by PJ Strebor
The day could still be lost. Insolent was too badly damaged to rejoin the fight, and the Brets were too distant to read what was happening through the interference. By now, the E-boat could have reloaded her torpedo. If she fired, four million people would die.
A flush of anger welled up, and he shook himself. “No, dammit. You’re not dead yet, Telford. There’s always another plan, another way out. Think, dummy, think. No weapons, remember.” He sat for a short time, working the problem. A weary smile stretched his lips.
His muscles screamed with the slightest effort. Nathan’s hands shook, but he could move his fingers just enough to reach the touch pad.
Cursing his weakness and the clumsy controls, Nathan forced the boat to move. Time and again he had to adjust his heading, but with bone-weary effort he brought his wreck directly under the E-boat’s stern quarter. Without sensors, he could only assume her shields still operated. A nearly invisible shimmer from her hull confirmed her shield status. She remained static, her nose pointing directly at Panthera. During his approach she hadn’t fired at him, so she must believe he’d been destroyed.
He had already blown the top hatches from both combat spheres. He disengaged the locking clamps holding the second chair in place, and the combat sphere floated clear of the boat, stopping when it nudged the E-boat’s keel shields.
Nathan groped in a pocket for the controller. The effort made him lean back and groan. “Stay awake, you weak bastard.”
Will three-quarters of a megatonne be enough to bring her shields down? Maybe, if they’ve been weakened from Insolent’s attack.
Nathan backed away, hovering a hundred meters from the fantail. He hit the activate control and braced for the shockwave. For a little nuke, it made an effective flash. The E-boat heaved over, her nose pitching down at an acute angle. The shockwave reached out and slapped Nathan’s junk pile, pushing it away from his target.
***
“Where the hell did that explosion come from?” Matthes shouted.
“Don’t know, Sir. Our sensors are still down.”
“It has to be that strange-looking fighter,” Willi said.
“How in fuck’s name could he—” Matthes bit back a curse. “Torpedo loaded yet?”
“One minute, Skipper.”
“Make it faster.”
“Sir, the crew are loading it by hand. It takes time.”
“Hurry them up.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
***
With all the difficulty of wrestling a Cimmerian, Nathan fought the hulk of his Kamora under control. He had set all of the controls except the final two, moaning at the small effort. He did not want to linger near the irradiated hull any longer than necessary. Muttering obscenities at his unresponsive controls, he finally positioned his shattered fighter back under the enemy boat. A large hole appeared in her shields, directly beneath her engine room.
Continuing to fight for control, Nathan rolled the boat over. Miraculously, the main undercarriage dropped into place. Not the nose skid: that was gone, together with the rest of the bow. Nathan latched on to the underside with magnetic seals, and locked her firmly on to the enemy’s keel.
An image of Livy and Ellen popped into his head. Taking a deep breath, he pressed the ten-second delay on the boat’s self-destruct and pulled ejection handles.
The timer began ticking down. The combat sphere did not move. He frantically pulled on the handles again and again. “Fucking piece of shit.” Spurred by rage, he slammed his fist onto the control pad.
With a violent surge, the sphere shot from the doomed fighter. Through the few remaining lower panels, he got a glimpse of the E-boat as he streaked away. Three, two, one. Nathan averted his gaze as the Kamora’s reactor exploded.
Nathan blinked away the silvery fireflies. A second, more powerful, explosion lit up the darkness of space as the E-boat vaporized.
He managed a bone-weary laugh.
“Got you, you bastard.” His eyes began to close.
The shockwave struck out at him, but thankfully no debris accompanied it. The planet appeared to be closer than he had expected. Closer and closer, until he realized that the blast wave had pushed him into the planet’s gravity well.
“You’ve gotta be kidding.”
With power levels dropping, he wondered if he could control the sphere’s reentry and landing. If the power dropped much more, the anti-gravs would not function and he would plow, like a meteorite, into the surface.
His sphere plunged into the gloomy ionosphere, the capsule shaking as it struck atmospheric resistance.
Finally, he dropped through into clear blue sky. He would come down in the ocean, off the shores of the southern continent. His head fell to his chest. The desire to sleep nearly overwhelmed him. He fought the craving with every gram of his being.
With no SMC, he would have to take his best guess as to when to apply what little of his power remained. For the second time in two days, he hurtled toward the surface of Cimmeria.
Through blurred eyes, Nathan tried to estimate his height, never easy with a flat ocean surface. Engage the anti-grav too early, and he would run out of power and crash into the sea. Leave it too late, and he would die. He stared at the distant green, mountainous horizon, trying to gain some perspective. His approach was angular at about forty degrees to the plane. That might help.
His trembling finger hovered over the touch pad. The flat surface rushed toward him at blinding speed. His back flared and he hit the anti-grav, a short, sharp burst that slowed him just shy of the surface. His sphere stuck the water and bounced, struck the water and bounced, each time losing momentum. Carried by inertia, it tumbled end over end so rapidly that the gee forces threw his limp body about until he blacked out.
