by M. D. Cooper
Bubbs’ avatar, short pigtails and all, appeared in his mind and blew him a kiss.
Winter had them on hand, but decided to do things properly for once.
The Silstrand captain joined in on Bubbs’s channel.
Quaker’s avatar raised its eyebrows.
Bubbs sent a private growl of annoyance to Winter.
Winter rolled his eyes.
Quaker shot him a dark look, and was about to speak, when Commander Mary spoke up.
Shit!
He sighed.
The mech woman aboard the stealth ship laughed.
He sighed, but couldn’t stop from grinning.
“Winter!” Lana called out, but didn’t chase after him as he ran down the passageway to the detention center lifts.
He was, however, pretty sure he heard her mutter ‘dumbass’.
* * * * *
Lana crossed her arms and paced back and forth outside of the cell where they had secured General Levin. Two armed guards stood on the inside and two on the outside, with another pair patrolling the nearby corridors. The man wasn’t going anywhere.
Still, Lana was nervous as she peered inside the room. He was sitting on the cot, hands folded.
“I’m ashamed to admit that I fell for your act so thoroughly.” Levin said as he stared at his hands. “But in the end, it won’t matter, Lana. If that’s even your name.”
“Why won’t it matter?” she asked.
“Because my AI, Morgan, alerted my ships that I’ve been taken prisoner. They won’t idly stand by. They’ll already be on the move, and they’ll storm this relic of a mine. I’ll be rescued, we’ll find the virus, and then we’ll pound everything to gravel.”
“Chimin is under the SSF’s protection. It’s part of Silstrand now, and they’ll defend us. As soon as we give the word, they’ll attack.”
“The word has been given, child.” Levin stood up from his sofa, and the two guards stationed in the cell raised their stun batons
“Sit back down!”
“Sit down!”
Levin’s hands rose, and a knowing smile settled on his face. “You think you control me? You think you can stop us? You’re only slowing down the inevitable. I’m looking forward to bringing you back to Garza, though, little Lana. I don’t know how you pack a punch like that, but I’m sure we’ll find out.”
Lana uncrossed her arms, ready to show Levin exactly what she was capable of, when the asteroid shook beneath her feet.
Guess he’s not lying.
“Stop this! Call it off!” a woman’s voice cried out from down the corridor.
Lana looked to her right and was surprised to see Grace running toward the cell.
“I have what they want!” Grace held up a slide, presumably with the dead virus pressed between the plates. “We can stop this attack before Chimin suffers any further.”
Lana held her hand up as the SSF privates outside of Levin’s cell stepped forward, ready to stop the governor.
Grace waivered. “We can’t defeat Orion. We can’t stand against them.”
Lana shook her head. “If that’s the case, Kylie should never have stood up to Raynes in the first place. Look, this is why Silstrand is here. To secure the Fringe. Now you have allies who can stand up for you. I know Chimin is isolated, I know you and the others have stood alone for a long time, but that time’s passed. You have friends. Strong friends.”
Grace glanced at Levin, sitting on the edge of his seat, eyes alight with anticipation, and then back at Lana.
“Don’t give in to fear, Grace. These people have chosen you. You can’t lead with fear. You have to lead with hope. You have to do the right thing.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Levin ground out the words one by one. “You do what you must. You get that to my people, no matter the costs, and they will stand down!”
Lana cast the Orion general a dark look. “Don’t listen to his lies. He’ll say anything to get his way because that’s the type of person he is—the type of person who will happily commit genocide to further his own twisted agenda. That’s not who you are.”
Grace closed her eyes and lowered her hand. “I want to protect Chimin. I’m afraid of making the wrong decision.” She opened her hand, the slide of cells free for the taking.
Lana took it from her and slipped it into her pocket. “We can’t always know what’s going to happen, but we do what we think is right.”
“Can it be that easy?”
A snort of amusement burst free from Lana. “You know that’s not how it works. There’s a war going on—from what I’ve heard, it might be the biggest war ever, because dorks like Levin here want to make everyone do things their way. But right now, the people here, they’ll be scared. They need a leader. They need you to tell them we’ll all be OK.”
