by Chris Ward
And Lia, who had been duty officer at the time, allowing a bomb-ship to dock without full safety checks, had taken the fall.
Near-mindless with grief and threatened with a court-marshaling which at best would strip her rank and at worst would send her to a prison planet, she had chosen to run.
And she had been running ever since.
Vowing to avenge her husband and child, she had roamed the galaxy, surviving how she could, hoping to build her strength but finding one dark path led to another.
And the darkest one had led to a little moon in Phevius System, where she had given up her mother’s life on a thread of hope.
‘I failed you all,’ she whispered. ‘All I ever did was try, but I failed. Sometimes you can’t win, no matter how hard you try.’
As though in response, the ship shuddered. Lia opened her eyes. Fighters were approaching, firing on the Raging Fire, whose shields would surely fail before long.
She glanced at the counter.
Six minutes.
It was five until they passed close enough to the wormhole to make a break.
She hoped Caladan, Jake, and Lump made it.
That would be something, at least.
50
Caladan
He heard the firefight before he saw it. Turning the corridor’s corner, he came up behind a line of crouched Bareleon warriors, their chrome-black body armor glinting in the strobe flicker of the blaster fire.
‘Lump!’ Caladan screamed, rolling out into view, unleashing a volley of blaster fire at the back of the Barelaon line. Three fell, their fragile, robot-human body kits breaking up, but others turned, engaging him, pushing him back. Before diving into cover, he glimpsed more entrenched farther ahead, slowly pushing their way up the corridor toward the radiation store.
‘So much for keeping our presence quiet,’ he said through gritted teeth, setting his blaster to its highest power then risking a glance out to assess the corridor’s layout. A return blast slammed into the wall behind him, but he had seen: above the nearest entrenchment ran a line of fuel pipes, most likely connected to the heating system or electrics on the lower levels.
He didn’t wait to assess his own danger. He rolled, aimed, and fired, then ducked back in as an explosion rocked the corridor and a fireball blasted past his head. As the smoke and fire cleared, he ran into the cloud of debris, firing on everything that moved.
Through the smoke appeared a pair of wide blast doors, battered and scored by blaster fire. A guard desk stood in front of it, blown nearly to pieces. Around it lay the bodies of a dozen Bareleons, nothing beyond their black body armor recognizable as any known off-worlder species. For the first time in his life, Caladan was looking at something totally, unexplainably alien, their features a mess of lumps, nodes, tentacles and shiny points like glass, any of which could have functioned as eyes, ears, nose or mouth.
He kicked the nearest aside, moving to the terminal where nothing moved, needing to get this next moment over with.
Lump lay on the ground behind the terminal, his eyes closed, his body still. He had taken hits from a dozen blaster shots, soaking his clothes with blood. Passed out, he had taped his guns to the terminal’s sides and fixed the firing buttons, maintaining his defense of the radiation chamber even after he himself had fallen.
‘Damn, boy, you could have waited,’ Caladan said. He lifted the stricken form onto his knees, cradling Lump’s misshapen head. ‘I saw what you did. I saw that image you made. It didn’t matter. Look at me. One arm gone and a lot more besides, and I’ve taken every stare going. No one sees inside, do they, but I think … you know, I saw inside of you. And if there was anyone who deserved to be my son … well, I think you took the crown. I couldn’t match you, could I? Not for looks, not for deviousness, not for resourcefulness, and certainly not for cheek. You were my son, boy, that’s for certain. And I’ll never forget you.’
Lump didn’t move, but for a moment Caladan thought he saw a slight creasing of the boy’s misshapen lips. He sighed, waiting, but no movement came. He lowered Lump to the ground, pulled a cleaning sheet out of a compartment at the bottom of the guard terminal and draped it over the boy’s face.
‘I’m sorry, boy. I wish I could do better.’
He looked at the still form for a moment longer then turned back to the terminal. By some miracle it still worked, and when he brought up the ship’s systems, he stared in surprise.
