by Nick Webb
Even though the main fighter bays of the Swarm carriers had been destroyed, it seemed that several hundred craft had surrounded the remaining two singularities in an attempt to blockade the sabotage runs. A storm of weapons fire flared all around Ballsy and his crew as they angled through the melee.
“Delta squad is gone. Beta squad is on its way. Our orders are to run interference for them until the package is delivered.” Ballsy cranked hard on his control stick and dove down through a formation of enemy bogeys, letting Pew Pew and Fodder savage them with two streams of rapid-fire ordnance. Spacechamp picked off the stragglers. Spatters of rapidly freezing Swarm goo streaked across Ballsy’s viewport.
A few moments later Beta squad arrived, and Ballsy and his crew careened toward a dozen bogeys converging on the new-comers. It seemed the Swarm knew exactly which fighters posed their super-weapon the greatest threat as they targeted the fighter with the osmium brick attached to its undercarriage.
“Pew Pew and Fodder, peel off and take out the wings. Spacechamp, cover me.”
“No problem, boss. And Ballsy, remember, don’t fly like my brother,” said Pew Pew.
“Yeah, well don’t fly like my brother,” replied Fodder.
The two fighters sped away in opposite directions. Two brothers. Each headed toward half a dozen enemy fighters. Don’t fly like my brother. They actually were brothers, something Ballsy had figured out only recently. They always said that when they were in a morbidly cavalier mood—something that came when they faced down hopelessly dangerous situations. Ballsy scanned the wings. There were more bogeys than Ballsy had initially realized, and he suddenly worried that he’d sent them to their deaths. Fodder was always complaining about that—hence his callsign—but a sick certainty hit Ballsy as he became sure he’d finally sent his fellow pilot to his death.
Yet there was no time to worry. He was in the midst of them now, and a sudden jerk told him he’d been hit. But the damage was light, and before another slug could connect he looped around in a tight curve, allowing Spacechamp to blast a few bogeys that had started to tail him. He finished the loop and ended up on her tail, returning the favor as she’d taken on two shadows herself.
“Ballsy, you’re hit,” said Spacechamp.
He craned his neck around and saw the smoke billowing from his right wing. Technically, he didn’t need the wing, so long as he didn’t have to re-enter the atmosphere, but if the internal pressure was compromised, or if the starboard stabilizers were damaged, he’d have a hell of a time in the coming minutes.
Testing his maneuvering thrusters, he satisfied himself that he was good to go, when suddenly the world seemed to explode. Am I hit? Damn. He couldn’t even see.
A whooping cheer made him realize that it wasn’t him that had been hit. It was the singularity. Beta squad had delivered its package. He breathed a cautious sigh of relief.
“Why are those bricks made out of osmium, anyway?” said Spacechamp as the light from the explosion died down. She was often distracted by details like that, and Ballsy hated it when she wondered things out loud in the heat of battle. How anyone could be distracted during such an intense situation was beyond him. He shrugged the question off, but Fodder answered for him.
“Comes from the asteroid mining ops. They use all the other heavy metals in ship hulls, but the osmium is useless. They just dump it all out in the asteroid belt. But now they finally got a use for that crap.”
Ballsy sighed again in relief. Hearing his voice meant that Fodder was alive. He scanned his readout looking for Pew Pew, but didn’t see him. He squeezed off a few rounds at a stray bogey as it passed, and searched the field of battle for their next target.
“But isn’t that shit poisonous? Osmium?” Spacechamp continued. Ballsy was half tempted to reprimand her for distracting them, but before he could say anything a fireball exploded right behind him.
A bogey, caught in Spacechamp’s deadly sights. Damn. The girl was good. Guess she could wonder about trivia and blast cumrats out of the sky at the same time.
“You seen Pew Pew, Spacechamp?” He pulled hard left to avoid running into the smoking skeleton of an IDF light cruiser, then wrapped around hard and blasted two bogeys trailing Fodder to oblivion.
“Nope.”
He craned his neck around again, searching for Pew Pew. “Fodder, where’s your bro?”
“Don’t know, man.”
Fodder’s voice sounded nonchalant, at ease, as if his brother had just gone outside for an evening smoke. Those two had far more confidence than Ballsy. Hell, what had happened to him the last two months? He was distracted, his confident wavered—he was nothing like the balls-to-the-wall young space jock he remembered being after graduating from IDF Flight Academy.
