by M. D. Cooper
Most systems had allies, people who would come to their aid—or at least harbor refugees. Midditerra had no such friends. If they were defeated, there was nowhere for them to flee. They’d be expelled from any nearby system they attempted to seek shelter in.
Pierson knew that the Midditerrans understood this was a battle they had to win.
Major Doma frowned at the battlespace, enlarging a section of the conflict. “Huh…that group in the shield bubble is coming toward us.”
“Intercept?” Pierson asked.
“Close. They were already pointed in our general direction. Maybe they’re just trying leave the battlespace. It’s what I’d do, in their position.”
Pierson cocked an eyebrow at Doma, then glanced at Colonel Reg. “Colonel. I want you to work up strike scenarios to board those ships without too much damage. There’s a chance the Streamer Woman is aboard one of them.”
“I’m in agreement with that assessment,” Colonel Reg replied. “It’s possible that ship that arrived last is her ship, too. Its hull profile has changed, but if you strip away most of the cargo pods, it is a close match.”
Pierson agreed with the colonel. “Well then, all the more reason to be careful.”
Pierson knew that he could very shortly be at a crossroads. His orders were to find the most expeditious means to capture the Streamer Woman—and her ship, if possible.
However, he’d already lost hundreds upon hundreds of ships. He wasn’t prepared to leave his people behind once he had the woman captured. Taking this planet and station, at the very least, was a must. He also had to mount S&R operations to help Admiral Dalia retrieve her lost personnel.
No, better to have her focus on that now. There’s no point in trying to take Teegarten Station anymore—though those planet pushers would be quite the prize as well.
“Doma, tell Admiral Dalia to fall back. She needs to rescue any survivors and destroy any damaged ships. No need to let these pirates salvage more military craft than they already have.”
“Yes, Admiral,” Doma replied.
Pierson glanced at the holo before him, considering concentrating his rear fleet elements on Nesella station rather than the MDF ships. The station housed more weapons systems than he’d expected; taking it now would remove the enemy’s stronghold, and could scatter their fleets, making them easier to pick off in the second pass.
The chaos of Nesella’s destruction would also benefit his endeavors. The Midditerrans could fight all they wanted, but the outcome of this battle was a foregone conclusion.
He passed the orders to the rear formations, and then looked for the small group of ships he was now all but certain held what he was seeking.
“Wait…where are they?”
“Sir?” Doma asked, looking down at the holo.
“The shield-bubbled Midditerrans. They’re gone.”
Doma opened her mouth to reply, when proximity alarms sounded, warning of ships within one kilometer of the Nova Star.
“Black night, it’s them!” Doma all but shouted, as more alarms sounded, indicating that the ship had taken damage.
Pierson focused the battlespace on his flagship and saw the enemy’s shield bubble pressed against the Nova Star. Holes from plasma strikes were venting from a hundred locations, while beams tore into his ship, disabling point defenses.
Just as suddenly as the attack had started, the enemy stopped firing.
Pierson knew what was coming next.
Sure enough, over two-dozen assault craft launched from the enemy vessels, crossing the gulf to the Nova Star.
“They’re insane,” Doma whispered.
“No. Cunning,” Pierson replied, as the ship’s captain called over the 1MC and shipnet, ordering all hands to prepare to repel boarders.
Pierson checked his sidearm. If the Streamer Woman had launched an attack aimed at his ship, there was only one target she would have in mind.
THE WARLORD
STELLAR DATE: 02.07.8512 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: BWSS Nova Star
REGION: Kora, Midditerra System
Katrina peered around a corner and fired her rifle at the retreating enemy soldiers. One of her kinetic rounds hit a woman in the back, and she dropped to the ground.
“Advance,” Katrina called back to the eight Adders with her, and they moved ahead, securing the corridor while Katrina followed behind.
Katrina reached the end of the corridor, where the Adders were standing over the woman Katrina had dropped.
“Shit, that sucks for her,” Lloyd said, pointing at the writhing woman on the deck. “Armor fractured from the shot, and I think it broke her spine.”
Katrina looked at the woman, who had stopped moving, though she was still moaning in pain.
“I’ll do better next time.” She flipped her rifle to pulse-mode before firing twice at the soldier’s head. The point-blank pulse shot cracked her helmet, and blood began to leak out.
“Stars,” one of the Adders whispered.
“No one’s going to be coming for her,” Katrina replied. “This was a kindness.”
No one argued, and she pointed down the right-hand passage.
“That way.”
The team worked their way down the passage until they reached another intersection.
Katrina nodded as she peered down the passageways.
“OK, folks, we’ve gotta head up a deck. There’s a ladder shaft down that left-hand passage.”