Lia had already activated the rear thruster, blasting them forward into the Helix’s core.
Five minutes until they passed within momentum range of an inter-system wormhole which was their only chance of survival.
Six until the ship self-destructed, releasing the deadly radiation core it carried onboard.
Caladan turned to Lump. He gave the boy’s hand a squeeze, feeling a momentary pang of regret that he swallowed down. He hurried back the way he had come through the clouds of smoke, among which emergency lights on the walls had now begun to flash.
Parts of the ship had begun to shut down, but he had done his homework on the Raging Fire’s labyrinth of service corridors during their flight. He found his way through gloomy, narrow passages where breaking coolant systems had let the ship’s internal heat swirl out of control, leaving rivers of hot water dribbling down the walls. He ran down metal stairwells, climbed awkwardly up ladders, and even shimmied down a thirty-meter emergency escape pole, his shoulder aching as he regretted, not for the first time, his lack of a second arm.
He was only a couple of corridors away from the small hangar where the escape shuttle waited when he heard a commotion up ahead.
Pulling his blaster, he squatted and peered around a corner, fearing more Bareleons. Instead, his eyes were met with a bizarre sight: a clumsy transportation droid trying to pull a loaded gurney through a smoking crater in the corridor floor.
‘Jake?’
He ran forward, deactivating the droid with the push of an emergency override, and then peering into the tank to see that indeed Jake lay inside. He didn’t pause to consider what Lia had done, nor why she wasn’t with the inert journalist. He lifted the stuck wheels out of the hole and dragged the tank after him, thankful for a gurney sturdier and in better condition than much of the rest of the ship’s components.
An airlock let him through into the hangar. A magnetically sealed wall opened out on to the vastness of space, giving him a nausea-inducing view of the Bareleon fleet. More ships than he dared to count blasted through space like a cloud of flies, while beyond the seemingly uncoordinated mess he saw the great arms of the Helix itself.
The shuttle sat on a springboard launch pad. Slightly triangular with a domed upper surface like a loaf of Earth-bread, it had no obvious weapons and looked as capable of escaping the Bareleon fleet through the mist of encircling ships as he did by flying with one arm. The terminal told him that the wormhole was a bare million Earth-miles to their starboard side, a few minutes at full speed.
Surprise.
It was their only chance.
He tried not to think about Lia as he pulled Jake’s recuperation tank into the shuttle and secured it. He tried not to think about her as he activated a launch sequence, and he tried not to think about her as the magnetic field opened to allow the shuttle to leave.
He tried not to think about her, but he did.
‘Damn you,’ he spat, closing off the magnetic field and pausing the launch sequence. In a moment he was out of the pilot’s chair and running down the hatch to the hangar floor. Smoke had begun to rise from the terminal as its internal systems overheated, but the intercom to the bridge was still working.
‘Lia!’ he shouted. ‘Come on! You can still make it!’
The crackle made his heart jump. ‘It’s too late,’ came a barely audible voice. ‘The autopilot has disengaged. I need to stay with the ship as long as possible.’
‘No! There’s nothing more you can do!’
He thought he heard a sniff. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be fine
. There’s a single person escape pod on the bridge.’
‘I know there is! I bought this junk heap, remember? And it’s useless. It’s got no stasis-ultraspace, no power, nothing. You’re as well off staying with the ship as taking that thing.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But you know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lia….’
‘Caladan … I can operate your shuttle’s launch sequence from here. This is your last chance. You owe it to Jake to go with him. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. One way or another.’
‘Lia … I….’
‘Don’t get sentimental. Get out of here.’
The transmission clicked off. Caladan punched the terminal dashboard until blood pooled under his hand. Behind him, the shuttle’s engines started up, the thrusters flaring.
‘Damn you,’ Caladan shouted, as he ran for it. ‘Damn you, Lianetta.’
