Threshold of Victory

by Stephen J. Orion

  The dog was bolder than he’d imagined, standing bare meters off to the left of the door they’d come through. There was no useful cover in that corner of the room, the pilot had clearly counted on their tunnel vision, and they had delivered. Its sidearm was levelled as his machine, and Musashi could see the bolt cycling as his own crosshairs seemed to drag impossibly slowly over his target. The enemy fired again, but this time the round deflected off his heavy chest armour and served only to jerk his aim the last few centimetres on to target. He fired a fully automatic barrage while yanking his aim up his opponent’s right leg, across the stomach and off their left shoulder.

  As his rounds struck the machine, Musashi felt a pang of deep and unexpected regret. Even dead to rights, his opponent was like no other, making tiny adjustments that shifted the legs and brought the heaviest plating into the path of the shells. The arms crossed over where his attack should have shattered the ion drive, the machine pivoted with the blow to the shoulder, deflecting the rounds away.

  To call this pilot an ‘ace’ would be to lump it in with so many other pilots who, while exceptional, were graceless savages against this artist. Such a barrage as he had just unleashed should have left the machine an irreparable ruin, its pilot slaughtered. Instead it wavered on its brutalised leg, its gun arm was gone from the upper elbow down and its knife blade was snapped off where it had deflected a shell. It was in no condition to fight, but to find it still standing was as discovering a flower had survived a nuclear strike.

  This was not ‘a’ pilot, the indefinite could not apply here, it was the singular: the one who no other would ever surpass. The perfect pilot Musashi had aspired to be.

  And he had killed them.

  Oh the machine still moved, but it could not fight, and it could not run. His brothers were already turning and they would rip it apart like jackals with a scent for blood.

  “I am sorry,” he whispered to the pilot as the lights faded in his shattered cabin and he waited to die in the broken dark.

  ****

  High Orbit

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  Tarek was flying off the Arcadia’s portside when he felt a sudden and staggering pain like he’d been gutted by hot metal. He tasted iron and felt a sensation of dread descend on him with an almost physical weight.

  He took his bearings immediately, searching for the source of the sensation. Everything seemed to be going well: the Cold Sabres were just forming up around the carrier to land and rearm while the Arcadia had just lobbed what must be the last of her missiles through the gate, and it was now flashing shut. He wasn’t privy to the status of the ground team, but Arcadia control had assured him that they would be withdrawing once the last of the gateships had been destroyed, which by Silver’s count had just happened.

  And that was the moment when the cards he put together for the battle, were suddenly stripped from his hand in a violent rush that he’d become all too familiar with. Rease had changed something, and he was about to find out what.

  But it wasn’t Rease.

  The portal cracked open, and this time the Arcadia didn’t fire. Instead, impossibly, something came through. Someone had breached their firewalls and seized control of the gate. Someone had a gateship that wasn’t in the code book Felton had recovered.

  Someone else had a seer.

  The prow that came through was immediately identifiable as a Griffin-class strike carrier, the same class as the Arcadia, the same class as the CNS Olympian.

  And as the rest of the ship emerged, the three flights of the Blood Iron Squadron scythed out to confirm it. They didn’t deliver terms or recriminations. The moment they arrived the Olympian’s particle lances sheered the gate apart and then turned to track on Arcadia while the Blood Iron’s Sabrecats soared in on her escort.

  No one was reacting.

  “Undying, look alive!” Tarek shouted over the general channel, as he grabbed a card for defeating the Blood Iron. “Form defensive pairs and break, bring them into the Arcadia’s point defence range.”

  The Undying reacted quickly, scattering out of the path of the Blood Iron and drawing them back towards the Arcadia. Cormento’s squadron were elite, but Silver immediately noticed two things that gave them a chance. The first was that Blood Iron’s sister squadrons were missing which gave the Undying and the Sabres a crucial edge in numbers – for now at least.

  The second thing he noticed was the Colonel Cormento wasn’t with them. It was a vital revelation, not only because the Colonel was a deadly pilot, but because he doubted Eternal Wraith would be much use in a fight against his own father. Those two advantages weren’t much, but based on the card he held they were enough.

  But as soon as he thought it, the card was torn from him again. The Blood Iron were changing their formation. The seer was changing their formation.

  ****

  Outpost Origin

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  Rease’s wolf staggered as another shell struck its weak rear armour. This time the entire hip assembly collapsed, and the machine came down with a spine-wrenching crash. As her world began to still again, she tried to spit the blood that had pooled in her mouth, but the burned flesh on the right side of her face wouldn’t let her open her mouth more than a centimetre or so.

  Swiping at her bloody drool, she triggered the emergency cabin release and her last smokescreen canister almost simultaneously. The cabin burst open into a thick blanket of smoke and Rease hissed in pain as she quickly levered herself out of the chair. Anywhere her body didn’t hurt sharply, it ached instead, and what she’d envisioned as a dead sprint to a nearby access ladder became more of a staggering lope.

