by J. N. Chaney
Dash swore. The big ship had to go. The trouble was, it was specifically built to sustain punishment and shrug off damage.
On the outside.
How about on the inside?
“Amy, Conover, cover me. I’m about to get shockingly intimate with this big bastard.”
“Last time I heard that was in a bar on Passage, right before closing time,” Amy shot back. But Dash could hear the tension in her voice. All of the mechs had taken some damage, and the battle was beginning to wear on all of them. The longer it went on, the more ships and people would die.
“Dash, could really use a hand here!”
It was Leira. Dash checked tactical and saw that she and Jexin had somehow become cut off from the rest of the fleet and were being swarmed by Deeper fighters and light ships, backed up by a battleship and a trio of heavy cruisers. The two mechs fought tenaciously, but if they weren’t helped, they might soon be overwhelmed.
“Dammit—okay, Leira, on my way—”
“Not necessary, Dash. We’ve got this,” a new voice said.
It was Steenowat, the leader of the N’Teel’s military contingent. She’d worked closely with Jexin, and despite some initial friction, the two had become close friends.
Dash did a quick appraisal. The N’Teel had already dispatched a flight of Moonbane fighters to help Leira and Jexin. A squadron of N’Teel warships had peeled out of the battleline and now accelerated behind the fighters, moving to the rescue. A squadron of Hriki ships immediately moved in from the reserve, taking their place.
Armed with Unseen tech and weapons, it was a potent force, but was it potent enough?
“Lori, Dash.”
“Go ahead.”
“Go and help the N’Teel relieve Leira and Jex. I need to focus on taking this big Deeper ship out of action, or this thing may not go our way.”
“Roger that.”
Clipped and succinct. In less than a year, Lori had gone from wide-eyed, rookie mech pilot to smoothly professional commander. Just as Alora Ellsworth, Captain of the Taffy, was an inspiration, so was Lori.
Dash yanked his attention away from Leira and focused back on the Deeper dreadnought.
“Okay, Sentinel, take all the weapons offline except for the power-sword and the blast-cannon. Shunt all the power you save into the shield.”
“Done. I’ve also shifted additional energy into the power-sword to ensure it can cut through the Deepers’ hull more quickly. You’ll want to do this as quickly as possible.”
“Gotta love the Meld. Means I don’t have to explain the plan,” Dash muttered, rolling the Archetype and diving straight toward the Deeper dreadnought.
“Actually, the Meld has nothing to do with it. I just know what you intend to do,” Sentinel said as the huge ship quickly loomed closer. Dash flicked his attention behind him, just for a second, to confirm that Amy and Conover were covering him.
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“I’m that predictable?”
“Only to me. The Deepers will not be expecting what you’re about to do at all because it’s a ridiculous notion. No sane being would even contemplate it. And that is why, Dash, you and the others must remain the pilots of these mechs. I would never have even considered something like this.”
Dash lined up on a portion of the vast Deeper hull just behind the amidships point. “So you think it’s insane, huh?”
“I do. And that’s why it’s probably brilliant.”
Dash firewalled the drive, decelerating the Archetype. Batteries both to his left and right immediately started tracking and shooting, slamming fire into the mech. The shield gradually filled with energy. But Sentinel worked hard to clear it, only briefly exposing the mech to the full fury of the Deeper broadsides. Even then, the armor shrugged off most of the hits.
Dash landed gently onto the huge expanse of hull, applying thrust to keep the Archetype there and give him the leverage he needed. He deployed the power-sword and began gouging a hole into the Deeper ship, methodically slashing away in a flurry of glowing destruction.
“Sometimes, you need to get up close and personal,” Dash muttered, driving the blade through a savage arc.
“I sense you enjoy this part of the job,” Sentinel replied in an even tone.
Dash hacked a section of Deeper hull away, the edges seared to liquid. “You might say that.”
