Threshold of Victory

by Stephen J. Orion

  A single security officer popped up from behind a ravaged barricade in the centre of the room, only to face a blaze of automatic fire from both Felton and his point man. Neither of them stopped as they fired, their sole objective being to escape the fatal funnel around the doorway. Felton moved left as the other cut right. He followed the wall and swept his aim from the centre of the room to his direction of movement.

  His sites passed briefly across a wounded soldier struggling to reach for a weapon, but he wasn’t an immediate threat, so Felton left him for the marines coming in behind him. The time he saved kept him traversing the room towards the corner, kept his aim shifting where he found another soldier emerging from behind the ruins of a table with a submachinegun at shoulder ready.

  Felton fired, his gun steady in his exoskeleton-assisted hands as it unleashed a barrage of automatic fire and cut the man down. He continued forward despite someone else opening up from across the room – heavy rounds ripped up the wall and one shattered a ceramic plate on his shoulder. Felton just kept moving towards the corner. Anyone who was tracking him had taken their aim off the doorway, and sure enough there was an answering bark of heavy carbine fire from behind him.

  The machinegun that had sought him out stopped, and Felton reached his corner, sweeping his aim back across the room to find it empty of opponents. His four-man breach team were now arrayed along the front wall facing into the room like a firing squad.

  “Clear!” Felton shouted. “Second team in.”

  The next four men entered, and Felton’s team shifted a metre off the wall to allow them to pass along the perimeter of the room to the door on the far side. After stacking up on the door, they followed a very similar technique to breach the next room. Once they’d engaged, Felton let out a breath and checked his shoulder, it felt bruised and the armour plate was a ruin, but there was no blood, and it didn’t feel like he’d suffered a fracture.

  Sweeping through the Olympian was taxing work. It was a large ship, and they had to assume it was carrying its full marine compliment which was a lot more men than Felton had. While those numbers meant just moving through the ship was nerve wracking, the Lieutenant actually believed there was little real chance of the defenders stopping them from reaching their objectives because he had two insurmountable advantages.

  The first was that he knew exactly what he was doing. The Arcadia and the Olympian were both modern Griffin-class carries with near identical floor plans, and Felton had gone through almost identical procedural training for defending its halls and corridors. The second advantage compounded the first: Felton had been involved in a shipboard insurgency, albeit on the opposite side. Though he cursed the Exodites for their betrayal, it had taught him volumes about the weaknesses in defence procedures. If nothing else, he’d learnt just how difficult it was to force an engagement on a highly mobile enemy.

  “Coming out,” the second team leader shouted just before his team returned from their breach.

  They weren’t alone. They brought with them a dozen individuals in neon orange fatigues and even brighter expressions. Felton caught himself smiling back. Commander Lyle and his technical team were what they’d come for, but they weren’t alone. Behind them came members of the Commander’s security team and, by extension, the Arcadia’s marine detachment.

  But it was the last one who was a real surprise. Where the others had been set free, Felton’s men were clearly still treating this one as a prisoner.

  “Colonel Cormento,” Felton identified him and then left it hanging as he tried to decide what to follow it with.

  “Today has been interesting for us both,” Cormento offered. “While I applaud your efforts to free your colleagues, I’m not sure I require the same service.”

  “You want to go back in your cell?”

  “Quite.”

  “If I tell you we’re about to blow this ship up, will it change your mind?”

  “I wish that were so, but I don’t think that’s how this will play out.”

  “Well too bad, I’ve decided you’re coming with us.” He turned his eyes to the nearest private. “Colonel Cormento is your prisoner now, don’t let him lag behind.”

  Deciding they’d lingered long enough, Felton signalled his team to withdraw from the room. It wasn’t until they were two corridors away that he fell back to speak with Commander Lyle.

  Several days in a cell had somehow failed to reduce the Commander’s warm smile. What they had done was shave off his snowy beard, which made the man look quite different. In a way he’d assumed the white facial hair was what Lyle had instead of a chin, and seeing the old man’s jaw somehow felt indecent.

  “So you’re going to blow up the carrier, then?” the black coat asked as they paused in a dry stores room.

  “That is Lieutenant Rease’s plan,” Felton said.

  “Of course, it is. I take it the young Lieutenant would like my team to provide some technical assistance in reconfiguring the gate projections offsets and rotational adjustments?”

  “You know there’s a gate on board?”

  “Deduction,” Lyle answered. “Rease wouldn’t need me, if she if all she wanted to do was detonate a nuke in the hangar. Do you have a radio I could borrow, Lieutenant?”

  Felton nodded and signalled the platoon’s radio officer to pass over one of the spare handsets. Sparing few words, Lyle and Rease got to the business of exactly how to adjust the gate settings.

  ****

  With a loud and pained sigh, Kerdana lost another future, this time in response to a report from the marine commander that the boarding team had successfully engineered a jail break. What possible impact that could have on the battle, she couldn’t fathom. It was also beyond her how this revelation hadn’t come up when the boarding team first arrived. Tarek couldn’t be in contact with them, so their future had to be fixed.

  Unless there was a second seer.

