“How did they get the code?”
“It was built on Solace. Fortunately it’s the only one, but if you force it on them, they’ll have to set it off in the middle of the hangar deck. You need to pull back.”
“So they can set it off somewhere even worse?”
“No, so they can try; and so you can stop them. The Arcadia is just a secondary target, they want the gateship.”
“They’re going to knock it back into the atmosphere,” Collins said.
“That’s their plan. Desla has already taken over Arcadia’s flight control.”
“I have men there, I didn’t hear anything.”
“They’re dead. Desla isn’t like the others. They’re just pilots, he’s… I don’t know what Exodite special forces are called, but he’s that. Don’t approach him.”
“Say I believe you and we let the Exodites launch with that nuke, then what.”
“You’ve got half the deck crew with you, think you can get yourself into a Snowhawk and onto the launch racks?”
“I can,” he said. “What about flight control?”
“A marine team lead by ensign Velta are en-route to secure that now.”
“I thought you said Desla was dangerous?”
“He is, but he won’t be there. The clock is ticking, Lieutenant. Are you going to let them set off that nuke on the deck, or are you going to fight them out there, on your terms?”
“Well, I do love to fly.”
****
“Going somewhere, Lieutenant?” Commander Lyle’s question halted Rease as she was halfway up to her wolf’s cockpit.
“The Arcadia is under attack,” she answered as she pulled herself into her seat and strapped in. Around her the other arcom pilots were doing the same. “I’ve called Warhorse back to pick us up.”
“Do you really think the Arcadia is their target?” the black coat asked, putting his boot on one of the massive spent shell casings from a Mauler rifle and rocking it back and forth.
Rease rolled her lip, she didn’t. She knew the gateship would be the ultimate target of any attack, and knew she should stay as a last line of defence. Somehow it didn’t matter. She could feel events shifting over on the Arcadia. The gateship might be the target, but the future was being decided a two-minute flight away, and she wouldn’t be sidelined, she couldn’t be sidelined. She hadn’t started it, but this was her war, her responsibility.
“I have to go,” was all she said as she pulled the hydraulics to lock the canopy back into place.
The machine was ornery about the inexperienced hands that had earlier performed a hard restart on the ion reactor, and it took her a few tries to bring it to power now. For several moments, she sat in the darkness, and it seemed to move around her. She willed it to be still, but she began to feel the snow flurrying in a place so far and dark that she had left it behind forever.
I do not fear the dark. I am not her. I am not there. I hunt.
The screens came up, and she saw Commander Lyle walking away towards the door, but he glanced back at her, and she could see the disappointment on his face.
****
The entire complement of the Undying who weren’t flying CAP had assembled on Phillips’ order, Kelly among them. He’d described an insane situation in which the Exodites had turned against the ship. He’d given them weapons and told them to make their way to their barracks and stay there. He’d said to expect a trap, to stay alive, and above all to keep a look out for Ucoo. Then he’d left them. It was the first time he’d abandoned them in the middle of a battle, and it carried the reek of ill omen.
But there had been no time to question it. Phillips demanded they move out immediately and had left Kelly in charge. She held the shotgun he’d given her tightly against her shoulder as she led the team quickly through the corridors. Momentum was the only way she could keep herself moving as the sounds of gunfire and screams echoed through the corridors from the direction of the hangar deck.
The closer they got to the barracks, the more the sense of unease grew in her. Very different to fear, she had fear already, this was a twisting sickness in her gut that told her she was approaching something terrible. She wanted to send the others back, but Phillips had been insistent that they stay together.
The hatch to their barracks loomed ahead, open like some foreboding maw, some perversion of what was supposed to be a safe place. It was all she could do to approach it, to take one step after another until she reached the door and turned in. It was distrustfully familiar but with an unforgivable twist at the centre. A chair had been placed there and in it was Ucoo, her form hanging from ropes, her bloodied face almost unrecognisable and the collar of her fatigues had been torn aside to reveal the word ‘TRAITOR’ finger painted in blood onto her pale flesh.
