The Galactic Chronicles: Shadows of the Void Books 8 - 10

by J. J. Green

  Just one more flight. Or maybe it wouldn’t even come to that.

  He yawned and put on his helmet, but opened the visor, which turned off the air and power. Reserving those for when he absolutely needed them had saved his life a couple of times. There weren’t many more lonely and isolated experiences than floating in a disabled fighter ship in deep space, waiting for and hoping that someone would be back to pick you up before your oxygen or heat ran out.

  The squadron leader’s head appeared at Carl’s window. “Lingiari?” came the man’s voice through his comm. Carl nodded. The man made the universal open up gesture. Carl gave the voice command to unlock the hatch, and with the clunk of heavy metal, the ship complied.

  “What’s up, sir?”

  “Step out, pilot. Gotta scan you.”

  Carl unfastened his safety harness and swung out of the cockpit. The squadron leader ran a Shadow scanner up and down his body. He read the display and nodded. “Just a precaution after your late arrival last night. Can’t be too careful. It seems a bit odd to me that we’re getting special attention. The Thylacine’s the only ship with the full complement of pilots. It’s like we’ve been singled out for something.”

  Carl shrugged, but the man was right. It was a little strange that the authorities had gone to the trouble of reassigning himself and two other pilots to the Thylacine at the last minute. The ship was an ordinary destroyer. There was no reason it should be shown any special favor. Jas hadn’t said anything about the battle plan for the ship.

  “Anyway,” the squadron leader continued, “glad to have you aboard, Lingiari. I read the service record that arrived with you. I was impressed. It looks like the Unity have sent us their best. You’ve been in this war longer than I have. Not many have survived so long.”

  “I’ve been lucky, sir.”

  “Takes more than luck to survive the number of firefights that you’ve seen. You could probably teach me some maneuvers, but there’s no time for that now. You were never promoted to squadron leader?”

  “I was offered, but I prefer just to fly.”

  “Probably wise. Let’s get through today, then I’d be glad to share a beer with you later when we celebrate winning this kratting war.”

  Though the man’s words were light, his eyes told of the pilots he’d spoken to in the same manner for the last time.

  “I’d be happy to,” Carl replied.

  The squadron leader ordered him to return to his ship. As Carl refastened his harness, he mulled over the man’s suspicions about the role the Thylacine was to play in the battle. But after a moment he gave up trying to figure out what it might be.

  Whatever Jas’ task was, it didn’t make any difference to him. He would have to do the same job as always: get close enough to the Shadow ship to penetrate its force field with low energy fire, and destroy whatever he was told to destroy. Then get out of there fast before he was caught in the blast if the ship exploded.

  For the time being, however, all he had to do was wait. He settled down to mentally replay his recent moments with Jas.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Jas encountered Sayen as she went from the launch bay to the bridge. In a quarter of an hour, the order would come to jump to the star system where the massive Shadow ship had been spotted. Jas was in a rush, but at the sight of her friend, she had to stop to tell her the news.

  As passing crew members moved out of earshot, she said, “Sayen, Carl’s here.”

  “Carl’s aboard the ship?” Sayen exclaimed. “He’s alive? That’s great. When did you see him?”

  “Last night. He came to my cabin.”

  “Oh,” Sayen said, smiling. “That must have been quite a reunion. I’m happy for you.”

  “I’d be happy too, if it weren’t for what we have to do today.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Sayen’s smile fell. “He’s flying, then?”

  “I couldn’t persuade him not to. I probably could have thought up a reason to excuse him from duty, but he wasn’t having it.”

  Her eyes softening, Sayen said, “If he’s made it this far, he can make it through one more battle. I’m sure of it.”

  “I hope so. I don’t know what I’ll do if he doesn’t. I’d given up on him. I’d given up on everything. Then he came back. If he doesn’t survive this, I don’t think I’ll have a reason to go on.”

  “Carl will be okay, Jas,” Sayen said. “He’s a brilliant pilot.”

