The Alliance

by Jason Letts

  “You must see a lot coming in and out of here,” Rion said while Bailor and Lena started the restocking process. The woman’s eyes widened, no doubt surprised that someone was going out of their way to talk to her.

  “I guess,” she said, sounding a little tired.

  “What can you tell me about the fighting lately? I’ve heard a lot of things and don’t know what to believe,” he said, hoping the air of authenticity she had wasn’t a mirage of her tired appearance.

  She sighed and rested her hands on her knees as she looked over at the line of docking bay ports.

  “It’s changed, I’ll tell you that. The pilots are energized, but many of them don’t come back. At this rate there won’t be a man on Neptune the age of twenty left by the end of the year. The ships that went in used to barely get off a shot or two before being blown up. Now they’re coming back with their payloads completely spent, so there’s that. But it’s the Alliance, and that’s a wall we all know deep down we’ll never get through.”

  Rion pondered what she said for a moment before thanking her and moving on to help out his comrades. The attendant certainly painted a rosier picture from the Marshall Force’s perspective than what the Alliance suggested. If nothing else, that huge stash of weaponry would at least take its toll on the Alliance.

  A little later on, Ultima Verche was ready to meet with them and the illuminated floor again led them to the lift that brought them up to her office. Her hands were clenched and her eyes were narrowed at them.

  “Are you done playing and ready to get to work?” she asked.

  Rion was taken aback by the accusation. He’d come in all ready to face her down again, but he didn’t think it would start off this way. Maybe this was why she kept them waiting so long.

  “What do you think we were doing?” he asked, staring at her intently.

  Verche’s face hardened even more.

  “Don’t get me wrong, it sounds like a wonderful time. Cruising around Jupiter and holding up tours with your fancy ship. I just don’t see how that gets us any closer to what you promised you would deliver,” she said, crossing her arms.

  Lena cleared her throat.

  “What? We didn’t do anything like that,” she said.

  “Wait a second,” Rion cut in. “Commander Hobart accused us of raiding the power grid on Mercury. It kind of flashed by me in the heat of the moment at the time and I didn’t think much of it, but this is the second time we’ve been wrongly fingered for doing something.”

  “Curious,” Bailor said.

  Verche pursed her lips at the denial, judging whether or not to believe it.

  “Then what have you been doing?”

  “Are you saying you heard about a cruise line raid but you didn’t hear what we were doing?” Rion asked, surprised again. “We were at the food distribution station outside of Earth when a fight broke out and much of the station got demolished. A lot of food lost in the process.”

  Verche’s eyes lit up and she leaned in.

  “No, we didn’t hear anything about that. They’ve effectively blocked us from tapping in to their channels. But I must say that’s an impressive tactic. Starve them out? I didn’t think you had it in you,” she said, almost glowing.

  It was uncomfortable being praised so highly for potentially depriving so many people of anything to eat.

  “Actually we only wanted to hack in and get control so we could deliver the food more freely, get the people on the inner planets with us,” Bailor said.

  Verche blinked, losing some of her luster.

  “That sounds worthwhile too, I suppose,” she said. “But the end result is you ended up setting fire to their supply chain. I’ll take it. What’s next?”

  Rion looked her in the eyes.

  “We came back to find out how things have been going on the front lines. What can you tell us?”

  After nodding slightly, the older woman held up a finger at them while retrieving a drink from the table.

  “It’s going phenomenally well thanks to the weaponry you brought us. We’ll bleed them dry eventually, but your return has me thinking that with your help we could finally have the breakthrough moment we’ve been looking for. You’d give our fighters something to rally around, and we could turn an incremental win into a blowout. Leave no one left alive. Really get back at them for what they did to you,” she said, savoring it.

  Rion had to think fast. Verche’s position sounded more like the equivalent of the Alliance broadcast spin than the honest truth of the docking bay attendant. The Marshall Force’s Ultima may not have been trying to intentionally get them killed in the bitter fighting, but she had to know that producing a devastating victory would be impossible. Still, he couldn’t let her know he knew that.

  “That sounds great,” Rion said. “We’ll start getting a plan together to move in.”

  “Oh, we can take care of that. You can report directly to our base on Uranus,” she said.

  Leaving room to hedge became more and more difficult.

  “We’ll head to Uranus,” he said.

  Verche assumed a softer expression, reaching out and putting her hands on the shoulders of Bailor and Lena to wrap them in a small circle.

  “This is great teamwork,” she said. “Going after their food sources was a brilliant idea. I can’t wait to see what kind of impact you can have alongside our fighters.”

  It was a relief to be back in their ship with the airlock closed and the room to themselves. Aside from already having an impersonator wreaking havoc with their image, they had to grapple with the thorny issue of how to advance their agenda despite the increasingly bloody fighting.

  “Set course for Uranus?” Bailor asked.

  “Sure, but we’re not stopping there,” Rion said. “The explosion back at Earth is going to put a lot of people in a bind very soon, so we don’t have time to be fighting at the front lines where we might get killed. And we definitely don’t have time for one side to bleed the other dry. We need to cut to the chase.”

