by Will Crudge
“You sounded like a man.” David wouldn’t let his tone or facial expression betray his astonishment.
“My speaker controls took damaged and are in a repair cycle. The safe mode default is male.” She shook her head.
“Makes sense.” David nodded. “I’m the senior ranking Soldier here. The fact that we’re not dead can only mean that we’re more useful to you alive right now. Keeping my shipmates here as well is pointless. Let them go, and I’ll be as compliant as UAHC regs allow for.”
“Not going to happen.” She shook her head. “The only reason you’re alive, is that I wanted to determine what value you may actually be… if any at all. I have no reservations about killing you, or your crew.”
She’s tough. I like that, David thought. “Well, what have you decided?”
“That depends on you, captain.” She gave a crooked smile. “What value are you going to sell me on?”
She’s good. Damn good. I guess these spec ops fuckers aren’t hand-picked for nothing. “I’m a mine-layer skipper assigned to support a marine and fleet fighters. Not all that important, am I?” He smiled back.
“You’re not selling yourself very well. Perhaps you should reconsider how you frame your pitch?” she said with a scowl. But getting under her skin was exactly what David wanted.
“I’m no salesman. I’m a soldier. I fight… follow orders… and if need be, die,” he said with a straight face.
“I admire your courage, captain.” She nodded, and then transitioned her body language to a more authoritative posture. “However, you are toying with me to bide time. I’m not an idiot!”
“I never thought you were, Senior Agent.” He said with a wink. “I just needed a good thirty seconds for my armor to initialize its backup generator!”
The agent’s facial expression betrayed concern for the first time, and he pointed his left forearm at her face. She managed to duck away before the pulse came, but he wasn’t aiming at her to begin with.
The two soldiers that he’d initially seen were now struggling to move. The short-range EMP weapon did its job, and the two men were trapped within powerless suits of armor, that were now too heavy for their non-augmented strength to manipulate.
David hopped to his feet and grabbed his sidearm from the hidden compartment in his leg. He winced as the impact of heavy slugs slammed into his upper back, but he managed to wheel around and drop two more soldiers with head shots.
But then reality set in. He realized he had made a serious mental error and had not scanned the room for threats before he decided to take action. Had he been more diligent, then he would have seen the other twelve commandos bearing down on him from across the docking bay.
He was out of options, and he’d tipped his hand. Giving up was no longer an option not since he drew first blood.
All he could do was dive behind a hardened shipping crate he saw in his periphery and prayed that his maneuver would shift the enemy fire away from his motionless shipmates. But alas, they were in the open and vulnerable.
Shit! He cursed himself for being too impulsive. He would have made the same choices had it been his own life on the line, but now he all but doomed his remaining crew.
“Give up!” Elizabeth shouted. “You’re outgunned, and I have six plasma rifles aimed at your shipmates!”
But he knew they were dead either way. If he dropped his weapon and exposed his self, then he would be dropped. Kelley and Jefe would meet the same fate a second later. But he had to make a call, he supposed. Sometimes the only bad decision is not making one at all! He reminded himself of the old leadership mantra he’d learned from his days at the academy.
“Don’t shoot! I’m coming out,” David said. He hesitated at first, but then mentally forced his hands to raise from behind cover. He slowly placed his ballistic pistol on the crate’s surface, and then methodically stepped out into the open.
His hands still raised, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Get it over with already!
But no shots came. Something was happening. The blood-curdling roar of a beast reverberated through the cavernous structure, and David opened his eyes once more.
The tiger had already tackled and killed half of the twelve soldiers. David froze in confusion. Nothing in his decades of training or operational experience had prepared him for a sight like this. He almost didn’t notice that Elizabeth had decapitated another soldier with a massive sword of some kind.
He shook off the shock of it all and lunged for a fallen rifle a few meters to his right. With a single motion, he retrieved it, cocked the manual charging handle, and switched it into ballistic mode. But by the time he had established a firm sight picture on a single target, he realized there were no targets to be had.
