One Last Flight: Book One Of The Holy Terran Empire

by Carlos Carrasco

“Head straight for the Paladins,” Lieutenant Zapatas advised. “Slip right in between them.”

  “You sure your people know we’re friendlies?”

  “We gave them your transponder signal.”

  “You heard the man, Strumpet,” I said. “Head for the Imperial Paladins. Best possible speed. And then set a course for Aldiss, once we’re safely past them.”

  “Courses plotted,” Strumpet’s computer responded.

  The ship careened into a starboard turn as her bow rose to the proper bearing. Krestor Station’s Command Center hove into view. The dome was shattered; a jagged ring of crysteel was all that remained. A cloud of debris floated in the space above it. There were corpses among the detritus.

  Our dreaded suspicions were confirmed with the blunt force of a kick to the gut.

  Sister Elizabeth gasped behind me.

  “Sons of bitches!” I growled.

  I made a quick study of the scope but could find no target upon which to vent my wrath. “Strumpet, switch to manual.”

  “Manual control engaged.”

  “What are you doing?” Zapatas demanded.

  I ignored him and turned the ship back towards the station. Alpha Bay came into view. I increased magnification on the monitor. The bay was crawling with Federation troopers. They were forming into ranks, preparing to scour the station for more Imperials.

  “Strumpet, Alpha Bay is your target,” I said. “Ready torpedoes, all three.”

  “Torpedoes ready.”

  “You didn’t have any torpedoes when I impounded the ship,” Zapatas said. “Where did you get them?”

  “I know a guy,” I said, and then corrected myself under my breath, “Knew a guy…”

  “Don’t do this Gaelic,” Zapatas said. “It’s not going to bring her back. We’ve got civilians on board...”

  I flew out for ten klicks, making certain the warheads would have the necessary distance to arm themselves and then turned back to face Alpha Bay.

  “Gaelic, please…”

  “Strumpet, fire torpedoes!”

  The missiles streaked across the space between the ship and station. The bay’s shield curtain was calibrated to keep out the deadly plenum of deep space. The projectiles pierced it as easily as they would a rain cloud. Flames bloomed in Alpha Bay, turning that segment of the ring into a fiery hell.

  I turned the yoke, returning the ship to her previous course. “Strumpet, take over,” I said and unstrapped myself from the seat. I rose unsteadily to my feet. I was hot with anger, feverish with hatred for my condition, the position I had been thrust in and at my utter helplessness to do anything about any of it. A new wave of nausea rose to meet the hate roiling in me.

  “That was stupid, Gaelic,” Lieutenant Zapatas said, blocking my path to the bathroom.

  “Get out of my way, goon!”

  The knight didn’t budge. “That was stupid and a reckless…”

  “There’s a pair of Starwings headed our way,” Ringo announced from the seat I had vacated.

  “But mostly that was selfish, Gaelic,” Zapatas continued. “Utterly selfish to risk the lives of civilians for an act of revenge. You may have just killed us all.”

  “We all got to die sometime,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “This is sub-lieutenant John Ringo of the ISS Lyonesse requesting assistance. We have civilians on board and are being pursued by two Starwings. This is a priority one distress call! I repeat…”

  “I won’t ask again,” I said closing the distance between us. “Get the hell out of my way.”

  Lieutenant Zapatas stepped aside with a sad shake of his head. “Just when I was beginning to believe you were a better man than I first assumed you were.”

  I was going to tell him just what I thought of his opinion of me, but the words never came. Instead, a jet of vomit erupted from my mouth. My bladder and bowels loosed their contents. I dropped to my knees. My head swooned. I vomited again. The world about me retreated and dimmed. Darkness crowded in from the outer edges of consciousness. I fell forward, face-planting in my own puddle of bile.

  A blackness, deeper than starless space, swallowed me.

  22

  My consciousness returned some indeterminate time later, a slight, trembling flame, flickering in and out of existence it seemed, aware only of itself and the vast darkness which encompassed it. My mind grabbed for sensations beyond itself; inchoate sounds, faint and fleeting scents, warmth, cold… the prick of a needle? The touch of a hand?

