The Great Game

by O. J. Lowe

  Still she was nearly in through the hatch, nearly aboard the albus-class ship. A lot larger than a fighter and packing a lot more firepower, they were still incredibly manoeuvrable and could take a lot of damage should the need arise. The classing marked it as a smuggler’s runner, or at the very least the source of a great many wet dreams for those who aspired to the profession. The shots were still coming although they’d drastically slowed down to a few paused flurries.

  The front of the ship was disc shaped, the rear more of a squat square shape that curved up at the top, a single chunky outlook sticking up out of the top of it, a mirror image of the same design at the bottom. Top and bottom mounted manual cannons, unless she was mistaken. Until she got aboard, she wouldn’t be able to fully assess its attack capabilities but those cannons looked powerful. Easily strong enough to blow an eaglefighter into tiny pieces.

  It was an Elki model unless she was mistaken. One of the T-J500’s, straight out of Serran. Not many of them still around, they’d long been upgraded into the, in her opinion, much inferior T-K600S. The upgraded ships had been much more popular, plenty of them had been sold to the Allied Kingdoms Army over the years. For the first time in her life, she thought she was in love. Even from behind cover, she couldn’t stop staring at it, despite the mortal danger of being shot at.

  Noorland’s hacking tool was doing its job, slowly but surely. She could see it cycling through the numbers on the tiny screen, searching through thousands of combinations for the right code that would unlock the hatch. Then she’d need to hardwire into the control system, find out what she was dealing with… That she might not be able to fly it didn’t enter her head. If it was air-worthy, then she’d have it in the air sooner or later.

  By the looks of what she could see in the battle outside, the fighters were tearing each other apart, while the base itself hammered away at the dreadnoughts, preventing them from getting too close. A ship like this could just about change the flow of battle, if she’d read the situation right. Whoever was commanding the five kingdoms fleet had erred in their tactics, they’d elected not to bring albus-class cruisers into play and it could cost them dearly. The entire fleet looked like it had been thrown together at minimum notice and they’d gotten what they could. Wouldn’t have surprised her in the slightest if that was the case.

  At least coming out of the airbase, she’d be able to get close to those guns. Noorland had already filled her and Navarro in on the deal from what he’d been able to pull from the computers. Every onboard defensive cannon functioned as part of a chain reaction protocol, they’d fire one after another, all in a row, the combined force of over a hundred blasts well enough to deal with anything. One of the dreadnoughts had already found that out to its cost. She’d looked out onto the battle, seen the smouldering remnants still falling away from where it had fallen.

  That had been the point she’d known she needed to get out there as soon as possible. In here, it was marginally safer. Out there, she’d be taking a huge risk. She was tired and hungry, would be rusty behind the controls of a ship. But at the same time, Alex wasn’t about to stand by and do nothing.

  She was going to make her contribution, one way or another.

  Chapter Sixty-Six. Turning Tides of Battle.

  “Sooner or later, everyone has to take a running jump into the unknown.”

  Amalfus to Kyra Sinclair and Gideon Cobb about the unpredictability of situations.

  The third day of Summerfall.

  Kyra hissed inwardly, felt one of the blades flash just a little too close to her face. She caught the sense of heat, the light seared across her vision just for a moment and involuntarily, she felt herself recoil backwards and surrendered a little of her position. He was on her immediately, both blades hammering down at her single one. She reacted as only she had to, defending desperately for her life. She needed to. Fighting against two weapons when you only had one was a desperate gambit, you needed to be twice as fast to avoid being cut to pieces.

  Already she was tiring, drawing more and more on the Kjarn to supplement her movements, her blade leaving faded imprints of colour in the air as it flashed back and forth. She was lucky, very lucky that her opponent’s moves and motions seemed all too rusty and out of form. Were he any sort of practiced sword master, this fight could already have been over. As much as her confidence in herself was justified at times, she held no delusions that she was the greatest kjarnblade wielder ever. She was young, she lacked experience that her opponent might possess, given his years on her. Holding her own against him was commendable, but it’d count for nothing if he cut both her arms off. That’d put a dampener on any sort of prowess she might be able to show.

  Of course, there was more than one way to fight. One of his blades came down, she pushed it back and then jumped backwards several feet, throwing out a hand to strike him with an invisible wall of force that sent him staggering several feet. He hadn’t expected it and with both his hands full, his ability to counter it was nullified a little. The hand gesture wasn’t necessary but, she’d always been reminded, it was useful as a focus. With just that simple piece of motion, you knew exactly what you needed to do and it was that little bit easier than trying to do it without. The vigour behind the motion helped as well, push forward hard and inevitably some of the aggression went into it. Just a little nudge and it was controlled, placed. The thinking was sound. She’d seen those who could throw someone across a room just by looking at them.

  Somehow, she doubted right now he had the control to fight back with the Kjarn minus a free hand. She smiled at him, not ashamed to admit quietly to herself that she was loving this. As one of the possible heirs to the Cavanda, this was one of the things she’d been trained for since she’d been inducted into the group. To face the Vedo should they ever return. To make sure that they stayed extinct. To dominate.

