... and they are us

by Patrick McClafferty

  There was more amusement than anger in the thought.

 

 

 

 

 

  There was a sense of vast amusement.

  Zed ignored the last comment.

 

  Zed couldn’t help but laugh. Behind them the sun was quickly dwindling as their speed climbed.

  The red sun shuddered and rippled, the deep crimson becoming lighter and lighter until finally it reached a brilliant blazing white. Then it exploded. The flash was so intense that the entire viewing room blinked off and then back on. A wall of white destruction and lethal radiation raced toward them from astern, slowed, slowly began to drop back as they outpaced it.

  “Radiation levels are reaching critical…” A male voice said in dull monotone. “Radiation has exceeded critical levels.”

  The viewing room turned red and an alarm began to sound. A red icon appeared on the white wall of fire behind them just as a scorched black nose of a starship appeared, and grew.

  Zed felt his heart pounding in fear.

  Zed and Kat stared in horror as the destroyer edged out of the wall of death that was the blast of the super nova.

  Zed complied quickly, and the ship jogged just in time to avoid getting struck by a heavy energy beam. “Launch countermeasures.” Zed barked, remembering his books on tactics. “And launch all the spider mines we have in stock” The ship trembled. . He speculated idly.

  A heavy energy beam lashed out from the destroyer, and because of the countermeasures, missed them by a comfortable margin. Flashes erupted around the pursuing ship, and Zed and Kat could clearly see it jerked from side to side by the explosions. A volley of missiles raced out of the Creednax ship, and the Formidable lurched drunkenly.

  Zed cursed, looking at the ship status.

  Zed felt himself squinting at the display.

 

 

  Zed’s eyes grew very wide.

  Lola wavered.

  Zed glanced at Kat, who was just becoming aware of what he was suggesting. Her glare should have dropped him where he stood. He gave her his best grin.

  The battle-cruiser shook again, and somewhere an alarm began sounding. A flashing red display notified him that seventeen percent of the battle-cruiser was now open to space.

  “I have to go now.” Zed tried to explain to Kat. “The destroyer is sitting back there chewing us apart, and we can’t outrun it.”

  Lola sighed.

  “Chair…” Zed began aloud.

  “Wait!” Kat stepped up to him and kissed him again. Her eyes were deep emerald pools he thought he might happily drown in. She smiled. “You can go now, but take care of yourself.”

  “Chair…” It really wasn’t a very coherent sentence, and he was slightly surprised that the computer understood it at all. “Take me to the pinnace.” The viewing room stayed, and Kat disappeared.

 

  Zed swallowed. “Ship, launch pinnace, cloaked please.” The stars twisted, and above him he saw the scarred hull of the once beautiful Battle-cruiser Formidable. “Ship, raise defensive screens, charge and activate all weapon systems.” Two status marks he hadn’t noticed before on the bottom of his field of vision turned green. “Drop me behind the Creednax destroyer, and set up for a stern attack on his engines. Go!” A red path appeared angling steeply away from the battle-cruiser and up behind the enemy vessel. The destroyer was even more heavily damaged than the Formidable, and the small pinnace closed quickly. “Lock all weapons… Fire!”

  The Creednax destroyer staggered and began to tumble, fire and debris blasting from her ruined engines. Her weapons were still very much operational however, and heavy energy beams lashed out at the tiny ship that had smitten them. One beam brushed the wing of the small pinnace, and sent the craft tumbling.

  A structural member groaned in protest somewhere. The tumble stopped. Far behind him he could see the approaching blast wave of the super nova, boiling with destruction and lethal radiation. It would take both the pinnace and the destroyer at roughly the same time. Almost all the lights in his shipboard status were red: drive, weapons, shields, cloaking and even life support. Only the com was still green. He began telling Lola, before the sun-bright beam lashed out of the dark and neatly divided the Creednax destroyer in two—the long way. “What the…” The display in front of him flickered momentarily. A striking woman of ageless beauty and dark hair was smiling at him.

  “Bonjour, Capitaine de la Flotte.” She said in a husky Parisian accented voice.

  “Cybele? Is that you?”

