by Nick Webb
“El Amin, ma’am. What’s left of it, anyway.”
“El Amin? In the San Martin system?” Granger—or whatever was claiming to be Granger, had destroyed that moon, either purposefully or inadvertently, in the process of attempting to convert it into a Granger moon. The debris was now threatening the colonies on Sangre de Cristo and would wreak havoc on San Martin itself within a few years. How the hell could he be convalescing in the leftover remains of a destroyed moon?
“Yes, ma’am.”
How very strange. These pirates were not behaving like pirates. Unless they had some kind of ulterior motive….
“Mung, what the hell is going on? Why are you bringing me this information? Who gave it to you? Who sent you?”
“I was sworn to secrecy, admiral. But I assure you, I, and the source of this information, want nothing more than for the Companion to the Hero of Earth to succeed in her destiny.”
The Companion. That was Grangerite language. And that explained it. Mung was a Grangerite. One for whom faith was far more important than a bounty of fifty million. And apparently the lives of his fellow pirates.
“Well then, Falun Mung, I thank you.”
“Glad to be of assistance, admiral. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we must be on our way. Do you need any technical assistance before we leave?”
“No. We can manage it from here. Thank you again.”
She watched while, on the viewscreen, the Hero’s Path engaged its q-field generators and in a flash it was gone.
They were alone again. They were close to being able to join the battle that was surely raging over Britannia. And, if she lived through that battle, she had a choice: find Captain Tim Granger, or finally find her nephew Danny, the whole reason she’d rejoined IDF in the first place.
The choice was not hard.
“Davenport, I’m heading back out to replace those last four generators. As soon as I’m back inside begin the q-jumps to get us to Britannia.”
“Yes ma’am. But, ma’am, most of our weapons are still inoperative. Are we going to be much help there?”
“No. Even with our weapons we weren’t going to be much help. But maybe we can at least distract the Swarm until the Granger moons show up.”
Lieutenant Case came back through the door holding another bag identical to the one the pirate had knocked out into space. She began pulling her suit back on.
“And if they don’t, ma’am?” said Davenport.
She engaged her vacuum seal and answered him through her helmet’s headset. “Then you’ll get a front row seat in Saving Humanity by the Seat of One’s Pants 101. Taught by the resident expert. Class is in session.”
Chapter Fifteen
Bridge
Pirate ship Hero’s Path
Sector 21-K
Falun Mung rubbed his hands together with glee. He turned back to his brother at comms. Not his brother by relation, but his brother in God. “Send a meta-space transmission to the Patriarch. As follows.” He lowered his voice into a tone of deep respect. “Patriarch. We’ve found her. And she’s heading to Britannia.”
Chapter Sixteen
Fighter cockpit
Inside Swarm Vessel
Near Britannia
Zivic’s eyes kept darting from the control panel for the fighter’s thrusters to the giant power core looming ahead of them and back, wondering if he had time to figure out how to fix the blasted things. His readout told him he had less than thirty seconds.
“So … your plan is to kill us? Really? After all that? Why?”
His dad’s voice cut in and out from the drones’ jamming signal, but he could still make out the mocking reply. “Uh … to save Britannia, dumbass.”
“But—”
“And we’re not dying. Not today.”
“But—”
“Watch and learn, son.”
Zivic grabbed on to his armrests to steady himself as his father lurched them from side to side to avoid the hundreds of drones still surrounding them. For presumably computer-controlled things, they were a remarkably poor shot, but occasionally a few rounds made it through and dented the skin of his bird and the shuttle towing him.
“Learn how to get myself killed? I was already pretty damn good at that, Ballsy.”
It was the first time he’d used his dad’s old callsign.
But it seemed appropriate, given their circumstances.
“Not good enough, Batshit, you’re still alive.” His dad swore as a drone strafed him with rounds, a few of which must have actually punctured the cabin and evacuated his air supply. “Well, isn’t that just a bitch—”
“Dad!” He watched in horror as the shuttle vented streams of expanding gas. “Please tell me your vacuum suit it is on….”
