by Jay Allan
Ricard Lille. He was up there, and he’d shot at something. And, she’d just triggered his trap.
He’ll know I’m here…and that means I’ve got seconds at best.
She dredged up every bit of strength inside her, and she raced up the last few rungs, gritting her teeth against the throbbing pain, and reaching in, grabbing her pistol as she threw herself up over the small half wall, and onto the roof.
She could feel her strength draining away, but she dug down for all she had. Her eyes scanned the roof quickly, and her gaze stopped abruptly. She saw the figure, even as it was turning from the street toward her.
Ricard Lille.
Every bit of strength that remained to her flowed into her blood, and she jerked herself to the side, even as Lille brought the rifle in his arms around toward her.
The pistol was in her hand, and even as she struggled to avoid Lille’s aim, she brought it to bear and fired…almost simultaneously to Lille’s shot.
She dropped down to the roof, hitting the synth masonry with a hard thud, even as the bullet Lille had sent her way ripped by, just above her head.
The impact from hitting the roof knocked the wind from her lungs, and her hand lost its grip, the tiny pistol with its single remaining round slipping free and skittering across the smooth, hard surface. She struggled to turn around, to bring her eyes to bear on her opponent. As she came up, she saw Lille, standing where he had been…but the rifle was no longer in his hand.
And, his shirt was covered all along the left shoulder with a bright sheen of blood.
She was wracked with pain, the chunk of metal still firmly embedded in her side, blood oozing out all around, even as that agony was joined by the new torment in her legs, her knees, where she’d slammed into the roof.
But, none of that mattered. This was the moment, the final showdown, the battle she’d driven so hard to fight. She was wounded…but, she’d drawn blood, too. Her injury might be more serious, but that was splitting hairs. None of it mattered. The fight lay in front of her, her nemesis, the man who’d broken her, who’d shattered her own sense of herself, standing meters away, wounded, even as she was.
She raced forward, pouring all her relentless stubbornness into ignoring the pain, the weakness, the fear. Nothing mattered in that moment, nothing but killing the man standing before her. She felt pure rage, unadulterated hatred taking hold of her, every dark thought she’d kept penned in the deepest recesses of her mind pouring out, an orgy of desperate and dark emotions, of hostility and bloodlust unmatched.
She could see Lille reacting, shifting to the side, for an instant looking as if he was going to lunge for the dropped rifle. But, as he saw her coming, he jerked back, digging his legs in, reaching around behind him to draw a knife from the sheath hanging from his belt.
Andi saw the morning sun glinting off the assassin’s weapon, and she kept her eyes locked on it. But, Lille wasn’t the only one with a blade. She pulled her own weapon from its hiding place, even as she ran, and she tightened her grip on it, leaping forward the last two meters, into the final struggle.
The finish of the battle she knew would be, had to be, to the death.
Chapter Fifty-Four
CFS Repulse
250,000,000 Miles from Planet Ulion
Venga System
Year 317 AC
The Battle of Ulion – Phase Six
Sara Eaton watched as the guns of her battle line raked the last of the enemy escorts. Stockton’s squadrons had already hit the small, deadly vessels, but with only lasers. The small fighter weapons had mostly caused minor damage to the frigates…except when a well-placed hit struck a store of antimatter somewhere near the outer hull. When that happened, the target ship simply vanished, nothing left but pure energy and some superheated dust.
The battleships had an easier time of it. The deadly particle accelerators were still at long range, and accuracy was less than she might have hoped. But, when one of the deadly beams struck its target, almost inevitably, the frigate was obliterated. The lasers of Stockton’s fighters damaged only a small area, making an antimatter hit a stroke of luck. The battleships’ primaries tore giant holes in the small ships, slicing into deck after deck. At least half the shots had caused antimatter explosions, certain death to the target, and most of the others were still powerful enough to cripple the small vessels, even without the assistance of matter-antimatter annihilation.
The escorts were deadly to fighters, and that was something she’d have to discuss with Winters and the other senior officers. The next time Confederation forces engaged the Hegemony, they had to be ready to deal with the escorts…without sending the strike forces right through clouds of the waiting ships.
But now, her people had a job to do. They had to finish the attack, destroy as many of the enemy escorts as possible, and then pull back, reverse course. If that even mattered anymore.
The Hegemony battleships were coming on hard, and Eaton was far from sure her own heavy vessels could escape. The forward line of the enemy was badly battered, and while there were likely still active railguns among the several dozen ships, she’d bet there weren’t many. But, the second line, and the third beyond it, were untouched. As soon as they closed to range, they would blast her ships to scrap.
She would pull her forces back, of course, try to get back on the original plan, but she’d lost too much time, and her ships had built up too much forward thrust. She might get away, but only if the enemy let her. If the Hegemony forces blasted at their incredible maximum thrust levels, they’d catch her, at least if she headed toward the transit point.
