by Richard Fox
“What’re your names?” he asked.
“I’m Chris Dinkins,” the older of the two boys said. “This is my brother Ben. That’s Suzy Oldman.”
Roland opened the case on his lower back and brought out shrink-wrapped vac suits.
“You know how to put these on?” he asked.
“I want to go home! I want my mommy!” Suzy screamed.
Roland looked at the delicate spacesuits held in his giant fingers. Armor was designed for brute force, not something so intricate as putting a child into an oversized vac suit.
“I know how to work the boxes,” Chris said. “I saw the big one doing it right before they put us inside on Oricon. It’s easy.”
“Show me,” Roland said. Chris went to the girl inside the half-open coffin and closed it. He touched two fingers to a shiny panel, but nothing happened.
“I know.” The boy said and picked up the Ixio’s hand, touching the panel with it. The box hissed and sealed shut. Roland did a scan and found it to be airtight and shielded enough to handle the void.
“I need you all to get inside.” Roland pointed to empty coffins.
“No!” Ben howled.
“Listen to me.” Roland tapped his chest. “I am inside something just like that right now. I get scared every single time I put on my armor. Right now, I need you all to be braver, stronger than I am. Find the iron in your hearts and get inside so we can leave.”
“You’ll take us home?” Suzy asked.
“The first person you see when you wake up will be your parents. I swear,” Roland said.
A Sanheel spike ripped through the wall and cracked the top of a tank. Blue liquid gushed out and spread across the floor.
“Come on, Ben.” Chris led his brother to an empty stasis pod. Ben stepped inside and pressed his fists to his eyes. He froze a split second later. Chris sealed the pod with the dead alien’s hand.
Suzy stood in front of a pod, her hands clutched to her chest.
“I don’t know, Chris,” she said. “The last time I—”
Roland bumped his knuckles against her and pushed her into the pod. Chris slammed it shut.
“Thanks,” Chris said. “She’s always like that.” He passed the alien’s hand to Roland and backed into the last stasis pod.
“You remind me of that one armor in the movie everyone’s seen about the Dotari,” Chris said.
“Don’t have time for this, little man,” Roland said as he gently gripped the Ixion’s wrist between two massive fingertips.
“I think his name was Elias.”
Roland shut the coffin and sealed the boy inside.
One of the chamber’s side doors opened and Rakka came flooding through. Roland activated his flamethrower and swept the flames over the intruders. The room filled with black smoke and high-pitched screams from the alien foot soldiers. Roland looked up at the smoke billowing across the roof.
“I think we’re near the hull,” he said. “Burn cord.”
He took a canister out of the box on his lower back and attached the bright red cord to the ceiling, forming a rough hexagon. When he touched the cord with his flamethrower’s pilot light, the entire length ignited. Molten metal dripped down as the cord burned through the ceiling. Gray smoke spat through the gap as the cord went higher and higher.
The smoke stopped, then the ceiling burst up like a cork. The void sucked all the smoke out of the hole in seconds along with the rest of the chamber’s air. The rest of the Dragoons came into the chamber, their shields pitted and chipped.
“That breach activated their emergency bulkheads,” Gideon said. “Cut them off from us. Doubt it’ll stay that way long.”
“Time to leave, yeah?” Aignar asked.
Roland jumped up and climbed out of the still-smoldering hole cut through the hull. Aignar came up after him and took his anti-grav impeller off his back.
“Roland, where’s your—never mind, I’ll do it.” Data wires snaked out of his wrist and into the impeller.
“Catch.” Cha’ril tossed a stasis pod up the breach and into Roland’s waiting hands. He passed the box with the child inside to Aignar.
“Jolly Greens, this is Dragoon-3 requesting immediate evac,” Roland broadcasted. He caught another box and handed it off to Aignar, repeating the transmission again and again while shuttling the coffins out of the Kesaht ship.
“Nothing heard, sir,” Roland said to Gideon.
“I think I see them.” Aignar sent a target icon to Roland, a point well behind the battleship. Roland zoomed in. A hull section of the battleship floated in the void, turning end over end. On one half was the denethrite bomb.
