04 Dark Space

by Jasper T. Scott

  He found himself wondering about the Avilonians: humanity could have fought off the original invasion if the Avilonians and the Imperium had stood together. So why didn’t they?

  Ethan frowned and pushed those thoughts from his mind. “We’re going to have to hurry if we want to get in on the action,” he said while switching from grav lifts to thrusters. A meaty roar rumbled through the ship as he throttled up to the ship’s maximum acceleration of 125 KAPS. That was significantly less in atmosphere than it was in space, but still more than fast enough to pin them to their seats and send the city falling away beneath them at a dizzying rate.

  “How many are there?” Alara asked.

  Ethan queried the gravidar for a tally. “Fifteen capital-class, and just over five hundred Shell Fighters . . . they’re down to less than half of what they came with. . . . Hoi! What’s this?”

  “What’s what?”

  “Look!” Ethan pointed to the grid, to the red icon of an enemy starship hovering high above the planet. “That’s their command ship!”

  “Why aren’t they cloaked?” Alara asked.

  “Maybe the Avilonians have a way to see through cloaking shields?”

  “If that’s the case, then the Sythians are in for more trouble than they know.”

  Just as Alara said that, the eye of Omnius at the top of the Zenith Tower abruptly swelled to twice its size and a blinding beam of white light shot straight up through the clouds. Ethan followed that beam on the gravidar to see where it went.

  He watched wide-eyed with glee as it collided with the gargantuan command ship and sliced off a large chunk of its port side.

  “Holy frek,” Ethan whispered.

  They soared into the clouds, and the space ahead of them grew thick with red bracket pairs as the ship auto-highlighted nearby enemy targets on the HUD. “Heads-up boys and girls,” Ethan said, switching over to Hailfire missiles. Destra had filled the Trinity’s launchers to overflowing with munitions before sending him on his way—just in case.

  Before they were even through the clouds Ethan saw bright lances of red and blue dymium pulse lasers streaking out from his corvette’s turrets, tracking enemy Shells. Ethan targeted the nearest fighter and hovered his targeting reticle over the enemy fighter. He waited to hear the solid tone of a lock and then fired off a pair of Hailfires. They jetted out into the clouds and disappeared.

  Then the Trinity punched through the clouds and they saw the real battle in all its glory. Sythian cruisers and battleships were clawing for the sky, their shining mirror-like hulls peppered with explosions from unseen ordnance. “What the frek is hitting them?” Ethan asked.

  “Lasers?” Alara suggested.

  Ethan shook his head, barely noticing as the missiles he’d fired split into eight shards each and blew three Shell Fighters out of the sky. “No. Not beams either. Those are being absorbed by shields. These are explosives. ”

  “Well, some type of warheads, then.”

  “Right, but why can’t I see them on the grid?”

  “Maybe they’re cloaked?”

  “Maybe,” he conceded.

  “Ruh-kah!” Atton whooped over the intercom just as the first Shell Fighter succumbed to fire from the Trinity’s turrets. “That’s one!”

  “You’re going to have try harder! I’m already up to three.”

  “Put me in the pilot’s chair and we’ll see what I can get,” Razor chimed in.

  “Nice try,” Ethan said through a smile. “Not happening.”

  Ka-boom!

  “Hoi!” Atton called out.

  Dead ahead a Sythian Battleship cracked into jagged pieces.

  “That’s a pretty sight!” Razor chimed in.

  Ethan grinned. “Copy that.”

  Alara jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow. “Look at that,” she said, pointing to the grid. Ethan looked down at his MHD and found all the Shell Fighters there suddenly breaking off to turn tail and run, leaving the capital ships to fend for themselves.

  “It’s a rout!” Ethan called out over the intercom. “Let’s run ‘em down!” He pushed the throttle up past the red lines and into overdrive. The ship began to shudder and shake around them. The stars grew progressively brighter. Streaking golden lights began racing by all around them—hundreds of Avilonian fighters chasing after the Shells at top speed. Curious about how fast that top speed was, Ethan targeted one of them and found it accelerating at 225 KAPS, almost double the Trinity’s top speed.