  “Oui mon Capitaine, as you say, in the nick of time. Let me bring you aboard and we will catch up with your young lady in the battered Formidable.” In the screen in front of him a ship appeared. His jaw sagged in shock. Fully a kilometer long, the vessel looked more a living creature than something simply constructed. Her mottled grey and green hull reflected nothing, save the huge blue steel rose etched on the port side of her hull, the points of the metal thorns on the stem glittering in the starlight. She reminded Zed vaguely of an Earthly squid, but traveling with her six tentacles stretched forward. She was the most magnificent craft Zed had ever imagined, and the most terrifying. If there had ever been one, this ship was truly a denizen of the deep between the stars. The pinnace trembled slightly as the tractor took hold of them. Slightly below the Rose emblem, in blue steel letters three meters tall Zed read Rose of the Dawn². There was a slightly raised and smaller number two just after the word Dawn. “Welcome to your new flagship, Capitaine.”

  EPILOGUE

  The ten acre glassite covered atrium on Thal’ark Station radiated life. Beneath the clear and nearly impregnable dome pansies and violets grew to the size of dinner plates in the fertile sun-drenched soil and a small river, complete with trout ran gurgling across one side. The sweet scent of Jasmine filled the warm air
.

  Overlooking the river, Zed and Katherine sat side by side on a small stone bench and faced a smiling Helen Sutherland. “The last tests show that the effects of your radiation exposure are finally and completely gone, thanks to your nanites. You are both cleared to go back to your duties.”

  Zed gave the smiling woman a sour look. “It has been six months, doctor. You took your sweet time.”

  “You both should be dead. What do you want, a medal?” She turned slightly as Cybele walked down a wooded path to stop by the three people. Helen continued what she had been saying. “You saved Chamdar, you saved Dramul and you saved Earth, while destroying the Creednax homeworld. What more do you…”

  Cybele cleared her throat politely, and Helen looked up. “That’s not quite true, doctor.”

  Doctor Sutherland frowned. “What part isn’t true?”

  “Fleet Captain Yates and Captain Johansen defeated the Creednax, but they did not destroy their homeworld. According to information retrieved from QX’an tril Station, what they destroyed was the Creednax main forward operating base.”

  Zed sagged. “Then what we did was all for nothing. All those deaths…” Kat looked like she’d been punched in the stomach. Helen turned white.

  “Try not to be dense, mon cher.” Cybele reprimanded gently. “Of course what you did was important. You set the Creednax back a millennium in this quadrant alone. We now know the direction, if not the location, of the Creednax homeworld, and with the data we are retrieving from the station files, we stand a very good chance of developing a weapon capable of beating them permanently.” Cybele touched his arm and he felt the warmth of her hand. Computer-human interfaces had come a long way in the last six months. “But that is for the future. Right now I believe you have several speeches to make to the residents of this station, and the planet Cybele. You are their leader, after all. Then there is the problem of Lola to resolve. She’s getting tired of being cooped up in the Formidable since I removed her from your own neural interface, and frankly I’m getting tired of listening to her whining.”

  Zed glanced up at the blue and white globe that hung suspended in the sky beyond the atrium. “I think I would rather fight the Creednax than deal with all this.” He muttered dryly, then woofed sharply when Kat hit him in the ribs with her elbow.

  “Be nice.” She hissed.

  Helen Sutherland laughed as she stood. “I’ll leave you to your weighty matters. I have patients who need me.”

  “Thank you for everything, doctor.” Zed said quietly.

  Cybele smiled as the woman departed. “Au revoir, Doctor.” Her gaze turned to the two remaining humans. “So, mon Capitaine, where shall we go?” Zed and Kat looked up. The planet Cybele floated serenely in the sparkling heavens, surrounded by a bevy of dark chips that were the repaired remnants of the fleet. When Zed didn’t reply Cybele continued. “The Imperium had a huge manufacturing planet out in the western end of the spiral arm of the galaxy; just a few hundred light years past your world I believe, Capitaine.”

  Kat’s laughter was clear and light as bells on a snowy evening. “And we might just stop by Earth for a few more crewmembers and colonists for the planet, I suppose?”

  “It is a possibility, Commandant en Second. Thal’ark Station is only about thirty percent manned, and the supporting vessels including Formidable, are even worse off. We only have a hundred people on the planet.” The figure of Cybele, the AI for the Rose of the Dawn² and Thal’ark Station crossed her arms under her breasts, and raised a single arched eyebrow.

  Zed just smiled.

  END