  “And what’s that?” Lena asked.

  “We need to convince the Alliance that they’re losing,” he said, staring through the windshield at the stars as if they were pieces of a puzzle. His long, drawn-out plan to turn the tides of the war back and forth were getting crunched and barely as soon as he’d grasped it he saw his opportunity slipping away. Would it even be possible to roll back the tides and restore the Alliance to a more benign state?

  “What good will that do us?” Bailor asked.

  Rion sighed as he looked at his amazing ship. There were some things it couldn’t do.

  “Once they think they’re losing, they’ll need our help.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “Are you sure about this?” Lena asked him.

  “Perfectly,” Rion said.

  “I can’t be the only one who thinks this is flying monkeys crazy,” she said, glancing over at Bailor. He sucked his teeth and stretched his neck.

  “The only part I don’t get is where we try to kill him.”

  “You will,” Rion said. “I’ve triple checked the details. Just be there at the right time and give everything you’ve got to the port side. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  He tried to smile to reassure them, but it didn’t appear to be working.

  “And then how are we going to get you back?” Lena asked.

  It was clear she was afraid of losing him, and it filled Rion with a sense of warmth he hadn’t expected. The unfortunate part was that the only thing that got those furrowed eyebrows of concern out of her was the possibility of never seeing them again.

  “If everything goes according to plan, I’ll be able to fly right out to meet you.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Bailor asked.

  “Tortured and executed.”

  Bailor nodded and Lena donned a rueful smile as Rion waved goodbye and walked out of the airlock into a small transfer station outside of Titan. It didn’t have a dedicated Alliance presence, and
all it took were some falsified identification cards and most of the charges they had left to purchase a chip containing tickets to Earth’s moon.

  The thought of going back turned his stomach, but somehow the life he left behind was the doorway from the life he had to the life he wanted. Even in his head he couldn’t quite believe it.

  Traveling on a sluggish Licenza transport amidst one-hundred other people breathing the same stale air felt like sleeping on a bed of nails after being aboard the Assailing Face. He missed sharing the cramped space with two people he knew. Even the thin cots he’d strung up seemed preferable to a seat that could only recline by about fifteen degrees and was sure to get kicked by the person behind.

  But he survived the trip to Saturn’s major Byways station and took the connecting flight to the moon. It took days of eating dehydrated meals, the best there was available because of the food shortage, to reach his destination. When he first set eyes on the Gravilinx station, his hands and skin immediately felt like they were coated in grit. If the feeling of revulsion he had was the worst thing he endured, he’d be lucky.

  One last shuttle brought him to the manufacturing center, which was still being operated by the Alliance. Rion had the uniform he’d worn when he left and he had his card. When he got off at the station, he’d seen that nothing had changed. So many people were coming and going that a nod was enough to get him through the gate. That left him roaming around the area with the strange feeling that he’d been attacking the people around him only a short while ago. But no one knew and no one seemed to mind him.

  The closet that had been his room had been given a new occupant, forcing Rion to find somewhere obscure to pass the time. A windowless lounge in a lonely corner of the station fit the bill. It was a good thing some of the washrooms had showers.

  A tinge of nervousness hit him when he arrived for his first shift. He was sure someone would recognize him from before or notice that he was completely new to them. Neither happened, and a glum, straight face was enough to make it into all of the technicians’ rooms. He even added his own name to the shift timesheet when no one was looking.

  The specific work group he added himself to was the maintenance and cleaning crew, the very same one he’d been dying to get out of before. He felt the irony was so thick he could cut it with a knife. Once he had his suit on and was loaded into the shuttle that would take him out to the work site, he was even more indistinguishable from everyone else. The job hadn’t changed at all, mostly airblasting windows and port connectors.

  On this particular day they had to attend to a ship known as an Alliance Remote, which as the name hinted was a ship that explored the very outer limits of humanity’s reach. This one had just returned from a five-year trek, found nothing, and was preparing to go out again. It sounded like another job that Lena would enjoy and he would loathe.

  While out scrubbing the ships in his armor of anonymity, he started to plant seeds over their channel.

  “What’s funny is by the time this thing comes back there may not even be an Alliance,” he said.

  “What? Yeah, right,” someone responded. That was the bite he needed to go on. There was chuckling over the line and he joined in with them.

  “That’s what I would’ve thought, but that’s why they transferred me here from the base along the front lines. So many of the ships weren’t coming back at all that they didn’t need so many people to fix them. But keep lapping up what they feed you in the broadcasts,” he said confidently.

  It was easy to trust that those around him would have trouble rejecting something that spoke to their worst fears. He dropped nonchalant hints all around the Gravilinx station whenever he could.

  The Remote was followed the next day by the private ship of a dealer with connections to the Alliance. The resemblance there to what he knew about his father’s profession was uncanny, but the owner had an ethnic background that didn’t match his even though the ages were similar.

  After those two days, he didn’t need to write his name on the shift chart anymore. It didn’t matter that the job wasn’t his, the supervisors took it for granted and now assumed he was supposed to be doing it. Like before, barely passable meals were provided in lieu of pay by the generous Alliance. Dust was the only other thing that seemed interested in using the lounge space where he slept.