  He let out a long whistle. “That is one fast fighter.” Even Nova Interceptors weren’t that fast. And as for the Sythian fighters they were chasing, they may as well have been standing still. The Avilonians caught up in a matter of seconds, and red hot streams of lasers began pouring from them, lighting their targets on fire. Ethan targeted the nearest Shell and tried for another missile lock. The reticle flickered red, and then he heard a solid tone and fired off another pair of Hailfires. More lasers began streaking out from the Trinity’s turrets as they came into range.

  Space ahead of them was peppered with exploding Shells. But rather than slow down to focus on the enemy fighters more squarely, the Avilonians roared past them, giving the enemy a chance to take a few potshots. Ethan saw at least two Avilonian fighters flicker off the grid before they passed out of range.

  “I don’t get it,” Alara said. “They could have hounded those Shells until they killed them all.”

  “Yes, they could have, but then they wouldn’t be able to go after that.” Ethan pointed to the Sythian command cruiser, visible as little more than a glinting speck in the distance.

  “They can’t be far from a safe jumping distance,” Alara replied.

  “No, I’d say they’re just about there,” Ethan replied while lining the command ship up under his sights.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What’s it look like? We’re going to join the party,” he replied.

  “What are you going to do when we fly past those Shells and suddenly they’re on our tail? They’ll tear us apart.”

  “Something tells me they’ve got bigger problems.”

  Flying up behind them and catching up fast were a quartet of Avilonian cruisers. All of a minute later, the glinting wave of Shells ahead of them became a dazzling wall of fire that almost blotted out the stars.

  “What the . . . ?” Ethan trailed off.

  “Hoi, leave something for us!” Razor whined.

  “They’re dying before I can even target them!” Atton added.

  “I didn’t see any weapons fire. What’s shooting them?” the female pilot put in.

  “We noticed the same with the cap ships earlier,” Ethan replied. “Possibly some type of cloaking missiles.”

  “Slick. Wish we had those,” Razor replied.

  Ethan was just about to pass through the wall of flames, when the Avilonians’ fire let up. Now there were just a few dozen Shell Fighters left, exploding here and there.

  “This is krak!” Razor said. “I only got one and two assists.”

  “Two here,” Atton replied.

  “Still three for me,” Ethan replied, finding to his disappointment that the last pair of Hailfires he’d fired had gone to waste—their targets blown apart before they’d arrived. “But I still win.”

  “I got two and three assists,” Ceyla added quietly.

  Alara nudged him with her elbow and turned to him with a smile. “You know what that means?”

  Ethan was too busy gaping in shock to reply.

  “It means she wins,” Atton said for him. “One assist equals half a kill, so she’s got 3.5. Nice work, Corbin.”

  “Corbin, huh?” Ethan said. “Well, you owe me a drink little lady.”

  “That’s Marksman Corbin to you, civvy, and why do I owe you a drink? I won.”

  “Exactly. How else am I supposed to feel better about that?”

  Laughter rippled over the comms. “In that case I’ll buy you two.”

  “Generous. I accept.”
r />   “Consider it an advance on future defeats.”

  “If that’s the case, I’ll have to pay it back soon.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Alara said.

  “Whose side are you on?” he asked.

  “Yours of course. I’m just trying to protect your ego from further bruising.”

  Girlish laughter trilled over the comms. “I like your copilot, hotshot.”

  Ethan smiled. It was nice to break up the unrelenting despair of the past few weeks with some playful banter. Now, finally, humanity was on the winning side of the war. If anyone had been keeping score with the Sythians, humanity’s kill-to-death ratio had to be abysmal by now.

  That just means we have a lot of catching up to do. It's about time we had some revenge, he thought, his eyes on the distant speck of the Sythians’ command ship. Ready or not, here we come.