  But nothing her friend said could dispel the fear that hung over Jas’ heart, and there was no time to talk more with her.

  “We’d better go to the bridge,” Jas said.

  Pacheco was already there. He was standing—there was nowhere for him to sit. As well as overseeing the battle maneuvers of the Thylacine, he would help to orchestrate other ships involved in the engagement.

  His expression was pained and tight as Jas and Sayen entered the bridge. He didn’t look at Jas as she took her seat. Sayen went to her console. The rest of the officers were already at their stations.

  “Navigator,” Pacheco said, “Please plot our jump.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sayen swiped her screen to activate it and read the display. “Oh,” she said. “K.67092d?”

  “Yes,” Pacheco said between his teeth. “Is there something remarkable about that, Navigator?”

  “No, sir,” Sayen replied. “I mean, it’s only that I’ve been there before. It’s the planet where the commander and I first encountered the Shadows.”

  The Shadow trap planet. Of course. Jas thought. The planet’s designation had been familiar, but she hadn’t realized why until Sayen pointed it out. After all these years, they were returning to where it had all begun.

  “Hmpf. Yes, it is a Shadow planet,” Pacheco said. “One of the earliest ones from what we can gather. Possibly the Shadows have their reasons for parking their mother ship there, but that doesn’t concern us today. We’ll be fighting this battle in space.”

  Jas recalled the harsh, windswept, barren surface of K.67092d and the hexagonal structures that the poor fool, Master Loba, had insisted were not constructed by sentient beings. No one had ever discovered how the Shadows made their traps, but there was no doubt about what happened inside them. Myth-addicted, resource-hungry Loba had paid for his thoughtless greed with his life.

  Jas gave a shudder. Of all the planets she’d visited while working aboard prospectors, K.67092d was the last place she wanted to return to. She’d rather go back to Antarctica.

  “Coordinates ready,” Sayen said. “Sending them over.”

  Pilot Kennewell gave a nod as they arrived. “Jumping in ten.”

  Jas relayed the information to the crew around the ship, telling them to take their seats. “Perhaps you should find a jumpseat, Admiral?” she asked. It wouldn’t be safe for him to be standing when they jumped. Though the process usually wasn’t violent, it wasn’t unknown for ships to jump into weapons fire.

  Pacheco seemed to wrestle with something in his mind, but he conceded to Jas’ common sense and left the bridge.

  The tension relaxed a little as he departed. Officers who had been intent on their screens looked up and around at each other. There were some nervous smiles and quiet good luck wishes.

  Jas tried to clear her mind, and get ready for the battle, but in truth her thoughts were in turmoil. Depending on how the battle went, she faced a terrible decision. If it made tactical sense to scramble the fighters, she would have to do it. And that would mean putting the life of the man she loved at risk.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  As soon as the Thylacine had made the jump, Pacheco began to make his way back to the bridge. The comm officer had set him up with channels to the ships under his command, though his ability to speak with them depended on how effective the Shadow ship’s dampening field was.

  In the battle where they’d lost the Camaradon, it had been all but impossible to comm the other UA ships through space rather than jump channels, but he had to try. The right maneuver at
the right time might mean the difference between victory and defeat. In case he couldn’t comm the other ships, all their captains and commanders had been fully briefed on the aims and rationale of the battle tactics in case they were forced to act without instruction.

  The battle plan was simple: deluge the Shadow ship with fire to prevent it from jumping, surround it with UA ships to dilute the effect of its ray, and give the Thylacine time to create the anti-matter bomb. The Thylacine would also need their protection while it prepared the bomb.

  Jas had to make sure that her ship didn’t stand out from the rest. If the Shadows suspected that she posed a special threat, all they had to do was target it for destruction with their beam, and the last hope of galactic civilization would be crushed.

  That was why the Unity Alliance had chosen the Thylacine. There were bigger, faster ships with more firepower, but they would attract the Shadows’ attention. The Thylacine was a run-of-the-mill destroyer. It wouldn’t stand out. It was like a drab brown scorpion with a lethal sting in its tail.