“Not them,” Roland said. “But the Kesaht did find our parting gift.” Roland caught the last of children.
Aignar had all the coffins pressed into a rough sphere against his impeller wedge, which pulled the coffins against it like a magnet.
“You can reverse the anti-grav waveform,” Aignar said. “Make it pull instead of push. Course it does strain the system awful hard. It’ll burn out in less than an hour. Times like this I wish we had rope in our kits.”
Cha’ril and Gideon crawled out of the ship as Roland looked across the hull to Oricon, which seemed farther away than ever.
“I think…I think I’m out of good ideas,” Roland said.
“We need to signal for pickup.” Gideon put himself between the stasis pods and the distant denethrite bomb. “Shield wall.”
Roland unfolded his shield and came shoulder to shoulder with Gideon and Cha’ril.
Gideon touched the side of his helm, and Roland ducked behind his shield.
A blinding flash of light broke across the battleship, like a new sun had been born and burned away in an instant. A surge of heat flooded his shield and spiked into his arm, and he felt pain in his arm within the womb, a psychosomatic reaction to the damage his armor suffered.
“That should get their attention,” Gideon said.
“Contact.” Cha’ril pointed over the edge of the battleship where crescent-shaped fighters arced over the hull.
“Think they’ll fire and risk hitting their own ship?” Aignar asked. Yellow bolts of energy spat out of the fighters and shot overhead. Bolts struck the side of the cannon battery, smashing the armor into fragments.
“Dumb question.” Aignar fired gauss shells at the oncoming fighters, breaking the wingtip off one and sending it spinning into the alien ship next to it. The two exploded into fireballs against the hull.
“They can see us from the bridge.” Cha’ril planted her anchor and brought her rail cannons to bear on the crystalline pyramid, then loaded a shell into the chamber.
Roland took a fighter’s energy bolt to the shield and skidded back across the hull, stopping only after Gideon grabbed him by the shoulder. Roland pumped shots after the fighter as it flew overhead. One round connected and snapped the alien ship in half. The two sides tumbling into the void like loose scythes.
“Cha’ril, I want you to miss,” Gideon said.
“To what?” Cha’ril did a double take at the lieutenant.
“You heard me.” Gideon fired on four more fighters coming over the prow of the battleship.
Cha’ril’s rail cannon flashed, the effect of being near a rail cannon firing much more subdued in the void than on the moon’s surface. The remains of a cannon battery toward the far edge of the ship tumbled away into the void.
“I missed the bridge,” she said.
In the pyramid, the Sanheel crew looked up from their workstations. The red-clad captain pushed aside the other centaur he’d grabbed as an impromptu shield.
“Reload,” Gideon said.
Cha’ril held up another shell, then slowly and deliberately put it into the chamber.
“I can’t fire again for two minutes,” she said. “The capacitors need to charge.”
“We know that, but they don’t,” Gideon said.
The Sanheel captain waved his arms and the fighters broke off their attack
and flew to the other side of the battleship.
“I am off standing with a Mexican, correct?” Cha’ril asked.
“Almost,” Roland said. “Just keep looking like you want an excuse to blow them all to hell.”
“I don’t need an excuse. I need permission.”
“Dragoons, this is Jolly Green 6,” came over the radio. “You’ve got a swarm of bogies on the ventral side. My escorts don’t have the combat power to break through and make extraction.”
“This is Gideon,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve reached a tentative agreement with the Kesaht. Bring the Mules in for pickup and hold fire. Can you relay a tight-beam message to Captain Sobieski?”
“Negative on tight beam, wide only. Enemy likely monitoring.”
“Tell him a trained Uhlan with a lance could spear a loaf of bread out of a man’s hand. I expect he can do better,” Gideon said.
Cha’ril looked at Roland, who shrugged.
Two Mules approached, their bottom turrets turning from side to side.
“Cha’ril, you and I stay here until the children are clear with Roland and Aignar,” Gideon said. “Roland, the instant your Mule gets clear, you send a wide-band message to Sobieski. Tell him ‘ogien.’”
