Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Target is in deceleration burn,” came Second Lieutenant Geish’s voice from back in Command T-3. All the surviving, functioning bridge crew were there, the Captain included. Hers was the only post that was still working up here, on the bridge, despite Lieutenant Dufresne’s best attempts to tear everything apart behind her with Emergency’s help. “ETA four minutes thirty.”

  “Arms Two, what’s your status?” That was the Captain’s voice, hard with that thinking-calm he got in tight situations. Bree had come to trust that tone with her life in the past few months. There were lots of smart people on Phoenix, but the younger bridge crew all agreed that while there might be a small few who were smarter than the Captain, there were none who could translate those brains into action under pressure like he could. The older bridge crew might have been a little more reluctant, given they’d spent most time under Captain Pantillo, but the youngsters saw no point in pitting the past outrageous genius against the present.

  “All systems green, Captain,” she said, voice muffled within her mask. It sounded like it belonged to another person. Like this whole, horrible experience were happening to someone else, and she was just watching. That distance was a relief, and made everything far less frightening than it could have been. “Batteries two and four are non-responsive, but one, three, five and six are good. Our tumble gives me an intermittent angle, but if I were him I’d start firing to disable our remaining guns in about three minutes.”

  The incoming enemy was a deepynine shuttle. No one had seen where it launched from, but Phoenix’s relative V was still not great, having been disabled while climbing out of the gravity-well. The deepynine warships were busy at the moon, and this one, solitary shuttle, no doubt loaded with drysine drones, had been sent to investigate the tumbling wreck.

  “I can give you an attitude burst that will bring us rolling onto a semi-stable broadside,” the Captain replied. “That should give you a five second window before his return fire starts taking out batteries. Just make sure you hit him.”

  “Yes Captain. Defensive fire isn’t as independently mobile as offensive, hits aren’t certain and I’ll bet those shuttles are fast. But as long as he thinks we’re dead, we’ve got a chance.” Except that machines couldn’t be surprised, surely? What if he opened fire early, just to be certain? Or would he be under instruction to avoid further damage to Phoenix lest there remain some valuable prize aboard unclaimed?

  “I’m reading a launch from the city,” said Geish. “Small missile launch, two of them. Heading for an intercept in those overhead ships, there’s four of them now.”

  “How big are those missiles?” asked the Captain.

  “Um… small. Very small. Fast acceleration… Captain, if that’s the moon’s defensive systems? Two missiles won’t do shit, they’ll be intercepted real quick. See look… I’m reading counterfire even now, we are ETA two minutes fifty for intercept.”

  “Let’s wait and see, Second Lieutenant,” the Captain admonished him. But he sounded grim, Bree thought. Two small missiles? Bree wished she could see them, but Geish’s scan feed was not available to her now. She knew a lot about missiles, their various propulsions, guidance and warheads. In the Academy she’d spent a full two years on the subject, having been identified for an Arms track early with her reflexes being what they were, post-augment. Perhaps if she could see them, she could get some last, final reassurance that they were surely super-advanced and everything was going to be okay again… but she couldn’t see them, and refocused upon the job at hand.

  “The shuttle’s launched,” said Geish. “Looks like drones. We’ve got drones incoming, I can’t tell how many, the signal keeps fracturing.”

  “Hello Corporal Rael,” said the Captain. “Drones inbound, we can’t tell how many.”

  Bree couldn’t hear Rael’s reply. He was the only marine still aboard, defending back-quarter with some spacer volunteers in EVA suits with rifles and booby traps. She supposed that even a spacer could fire a Koshaim in zero-G once, before the recoil put him through a wall. Or were there surviving armour suits that spacers could put on? Damned if they’d be able to fight in them though, not like marines did.

  She recalled meeting Corporal Rael once, just a random encounter in the corridors. Female crew mentioned him from time to time — not only was he one of the Major’s Command Squad elites, he was reputedly the cutest guy on the ship, or amongst the marines, anyway. A few female spacers Bree knew had even wandered through back-quarter for no other reason than to sneak a look, and see if the rumours were true. Herself, she’d not been disappointed. At least he’d get to go down fighting. She’d still be stuck in this chair, trying to man the defensive guns, when the drones cut their way into the bridge and sliced her to bits.