“You’re pretty smart for your years,” Grace said as her tired eyes met Lana’s.
“I’ve been through a lot of shit for my years.”
Grace nodded and even though she looked fatigued and afraid, she stood taller. Firmer. “I need to address them and let them know they’re not alone. That we’ll get through this.”
Hopefully, Lana thought, with very little destruction.
“And for that I’m going to need my office,” Grace continued. “I’m going to talk to Captain Quaker and tell him I’m resuming my duties. He can protect Chimin while I support our people.” She took a deep breath. “Thank you, Lana.”
Lana nodded. “Anytime. By the way, how’d you know where to find Levin?”
“Cassandra told me. She’s loyal. A good Chimin. Am I free to go?”
The two privates looked to Lana, who nodded, and Grace was on her way. Lana breathed a sigh of relief that talking the woman down had worked. The last thing she wanted was to see the doctor get hurt.
She pulled the slide back out of her pocket, and then glanced at the guards. “I’m going to go incinerate this thing. If you guys need anything, let me know.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Lana turned away and strode down the corridor to the detention center’s lifts, surprised to see Winter leaning against the wall around the first corner.
“How much did you see?”
“Just about the whole damn thing. Don’t think I woulda done such a good job of it. You really knew what to say to her.”
Lana shrugged and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Yeah, well, I’ve made some pretty stupid decisions. Stupid choices when I was scared, thought I was alone. Thought nobody cared. I didn’t want to see her do that.”
Another vibration shook the deck beneath them, and their worried eyes locked onto one another.
Winter grunted. “If we can get out of this alive, maybe we can finally get off this rock.”
* * * * *
Captain Karth gripped the armrests of his seat in the center of the Tumult’s bridge, as the forward display showed the Orion cruiser firing its engines as it turned to close with Chimin-1.
“OK, people, this is it. Portia, I want the Hammerstrike and Tiberius to take positions ten klicks off our starboard bow, stacked, twenty klicks apart. If that bastard wants to fire anything other than beams at Chimin, we’ll be in a position to take it out.”
“What about the Coalesce ships?” Chief Bradley asked from the weapons station.
“I’ve assigned them to close support on Chimin-1. If the enemy fires missiles or tries to send in boarders, it’s on them to keep the rock safe.”
Chief Bradley nodded and updated approach assessments, which showed as red, orange, and yellow lines on the main holotank.
The Orion ship was still over a hundred thousand kilometers away—outside of effective beam range, with the dust that orbited along with the Chimin asteroids. But what really worried him was the chance that the other stealthed enemy ships were much closer.
“Anything?” he asked his scan officer.
“Nothing, sir, not even a hint of EM or IR out there. But that damn star is still flaring enough that it would be hard to tell an energy leak from one of those ships apart from something flying by in the stellar wind.”
Karth grunted his acknowledgement, getting ready to direct his ships to launch missiles, when Captain Quaker connected from Chimin.
Quaker rumbled a grunt in his mind, then said,
A throaty laugh filled Karth’s mind. <’Captain’ Bubbs. I like the sound of that. Link me up with your combat net, and I’ll feed you my scan data,> Bubbs directed.
Karth wasn’t sure what she was referring to, but he was glad to hear the number of ships confirmed.
A moment later, the Tumult’s tactical holo lit up with two more signatures, these ones within fifty thousand kilometers of the Silstrand ships.
“Shit!” Chief Bradley called out from weapons. “Retargeting, loading solutions.”
* * * * *
Bubbs watched as the three Silstrand cruisers opened fire on the closest of the Orion ships, catching it while it was in stealth, which meant its shields were down.
The beams tore at the enemy ship for a moment, before the vessel got its shields up and began to jink as it returned fire at the defenders.
At the same time, the second of the two stealthed Orion ships dropped shields and boosted toward Chimin.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Bubbs said as she turned the Isolation and accelerated toward the enemy.
She activated her ship’s shields, and the stealth concealment fell away, earning her some ranging shots from the vessel she was now pursuing.
She’d never piloted something this size in combat before, but she had run a number of sims on the flight from Dante to Hanoi. Not only was she ready to take out some Orion scum, she was willing and able. Though her own vessel was closer to a destroyer’s size than a cruiser’s, it was over-built when it came to weapons and engine.