“Working on it,” came the strained reply.
“Aw … shitwidget.” The readout screamed at him. Fifteen seconds until impact with the core. “I gotta say, Ballsy, your plans suck balls.”
“Ok, I got the bloat helmet on—”
“That’s it?” Every shuttle and fighter came with an emergency helmet, affectionately called the bloat helmet, since all it did was form a rudimentary seal around one’s neck and keep one alive in vacuum for about twenty minutes until a more permanent solution could be found. But bloat helmets tended to let the vacuum turn one’s fingers and toes into large sausages.
“Ok, listen closely. Your ventral thrusters are still operational, yes?”
“Yeah, but—”
“And the jamming in your port thrusters is just a fuel line issue, if I’m interpreting these readings right.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Ok, I’m slowing us down slightly to buy a few more seconds. But when I say now, gun your ventrals and push us up and over that asswrench of a core tower. That will buy us about thirty seconds until we hit the wall beyond it.”
“Ok. And then?”
“I’ll surprise you.” He heard his dad grunt and hit a few things. “Ok, see you on the other side.”
“But—”
His gut churned as he saw the shuttle’s hatch open and his dad appeared, clutching onto the side with one hand and in the other holding a large utility knife.
“You’ve got to be shitting me, dad.”
He jumped.
Ballsy indeed.
It looked like he was about to fly off into the huge void of the silk road tunnel, but at the last second his dad’s hand reached out and snagged onto the net ensnaring his fighter’s starboard wing, and he whiplashed back as his momentum carried him too far.
But he held on.
The tower loomed closer. They were seconds away.
Ballsy hacked away at the netting. Zivic watched, wide-eyed, through his starboard viewport as one strap, then another, then another frayed away.
And they were free. “NOW!” came his dad’s voice through the comm.
Zivic gunned the ventral thrusters and they soared up, higher and higher. Ballsy hung on with both hand and Zivic could hear the man’s string of profanities. The tip of the tower was dead ahead, meters away….
He pushed the ventrals into overdrive. His dad would never be able to hang on, but he had to increase the intensity. Otherwise they’d crash.
He glanced out again. His dad had wrapped his free wrist in the remains of the straps. It was probably cutting off circulation, but he’d live.
They cleared the tower. Barely, with just a few meters to spare. “Ok! Cut the thrusters! Now!”
Zivic eased off the controls and they drifted at a frighteningly high velocity towards the wall beyond the tower. “So, what’s in that shuttle anyway?”
“An anti-matter package. Hold on….”
“An anti-matter package? That shuttle’s going to hit it in a few seconds!”
His dad was climbing down the underside of the starboard wing. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch. Now, when I give the signal, get us the hell out of here. I see the fuel-line problem—”
Zivic watched in
gut-churning anticipation, glancing between him and the power core tower which was about to blow at any second. Ballsy sawed through the exposed fuel line—which looked like it had mostly melted and fused with the titanium skin of the wing itself. One cut complete, he started sawing on the other side of the melted spot on the line. Once free, the far end of the fuel line started pulling away from the wing, but Ballsy grabbed it, tossed his knife out over his shoulder, and reached down to his belt to grab a smallish cylinder of some sorts….
“Oh my god, please tell me you brought more than cocknibbling DUCT TAPE to fix the fuel line!”
“Time was short,” came the curt reply. “And you’re still alive, last time I checked, so shut the hell up.” He pressed the two ends together, held onto the wing with his legs for leverage, and then pressed the two ends up to the wing to keep them from coming loose while he brought the duct tape up to his teeth. Ballsy somehow managed to unravel a long strip, which, miraculously, made it around the two ends of the line. He wrapped a few more times, tossed the tape, and then squeezed the union with both hands.
“GO!”