  Suspended in that timeless darkness, the sounds, scents and sensations slowly became more distinct, clearer and intelligible to my incipient consciousness. The familiar, soft hum of an aether drive, my own breathing, the beating of my heart, foot falls, coming and going, snatches of conversation, the tang of antiseptics and conditioned air, more touches of a hand; my mind seized and sorted it all in its effort to piece a world together from the disparate datum.

  And then there was light.

  A dim, yet enticing, glow set my eyelids atremble and beckoned me beyond their veiling. I strained to lift them. They fluttered open. Blinding light flooded my sight, banishing the darkness. I shut my eyes again. After the space of a dozen heartbeats, I slowly opened them again. The glare dulled by gradual exposure. The white blur before me dissipated and details quickly emerged.

  I was in another infirmary. It was a large, rectangular room. There were twenty, maybe twenty-five beds along the opposite wall. A silver crucifix hung above each one. My bed was one of as many across the room. I could not move well enough yet to take it all in, but it seemed that only about a quarter of them were occupied.

  Someone held my hand. I turned my head. It was Sister Elizabeth, seated on a chair at my bedside. She held my left hand in her right while she fingered her rosary beads with her left. The nun’s eyes were closed. Her lips moved in whispered prayer.

  I gave her hand a squeeze. The nun’s eyes flew open and widened at the sight of mine.

  Sister Elizabeth sprung to her feet. “Gaelic!”

  Gaelic of Arkum, I thought. Yes, that is my name. Jumbled threads of details began unfurling in my mind and weaving themselves into memories.

  “God be praised, Gaelic,” Sister Elizabeth said. “You’re awake. God be praised!”

  I tried to speak but my throat was dry. The words caught painfully in my throat.

  “Have some water before you try and speak,” Sister Elizabeth said.

  The nun dropped her beads on my lap and reached for a nippled bottle off a bedside table. She brought it to my lips and she gently squeezed some drops into my mouth. When I started to drink on my own, Sister Elizabeth looked up and across the infirmary. “Father! Father Erasmus! He’s awake, father!” She then turned back to me and explained. “Father Erasmus, he’s one of the ship’s doctors. He’s been taking good care of you. We’re onboard the Oremus. When Krestor Station fell, she was diverted to Aldiss and picked us up.”

  The Oremus? Yes, she was one of the empire’s missionary Mercy Ships. Krestor Station. The battling fleets. The Strumpet. My Strumpet!

  “My ship?” The words wheezed through my throat. “Where?”

  “Your Strumpet is here,” the young nun answered. “She’s tucked away in the hangar with the Oremus’ shuttles.”

  More memories returned. I recalled the final battles to shut down the Krestor’s AI and to get off the station. I remembered Esty leaving me again and the sight of the Command Center’s shattered dome. I recalled firing on Krestor’s Alpha Bay. The anger and hatred that prompted the attack were gone or perhaps, they were still blanketed under the remaining layers of amnesia. Either way, their absence allowed me to recall the action clearly, to see it objectively for what it was, a stupid, reckless and yes, a selfish thing to do. My foolish attack had needlessly drawn the attention of Startwings, endangering my passengers.

  Conscience bit deep at the confession.

  But we were not killed. We were on the Oremus.

  “How?” I
croaked.

  “A flight of Imperial Angels answered Sub-lieutenant Ringo’s distress call,” the nun said. “They covered us, allowed us to escape.”

  At what price, I wondered as conscience dug its teeth in deeper.

  Sister Elizabeth gave my hand a squeeze and released it as a priest came into view. He was an old, green-skinned, pointy-eared and golden-eyed Chlorix, bald but goateed in long silvery-white strands of silk-like hair.

  “Welcome back, Don Gaelic of Arkum,” the priest said with a smile. “You are one very fortunate man.”

  I took a large swallow of water before responding, “I don’t feel very fortunate, father.”

  “That’s to be expected,” the priest said. “You just awoke from a three-day coma. You’ll feel better in a few days.”