“Yes, sir.” Roland pulled a coffin off the impeller and waited for a Mule to arrive. It stopped a few yards above the hull and spun around. He pushed the stasis pod into the Mule, where the transport’s internal gravity gripped it and sent it to the deck. The crew pushed the coffins to the back of the cargo bay and frantically strapped them down while Roland and Aignar got the rest of the children inside.
“Lock up and go,” Gideon said, waving the second Mule closer.
As the Mule lifted its nose, Roland jumped off the battleship and powered up the mag lock on his forearm. His arm smacked against the hull, and Gurski, in the turret pod, waved to him. Roland mimed crushing his head.
Aignar locked on and the Mule fired its afterburners to leap away from the battleship. Eagles fell in beside the transport.
“Captain Sobieski,” Roland sent on every channel his armor could access, “Gideon sends ‘ogien.’”
On the battleship, Cha’ril’s rail cannon flashed and the ship’s bridge shattered into a million fragments.
“What the hell are they doing?” Aignar asked. Roland watched as Cha’ril and Gideon loaded up onto the other Mule. Beneath the battleship, a swarm of fighters broke loose and flew toward the upper half of the ship.
A red line zipped up from the moon and slammed into the Kesaht ship. Fire billowed from the impact and hunks of hull plating shot out, destroying a dozen crescent-shaped fighters.
“That was from a rail cannon,” Roland said.
Four more rail shells struck in quick succession, ripping through the flight decks. The battleship canted to one side, exposing her ruined hull. Two more shells streaked up from Oricon and punched clean through the ship. Fire spattered from the damage as the ship’s atmosphere bled out.
The battleship exploded, shooting the prow forward and spreading the rest of the hull across the sky like chaff pulled from wheat.
“Gideon? Cha’ril?” Roland asked over the broad spectrum.
He switched his sensors to IR, searching for the heat plume from their Mule’s afterburners, but the remains of the Kesaht ship clouded his sensors.
“No,” Aignar said. “No, no, no…”
“Dragoons, this is Gideon.”
Roland thumped a fist against his chest to thank the Saint.
“Took a hit on our way out,” Gideon said. “Crew is unharmed, but our Mule is disabled. Send a search-and-rescue bird at your earliest convenience. By that I mean before we burn up in the atmosphere or we find another piece of space junk with our name on it.”
“On it, sir,” Roland said, “and sir, you’re right not to trust the Kesaht to let us get away.”
“If an enemy wants honor or mercy, they need to show some first. Get the kids back to their parents. Well done, Dragoons.”
****
Captain Sobieski knelt on the cracked pavement of a supply yard, his rail cannons smoking hot. He watched as the last of the Kesaht battleship’s burning wreckage faded away, then he raised his anchor back into his leg and stood up.
He turned to the armor still kneeling in the remains of the alien artillery the Iron Dragoons had destroyed. Smoke and smoldering metal formed a hellscape around the armor, and damaged residential towers creating a battered skyline beyond the yard.
“Steel on steel.” Sobieski struck a fist against his chest. “Good shooting.”
The armor returned the salute and replaced their rail cannons on their backs.
“Orders, sir?” asked Lieutenant de Saxe of the Chasseurs.
“Get to the spaceport. The admiral will need us soon,” Sobieski said.
Chapter 15
The 14th was in the middle of a slug fest. The outer edge of Lettow’s frigates had meshed with the Kesaht’s screen and were trading cannon and rail blows at what amounted to knife fighting range for void war ships.
The aliens’ crescent-shaped fighters died in droves to the fighters off the Gettysburg and Falklands and his ships’ point defense turrets, but there were so many of them. Gor’thig’s fighters had managed to inflict some damage, and their mere presence was a distraction, like trying to fight with gnats in your eyes and ears.
“Hormond, where’s my hook?” Lettow asked the Falkland’s commander.
“Got twelve bombers coming up on the flagship.” Hormond appeared in the holo screen. “Can put fifteen torps in space. Spent most of our ordnance on those damn claw ships. Give them three minutes and keep the enemy looking straight ahead.”
