Duel in the Dark: Blood on the Stars I

by Jay Allan

  “I say again, Commander, there is no reason for you to die. The Union no doubt deceived your people. I will stand with you, urge for your survivors to be released as quickly as possible.”

  “No. I thank you for your words, and I know you speak from your conception of honor. But there is no route back for us. We have a saying among my people, Captain. The way is the way. We do not surrender. We do not return home in defeat. For us, there is only one alternative to victory. And one last duty for me to perform.”

  Barron stood in front of his chair, watching the woman on the screen, so recently his enemy…and now, what? He didn’t know her, but for reasons he couldn’t fully explain, he felt himself mourning her imminent death. He blamed her for the losses he’d suffered, but now all he could feel was regret that he’d been compelled to destroy her.

  He’d felt rage during the battle, but as he listened to her words, he began to understand. She had been created even as he had, destined from birth to fill a role. The culture that had molded her was different from the one that had formed his views. But he suspected they had much in common. She’d never had a choice. In her own way, she was doing her duty, even as he had been. He could think of a hundred reasons to hate her, but in spite of them all, he realized he respected her. Given time, he even believed he could even grow to like her. To call her friend.

  “Commander…” He’d intended to try one last time to persuade her, but even as he’d begun, she started to shake her head, and he realized she was as bound to what she was as much as he.

  “Farewell, Captain Tyler Barron. My regards, and my respect to a fellow warrior. Join your people, and fight the war that is like to come upon you. I ask but one thing of you. If, in the fullness of time, our people do become allies…know that my spirit rides to battle with you. For it would be an honor to serve at your side and not against you. Good fortune to you, and to all who serve you.”

  With that the screen went dark, and Tyler Barron sat long, staring at the blackness where his enemy had been moments before.

  * * *

  Kat had stood while she addressed Captain Barron. He’d been a worthy adversary, an opponent a true warrior could only respect, and she had treated him as such. But now she sat down. Invictus’s bridge was a smoke-filled wreck, most of her officers dead. Wentus was still alive, though he was mortally wounded and barely conscious. She wasn’t sure how many of her people were still alive in other sections of the ship. A significant number, no doubt, though she was sure hundreds were already dead.

  Now that she’d cut the com line, she sat down. It was odd that amid the destruction and defeat, the disgrace and the shadow of death upon her, she should still have a fleeting thought once again about how comfortable her chair was. She almost laughed.

  She reached down and pulled up the mini tablet she kept in the compartment next to her seat. She flicked her finger across it, and it lit up, displaying a photo. A young boy and girl. Her children. She ran her fingers over their images, and she felt strange, her eyes moist, wet with tears.

  Alliance warriors don’t cry…

  But for all the forcefulness of her thought, all the decades of training and indoctrination, the discipline bred into her soul, she could feel the tears streaming down her cheeks. She didn’t cry over her imminent death, nor even the realization that she would never see her children again, though that tore at her like knives slicing through her heart.

  No, it was none of those things that had broken her. It was the realization that her children would follow her example. They would be raised as the next generation of the Regulli, as heirs to the family tradition of service and unswerving devotion to duty. They would be just as she had been. Even if they had questions, doubts, they would bury them and follow their orders. They would fight…and they would likely win glory. Until one day each came to the pass she had, the final defeat. The thought of her children staring into the same abyss yawning before her was the final blow.

  She heard the com unit buzz. Captain Barron again, she knew, probably intent on making one more appeal for her to surrender. She knew the enemy commander meant well…but all the buzzing did was torment her, to tease her with glimpses of survival she knew could never be.

  The children were still there in her mind, amid scenes of darkness. She tried to push the bleak thoughts aside, but they were there, clear and resolute despite all her attempts to ignore them. Each of her children, years from now, grown, blood-covered and battered, driven on by rage, by the thought of their mother, dead so many years before. They would fight, and they would find their end, death’s bitter harvest in some battle years from now.

  Just as I at this moment…

  She felt sadness for her crew, and guilt at having failed them. Yet there was a spark of light too, gladness that at least the deaths of her people might avert war with the Confeds. Indeed, it almost certainly would. Her fall, at the hands of a single enemy vessel, shameful as it was to her legacy, would force the high command to rethink Confederation capabilities. She had no doubt they would cancel the proposed invasion, and that would save thousands of lives. Millions.

  She stared back at the image of her children, seeing them now, for just a moment, not as they would look in the future, but as they appeared in the image. The Ordeal, their lives as warriors…all of it was far away from today, in the future. There would be good years at Litora Montis…hunts and fishing expeditions, and long hikes in the mountains. They would be well cared for, she knew, as the inheritors of the Rigellus estates and wealth. And Tarkus would protect them, care for them. They would be happy, she hoped, at least for many years, though she felt a twinge of pain to think of them joyous without her.

  Live well, my children. Enjoy the days and the nights before duty claims you…and remember, your mother loves you always…

  She took a deep breath, staring down at the tablet image as a single tear dropped from her face and hit the screen. Then, a moment later, she set it down and reached over to her control panel. “Ship control, this is Commander-Princeps Katrine Rigellus.”