  One after another the ships came and went to be cleaned. They were all on the smaller side, but before long he knew he’d hook a big fish. The Alliance database told him to expect it.

  And right on cue, the Alliance’s flagship Vestige rolled into their corner of space. From a hallway window, he gawked at the ship’s size and design. He’d barely been able to do more than glance at it before, but up close the ship seemed to him more like a work of art. The engines looked like big glowing sports arenas. The bulky head containing the chancellor’s private chambers connected to the ship’s body via a thin stalk and looked like an egg resting on a needle.

  That’s where his bluffing needed to take him. It had gotten him this far, why not face-to-face with Chancellor Yetrue?

  But when he showed up to the crew stations and looked at the shift chart he saw he’d been shifted over to the construction crew, a move that completely derailed his plans. He quickly hunted down the supervisor on duty.

  “I thought I was assigned to the cleaning crew,” he said to a middle-aged man with worn hands and a moustache.

  “We’ve got to move some of you over to the shipyard to get one of the new cruisers back on schedule,” he said. It went unmentioned, but the word rivets was heavy in the air.

  “Is there any way I could stick with cleaning for just one more day? I’ve been dying to get a closer look at the Vestige,” he said.

  The cold look he got in return told him that the discussion would not continue and that it was in his best interest to leave. Frantically trying to figure out whether or not it’d be possible to stow away with the right crew, another idea hit him. He took another look at the shift chart and found the names of those going out to work on the Vestige. One of the names belonged to a man suiting up in the locker room.

  “You’ve got the look of somebody who wants something,” a young man with a hawk tattoo on his neck said to Rion.

  “They switched me out of our crew and into construction. I’m dying to get out to see the Vestige today. Name your price,” Rion said as the man smirked.

  “I’ve worked on it twice,” the young man said. “Now it looks like a big pain in my ass. But if you want to do it, be my guest. All I’d want is during the next week for you to take all my shifts and hand over half your rations.”

  He had a nasty grin on his face, clearly trying to get as much blood out of the bargain as he could. Rion had to act the part, shuddering his eyes, turning away, momentarily looking like he was going to pass.

  “Deal,” Rion said, continuing to try to sell his regret to the young man. The joke was on him though. There was no way Rion would be coming back to the Gravilinx station.

  On the way out to the vestige in the shuttle with a dozen other crew members, Rion tried to keep calm. He was asking a lot of Lena and Bailor, even if the risks were minimized. While undergoing maintenance, a good portion of the Vestige’s lower ranked crew would be on leave. Many of the defense systems and even the scanners would temporarily go down. Rion only needed to hope that in the chaos something wouldn’t happen that would get him killed.

  The day passed slowly and Rion began to understand why the man whose place he took was less than enthusiastic about coming back to the Vestige. There was a lot to clean and fix and not a long time to do it. They were forced to work through lunch while the threat came down that they might return home late.

  Rion kept his eyes peeled out into space, waiting to see something. Nothing but stars and blackness met his gaze. It was getting late in the shift and discomfort set in that something had happened to hold them back. Maybe they weren’t coming at all.

  The windows needed a lot of work,
but whenever he could Rion floated around the docking bays used to launch fighters like the Earthguard. The bay doors were locked tight and from everything he saw the rest of the exterior was impenetrable.

  Time grew short and a sense of dread hit Rion that he’d be called back to the shuttle to return to the station. Something had gone wrong and the Assailing Face had been held up, or at least that’s what he figured until his fears melted away at the sight of the screaming face soaring toward the front of the Vestige.

  Even from so far away, the strange appearance of those eyes and mouth was enough to invoke terror in him. Flickering lights around it signaled missile fire. It was like something out of a dream, stories from early childhood come to life.

  Panicked voices came over their communications line and the crew started scrambling in every direction. Then the missiles hit against the opposite side of the large cruiser one after another. Rion had barely enough perspective to see his friends sail over the top side of the Vestige, dodging return cannon fire. The swoops were so tight and crisp that Rion had to stop for an instant and admire Lena’s piloting.

  Was there anything sexier than a woman who could fly a spaceship like that? Either she was getting lucky or her natural talents were shining through. As long as they didn’t get blown up, Rion didn’t care which.

  After the missile explosions and the face passing by on its first approach, a number of trailing mines detonated. The voices over the com were going ballistic and Rion thought he saw one crewmember purposefully cut his tether and go for open space in an attempt to reach a safe distance. It was a foolhardy tactic and the man was likely to be floating nowhere for a long time.

  The Assailing Face came around again from the rear of the ship, prompting two things Rion had expected. More Vestige turrets had come online and were firing at the attacker, and the docking bay doors opened up.

  “Everyone inside the ship,” came an angry order.

  Getting caught outside in an explosion was the real danger, not that the single rogue ship would take out an Alliance cruiser one thousand times its size. Rion didn’t argue. He went along with the others as they pulled themselves into an airlock tube and waited for the end to seal them off from outer space.