In the holo field, a small group of bombers and a few fighter escorts closed on the rear of the Kesaht battleship. The engines created a sensor baffle that should mask the bombers’ approach until they launched their torpedoes.
A pipe in the bulkhead on the back of the bridge burst, punching a dent toward the holo tank. Steam shot through a crack in the blister.
The communications lieutenant screamed and gripped her helmet. She tried to twist it off, but a sailor pinned her arms to her sides in a hug before she could spill her air into the near vacuum on the bridge.
She shook her head from side to side.
“There was a transmission off Oricon!” she shouted. “Cut through everything!”
Lettow reached into the holo tank and pulled the moon to the fore. The battleship that was in distant orbit was in ruin, the hull perforated by multiple rail cannon strikes.
“Sir, the flagship.” Strickland moved the holo image back to the battle. The last remaining Kesaht battleship accelerated forward, the engines burning bright.
“Raven three!” Hormond said, announcing that the bombers had loosed their torpedoes.
The massive Kesaht ship burned forward, on a course straight to the Crucible gate. A course that took them perilously close to the Ardennes.
“None of the other ships are trying to break through…” Lettow said.
Behind the battleship, cruisers swerved into the torpedoes’ line of fire, taking the hits meant for the flagship.
“Guns, ready a full volley when the ship passes,” Lettow said. “Helm, adjust course to give us a clear shot.”
The Kesaht ship barreled forward, its shields flaring as rail cannon shots hammered away at the prow.
“Come on, you bastard.” Lettow gripped the holo tank and said a quick prayer to Saint Kallen.
The fleeing battleship came parallel with the Ardennes and her rail cannons fired. Lettow felt the ship shudder with each shot. Shells hit the shields covering the front half of the ship, the after effects fading out just ahead of the Kesaht’s engines. A shell smashed into the flank and a gout of fire exploded from the ship. Two more rounds hit home, and a still burning engine broke off the ship. When the Ardennes struck again, every hit bounced off shields.
“They’re rotating their shields,” Lettow said. �
�Keep up the fire…” He touched a cruiser on the opposite side of the Kesaht ship. “Hamburg, you should have a clear shot from your angle. Hit them!”
The cruiser’s turrets slewed toward its new target. The rail cannons flashed and scored direct hits on the battleship’s hangars. The ship trailed fire from its belly…but it didn’t stop moving.
“Their fighters.” Strickland pulled up a gun camera feed where a turret blasted apart the crescent fighters. The enemy fighters had shut down, traveling on their last vector.
The battlecruisers that had been hidden around the Crucible changed course, maneuvering behind the Kesaht flag ship.
“Hamburg, disengage,” Lettow sent. Fire from the alien ships he’d been fighting had slackened. Their ships meandered away from each other. The 14th did not relent, destroying the ships one by one.
“Pursue?” Strickland asked.
“No.” Lettow shook his head. “We break formation to chase them down and we’ll be vulnerable to what we’re already fighting. They want to run…let them.”
It took another hour to mop up the last of the Kesaht ships. On long range scanners, Lettow watched the battleship flee through the Crucible gate along with the last of the alien fleet. He breathed a sigh of relief when the wormhole collapsed and the Crucible remained in one piece.
“What happened?” Strickland asked. “That ship around Oricon wasn’t going to make a difference to the fight. If they got those ambush ships into the fight…I doubt we’d be talking right now.”
“Armor,” Lettow said. “Armor happened. They did something to send the Kesaht running with their tail between their legs.”
He touched a screen and a smattering of life pods appeared in the holo field.
“We can piece together what happened later. Get search and rescue in the void, we need to save our people,” he looked over his surviving ships, all of which sported damage, “and lick our wounds.”
Chapter 16
At the spaceport, Roland pressed Tomenakai’s fingers against the last stasis box. The lid hissed open and the light around Ben faded away. The little boy pulled his fists away from his eyes and blinked at his brother and his parents, the Dinkins.