  Being bisected would probably remove that enjoyment. But she went in again, once more traded a flurry of blows with him, this time making her efforts to force him onto the defensive. She heard him grunt, saw her nostrils flaring and his chest rising and falling with the exertions. He didn’t like it. He wanted to kill her, he was going to make every effort to but he was slowly realising and she could see it in his face that she wasn’t going to make it easy for him. She kept her breathing level, kept her form firm and continued to hammer away at his two blades with vicious thrusts, alternating between rapier fast slashes that he struggled to halt and hammer blows that rained down on him, each of them threatening to break through his defence.

  With Wim distracted, Nick turned his attention to Claudia. If he had a weapon, it’d be so easy, just point and shoot, click, boom, dead, no more trouble. That wasn’t an option. He tried to move towards her, saw her eyes narrow in his direction and she raised a hand. For a moment, he half expected something bad to happen until he saw the slim silver remote there in her grasp. He relaxed, not sure what he’d been expecting but it didn’t do to jump like that at the first sign of danger. A slim finger punched a button…

  That might not be good!

  … He saw movement in the background, over at her shuttle and hurled himself out the way, just as a flurry of lethal cannon fire obliterated the spot on which he’d been stood seconds earlier. They continued to track him, he lunged behind some overturned supply crates, hoping and praying to whichever Divines might be listening that there was nothing explosive inside them. That’d make the story a short one and the title being Unquestioned Failure. It wasn’t something he wanted his epitaph to be.

  He lay there for several seconds until the fire faded away into silence, raised his head to sneak a glance. They hadn’t retreated. Wim Carson and the girl still fought, moving around the full area of the hangar now, the girl looked almost primal savage in the rage stamped across her features, her hair blowing about and caked in sweat to add to that look. Wim Carson looked like he was struggling, his footsteps slowing and something about his movements suggesting fatigue. They bore under the ex
ertions, weaker, wearier…

  Just another missed chance. He regretted shooting at him all those times now, if he still had some shots left… Maybe the girl would kill him. He could live with that. Whoever she was, she might do his job for him. It wouldn’t be as satisfying but he could live with it. Just. Across the way, she sprang up and hammered her sword down onto Carson’s two, the effort requiring both to come up and block. And then with her free hand, she swept out a vicious punch, one that didn’t quite connect but Carson reacted as if it had, his body doubling over, his swords cutting a groove into the ground beneath his feet.

  The girl kicked out, hit him in the wrist with a boot as he tried to block her and Nick was sure he heard the crack as one of the swords faded away into nothing and was thrown clear of the battlefield. It landed somewhere in the distance with a faint ‘clink’ on the metal floor. That was Sharon’s, unless he was mistaken. He was still trying to wrap his head around the idea of Sharon owning a laser sword, but there was no time for that line of thought right now. It’d have to wait. If he survived, that was.

  Alex Nkolou wasn’t impressed.

  “You know who this guy was?” Noorland asked, and she heard him over the earpiece that he’d given her. It wasn’t directed at her; it wasn’t directed at anybody but she got the feeling he was talking for his voice to be heard. “Sammy Regan.”

  “Who?” Navarro sounded about as disinterested as her from up in the higher gun emplacement. It sounded like he was impressed with the potential of the new toy he was going to be let loose with. He wasn’t the only one.

  “Boss of the RCE. Regan Community Enterprises? Major player in the Canterage criminal underworld. Guess Cyris wasn’t bullshitting us about Coppinger getting all these criminal hard cases on board with her plan.”

  “Mmmm-hmmm.” Alex still wasn’t impressed but she’d stopped listening to Noorland now, instead running through her pre-flight checks. Of course, they’d been locked, of course the controls had needed to be over-ridden and quickly. The battle wasn’t going too well outside, there were going to be a lot of casualties by the looks of things and this… This felt right, being in a cockpit again. If Regan was who’d they’d just gunned down, and this was his ship, then she wasn’t impressed with the levels of security he’d employed to make sure nobody flew off in it. He had had one of those Canterage accents that made the speaker sound like they were permanently on something that befuddled the senses.

  First day of Unisco flight training, she’d had to crack into the ship she was due to fly. Because, the instructor had primly pointed out, you’re not going to always have a ready-made ship available for you to pilot. Sometimes you need an unfamiliar one. Sometimes you might have to appropriate one. And you need to know how to get in. You need to know how to make the computer dance to your tune.

  Noorland had given her one of the transponder beacons to announce their presence as friendly to the five kingdoms fleet. She’d hesitated over the idea of turning it on, wondering how long she could run the surprise on the enemy. And then she’d gone ahead and activated it. Better to be shot down by an enemy than a friendly. At least you could shoot back at the enemy.

  The cockpit was small, suitable for one pilot and the seat tilting back at an awkward forty-five-degree angle, her feet locked into restraints at the base of the seat for added security. She wasn’t sure she liked it. If she could find the override, she already would have disabled that. But there wasn’t time now and if the ship was shot down, being able to run for it wouldn’t make a difference.