The fire had actually slackened. Only a single x-ray laser battery was still able to shoot at him, the others being unable to depress far enough to target the mech. However, Deeper fighters were now being vectored in to strafe the mech, and warriors had begun boiling out of hatches and racing across the hull toward the mech amid a deluge of small-arms fire.
Dash ignored it all, trusting Sentinel to keep the shield rotating, maintaining its integrity. She did reactivate the point-defense system and sweep torrents of fire across the hull, blasting Deeper warriors to fragments. He simply kept hacking away until he’d opened a gap in the tough armor. He then applied more thrust, reached down, and ripped the gash in the hull even wider.
“Shall we?” Dash said to the yawning hull.
Then he stepped inside.
Dash chopped with the power-sword, slashing through bulkheads and decks, conduits that flared and sparked, and tubes carrying murky, viscous fluids. Warriors swarmed in around him, but he just kept hacking away, making a space inside the hull big enough for the Archetype to get completely inside. The blade was a blur, moving through motions no human muscles could ever hope to achieve.
“Dash, what the hell are you doing?” Amy asked.
Dash swung the sword. It flared and ripped through a bulkhead, a deck, and another bulkhead, all in one cut. The dreadnought’s internal structure wasn’t nearly as tough as the armored hull.
“Well, the Deepers decided to drop in for a visit. The least we can do is give them something to show our appreciation.”
He slashed again and again. In less than two minutes, Dash had carved out a big enough space to get the Archetype completely inside the Deeper ship.
Warriors swarmed the mech. He felt dozens of pinpricks as they poured small-arms fire into him and tore at him with scything claws. None of the damage was more than superficial, but given time, it would add up. He wasn’t going to allow that to happen.
“Okay, Sentinel, everything—”
“Into the shield, I know.”
Dash smiled, but it was grim. Sentinel had taken the drive offline and flung its power into the shield, pushing the emitters to the limits of their tolerance. That left only one other system fully powered up.
The blast cannon.
“Amy, tell all friendly fighters to break off and clear this ship.”
“Why—oh. Shit. Really, Dash?”
“Sooner rather than later, please, Amy.”
“Big yikes, boss. Roger that.”
Dash decided to wait thirty more seconds to give friendly forces time to get clear. The Deeper warriors, undeterred by the shield, kept piling up the damage on the Archetype.
He gritted his teeth. The chrono ticked down with agonizing slowness. That was how it went, wasn’t it? When you wanted things to either hurry up or slow down, time always seemed to do the exact opposite.
Thirty seconds. It would have to do.
Dash ensured the Archetype was facing toward the dreadnought’s stern, then triggered the blast-cannon.
It turned out there was something that could hurt the Archetype.
It was the Archetype itself.
Even with the shield driven to its absolute limit, the backblast from the discharge engulfed the Archetype in a stellar gust of superheated plasma and hard radiation. Warnings flashed across the status board. Dash just groaned as the sensation of damage slammed across the Meld. He forced himself to wait it out. When the blast cleared, he took in his handiwork, whistling low at the sheer chaos from one weapon, one act—one command.
An enormous chunk had been blown open, exposing more
than two hundred meters of the dreadnought’s interior to hard vacuum. Smashed decks and bulkheads still glowed yellow-white, punctuated by spitting circuits and wheeling slag.
“Sentinel, stand by to reactivate the drive!”
“We’re not leaving?”
“No, we’re gonna take another shot!”
“Oh.”
Dash had a bad moment as the Blur drive flashed a yellow caution status instead of immediately powering up. But Sentinel force-cycled the drive overflow, sending immense power back in a closed loop, and the drive abruptly flicked to green. By then, the blast-cannon had cycled back to full power, the wing-like energy accumulators roaring like a furnace with contained power.
And—now.
Dash redlined the drive, at the same time triggering the blast-cannon again, at full yield.