Before she knew it, Kelly was running into the room. The moment she crossed the threshold she knew there was nothing she could do to help Ucoo. By her second step she had deduced what that meant, what would happen if she continued into the room.
But she did. She waved the others back and sprinted right up to the corpse in the chair. She did not hesitate or doubt – somewhere between the deaths at Box Grid and Wraith shielding her crippled fighter, she’d decided it was better to be the person who died arriving too late to save a friend than to be the person who surrendered to the notion that someone would rig a bomb on a corpse.
Even if it was true.
Despite her urging them back, the rest of the Undying joined her, perhaps she had failed to stop them for the same reason she’d failed to stop herself. They formed a semi-circle around the chair but not one of them seemed certain what to do once they reached the mutilated body. She was a ghastly sight, but they were a fine honour guard, and for the barest moment they shone in light and flame.
****
Don’t think.
That was an instruction that Phillips’ infantry combat instructors had given him on dealing with CQB situations. Find aggression, find momentum, and let your trained instincts carry you through until the fight is resolved.
But thoughts came unbidden. His mind endlessly circled the Undying like a rookie pilot who couldn’t commit to fight or to flee. The weapons he’d given, the warnings he’d given, the training they’d had. It was enough, it wasn’t enough, they were strong, they were not, they were alive…
“Wait!” the Exodite threw his hands up before Phillips even noticed him, and the pilot belatedly levelled the sights of his carbine on the man.
For a moment, Phillips found himself at a loss, not only was he sweating at the realisation that he’d been a one inch trigger pull away from death, but his mind was struggling to construct a response to this new stimulus. The only phrase that came to his lips was ‘drop your weapon’ and it would have been a great way to reassert control over the situation except this man wasn’t carrying a weapon. His mind clung to those words, those words and the fate of his pilots, the fate of his lover. Instead of being a leader or warrior, Phillips was just staring dumbly at the other down the hull of his rifle.
“I… I came to warn you,” the man said nervously glancing behind him, his hands still up. “Desla knows you’re coming.”
Phillips frowned, he’d guessed Desla would be planning a trap, and he’d guessed where the man would be. The only place he could monitor the barracks from – the block security room. He was one corridor away from that location, and until a moment ago, he’d been certain he’d been undetected. The security room had access to a multitude of cameras, but he’d studied the layout and while he was no infiltrator, he was careful.
He assessed the man in front of him quickly: desperate, terrified, his shirt covered in blood that didn’t appear to be his own. He certainly looked like a deserter, and he sounded a little too close to breaking for it to be entirely an act.
“How?” Phillips demanded.
The Exodite flinched. “I do not know. I swear. He said you are predictable, he said—”
“Where is Ucoo!” the shout escaped him
unbidden, hot and angry vitriol that bubbled passed his lips to startle them both.
“She…” he looked at him, at the gun pointed at his chest. “She is dead. He killed her.”
“You’re lying!”
“No it… it is insane. Desla killed her and then…” Tears began to form rivulets down his face. “This is insane, we are just pilots. I do not want to fight you, I just want things to go back to the way they were before.”
“He killed her,” Phillips said, his emotions oscillating wildly between torment and rage; He felt himself breaking down the middle under the strain. That single fact was suddenly both the sole focal point of his world and the greatest impossibility he’d ever heard.
“He killed her,” the Exodite cried back. “Fathers forgive us, he killed her.”
Phillips was numb. Then a noise, fierce and guttural, issued from the pit of his chest, and he would have gunned the man down right then and there, but a new target appeared. One far more worthy of his destructive urges.
Desla had apparently heard their shouts, and had elected to go on the attack. He came around the corner braced against his submachinegun and opened fire almost right away. Phillips didn’t try to dodge but fired back, his aim kicked astray as he felt rounds rip down the length of his arms and pelt into the armoured vest he wore. The velocity of the bullets staggered him. The gunfire then stopped.