The sight of a Crimson commando with an absurdly large sword, and a pretty face was all he could see. The massive tiger was there as well, and the beast just casually walked up to the woman and lowered its head in anticipation for an ear rub.
David’s head tilted in confusion. She’s a War Master?
“Good work, Napo.” She smiled at the big cat, and then turned her gaze to the confounded Soldier. “I’m Senior Agent Elizabeth Hill but my friends call me War Master.” She winked.
David stepped forward and then stopped within a few meters of her. “How? Why?” It was all he could get out.
“I’ve spent time infiltrating the Crimson—much like Jimma Alba has. I suspect you’ve met her, haven’t you?”
“Yes… Yes, I have!” David shook off his late vestige of confusion. “She was fighting with us to try and retake the station from the Crimson forces, but we got separated early in the fight.”
“I know all about it.” She nodded. “Her father reached out to me when he arrived in Tangine space. Jimma is an old friend of mine. We trained together, but I was a few decades ahead of her.”
“Her father is here?”
“Yes. And others in the Guild as well.” She asserted. “I came in on one of the rescue shuttles donning a UAHC Marine’s uniform.” She tilted her head at the tiger. “Napo here, was already pre-staged in a climate-controlled cargo container.”
“How did you get these Crimson fuckers to think you were their boss?”
“Easy. I still have crimson credentials from years of infiltration. I simply found a dead Senior Agent’s armor and subverted her identity. When I came across this platoon, their own Senior Agent had already been killed, so they allowed me to take temporary command,” she said with another wink.
“Huh. So you were just messing with me?” David asked as if it were rhetorical.
“No, captain.” She smiled and shook her head. “I was playing a role until an opportunity came along to take these troops down.”
David just nodded, and then looked around. His thoughts returned to his shipmates, and then he rushed over to them. He scanned their vitals again, and they were still stable… for now. “Their med Nano is burning up the last of their suits’ energy. We need to get them on a ship in a hurry!” David said.
Elizabeth came up from behind, and then placed a hand on the Soldiers arm. “No worries, captain! Your ship is out there as we speak. They’re trying to do a multi-front rescue op.”
“My ship?” He said as his eyebrows furrowed.
“Yes, the Foehammer.” She replied. “That’s the one, right?”
“Yes, but how? We three, are what’s left of their crew.”
“I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. But I’m just glad that the Fleet Marshal altered their original rescue plan once he realized I was on station. It would have been suicidal otherwise.” She frowned.
“Do you have contact with the Foehammer?”
“No, but you will in a moment.” She nodded to Napo, and the huge tiger dashed over to a small portable pedestal, that David recognized was an ionic field generator. With one mighty swipe of the cat’s paw, the device was smashed to bits.
Within seconds, David’s internal HUD began to flicker with combat net
data. “I’m on the network!”
***
James cringed at the sight of the swarm of Mark-4 fighters that were bearing down on them. He may not have been a military trained tactician, but he’d had enough dealings with space skirmishes to realize that the fighters were waiting until they had the bulk of their number in formation before they fired. The massed fire would ensure the total destruction of both of the smaller ships once their numbers reached a specific threshold.
The sly plan that he’d come up with to maximize the two vessel’s fields of defensive fire would be useless now. He realized that the Mark-4’s all had Mark-6 loadouts, and that meant that they could stand off beyond the beams’ effective range and launch a hail of heavy weapons at them with impunity.
His heart sunk, and then he simply collapsed his face into his hands. Well, I guess I’ll die free.
“Hell yeah!” Steve shouted. James jerked his eyes up and nervously scanned the various displays. A new swarm of fighters now emerged. James couldn’t believe his eyes. He knew that the bulk of the UAHC fighters within the squadron were already destroyed, and that the few that remained were holding defensive positions around the more vulnerable UAHC ships that hadn’t already been wiped out.