  “What the hell?” That was Geish.

  “Scan, what’s the matter?” asked the Captain.

  “Captain, I just…” and WHAM! as something hit them, a massive jolt that smacked Bree’s head against her headrest and left her breathless.

  “What the FUCK was that?” came the unmistakable growl of Lieutenant Kaspowitz. It wasn’t so much the scale of the impact — if an impact it had been — as the style of it. A short jolt with no follow through — violent, as though the entire ship had been abruptly smacked sideways, and then… nothing, save for another few dozen flashing red damage lights and alarms. But nothing serious, Bree saw with relief, running a fast diagnostic over her precious remaining guns, and found them all still working.

  “Three ships are gone!” Second Lieutenant Jiri was suddenly shouting — Scan Two, Geish’s second. “They’re gone… look, secondary explosions!”

  “The missiles!” Geish yelled in triumph. “One of them’s gone, look! I thought I saw an energy spike just now, but… there it is again!” Another blow hit them, no less gentle than the last, but this time Phoenix seemed to ride it better, as though having learned what to expect. “The last ship’s gone! It wasn’t even that close… what the FUCK is that?”

  “I saw it,” said Kaspowitz. He sounded even more astonished than he did excited. “I saw definite gravitational lensing, just for a second, the background stars all bent inward about the missile. That’s a fucking gravity bomb.”

  Bree was no physicist on the level of Kaspowitz, but all bridge crew knew enough that they could teach it in university, at least. Defiance was what it was because of that long-ago science experiment that had resulted in the singularity about which the moon orbited. It did things to gravity that weren’t possible by natural physical law… but evidently, previous millennia of hacksaws had found the knobs and dials that controlled those physical laws, and begun playing with them. If they could put an artificial-gravity generator into the Kantovan Vault, or into whatever the singularity had been before it collapsed, then they could surely put it into a missile, then activate it for a one-time-only effect. A sudden, violent, temporal gravity-well, gone as fast as it appeared, with its range of effect drastically altered from natural norms… those deepynine ships had gotten a force of several hundred Gs in a sudden shot, possibly much worse. No one designed ships to withstand that much sudden acceleration, not even deepynines. They’d been torn apart, while further out, Phoenix had gotten a jolt, and nothing more.

  “That’s a deep-space area bomb!” Bree murmured. It had been the holy grail of space gunnery in the Academy… and quite technologically impossible, they’d all been assured. A single warhead that could destroy multiple ships across a wide area of deep space, without needing to penetrate defensive fire grids, or chase down jump-V warships that could accelerate in seconds more than missiles could in an hour.

  “Our guest is leaving!” Geish redirected everyone’s attention. “The drones are still coming, but the shuttle’s leaving! He’s heading for the remaining sard ships, that’s a long intercept trajectory, but he can make it if there are no more missiles.”

  “Let him go,” said the Captain. “Arms Two, get ready to target those drones, I’m preprogramming an attitud
e burn in five, four, three, two…”

  He never reached zero. There was a loud noise on coms, then shouting, and panicked yells. “Medical to Command T-3!” That was Kaspowitz. “We’ve had an explosion, the Captain’s hurt! Medical to T-3!”

  Bree wanted to ask what the hell was going on, but the attitude jets were firing regardless, and slowly Phoenix’s tumble was correcting, and a quarter-broadside was lining up. Near-scan feed worked well enough, and she could see the targeting dots of drones, burning hard in anticipation of what was to follow. There were about twenty of them, Bree thought. Well, not for long.

  Guns aligned, and she hit the triggers. At this close range and low-V, it didn’t take long for the shells to reach their targets. Menacing red dots vanished from her screen, one after another, but now her number two display was beginning to flicker. “Come on, not now! Lieutenant Dufresne, Petty Officer Morales! I’m losing the display, get it fixed or we’ll be swarming with drones, I can’t hit what I can’t see!”

