by Chris Ward
In a small control room adjacent to the hangar, they brought up their location information. The Bareleon vanguard team appeared as series of flashing dots.
‘They’re closing in,’ Caladan said.
‘Whatever you do, don’t be seen,’ Lia told the others. ‘If they think the ship is still occupied, they’ll search every possible hiding place until they find us.’
‘Can we fight them off?’ Jake asked. ‘Perhaps if we activate a transmissions scrambler to prevent them communicating with the fleet?’
Lia shook her head. ‘The fleet will detect its activation, and by connection, assume the ship is occupied. We’re banking on them thinking we’re abandoned.’ She grimaced. ‘But just in case you have no choice, make sure your blaster’s charged.’
‘They’ve stopped,’ Caladan said, leaning over the terminal. ‘I think it’s time we got to safety.’
They abandoned the control room, moving out of the hangar into the ship’s corridors, sealing themselves behind an airlock door. A couple of floors above, a gallery looked down on the hangar. Two shuttles sat in docking braces. Caladan had moved the third to a smaller adjacent chamber in the hope it would remain undetected.
A sudden massive shudder knocked them all to the floor. When Lia climbed up, she saw a gaping hole in the hangar doors. Space sucked smoke and everything unsecured out into its vacuum, rocking the two shuttles and making fueling pipes and mooring cables flail like tentacles.
Through a haze of escaping coolant spray, a small, square ship entered through the blasted doors and set down, its landing thrusters charring the hangar floor. It was jet black, a box near featureless besides securing cables that snaked out of its sides to attach to anything nearby that would hold it. Still shaking in its mooring, a door opened in the side and a dozen black-clad figures lurched out.
‘So that’s what they look like,’ Lump whispered.
Most of them walked like men, but a couple had extra limbs. A couple even had tails. All wore heavy body armor and helmets that hid their features. Each held a photon cannon across his chest, while their armor and belts were loaded with other weapons.
‘They look invincible,’ Lump said.
‘All that equipment makes them slow,’ Lia answered. ‘But they know how to use it, which is more than most mercenaries. Remember, don’t waste your time trying to reason with them. They might have been human or subspecies once, but now they’re mostly machine, and they care only about one thing. Defeating their enemy.’
‘The first bomb is rigged in that shuttle,’ Caladan said. He lifted a remote and tapped his thumb against its casing. ‘Let’s wake them up a little.’ He pressed the button. In the hangar below, the nearest shuttle’s lower hatch slid open. The closest Bareleons dropped into defensive positions, their weapons rising, anticipating an attack. When none came, they crept forward, peering up into the hatch. ‘Come on,’ Caladan whispered. ‘Just one of you.’
The Bareleons moved forward. One took a tentative step up the hatchway. Another nearby waved him forward. The first hesitated a moment then lifted his gun and shuffled up into the opening.
‘Here it comes,’ Caladan said.
The gallery’s glass shuddered beneath the weight of the explosion. As the smoke cleared, Lia saw carnage: a dozen Bareleons blown apart, a gaping hole in the shuttle where the hatch had been.
The others fired into the gap, but when no return fire came, a group approached, looking inside. They looked at each other, heads moving in silent conversation, likely assessing it to a loss of pressure, a gas leak, faulty wiring. They stepped over their dead comrades and moved deeper into the ship.
‘Time to fall back,’ Caladan said. ‘You all know your positions. And don’t forget your respirators. We’re likely to lose oxygen before long.’
Lia glanced at Jake and Lump, who both nodded. Jake ran for the elevator behind them, heading for the bridge. Lump ran for a downward flight of stairs, his destination the radiation storage bay’s control room.
Caladan grinned. ‘Just you and I left. Let’s go shut them down.’
They headed down into another elevator to the hangar level. The hangar airlock’s internal door was open.
‘They’re inside,’ Lia said, pulling her blaster.
‘If the fleet discovers us, we’re dead. You know that, don’t you?’
