by C. F. Harris
I gritted my teeth. This would’ve been so much easier if I had a halfway competent crew.
“Just do it, Smith. Nothing we fire at this guy is going to hurt his ship enough for us to get away. Those emergency beacons are our only hope!”
The ship continued to rock under the blasts. I could only hope that one of those beacons would get through to the Fleet in time for them to send help. Otherwise we were screwed.
6: Ultimatum
Jorav:
I leaned back in my chair and had to stop for a moment to catch my breath. I didn’t know the humans made their females so attractive, but I didn’t have time for that. She might be strangely exotic and attractive in that uniquely human way, but at the end of the watch she was an enemy and I had a job to do.
“They’re charging their weapons. Looks like they already had torpedoes loaded sir,” the weapons officer said.
I frowned at my readout. Several of their weapons impacted against the ship, to be sure, but there were several that went wild. No, not wild. They were heading straight back into the accursed human home system.
“Target those torpedoes and fire everything you have at them!” I shouted.
The weapons officer turned his attention to the torpedoes without questioning me. It was a testament to how well trained he was that he didn’t hesitate before following orders. Unfortunately it was going to be entirely too little, too late. I saw our weapons shoot one, two down, but two more made it past the bubble of our jamming equipment and immediately started broadcasting a human danger signal.
Everyone on the command deck went silent. They turned to look at me. Particular communications and weapons. It was clear from the pale blue on their faces that they expected to be killed for their failure, but I didn’t operate my ships in that way.
“End this quickly,” I said. “It would appear our foray into the human’s home system is over. I want us to at least take prisoners from this ship before we leave its husk behind for the rescue to find.”
The men went back to work and I fell back in my chair. Would taking out one ship on the edge of the human home system be enough to restore my honor? It was daring. More daring than anything any commander had attempted in decades. Yet at the same time I couldn’t help but feel that I’d failed. I’d intended to raid farther in their system. To hit one of their bases and fade into the blackness before the humans had a chance to react, or die in the process if they did have time to react.
This small pinprick would have to do. It was nothing compared to my grand plans, but it was all I had.
Even as the weapons tore into the human hull I knew there was nothing left for me to do here. The battle had been over before it even started. All that was left was the part that I truly relished. The combat.
“Prepare the launches for combat. I want all marines ready to go. I’ll be down there coordinating if anything is needed,” I said.
No one blinked at that. They all knew there was no need for it. I’m sure more than a few of the crew up here itched to be on the launches where they could gain some true honor, but that was the general’s prerogative.
It was time to regain some of my lost prestige for the honor of the Ascendency.
A full cycle later I was in a corridor of the human ship. Some of their security personnel were down at the end of the corridor firing their weapons every time one of our men came into view.
“How long has it been since the beacon went off?” I growled into my communicator.
“We’re seeing activity at the center of their system that is out of normal parameters. Or at least what we think is normal based on the short scan we took. It could be they’re mobilizing to fight us, or it could be something as simple as an exercise,” the communications officer spoke into my ear from the command center.
Good officer. He answered the true question I was asking and not the question I actually asked.
“We don’t have much time,” I said to the soldiers surrounding me. “We move in. Their command center is beyond this barricade, and we will take them all alive!”
The soldiers surrounding me all nodded. They knew it was possible we might not survive this, but I would lead them. Besides, unless they had truly heavy weaponry there was a good chance their pitiful shooters would merely bounce off our skin. All we could do was charge and hope for the best.
“Valor above all,” I said, holding my hand out in a salute.
“Valor above all!” the rest of the men shouted in response.
I pulled out my sword. I found it worked much better for fighting in close quarters. Especially against a species whose weapons typically didn’t do much against us. One reason why they tended to keep their combat ship-to-ship unless they had elite unites with power armor and other unique and crafty solutions they’d come up with to make up for their inadequacy during this long conflict.
A quick glance at the security holding us off from their command center was enough to tell that they hadn’t bothered equipping the people on this ship with anything useful like that.
I wanted to pretend that I didn’t know why I was so focused on getting to this woman. I lied and told myself that the only reason I was interested in reaching her was so that I could repay her for the turn she did me on a colony world light years from here where she destroyed my life. I wanted to believe that the only interest I had in finding her was so that I could destroy her.
And yet I knew that wasn’t the case. Deep down, at the core of my being, I knew I had to meet this warrior woman again. I had to see her. Feel her. Smell her. Taste her. I knew it was ridiculous, this was a woman who’d humiliated me and ruined a family reputation going back thousands of years, and yet here I was trying to reach her and conquer her.
Prove to her that I was the better warrior. Maybe in proving that I could also have her.