  Feeling uncertainty pluck at the edges of her consciousness, Kerdana ignored the marine Commander and settled back into the depths of her own mind to quickly hunt for an appropriate future. It took a great force of will to recreate her frozen sphere when the fragments of the last one were still pinging around in her mind. As she latched onto the first possibility she felt an even colder realisation hit her. It was the only possible future in which the Olympian still won.

  Almost shaking, she turned to the Captain who was standing as far away from her as he could and still be technically on the command stage.

  “Captain, cease the pursuit of the Arcadia. Pull us away and prepare to deactivate the main reactor.”

  He looked at her like she’d gone mad. “Admiral?”

  “No questions, Captain. Do it now!”

  ****

  High Orbit

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  Tarek watched the Olympian abruptly abort her attack of the Arcadia and begin a rapid withdrawal. He saw the Blood Iron begin to exploit their exit windows and cover each other as they extracted from the battle. He sensed his hand of cards disappearing into the ether.

  There was one card left. Jack of clubs. The endgame card.

  He quickly skimmed the future it depicted and understood. This was not just a future, it was a message from Rease, sent in the only way that was possible.

  He activated his comm. “Arcadia, this is Silver. Tell the Captain he needs to press the assault.”

  There was a pause during which he had to make several rapid course corrections as he realised Peril was not withdrawing with the rest of her squadron. Instead she was pursuing him deeper into the range of the Arcadia’s point defence weapons. At the back of his mind he realised this was the first and only mistake she had yet made.

  “Silver, this is Arcadia actual,” Pierman’s voice came back finally. “The Olympian is withdrawing, is there no way we could leverage this to escape?”

  “Not while they have a gate,” Tarek said. “The Olympian is pulling back to deal with taskforce V
endetta who are in the process of destroying that advantage. We need to keep the pressure up to give them that chance.”

  There was another pause, and when the Captain responded again it was across the general frequency. “All elements, this is Arcadia actual, the enemy is routing, press the attack. Engage and destroy.”

  Tarek smiled and switched his comm back to the line he’d had to Peril. “Okay, Candice, last chance to withdraw.”

  The only response was a dangerously close burst of cannon fire. He mouthed an apology and then pulled in tight to the carrier, skimming across the hull with Peril in close pursuit. Reaching the edge, he rolled until the Arcadia was above him and flew tightly around her edge. As soon as he rounded the corner he threw his fighter into a flat spin and fired a missile without waiting for it to lock. His work done he simply coasted backwards to watch the effects.

  Without the ability to see the future placing unguided ordinance into the path of someone beyond line of sight would have required impossible luck. Equally, the only way Peril could have hoped to evaded that projectile was if her own seer had warned her, but the length of time between Silver making the decision and Peril coming around the corner was measured in seconds.

  So Peril followed her destiny unaltered. She flew a perfect curve around the Arcadia that would have kept her in the dominant position to continue their engagement. She saw the missile at the last instant and tried to turn away, but she had too much speed and too little time. The projectile struck the fuselage just behind the cockpit and detonated, consuming the front of the aircraft and leaving only a decapitated wing and engine assembly behind.

  Silver didn’t waste any more time on her. Flipping his craft back towards the Olympian, he activated a full burn and hit his comm again. “Big Guy, this is Silver. I need you to open a door for me.”

  ****

  CNS Olympian

  High Orbit

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  Kerdana had no frozen spheres left. Her mind had filled up with broken shards, and she stared half-seeing at the screens as the Arcadia surged after the Olympian. Despite being on her last legs, she was insisting on a fight she couldn’t possibly win and yet, by some terrible destiny, would. Most of the crew didn’t understand what was happening, and some even laughed as they figured the battle would conclude in a matter of minutes.

  But a few, the internal security team and the gate operations unit first among them, were flying about in a wild panic. Because the gate wasn’t part of the original design for the Griffin carrier, they couldn’t remotely shut it down. Apparently, they couldn’t recapture it either. The arcoms prowling between the hangar and the gate room had killed over half of Kerdana’s marines already.

  The gate sat on the main backbone for the power grid, so there was no way to cut its power without deactivating the entire ship. Though extreme, that had been exactly Kerdana’s plan until the Arcadia started limping after them like a wounded and starving wolf. If they didn’t power down, the gate would destroy them, and if they did the Arcadia would destroy them. All glittering shards of ice and no future to be seen.

  Off the bow of the Olympian, Kerdana could see the architect of her misery. A single Snowhawk was making a mockery of the point defence weaponry and taking out the flak guns. As the Admiral watched, a bomber sitting at standoff range sent a cluster of heavy missiles slipping through the gap the Snowhawk had created in their defences. The missiles gouged open the armoured blast doors on the recovery deck, and with barely a pause, the Snowhawk swooped through the wreckage and disappeared inside.

  ****

  The long suppressing burst that Felton sent down the corridor behind him ended with the hollow ‘click’ of an empty magazine. He didn’t need to check to know that he had no spare, so he let the carbine fall slack on its carry strap and pulled his sidearm.

  Laying a steady fusillade of shots into his wake, he pulled back out into the hangar and then turned and made a dead run for the flight elevator.