  She’d wanted someone in the belly gun. Both Leclerc and Noorland had declined, citing their presence as being more important here, Noorland especially. Then Anne Sullivan had volunteered. How she felt about that, she didn’t know. The woman was a sniper and the job was basically shooting. But still, taking up the time to line up a shot, watching and waiting was very different from the frantic pace of aerial dogfights. This could get very messy.

  Still what was life without a little risk. And the cannons did both need to be manned. From here, all she had was a pair of solitary forward lasers, powerful but not tremendously effective when surrounded from all sides. And the torpedoes. They weren’t military issue but they’d leave a nasty hole in whatever they hit. Regan had obviously had some contacts capable of supplying him with something so illegal. The T-J500 was living up to its reputation as the ship of a desperado in this instance.

  The transponder ID she’d picked herself. Whatever the ship had been called before, it was now the Wolf Rose. Why, she couldn’t say. It had felt right. And when going with your gut, you couldn’t meet it halfway. It was all. Or it was nothing.

  “Guess this is it then,” she said.

  “May you die before people forget your name,” Leclerc said through the earpiece solemnly. “All of you.”

  “Not great sentiments, Jacques,” Sullivan replied. “I’d prefer not to go at all.”

  “You might be going into the wrong engagement then,” Navarro said, the Wolf Rose already airborne. She did handle well, Alex had to admit. Whatever the faults with the security, there could be no complaints about the maintenance of the engines and the controls. It felt good to be back in the cockpit, she thought, as she gently directed the ship towards the exit. Ready to hit the thrusters in three, two and a half, two, one and a half, one and…

  She punched them and the Wolf Rose shot out of the airbase like a cork from a bottle, straight into the fray.

  Here we go!

  Strangely enough, she didn’t feel worried by what came up ahead. Either they’d die or they wouldn’t. Couldn’t fight what would happen. Only fools didn’t accept the future for what it was, something that would happen when it happened and there was no changing that.

  Fresh shots rang out from somewhere above Nick and he chanced a look, grimacing as he did. Someone else was approaching, several fresh blasts crashing up into the shuttle’s automated gun. He heard a shatter, the eruption of sparks and allowed himself a second look to confirm what he suspected. The gun turret hung limply, useless in firing again. The bad news was he still had a pair of blasters trained on him, the wielder heavyset and roughly the same age as Coppinger albeit someone who looked like they’d fared not as well in the constant struggle that was life.

  There was also something dreadfully familiar about him. He’d seen the guy before, he’d been a contestant in the Quin-C. Nick had even been to see him fight once, just a few weeks earlier. How times change, he thought with a dreadful sense of irony clasping at the pits of his stomach. Where once there had been unquestioning friendliness in that expression, now his face bore a look of determined concentration.

  “Ah, there’s the scallywag,” Connor Caldwell said jovially. A pair of black eyes protruded from his hands, pointed firmly in Nick’s direction. “Come on out Mister Roper and join the fray. Plenty of fun to be had by all.”

  “Do you mind if I decline?” Nick asked, pushing himself up onto his feet. Both blasters were pointed at him, Caldwell had moved to stand next to Claudia.

  “Be a bit rude, I feel,” Caldwell grinned. “But I won’t hold it against you. Hands up please, my friend. No sudden movements.”

  “You see, Mister Roper,” Claudia said and there was just a small hint of unbearable smugness in her voice. “It pays not just to have friends around but family. There’s a certain sort of loyalty there that you just can’t buy.”

  “Family?” Nick tried to sound offhand, he didn’t want it to sound like he knew more about Coppinger than he should. It was probably too late to explain stuff away without mentioning Unisco but no point showing all the cards. Now she mentioned it… The files on her did mention Claudia Coppinger had an estranged brother. “What is he, your dad?”

  “Cheeky bastard,” Caldwell said. “That’s the funny thing about family. You can’t hold a grudge forever, y’see. Someone eventually wants to bury to hatchet. And sometimes you need to be the bigger man and go to fix things. See, I love my sister for that when she
could have done all this on her own.”

  Who shot the gun out then? Nick wondered, not entirely sure what had just happened. Still he raised his hands above his head and glanced around, looking for any sort of way out of this. There had to be one.

  “You can’t stop progress, Mister Roper,” Claudia said. “It’s sad but true. What is going to happen is going to happen and nothing you will do will stop that. Nothing that the five kingdoms will be able to bring to bear will save them.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Nick said. “I probably won’t be around to see it, right?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Claudia said. “You might still be…”

  “I think you will be,” Caldwell said, cutting her off. Her eyes narrowed and she turned to look at him with bemusement.

  “Collison…”

  “Connor,” Caldwell grinned. “You know that thing about loyalty? You can’t just turn it on like a tap, forget everything you already knew.”

  The look on her face as he pointed both weapons at her was priceless. He quickly underhanded one weapon to Nick who caught it, fought the urge to point and shoot the woman the moment it hit his palm.

  “I didn’t tell you everything about what I did while I wasn’t talking to you,” Caldwell said quietly for a moment before the friendliness came back in his voice where as some might have sounded sarcastic or cruelly triumphant. “But things have an astonishing way of working out, sister.”

  “Five kingdoms fleet,” Alex shouted into the comms system. “This is the Wolf Rose, requesting permission to join in the fray.”