Zivic initiated the engines, tentatively at first so as not to blow the duct-taped fuel line, then gunned it as he saw the pressure hold.
His dad held onto the wing with both legs, still pressing the ends of the line together. He was going to have one hell of a charlie horse in those hamstrings….
The fighter blasted away from the power core tower, back down the silk road.
The shuttle finally collided with the tower. An explosion from the released anti-matter ripped through it, unleashing a glittering, crackling, electrified plasma sphere of fiery hell.
“Faster, please,” came his dad’s strained voice, as the expanding sphere began to overtake them.
Please?! Zivic thought, shocked by the utter sincerity in Volz’s request. Damn. We really are screwed this time. Again.
Chapter Seventeen
Bridge
ISS Defiance
Near Britannia
“Five more q-jumps,” said Lieutenant Case. “Just a few more minutes, ma’am.”
Proctor nodded and tapped her comm. “Commander Carson. How’s our patient?”
“She’ll live. Barely. But she’s going to feel like shit for a week or ten. And she may never be able to eat anything spicy….”
“The price we pay for freedom is steep sometimes, commander. She’ll probably have to take the long-term chronic rad pills, given how much radiation she took in, even with whatever anti-rad material IDF intel injected her with in the first place.” She glanced at the countdown timer. Still three minutes until Britannia. “Can she talk?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Proctor shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Fiona? How do you feel?”
Liu’s voice was ragged. “Peachy.”
“Thank you. For saving us. It … doesn’t erase what you’ve done, but … I thank you.”
“Admiral, I don’t care what happens to me now. I had my revenge. And it was sweet. I fully accept responsibility for—”
Proctor frowned. “I don’t think you realize what you’re saying, Ms. Liu. You accept responsibility for murdering the president of United Earth? I’m no lawyer, but that’s one of the few capital punishment situations we’ve got. Your life is effectively over if you, quote, take responsibility for your actions.”
“Ma’am? Are you suggesting I … lie?”
“Why not? It’s what you’re very, very good at, is it not? You fooled me. You fooled Admiral Tigre. You fooled Danny, you—”
“NO! I … I did not fool Danny. It started off that way but….” Her ragged voice trailed off.
“It started off that way. So, yes. You did fool him. Even if only for a time. You’re a very, very good liar, Ms. Liu, so I ask you, why not this time? Half of humanity thinks I killed President Quimby and Admiral Mullins. I was in command of the Defiance when it took out their ship. No one’s going to believe me when I claim that a rogue IDF intel agent managed to convince me she was trustworthy enough to pilot my ship while I was already on the run and that said agent then shot the president all on her own accord. You’ve got the perfect alibi here. Why not use it?”
Silence. And she could almost, almost make out a hint of a sob. She glanced at the countdown timer. Just a few seconds.
“I’ll talk to you later. Carson, I need you back up here. Proctor out.” She turned to Lieutenant Davenport. “Any progress on the mag-rails? Or lasers?”
“I’ve got cannon five up to around seventy-five percent from ten percent. I don’t think it’ll go any higher without an actual engineer looking at it.”
She turned back to the screen. “It will have to do.” She grit her teeth. This was it. She’d been in many, many battles in her life. Many of them desperate, survive-by-the-skin-of-your-teeth affairs. But, given the scant reports she’d plucked out of the meta-space distress calls, this was shaping up to be the most desperate, high-stakes battle of them all.
Commander Carson re-entered the bridge, giving her a curt nod, and slid back into his seat at the command station. “Prepare yourselves, people,” she said. “Three Swarm ships. Only one Granger moon so far. We most likely will not survive this. But we have to try. Eight billion people are depending on us.” She turned to Lieutenant Case and gave him a slight nod.
“Initiating final q-jump,” he said. To his credit, his voice didn’t even tremble. Proctor had seen even the most hardened veterans of space battles occasionally lose it. This would be Case’s first. And his jaw was firm, his eyes locked on the viewscreen, and didn’t appear to waver in the slightest.