  The Thylacine was also Jas’ ship, and though Pacheco was finally beginning to accept that there would never be anything personal between them, he was still moved to protect her. He’d argued strongly that the Thylacine was the right ship for the job.

  In a way, he felt a fool. It didn’t take a genius to guess that that pilot he’d seen coming out of Jas’ cabin that morning was the lost love she’d been pining for all these years. He’d been crushed, if he was honest with himself, to see the man in the flesh. It was one thing to understand on an intellectual level that your love would never be reciprocated; it was quite another to meet your rival face to face.

  There wasn’t anything special about that man, Lingiari, Pacheco told himself. It was just that he’d made his move first, and Jas wasn’t capricious. He knew that. It was one of the things he liked about her.

  He was at the bridge. The doors opened and he went in. The battle was already in full swing. The holo of the gigantic Shadow ship hung in the air to the front and center of the bridge. The UA ships ranged around it to the sides and above and below. Farther below, the gray-brown surface of K.67092d with its wide, pale blue oceans slowly turned.

  Every ship was firing. Pulses were raining down, but the Shadow ship wasn’t using its beam. It must require a period of time to start it up, Pacheco realized. They really had caught the Shadows by surprise this time, unlike at the previous battle where the beam was activated almost immediately.

  The Unity Alliance ships were pouring all their energy into attacking the Shadow ship’s force field. Pacheco hoped the effort was making a dent in the ship’s massive power supply and preventing it from jumping.

  He glanced around him as he went over to the comm officer’s desk. Everyone on the bridge was performing their tasks like clockwork. Jas sat at the center of the activity, pale and tense. He wondered what was going through her mind. To be reunited with her lover the night before she might lose him in battle had to be tough.

  A collective gasp and a flare that lit up the bridge told him before he turned to the holo that the Shadow ship had activated its beam. There it was. The impossibly powerful ray of energy had sprung out and was targeting a UA ship. The Shadows had picked a large battleship out of the numerous UA ships that surrounded it.

  The beam bore down on the ship, slowly gnawing away at its force field, grinding down its defenses. The battleship ceased firing pulses, as had been the order if targeted by the beam. With luck, the ship would have time to build the energy to jump before the beam broke through.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the Unity Alliance fleet targeted their pulses to avoid the ray on their way to the Shadows’ force field. If their guess that the beam absorbed the energy from pulses that crossed it was correct, it made no sense to feed it.

  The officers were glancing up from their consoles at the battleship that the Shadows had targeted. Jas was also staring at it, her knuckles white as she gripped her armrests.

  Suddenly, where the destroyer had been was nothing but empty space. A cheer arose, and Trimborn exclaimed, “They made it. They jumped.”

  The ray shone out into deep space, fading away at its farthest end. It quickly switched to another ship. This also immediately stopped firing, conserving its energy for its force field and to build up to jump. This ship was smaller, however, and Pacheco doubted it ability to withstand the Shadows’ beam to the same extent the battleship had.

  As if to attract the Shadows’ attention, another battleship moved toward the targeted UA ship, but the Shadows didn’t take the bait. They poured energy onto the second ship. The battleship inched forward across the holo display, though in reality it was traveling at thousands of kilometers per hour on its RaptorX engines.

  Jas murmured into her comm, no doubt checking her engineer’s progress with the equipment that was building the anti-matter bomb. Pacheco hoped the bomb was on schedule.

  The officers drew in their breath. The Shadows’ beam had broken through the second ship’s force field, but in another moment it was gone. It was impossible to tell what damage had been done before it jumped. The second ship’s crew would soon find out at the other end.

  Meanwhile, the battleship that had been trying to distract the Shadows from the weaker ship got its wish. The Shadow’s ray flicked to it.

  Pacheco had an idea. He asked the comm officer if she had a channel to the other admirals. If they all acted as the battleship had, ordering their ships to fly to the ship targeted by the ray, they might persuade the Shadows to split their attention. Ten UA ships would withstand a split ray better than one would its concentrated force.

