Old Ironsides

by Dean Crawford

  ‘You want me to do what?!’

  Nathan saw the Marine sergeant look at him as he shouted, and a clairvoyant sense of doom washed over him. Before he could react, Agry’s rifle whipped round to point at him.

  ‘You, stay right there!’

  Nathan staggered to a halt and threw his hands up as he watched the Marines pile aboard the shuttle and the sergeant ease his way to the shuttle’s ramp and look back to ensure that nobody else was still aboard the ship. His eyes locked onto Nathan’s and regret spread across his features.

  ‘It’s orders, from the admiral,’ he said apologetically.

  Moments later the shuttle ramp rose up and sealed the craft.

  Nathan turned and dashed into the launch bunker where he had seen the Marines pre-activate the emergency launch sequence in case they had been forced to manually get out of the ship. He closed the pressure hatch behind him and hurried to the control panel. He looked out of the windows to see the shuttle lift off from the deck and cruise toward the bay doors. A loud siren blared as the lights in the landing bay dimmed to red and the bay doors opened simultaneously in front of the shuttle.

  Nathan saw the shuttle’s boosters flare with heat and light as the craft rocketed out of the bay into a miasma of plasma fire outside, and then moments later it was gone. Nathan watched the cold vacuum of space outside and Neptune’s immense horizon and suddenly he felt more alone than he ever had.

  *

  ‘The shuttle’s away!’

  Marshall heard the communications officer’s cry across the bridge as he watched the battle unfolding before him. The frigate was fully engaged with no less than four cruisers, all of which were closing in around it fast as Captain Reece did his utmost to keep moving and spoiling their aim as he attempted to engage any one of them with a full broadside.

  Marshall’s gaze switched to the Aleeyan battleships now lumbering closer to the fight. As soon as they came within firing range he knew that the cruisers would disengage and then the battle would be over within moments. Titan alone could not hope to block the fire from four battleships and thus Captain Reece would be forced to disengage or be destroyed, the smaller vessel’s shields not strong enough to withstand multiple barrages from such large mounted weapons as those carried by the Aleeyan capital ships.

  Marshall knew that his position was unsustainable. If he stood and fought here, he and every person aboard the ship would die.

  ‘Order the fighters to disengage and cover the shuttle!’ he ordered the CAG. ‘Open the landing bays and prepare for a full tactical retreat!’

  The Executive Officer stared at Marshall in amazement. ‘This ship has not withdrawn from an engagement in its entire service life! You’re not suggesting we should…?’

  ‘This ship is outnumbered, outgunned and contains several thousand personnel who will die at the hands of the Aleeyans if we stay here and slog it out with those battleships. There is no glory in death, XO, you of all people should know that.’

  Olsen’s jaw tightened and his grip on the command rail exposed white knuckles.

  ‘We don’t run from a fight,’ he growled.

  ‘We don’t run into defeat either,’ Marshall snapped back.

  ‘If we run now, the Aleeyans will be emboldened!’

  ‘How emboldened do you think they’ll be if they blast this flagship out of existence?!’ Marshall roared.

  The blasts and rumble of battle seemed to subside in the face of the admiral’s wrath, Marshall’s face flushed red and his fists clenched by his sides as he stared the XO down.

  ‘Do you wish to live to avenge this defeat, or go down in flames for the hell of it and defeated just the same?!’ he demanded of the XO.

  Doctor Helena Sears glared at the admiral.

  ‘You just abandoned an innocent man to die at their hands,’ she uttered.

  ‘We just traded his life for five thousand,’ Marshall shot back. ‘And who’s to say he’s not involved with them? How else would they even know his name?!’ Marshall didn’t wait for a reply as he whirled to the CAG.

  ‘Call when the shuttle’s aboard! How many people got out?’

  The tactical officer glanced at a display and replied.

  ‘All but one,’ he called. ‘A man named Ironside is not aboard the shuttle!’