  “Commander-Princeps Katrine Rigellus, officer in command, AS Invictus. Recognized.”

  “On my authority, initiate sequence Omega-0.”

  “Sequence Omega-0 initiated. Ten second countdown begun.”

  She closed her eyes. She had done all that was required of her, all that duty demanded. She would die now as she had lived.

  Seven…

  She thought back, to the births of her children, to her days as a child herself. Now she would find her end far from home and leave her children to grow up without her, just as her own father had done.

  Five…

  She tried hard to cling to her faith, to hold on, even as the seconds counted down, to all she had believed during her life.

  Three.

  “The way is the way…”

  There was doubt there now as she repeated the mantra, questions she could no longer suppress. But she didn’t have to. Not anymore. For her, duty was over.

  One…zero.

  Deep within Invictus, a cache of hydrogen bombs detonated, and in a fraction of a second, the Alliance’s largest and proudest ship ceased to exist, vaporized in the fury of nuclear fusion. For a few seconds, the remnants of Katrine Rigellus and Invictus remained, a miniature sun, expanding briefly and then contracting, fading away and leaving nothing behind but the emptiness of space.

  Chapter Forty

  CFS Dauntless

  En Route to the Krillus Transwarp Link

  307 AC

  The battle was over, a victory, if anything so costly could be thus characterized. Dauntless’s crew had suffered terribly, but none worse than its ravaged fighter wing. The losses they had suffered were devastating. The training manuals stated that any combat unit taking casualties at such a level was effectively destroyed. But the fighter pilots were cut from tough cloth, and they accepted that they flew each mission with death as a wingman. And as a group, they’d be damned if they were destroyed, or
anything like it. Each and every one of them was ready to respond if the claxons rang again, even now, to move grimly down to the bays and launch once again into combat.

  But there was no call to arms now, no battlestations lamps glowing red or alarms ripping through the air. The survivors were gathered, as was their tradition, to sit up long into the night, to drink, to be there for each other…and to send off those they had lost.

  “To Ice.” Jake Stockton raised the silver mug above his head. His usually confident voice was tentative, shaken. He looked at the others, eleven men and seven women…all that remained of Dauntless’s fighter wing.

  “To Ice,” Kyle Jamison said, raising his own mug. “And to the others we lost here. Courageous warriors all. Heroes of the Confederation.”

  “Heroes of the Confederation!” The others repeated the toast in something that came close to unison.

  The pilots in the room knew they were lucky to be alive. They had survived more than the battle itself, nightmare that it had been. Most of them had also been low on life support by the time the wounded Dauntless had managed to track them all down and tow them aboard. It had been a slow process, towing each fighter aboard the wounded mothership, and by the time Stockton had been brought in he was unconscious, moments from suffocation.

  Stockton looked around the room. It wasn’t the pilots’ usual officer’s club. Indeed, they weren’t even behind Bulkhead Eight, the traditional partition of a Confederation fighter wing’s territory on a mother ship. Their quarters had been destroyed, everything behind Eight a total loss. Possessions, uniforms, personal items…all gone, incinerated or blown into space. But Stockton didn’t care, not even about the year’s salary worth of poker chips that had been vaporized…or were floating around the Krillus system somewhere. His thoughts were with dead pilots, and one in particular, a man who had been his rival, and who had saved his life.

  “The last thing Ice would have wanted would be for you to brood over his death, Jake.” Jamison leaned in, putting his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “We’re pilots…we drink and send off our dead, and then we move on to the next battle.”

  They all knew there would be a next battle. Whatever had happened at Santis—and there were all kinds of rumors flying around—there was little doubt that even if the prospect of full scale war with the Alliance had receded, the Union threat remained. War was still imminent, if not here, then on the distant border, where Dauntless had spent ten months patrolling. It would take some time before the ship’s extensive damage could be repaired, but there was little doubt they would find themselves in the middle of the fight again.

  Stockton looked at his friend, his expression somber. “You’re right, of course, Kyle, but…”

  “No buts, Raptor. The Confederation needs you, it needs all of us. And if Ice were here, he’d be the first one to tell you that. Mourn the dead…but look to the future, to the fight to come.”

  Stockton sat still for a moment. Then he nodded gently and raised his mug. “The fight to come.”

  * * *

  “You’re going to make it, Sam…you just have to hang on.” Walt Billings sat in a powered chair at his friend’s side, leaning forward, his hand on Carson’s arm. Billings’ legs were gone at the knee. A regeneration procedure would return the injured engineer to duty, but that would have to wait. Dauntless’s sickbay was as battered as the rest of the vessel, and Billings would have to endure the confines of his chair until they reached Archellia, and the facilities needed to grow him a new pair of legs.

  “You’re…good…liar…” Sam Carson’s voice was a barely audible rasp. The engineer had spent the last day doubled over, vomiting incessantly. Doctor Weldon had done everything he could, given Carson every drug available, both to treat his radiation sickness and to alleviate his symptoms.

  Barron stood just inside the door, next to Dr. Weldon. He’d watched as Billings spoke to his friend, trying vainly to cheer up the dying man.

  “Is there anything else you can do, Stu?”