That will soon change, she thought.
The screen flashed, and the starfield was replaced by hell.
Ido, Bolivar’s former moon, hung at the center between three massive, hundreds-of-kilometers-long monstrosities, which were raking it with devastatingly powerful green beams: charged anti-boron and anti-oxygen particles carried on a powerful laser-like photonic beam.
And the anti-matter beams were tearing Ido apart. “My god,” she whispered. “He’s not going to make it.”
She said he, but she had no idea who, or what, was down there. Was it Tim? No, he was at Titan. Could it be … an AI computer, somehow? Or was he just controlling it remotely? Or was there someone else down there? Or was Ido itself … conscious, somehow? However unlikely that would be? She’d recently seen displays of technology so advanced that some would call them magic, so she couldn’t discount any possibility at the moment.
“What’s the status of the fleet?”
Lieutenant Davenport scrolled through all the converted-to-text comm feeds scanning for news while simultaneously bringing up the tactical information broadcasted on the encrypted IDF tactical frequency. He was getting good in the two short weeks he’d been deputized.
“Not good.” Davenport looked pained. “We’ve lost a lot of ships. Admiral Tillis is in from San Martin and now commanding what remains of the Britannia Defense Fleet. Admiral Oppenheimer is here with the Earth Defense Fleet, but he’s taken heavy losses as well. The Swarm ships have taken damage, mostly from Ido, but looks like we’ve taken out a few of their weapons spires—the planet killers.”
“Christian’s here himself, huh? Ok. Engage the stealth. Let’s disappear, and maybe we can prick them in just the right places.” For all the good it would do. “Oh, and get me on meta-space. General broadcast, highest intensity we can manage without giving away our position.”
Commander Carson gave her the thumbs up. “You’re on, admiral.”
“Tim, it’s me. We need you. Now. Britannia is on the brink. It’s now or never, Tim. As many moons as you can spare.”
She’d broadcasted similar messages during each of their previous engagements with the Swarm—in between her search for Titan—but it never seemed to have an effect. The Granger moons had always shown up, yes. But at New Dublin they’d arrived far too late.
And she’d never received a reply.
/> “Ok. Showtime. Commander, scan the nearest Swarm vessel. See if you can identify any power conduits or….” She remembered their recent history, “or coolant lines, or … anything that might go boom with a well-placed mag-rail slug.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am.”
“In the meantime, Lieutenant Case, take us closer to that one there.” She pointed at the nearest behemoth, which hovered directly over the main continent of Cascadia. Where her own home was. Where her brother and his family lived. Where she’d taught classes just weeks ago.
“Ma’am, we’re receiving a coded transmission, tight beam, aimed right at us.” Davenport’s brow furrowed. “Trying to triangulate the source—” He smiled. “It’s the Independence, ma’am.”
“Ballsy.” Finally, some good news. The Independence was still alive, at least. “Patch him through.”
It was Lieutenant Whitehorse’s voice that boomed over the comm, however. “Admiral, we’ve got a problem.”
“A bigger problem than three Swarm ships in orbit over Britannia? That are nearly as big as Britannia itself?”
“It’s Volz. And Zivic. They’re stuck in there.”
“What? What are you talking about … you mean, in there?” She pointed at the Swarm ship, knowing full well Whitehorse couldn’t see her, but she seemed to pick up on the context.
“Yes, ma’am. We were just in there ourselves, trying to blow up one of their four main power cores, but Captain Volz ordered the Independence out once it became clear we’d be unable to achieve our objective without losing the Independence herself.”
“Let me guess, Ballsy is doing something rash, dangerous, and unlikely to succeed?”
To Proctor’s surprise, Whitehorse chuckled. “Well, actually, ma’am, they’ve done the important part. They blew the core. The ship’s so big that the explosion hasn’t reached the outer hull yet, but this section of the ship is about to light up. They might even be taking out the whole thing, god bless ‘em.”