Lloyd and one of the other Adders took the lead, and Katrina followed. They were moving down the corridor at a good pace, when a shot rang out from behind them. Katrina spun to see one of the Adders in the back of the group fall.
“They’re behind us!” she called out, and four of the Adders turned, firing down the passage as they picked up the pace.
Katrina zoomed her vision, spotting a half-dozen enemies at the far end of the passage. She took careful aim and squeezed off a trio of kinetic rounds. One of the enemies fell, and she took aim at another of the Bollers, firing once before the rest fell back behind cover.
“At the ladder,” Lloyd called, and Katrina heard the whump of a conc grenade going off one deck up. She fired more rounds at the corners of the hall where the Bollers had retreated, keeping them pinned as much as she could.
She was almost at the ladder, swapping out a magazine when one of the Bollers leant out around the corner and fired a beam down the passageway.
It brushed against her thigh, burning away most of her metal skin across a ten-centimeter patch, before hitting one of the Adders behind her.
Katrina bit back a scream and increased the frequency of her shots, waving for the other Adders to all climb the ladder first.
Seconds later, she was the last one in the passage. She lobbed a refraction grenade down the corridor before holding an arm up to her teammates.
A strong hand clamped on her wrist and pulled her up while she continued to fire rounds through the refractive haze.
“You good, Warlord?” Lloyd asked when he set her down on the deck.
Katrina looked down at her thigh, surprised to see a larger divot missing from her leg than she expected.
“Fine. Let’s move,” she replied with a grin.
“Are you in shock?” Lloyd asked, a look of concern visible behind his visor.
One of the Adders passed her a canister of biofoam, and she sprayed a covering over the wound. “No, it’s just funny; my skin always hurts, but t
his might actually hurt less. Now c’mon, let’s move.”
If Lloyd was perturbed by the statement, it wasn’t visible behind his visor as he directed two Adders to stay behind at the ladder shaft, and the rest moved twenty paces down the hall to the comm node entrance.
“This it?” Lloyd asked.
Katrina agreed. Getting here had been harder than she thought—and that was even with over a dozen assault teams working their way through the Nova Star, providing distractions and masking the true purpose of the boarding.
She placed a hand over the access panel and fed nano into the control system, bypassing the encryption systems and directly triggering the door mechanism.
“No matter how much security you put on a door, somewhere there’s a physical lock and a motor that moves it,” Katrina said as the door slid aside. “Just have to know where they are.”
She stepped into the room that doubled as both an auxiliary comm shack, and the location of the comm NSAI. The node on the far side of the room was larger than Katrina had expected, though she surmised that it was probably because of the ship’s role in the Boller Fleet.
No one was visible, though there was a half-eaten protein bar on the console, and Katrina gestured toward a corner on the far left side of the room where a cabinet lay.
Lloyd and another of the Adders strode across to the cabinet and wrenched open the doors to find a woman hiding inside. They yanked her out, and Katrina read her name tag.
“OK, Lieutenant Sarah, you’re going to give me unfettered access to this system. We have some new orders to pass to your fleet.”
Sarah shook her head and didn’t reply, her expression scared, but defiant.
“Do you know who I am?” Katrina asked. “I’m the Streamer Woman you’re all looking for. I have the technology to make you do what I want, and you won’t like it.”
As Katrina spoke, tendrils of nano formed on her metal fingertips, building up toward the woman, who began to quake with fear.
“OK, OK, what do you want?” she gasped.
“Provide your codes, and then pass the orders I give you to the rest of the fleet.”
“I can’t,” the woman wailed. “You’re going to kill them.”
Katrina shook her head. “I can’t really do that with orders. However, I can confuse them and force them into a retreat.”
“No, no…” The woman shook her head.
“I admire your courage,” Katrina said as she reached out and touched her hand to the woman’s head, feeding the nano into the BWSF lieutenant’s body.
Sarah screamed briefly, then her body went limp in the grip of the two Adders.
“Let her go,” Katrina ordered, trying not to look at the expressions of horror on her own people’s faces.
Lloyd and the other Adder released their hold, and Sarah shuffled to the console and input her access credentials. Katrina Linked with the woman’s mind and provided orders that would confuse the Boller fleet, sending half their forces out of weapons range, while the others moved into vulnerable positions.
Then she passed the BWSF encryption algorithms back to Sam so he could share them with the MDF and canton ships. Now they’d have unfettered access to the BSWF comms.
“We’ve got company!” one of the Adders down the corridor called out.
“OK, team, let’s get on the move,” Katrina called out, signaling her Adders to knock the woman out before she relinquished control.