51
Harlan5
Paul was certainly earning his nickname. Buck Sanders, chisel-jawed star of the GMP training academy’s textbook series, was a character Caladan had often goaded the captain about for a perceived crush on what was essentially a mess of lines drawn on a page. Buck certainly couldn’t have flown the Matilda with such careless abandon, and, however grudgingly Harlan5’s programming chose to admit, no little skill.
As the Bareleon came at them from all sides in ships ranging in size from something you could fit into the Matilda’s flight cabin to monstrosities which could land on a mid-sized city and leave no trace of its existence, Paul swung them back and forth, dipping into gut-wrenching dives and towering, spinning ascents, avoiding all but the occasional minor cannon blast as Beth, gamely hanging on in the co-pilot’s seat, returned fire.
‘Woo, got another one!’ Paul shouted, punching the dashboard before sending them into a spin so sharp even Harlan5’s vision began to waver. Beth’s head lolled, the girl on the verge of passing out, but Paul, whom Harlan5 was convinced was either part robot or part concrete, seemed unaffected.
‘I’m gonna be sick,’ Beth moaned, gritting her teeth, keeping one hand over the firing controls even as the ship’s motion swung her back and forth.
‘I’ve picked up a detachment from the spacecraft we detected,’ Harlan5 said. ‘It appears a small shuttle has jettisoned. That could be my captain. Might I suggest a course to intercept and perhaps guide them into the wormhole?’
‘Which way?’ Paul shouted.
Harlan5 began to read out a line of coordinates. The spacecraft was showing clear signs of plowing headlong into the Helix itself if not stopped first. Harlan5 didn’t like to guess at its plan, but if a shuttle had jettisoned, that suggested some sort of bomb.
‘No more numbers, robot! Which way?’
‘Left,’ Beth shouted. ‘Aim between those cruisers.’
‘Are you sure? You know that from that code?’
‘No, but if you aim at either one we’ll collide!’
‘Ah, sure.’
The Matilda roared on, cutting through the Bareleon fleet. Harlan5 glanced at the system controls. Fuel was fine, but the shields were low on power. They had taken too many hits. Eventually the fighters would grind them down, but they could only withstand one more major blast.
‘The wormhole,’ Harlan5 said. ‘It’s our only chance.’
‘Where’s the shuttle?’
‘Heading right for it, but the Bareleon are moving to cut it off.’
‘Will it make it?’ Beth asked as they leveled out through a clearer area as a group of fighters were caught blindsided.
‘It has no chance without cover,’ Harlan5 said. ‘It’s small and nearly unarmed according to my programming’s identification of its model.’
‘Then cover it shall be,’ Paul said, punching the dash. ‘Have we got a visual yet?’
‘It’s that dot three from the right as you look at the left view-screen, just past the central column,’ Harlan5 said. ‘Is that layman enough for you?’
Paul grinned. ‘Got it. Can we make contact?’
‘I’m sending a transmission now,’ Harlan5 said.
‘Let’s send them home,’ Paul said.
52
Lia
Lia sat with her feet up on the terminal, her hands behind her head. Through the view-screens she watched the Bareleon ships closing in, their fighters and now cruisers firing on the Raging Fire as it continued its collision course with the Helix. Caladan and Jake had evacuated, the shuttle hopefully ignored as the Bareleon fleet turned its focus on her speeding bomb.
Did they know what was coming? Did she? Lia wished she had something decent to drink as a toast to what she hoped would be a major victory, but she would never know for sure.
As the ship began to bank again, she leaned forward and adjusted the controls, bringing it straight. She sighed. The escape pod behind the bridge was wishful thinking. It might make it to the wormhole, but without someone at the controls, the Raging Fire would veer off course, exploding uselessly in the vastness of space.
‘You wanted a hero, Jake,’ she whispered. ‘Here I am. Write something good about me.’
Just three minutes until self-destruction. She wondered if it would hurt. It felt appropriate to announce her presence at last, but the Raging Fire’s transmissions alerts were too mundane. Instead, she input her own code, blasting her own word of defiance, one that had come to mean so much.