  Chapter 33

  High Lord Shondar was relieved when they were finally out of range of the ship-cracking beam that had been firing periodically at them from the surface of the planet. He began to hope he might just make it back from Avilon alive. As for his fleet, however, that was another matter. More than a hundred starships gone—cut to pieces in less time than it had taken for his fleet to dispatch the derelict Avilonian one. The difference was, his ships could still move and shoot back. It wasn’t much of a difference. Shondar had never seen such a fast turnabout in war—not in the whole decade which they’d spent wiping the galaxy clean of its human pestilence.

  “My Lord, we are ready to enter the light stream,” the operator at the helm said, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Do so!”

  The bright sparkle of stars turned to an ugly swirl of light. Shondar hissed and subsided against the back of his command chair. It was done. The Avilonians had won the first round.

  But what of the second? From what he’d just witnessed, Shondar doubted that he and the other lords could prevail against the Avilonians. The one hope they had was that they had annihilated the Avilonian fleet before it could come online. At the end, when they had suddenly begun to fight back, the majority of their strength had been in their ground defenses and their thousands of fighters. The Avilonians could not project that strength beyond their world. Not without another fleet. Perhaps they had another one in reserve. Shondar hoped not . . .

  He caught himself with an ugly scowl. This disaster planning was beneath him. How had he gone from planning the conquest of Avilon with the other Lords to trying to think of a way that they could survive if the Avilonians chased them back to Dark Space?

  The irony of that was not lost on him. Dark Space had been humanity’s refuge against the Sythian Coalition for the past ten years. Now it was about to become the Coalition’s refuge against humanity.

  Shondar’s hands involuntarily bawled into fists and he pounded the armrests of his command chair, causing the displays before him to shudder. It made no sense! If the humans were so strong, why had they saved their strength for last? Why not fight as one and repel the invasion? Why had they remained in hiding all of this time, only to show their strength now when they were forced to defend themselves?

  The answer to all of those questions came to him in a sudden flash of insight. Because they know about us, he realized. They know we could easily crush them if all of our might were brought to bear. What is one sector against thousands?

  The first seven clusters they’d sent to the humans’ galaxy to test their strength had proven to be the only seven they needed to send. Rather than send more fleets needlessly after the first, those seven had gone on to conquer humanity completely. Now that the initial invasion was no longer enough, they had but to ask the supreme one to send more reinforcements.

  It would not matter if the Avilonians’ technology were more advanced, Shondar realized. They would be so hopelessly outnumbered that they couldn’t hope to survive.

  Suddenly the Gasha groaned and the dazzlingly-bright swirl of the light stream vanished as the command ship was pulled unexpectedly back into real space. Dead ahead Shondar saw the maddening blackness of the nebula they had been trapped within mere hours ago.

  “What?” he boomed, rising from his chair. “What happens?” he demanded.

  “A gravity field does pluck us from the light stream again, My Lord. This time we are at the edge of it, not far from whence we came.”

  “Get us out! How far are we?”

  “We—”

  “Enemy vessels detected!” the sensor operator said. “Dead ahead!”

  “They follow us?”

  “No, My Lord, they are in the wrong place. They lie here in wait for us.”

  “How?”

  “We do not alter our final trajectory for many minutes. They must have forces nearby, and communicate our flight path to them.”

  “Come about! We go back the way we come.”

  “Yes, My Lord.”

  Then the Gasha shuddered underfoot and a distant rumble reached their ears. “What is that? Are they in range so soon?”

  “We cannot see what they shoot us with!”

  “Fire back!”

  “We are out of range!”

  Shondar cursed viciously. “Continue running!”

  “Enemy contact!”

  “Again?”

  “They are behind us! These ones do follow us from the planet, My Lord! What are your orders?”

  Shondar’s naturally gray face paled still further, and his glowing white eyes widened in horror. His gaze turned to the star map hovering before him. Thousands of purple enemy blips were rushing at them both front and rear in two encircling arcs. They were moving to trap the Gasha between them.