An unknown time later he awoke, lathered in sweat, gasping for air. Striking the life support control had no effect. In the near darkness he groped for his re-breather. Gone, lost somewhere on the station. He punched the retrieval control. The chair did not budge. Power levels had bottomed out. He tried to unbuckle, but his hands refused to work.
“Stand up. Pry the hatch open.”
His body spent and unresponsive, he could no longer move. Nathan slumped into the chair, exhausted, defeated.
“I’ve finally run out of tricks,” he whispered into the darkness. “What irony. To survive a day like today and die from suffocation.”
Weary beyond belief, he fought for his next breath.
CHAPTER 69
Date: 24rd March 322 ASC.
Position: Cimmerian outer marker.
Status: Talgarno battleship Serenity’s Spur. Alert Condition Two.
“Long-range readings haven’t changed, Sir. It’s still a mess out there.”
Admiral Braun’s flag captain leaned in to his ear. “Six hours, Sir. How long do we wait?”
“We wait, Captain, until Vengeance reports back on what the hell is going on in Cimmeria.”
“Respectfully, Sir, she should have been back hours ago. Should I send another ship to reconnoiter?”
Braun had considered the same thought. What could have happened to Vengeance? She only had to hyper in, check out the situation, and hyper back.
“Captain, I’m getting a reading on long-range scans. A large contact moving slowly. On course for the fleet.”
Braun nodded to his flag captain.
“Comm, message to the strike force: Alert Condition One.”
It took an hour for the vessel to come into clear sensor range.
“Ship identified. It’s Vengeance. She’s heavily damaged, Sir.”
“Comm, contact Vengeance.”
“I’ve been trying, Sir. No response.”
More precious time ticked by until the battleship came into closer communications range.”
“Sir, message from Vengeance. Text only.”
Braun did not like anyone reading over his shoulder, but could understand his flag captain
’s curiosity. The message scrolled across his screen.
Ship badly damaged. Many casualties. The entry to Cimmeria is —
“Comm, what happened? Where’s the signal?”
“Sorry, Sir. Communication lost at the source.”
“Captain, dispatch a landing boat to Vengeance immediately,” Braun ordered. “I want Captain Eisen in my ready room in twenty minutes.”
“Aye, Sir.”
Braun marched into his ready room and paced the deck. A sick feeling welled up from the pit of his stomach. “What the hell’s going on?” he said to the silent room. He poured another cup of coffee and slumped heavily into his chair. “We had Cimmeria in our hands. What the fuck went wrong?”
For twenty minutes he pondered the impossibility of the situation, growing steadily more agitated with every minute that passed. His comm beeped.
“Braun.”
“Admiral, Captain Eisen has just come aboard.”
“Show him in, dammit,” Braun snapped.
Still clad in his V-suit, Eisen looked terrible. He had blood stains on his face and suit, and an expression of such misery Braun was tempted to feel sorry for him. Eisen looked ready to collapse.
“Sit down, Captain,” Braun said.
He slumped heavily into the chair.
“Coffee?”
“Thank you, Sir.”
Braun nodded to his flag.
As Eisen sipped the hot liquid, Braun examined his eyes. What had happened to the confidence he had seen from Eisen only seven hours previously? This man looked to have lived through a nightmare: distant, haunted. Braun had waited as long as he could.
“Very well, Captain Eisen, let’s have it.”
The captain placed his mug carefully on the briefing table and tried to straighten his back.
“Horrible, Sir, just horrible.” He took a sharp breath. “We had rolled over and were breaking through hyper for the inner marker. Everything was green across the board. Then we hit something that shouldn’t be there. Something in normal space. Something huge.”
The hyperspace nightmare: encountering something in normal space not plotted on the star charts. Two objects could not occupy the same space, even if one was in normal space and the other in hyper. Eisen must have done more than only graze the object.
“The impact fried our hyper generator and we were ripped into normal space.” He shook his head. “An asteroid field, Admiral, a fucking asteroid field. There wasn’t supposed to be anything like it on our approach. We dropped right into it. If we hadn’t cut our approach speed, the transition would have destroyed us. Still, it tore us to pieces. I have two thousand of my crew dead. The ship barely made it back here. We had to use what was left of our weapons to shoot our way clear.”
With shaky hands, he took another sip of coffee. Eisen stared at Braun, the misery changing to rage.
“Admiral, the Massey Archipelago, the Grand Channel, they’re gone, Sir.”
“Gone?” his flag captain said.
Braun pulled a flask from an inside pocket and offered it to the broken man who used to be one of his most capable commanders. Eisen gulped down three healthy shots of schnapps.
“Continue with your report, Captain.”
“It’s all gone, Sir. The battle platform, the archipelago, everything. Best guess is that the platform self-destructed. A desperate attempt to stop our forces.”
“The ninth fleet?”
Eisen shook his head.
Braun stood and rubbed his hands over his face.
“Captain Eisen, in your professional evaluation, could this strike force still make it to Cimmeria?”
“Sir, my ship is a hulk. Any ships that try to make it through that mess will turn out the same way. It’s horrible. Horrible.”
Braun nodded.
“Flag, inform the fleet to send every available landing boat to evacuate Vengeance’s remaining crew. Captain Eisen, you will return to your command, and once your crew is off, you will scuttle her. Understood?”