“I never thought I’d see the day that the UAHC Air Force would ever fight in open space,” Steve cheered.
It was true. James now began to feel a glimmer of hope, as he watched the UAHC Mark-8 fighters flank the Crimson formation. The surprise was complete, and the end result was devastating.
The UACH Air Force fighters outnumbered the Crimson swarm by at least three to one and had the element of surprise. James could read by their current velocity, that they’d been launched from a HAL somewhere in open space. As fast as fighters could be, they weren’t capable of reaching point two three times the speed of light without a boost of some kind.
At that velocity, their missiles were useless, albeit dangerous to deploy. But their beam cannons were all too deadly either way. James saw the bulk of the friendly fighters overshoot the Crimson swarm and go into a DECEL maneuver. The decelerating fighters were arrayed at hundred and eighty-degree attitude in relation to their vector, and they continued to burn through the enemy formation.
Another group of friendly fighters changed their vector and began to fan out on multiple intercept angles throughout Tangine space. James realized they were making a strafing run at the Crimson forces that were still either hunting the Hailstorm, or just mopping up the remnants of the battered squadron.
“Steve? Can you read me?” A voice broke through on the voice net.
“Aye, Cap! I’m glad to hear your voice,” Steve replied.
“I need immediate EVAC!” David spat. He obviously didn’t have time to exchange pleasantries. “I’ve got two wounded… non-ambulatory… five total bodies… sending locator beacon tokens now!”
James saw the tokens populate on the NAV display, but Steve had already executed the handshake before James could even think to reach for icon.
“Got it! Heading there now. ETA, one hundred and eighty- three seconds,” Steve said.
“One more thing, Steve,” David added. “This bay isn’t a standard berthing. It requires airlock access, and the power grid for the doors is down.”
“So… How the hell can I get you on board?”
“Haven’t you ever wondered why the Foehammer has an ax-shaped prow?” David sent a digital wink to the main display in the CIC.
One hundred and eighty-three seconds later, the mighty sloop was in position to ram through the docking structure’s outer wall. It was largely composed of towering panes of transparent panels that were interlaced together by high-strength alloys. No match for an axe blade that had hundreds of thousands of tons behind it.
Kelley and Jefe were still out cold, but David had activated their helmets, and ensured that they were relatively safe from the vacuum of space, and all the solar radiation that flowed through it.
He stopped to marvel at the sight of a fully armored Crimson commando with a gigantic katana-like sword strapped to her back and stood next to a half-ton tiger. He’d seen a Zodiac jump through open space before… a War Master too… and he knew the big cat could shrug it off easily enough. He also supposed that Elizabeth could do it just as well, but as long as an atmospheric sealed helmet was an option, she might as well take it.
The massive German-U-Boat-shaped sloop crashed through the bulkhead structure like a hot knife through butter. The raging torrent of escaping atmosphere rushed towards the exposed vacuum beyond, and David had to steady his fallen comrades, lest they be sucked out with the growing cloud of debris that was being sucked out into space. Alarm lights flashed red, and the standard lighting of the docking area dimmed to a reddish hue.
But soon the emergency energy shields snapped into place and sealed the atmosphere once again. The sound of alarms were no longer drowned out by the violent rush of air and debris. The sloop ground to a halt, and a blast door from the forward missile magazine hissed with a puff of vapor, and then opened once the atmospheric pressures equalized.
The magazine door was at least ten meters from the deck of the dock, on which the keel of the sloop rested. But then the familiar face of Griffith emerged with a smile. He and some woman wearing a raggedy police uniform began lowering ropes and recovery harnesses.
“I see you’ve captured a Crimson commando… and a tiger?” Griff shouted, but didn’t stop doling out slack for the lines.
