by Sam Bradbury
Chapter Forty-two
I guess I fired because I couldn’t let Stahl escape. Not with that kind of weaponry onboard. The question I ask myself now is that if I’d known what was going to happen to Helghan, would I still have fired?
My missile went straight into the main core and his ship exploded in a burst of green that burned our eyes. Space boiled. Everything went white and the bombers were pummelled with aftershock, Rico and Jammer suddenly forced to take evasive moves. We pulled away from the explosion, coming round in time to see tendrils of petrusite lifting from the planet surface as though sensing the presence of the great energy above and wanting to join with it.
And now the sky was torn by a great pillar of lithe petrusite that rose to join the billowing fiery shell of Stahl’s destroyed cruiser. The two created an enormous secondary explosion that enveloped the space elevators and space station and at the same time engulfed the entire planet face, flooding over its surface. Taking it over.
And then the blast was heading towards us and Rico was pulling us away in a steep climb to try to ride it out, surfing it out of danger. Around us the enemy fleet began to burn, our smaller craft staying just ahead of the bubbling death, and we saw other slower ships engulfed and exploding and then we were looking around desperately for Jammer’s ship. She’d been there. Now she wasn’t.
We craned our necks to look for her, Rico barking into the comlink, ‘Jammer. Jammer,’ getting more frantic, when suddenly she appeared at our side, so close we could see her grinning at us.
‘Guys,’ she said, ‘what did I tell you about leaving before the explosions start?’
We grinned, relieved, and came back around to see Helghan – and what we saw was total devastation. The planet wore a death shroud of petrusite. Pools of it bubbled on the surface – pools that must have been hundreds of klicks wide at ground level, while the rest of the planet was cast in an oily green sheen.
‘I’m not reading any comms traffic,’ said Jammer, aghast.
‘Yeah, we took out the whole fleet.’ I don’t think the enormity had sunk in for Rico yet. It was only just beginning to sink in for me and for Jammer.
‘No, I mean nothing,’ she insisted. ‘The entire planet is silent.’
We looked down, wondering how many millions had just perished. The green shimmered back at us.
Death shimmered back at us.
I knew, as we banked away, that I’d be seeing Helghan burn in my nightmares for a long, long time to come. And I knew that I’d be waking up asking myself if I’d had to fire that missile. If I hadn’t then Stahl would have made it to Earth, but even so … Yeah, I’d be thinking about that a lot, I knew.
As though Jammer was reading my thoughts, she drew up alongside me and flashed me a lopsided, reassuring smile that I returned. No doubt about it, she’d earned that beer.
Hell, I thought, as we turned and headed for home, I’d maybe even stretch to a burger too – if she was lucky.
Epilogue
There was silence. Just the low murmur of a wind that barely disturbed thick clouds of deadly petrusite hanging in layers over the ground. Through the dense fog were the barely discernible shapes of wrecked buildings, coated in green haze. Everywhere were bodies and the wrecks of vehicles, littering the entire landscape. This was Helghan now. Shrouded by green death.
Not everything was dead, though, for two hazmat troopers materialized from within the green mist. One of them was carrying a handheld sensor that had begun bleeping, and he directed it now towards an irregular shape that appeared from within the fog. In response it began bleeping more frantically.
‘There,’ he said simply, pointing, and the two walked over to what was lying on the ground. An escape pod.
The mist parted around them as they approached it, and as they did so there was a release of hydraulics, and the pod door slid open.
The two troopers looked inside. Both bowed their heads; the trooper holding the sensor was the first to speak.
‘Welcome home, sir,’ he said.
Acknowledgements
Hermen Hulst
Arjan Brussee
Jan-Bart van Beek
Michiel van der Leeuw
Angie Smets
Brant Nicholas
Lambert Wolterbeek Muller
Paul-Jon Hughes
Mathijs de Jonge
Rob Heald
Victor Zuylen
Aryeh Loeb
Chris Weatherhead
Steven ter Heide
Andrew Holmes
Alice Shepherd
