Project Starfighter

by Stephen J Sweeney

  @OverlookE – I would like to know who is flying that fighter.

  @KethlanK – I have received an update from the space station at Ceradse. A man was seen entering the Firefly in a docking bay just before the arrival of the Grand Vizier and her escorts to Spirit. He has been identified as Chris Bainfield.

  @OverlookE – That name sounds familiar.

  @KethlanK – He was part of the uprising, and was thought to have been killed around a month ago. It seems this information was incorrect. He is now believed to be working alongside Sid Wilson. Wilson is the last remaining on our Most Wanted list.

  @SkillmanL – I want both men killed. Make sure it actually happens this time.

  @KethlanK – As you wish, sir.

  @OverlookE – Commander, before you go – I received a peculiar report from a drone operating within the Zetaman Human Interface Research Facility at Murdar, informing me that a breakout attempt had been made by Ursula Lexx. Can you comment on this, at all?

  @KethlanK – The drone is confused. I put in a request to simulate Lexx escaping from the facility, to observe her performance and see whether or not she attempted to draw on her abilities. I advised that I would be present in the simulation, to add to the authenticity.

  @SkillmanL – Is what you’re saying correct, Commander?

  @KethlanK – Yes, sir.

  @SkillmanL – Fine. Have the drone taken out of service and reset. We cannot have malfunctioning drones working at such an important location; it represents too much of a security risk.

  @OverlookE – Sir, as we have now discovered the location of Phoebe Lexx, should we now not kill the first twin?

  @SkillmanL – You seem very keen to dispose of this younger woman, Erik. But as I have said before, I do not want her killed until both women have been located, brought together, and their identities confirmed. We cannot risk a repeat of the drone mutiny we experienced with William Benedict, should we get the wrong person. Keep Ursula Lexx under observation until we have found her sister. Do not disobey me!

  @OverlookE – Yes, sir. I won’t, sir.

  @SkillmanL – Commander, your mission as of now is to track down that Firefly, Bainfield, and Wilson. I want all three of them eliminated.

  @KethlanK – At once. I will deal with it personally.

  Chapter 12

  It took Chris and Sid the best part of a day to discover the remains of the Resistance group at Hail. Given how the survivors on Ceradse had treated their former allies, turning Jasmine Wooding over so quickly to the drone that had come to the diner, Chris half-expected the men and women there to take one look at Sid and himself and offer them up to WEAPCO, in exchange for protection.

  The Resistance survivors had retreated to an underground base that had been constructed in secret, during the early years of the rebellion’s formation. Hail was a barren world, and Sid and Chris stumbled across the base almost by accident. Being notified by the Artful Dodger’s AI that they were being discreetly tracked as they flew over a mountainous region of Hail’s largest continent, the two had hopped into Sid’s Manx and descended to the surface. It had almost been their undoing.

  “A good job you broadcast your identities so quickly,” Hugo Webb, the scout that had met the pair, said. “We only saw the WEAPCO freighter, so would have shot you out of the sky in seconds.”

  Chris looked about himself as they walked through the base. The place wasn’t quite as glamorous as New Chile had been (well, parts of it, at any rate). This place had a real underground feel; it featured cold, dark metal, with serviceable lighting, and basic accommodation and living standards.

  “How long has this place existed?” Chris asked.

  “The past forty years,” Webb said.

  “A lot of people here?”

  “Not many,” Hugo said, with a small shrug. “Of those that survived the assault on the fleet, only a few returned. Everyone else ran away and hid. I guess they were too afraid that the Corporation might nuke the planet in their search for us.”

  A reasonable assumption, Chris thought. The base extended deep underground, with several entire levels being set aside for hydroponics. Everything else was focused on constructing weapons and parts for starships, on training personnel, and gearing up for the push against WEAPCO.

  Or it had been, once.

  The three came to a large open area, some sort of communal living space. Men and women were standing around, settled in chairs and keeping themselves busy with various tasks. Their attention turned to Sid and Chris as the men entered; Chris gave them a silent nod.

  “And WEAPCO doesn’t know that this place exists at all?” Chris asked Hugo.

  “To be honest, I don’t know,” Hugo said, sitting down on one of the chairs with a heavy sigh. “Maybe. I think that since they intercepted the fleet over Ceradse so soon after we were in place and ready to commence jump that they have been watching us for quite some time.”

  Chris nodded. “They did that with the mercenaries, too. They decided to herd them all into one place and then take them all down in one go.”

  Hugo nodded. “Yes, we saw the Grand Vizier enter the system. God knows how anyone managed to stop it. Do you know who did?”

  “Yes. Me.” Chris kept his tone even, his expression serious.

  “What?” Hugo looked at him sceptically. “You? How?”

  “As the frigate was moving towards the asteroid group, I targeted its engines. I then had Sid kill its Hall thrusters so that it couldn’t slow itself down, and let it smash itself into an asteroid. I figured that since I couldn’t bring an asteroid to it, I would bring it to the asteroid.” He shrugged.

