“There could’ve been ordnance or ammunition stored in there,” the Reformist rep said.
Riahn mentally rolled his eyes. “That story doesn’t add up. The Confed stores something threatening to the Defenders in the same building as Carinian asylum seekers and leaves it completely unguarded? Not likely.”
“The Minister of Unity is correct,” Morvan said on the other side of the room. “This attackwas unprovoked and, by any reasonable standard, unjustifiable.”
Rube Honnas, Dominionist and bellwether among the undecideds, massaged her forehead a moment before speaking up. “But the other story doesn’t make sense either. Satellite surveillance indicates they fell back as soon as they destroyed the building. Why go through the trouble of leveling a house of God for nothing?”
“It wasn’t for nothing,” Morvan replied without hesitation. “In their eyes, it was retaliation for impeding their independence. They see themselves as freedom fighters. And we’re supporting their persecutors.”
Riahn watched Honnas closely to gauge her reaction. She pursed her lips and nodded slowly, still skeptical but connecting the dots.
“Our relationship with the Confed is complicated, admittedly,” Riahn added. “But these insurgents see it as one of mutual benefit. Plain and simple.”
“So the argument is they’re not showing the restraint that a legitimate authority would show,” Honnas said, following the logic.
“Precisely,” Morvan said. “We can deal with leaders who can control their people, but not with angry mobs.”
“But isn’t that exactly what they’re upset about?” asked Lola Arga, a young and fetching Unificationist representative from the coreward edge of Carina. Former news anchor, if Riahn remembered correctly. “We’ve been favoring Earth’s leaders over the Levanti locals for decades, and they’ve had enough of it?”
Riahn saw subtle nods around the table. It incited a newfound passion in Morvan, and the Minister of Arms became even more electrified than before. But instead of jumping into a response, he held back. He planted his hands on his hips, tightened his lips to a thin line, and drew in a long breath through his nostrils. The entire room focused its attention on him.
“We’ve done enough skirting around this issue,” he said, putting on a look of reluctance at facing an unfortunate reality. “Everyone knows that neither the Confed nor the Defenders of Glory are good potential partners. Long term, we cannot tolerate either of them controlling the Sacred Planet. Wewillneed a more permanent solution, and I say that ought to be stepping in to make the Sol system and its surrounds a Carinian protectorate. It sounds aggressive, but the Sacred Planet is our heritage as much as it is anyone else’s. We cannot let it fall to an angry mob, and we cannot let it remain in the hands of a draconian one-world government. Since Earth evidently cannot come to a compromise without violence, Carinaneeds to insert itself. And for that . . . we need this resolution to pass.”
He scanned the quiet conference table for a long, tense moment, staying resolute. Unapologetic. Riahn felt his pulse pounding in his neck and arms, sensing a momentous shift. No more vague rhetoric or circuitous arguments. The time for a concrete action plan had arrived. Riahn cringed as representatives exchanged glances around the table. This would change the meaning of the war resolution vote drastically, and they all knew it.
Rube Honnas finally spoke up. “I think that’s exactly what needs to happen.” The fifty-something, salt-and-pepper haired woman earned the eyes of the whole room. “The Carinian people are tired of half-solutions. Earth doesn’t need a bandaid. It needs a fundamental restructuring. For the sake ofits own people as well as ours.”
“And do what about the Confed?” Arga asked with an air of skepticism. “Dismiss them with a flick of the wrist?”
Mumbles of agreement spread through the room.
“They’re not going to go peacefully,” one of the Reformists added.
“If a peaceful solution was possible, I’d be in favor of it,” Morvan said over the clamoring. It quieted the table again. “Believe me, I pray for the peace of Jerusalem. But sometimes, prayer isn’t enough. If you look at the situation on Earth,really look at it, you’ll see that significant changes need to be made. And we need to be the ones to make them.”
Arga frowned, seeming unconvinced. “Why us?”
