Ghost Wing (The Ragnarok Saga Book 4)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  “One of ours?” Thomas asked. Not Kel, he prayed. Don’t learn that lesson from the enemy.

  “No, sir. One of the Hermes fighters.”

  What was that pilot doing? Was he planning to dive at the enemy ship, trying to do a little damage like they had just done to the Intrepid? Or did he have something else in mind? Thomas watched the ship’s course. It wasn’t accelerating like it would if it was going to smash itself against the dreadnought’s armor. Instead, it was inexplicably slowing down!

  “Sir, that Wasp?”

  “Yes?” Thomas asked.

  “It’s broadcasting. Not on our frequencies, sir. On a variety of other ones.”

  That was damned peculiar. “Put it on speakers.”

  The speakers crackled for a moment as the ensign found the right frequency to catch the message. Then a human voice began speaking, using words Thomas didn’t understand at all. It didn’t sound like any language he’d ever heard before.

  But he recognized the voice doing the talking without any trouble at all. It was Choi Xiang. He was out there after all. Alive despite everything Thomas had fought for. He ground his teeth together. It wasn’t enough that the man caused untold death and suffering while he was alive. Even dead, he was conspiring with the enemy in the middle of a battle. Because that had to be what he was doing. Somehow Choi knew the alien language. He must have learned it during the first contact, all those years ago. Whatever he was saying, Thomas was sure it wasn’t good for the Intrepid or Earth.

  He had to stop the man, this time for good.

  27

  Xiang’s fighter swung in close to the alien dreadnought. He’d watched the last few exchanges of fire between them with interest. The Intrepid had destroyed the aliens’ main gun. But that suicide run with the alien fighters must have done significant damage to the UN ship. They’d stopped firing altogether. Surely even if the larger guns on the ship were down, there were some backup weapons? Unless the bridge had been hit, leaving their command and control shattered. He wouldn’t feel especially bad if Stein was dead thanks to all this.

  The trick was going to be pulling this off without dying himself. The alien fighters were all engaged around the Intrepid. That left an opening for him to move in. If he attracted too much attention of the wrong kind, though, one of those smaller guns on the dreadnought was still more than enough to obliterate him with a single blast.

  Talking was the least of his problems. He recalled the frequencies which were used for the first contact. He had faith that those would still work now. And while the alien language was indeed odd, it wasn’t impossible for the human mouth and vocal chords to imitate. It was an elaborate speech, but Xiang always prided himself on his skill with language. He knew twelve different ones from Earth - and one from a distant star. To be fair, he wasn’t fluent in the aliens’ tongue, which was a vibrant mix of hundreds of different clicks and whirring noises. But he could understand and speak enough that he was confident in his ability to get the message across. It wasn’t going to be high diplomacy this time. This would be a walk in the park.

  “Attention, Jaernyth ship. This is President Choi of the United Nations of Earth,” he said into his radio. No, that wasn’t really his title anymore. But the Jaernyth responded well to rank. Their society was much more formally structured than anything humanity had developed. Each member was born into a role and fulfilled it throughout their life. Only the highest ranks had any sort of autonomy. Most of the race were drones and soldiers, born to work or fight and never doing more than those things. They were barely what Xiang considered sentient at all. The leaders, on the other hand, were bright - if overconfident. He was counting on the latter today.

  “One of the creatures speaks a real language. Fascinating. Barbarians! You used a warp engine as a weapon in violation of interstellar law. You are war criminals and will be treated as such.”

  That was interesting news. Both that using the Albucierre drive as a weapon was illegal, and that there was such a thing as interstellar law at all. Was the law just for the Jaernyth race? The implication he heard was that the law extended to many races - including humanity, and that ignorance was probably not going to be considered a good defense. Which raised two questions: if there was a body of interstellar law, who had created it and how was it enforced?

  Problems for another time. In the here and now he had to prevent these ships from wiping his species from the cosmos. Perhaps there was a way to cause just a little trouble for his rival at the same time, though.

  “Admiral Stein commands the ship you just disabled. He is a rogue and took these illegal actions without sanction. He will be dealt with,” Xiang said. Nothing like blaming the enemy for a crime he didn’t even know he committed. That name might never make it out of this solar system if all went well. On the other hand, perhaps it would.

  “It does not matter. We spoke to you before. Your kind was given a deadline to be united or perish. That has passed,” the voice replied. “We will take your worlds since you are using them so poorly.”

  “I think not,” Xiang replied. “You won’t. In fact, you will return at once to your own world and not return, or you will die. This is your only warning and last chance.”

  There was a series of high pitched clicking noises that Xiang wasn’t sure how to translate at first. It took him a minute to realize the Jaernyth was laughing at him. That raised his ire a notch. He had never cared for being laughed at. But he reined in his temper, pulling it back under the same iron control he always had. This was good news, after all. It meant the Jaernyth were playing right into his hands. Intelligent they might be. Skilled at diplomacy and subterfuge, not so much.

  “You will die along with the rest of them. Half a dozen of our beam weapons are trained on your pathetic little ship as we speak. It is only for diplomatic courtesy that we bothered to have discourse with you at all,” the voice replied. “We have spoken with you before, so we offered this courtesy now. All you offer in return are empty threats?”