Lia gave Caladan a grim smile. ‘And if they find that radiation core before we’re close enough to reach the Helix, most of the Fire Quarter will be dead too. Which would you prefer?’
Caladan grinned. ‘Can I roll the dice?’
‘With which hand?’
Caladan laughed as he shrugged the stump of his left shoulder. ‘Oh, would you look at that. A seven. I guess our luck’s in.’
Somewhere down the corridor behind them came an ear-splitting boom. They both dived to the ground, scrabbling behind a corridor support pillar.
‘Let’s close this way down.’ Lia reached into her pocket and removed a remote charge which she jammed into a crack in the wall. ‘We have eight seconds. Move.’
They raced down the corridor, getting around a corner a moment before the explosion sent a wave of shrapnel flying through where they had been standing.
‘We’re going to destroy this ship, room by room,’ Caladan said.
‘Better us than them. Come on.’
Consulting a tiny handheld computer map, they made their way through the corridors of the ship, trying to cut off the Bareleons’ progress one route at a time. Soon, wherever they turned they were met by walls of smoke and debris.
They clambered over a heap of junk and paused at a clear intersection where boot prints had left dust smears on the floor.
‘We’re too late,’ Caladan said. ‘They’ve already got past us. This way heads to the radiation store.’
‘Then we have no choice but to engage them.’
Caladan whistled through his teeth. ‘It was nice knowing you, captain.’
Lia gave Caladan a grim smile and squeezed Caladan’s shoulder. ‘Ready or not, it’s time to engage. Time to see if this ridiculous plan of ours will actually work.’ She took the transmitter off her belt and called the bridge.
‘Jake? You there? It’s time to engage the remaining thruster. Full speed. Jake?’
She glanced at Caladan. The only answer was the hiss of static.
48
Beth
‘So, you reckon that dot is Abalon 3?’ Paul squinted at the view-screen. ‘That one there?’
‘No, the gray one.’ Beth rolled her eyes. ‘Just look at the coordinates.’
‘I don’t trust lines of numbers,’ Paul muttered. ‘Only my own eyes.’
‘Well, it’s lines of numbers which stop us from flying into the middle of nowhere,’ Beth said, struggling to keep a lid on her anger.
‘And so what’s that cloud? A galaxy? What’s it doing right behind that planet? Shouldn’t it be invisible in the reflected light from the planet’s surface?’
Beth scowled. ‘How very scientific of you. That’s the Bareleon fleet. Thousands and thousands of ships, and I’d guess that darker mass at the center is the Helix itself.’
‘Wow, it’s big.’
‘Big enough to consume planets,’ Harlan5 said from behind them. Which is what it’s likely been doing since the dawn of its existence, in galaxies far away from this one. However, Raylan Climlee decided it would make a good ally in his quest for domination over the Fire Quarter.’
‘And now it’s eating his kingdom?’
‘My programming suggests that’s about right.’
‘Harlan, you said your captain’s mayday signal came from the other side of that fleet?’
‘Yes.’
‘What could they be doing over there?’
Harlan5’s eyes twinkled. ‘My programming has no idea, but it is most likely they are involved in trouble of some sort.’
‘Have you picked up any recent transmissions?’
‘I’ve been switching on o
ur receivers every thirty minutes for no more than a fraction of a second at a time. The most recent occasion was nine seconds ago.’
‘And?’
‘I received no further maydays, but I did pick up a signal relayed to the Helix from a vanguard patrol.’
‘What did it say?’
‘Would you like the base code or my interpretation of it?’
‘No more numbers,’ Paul said.
‘Very well. It acknowledged the presence of a ship that still had some semblance of power.’
‘How are we supposed to take anything from that?’ Paul punched the pilot’s dashboard. ‘Damn, robot. Can’t we program you with better analysis skills?’
‘You need to understand that the Bareleon communicate in ways that few off-worlder species can understand. They’re part organic, part machine. Their communication is entirely alien, so only those segments which break from their regular code are readable.’