The next few seconds were a blur. The world again turned plasma-white, the Archetype blasted itself free of the Deeper ship and shot into space at over one hundred g’s of acceleration, debris clanged and thumped against the mech in a staccato symphony of ringing destruction. Dash howled out loud at the abrupt flood of sensation across the Meld. But ahead of him, the view cleared, settling back into the smooth, star-studded blackness of space. For a moment, he let the mech keep accelerating away, taking the time to regain his mental footing.
“Holy—shit! Sentinel, you still with me?”
“If I wasn’t, then you’d have much bigger problems to deal with.”
Dash winced at the aftershocks still rolling across the Meld like waves on a stormy sea. A few systems had gone offline, including the right knee actuator and the backups in both ankles. The Archetype had been scorched and battered, but it still flew, he could still control it, and, most importantly, he still had all weapon systems ready to use.
He finally slowed the Archetype, then jackknifed it and looked back at the massive Deeper ship. Hopefully, he’d hurt it at least enough to give the rest of the fleet an opening to—
“Oh. Color me impressed.”
A series of explosions continued rippling along the length of the huge ship, starting from a massive, glowing crater that had been gouged out of its flank. The blasts erupted like geysers from their aft, accompanied by flashes of EMP and blasts of radiation. Reactors, Dash thought. Reactors were going critical and losing containment, though they all seemed to be scramming first, starting an emergency shutdown to dampen the fusion reactions and limit the damage.
But the titanic ship had been mortally wounded. Only a handful of its many batteries were firing, and even then, in a desultory sort of way. The slow yaw Dash had inflicted on it with damage to its exhaust ports had now been joined by a stately roll. The big ship was tumbling out of control, but in a ponderous, almost graceful way, thanks to its sheer mass.
The Talon and Pulsar sped into formation with Dash, left and right, and deftly took up station.
“Dash, you still alive in there?” Amy asked.
He winced at the throb of a residual headache. “Let’s call it alive-ish.”
“Dash, that was absolutely insane,” Conover said. “Absolutely, utterly, bat-guano insane.”
Dash smirked. “Are you telling me I should never do that again?”
“For what it’s worth, I am,” Sentinel put in.
Conover chuckled. “No, I’m telling you that next time, you should bring me with you.”
Kristin’s voice bounced across the comm. “That would be so cool. Let’s do it. That big ship isn’t dead yet!”
“Okay, let’s rein in our enthusiasm here, folks. Benzel, SITREP, please—”
“Dash.”
It was Leira’s voice, just a single word. But it carried such a desolate tone that Dash’s gut reefed down into a hard knot. Something was wrong.
He looked for the Swift and found it amid a handful of Moonbane fighters, not far from the N’Teel task force Steenowat had sent to help Leira and Jexin. The Polaris hung ominously a short distance away, flanked by a pair of Orions.
“Leira? What’s going on? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“So what—”
“It’s Jexin. The Deepers captured her, Dash. She’s gone.”
10
Dash braced himself, setting his jaw in an effort to watch the battle play out free of anything other than a commander’s critical eye. Tybalt had integrated imagery with that collected by the N’Teel, both their Moonbane fighters, and their capital ships, as well as the Realm fighters that had intervened to help the Swift and the Polaris. The whole thing played out as a seamless, coherent picture, which Dash could actually rotate, pan, and zoom to see it from different perspectives.
It was horrible no matter how he viewed it.
Either by fluke or design, the Deepers had managed to cut off the Polaris and Swift from the rest of the Allied fleet. This shouldn’t have been too much of a problem for the fast, powerful mechs, but the Deepers, seeming to sense an opportunity, poured combat power into the fight. Realm and N’Teel fighters had arrived to help, but piecemeal, each flight simply getting there as fast as it could. The result was a confused, uncoordinated, and largely ineffective effort to break the Deepers’ impromptu battle line and take the pressure off the two mechs, which were now the focus of a serious bombardment. The crucial moment came when a torp detonated what looked like only a few meters away from the Polaris. The mech briefly tumbled out of control but quickly started to recover. Not quickly enough, though, to avoid a Deeper fighter that veered toward it. The Polaris’s scattershot managed to come back online and pump out a few shots, one of them hitting the onrushing fighter. But it didn’t stop the Deeper craft from slamming into it at an appallingly high velocity.