  “Anyone who isn’t on that lift in twelve seconds is left behind!” he shouted at the team around him, soldiers and prisoners alike bolting for the platform.

  Rounds snapped through the air around him as the Olympian’s marines pursued them out onto the deck. A moment later they were answered by the triple thunder of an arcom’s rifle on burst fire. Rippling explosions ravaged the thoroughfare behind Felton’s platoon, and Kerdana’s marines fled back to safety.

  Already crowded onto the flight elevator were the wounded and the last of the arcoms from Rease’s Pieces. Rease herself had apparently traded her ruined flight suit for an emergency vac suit much like the ones Felton had liberated for the prisoners.

  “The gate is set?” Felton heard Lyle ask as they stepped onto the platform.

  “Slow power-up cycle, we’ve got just that long to get out of here,” Rease answered, mashing some keys on a nearby console and starting them rising rapidly to the recovery deck.

  “What’s to stop them deactivating it?” Felton asked, taking a knee and turning back to cover the hangar, only to find it empty. The enemy marines had apparently decided to let them go.

  “Booby traps,” Rease said. “And we also destroyed most of the controls. All of the controls really. It’s a mess in there.”

  The conversation paused as the elevator passed into the cowling that formed a pressure seal between it and the hangar-deck ceiling. The arcom pilots abandoned their vehicles and everyone went through a rapid cross-check on their suits before the shaft began to depressurise.

  “Your plan is to escape via a shuttle,” Cormento asked by radio. With the elevator now depressurised, simple speech wouldn’t carry. “You assume they will just let us leave?”

  “I doubt it.” Rease snorted. “I imagine they’ll be feeling pretty vengeful given the circumstances.”

  “Then might I offer my services as a pilot?”

  “You didn’t even want to come with us,” Felton pointed out.

  “I wanted to survive,” Cormento said. “That is as true now, as it was back in that cell block.”

  “There’s only one pilot I trust to dodge that much AA in a shuttle,” Rease said. “And he’s not you.”

  The doors above them opened, and the flight elevator rose onto the depressurised recovery deck. In the distance, they could see stars through a rent in the armoured doors and, somewhat closer, the silvered Snowhawk that had come through it. Not a dozen metres from the elevator sat a Constellation Navy shuttle; Tarek stood beside the hatch with his arms folded and an air of insufferable smugness.

  “Time is a factor…” he said as the others stared in disbelief.

  The survivors snapped into motion, taking a mad dash across the vacuum and filing quickly up the ramp. There were several shuttles on the Olympian and Tarek had chosen based on speed rather than size, so it was a tight fit. No one wanted to be left behind though, so the marines happily shed their exoskeletons and everyone pressed in any way they could.

  “How did you know to find us?” Felton asked as the hatch sealed.

  “She sent me a message,” Tarek said and nodded to Rease. “But it’s not the sort I could explain.”

  The Luperca smiled despite her damaged face. “Once more for old time’s sake.”

  “Once more,” Tarek said. “like always.”

  ****

  CNS Arcadia

  High Orbit

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  30 April 2315

  When he’d ordered them to press the attack against the Olympian, Pierman believed he was sacrificing the Arcadia. Working with Tarek was a game to which the rules were forever in motion, and while his reasons for continuing the engagement against the other carrier were sound enough, it was difficult to believe that Arcadia’s survival was an outcome he foresaw.

  In the end, his ship endured far longer than it had any right too. There were so many critical damage items that it had become easier to itemise the ship in terms of what
still functioned. Even if the carrier could still fly, she’d never fight again, of that he was certain. Structural members had been severed or compromised all over the ship, and three of her main drives were down and one had to be kept at twenty percent burn to act as a valve for an overloaded ion chamber. Crew losses were north of forty percent, and the fighter wing had lost more than half its numbers trying to persecute a battle against the Blood Iron.

  Minute to minute, Pierman had been trying to decide when to order the evacuation, even knowing that their fate, if picked up by the enemy, was likely to be bleak. He was still considering the order when the shuttle shot out of the Olympian’s recovery bay, cutting a death defying spiral through the point defence fire.

  And then a gate appeared.

  A massive disk as long as the Olympian and parallel to its beam. The portal was only present for a heartbeat before the destruction it wrought disabled its own power source. At first the impact was deceptively small, just a thin line running at an angle from the bow to the stern of the carrier, describing a slight incline as it went.

  Then the Olympian came apart like a split log. Every block section was compromised, every deck split somewhere. Secondary explosions sent the two huge pieces catapulting insanely apart as reactors, fuel stores, and munitions detonated in a cascade failure.

  Pierman knew he should be feeling some sense of horror, or at least regret, at the number of Constellation lives that had been lost in that instant. Instead, all he felt was a gentle wave of relief that washed over him.

  The CNS Arcadia, the ship that ended the war, had survived.

  Epilogue

  A tall ship and a star to guide by

  Constellation Carrier CNS Arcadia

  High Orbit

  Inimicus, Unknown System

  2 May 2315

  Following the battle, the Arcadia collected the survivors from the Olympian, along with the remaining Blood Iron pilots. It went without saying that all surrendered unconditionally and both groups were being held under guard, pending charges.