She might make it farther if she set a course directly away from the enemy, but that vector led only to deep space, and to another, different, but no less grim ending. The faster enemy ships would still catch her, it would just take a bit longer, and her people would be well beyond any place help might arrive.
She put it all out of her head. She’d done what she had to do, and she was going to see it finished. Then, she would deal with what came next. And, she would find a way.
As she always had before.
* * *
“Let’s go…there’s no way those bastards get away, not after all the damage they did.” Federov snapped the orders into her comm, once again the cool model of focused calm in battle. She led her patched together wing, a ragtag group by any rational measure, forward. Stockton and the returning strike force had already hit the escorts, knocking out a dozen or more, with only lasers. And, then the battleships had opened up with their primary batteries, weapons so immensely powerful, even the barest of grazes blasted one of the vessels to oblivion.
The word had spread. The weakness of the enemy escorts was clear. The small, lightly armored ships carried considerable amounts of antimatter. They needed the high-yield fuel to power their deadly rapid fire, but they lacked the bulk and the heavy armor to adequately protect it. Even the slightest hit in the right place could turn one of the escorts into a cloud of hard radiation.
And, hodgepodge or not, Federov’s fighters had plasma torpedoes. All they had to do was get close enough to launch and score a hit. Almost any hit would do. There were fifteen of the small enemy ships left, a tithe of the number that had savaged the fighter squadrons earlier, but as far as Federov was concerned, that was too many to let live.
One is too many.
In her mind, still fresh with images of friends and comrades blasted to atoms by the Hegemony ships, even allowing a single one to escape was unthinkable.
She brought her ship around hard, even as the weaker half of her hastily-assembled force struggled to match her moves. She knew some of her pilots were weak, perhaps a quarter of them had no business being in a Lightning under any circumstances, much less in combat. But, this was a war that would call on everyone to give what they had, all they had.
And, she wasn’t going to let those ships get away. When the Hegemony leaders congratulated themselves on their new anti-bomber defenses, she was
determined to temper their satisfaction with the realization that not a single one of their creations had survived.
She was driven by the urgency of the situation, by the need for vengeance for the losses the wings had suffered…and also by the festering wound inside her, the rage she still felt at having her fighter shot out from under her. She knew she should just let it go, and she wondered if she’d lured pilots who weren’t combat ready to come with her on some pointless mission to strike back for something that really didn’t matter.
She shook her head. Not because she decided she hadn’t gone too far, that the mission wasn’t about her salving her inner wounds.
Because she’d decided she didn’t care.
As far as she was concerned, every one of those ships was going down, and damned the cost.
* * *
“I need those calculations now!” Clint Winters roared out the order, with an unfiltered intensity that made every officer on Constitution’s bridge tremble. His battleships were faced off against half the enemy’s front line, and the exchange had been a brutal one. Only two of the Hegemony vessels had still had functional railguns, but they’d claimed a heavy price before Winters’s primaries had come into range, and his remaining battleships focused all their fire on them.
One of the deadly ships was gone now, blasted to dust, and the other was heavily damaged, its railguns blown to scrap. But, the battle had moved now to secondary range, and both lines lashed out at each other, firing every weapon they could bring to bear. It was a fight Winters thought his people just might be able to win. And, one he’d have been happy to let them try…if there hadn’t been two more lines of enemy forces moving forward, dozens of fresh battleships that would open up with their intact railguns as soon as they came into range.
In less than forty minutes…
“It’s impossible to be sure, Admiral, without knowing the condition of the first line ships, and how they might react. But, my gut is…” The officer hesitated, and that told Winters all he needed to know. All he’d already suspected. “…they’ll be able to catch us before we can transit.”
The words hit Winters hard, even though they’d hardly been unexpected. He’d let the battle slip from his control, allowed his ships to push too far in-system. He’d done it to buy time for Eaton’s ships, to reduce the pressure on the squadrons…there were a hundred reasons he could put forth. But, in the end, he knew he’d let his discipline crack, he’d given in to emotion, let his feelings for the ships and spacers under his command direct his actions.
And now, we’re all going to die.
He looked over at the display. Everywhere his eyes moved, the situation was disastrous. Eaton had led her battleships forward, obliterated the enemy escorts that had so damaged the strike forces. But now, she was engaged with a pack of enemy battleships, the other half of the Hegemony’s first line. Her people were putting up a good fight, as his were, but they were even farther in than his own ships. There was no way they could get back to the transit point before the enemy’s second wave closed and began to rake her ships with railguns. She might make a run to deep space, but that wouldn’t accomplish anything…and he knew Sara Eaton well enough to guess that, whatever she did in the next couple hours, it wouldn’t be fleeing into the depths of the Venga system.
Constitution shook hard, and Winters reached out instinctively, grabbing onto the armrests of his chair. He was strapped in, and his harness was holding him in place, but old habits died hard.
His eyes moved down the figures scrolling across his workstation screen, status reports on the fleet. He had to do something. If his people continued on their present courses, the fleet was lost. He doubted more than a shattered hulk or two would escape, if even that.