He didn’t immediately see why. His vision had collapsed to a narrow slit as pain burned through him like he had mercury in his veins. He thought he’d caught his balance, but suddenly he was on his knees and then slumped back over his heels to lean bonelessly against the wall. He breathed around the pain, an easy exercise for a pilot, and brought the world back into focus.
Desla was not dead as he’d hoped, indeed he seemed completely unharmed as he advanced from his cover at the end of the hall. The abrupt cease fire had apparently been caused by the turncoat who had thrown himself in between the two, his arms spread wide. It was a miracle the Exodite had stopped firing in time. Phillips could hear them talking, but his pain had become a loud thing, a buffeting white noise that drowned out any sense he could make. He knew Desla was shouting, demanding, and that the other was pleading and begging.
But Desla was still alive, and Ucoo wasn’t.
It was so abhorrent to the proper order of the Phillips’ world that he could not let it stand. The part of him that wanted to stop, to sleep, and perhaps even to die, was powerless before that simple necessity. That one thing that could not be left undone.
One of his hands began to move and he looked down at it. It was bloody and had gashes ranging from grazes to furrows but he couldn’t sense the agony above the white noise of pain that seemed to lean upon him. There were a handful of secure items on a carrier that only a member of the Peerage could have checked out of the armoury, and his hand found one, hooked at his belt.
As his grip closed around the grenade, he noted that not all of his fingers cooperated. He couldn’t feel its weight, but his arm shook beneath it as he hooked the pin loop over his belt and yanked the grenade free of it. He cocked his arm, seeing Desla’s shocked face as he back pedalled rapidly. The Exodite fired, and a spray of blood emerged from the back of Phillips’ protector. The man fell, and Desla’s aim adjusted, hoping a clear shot would appear soon enough.
Phillips smiled from behind a numb face. He hurled the grenade with all his remaining strength, but it barely cleared the falling Exodite. Barely was more than enough, however; and it skittered down the corridor, seeming to chase Desla as he broke into a dead run back to the cross junction.
There was a rush of fire between them. Heat warped the walls of the corridor and steel fragments made great claw marks in the cladding. The fallen Exodite was rendered unrecognisable but his body shielded Phillips from most of the lethal shrapnel. He felt a spray of pellets on his face, icy flecks of pain that found purchase in the numb mask he wore but somehow didn’t penetrate.
The corridor was thick with smoke, burning debris and the steam of broken pipes that all vied for dominion over the swirling madness he surveyed. Between the curtains of ruin, he caught a glimpse of Desla’s face, sideways against the floor, bloodied but animated with pain and a damnable determination to keep living, to complete one final task.
I won’t let you, Phillips promised him silently.
And he was certain he could hear the other promising him the same thing.
****
“Warhorse, this is Razor,” the announcement came through Walters’ headset as the lifter ferried Rease’s company back to the Arcadia. “I’m right on your twelve, trailing an Exodite bandit with a hot nuke.”
“Copy that, Razor,” Walters responded. “We’ll stay out of your way.”
He was just turning to relay the order to his men when he heard the unmistakable sound of Rease’s combat boots rattling off the grated floor. He turned to faced her but she said nothing, just stared him down, her hands on her hips.
“Don’t give me this,” the skipper muttered. “This isn’t a combat ship, we’d just get in the way.”
Rease said nothing.
“What do you want from me? This crew is untested, this ship is unarmed, there is already a fighter engaging them. There are so many reasons not to take this risk.”
But really there weren’t, there was just one, and Rease didn’t need to say it, she already had so many flights ago. He could ignore her, of course, as ship skipper he made the final call, and if questioned later, he could use all the reasons he’d given her for keeping his ship safe, for keeping himself safe. Razor was Lieutenant Collins, the Arcadia’s ACM trainer, he could take down a lone bomber, and even if he didn’t they could find another gateship, surely the enemy had more than one. Was it worth dying for this?