  “Sorry, sir,” the woman said, “nothing yet, but I’ll keep trying.”

  If they couldn’t spread the devastating beam around, the Unity Alliance was playing a losing game. By firing all pulses, the UA ships were expending energy quickly. Few would now be able to do what the first battleship had done and simply jump out of trouble.

  They had to last long enough for the Thylacine to launch the anti-matter bomb.

  Even without Pacheco’s suggestion, many of the UA ships seemed to have had the same idea. They flew toward the battleship that was under fire. But the Shadows were not to be tempted. From experience, Pacheco knew the battleship’s force field could not last much longer. He caught Jas’ worried gaze as they both counted down the seconds.

  The beam broke through the battleship’s force field. A minute later, it’s hull began to break down. Soon, it was gone.

  “Did they have time to evacuate?” someone asked.

  “Concentrate on your job,” Jas snapped.

  Another ship blinked into existence to the far side of the Shadow ship. It was the first battleship, returning to the fight. The Shadow ship saw it immediately, and left its third target to fire again upon the returned ship.

  The pulses that the UA ships were pouring at the Shadow ship’s force field seemed to make no difference to its resources. The beam didn’t lessen, dim, or waver. The ship’s power levels were incredible.

  Another ship appeared and began firing on the returned battleship. Pacheco’s momentary confusion cleared. It was another Shadow ship. The mother ship was calling her children to her. Another Shadow ship appeared, and another. The battle became difficult to follow as the new Shadow ships engaged with UA vessel, forcing them to re-target their pulses.

  The returned battleship lost its fight. It burst apart.

  How much longer for the anti-matter bomb? Time was dragging. They’d been fighting less than half an hour, yet it seemed much longer. Had something gone wrong with the bomb? Pacheco couldn’t ask Jas directly. None of the officers present knew of the UA’s plan. The danger that something would be leaked to the Shadows had been too great.

  “They’re sending out fighters,” exclaimed Trimborn.

  From the underside of the giant Shadow ship, a cloud of sparks streamed like hornets from a nest. The Shadow mother ship was going all out to attack the UA ships.
Pacheco swung to Jas with a sudden realization. If any approached the Thylacine, she would be forced to respond. Not to do so would be odd, and she couldn’t afford to do anything to attract the Shadows’ attention. The Thylacine wouldn’t last long under that dreadful beam.

  Another UA ship exploded, and the ray sought a new victim. More Shadow ships appeared. The tide of the battle was turning against the Unity Alliance They had to deploy the anti-matter bomb, and soon. The chances that the Thylacine would be next to experience the Shadows’ beam drew stronger every moment.

  “Fighters approaching, ma’am,” Trimborn said, though his words were unnecessary. The contingent of Shadow fighters approaching the Thylacine was plain to see.

  “Target pulses on them,” Jas said.

  The Thylacine’s pulses diverted from the Shadow mother ship and onto the approaching fighter ships. The small specks were undeterred by the bolts that passed through them, hitting only one or two. The Thylacine had to use a different method to defend herself from their attack.

  Jas’ face was wracked with pain as she spoke into her comm, and Pacheco lip-read the words, “Squadron Leader, scramble fighters.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Jas could barely concentrate on the battle. Her thoughts and heart were with Carl, who was at that moment flying out of the safety of the Thylacine to do battle with Shadow fighters once more. In her mind’s eye, she could see him intent over the controls of his ship, guiding it skillfully into space, seeking out the approaching Shadow ships, ready to fire.

  Like all the other pilots, he was also tasked with breaking through the Shadow fighters’ ranks and attacking the origin point of the Shadows’ devastating weapon in the hope of disabling or destroying it, slim though the chances were of their success.

  And Carl wouldn’t shirk his duty, Jas knew, even though he’d done far more than his fair share of fighting.

  Her gaze was fixed on the swirling sparks that were the Thylacine’s fighters, already drawing near the enemy. The rest of the battle faded in significance compared to those tiny flecks of life. The two sets of fighters engaged, and the sparks began to disappear.