Lieutenant Charu in main gun operations. We have negative contact with the general. You’re the only OIC I can reach, and I need to inform you that we’re detecting at least three battleship-class vessels in near space.”
One of the enemy fighters came streaking in at the turret, guns blazing. Thales targeted and tried to lead, but the ship was all over the place. Around him he could hear armor-plating coming to pieces from a thousand rounds suddenly penetrating its bulk.
Some distant thought reminded him he might die right now. But he knew the RF-D77 battery system shielded the gunner from blaster fire, even Savage Wars slug-throwing tech
. If the gunner had been in armor and strapped in, he wouldn’t be dead.
One of the gun’s charging batteries shorted out and exploded with a terrific electrical CRAAAAAAAAAK!
Must’ve taken a hit, thought Thales. He swapped out targeting to reroute battery power from the auxiliaries down below.
Meanwhile the lieutenant down in fire control was still asking him for orders. “Sir! Tell me what to do. We’ve got fighters everywhere. The general’s missing, and I’m not kidding. This is for real!”
Power rerouted, Thales brought targeting back up and prayed the guns wouldn’t explode on him. Lancer interceptors had joined the fray now. That was good. He tagged them and set the guns not to engage if they came in too close to his targeting reticule.
“Sir! Did you hear me?” screamed the LT over the hiss and wine of the battery cannons.
“Say again,” grunted Thales as he tried to target a fast-moving enemy fighter going for a kill on a Lancer. He winged it, and it spun off into the dirt of the moon. Thales rotated the gun, looking for more targets.
“We’ve got three Repub destroyers tearing through our sector defense group,” the lieutenant said. “Tagging them now. Could be rogue ships the MCR hijacked. Admiral Bula’s ship is burning up in the atmosphere. Sir, what are my orders?”
Thales didn’t have enough time or brains to wield the battery guns and figure out what to do tactically. Literally he was doing a gunner’s job. And the general’s job. The only job he wasn’t doing was his own.
“Listen, Lieutenant… Are you saying I’m the current ranking OIC?”
“Roger that, Captain,” replied the kid nervously.
Thales waited. Tracking and firing on more of the strange alien fighters. This was a decision he did not want to make.
But as he’d learned back in officer school, a bad decision was better than no decision at all.
He’d always doubted himself.
But he called on that bit of training from way back when, and it helped to free him from that constant struggle of doubt. It gave him the permission to do anything, as long as he did something. To do nothing was to submit to death.
“Warning alert!” came an automated voice over general comm. “Unidentified bomber craft inbound.”
“Lieutenant, are you tagging those inbound starfighters as bomber-types?”
“Yes, sir. Defense AI says they’re consistent with type configuration.”
Good move. You’re making a decision. Sorta.
“All right… get me firing solutions on every unidentified capital ship. Tell me who we can hit in the next two minutes.”
There was a long pause.
“Sir… are you talking about firing the main gun?”
“I am.”
An even longer pause. Thales rotated the turret skyward and began to range the incoming bombers well before they could drop their payloads. His was now the last turret active across the sprawling base. Don’t think about that, he screamed at his own mind as he led the first bombers, tossing high-intensity baster fire up at their slender frames.
“Launch detected,” announced the battery AI. A moment later his HUD tagged two bombs falling directly at the base. At him. And some part of him wanted to fling himself out of the gunnery chair and take cover. But his body refused to obey, and instead he returned as much fire as he could.
KTF, he thought. Just like the legionnaires. And if he hadn’t been wearing a helmet, any casual observer would’ve seen the iron-set sneer of a real killer as he tried to knock down as many fighter-bombers as he could in the time that remained him. Even as two bombs fell right toward his position.
KTF.
“Kill them FIRST!” he screamed into the comm ether.
The first bomb hit the fortress about half a kilometer away from the battery turret. Lunar dust and sand went flying in all directions, and even the hardened turret, set on gyroscopic hydraulic-assisted platforms, shuddered with a sudden end-of-everything violence. Across the base, military vehicles went flying and lesser buildings were flattened by the impact wave.
The other bomb disappeared down into the gaping maw of the main gun bore tunneled into the side of the moon. A second later there was a titanic detonation deep below everything, and the ground began to shift.
And still Thales continued to knock down the bombers above. In the end they broke off and scattered, some dropping their bombs wildly beyond the perimeter of the base. One smashed into the outer wall and destroyed a vast section of the defenses.
And then silence.
There were no targets in the sky.
Everything was quiet.
Thales brought up comm and contacted fire control.