  Hugo shook his head. “No, that’s impossible,” he said. “You couldn’t get near a ship that size without getting blown to pieces. Its defences are too high, for a start. An ordinary fighter wouldn’t last more than a few seconds facing off against something like that.”

  “I wasn’t using an ordinary fighter,” Chris said, before elaborating further on the abilities of the Firefly, and then moving on to discuss his plans for the future. “If Sid and I could do all that ourselves, imagine what we could all do together,” he finished.

  He glanced once more over the men and women here. All of them looked defeated, drained, and tired. He had hoped that his story might give them strength. It didn’t appear to have done so. Few had bothered to listen, and those that had didn’t seem to care much for the tale.

  Hugo shook his head. “No one wants to fight anymore,” he said, rising from his seat and starting off further into the base, Chris and Sid tailing after him. “A war against WEAPCO isn’t something that any of us want. Not something we think we can win, either. We’re resigned to that fact, now.”

  “What happened over Ceradse was a minor setback ...” Chris started.

  “A minor setback?” Hugo stared at him, quite appalled. “Having a fleet that you have spent the best part of forty years secretly constructing being blasted to pieces in a matter of hours is not a minor setback. That’s a goddamn disaster!”

  “If—” Chris began.

  “We spent the same amount of time selecting and training crew from the very best of the volunteers, making sure they weren’t acting against us,” Hugo interrupted. “We had to live double lives, find funds, work our fingers to the bone, risk endangering our friends and families every day for four decades, only to fall at the first hurdle.

  “WEAPCO were watching and tracking the Resistance for years. They knew all the names of the major players involved. We saw it on the news – they called out everyone within hours of the fleet going down, declaring them terrorists and criminals. They got everyone.”

  “Almost everyone,” Chris said, with a sideways glance at Sid.

  Hugo studied the skinny, floppy-haired youth standing before him. It finally clicked. “I thought you looked familiar. Sid Wilson, the computer expert.”

  “Yes,” Sid said. “I was one of the people charged with breaking into WEAPCO’s systems.”

&
nbsp; Hugo sneered. “Didn’t do much good though, did it? Didn’t know they had so much on us, did you? Some hacker you turned out to be.” Hugo continued walking.

  “Hey!” Chris called, grabbing hold of the man’s arm, stopping him. “Sid worked just as hard as anyone else in the Resistance. If he had known about any potential ambush, he would’ve let us know. Do you think he just decided not to tell us and let everyone go to their deaths?”

  Hugo glared at Chris, opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. Chris said nothing, and simply folded his arms, waiting.

  “I’m sorry,” Hugo said. “I’m sorry. It’s just ...” He looked anywhere but at the two men, seemingly not knowing how to go on. “How did you escape?” he finally asked, changing the subject.

  Sid told him, detailing his and Chris’ escape from Tira, their time with the mercenaries, and of how he had managed to uncover secured WEAPCO data. Despite all this, Hugo still didn’t appear at all impressed. Perhaps he truly no longer cared.

  “Look, we need only get a few ships together, and we can start over,” Chris said. “How many do you have here?”

  “A handful,” Hugo said.

  “What kind? Fighters?”

  “The ones back in the bay,” Hugo said, indicating the direction they had come from. “What you saw there is it.”

  “That’s it?” Chris asked, incredulously.

  “That’s it.” Hugo shrugged.

  Chris glanced back towards the bay. The only real fighter he recalled seeing there was a Valkyrie. Powerful craft from what he knew of them, more powerful than the Firefly, but nothing special. The Firefly could best it with only a few simple upgrades. The Valkyrie was probably the only offensive craft left over from the failed Resistance.

  “We’ve disconnected the AI control,” Hugo said. “It’s still in there but can’t interact with the central system. We didn’t want to try to remove it completely, as we weren’t sure what effect it might have on the ship itself.”

  “What about the others?” Chris asked.

  “They’re mostly standard commercial spacecraft,” Hugo said. “Nothing more.”

  “Weaponry?”

  “A few guns on some, but that’s it.”

  “They could be improved,” Chris said, but Hugo could only scoff. “Look,” Chris continued. “I have access to one of the most advanced WEAPCO fighters in existence. It supports a human-AI interface that allows me to control and talk to it with my mind. I can increase my perception of the world around me, effectively slowing time. It also acts as a flight assistant. I took down over a dozen Talons the first time I was in the seat, without suffering any damage myself.”

  “Good for you,” Hugo said.

  “Hugo, I don’t get it,” Chris tried again. “Do you want to live as a slave forever? For the Corporation to dictate your life, telling you what you can buy and sell, where you can live, and what you can own? Where you can and can’t go, what you can and can’t do? How soon before they tighten things further?”

  Hugo seemed to struggle for words for a time, before he indicated that the two younger men follow him once again. “Come, let me show you something.”

  “What?” Chris asked.

  “What you can have if you choose to stay here.”

  ~

  Hugo started his tour in the bay Chris and Sid’s Manx had been brought to, showing them the vessels docked there.

  “These two are scout craft. We use them for recon work. As I said, they are lightly weaponized, but possess low-grade particle cannons and nothing else. The others are general transport vessels that allow interplanetary travel. As you would expect, none of them have independent jump drives, and they are reliant on gates.”