‘Which means?’
‘I only know what they’ve found from my interpretation of an anomaly in their regular code.’
‘So you’re guessing?’
Harlan5’s eyes twinkled again. ‘To a certain extent, yes.’
Paul turned to look at Beth. ‘We got any more juice in the motors? We can’t win this fight, so let’s go to ground, lick our wounds, work on building a fleet to blast these mothers out of the sky.’
‘What if that’s Lianetta Jansen out there, and they’re in trouble?’
‘Goddamn it, who cares? She’s a space pirate.’
Beth wanted to slap him, but he was too far away. ‘She’s not just a space pirate. She destroyed Raylan Climlee’s space station—’
‘Technically, it was our pilot who did that—’
‘—and if she did that, we need her in this war. We can’t let her just die out there on some damaged spaceship.’
‘So what do you suggest? We attack them?’
Harlan5 raised an arm. ‘Um, there’s something else that I—’
‘No, but we can’t just run away.’
‘—picked up during—’
‘We’re not running, we’re tactically withdrawing.’
‘—that last transmission.’
They both turned to look at Harlan5. ‘What?’ Beth said.
‘A large battleship just came out of the same wormhole through which we arrived. It’s accelerating quickly, moving toward us.’
‘Raylan Climlee?’
‘It seems highly likely. And he’s sent a transmission to the fleet, alerting them to our potential presence.’
‘So, goddamn it, we have a problem.’
‘On a scale of one to ten, about nine-point-five.’
‘What would be a ten?’
‘If we were disarmed, without power, and already in their firing range.’
Paul sat up. ‘We have three things going for us. Look, I’d take them on in a second, all of them. But we have a choice ass ship right here, one we could use in an interstellar war, when the time comes.’
Beth shook her head. ‘It’s not our ship. We stole it. And the real owner of that ship is on the other side of that fleet, in grave danger. Harlan?’
‘My programming agrees with Little Buck here in a practical sense. Our chances of survival are practically zero. However, my recent memory banks recall that the Matilda has been in such situations on occasion before. And—’, he scratched the top of his head in a way that was almost human, ‘—I would very much like to see my captain again.’
Beth felt her heart beginning to flutter. ‘We can’t win this,’ she said. ‘We just can’t.’ Then, taking a deep breath, she said, ‘Harlan, restore the ship’s power and switch on the transmitters. Send a response to that mayday call.’
‘As you request.’
Beth shook her head. ‘We can’t win this. This is suicide. They have thousands of ships. What chance do we have?’
Paul looked up at her. ‘Switch the controls over to fully manual. I’m flying this ship now.’
‘Um, I don’t think so.’
Paul’s smile bordered on madness. ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life for a chance like this. Do it.’
‘You’re going to get us killed.’
‘Power the cannons. If so, let’s go down with a fight.’
Beth looked up at Harlan5. The robot’s eyes were sparkling with a shifting rainbow of colors. ‘Are you enjoying this?’ she asked.
‘I can sense a certain level of exhilaration,’ he replied. ‘It might be a good idea to strap ourselves in.’
49
Lia
‘I’ll go,’ she said. ‘Do what you can.’ She paused as Caladan nodded. ‘And if this is the end … we had some adventures, didn’t we?’
Caladan met her eyes a moment then lurched forward, pulling her against him with his only hand. He held her against his chest, hugging her tight.
‘You do what you have to do,’ he said. ‘And one way or another, I’ll see you on the other side.’
‘Wherever that is.’
‘Good luck.’
‘And you.’
He pushed her away, smiling, his eyes wet. With a single nod he let her go.
As Lia ran back up the corridor they had come down, in the direction of the elevator shafts to the upper levels, she refused to look back. Her eyes stung with tears, and it wasn’t just from the smoke, but she wouldn’t let the thoughts in. She had work to do, and there was a chance yet that some of them, at least, might be saved.