  Marshall turned and looked at the display screen, saw Icarus’s gigantic hull speckled with fires as she silently drifted above the vast blue disc of Neptune like some gigantic bioluminescent fish deep below the ocean waves. He spotted the shuttle fleeing toward them, a cloud of fighters swarming to protect it from the Aleeyan barrage as it rocketed toward Titan’s aft landing bays.

  Marshall straightened his collar and barked another order.

  ‘Helm, full about! Prepare for emergency leap!’

  The helmsman obeyed automatically and the huge battleship began to turn its tail to the battle as its landing bay doors opened. Marshall saw through his multiple displays images of the fighters streaming back aboard the huge warship, and moments later the shuttle dove for cover inside one of the huge bays as the doors slowly closed behind it.

  ‘All vessels aboard and accounted for!’ the CAG reported. ‘We’re ready!’

  ‘Signal Captain Reece,’ he said, his throat constricting as he almost choked on his own words. ‘Full retreat!’

  Olsen looked up and they shared a silent exchange, the knowledge that for the first time in history Titan was being forced to retreat from battle.

  ‘Now!’ Olsen yelled, supporting his captain despite the fact that every fiber of his being clearly screamed at him to turn the ship around and engage their enemy head-on.

  Moments later the ship’s pre-programmed computers engaged the emergency jump protocol, a continuously computed trajectory designed to allow escape with great rapidity from any unexpected ambush or assault.

  Marshall stood with his hands behind his back and his jaw tense as moments later Neptune vanished into blackness as Titan leaped away from the confrontation and vanished into the safety of super luminal cruise.

  *

  Nathan stood aboard the bridge of Icarus and watched the huge battle outside. The immense warships manoeuvred around each other, flares of bright blue and red light zipping back and forth between them like static electricity as they fired salvos of immense plasma energy at each other.

  He couldn’t make out the tiny shuttle or the fighters swarming through the frigid blackness, but he saw Titan begin to move. Slowly, the huge battleship turned away from the onrushing Aleeyan ships. Nathan saw a faint ripple in the fabric of space around her, the stars quivering as her mass drive warped space and time and then moments later her engines flared and then she vanished like the light from an old television set blinking out. Where once there had been a massive warship, heavily engaged, there was now empty space, plasma blasts that had impacted her shields and hull now passing unimpeded and fading away as their energy was lost to the vacuum of the cosmos.

  Nathan watched in silence as the huge Aleeyan ships ceased to move, slowly converging instead on Icarus. He swallowed thickly, nervous now of what to expect as he saw one of them move alongside the stricken vessel. Her huge hull drifted slowly into position, bristling with cannons and lights through which he was surprised to see figures moving, some running, others just watching.

  A distant, metallic thud echoed through the ship’s lonely corridors. Nathan didn’t know quite what else to do, so he moved across the bridge and sat down in the captain’s chair and hoped that he could survive whatever was about to become of him.

  Marshall had abandoned him to his death at the hands of an implacable enemy for reasons he could not hope to fathom. Orders, Agry had said. Orders meant that somebody had wanted Nathan to die up here, far from home, a victim of an Ayleean attack.

  Nathan looked at the big screen before him, at Neptune’s splendour and the myriad stars glittering across deep space. He heard movement from somewhere else in the ship, far away but in the otherwise silence it
was audible enough. The computer’s voice echoed soullessly through the bridge.

  ‘Hull breach in Sector Four, Deck Delta. Atmosphere stable.’

  ‘We’ve been boarded,’ Nathan said to himself.

  ‘Affirmative,’ the computer replied.

  Nathan was mildly surprised. ‘You’re talking to me?’

  ‘There are no other authorized personnel aboard,’ the computer replied. ‘You are now the de facto captain.’

  ‘I’m the captain,’ Nathan whispered to himself as he sat in the chair and surveyed the bridge. Might as well enjoy it. ‘Captain’s log,’ he mumbled, ‘star date four one seven four one three nine….’

  Nathan chuckled to himself and pointed at the screen. ‘Make it so.’

  ‘Make what so?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  The noises grew louder and Nathan guessed that the Aleeyans were making their way toward his position.

  ‘The bridge is about to be breached,’ the computer said. ‘Do you wish to seal it?’