Amid the flash of detonating ordnance and a cascade of debris, the impact crippled the Polaris. Both of its legs and one arm were amputated in the collision. The mech now tumbled helplessly out of control, Tybalt confirming that essentially all of its systems had been knocked offline, putting it into emergency survival mode.
The Deepers pounced. Heedless of their own losses, they converged on the Polaris, swarming it and pouring fire into it. Dash could see Leira desperately trying to close in to help, but the Deeper fire was too intense. They managed to hold her, the arriving N’Teel, and a flight of Orions led by Lori at bay long enough to actually try and seize the battered mech and try towing it toward the gate. But the Realm pressure kept mounting. Benzel had ordered a squadron of heavy cruisers, led by the Sabertooth, to close in and support the Swift and the N’Teel. At the same time, the Realm and N’Teel fighters finally got themselves organized and added the weight of their attacks. The arrival of a second flight of Orions finally convinced the Deepers to give up and pull what remained of their forces back through the gate. The Orions quickly recovered the Polaris, which was when they learned the Deepers had somehow managed to extract Jexin from its smashed remains.
And by then, the Deepers, and Jexin, were gone.
All of this had happened in the time it took Dash to attack and cripple the Deeper dreadnought.
Dash had to take a few moments to breathe. The battle had largely wound down around him, Benzel having now seized access to the gate, trapping the remaining Deeper forces on this side of it. The aliens made no further attempts to pass through it, apparently just writing off whatever ships had been trapped. The last of those was now being pounded into scrap by the Herald and her consorts.
Something closed in beside the Archetype. It was the Talon.
Amy’s voice came over the comm. Its uncharacteristically somber tone perfectly summed up how he felt.
“I’d ask you if you’re okay, but I know you’re not. None of us are. But you have something you have to do,” she said.
Dash started to reply, to ask her what the hell she meant. But he knew what it was. He looked across the tactical display and found the Swift hanging silently near the battered remains of the Polaris.
He took one more long, slow breath, then let it out.
&nb
sp; “Yeah. I do. Thanks, Amy.”
“Hey, any time, boss.”
Dash accelerated the Archetype toward the Swift. There was no need, of course, for him to get physically closer. He could talk to Leira over the comm from a million klicks away as easily as he could from one klick. But that wasn’t the point. Something very human inside him prompted him to get as close as he could to Leira, the same way Amy had done with him.
Dash switched to the private channel he shared with Leira.
“Hey.”
Nothing.
“Leira?”
Still nothing.
“Leira, listen—”
“No, Dash, I won’t listen. I know what you’re going to say, that it wasn’t my fault.” Her voice was a bubbling stew of emotions—bitterness, anger, sorrow, regret. Dash knew he had to burn through it to get at Leira’s rational mind, and he had to do it now.
“Actually, I wasn’t going to say that.”
“What, you’re saying it was my fault?”
“Yeah, I am.”
Silence again. He didn’t have to imagine very hard just how his words had impacted her. He’d devastated her. Now, he had to yank her back out of the dark places she was going to where he needed her to be.
“I—” was all she managed to finally blurt back.
Dash pressed on. “It was your fault, Leira, yeah. But it was also Amy’s. And Conover’s. And most of all, it was mine.”
The channel remained dead silent, but Dash could tell she was listening to him now.
“We got complacent. Cocky, even. After the hexacore upgrades, adding the scattershots, and a pretty much unbroken record of winning fights, we managed to get ourselves into a place where we thought we could do anything with these mechs. As it turns out, we were wrong. They might be the most powerful war machines in the galaxy, but even they have their limits. And we just found one.”