Morvan gazed at her with eyes as sincere as Riahn had ever seen them. At times, the man’s features could take on such woundingly genuine expressions as to make Riahn wonder what was real and what was affected. Perhaps, at a certain point, the one bled into the other.
“If not us,” Morvan said in a soft voice, “then who?”
Chapter Forty-Two
Carina Arm, approaching Nexus Point CR 6269 . . .
Davin yanked the straps tighter over his chest in the copilot’s seat while Strange ran checks on the main thrusters. They were about to get a thorough workout.
Out the windshield, lines of light whipped by in curved arcs as their warp bubble carried them way faster than the galactic speed limit toward their exit gate. They’d hit it soon—forty seconds, according to the dashboard countdown timer.
“Ready?” Davin asked.
“Cap,” she said, not sparing a glance away from her work. “If I die like this, I’ll never forgive you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not too keen on buying the farm either.” Davin patted a structural beam angled up into the ceiling from the hull and whispered, “Hold together, old girl.”
The copilot’s dash screen flicked on to a feed from the compact engine room. Kiki was turned sideways inside the narrow curve of space between the pipe- and switch-lined wall and the egg-shaped fusion engine. She looked irritated—her usual face.
“I can’t find it!” she exclaimed. “The labels in here mean nothing to me.”
“There are only two engine nozzle levers in there,” Davin said. “Behind you. Just to the left of the hatch. They’re right there together. Just pinch the handle on both sides and push it up as high as it’ll go. That’ll open ‘em up for a faster burn.”
Kiki craned her neck to look behind her, and a few seconds later nodded and switched off the connection. All Davin could think about was how much he missed having Bron onboard. They’d need a new mechanic soon. Especially considering all the electronics that had short circuited over the years and forced them to do some functions manually, like opening nozzle valves.
“You sure about this, Strange?” he asked.
“I’m sure I don’t want to rot in a Carinian prison for the rest of my life,” she replied. “Or mysteriously disappear to some black site and get my fingernails pulled off.”
Davin grimaced. “When you put it like that . . .”
Fifteen seconds left on the dashboard timer. Davin mashed the shipwide comm button.
“Joan of Arc, time to go! Get to a seat and strap in. You’ve got ten seconds!”
“How far behind you think they are?” Strange asked.
“Corella DeVille?” Davin said. “Couldn’t be more than a few minutes. We can’t waste time. You got the new gate path locked in?”
“Yep,” Strange said quickly. “We got three nexus points to lose ‘em, then two more to the TransTek system.”
Davin took deep breaths.
Three, two, one . . .
The stars suddenly solidified into a sheet across the expanse, an intricate pattern unique to this exact point in the galaxy. Davin gripped the handlebars on either side of his seat.
“Punch it, Strange!”
TheFossa lurched forward. Its hull crackled and creaked all over as the engines roared behind. Everything shook violently. With nothing in the immediate distance out the windshield to compare their location to, it almost seemed like they weren’t moving, only vibrating. But Davin noticed the local star, a dull red dwarf, slowly sliding out of view. The horizontal dashboard monitor displayed their speed as a blur of rising numbers and the G-force alongside it: 1.8 gees. 1.9 gees. 2 gees. 2.1 gees. Davin couldn’t remember
a time they’d ever accelerated this hard.
Meanwhile, the timer began counting upward instead of down. At thirty-five seconds, Davin hauled his heavy arm up and stretched his finger out to switch the copilot’s screen to a rearview camera feed. It showed a solitary spacebend gate. No gunship yet. So far, so good.
The map screen in the center console showed their location as a small, blue arrowhead creeping away from an emerald green notch—representing the spacebend gate—toward another notch a ways off.
A minute in, they’d only covered around a third of the distance. Not enough. Davin flicked his eyes back and forth between the rearview camera feed and the gees. They’d climbed above three now. Still no sign of Corella’s gunship. TheFossa’s hull moaned with the stress, but she was strong. She’d hold up.
Out the windshield, Davin could barely make out a curved, reddish glint in the distance—their escape.