I shook my head and pushed those thoughts away. That way was madness. I was in the middle of combat, and I wasn’t going to allow myself to be swayed by an exotic human with her too-tan skin that wasn’t even a proper shade of blue. No, I was going to take this ship for the glory of the Ascendency, and I needed to take it soon before the humans fully realized what was going on out here on the outskirts of their system and they sent truly dangerous warships to do us in.
I rounded the corner with my sword drawn. The humans fired at me and I felt the sting of their weapons hitting me, and I grinned. Presumably a ship this far out was supposed to be running interference for my people doing exactly what I was doing right now, but it appeared the humans who sent this ship on its mission neglected to provide it with the weapons they needed to truly fight off a boarding party. They didn’t have weapons designed to pierce our skin. They didn’t have that accursed battle armor that had bested me the last time around.
It was warrior against warrior with raw strength on the line, and when it came to that my people would always come out the betters.
I felt the battle lust as my blade sank into the human security. One let out a cry and the other simply gurgled as my blade rammed home. I stepped forward to the door to their command center, but of course it refused to open.
“Battle technician!” I bellowed.
A warrior scurried down the hall and paused for a moment to look at the two humans I’d dispatched. The warrior was young. I didn’t know his name. I wondered what personal dishonor had prompted him to come on this mission at such a young age, but I didn’t pry. He placed a small explosive against the door and it started beeping faster and faster. We both ran to the end of the corridor and dove around the edge as it was rocked with a massive explosion that sent fragments of bulkhead crashing down.
I peered around the corner, fully expecting to be hit at any moment with more blasts from their puny energy weapons. Only I was met with nothing. I heaved a sigh of relief. Maybe this accursed human had finally realized that there was no fighting the Ascendency. That she’d been bested. She might have come out on top the last time we met, but this day was mine!
I realized just how wrong I was when I stepped into their command center. It was a mess, and not just from the explosive charge we’d set off. That was designed to explode out, not in, so it didn’t harm anyone on the other side. A bit of technology designed for rescue that I’d discovered was also very good for taking prisoners.
I didn’t know if there would be any prisoners to take. It appeared that our first salvo at the human ship had been enough to do far more serious damage than I would’ve imagined while making the trip over here in the landing ship. I stared in astonishment and wondered that any species could design a command center that would explode in battle like this. Several humans sat slumped over their stations with dangling sparking wires hanging out over them.
“Amazing,” the young warrior said. “These are the wily humans who you said we should fear so? I don’t see the reason for that fear.”
My backhand caught him before I could even think. He was insulting me by calling my judgment in to question, but that wasn’t the only reason I’d slapped him. No, I was slapping him as much for his insult to the human as I was for his insult to me. What had come over me? What was wrong with me?
The warrior came back growling, but several men behind him stopped him and he seemed to regain some measure of control. I nodded.
“Never underestimate your enemy, even in defeat,” I said. “I made that mistake once and it cost me much. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t made a mistake that was costly to you, and you would do well to follow my advice and make a truly regrettable mistake. Like correcting a commanding officer.”
The warrior nodded and stood at attention, but he was already forgotten. I moved into the command center and ran my eyes over the humans. My eyes glowed as I looked at each one in turn, and finally they came to rest on a large metal bulkhead that had collapsed over the center of the command room.
The center. Where the commander usually sat in these human designs. I jogged down a slope in the back of the command center and leapt over a railing, thinking the entire time that it was ridiculous that they would make their security person do this every time they needed to get to the command staff in an emergency, and I found her lying covered in that too-red human blood as she rested under the bulkhead.
“I need a medic with training in xenobiology,” I shouted.
I looked up to make sure my men followed the order. They were all speaking into their intercoms. Good. The last thing I needed was a repeat of that terrible day when my world was destroyed. I turned back to this strange commander. I didn’t even know her name, and yet she’d dominated my thoughts so completely since that day that there were times when it felt almost as though I had a mental link with her much the same as the one I’d shared with my wife.
I shook my head again. Those thoughts were not helpful in the current situation. I needed to concentrate on business. There was no way that I could let her know how thoroughly she’d been defeated if she wasn’t alive to know she’d been bested.
The bulkhead she’d fallen under was trivial to lift, and so lift it I did. Amazing that these humans could be so fragile that something so light would be enough to hold her captive. I just hoped I didn’t harm anything by moving it, but at the same time it would have to be moved eventually so there was really no choice if I wanted to make sure she lived.
I stared down at her. The warrior woman who’d defeated me twice over. The woman at the center of my thoughts for so long. And I felt a possessive streak run through me as I looked at her.
“This one is good looking enough,” the same young warrior said coming over to me. He reached out to kick her as he spoke. “I wouldn’t mind having her fixed up by the xenomeds so I could have a little fun. Good choice, General.”
I caught his foot before it could make contact with the human. They were so delicate that it was possible just the act of him kicking her in her current state would be enough to cause irreparable harm. I flipped him back and he went slamming into a charred piece of furniture that looked like it had once been the command chair. There was a human male lying underneath it groaning but otherwise not moving, though his groans grew louder as the warrior crashed into it.