His people had fought hard, and they’d inflicted enormous damage against an enemy that outmatched them technologically, and massively outnumbered them. He tried to find some solace in such thoughts, but the response came from the part of him that had earned his nickname. The ‘Sledgehammer’ saw defeat as defeat, and killing a few enemy ships before losing all of his was cold comfort.
Especially when he knew the enemy would just press on after his people were gone. Megara was only two transits away. The Confederation’s capital had never been attacked by an enemy, not even in the dark days of the War of Shame. If it was to happen now, Winters wondered if he wouldn’t be just as glad to be dead…but that smacked too much of desertion to him, and he wracked his brain, trying fruitlessly to come up with a way—any way—to get at least part of his fleet out.
But, there was nothing.
Then, his eyes caught something on the display, just as Constitution lurched hard to port, and a whole series of panels on the far wall exploded in a shower of sparks. The bridge lights died for a moment, replaced for a few seconds by the battery-powered backups, before the main fixtures came on again.
Winters looked all around, trying to get a feel for how badly his flagship was hurt. He forgot the glimpse on the scanner for a few seconds…until the tactical officer turned toward him and almost yelled, “Admiral…we’ve got ships transiting in.”
A pause, and silence on the bridge as every eye focused on the display.
“We’re picking up a beacon, Admiral. It’s Dauntless. Admiral Barron is here, sir.” The officer looked back at his screen, and then he turned toward Winters again. “He’s got the fleet with him, sir. I’ve got a dozen battleships through already…and they’re launching fighters.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
Just Off the Promenade
Troyus City, Planet Megara, Olyus III
Year 317 AC
Andi felt the impact as her body slammed into Lille’s, pushing the Alliance assassin back almost a meter…close to the edge of the roof. She gripped her knife with all the strength she could muster from her pain-wracked and wounded body, and she slashed at her adversary, barely missing as he dodged back…and then shoved his arm forward in a quick stabbing motion.
Andi saw the blade coming toward her—she felt it, at least in her mind—and she let her body go limp and drop down to the surface of the roof, slipping away from Lille’s strike.
She leapt up, spinning around, even as Lille turned again. She saw the bright red on his sleeve, the large circle expanding as her enemy continued to bleed from the wound she’d given him with her pistol shot. She could feel the warm wetness on her own midsection, and down her leg, but the chunk of metal still lodged in her thigh was holding back most of the flow of blood. It hurt like hell, and she’d had more than one impulse to pull it out, but she resisted, leaving it in place.
Her eyes flashed all around as she rose, looking for her gun, and for Lille’s. She spied the assault rifle, but it was too far for her to make a move. Her pistol was nowhere to be seen.
She looked across the small distance between her and her enemy, and their eyes met. Lille was a psychopath, and he’d always had a strange lack of emotion about killing. She remembered his manner when she’d been a captive, the cold, almost clinical way he’d administered the tortures that had turned her mind inside out, that had broken her. But, now, there was emotion in his eyes. For the first time, she saw fear in the Sector Nine killer’s gaze…and she drew strength from it.
She moved forward, slowly now, carefully. She’d fought many times with a knife, and she watched his every move, scanned for weakness, for opportunity. She lunged forward once, then twice, both times pulling back, as Lille reacted too quickly for her to bring the strike home,
She jerked hard to the side, barely evading her adversary’s attack, and she moved right into a strike of her own, coming close—very close—to scoring a hit. But, the two of them remained facing each other, both wounded, both losing strength.
And, both coldly focused on what each realized was—and could only be—a battle to the end.
* * *
Holsten leaned over Striker, shoving his jacket under the wounded man’s head, trying to make the admiral comfortable any way he
could. He could hear the sounds of the medevac airship, and he knew it would be on the ground in a minute, perhaps less.
He just wasn’t sure if his friend had a minute.
Striker’s wound was gruesome. The bullet had struck him in the back of the neck, a large, high velocity projectile that had ripped through the top of his spine and exited to the side of his throat. He was covered in blood, gagging for every breath. The shot had been well-aimed, the weapon a sniper’s choice.
Or an assassin’s.
Holsten had no information, nothing solid to go on…but he knew with a cold certainty. This had been the work of Ricard Lille.
He cursed himself for his failure in finding the assassin, for the readiness with which he’d been prepared to assume the man had fled Megara. Now, tragically too late, he understood…and he realized a man like Lille could never allow a humiliation like Striker’s rescue to pass. Gaston Villieneuve was a pure opportunist, a man who could pick and choose beliefs and codes of conduct to suit his needs. But, Ricard Lille, though a cold-blooded killer, had his own twisted brand of honor.
You should have known…you should have foreseen this…
He looked down again at Striker. The admiral’s eyes were open, looking back at him. He was speaking, trying to say something.
Holsten leaned forward, putting his ear to his friend’s mouth.
“Tyler…” Striker’s words were soft, almost inaudible through the sounds of blood filling his lungs. “Tell…him…”