The ship’s systems, destabilized by the damage they had done in the lower levels, had begun to fail. She stepped through a door into a corridor that led to the coolant generator chamber and was met with a burst of heat that might have scalded her were it not for the flexi-helmet respirator pulled over her face.
The coolant generators were no longer cooling themselves. Soon the generators would go into spontaneous meltdown, first creating a ball of heat and then exploding. The ensuing fire would in turn put a strain on the oxygen generators.
Miraculously, the elevator still worked. Lia rode it up to the bridge then blasted her way through three doors which had stopped working, their electrics jammed. Inside the bridge, she found Jake lying on the ground not far from the pilot’s terminal. Lia rolled him on to his back to discover bleeding from a head wound, his respirator knocked loose. From debris strewn across the floor, she surmised one of the explosions had shaken the bridge.
Knowing it were not the Stillwater deficiency but some other injury made her feel little better. She dragged Jake out into the corridor, then into a small medical bay designed for treating injured flight personnel who might need to continue their work.
The bay contained a single portable recuperation tank. After loading Jake inside, Lia activated a medical droid and input some coordinates, instructing the droid to take the tank down to the docking bay where Caladan had left their planned escape shuttle.
With the debris lying in the corridors, and some routes blocked, it was unlikely the droid would ever make it. Lia patted the top of the tank, running a finger over the outline of Jake’s face.
‘I know you wanted to see all this, but I’m afraid that might not be possible. If we meet again, I’ll give you my best account, and if not, I hope Caladan talks you through it with enough embellishments to make you a superstar.’ As the droid, a squat box on caterpillar treads with a rear towing hook attached to the recuperation tank’s gurney frame, pulled it toward the door, Lia started to say goodbye, but the word caught in her throat.
Instead, she just lifted a hand she found was shaking.
On the bridge, the mist of Bareleon ships filled the view-screens, thousands of patched-together amalgamations of salvaged parts, stolen, recycled and reformed pieces of other peoples’ lives, buzzing like flies around a central monstrosity which Lia was thankful she couldn’t clearly see. Occasionally some magnificently sized robotic tentacle would snake through space like a mother’s arm caressing a thousand of its children at once, and L
ia would gasp in awe at its sheer scale. Still many millions of Earth-miles distant, it was the size of a planet, a part-machine, part-organic, endlessly consuming space octopus systematically clearing out everything civilized that lay in its path.
With her eyes not leaving the densest patch of the fleet, Lia pressed two buttons on the pilot’s dashboard, activating two very different sequences.
One was the remaining thruster, pushed to full power, plowing them forward like a giant metal battering ram.
The other was the ship’s ultimate shutdown sequence, a system once common among ships but now gone out of fashion, carried only by those which transported the deadliest of cargos that ought never to fall into enemy hands.
A self-destruct.
‘Nine minutes,’ Lia muttered. ‘Where does the time go? Raylan, it would have been nice to meet you again and put a blaster between your eyes, but this is the closest I can manage, I’m afraid.’
Not long now. Lia closed her eyes, finally allowing the faces and the memories to come rushing in. Her dear husband, Stephen, so strong, so brave, whom she had met at the Galactic Military Police Academy on Cable, and fallen immediately in love with, melting what she had thought was a duty-hardened heart. How they had talked, for a while considering giving it all up, living a simple life, raising a quiet family and looking up at the stars at night with wistful sighs, regretting nothing.
It had been those stars, though, which had swayed them, convincing them they could pull it off, have everything, and for a while they had: her beloved son Andrew had been born and raised on a GMP space station deep in Trill System, safe and loved, educated in the GMP’s schooling system, protected, brought up with kindness and love.
She had thought it would last forever, until the day it ended.
The day of an attack on the station that left Stephen and Andrew dead, murdered by an opportunistic warlord who had goaded the GMP of his invincibility, taunting them with his cruelty and mercilessness.