“Talk to me, Lieutenant.”
Nothing.
“What’s going on down there?”
Nothing.
“How bad is it?”
If the orbital gun was down, then this was over. For the base, and for Tarrago.
“I’m here, sir. We’re fine.” The kid sounded shaken. And giddy at the same time. “We’ve got some damage, but we have firing solutions on all ships. We can’t hit the battleships. But we can hit those rogue destroyers.”
Thales climbed out of the turret. His whole body felt like it was made of rigid iron turning to sudden warm gel. And then his body began to dump sweat as it shook uncontrollably.
That’s just the fear, he told himself as he sat down on the floor of the turret to catch his breath. It’ll pass.
“Sir,” began the lieutenant in fire control. “We will need some kind of authorization to actually engage, won’t we? I mean, we never fire this gun but once a year, and the entire House of Reason comes out just to watch it.”
That wasn’t totally true, thought Thales. But the kid was right. Firing the main gun was a pretty big deal.
And then some other part of himself reminded him that the base had just been bombed and that there were enemy ships in the system the size of which no one had seen in a generation. And—and this was probably the most bizarre aspect of the whole situation—the Republic’s own ships were attacking the system defense group.
He tapped his comm. “Contact Admiral Bula and confirm that he’s under attack by unknown enemy forces. Specifically, clarify we mean the destroyers currently engaging his group.”
“Can do, sir.”
Good kid, thought Thales.
He was having trouble breathing. He leaned back against the gun. He felt better. He took deep breaths now.
A moment later the lieutenant was back.
“Admiral Bula’s first officer confirms they are under attack, and he has confirmed our targets. He’s also requesting fire support. Admiral Bula is dead. The first officer is in an escape pod. The Carramo went down.”
Thales felt his eyes close. He was sleepy. It was just after two o’clock in the morning, local time.
“Target lead enemy destroyer and fire for effect.”
Bridge of the Corvette Audacity
Above Tarrago, Heading to Jump
0221 Local System Time
“We’ve lost the deflectors, Captain. Guns six and seven are offline. Taking casualties in engineering.”
Desaix ignored the report and concentrated on the jump. That was their only hope now.
“Can we get any kind of window with that destroyer in the way?”
“Negative,” replied the navigator.
“More enemy fighters inbound!” someone in sensors yelled over the din.
“If we alter course in the slightest we’re looking at a total recalc for jump solution,” finished the navigator. “Sir?”
A collision alert horn began to bellow. The destroyer was now directly in the way of where they needed to go.
“Brace yourselves!” screamed the pilot. “She’s firing on us!”
Ahead, the big waist guns of the destroyer began to open up on the corvette. A Raptor chased one of the enemy fighters across the cockpit windows, blasters blazing away for a kill.
“
Time to jump?” asked Desaix, hearing the quiet desperation in his own voice.
***
The round from the orbital defense gun that hit the destroyer just ahead of the Audacity had been accelerated by a rail gun system that urged the guided round—a piece of forged impervisteel the size of a large tree trunk—up through a cascade loop that pushed its velocity to the edge of light speed. The city block–sized magnets also provided some initial guidance until onboard independent targeting and tracking took over.
The round hit the destroyer well below the forward command structure, but just off the port beam. The lieutenant in fire control had planned it that way, with the help of the targeting computers—a series of banked systems three stories high, deep inside the moon’s dead core. And with little gravity to slow the round’s departure from the launch system, its effortless flight continued right through the destroyer’s aft engine compartments.
It literally gutted the ship from stem to stern.
The crew of the Audacity, in the moments before the larger ship’s explosion in every direction, watched the hyper-ballistic round tear straight down the beam of the destroyer in a diagonal course. First it struck the forward torpedoes. Then it gutted decks twenty-two through twenty-four entirely, destroyed the starboard hangar, killing everyone there instantly, and traveled another three hundred meters, hitting munitions magazines and targeting systems, resulting in huge explosions all along the spine of the ship. It slammed through—not into—engineering, where it hit the reactor, which didn’t explode until the batteries went up a picosecond later. Finally the round punched out the back of the massive ship, carrying a debris trail off into the nether reaches of space.
All this took about a second and half, but to the bridge crew of the closing Audacity, it seemed slowed down for their viewing horror.
The ship exploded violently directly in front of them. Debris scattered in all directions, including directly into the path of the oncoming hammerhead corvette. In the moment before Captain Desaix ordered the jump by shouting, “Jump now!” they saw several fighters from both sides go up in a wave of destruction.