Matilda, Matilda, Matilda.
To her surprise, the receiver blinked, someone close by responding to the transmission.
She pulled up location coordinates and an identification assessment, her eyes widening as a rendering of the answering ship appeared on the screen.
‘Harlan,’ she said into the receiver. ‘Is that you?’
‘Captain, it warms my synthetic heart to hear from you again.’
The Matilda, piloted by someone unknown, was roaring through the Bareleon fleet in pursuit of the shuttle.
‘Harlan … I don’t know how you got here or who you’re with, but make sure you get them away,’ she said. ‘And get through that wormhole. What we’re about to do… don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’
‘Captain—’
She shut off the transmission, closing her eyes. At the last, her old ship had returned to her, but it was too late. She could only hope they escaped.
The receiver was flashing again, this time from a different source. Lia felt a little more trepidation as she clicked the respond button, aware that she had less than two minutes left of her life, not wanting to fill it with hate or pain—
‘Ah, Lianetta, are you there?’
Anger bloomed in her heart as she leaned over the controls.
‘Raylan Climlee—’
‘I don’t know what madcap mission you’re on, but I just wanted you to know that I have your friends in my sights. They won’t escape. They will all die, and they will suffer, just like your family did. I made them hurt, Lianetta. I made them hurt in your honor—’
Something slammed down on the receiver, destroying it in a shower of sparks. Lia jerked back as the metal pole lifted again, and she found herself staring into a bloody face looking up at her from beside the captain’ seat.
‘You don’t need to hear that,’ Lump said.
Lia stared. ‘I thought you were with Caladan.’
‘I’m afraid I played a little ruse on my father,’ he said. ‘I played dead. I just wondered what he would say, then it didn’t seem appropriate to interrupt him.’ He lifted a finger and wiped away a tear. ‘I think I might have impressed him at last.’
Lia smiled. ‘That’s not an easy task. You did well. Quickly, there’s still time. There’s an escape pod behind the bridge. You can still get away.’
Lump gave a slow nod. His eyes had glazed over as he looked past her at the fleet outside.
‘I know there is,’ he said.
The metal pole swung into Lia’s face.
53
Beth
Harlan5 had gone quiet.
Beth, her stomach churning, risked a glance back, and saw the robot staring out at the Bareleon fleet and the dot of the shuttle ahead of them.
‘Harlan? Are you all right?’
‘I received a transmission,’ the robot said. ‘From my captain. She’s not on that shuttle, but others are. We have to help them.’
‘She’s not? Where is she?’
Paul glanced at her, for once not saying anything, and Beth understood.
The barge.
‘Crank it up, Paul,’ she said, trying to sound heroic. ‘Let’s cover them and get out of here.’
‘Right on.’
The Matilda arced in toward a line of oncoming fighters. Beth hammered the cannon controls as fast as she could, feeling a wave of elation as half a dozen fighters blew apart. There were more, though. There were always more.
‘There’s a cruiser targeting the shuttle,’ Paul said. ‘I don’t think it’s Bareleon. It has the markings of Phevius System.’
‘Raylan Climlee.’
‘We have to stop it.’
Harlan5 shifted in his brace. ‘We can’t even dent it unless we drop the power from the shields and focus all the ship’s firepower,’ he said.
‘Which would be a really stupid idea, right?’ Paul said. ‘We’d be undefended for several seconds.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘But you think we should do it anyway?’
To their left, the dot that was the space barge was past them now, taking heavy fire from the Bareleons as it headed into the Helix’s core.
‘I think we should do it anyway,’ Harlan5 said. ‘On your word, Little Buck.’
‘Three, two, one … fire!’
The Matilda began to shudder as fighter fire previously deflected by the shields found its mark. Ahead of them, a concentrated blast rocketed through the sky, slamming into the cruiser’s side, powerful enough to break through its shields. The huge ship banked. Ahead of them, the shuttle blinked out of existence.