“Aye, Sir.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Braun said, placing a hand on his shoulder. It was mine.
Eisen nodded glumly.
“We all have jobs to do, so let’s get to it.”
Eisen regained his feet, but could not look him in the eye.
When the hatch snapped shut, his flag captain asked the obvious question.
“So, Sir, what do we do now?”
Braun sighed. “We disperse the fleet and make a run for home.”
“Dispersal, Sir? The Brets have nothing that could harm our fleets.”
“The Brets have over a hundred warships patrolling the exclusion zone. So we’ll give them a lot of small targets rather than one large one. If they gather sufficient numbers, say a squadron of cruisers, they could damage us, or worse, slow us down. You know our orders. No surrender.”
“But Admiral, we—”
“I’ve made my decision, Captain. Carry on.”
“Aye, Sir.”
When he left, Braun fell into his chair. “What a fucking disaster. And it’s all on me.”
CHAPTER 70
Date: 24th March 322 ASC.
Position: Open space, five light years inside the Cimmerian exclusion zone.
Status: Bretish destroyer Ascot. Repairs ongoing.
Captain Imelda Thorpe rubbed the back of her neck. The knot on her vertebra refused to pop. Her first officer stepped into the briefing room.
“I have a report, Captain.”
She nodded and pointed to his usual chair, by her right hand.
He rubbed his eyes.
“Might as well get the worst out of the way. Final count, nineteen dead, twenty-six in the infirmary.”
“So Henderson didn’t make it?”
“According to the doc, too much damage.”
“Well, Alistair, the rest of us are still alive.”
“If you hadn’t ordered that high speed egression when you did, we’d be trapped in hyperspace, like meat in an oven.”
“Talking of which?”
“Our people are working on it. We have the comm hyper channel open and have sent continuous messages for assistance to Commodore Dilley. Still no reply.”
“Time to restoration of hyper?”
“Skipper, they performed a minor miracle getting the comm channel open. You know how temperamental the hyper generator can be.”
She nodded, her exhaustion threatening to crush her. Nineteen dead.
“Go on.”
“Bow weapons bay is wrecked. That fast transition saved our lives, but it came at a price. Reactor is operating at around seventy-five percent, engines are back up and life support is fully restored. We’re still working on shields.”
“Still alive,” she repeated.
“Thanks to you, Skipper.”
The hatch snapped open. “Sorry, Captain, the alarms are still out,” the CPO said, hastily. “There’s something happening.”
Thorpe and Hodges strode onto the bridge and stood behind the tactical officer.
“Skipper, we have a Talgarno battleship at the extreme edge of our sensors.”
“Has she spotted us?”
“No, Ma’am, she didn’t even ping when she egressed. I thinks she’s here to … wait, wait. Yeah.” The T-O looked at her for the first time. “She’s ingressed, Skip.”
“Navigation correction?”
“That’d be my guess, Ma’am.”
“What’s her heading?”
“Best guess, Talgarno.”
“Right. Good work.”
Thorpe stepped to the comm console. “Lieutenant, send a broadband signal to all allied warships within the exclusion zone. Widest possible dispersion. Message reads: Talgarno battleship located at our position on course for Talgarno. All units should consider any such ship to be hostile. They have fired on my command. Expect there may be many more.”
“Commander, any
thing I’ve missed?”
“No, Captain. Unless you want to add kill the bastards on sight.”
“Commander Hodges, that is a capital idea. Comm, add: Strongly suggest that you kill the bastards, on sight.”
CHAPTER 71
Date: 24th March 322 ASC.
Position: Cimmerian high orbit.
Status: Monitor Insolent, undergoing repairs.
Captain Steven Bradman examined the rotating holo image of his command that floated above the briefing table. The enemy attack had hurt her, but they made their boats tough in Athens. Angry red icons marked external sections of the hull requiring serious attention; many amber icons dotted the rest of the boat. Still, Bradman admitted, we’re lucky to be alive. But not all of them had made it.
Fifteen of his crew were on the surface, being treated for radiation burns. They would recover, in time. He had been obliged to put two pilots into the fighters left unoccupied by his missing officers: Ensign William Garrovick had not only survived the battle but got a piece of one of the Jackals; his helm officer, Lieutenant Edina Sommers, had not been so lucky. Then there was the additional death of Ensign Nathan Telford to add to the butcher’s bill. Bradman held off writing the letters.
His D-O poked her head through the hatch that had been jammed open by the attack.
“Got a minute, Skip?”
“Sure,” Bradman said.
Easing back in his chair, he tried to rub the fatigue from his reddened eyes.
“Maybe you should get some sleep?”
“Later,” he said. “What’s happening?”
“We’ve replaced the burned-out blisters in the forward sections, force fields in badly affected areas are holding, temporary structural repairs are under way.” She tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle a yawn. “If everything goes to plan, we can take her down to the repair facilities by tomorrow.”
“Excellent work, Antonia. You might want to consider getting some sleep yourself.”
“Sleep? What’s that?”
They shared a weary laugh.
“Oh, while I think of it, there’s something our young ensign would like to discuss with you.”