  Xiang checked the time. He needed another minute. The Hermes would be in position shortly. If Commander Knauf understood what he needed to do and followed through, he would still need Xiang to delay the aliens just a little longer. If they discovered the plot early, it could be unraveled. That would never do. He had to stall.

  “Our fleet will wipe your ships from the sky. Even now the rest of our ships are on their way here. You will die in fire, but we offer you this mercy: leave now and we will allow you to live,” Xiang said.

  More laughter followed. “We have watched you for some time now. We know all your military capabilities. Once we have repaired our sister ship and the ring, our invasion fleet will make short work of all your worlds and your useless fleet.”

  They weren’t wrong. The UN fleet was much stronger than it had been when Xiang died. But it was still barely enough to take on just these two vessels in a head-on fight. The Jaernyth wouldn’t attack with only two ships, though. They’d bring in as many as they thought they would need to have no chance of losing. If that meant sending twenty dreadnoughts to Earth, or fifty, he had no doubt that was precisely what they would do.

  “You are weak-minded fools. You cannot hope to beat us, so you bluster instead? You call us criminals, yet strike first against a race which has done you no harm,” Xiang said. “That is in violation of our laws, and you shall be held accountable for each human life lost. You are insects. Like any other insect, we will crush you beneath our boots.”

  The communication turned into a harsh set of angry-sounding clicks that Xiang couldn’t understand. His grasp of the Jaernyth tongue didn’t extend to swearing, and it was clear from the tone the alien was unleashing every bit of invective it knew in his direction. That was fine. Keep looking at me. Pay no attention to the elephant…

  The dreadnought’s guns opened up. Xiang was prepared, already moving at a good speed. All the practice in the fighter over the last few days served him well. He executed a series of evasive move
s, dodging and weaving to keep the beams from connecting with his ship. One slip and he would be instantly cooked, and yet it was like this was where he was always meant to be. He was a ghost, dead to everyone on Earth. But Xiang had never felt more alive than in that moment. The combination of physical conflict and mental fencing utilized all his skills and assets at once. It was exhilarating!

  “I will have to bid you farewell now,” Xiang said. He checked the timer. Any second now. “It’s time for me to be elsewhere.”

  “You go nowhere. You die now,” the alien said.

  “I think you have that wrong,” Xiang said.

  As he spoke those words, the Hermes shot out from around the back side of Triton. It was moving fast - very fast indeed, having burned on maximum thrust for an extended period of time and then gained more velocity by slingshotting around the moon. It was headed back into the fight and only a few seconds away.

  The die was cast. Either Knauf would do the right thing or he wouldn’t. There wasn’t anything more Xiang could do to influence the outcome here, which meant it was time for him to go. He pushed his own engines to the red line, shooting straight at Neptune’s atmosphere. The gases there would block any stray particle beam weapons sent his way, and his fighter had survived a short trip there before. It could do so again.

  After that? He’d have to see. Choi Xiang was back in the world again. The future was littered with possibilities for one such as himself.

  28

  Xiang hadn’t told Max precisely what he had in mind, but he was smart enough to come up with a good guess even before he laid in the course. Once he was underway, it wasn’t difficult at all to figure out what was up. Max didn’t change course though. Xiang wasn’t wrong. They had to stop this invasion here and now, before they got a strong enough foothold in the solar system that humanity would never be able to kick them out. Those ships had to be defeated. No matter the cost.

  His guesses were confirmed as the ship sailed around Triton and the battle came back into view. The Intrepid was all but out of the fight, listing wildly with only her fighters still engaging the enemy warship. For its part the alien ship was mainly ignoring the Intrepid for the moment. It had pivoted on one axis to bring its guns to bear against some other target, which left few weapons trained on the Intrepid.

  “Three guesses what made them move like that, and the first two don’t count. Well done, Xiang,” Max said over the radio. There was no response, so he didn’t know if the man heard him or not. For all he knew the aliens had already blown him to shrapnel. But it was worth saying anyway.

  The Hermes was moving at a reckless velocity. Bits of metal they ran into pinged against the outer armor, embedding themselves into the ship’s surface. It was too fast to be flying this close to a planet. Even worse so close to a space battle, with millions of bits of debris flying everywhere. But the ship wasn’t going to matter in a few seconds anyway. All it had to do was cross a few thousand kilometers more, which it would do in the veritable blink of an eye.

  The alien ship saw the threat, but all their guns were turned away from the Hermes. They began to slowly pivot back to face the danger. Max could already see they would never be in time to bring most of their weapons to bear. The few which could fire at him did so, their beams stabbing deep into the bow of the Hermes. That wasn’t enough to stop her. It wasn’t even close. The momentum they already had would be enough to finish the job even if the engines failed.

  Time to address the crew. Max opened a link to the other five digital minds on the Hermes.

  “I want you all to know it’s been an honor serving with you. In another minute we will impact against the enemy warship. We’re moving fast enough that it is unlikely either ship will survive,” Max said. Unlikely wasn’t the half of it. The transfer of energy should be enough to nearly liquify both ships. “I wouldn’t be taking such an extreme measure if there were any other way, but the invasion must be stopped and we’re the only ones who can still do it.”