  “If I don’t die first,” I said.

  The priest’s smile widened. He turned to the nun. “You didn’t tell him?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I didn’t think it my place to tell him, father,” Sister Elizabeth said.

  “Tell me what?”

  The priest nodded and turned back to me. “We have sufficient cause for cautious optimism, Gaelic of Arkum. Your transuranic cancer is in remission.”

  I stared at the priest and nun, mouth agape. My mind was blank, numbed by the very notion at the heart of his announcement. I couldn’t believe that they would joke about such a matter. Yet it seemed equally impossible that they were telling me the truth. “That’s. Not. Possible,” I said, finding my voice at last. “Transuranic cancer is incurable.”

  “So I believed until I met you,” Father Erasmus said. The priest reached past me and drew forward a monitor attached to a double jointed arm. He swivelled the screen around to face me. As I read and re-read the vitals displayed on the monitor, the priest explained, “Your interstitium is clean. Actin polymerization is coming along nicely. Your proteametic readings are very encouraging. The interleukin count is a little high, but manageable. Cellular biofield resonance is getting stronger by the hour. Your body is no longer exhibiting any of the acute pathic autophagy for someone in so late a stage of transuranic cancer. Quite the contrary, you’re producing healthy white blood cells again. And they’re quite vigorous in their purging of the few remaining TC cells. We’re aiding them along with targeted applications of bionanitics. If you continue to progress along your present course, we could declare you cured in just a few days.”

  “How?”

  “We don’t know,” the priest answered with a shrug and a shake of his green head.

  I looked from the priest to the nun and back again. “It’s a miracle,” I said.

  “Now, now, Gaelic of Arkum, let’s not leap to conclusions,” the priest admonished. “Especially of the fantastic sort.”

  I turned to Sister Elizabeth. Her eyes were welling with tears. I turned back to the priest and asked, “What do you mean? I thought you people were all about miracles.”

  Father Erasmus smiled indulgently at me. “The Resurrection of our Lord and Savior is the foundational miracle of our faith. And yes, we believe human history is peppered with miracles, great and small, but, we don’t rush to call everything we don’t understand a miracle. That way lies error… and error breeds heresy, my good Don.”

  I was as equally incredulous of the priest’s pronouncement as I was of his prognosis. “Then how do you explain my remission?”

  Father Erasmus loosed a heavy sigh with a deep shrug of his slender shoulders. “I don’t know how it has happened. Therefore, I can’t explain it to you. I can however, conjecture. My guess would be that you stumbled upon a therapeutic regimen. Again, I’m only speculating, but I would hazard to say your cure began during those long hours you spent between Ganesh and Vishnu, bombarded by their radiation.”

  “But radiation therapy has never proven effective against TC,” I said.

  “Standard radiation therapy has proven ineffective, yes,” the priest agreed. “But we don’t know exactly the type and intensity of radiation which you were exposed to during that time. We’ll have to investigate the area, once the war is over.”

  “My Strumpet’s sensor log could tell…”

  “We’ve checked. Unfortunately, your Strumpet’s scanners were impaired at the time by the damage they received in your battle with the Starwings and the subsequent beating from the iron hail storm. The ship’s sensor log is incomplete, her analysis, inconclusive.”

  “But you still believe my time in that radiation soup cured me?”

  The priest shook his head. “No, not by itself. Not likely. I theorize the conditions for remission were generated by the radiation soup, as you call it, in some inadvertent and fortuitous combination with your self-administered anti-rad therapy, your frequent use of bio-enhancement, perhaps even the nuclear missile you detonated and the gravitron wash you were exposed to before your ship entered Krestor Station.”

  “That’s a whole lot of variables there, doc.”

  The priest/doctor nodded his head excitedly. “I know! Scientists will be studying your case for years to come, Don Gaelic of Arkum.”

  “Or we can just call it a miracle,” I suggested with a weak grin.

  Father Erasmus chuckled dryly and offered me his hand.