The red suit of armor began to disintegrate in front of his eyes. David knew she’d initialized the automatic quick release, and the suit was disassembling itself. The panels and appendages of the suit just clanged against the deck plate, until the view of a woman in a UACH issued set of sub armor emerged. She reached down behind her to retrieve her sword that had been attached to the armor before it fell into pieces. She dusted the scabbard of the mighty sword off, slung it over her back, and then looked up at Griff.
“These days, I prefer the title of War Master,” Elizabeth said with a smile.
Griff just shook off his astounded expression and transitioned to a broad smile. “Now if we could just find Jimma and Sasha, we’d have enough whoop-ass to conquer all of Crimson controlled space.”
All Ahead Flank!
Location: UDF Cutter Aegis, CIC, Tangine Interstellar Port
Date Time: Post Interstellar 08/04/4201 1945HRS Unum Standard Zulu
System: Sol System, Mid Region
Captain Ives watched in amazement, as the sloop sliced right through the docking structure and came to a controlled halt. It takes an Unum AI to make a UAHC ship dance, she thought.
“Ma’am, I suggest we pull out to at least three more clicks from the station proper,” Ensign Furman said while pouring over the tactical displays.
“He’s right,” Lisa, the ship’s AI, confirmed.
“Makes sense.” The captain nodded in response. “We’ll need a better vantage to have line of sight. Anything could be lurking beyond the vertical horizon, and we don’t have enough ammo to fight much more than a carrier pigeon.”
“What’s a carrier midget?” The Ensign asked.
I love my crew, but sometimes I wish they’d read a book once in a while. She shook her head. “OK, Lisa. Take us out. I’ll let James know.”
“James is it?” The AI sent a wink to her neural interface. “Not, Pirate McPirate-Face?”
“Ha!” Ives rolled her eyes. “That guy may have been a pirate, but he’s proven himself. I think after saving the Foehammer and, by proxy, us… The least I can do is call him by his name.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Lisa jibed. Furman just looked over his shoulder with a naughty smile, but when he met Ives’—not too amused—face, he cleared his throat and went back to his telemetry.
“Enemy destroyer inbound and heading straight for the Foehammer!” Lisa shouted. “Must have been behind a debris field, or something came out of nowhere.”
“Load up what we have left in the fiv
e-inch and cut loose once you have a solution,” Ives ordered.
A few moments passed, and then the sound of metal on metal rung through the hull of the ship. No one bothered to verify that the rail had loaded its first projectile. The sound was all they needed to hear.
“Shot-out!” Lisa reported. Beyond a dulled rattle of bulkhead panels, the shot made no sound at all. But it the silent killer was on a clear intercept path.
Ives kept her eyes glued to the visual feed. The shot was timed perfectly. Destroyer would have to either slow its current velocity to stay on course, or at least have to lose velocity to change vectors all together. One did not always have the luxury of having an artificial planetoid on your back. No matter the case, the destroyer would have to absorb a direct hit from the rail slug.
Ives knew a head-on shot with a five-inch rail would only do minimal damage to the much larger vessel but she also knew the enemy ship didn’t have any evasive options at this point.
As predicted, the destroyer had to pull a one hundred and eighty-degree attitude change in order to DECEL. It was the precise time that the five-inch slug struck the thruster array of the destroyer center mass. Flumes of burning atmosphere lashed out of the hull like streams of flaming streamers.
The destroyer was on course to collide with an adjacent section of the station, so Ives wasn’t concerned about the Foehammer’s safety at this point.
She and Furman cheered in triumph. Before today, she would have been ridiculed by her peers if she had ever suggested that an Unum Cutter could fight in open military combat against a destroyer and win. She smiled brightly as ever. It was even sweeter to know that the mighty Aegis had already taken on several frigates, fighters, and had even killed… or assisted in killing… three other destroyers prior.
But the smiles were short-lived. The wounded destroyer collided with the husk of a dead frigate and was knocked out of its spin.
“Recalculating the projected impact of the enemy ship… SHIT!” Lisa shouted.