“Take him into custody,” I said. “We do not harm prisoners once they are taken.”
Every warrior on the command deck paused to stare for a moment. I looked to each of them in turn, meeting the challenge in their eyes. True we weren’t supposed to do that, but it wasn’t unheard of for prisoners to be handled inappropriately. Particularly when the battle lust was upon a warrior. That would not happen now.
Each of them looked away in turn. None of them were in a mood to challenge me this day. Good. I didn’t want to leave the human female’s side.
After an eternity a xenomedic finally did arrive. They pushed me aside and I stood there worrying that this might all have been too much for the human. That she might expire before I had a chance to show her how thoroughly she’d been bested. Finally they lifted her on a hover stretcher.
“We’ve done everything we can for her here, general,” one said. “We’ll have to take her back to the ship to complete the process.”
“Very well. Make it happen. I will have the entire command staff of this ship. It’s important that we gather information about humanity’s defenses!”
The words sounded hollow as I said them, but everyone else seemed to believe them well enough. Good. I didn’t want any of them to know I had any sort of ulterior motive for saving the human commander. Especially when there was still a battle to win. I pulled out my sword as my men continued working on our new prisoners in the command room.
There was battle to be joined out there. I followed the sound of sizzling energy weapons and the clang of blades as humans screamed and died where they resisted us, but my mind was back on my ship where the human commander was.
For the first time in my long life I itched to be away from battle and back home rather than in the thick of it.
7: Captive
Talia:
Warmth. Inviting warmth. I felt myself bathed in a glowing light that seemed to envelop me and made me feel as though everything was right in the world. I don’t think I’d felt that way since I was young and staying at my grandmother’s house on the lesser continental mass on Vorath IX.
No, wait. That couldn’t be right. The entire lesser continental mass along with grandma’s house and grandma had been vaporized by a Livisk mass weapon. Which I’d later learned was a fancy term for the Livisk throwing a giant chunk of rock at the planet to do as much damage as possible with good old fashioned orbital mechanics and physics.
I still remembered the terror of lifting off through the cloud cover created by that impact. A beautiful world destroyed for all life in a matter of seconds. Though on the bright side it had provided invaluable scientific insight into the K-T impact for scientists who were into that sort of thing. Something about it being ethically suspect to throw a rock at a habitable world and the Livisk providing the perfect laboratory.
None of that mattered to me, though. I was a little girl whose home was destroyed. One of many millions of homes that had been destroyed in the back and forth between our two species.
Only how could I possibly be at grandmother’s if it had been destroyed? My eyes flew open and I found myself hovering in a strange glowing field of some sort. I felt the sort of weightlessness that came from being in free fall, and it wasn’t entirely pleasant. I’d never been a fan of zero-G, and regularly blessed the magnificent bastard who invented artificial gravity and made it possible for me to travel through space without losing my lunch every five minutes.
“Where am I?” I shouted.
No answer. I could see figures moving around out there, though they were all hazy and indistinct. No, all I could see was that they were walking on two legs. Could that be humans out there? I tried to think where I was. Or where I should be.
A flash of memory. Consoles and various bits of the command center exploding all around us. Honestly. What sor
t of idiot designs a command center on a battlecruiser that explodes at the first sign of getting fired upon? If I ever made it through whatever the hell was happening to me right now then I was going to have words with whoever made that design.
“Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
More light. Something blinding flashed in front of my face and moved down. A good thing too. Something was preventing me from moving even though I was floating. This didn’t feel like any sort of human technology I’d ever seen, but I’d never been one for going to the doctor in the first place. Perhaps this was something new on earth.
Why did I have the feeling I wasn’t on earth? That light continued moving down as though it was scanning my body. There was something important going on here. There was a good reason why I wouldn’t be in human hands, but I couldn’t think of it, damn it.
Then it hit me. The bulkhead collapsing as I got a report that there were Livisk boarders moving in on the ship. A Livisk boarding party. Damn. Once they got on a ship they were like the once mighty cockroach. You either killed them all or they took over.
I struggled against whatever bonds were holding me in place. Only the struggle was made all the more difficult since there wasn’t much of anything to struggle against. No, the harder I tried to move the less good it seemed to do. Finally I gave up and gave myself over to the floating.
Something started beeping somewhere above me. Rather insistently, too. I tried looking around and remembered too late that I couldn’t move much of anything. Damn it. If this was a human medical bay then I was going to rip the doctors a new one.
The beeping grew more and more strident until finally the glow started to pulse around me. I felt a tingle running up and down my body as I continued trying to struggle and finally the glow started to move down and the blur preventing me from seeing out into the world beyond my prison was revealed.
I found myself wishing I could go back to not knowing where the hell I was.