  “I cannot fault you for feeling so, my good sir,” he said, shaking my hand. “So I will not try to dissuade you any further. Let us agree that it is a blessed turn of events. We are all praying it be God’s will that your remission be a full one. Until then, rest and, though I have been told that you are an unbeliever, might I suggest you join us in our prayers for your speedy and full recovery.”

  “Pascal’s wager again, huh?”

  “You’re familiar with it?”

  “Your young nun here is quite the proselytizer, father,” I said with a wink at Sister Elizabeth. “You should see to it that she gets a raise or maybe an occasional Sunday off.”

  She smiled, freeing a tear.

  Father Erasmus looked at her and then turned back to me with a grin. “I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, I’ll leave you in her capable hands. I’ll be back to check up on you in the morning. Goodnight to you both.”

  “Good night, father,” the nun and I said in unison.

  I waited until I thought he was out of earshot, not something easily determined for a Chlorix, before asking the young nun, “You believe it’s a miracle don’t you?”

  Sister Elizabeth grabbed my hand again and nodded vigorously, loosening more tears.

  “Then what’s his problem?”

  “He’s a Jesuit,” she answered with a dismissive shrug. She then leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “They’re often too clever for their own good.”

  “I’ll have to remember that,” I said.

  She nodded sagely.

  “So tell me, what happened, after I fell into a coma?”

  “As I said, the Angels allowed us to escape. We cleaned you up and took as good care of you as we could on the Strumpet. It was touch and go for a while, but there were two doctors among the civilians. They managed to keep you alive until we made it to Aldiss a day and half later. Once in orbit, we transferred you to the Oremus.”

  “And the battle?” I asked “You said Krestor fell?”

  “Yes, the Federation captured Krestor Station. Excalibur, Galatine, the whole Imperial battle group was destroyed.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “We all are.”

  “And the foundry?”

  “It was destroyed in the fighting.”

  “The civilians we left behind, what became of them?”

  “When we left Aldiss this morning, the news was that the Federation was processing them. They were all Havenites, so the Feds will just dump them back on Haven after processing.” The young nun paused. She seemed to turn introspective for a few moments before continuing. “Your Esty… Mother Superior Dymphna is among the confirmed dead.”

  It was my turn to withdraw into myself for a few mo
ments.

  “I’m sorry, Gaelic, but she died along with everyone in the Command Center when it was struck.”

  I nodded gravely, recalling the last view we had of the Command Center.

  “We’re saying a Mass for all the fallen this Sunday.”[1]

  I nodded again.

  “You should join us.”

  “I’ll be there, transuranic cancer willing.”

  “Don’t be so incorrigible, Gaelic of Arkum,” she squeezed my hand. “You’ll be there if God is willing.”

  “Well, you know me…”

  “Do I?” the nun asked, a small smirk pulling on a corner of her mouth. “I think you’ve been holding out on us.”

  “What do you mean by that, sister?”

  The nun pointed up at the wall behind me. I craned my neck and rolled my eyes up in my skull to find Aggie Whittler’s rough-hewn cypress crucifix looking back down on me.

  “Well, I’ll be,” I said and laughed. “It’s a gift from an old friend.”

  “We found it while looking through your storage cabinets,” Sister Elizabeth said.

  I turned back to the nun. “Looking through my cabinets?”

  “We were searching for medicines, medical equipment, anything that might help us keep you alive, Gaelic.”

  “Well, in that case, I must forgive you for rifling through my stuff.”

  “I’m told certain holos were also found, holos that are best consigned to the flames.”

  I laughed again. “My job requires that I spend a lot of time in space, sister; all by my lonesome.”

  “That’s no excuse, sir!”

  “Bucking for the reverend mother position already, are you?”

  Sister Elizabeth let go my hand and snorted imperiously. “That’s a low blow that does not merit a response.”

  “Forgive me, sister.”

  “You are forgiven,” the young nun said with a ceremonious nod of her head. “My son.”

  We shared a laugh and then fell silent for a long spell before I thought to ask, “Where are we headed, by the way?”

  “Earth,” she said. “By way of Amber so that Lieutenant Zapatas and a few others can connect with the Lyonesse.”