  ‘Negative,’ Nathan replied, guessing that they’d get through one way or another in the end. ‘Let’s see what they want from us.’

  ‘Typically, Aleeyans see humans as prey and slaughter them on sight.’

  ‘You can shut up now.’

  The bridge returned to silence but for the occasional sparking of blown circuitry nearby. Nathan waited for what felt like an age, but when he finally heard heavy boots thundering toward the bridge he found himself wishing he could wait just a little longer.

  The smoke coiling in through the bridge doors was blown aside as a troop of massive Aleeyan warriors burst onto the bridge, their weapons aiming at Nathan, his seat swivelled to face them.

  Nathan felt a pinch of fear as he witnessed their physical size in the flesh for the first time, towering giants that were festooned with the weapons of war. Nathan forced himself to remember that these beings were essentially human, despite their exterior appearance, and that they had to retain something of the humanity from which they were descended.

  Nathan veiled his fear behind a thin veneer of curiosity as he sat in the captain’s chair and made a steeple from his hands that he rested his chin upon. He surveyed the muscular soldiers as they fanned out, surrounding him and glaring at him down the barrels of their rifles asa they stepped over the corpses littering the bridge deck. Nathan composed himself and decided that he had to take control of the situation. Make himself something other than a captive. Make a demand. No, give them an order, something important, something determined, something, anything!

  ‘Take me to your leader.’

  Nathan wept inside but he kept a sombre expression on his face. The Aleeyans looked at each other briefly, and then suddenly something hard wrapped around Nathan’s throat and he was hauled out of the seat and dragged onto the deck.

  He smelled a foul odor of sweat and skin, of metal and flesh bound as one and as cold as a corpse against his skin, and then the Aleeyans closed in around him and he realized that he was being pinned down by one of the muscular creature’s massive hands. The pressure on his chest fixed him in place, made motion impossible. As the other soldiers watched, the Aleeyan slowly reached down to his side and drew a long and highly polished blade, curved like a crescent moon and wickedly sharp.

  His voice was deep, gurgling, as though he were talking underwater. ‘Don’t move.’

  Another Aleeyan crouched alongside Nathan and produced a huge syringe, then grabbed the collar of Nathan’s jacket and tore it open to expose his arm. Nathan squirmed to avoid the needle as it was lowered toward his bare skin.

  ‘What are you doing?!’

  A massive hand clamped his jaw and held his body in position as the Aleeyan plunged the needle into his arm. Fierce pain seethed beneath Nathan’s skin and he saw the syringe fill with his blood as he writhed beneath the Aleeyan’s powerful grip.

  The syringe slowly filled with Nathan’s blood and then was removed from his arm as the other Aleeyan pinning him down allowed him to clamp one hand over the wound. The warrior with the syringe stood and looked down at him.

  ‘We got what we need. Now, I’ll take his head.’

  Another spoke. ‘I’ll take his testicles, the women folk like to cook them.’

  A third shook his head, his thick black mane shimmering. ‘I’ll take his heart while it’s still beating. If you do it fast enough you can eat it before they die.’

  The blade moved down as fear poisoned Nathan’s body and he cried out. ‘You’re as human as I am!’

  The blade’s razor sharp tip pierced Nathan’s jacket and punctured his skin with a tiny pin-prick point of white pain.

  ‘We’re nothing like you,’ the Aleeyan hissed, and his shoulder rolled as he drove his weight behind the blade.

  ***

  XXXIV

  Nathan opened his mouth to scream when the Aleeyan suddenly flew up and away from him as though he had been fired from a cannon. The blade was snatched from Nathan’s chest and flickered in the light as the Aleeyan was hurled across the bridge and slammed into a workstation with a tremendous crash.

  The other soldiers scattered away from Nathan as he looked up into the eyes of what he guessed was their leader. Indistinguishable from his comrades but for the glittering golden chevrons adorning one arm, the huge warrior looked down at Nathan for a long moment before he extended one huge, leathery hand.

  ‘This one lives,’ he growled. ‘My name is Havok.’