  32

  Erik awoke to the dawning realisation of a splitting headache. Or not just a headache, he thought. His skull hurt. He felt dazed, like that one time he’d fallen off a horse at Greenoaks Ranch as a teenager, on a weekend trip with the family. Then, as now, the lights had seemed too bright, like white spears into the back of his brain. He squinted and blinked, raising a hand to shield his vision… and found the arm hooked to tubes, and electrode monitors.

  He tried to recall what had happened. His last memory was of being crammed into Command T-3 with Geish and Kaspowitz, trying to… trying to do something, he couldn’t quite recall the details. But evidently he was alive, which was unexpectedly good news considering the circumstances. Deepynines and sard might have kept him alive as a prisoner, but in that case he doubted he’d be in a bed quite as comfortable as this… and still in full possession of all his limbs.

  His vision cleared a little and he looked around, the pain of the headache fading. Likely that was the bedside medical monitor feeding painkiller into his arm. But the monitor looked odd, a strange design, like nothing they used on Phoenix, where everything was built into the walls. This monitor looked portable, a stern, dark sentinel on wheels. Beyond, the room walls were concave, curving in at the ceiling, with displays and lighting that seemed irregular, and only half-functional. Alongside him was a bunk, a simple platform protruding from the wall, with a mattress and someone lying on it. A medbay, then… but not the Phoenix medbay. Then he realised that the weight of his own body on the mattress was slight. Low gravity, but not zero-gravity. Logically he was on the moon, then. In the city his marines had called Defiance.

  Suli was dead. Keshav Karle too. And many others, throughout Phoenix’s crew. It crushed all the good news out of him, and left him empty. They seemed to have won the fight, somehow. Given how many tight scrapes he’d survived of late, that wasn’t so surprising, however unlikely. But he wanted to go back to sleep, to not have to face this right now. As Captain, everything was his responsibility if not always his fault, and though they were a long way away from Fleet post-action reports and analysis, with all the blame-finding of the bigwigs who sat in high command, he could never escape the post-action reports in his own head.

  Then he thought of Lisbeth, and Trace, and others whose fates he did not know, and cursed himself for being so selfish. Someone came to him, and it took him a moment to figure that it was Spacer Troi, who was typically an armaments tech under Lieutenant Karle. Some muddled conversation — on Erik’s part at least — revealed that Lisbeth and Trace were still alive. Beyond that, Troi had to apologise — he’d been part of the evacuation of non-essential personnel from Phoenix, and now found himself assigned to medbay duty in Defiance, and had already discovered that half of what he thought he knew was just the rumours and nonsense that spread through a crew in times of crisis. Troi did at least know that Lieutenant Karle was dead. That was sad, but as Troi said, he had several immediate friends of similar rank who were also dead — Spacer Lewis and Petty Officer Mubuto. Erik recalled them both well, and repressed the urge to go back to sleep once more.

  “Where is this place?” he murmured, sipping on the water bottle Troi had brought. Troi had many — and some food on a trolley he’d scavenged from somewhere. With so many wounded to tend, the Corpsmen and Doc Suelo were all busy with more serious cases.

  “It’s in the north sector,” Troi explained, glancing about the ward to be sure someone else did not need him. Other spacers moved past, all with a purpose, and there were no visitors to just sit by bedsides and hold hands. Erik supposed, as his thoughts grew clearer, that everyone must still be very busy. “Lieutenant Hausler found it, hiding from the deepynine shuttles. It’s an environmental habitat — there’s actually quite a few of them, but this one seems most functional. Lots of organics used to live here, sir. Among the hacksaws. Lifesupport and electrics are all somehow still working, and even the medbay… though Doc says half the systems are out. He brought some portable stuff from Phoenix, the techs managed to get some indigenous stuff working…” he indicated to the foreign monitor by Erik’s bedside, “…he’s coping. Barely.”

  “And what’s happening with Phoenix?” Erik asked.