At a minute and a half, they’d hit the halfway point. No gunship in the rearview. Davin started to feel a cautious, jittery excitement building in his chest. Could they make it to the adjacent gate before Corella’s ship emerged behind them? It surprised him to feel a cautious optimism. He could almost start imagining his daring and heroic rescue of Sierra again.
All of that changed at a minute and fifty-two seconds. One moment the rearview showed nothing but empty space around the gate. The next, a cannon-spiked gunship had sprang into existence in front of it and was firing its forward thrusters, apparently trying to figure out what was going on.
“Straaayyynge!” Davin called out through clenched teeth.
“I see’m!” she called back, unable to move her head or unhinge her jaws.
Five gees of gravity was not very conducive to holding a conversation.
The Carinian gunship didn’t hail them, didn’t give any warning whatsoever, just immediately fired off a volley of missiles—seekers, probably. Davin felt the blood freeze in his veins.
“D’coy duns!” Davin mumbled as loud as his crushed lungs would allow.
In the rearview, several gleaming projectiles streaked through the distance between the gunship and theFossa.
Strange reached her fingers to the center console and flicked on the autopilot switch. TheFossa’s AI could guide them safely through the target gate, but it wasn’t equipped to dodge incoming missiles. Next, Strange crept her fingers across the control board to a square set of four red buttons. With a trembling finger, he held down the bottom left button. In seconds, Davin saw a pair of flashing drones about the size of a seabird punch out the back of the fuselage and zigzag away from the ship. Then another pair shot out after them, and another.
The incoming missiles split off in different directions like the fronds of a palm tree, each chasing a different drone. Explosions flared in the rearview and left moving, expanding clouds of debris behind.
At three quarters of the way to their escape gate, the acceleration cut off, all at once. The sudden shift in gravity made Davin and Strange rock forward into their seat harnesses. The straps dug into Davin’s skin so hard it sapped away what little breath he held in his lungs. He shoved himself back in his seat and gasped, taking in a deep, full breath of sweet oxygen.
The gees had dropped to zero, but their speed remained at the same staggeringly high number, even continuing to rise. It was a feature of the autopiloting system. Ships wouldn’t stay inside their warp bubble unless they maintained a steady speed and direction going into the gate. Davin had heard horror stories of what happened when part of a ship slipped outside its warp bubble, and they all involved immediate disintegration.
Strange immediately got back to work, switching off autopilot and taking control again. The rearview showed more missiles on their way, and the gunship had turned to face them now, following. Ahead, the spacebend gate’s guidance lights blinked in unison all around the ring, which had grown much bigger. Its safety seemed so close, yet still too far away.
“Throw out more decoys,” Davin commanded breathlessly.
“We’re out,” Strange said between heaving breaths.
“We’re out?!” Davin exclaimed. “I thought we had ten!”
“Wedid have ten. We used four rescuing Sierra from the creepy Abramists and the other six just now!”
“Can you dodge the missiles?”
Strange’s eyes bounced between various screens and monitors. “Shit. There’s like five of ‘em. I don’t think so.”
“Dammit.” Davin felt a knot form in his guts as he switched the copilot’s screen to show a camera feed from inside the airlock. At the far edge of the room, by the slanted ramp door that sealed off the room, floated a messy cluster of items.His items. “I figured this might happen. Thought of a backup plan.”
“Backup plan?” she asked, distracted by steering. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s a longshot,” he muttered. “But it might work . . . might work.”
He took one more look at the items swirling around the in airlock. Rare gems, pendants, medals, plaques, blown glass artwork, a blazer knife, a wildly hairy stuffed animal head . . . visual memories of his glory days of looting. They had been the only expendable items he could find on the ship—at least the only ones that didn’t require unbolting. Among the chaotic flow of knickknacks, Davin spotted the microscope that he’d taken from Jai’s old room. And then Jabron’s old metal sign he’d yanked off the wall. “Property of JABRON.”