He’d heard the phrase ‘too young to die,’ but that was an observation, not a feeling. It was easy to die for a cause in youth because, somehow, you never really believed it was going to happen. Only the old hearts truly knew to fear death because with age, with experience, came the cold realisation that people can and do die. People you looked up to died. People who seemed beyond the claws of mortality were still just one mistake away from a plaque on a memorial wall. The cold well of the nothing beyond death seemed poised to swallow all of the things he yet wanted to do. All of the things he’d failed to accomplish so far would flip from ‘was going to’ into ‘never did’.
But that fear, all of the weight it carried, was a thumb on the scales. No matter what justifications he might later give a review board, he knew it. The cold eyes of this woman, still young enough to believe she would never die, knew it.
Walters reached for his headset. “Maize, how much of a lead does the Exodite have.”
“Lots… Razor is gaining, but it’ll be a near thing…” There was a pause. “Tell me you’re not thinking of Tareking this.”
“I’ll do it,” Candlelight interjected excitedly and then belatedly added, “…sir.”
“Do what exactly?!” Maize asked.
“Run interference. I did basic ACM for my shuttle cert, and it’s not like I need to burn him, it’s just flight disruption.”
Too excited, too flippant. Her attitude was almost enough to make Walters abandon the idea altogether. Almost.
“Do it,” Walters said, and the moment the words came out of his mouth he somehow felt lighter. He keyed the comm. “Razor, discount my last, we’re going to try and stall the bomber so you can catch up.”
There was a pause and then. “You’re going to Tarek this one?”
“Apparently, yes.” He killed the switch and then turned to look at Rease, still silent in the doorway.
She took her hands off her hips and favoured him with a smile before heading back into the hold. Or at least she took one hand off her hip, he corrected mentally, the other had been resting on her sidearm.
****
Lieutenant Collins was closing in on the bomber as quickly as he could, but he knew he didn’t have mu
ch time. The nukes were comparatively long range and the gateship couldn’t be relied on to defend itself. When the Warhorse announced their intention to intervene, it was both a blessing and a curse. Anything they could do would only work in his favour, but he needed to get into the fight before they got themselves killed.
His Snowhawk had been fitted in a hurry, so he was barely carrying any weight in armament but he did have plenty of fuel. Doing some rough math, he calculated the amount he’d need for a one way trip and a short engagement before jettisoning the rest. The acceleration G’s picked up but not a lot.
“Warhorse, this is Razor, what’s your strategy?” Collins asked as he watched the Warhorse plant itself right in front of the bomber and begin to burn in.
“Razor, this is Candlelight. I’m going to ram this thing down his throat.” was the enthusiastic response.
“What?!” the new voice was Maize. Collins knew that without any need for introduction. “What happened to disruption? What happened to Basic ACM?”
“This is basic,”
There was apparently no further time for discussion as the Warhorse thundered in on the Exodites. Tracers shot out from the bomber, and the Warhorse jinked as much as a beast of its size could. Rounds sparkled off the blunt nose but that was its heaviest armour and gun rounds wouldn’t pierce it except at dangerously close range, and even if they did, a shot would have to traverse then entirety of the ship to disable its engines. The most the Exodites could hope to achieve was to crack the other pilot’s nerve.
Nerve which Candlelight apparently possessed in spades. She barely deviated at all. The Exodite pilot seemed blessed with a similar daring, perhaps banking on the near certainty that any tiny error would cause the ships to shoot safely past one another.
He would have been right, as they closed the final hundred metres it became apparent that the bomber would pass just a few metres to the right of the lifter. That was up until the moment Candlelight rolled the ship onto its side and maxed the VTOL thrusters. The Exodite struggled to evade as the Warhorse surged into its path.
Threshold of Victory Page 29