  Weldon sighed softly. “I’m sorry, Ty. He was too far gone by the time they got him out of that chamber. There was never anything I could do but try to make him comfortable.”

  “How long?” Sam Carson had been one of the most popular members of the crew, with the ship’s captain no less than with his peers. And he had saved all their lives. If Carson hadn’t gotten the reactors back online, Barron knew none of his people would have survived.

  “He’ll die today. A couple hours. Maybe three or four.”

  Barron just nodded. Then he walked forward, nodding again to Billings before he knelt beside the stricken officer. “Hello, Sam.” He paused, then he realized Carson couldn’t see him from that angle. He leaned forward. “It’s Tyler Barron.”

  “Captain…” Carson tried to move his head, and Barron could see from his lack of success just how weak the man was. “Sorry, sir…can’t…move…much…”

  “Don’t apologize, Sam. You’re a hero. You saved us all. Commander Fritz told me what you did. I just wanted to say…thank you.” Barron paused. It wouldn’t do Carson any good if he lost it. But his words alone sounded so pointless, so inadequate.

  “Did…my…duty…”

  “Yes, Sam…you did your duty. And more.”

  “Fritz?”

  “She’ll be okay, Sam. She’s in surgery now or I’m sure she’d be here.”

  “How…long?”

  “How long?”

  “Do…I…have…”

  Barron felt a lump in his throat. He struggled to force out the words, to keep his voice even. He thought about lying, about insisting Carson still had a chance. But it seemed beneath the dignity of the courageous engineer, less than he deserved, however well meaning the attempt at deceit might be. “Dr. Weldon says a few hours, Sam.” A pause. “At most.”

  Carson exhaled softly.

  “Tablet?”

  Barron shook his head. “I don’t know what you…”

  “He wants this, sir.” Billings extended his arm toward the captain. He held a small tablet in his hand.

  Barron took the device and looked down at it, moving his finger across to activate it. A small image appeared on the small screen, a woman, attractive but looking exhausted…and in her arms, a baby.

  Barron felt his emotions surging up inside him—guilt, anger. Sadness.

  He reached down, taking Carson’s arm, putting the tablet in his hand. The device fell, the dying man’s hands too weak to hold it. Barron picked it up, moving it in front of Carson’s eyes. He stood for a moment, and then he felt Billings reaching over, taking the tablet. “I can hold it for him, sir…I know you’re busy.”

  Barron felt another pang. He was busy. Dauntless was a wreck, half its engineering staff in sickbay. For that matter, half its crew dead or wounded. And, while he believed what Commander Rigellus had told him, he had no proof that there weren’t other Alliance forces on the way even now. Still, the idea of not having time for a dying man, one who had saved all their lives…it made him feel small, cold.

  “Really, Captain…he’s in and out. I don’t even think he’s still here, not really.”

  “You’re a good man, Walt.” Barron looked down at the lieutenant. “Stay with him, will you? Until…the end.”

  “I will, sir. You have my word.”

  Barron just nodded. Then he took one last look at Carson, and he turned and walked toward the door.

  Chapter Forty-One

  From the Log of Captain Tyler Barron

  War. It is feared, glorified. A last resort or a cold-blooded way to achieve governmental ends. An ancient quote, its origins long lost in pre-cataclysmic history, called it the ‘final argument of kings.’

  I have experienced it now, in all its unsavory horror. I have watched those who served with me die, some quickly, vaporized in a fraction of a second. Others, slowly, lingering in fear and agony as their lives slipped away. I have even come to mourn for an enemy, one I also hate for the death she brought upon m
y people.

  I always wondered why my grandfather spent so little time telling me about the great battles fought. I couldn’t understand why he always turned the topic to fishing or the family estate…or any topic far from the travails of the battlefield. Now, I think, I understand him far better. I can perceive, at least in a small way, the demons that must have haunted his sleep and preyed on his mind.

  I am a good son of the navy, and I serve the Confederation and its duly-constituted government. Yet, I question now the justice of men and women casting a nation into war when they have not themselves experienced it, or paid its terrible price. I do not long for a military dictatorship—far from it. We are surrounded by brutal regimes where freedom is a forgotten ideal. Yet, it sickens me to think of politicians who have never heard a shot fired making a decision that will send thousands of good men and women to hideous deaths.

  I know war with the Union beckons, that my crew’s respite will be but a short one before the trumpet again calls us. And we will answer, as those before us did, as my grandfather did. And in this war to come, as in those that preceded it, there will be a Barron on the front lines.

  CFS Dauntless

  In Space Dock

  Archellia, Cassiopolis III

  308 AC

  Tyler Barron stood on the platform, watching solemnly as canister after canister rolled slowly from Dauntless’s main cargo hatch, to the accompaniment of the Confederation’s anthem. Each of those two meter tubes carried one of his crew, the physical manifestation of the cost of his great “victory.” He knew their sacrifices hadn’t been in vain, that defeating the enemy battleship had likely averted war with the Alliance, and spared the Confederation the nightmare of a two-front battle. But standing there watching the seemingly endless procession, listening to the poor quality recording blaring through the speakers, he couldn’t help but think his people deserved better.