That was the past. Davin had to let it go.
He tapped a button to split the screen, showing a command menu on one half and the rearview feed on the other. He had no idea if this would work, but they were out of options.
“Keep it steady, Strange.”
She glanced over, confused. “What—you got something in the airlock? What do you have in there?”
“Just some things I don’t need anymore,” he muttered, concentrating on the incoming missiles.
They were closing the distance rapidly, traveling many times faster than them. Closer, closer, closer. . . . Finally, the missiles converged behind theFossa, directly to the rear of the airlock ramp door. Davin pressed a button on the command screen and opened the airlock door. Knickknacks flew out in a big, glistening cloud. The missiles wobbled, taking hits as they plowed through the field of small, metallic items.
Davin glimpsed Jabron’s sign flipping through space, straight into one of the missiles. That did the trick. It exploded in a ball of fire that blew outward and was snuffed out in an instant. The first explosion set off another missile, which set off another. A chain reaction carried across the entire cluster of missiles, creating a hail of blasted shrapnel and debris. TheFossa wasn’t going fast enough to escape it.
Shards of metal pelted the aft of the ship, causing them to fishtail. It sounded like a chorus of children playing the drums on pots and pans back there. TheFossa’s body thrusters fired to compensate, working hard but unable to stop the quivery movements. Davin looked up at the spacebend gate now looming huge out the windshield. They would enter it soon, and not at all in the right conditions.
“Strange, if we don’t stabilize before—”
“I know, Cap!” she shouted. “I’m trying!”
One more bang slammed them from behind, ringing the hull of theFossa like a bell and knocking them out of balance. One side of the spacebend shifted out of view from the windshield as the other pulled alongside them.
Strange wrenched the steering handles to correct, but the ship’s thrusters couldn’t work fast enough. “Shit, shit,shit!”
Davin gripped the handlebars beside his seat as they went into the gate. All the stars disappeared in the blink of an eye, everything turning to a deep and unending blackness.
Chapter Forty-Three
Sagittarius Arm, on the planet Triumph . . .
Zantorian sipped espresso from a dainty china cup and considered what to do.
He and Drazen, Lord General of Eagle, sat at a glassy obsidian table set amidst the verdant, manicured garden atrium
of the Diamond Castle. Golden trellises harbored green vines snaking up and sprouting giant flower faces of brilliant yellows, oranges, reds, and purples. Immaculately trimmed hedges formed a natural barrier around the open, grassy area in which they enjoyed their afternoon coffee and zucchini sandwiches.
On the far side of the atrium, a stringed quartet played smooth, velvety music that resounded throughout the vast chamber. At each gap in the hedges, a pair of nanoflex armored guards stood holding blazer pikes, backs turned to the Grand Lumis.
“Six days,” Zantorian said, staring at two uneaten, triangular zucchini sandwiches on his plate. “Six days to the war resolution vote in Carina. My sources say it’s close. Anyone’s guess which way it will go.”
Drazen, resembling a giant in the little cushioned wicker chair, finished the last bit of his sandwich, washed it down with black coffee, then ran a white napkin over his bristly face. His beady eyes, hidden under an imposing brow, gazed across the table without intimidation.
“No word from Velasco or his agents?” he asked in his curiously soft-spoken voice.
Zantorian shook his head. “He knows the predicament he’s put us in. He knows his actions heighten the risk of a premature initiation of war. Yet he persists in his campaign against the Terrans.”
Drazen pushed his chair back enough to cross his meaty legs. “With respect, my lord, it’s my understanding that Carina views the rebels in Jerusalem as a greater threat than Swan.”
“As of now, they do,” Zantorian agreed. “The rebels’ behavior is erratic, illogical. I suspect some covert ploy is at play. I’ve already dispatched my champion to get to the bottom of it. I’m confident the situation in Jerusalem will reverse shortly. It’s Velasco I’m not so sure about.”
Horns of the Ram (Dominion Book 2) Page 20