  He’d been so distracted by his sudden defeat that he hadn’t even thought about what the Avilonians might do to stop them from leaving. He’d forgotten all about the gravity field.

  “Come about and face them! The shakars force us to fight, and so we fight! For glory!”

  “For glory!” his crew shouted back.

  That battle cry left a bitter taste in Shondar’s mouth. For one who knew nothing of defeat, it was hard to accept, but he knew what was coming.

  Death was coming for them all.

  * * *

  Ethan watched the Sythian command ship vanish with a flash of light. “Frek! We missed them.”

  “That’s it?” Alara asked. “Aren’t you going to follow?”

  Ethan considered that with a frown. “We can’t take a 30-kilometer-long warship down with just the Trinity, and there’s no way the Avilonians’ fighters can chase them all the way to Dark Space. Show’s over,” he said, banking back toward the planet.

  They began flying past Avilonian starfighters and then past a group of cruisers. Oddly, none of them was turning around. Ethan watched them on the grid with a furrowed brow. “Why aren’t they going back?”

  Alara shook her head.

  Then the Avilonian fleet abruptly vanished.

  “The frek? Where’d they go?” Razor put in, asking the question that was already on the tip of Ethan’s tongue.

  “Cloaked?” Alara suggested.

  “Why? There’s nothing to hide from anymore,” Ethan said.

  “Wait a minute . . .” Atton whispered. Then came a rush of static as he let out a sudden breath and gave a short yip of laughter. “They just jumped away, too!”

  “What?” Ethan shook his head and checked the grid for a radiation trail. “Why would they jump after the Sythians if they don’t have the range to follow them? And besides, I don’t see any traces of T-radiation.”

  “Their drives don’t work the same was as ours, and as for it making sense, it makes plenty,” Atton replied. “We ended up stuck in a gravity field a few light years from Avilon when we came here in the Intrepid. It turned out to be one of many. Omnius uses them like a wall to keep people out of the sector.”

  “You’re telling me they’re protecting a whole sector with artificial gravity fields?” Ethan was incredulous. “The energy it wou
ld take to generate fields that size is—”

  “A lot more than we can imagine,” Atton finished. “I don’t know how Omnius does it, but I witnessed it with my own eyes. Why do you think it took so long for us to get here? We only escaped the gravity field when Omnius shut down.”

  “What’s your point, SC?” Razor chimed in.

  Ethan put the pieces together a moment later. “Start spooling for a jump!” he said to Alara, his hands already flying over the controls to deduce a vector from the trail of tachyon radiation which the Sythians had left in their wake.

  “Where to?” Alara asked.

  “Give me a second. . . .”

  “Hoi, I’m not going to die on some skriff’s quest!” Razor said. “You can’t take us all the way back to Dark Space in this bucket, and even if you could, I’m not going.”

  “If your commander’s right,” Ethan said, “we won’t have to go that far before we get yanked out of SLS.”

  “The grav fields . . .” Ceyla said.

  “Exactly. If I were Omnius, I wouldn’t let the Sythians escape if I didn’t have to. I just hope we’re in time for a few parting shots of our own.”

  “Frek yeah!” Razor said.

  All of five minutes later the drives were spooled and Ethan had them flying on a parallel trajectory to the one the Sythians had taken to escape. “Ready?” he asked, turning to Alara.

  “Punch it!” she said.

  And with that, stars and space turned to star lines and bright swirls of light. Ethan sat back and waited. The minutes passed in an agony of anticipation with the occasional comment from the gun deck. He was just beginning to wonder if he and Atton had guessed wrong about the gravity fields when a reversion alarm sounded through the bridge and the dazzling swirl of SLS vanished with an abrupt flash of light.

  They dropped out of SLS in the middle of a warzone. Space ahead of them was void of stars, but bright and flashing with dazzling streaks of red light. The sheer blackness of space confounded Ethan for just a moment before sensors flagged it on the grid as a dark nebula.