  Behind her more shells exploded as the Exodites took no chances, targeting the IR reading for the steaming wreck of her arcom and unleashing everything they had on it. Ironically their obsession with destroying her was all that saved her, allowing her to reach the recessed ladder before they even realised she was no longer on board.

  Climbing was agony. Her right arm was burned and gouged with bloody shrapnel, her slick fingers fatigued quickly and threatened to lose their grip with every rung she ascended. She wasn’t sure what kept her going, her conscious mind had receded, and her body pressed on with some desperate drive of its own.

  She’d always thought she’d die in her arcom, but here she was, staggering away from the machine that had carried her through so many battles. The war wasn’t over. The ghosts were unforgiving, and they drove her on and on until she wanted to scream at them to let her expire. She hated their unreasonable demands that she save one more life. Always one more.

  But then she realised, this time, this one time, they just wanted to save her.

  ****

  High Orbit

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  “I’m hit!” Reed screamed.

  It hadn’t been a choice, simply a reaction to the terror that peaked when the missile she’d been trying to fox exploded right on top of her. She’d expected to die – between fuel and armaments, more parts on a Snowhawk were explosive than not. But despite the odds, she endured, her screens covered in warning red, her fighter careening out of control on one engine as it shed away its swallowtail assembly and the better half of its right wing.

  “This guy is all over me!” this other voice of hers continued, the frightened child that didn’t at all match the pilot she wanted to be. “Where is everyone?”

  But everyone was kilometres away, and it was her own fault. She’d been aggressively using gravity dives to stay ahead of a Blood Iron Sabrecat, and though the effort had staved off her opponent temporarily, it had also separated her from her the rest of the squadron. Perhaps that had been her enemy’s intention all along. He certainly seemed calm enough as he vectored away briefly to avoid an overshoot and plan his next attack.

  She tried to pull her fighter around to face him, but he’d veered to her
undamaged side, which meant her engine was working against her. By the time she’d rolled to correct, it was already too late, the fighter was closing in to finish her off.

  In the next moment, it was surrounded by a hailstorm of chain gun rounds from almost directly above. The pilot’s response was immediate and aggressive, standing onto its wing to minimise his profile and then pulling a flat turn to bring him head on against his aggressor.

  That aggressor was a Duke bomber from Paveway Squadron. The two heavy ships had stayed on the periphery of the engagement, and she had disregarded them completely. They were no match for elite pilots in high-end fighter craft, and an unsupported attack run against a Constellation Fleet Carrier like the Olympian would be suicide.

  But this one was throwing everything it had at the Sabrecat in a deadly head-to-head engagement. The bomber was better armoured, but the Cat was faster and with a better pilot. Twinkling armour tore from both craft as rounds found purchase. They shifted for aim and evasion, and somehow neither craft failed as they slipped by each other like two master samurai aiming to kill in a single pass.

  The bomber pulled around, setting up for another attack run, but it didn’t open fire. The Sabrecat had not moved, not altered its vector in the slightest, it simply drifted away from the battle a lifeless ghost. Satisfied the target was no more threat the bomber fell in on Candlelight’s wing.

  “You okay, Candlelight,” the voice was Maize’s, still breathless from his duel.

  “Yeah,” she smiled, dazed from her own near-death experience. “That was fucking amazing!”

  “Didn’t know I had it in me,” he admitted. “Let’s get you back to the Arcadia. I don’t think you’re in fighting condition.”

  ****

  Constellation Carrier CNS Arcadia

  High Orbit

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  As soon as they’d landed, Reed knew something was wrong. She hadn’t been able to see it before, but as her ruined fighter crowded onto the flight elevator next to the bomber, she saw the holes in its canopy. The craters where high velocity rounds had defeated the armoured glass protecting the pilot. Protecting Maize. Jackson.

  There’d been a team of pressure-suited medics waiting on the landing deck, and they were already opening the bomber’s hatch as the elevator descended. She abandoned her craft and went to help only be warded off by one of the rescue team.

  She stormed outside of the vessel until the elevator finally hit the hangar deck, and Jackson emerged. His flight suit matted with blood and patterned with emergency sealant patches. His feet went through the motion of taking steps, but it was clear he was only staying upright through the aid of Walters and a med tech.

  Reed made her way quickly to his side as they eased him onto a stretcher and began stripping away his ruined jacket.

  “Took a bullet for you,” he said hazily. “Killed the bad guy, saved the princess. You owe me…” He coughed out a weak laugh. “…sextuple jinkie.”

  Reed wanted to respond with a joke of her own, but he was in bad shape, and she didn’t want to risk the last thing she said to him being something flippant. Caught in the moment, her brain couldn’t find any words of substance.

  “You’ll be okay,” she said hurriedly as the medics pushed her away.

  They quickly removed the wounded pilot from the deck and then came back and retrieved the body of the bomber’s dorsal gunner who had apparently not been so lucky. If that wasn’t enough to remind her that they were badly outmatched, there was a thundercrack overhead that flattened everyone to the floor. Ears ringing, Reed looked up to where a section of internal wall had been atomised by a particle lance, and she could see all the way to the stars outside. As her hearing came back, it was filled with the sound of a decompression alarm and the steady clinking of falling debris. She staggered to her feet as the deck crew began scrambling for their shelters.