  Nathan stared up at the warrior, pain still lancing his chest where the blade had punctured his skin, but he reached up and took the offered hand. The Aleeyan hauled him to his feet and pulled him close, his yellow eye and sharpened teeth glaring down into Nathan’s face from barely inches away.

  ‘Pay them no mind,’ he said. ‘They’re inhumane.’

  A ripple of guttural chuckles gusted through the gathered soldiers as Nathan was released, Havok looking him up and down appraisingly.

  ‘So you’re the one.’

  ‘The one what?’ Nathan asked nervously.

  ‘The one who started the plague that eventually killed mankind,’ the Aleeyan rumbled. ‘It would only have taken a little more luck to have finished their damnable race off but it was a good effort, Nathan Ironside.’

  ‘You know my name?’

  ‘I know everything about you,’ Havok replied. ‘I made it my business to know of you and what happened, and when I heard that you had been reanimated I was determined to know more. You, my friend, are something of an idol to me.’

  The fallen warrior who had threatened to gut Nathan alive scowled as he got to his feet once more, the blade still in his hand.

  ‘He’s human scum,’ he snarled. ‘He should be torn apart and eaten.’

  ‘He’s a victim,’ Havok snapped, ‘as much as you or I and is not a part of our time. He knows nothing of who we are, and that is why I wish him to live.’ Havok smiled at Nathan, in as much as he was capable of doing so. ‘You must excuse Asrad here, he can be somewhat hostile to humans.’

  A flicker of humor broke though Nathan’s fear.

  ‘He’s a bit tetchy. I still don’t understand why you want to kill humans. You came from humans, it’s in your DNA. What good will it do to wipe them out?’

  Havok’s smile remained but Nathan detected a steely glint of anger in the warrior’s expression as he reached out and guided Nathan to walk with him.

  ‘I have no doubt the humans have told you much about who we are,’ he growled as they walked out of the bridge and through a smoke-filled corridor. ‘Just as I have no doubt that only half of it was the truth.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’ Nathan asked. ‘You think that if you hit me with a charm offensive that somehow I’ll believe that mankind is to blame for all of this?’

  ‘The charm offensive,’ Havok replied as they walked, ‘is that you’re still alive and not even now being eaten by my troops. That’s how they feel about humanity, and for good reason. What you choose to
believe is up to you, Nathan, but I will show you anyway and in time you can decide for yourself who is to be believed.’

  Havok led the way through Icarus, the corridors abandoned but thick with the haunted air of lives and histories lost. The lighting was flickering in and out, creating ghostly shadows that chased up and down as Nathan was led to a section of the hull where the Aleeyans had blasted their way through what he guessed was some kind of escape pod mount. The wall of the corridor was torn away, opening out like some gargantuan metal flower, the petals twisted and warped from the explosive charges used to breach the hull.

  Nathan could see through nearby windows the hull of the Aleeyan warship close alongside that of the colony vessel, and through the ragged hole in the hull a narrow metallic tunnel used by the Aleeyan soldiers to board the ship.

  ‘This way,’ Havok insisted, gesturing to the tunnel.

  ‘I don’t know what’s on the other side,’ Nathan said. ‘How do I know you won’t kill me the moment I get over there?’

  ‘Because if I wanted you dead, Ironside, I’d have killed you the moment I laid eyes on you.’

  Nathan swallowed down his reluctance and stepped into the tunnel and walked across the narrow bridge to the warship of mankind’s mortal enemy.

  *

  CSS Titan

  ‘Sub-luminal in three, two, one, disengage!’

  The huge battleship surged out of super-luminal cruise as Foxx limped onto the bridge to see Captain Marshall and his team scrambling to bring the ship to battle stations once more in case the Aleeyans had pursued them. The entire bridge seemed somehow distant when viewed through the hood of the biohazard suit in which she had been encased before being brought aboard along with every other member of the boarding party.

  The Marine medics had given her a shot of adrenaline and nano-sensitive pain relief, the two combined treatments alleviating her symptoms sufficiently for her to get back onto her feet and try to find out what the hell was going on.