Her weapons systems read fire-ready, and she let loose with two long shots at the Orion ship’s engines, only to have the target jink aside, her beams streaking harmlessly through the void.
“Bastards,” she muttered, waiting for the distance to close before trying again.
The Orion ship slipped to within ten thousand kilometers, and she fired again, this time tagging the cruiser’s shields, but not doing any damage to the ship itself. Then the enemy vessel rotated and fired its engines toward Chimin, shedding velocity.
Damn, they’re about to drop their assault boats, Bubbs thought, hoping that the Coalesce ships would take advantage of the exposed engines to fire on the enemy.
Sure enough, the rear shields on the cruiser lit up from beam strikes from Penelope’s ships, but nothing penetrated enough to do actual damage. At the same time, the Orion vessel opened fire on the Isolation, and Bubbs jinked to the side, now closing faster as the enemy braked while her ship accelerated.
Movement on the enemy’s hull caught her attention, and she realized a forward docking bay was opening.
Oh ho, now we’re talking.
She targeted the bay’s corresponding location on the enemy’s shields with all of the Isolation’s forward beams and the dorsal railgun. Time slowed to a crawl as the Coalesce ships continued to pepper the cruiser with shots—hopefully wearing its shields down—while Bubbs waited for the assault craft to exit.
Six long seconds later, the nose of a dropship eased out of the bay, while at the same time, the enemy fired its forward weaponry at Bubbs.
“Suck it!” she cried out, returning fire just as the assault craft passed through the shields, cutting the thing in half with her beams.
The barrage of rail shots that followed tore through the opening in the protective barrier and slammed into the cruiser’s hull. An explosion blossomed inside its shields.
Bubbs thought she could feel it until she realized that it was her own ship that was shuddering.
“What the hells?” she muttered, feeling silly for talking aloud on an empty bridge.
She glanced at the damage assessment, noting that her port-side proton beam had been damaged. Other than her ship’s reactors running hot to power the shields, nothing else was listed in the damage report, so she returned her attention to the Orion cruiser.
The Coalesce Legion ships had seized the opportunity that Bubbs’ lucky shot had created, and were throwing everything they had at the Orion vessel’s port side.
A moment later, the white-hot glow of the enemy’s shields shedding relativistic particles ceased, and the cruiser’s hull began to glow as beams danced across it.
The Isolation’s railgun flashed ‘fire-ready’ again, and Bubbs let it rip with a full barrage, tearing holes in the cruiser’s hull.
A second later, the ship’s shields dropped entirel
y and the vessel began to broadcast a surrender beacon.
Bubbs ceased paying the ship any heed as she heard Captain Penelope give the enemy a deceleration trajectory and orders to power down all weapons.
She checked the broader battlespace to see that the Silstrand ships were hammering the second Orion cruiser, while the one that had been unstealthed all along ceased its burn and was turning to flee.
“Nice try, asshole” Bubbs grunted as she turned the Isolation and opened the fusion burners up, boosting for the enemy vessel.
she shot back.
She half expected the Silstrand captain to try and order her to hold back, but a moment later, he replied with,
Huh…guy has balls. I like it.
The Silstrand ship was just under fifty thousand kilometers behind Bubbs, and the Orion target was eighty thousand ahead. She weighed her options and decided not to waste beam energy until she was closer.
Though the cruiser was fast, the Isolation was built for running and hiding—which meant it had engines that outmassed the rest of the ship almost two to one. At full burn, the kilometers separating the ships were counting down by the hundreds.
An indicator on her holodisplay lit up, and she saw that the first ship she’d attacked had attempted to release a wave of dropships as it passed by Chimin-1—all of which were destroyed by the Coalesce craft, showering debris across the asteroid.
“Lying bastards,” she swore, glad that anyone who had launched an attack while broadcasting a surrender beacon was tasting vacuum.
Then her attention was pulled back to her target. The distance between them was now only twenty thousand kilometers, and Bubbs decided to fire a few shots to see how they reacted.
Unsurprisingly, the Orion ship returned fire, but she noted that they’d only used half of their rear-facing weapons.