In the corridor, the two Adders at the ladder shaft were firing down at attackers. The deck was glowing nearby, and Katrina signaled them to fall back before the enemy melted it out from under them.
She led the Adders through the passageways, toward where their boarding ship waited.
Katrina checked their position in the enemy ship. “OK, team, we need to get to the end of this passageway, then down three decks and we’ll almost be at our—”
Katrina took off at run, sliding across the deck to the ladder shaft and dropping a conc down as the Adders raced after her. The grenade went off, and she swung down the shaft, dropping three decks before grabbing onto the rails and stopping herself.
She vaulted to the deck and was covering the approaches when the entire ship shuddered. She held onto the ladder as the a-grav systems went offline.
The ship shook again, and then white light poured through the corridor, slamming Katrina into a bulkhead. Air started racing past her. She was about to activate her magboots when another concussive wave rolled through the ship.
She lost her grip on the ladder and flew down the corridor, slamming into the bulkheads, then into a stack of conduits. Her back hit something hard enough to break ribs, and her head smashed into the deck, then everything went black.
FALLEN
STELLAR DATE: 02.07.8512 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Voyager
REGION: Regula, Midditerra System
Troy watched in horror as BWSF beams cut into the Nova Star, tearing the ship to shreds. He mapped their firing pattern and realized that Katrina was in the thick of it.
She wasn’t going to make it off the enemy ship.
“We have to pull back,” Rama said, her voice strained. “They’re going to shoot right through their own ship and take us out!”
Troy replied, unwilling to retract the shields while Katrina was outside their protection.
“If she makes it to an assault ship, we can extend the shield around her,” Carl said. “But if we all die, there’s nowhere for her to go to!”
Troy spent another second considering possible options before finally agreeing with Carl’s logic—logic that would likely see Katrina’s end.
Sam said, his voice filled with worry while Jordan cried out, “No! You can’t!”
Troy was surprised by the passion in the woman’s voice. She seemed to really care for Katrina.
Troy didn’t discuss it further. Instead he drew the overlapping shield umbrellas back around Cavalry One and directed the ships to move away from the Nova Star as the cruisers in the BWSF formation fired on it.
As they boosted away, Troy watched a beam cut clear through the enemy’s former flagship, and then another, the second one near where Katrina had been.
Come on, he thought, keeping optics and sensors trained on the breach ship she had used. Four others pulled away from the Nova Star, and Troy let them through the shield, barely paying attention to them once he confirmed that Katrina was not aboard.
He tried to reach her, but beamfire was striking the shield bubble now, causing too much interference for her small signal to get through.
Then the Nova Star exploded.
Troy had enough time to think that it must have been a self-destruct of some sort, before the shockwave hit the ships in the shield bubble and shoved them away from the Bollam’s World cruisers.
Rama cried out, and Carl swore about something, but Troy wasn’t paying attention. All his focus was on coordinating with Sam and keeping the shield bubble intact as the ships were thrown toward Regula’s dark blue clouds.
Over the course of the breach, Cavalry One had moved closer and closer to the planet, holding its position relative to the enemy, as the BWSF fleet completed its initial pass, delivering strike after strike on the now-decimated Nesella station and its defensive platforms.
Troy had barely paid attention to the rest of the battlespace during the breach, but now he saw that Nesella was in ruins; millions of humans dead, as the station bled atmosphere into space.
None of that mattered now.
He refocused on his task: keeping the shields up as Sam altered vector, pushing them away from the cloud tops of Regula, even as the planet sought to pull them down into its depths.
Weathering the continual attacks and the Nova Star’s explosion had taxed the reactors, and two of the ships were near critical shutdown. If they fell out of position, the shield bubble would fail, and they’d either be holed by the enemy or be crushed to a pinpoint of mass.
Try as he might, there was nothing for it. They couldn’t escape Regula’s gravity well. As the ships slid beneath the planet’s clouds, Troy shouted across the Link, willing Katrina to hear him.
FOUND
STELLAR DATE: 02.09.8512 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: CDS Talisman
REGION: Regula, Midditerra System
Everything hurt.
A lot.
Katrina couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead, just that she was in pain.
Alive then, I suppose. I don’t think you can feel pain when you’re dead. At least, I sure hope not.
She tried to move her body, but nothing happened. A wave of panic washed over her, but she pushed it down. Katrina tried again, and this time her hand moved.
Just exhausted…or something. Stars, my head hurts so much.
“She’s coming to,” a voice near her head said.
“No way. We dumped enough tranqs into her to keep a whale asleep ‘til the heat death of the universe.”
“The monitors don’t lie.”