  “No offence sir, but I’m just an arms tech. We got evaced… I dunno, sir. The shuttles are still running back and forth, I think they’re bringing a lot of stuff down… a couple of the parren ships survived the fight, but they’re busy with their own guys, I guess. They got smashed, sir. Even worse than us. You hear Tobenrah’s dead, sir?”

  “No,” said Erik. He knew it was a ground-shaking thing, but he just couldn’t figure out what it meant right now. “First I’ve heard of anything.”

  “Talisar got hit just after we did. Some survivors, but Tobenrah wasn’t one of them.”

  Erik nodded, and winced at the pain that brought. Against deepynines, it was predictable. He suffered a flash of memory. “And the… the moon launched defences, right? That destroyed the deepynine ships?”

  “The word is a gravity bomb, sir.” Troi glanced again, and found the lanky frame of Lieutenant Kaspowitz skipping easily through the doorway. “Look sir, it’s Lieutenant Kaspowitz, I think he’d explain it better than me.”

  “Thanks Spacer,” Erik murmured as Troi stood up to go. “And Spacer? I’m sorry about Legs and Lewy.”

  “Yeah,” said Troi, the young man downcast and dealing with it, though barely. “Yeah, me too, sir. Lieutenant,” he added to Kaspowitz, and headed back to his trolley, to check on other wounded.

  “Spacer,” Kaspowitz acknowledged, and took a knee at Erik’s bedside. He was tall enough that that still left enough height to look down from. Erik squinted at him, trying to make out his expression before the bright lights in the ceiling. Only they weren’t actually so bright, he thought, as his eyes adjusted. Kaspowitz grasped his hand, roughly. “How you feeling, Captain? Got a message you were awake.”

  “I feel like I’ve been smacked on the head,” said Erik. “How long was I out?”

  “Nearly twenty hours. Doc said you had some swelling on the brain, but only light. Gave you a shot to keep you under for longer, said that was safer. You’ll be hungry, though.”

  “More thirsty at the moment.” Erik sipped his bottle. “How’s Phoenix?”

  Kaspowitz shrugged. “Mess. Total write-off, really. Engine’s gone, not repairable. Or not without a major port overhaul, anyway. Which is just what this place is, so Rooke reckons he might be able to do not so much an overhaul as a total rebuild. Could take a year, though.”

  “So Rooke’s alive?”

  “Yeah. Curled up in Engineering, tried to get out and fix stuff, but had to abandon that when the drones arrived.”

  “Drones? We got boarded?”

  Kaspowitz nodded. “Yeah. Just three, Bree lost her targeting before she could nail them all. Three drones got in through the back-quarter hull breach. Corporal Rael blasted them all, barely a scratch on him. Damn lucky we had him aboard, we could have lo
st dozens more if it was just us spacers.”

  Erik took a deep breath, memory returning fast. “Right. Hit me with it.”

  Kaspowitz peered more closely. “You sure you’re ready?”

  “No. Hit me anyway.”

  “Right, just the ones I know for sure. Suli. Keshav.”

  “Yeah, I remember that.”

  “Wei lost his arm, he’ll be okay though, he’s in intensive care. Second shift are all alive, despite Giggles running around without a suit on.” That was Dufresne, Erik remembered. “Williams. Hale. Leong.” The list went on for a while. Kaspowitz stopped at thirty-five. “That’s all I know for sure, with spacers. Goldman’s count is sixty. We lost a lot when back-quarter breached, some of those we’ll never get the bodies back. Same number wounded, half of them serious.” He gestured about the medbay.

  “Marines?”

  “Trace has the full numbers. I think about fifty, same number wounded. The only one I know for sure is Lieutenant Zhi. Crozier’s hurt, but not bad. Word is Delta saved all our necks defending the geofeature. About half of them are dead, though.”

  Erik did close his eyes. Intellectually he knew they’d still gotten off light. By all rights, none of them should have survived that engagement, as outmatched as they’d been. If it hadn’t been for Styx’s insistence that this was a good place to come, presumably because she knew the technology that defended it, none of them would be.