  “Stop,” Walters rumbled, grabbing the crew chief by the shoulder with a blood-spattered pilot’s glove. “Rearm me.”

  “Are you deaf?” the chief snapped. “The whole deck is decompressing, and we don’t have suits.”

  “What you have,” Walters continued without letting the man go, “is a good twenty minutes before that tiny hole makes this atmosphere dangerous. Plenty of time to give me a couple of nukes. Hop to it.”

  The chief looked up at the distant hole, which was large enough to crawl through, then back at Walters and finally nodded. The pilot let him go and the tech scrambled away, hopefully to gather his crew and comply with his instructions.

  The Lieutenant turned to her. “Reed, I need a pilot.”

  She looked over at the wreck of her Snowhawk. “You planning to attack that carrier?”

  “We won’t win this if we don’t.”

  “Pretty sure they’ll kill before we can get close.”

  “Your alternative is they kill us right here.”

  “Shitty options,” Reed said, pulling her helmet back on. Surely Candlelight had at least one daring flight left in her. “Let’s see what they’ve got.”

  ****

  Outpost Origin

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  After escaping the destruction of her arcom and rabbiting into the duct work, Rease had taken the opportunity to apply some med-patches from her survival kit. She’d never needed them before and found she’d had to read the instructions to make sure she applied them properly. The disinfectants in the patches stung briefly, but then the painkillers she’d taken kicked in, and she felt the cool euphoria wash over her.

  She’d taken too many she knew, not enough to be harmful, but enough to make her dazed, to rob her of proper rationality. It was a choice her pain addled mind had made for her, and if it weren’t for the fact she was peripherally aware of the dangers of her circumstance, she’d have been totally okay with it. She realised she’d never had a cabin breach before, so this level of pain had been something new. Pain sucked, she thought, let’s get rid of pain.

  Unfortunately, pain or no pain, the three remaining Exodite arcoms had apparently realised she’d survived, and they’d fallen back to the main corridor between the submarine hangar and the command centre. Without explosives, that corridor was the only open passageway out and they knew it. For them, she suspected, it was no longer about the battle; it was now simply about revenge.

  In her mild delirium, Rease caught herself laughing out loud as she searched through the various parts and supply rooms for something to fight them with. She’d faced an entire company of arcoms single-handed and killed over two thirds of them; after that, the notion that a mere three could present such an insurmountable obstacle was hilarious to her. If only she could find an artillery piece in one of these rooms, she’d give them the Luperca touch.

  Her ears picked up the sounds of the heavy steel footfalls of an arcom, and she quickly drew her sidearm and took cover behind the nearest shelf of machinery. She was surprised that they were sallying forth after her; she’d expected them to be quite afraid of ambush by now. She looked at her pistol and smiled, supressing a giggle. Pistol ambush versus arcom!

  The first thing to enter the room was not actually an arcom but rather a small internal transport, like the ones the carrier used for ferrying people around the hangar deck. Behind it came the arcom, but it wasn’t one of the Exodites. In fact, it looked like Twos, but that was impossible since he would logically be in the safest possible place, and that was certainly not here.

  But when the arcom halted and popped its cabin, the pilot who stepped out was definitely him. An Exodite officer climbed out of the transport and with a nervous glance to the door stalked up to meet him.

  “Why are we stopping?” the Exodite snapped.

  “Hey easy now,” Twos said holding up his hands in a calming gesture. “Our boys back there said the person they’re looking for was on foot, right? So I figure we trade. She won’t shoot me, but if you’re just sitting in a t
ransport vehicle she might cap you before I can work my magic.”

  The Exodite nodded slowly. “A good idea; however, I am unfamiliar with piloting an arcom.”

  “I can probably show you easy enough.” Twos turned around to look back up at his machine. “I mean you must be smart; you’re what, second in command here?”

  “First, actually.”

  Twos put his hands on his hips and looked over his shoulder at the man.

  “That a fact. You run this immense facility, coordinate all these Maulers and gateships and everything. And now that things are starting to come apart you’ve got your exit strategy all planned out, and you’re smart enough to take it before the last minute.”

  “Why are we discussing this?” the officer asked, suspicion entering his voice for the first time.

  “Just recognising the pattern, used to be just the sort of thing I would do.”

  “Used to be?”

  “Yeah.” In one motion, Twos pivoted, pulled his sidearm and shot the Exodite twice in the chest.

  When the officer hit the ground, he adjusted his aim and fired twice more, just to be certain. With a quick glance to the door behind him, he holstered his pistol and scooped up the Exodite’s folder before touching his radio.

  “Rease, are you nearby?” he whispered, it wouldn’t have carried to her but Rease heard it clearly in her own ear piece.

  “Closer than you think,” she said, stepping out with her pistol levelled at him.

  “Holy shit!” Twos almost jumped out of his shoes, but he kept his hand well away from his holster. After a moment to catch his breath he looked at her more closely. “Boss, you look like crap.”