  Max stopped talking and waited to see if the others would say anything in return. None of them did, which surprised him. They were good people. None of them questioned whether their deaths were necessary or not. They didn’t ask him if there was any other way. If there had been, Max would definitely have taken it! He didn’t want to die. He’d given up his physical body, sure. But that had been part of the deal to transfer his consciousness. Passing away entirely was a whole different ball game, and not one he’d hoped to be playing anytime soon.

  There wasn’t another way, though. The last seconds ticked away. The alien ship had given up trying to twist so it could fire at the Hermes and was instead pushing its own engines hard in an effort to get clear. It was nowhere near enough. Max simply used his own thrusters to adjust course and compensate.

  Alien fighters swept in toward him to take out those thrusters. Max didn’t even have to react - the rest of the Hermes’ crew was already manning the smaller ship’s guns, which blew apart one fighter after another as they came. He twisted the Hermes to take one suicide run on a part of the ship he didn’t need, rather than lose a thruster. Thirty more seconds.

  There was nothing they could do. Nowhere to run. No way to escape. The aliens had to know that by this time. How would it feel to see death bearing down on you like that? He at least had the advantage of having made the decision to do this.

  Ten seconds left. Max let his thoughts drift before they winked out.

  Gurgle heard Commander Knauf explain what he planned. He was crashing the ship. That was unfortunate because he really enjoyed working with the repair bots on board. It was also a problem because he had promised Sam to always be there to help her. He couldn’t fulfill that promise if he were dead. How to fix?

  He was good at fixing things. Gurgle had fixed many things for Sam over the time he’d known her. In return, she had helped him become more than he’d ever dreamed possible. In fact, before he met her he couldn’t recall dreaming at all. Or thinking about what the future might hold, or worrying about death. She was the bright light that had changed his world the moment she entered it.

  She never gave up trying. Gurgle had seen Sam go on fighting even when all around her said the cause was hopeless. She never surrendered and so neither would he. There had to be a way to survive.

  Gurgle reached out to put all his processing power to work finding a way. He accidentally tapped into the ship’s primary systems, drawing all non-essential processing to his task. The computer was used to his mind working with it to help repair things. Gurgle was used to tapping into the ship’s non-sentient assistive intelligence to learn how to better do his job. It had been a good match.

  A solution presented itself almost immediately, and Gurgle set about getting the job done. It would require a special repair bot, one of the outside models capable of surviving in deep space with thrusters to jet about the outside of the Hermes fixing the outer hull. Gurgle ordered the bot into action and sent it to the computer core. There it would pull the memory units housing each crew member and then exit the ship carrying them.

  This was the complicated part. Gurgle could either stay behind on the Hermes and ensure the repair bot got off correctly, or he could set off a script for the bot to execute and hope he didn’t make any mistakes. Again he was faced with a dilemma: the certainty of saving everyone except himself, or a riskier method that would save everyone if it worked? Gurgle wondered which path Sam would choose for only a split second before settling on what he knew she would do. There was no question about it.

  Gurgle wrote the script and executed the command sequence. The repair bot went into action, racing to the computer bay where the drives were stored. Once it pulled his drive Gurgle would be unable to take any more action, so he carefully checked the script again and then attached a message in his voice to the bot’s homing beacon, just for good measure.

  A moment later he and the rest of the Hermes crew went offline as their drives were pulled from the system.

  Fift
een seconds after that the Hermes plowed into the side of the alien dreadnought. For the third time that day a massive light burned above Neptune as the two ships obliterated each other in an enormous explosion.

  29

  Sam watched helplessly as the Hermes plowed into the alien ship. She received Max’s last transmission, but what could she possibly say to him in response? He was doing what he felt like needed to be done. She couldn’t argue. It was do or die time. Either they stopped the invasion right away or they probably wouldn’t be able to do so at all. That didn’t lessen the heartbreak of seeing friends go up in the explosion. If she’d had eyes, they would have been streaming with tears.

  “Oh, Gurgle,” she said softly. One of her oldest friends was gone in that flash.

  That was always a risk Gurgle faced. He was much more in danger than she back in Valhalla Online. Until she’d managed to find a way to allow him to respawn like she did, any mission that ended in failure could be his last one. A stroke of bad luck would wipe him away forever.

  He’d never hesitated to go with her anyway. In fact, he’d fought with her when she tried to keep him out of things. Loyal to the end, Gurgle never gave up on her and always had her back.

  Now he was gone. She couldn’t believe it. If she’d never taken him out of Valhalla, then he would still be alive. He could have continued to exist there forever, in theory. He’d followed her over and over and always managed to come out OK. But in the end following her eventually led to the thing Sam feared most: Gurgle’s death.

  “He did well,” Harald told her over the radio. “It was the right thing to do.”

  “I know. That doesn’t make it easier for me to deal with surviving when they didn’t,” Sam replied.

  Harald didn’t respond. He was a Marine and would most likely have lost friends in combat while he was alive. He’d understand more than most where Sam was coming from.