  Then Hugo walked them to a lift and began to show them various other aspects of the base. The living quarters were tatty and unflattering, but they were at least warm, spacious, and offered a fair amount of privacy. They could easily be modified and extended, too, should one desire that.

  They next stopped at the workshops and monitoring stations. “The workshops give us the means with which to repair and maintain equipment,” Hugo said, “as well as providing the tools and systems to enable us to research and build better ones. We were thinking of trying to rework one of the WEAPCO drones, to serve as a robotic assistant—”

  “You really don’t want to do that,” Sid interrupted the man.

  “Because they explode,” Hugo said. “Yes. Thankfully we found that out before we brought any in.”

  Hugo continued the tour. A level down, Hugo introduced Chris and Sid to a communications and entertainment room. Despite being on an otherwise uninhabited planet, the base was still able to receive television broadcasts. Right now, the one person here was watching the news about the battle that had recently been fought around the Alpaca Group. The news channel, being owned and run by WEAPCO, was reporting that the battle had been a massive counter-terrorist operation, that being the reason why the Star Killer-class frigate had been dispatched. The report went on to say that the battle had become so fierce that the warship had sacrificed itself in order to protect the peoples of Spirit. The man watching the channel soon grew bored of listening to the propaganda and started to cycle through the other channels. All the major entertainment stations were available – sports, drama, movies, music, comedy.

  “We receive the broadcast transmissions that come into Spirit as normal,” Hugo explained. “We decrypt it as necessary and carry on. No problems there, either. All the rooms and living space here are able to receive broadcasts. News is generally real time, while everything else is on a delay of a few hours. No big deal. It gives us a small window into the wider world, down here below ground.”

  Chris gave no comment and allowed Hugo to show them around the rest of the base. There was a supply of fresh water, drawn up from a substantial underground reservoir. Vegetables were grown and tended by volunteers and automated systems, milk being produced from soy beans. No regular supply of meat, though. There was no one with the expertise to rear animals, not even chickens, and no space to do so, anyway. Meat was sometimes shipped back by people who left the base for a time. They did not bring a lot back with them, however, and it never lasted long. Most were learning to go without it, now.

  “We are self-sufficient, as you can see,” Hugo said finally, walking the two back to the bay. “We have everything we need – food, water, power, company. It’s safe, secure, and there will never be anyone to bother us. We have mostly done away with money, and if we need anything we can take transports to the mining stations, or jump to Ceradse and get whatever. We trade minerals and raw materials that we are able to mine from around the planet. It’s not a lot, but it’s more than enough to get us by.”

  Chris looked about himself once more, and then at Sid, who only shrugged. “So, this is it?” he asked Hugo. “This is the end of the war?”

  “There never was a war, Chris, that was always a pipe dream,” Hugo said with a sigh. “You want to know why we aren’t fighting. What I want to know is, why are you continuing to do so? You can try to fight WEAPCO all you like, but you’ll never win.”

  “Not with that attitude,” Chris said.

  Hugo looked at the floor, but said nothing.

  “So, you’re just giving up?” Chris said.

  Hugo shook his head. “We did the best we could with the time and resources we had. I’ve sacrificed much of my life to a futile cause. I was just like you when all this started – in my twenties, thinking I had the world at my feet, that I was invincible. I’m pushing sixty now, and I just want to live out the rest of my life in peace.” He looked about himself. “And you know, this isn’t such a bad place to do it.”

  “But what about everyone else?” Chris demanded. “What about the people that you were fighting for?”

  “They’re not my problem anymore. This is my home, now. The people here – they are my family.”

  “That’s very selfish of you,” Chris blurted out, unable to hel
p himself.

  “Chris, please try to understand,” Hugo said. “We dislike the Corporation as much as anyone. But there’s just no point in continuing to fight them. They have a stranglehold, and we’ll never defeat them, no matter how hard we push.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Chris said. “Surely you can’t all think this way here? What about everyone else, all the others that got back? Where are they?”

  “They’ve gone,” Hugo said. “They’ve seen the light.”

  “Can’t beat ’em, join ’em, eh? Cowards.” Chris wondered if Hugo might rise to that, but the older man’s expression remained as downbeat as ever.

  “I said before I showed you around that you’re welcome to all of this if you stay,” Hugo said. “The offer’s still open. There’s no point in going back out there and attempting to fight the Corporation again when you can build a life here, instead. WEAPCO might make life difficult—”

  “They’re a totalitarian regime,” Chris said.

  “—but they largely leave us alone and will let us get on with it. We lose some money on what we mine ...”

  “A seventy percent cut is not ‘some’.”

  Hugo once again ignored him. “We won’t do any harm here, and they are sure to ignore us. We’re not a threat to them or their ideals.”

  Flabbergasted, Chris turned to leave. Hugo grabbed his arm, lightly.

  “You can have a good life here, Chris, the both of you. Why go throwing it away for a cause that no one believes in anymore? I mean, honestly, what are you going to do? Take on the entire WEAPCO naval fleet all by yourself?”