He glanced back at the picture of Fishtail’s boy holding the toy fighter propped up on his dashboard. She had happened to him. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, about her son, about that day he’d told the kid her mom wasn’t coming home. The whole experience had knocked him on his ass. It surprised him—he was the battle-hardened space jock. He lived for the thrill. He didn’t get hung up about women, and he didn’t get hung up about lost friends.
But he was hung up.
The new orders flashed up on his console. Engage the carriers.
Commander Pierce’s voice blared over his comm set in confirmation. “All birds engage the remaining carriers. Fly interference for the New Dublin cruisers. Ignore the fighters as much as possible. Focus all firepower on the carriers. CAG out.”
Damn. They’d have to track down Pew Pew later. “You heard him, boys and girls,” he said, peeling hard to the right and setting his attack vector on the nearest Swarm carrier. It was just a kilometer away, billowing smoke and debris as the Warrior pounded a gaping hole in its side with nearly invisible laser beams. They may have been invisible, but they would incinerate his fighter within a second if he strayed too close.
An anti-matter beam lanced out from the carrier and slammed into the Warrior, followed by half a dozen more beams. One of them shot out and caught a New Dublin cruiser right in the bow, initiating a massive explosion that rocked the ship as it passed.
Fodder’s voice came over the comm. “Let’s go pick off those turrets.”
“Agreed,” replied Ballsy. “Spacechamp, back us up.”
“Aye aye, Ballsy, sir, cap’n lord commander!” Her voice was playfully ironic. For a moment it reminded him of Fishtail. Hell, it seemed everything was reminding him of Fishtail these days. Fighters reminded him of Fishtail. Sleeping and breathing reminded him of Fishtail.
They dove in, streaking and zooming back and forth to avoid the incoming fire from the enemy bogeys swarming them. He tried to remember Commander Pierce’s lessons. The CAG held a weekly training session for the seasoned pilots, and they’d just had one that morning. Keep it random, he’d said. If you’re predictable, you’re dead.
He bounced back and forth, up and down, as randomly as he could, bobbing and weaving through a cloud of fighters, picking off the occasional target as he often as he could, but keeping his heading toward the carrier. At last, they were there.
“Send a torpedo at that tower, Fodder. Spacechamp and I will cover.”
Fodder’s fighter leapt forward. A dozen or more enemy fighters careened toward him, and Ballsy shot around them in a gut-churning high-g loop, picking them off one by one with Spacechamp, who matched his moves.
Fodder managed to thread his way through the melee, though Ballsy didn’t see how—the cloud of bogeys was thick. This was possibly their most hopeless and deadly skirmish yet, even though the sacrificial cruisers took out over three quarters of the enemy birds in their own fighter bays. A lone torpedo blasted off from Fodder’s left wing and slammed into the anti-matter beam tower, even as a green beam lanced out from the turret and slammed into a passing IDF cruiser.
The cruiser and the beam turret simultaneously exploded, and Ballsy flinched as he soared through the expanding cloud of dissipating debris.
“Aw yeah. On to the next, pardner,” said Fodder.
They blasted away toward the next tower, halfway down the length of the carrier, and cringed as they saw the dozens of bogeys swarming around it—apparently they were expected.
“Right,” Ballsy began. “Nothing for it but to—”
Fodder didn’t wait for Ballsy to finish. He accelerated toward the swarm of fighters, guns blazing. “Yeehaw!”
“Careful there, Fodder, don’t take your callsign literally,” said Spacechamp.
“Babe, this is how I got my callsign. Full speed ahead, bitches!”
He plunged right into the thick of the horde, swerving and blasting them to pieces. A handful of slugs caught his tail and wings, but he kept on looping and firing. Ballsy swore and plunged in after him, Spacechamp close behind.
He took a hit. And another. Damn. This was going to be his last flight, he knew.
“I’m hit!” Spacechamp screamed into her headset. “Losing control—” Ballsy watched as a pair of fighters bore down on her, pelting her with several more slugs. But he had his own bogeys to deal with.
They were going to die.
Out of the corner of his eye flashed a bolt of shining metal, weapons fire screaming off its turrets. It was missing its right wing, and Ballsy wasn’t sure how it was still navigating, but sure enough it looped around and picked off Spacechamp’s tails before shooting straight at Ballsy, who dropped low for it to pass, and as it streaked by it nailed two of his own tailing bogeys.
“Hot enough for ya’?” came Pew Pew’s voice. Ballsy sighed in relief: he was still alive, and so was Fodder’s brother. Unlikely as both events seemed.
“I told you, don’t fly like my brother,” said Fodder, who had punched his way through the melee and now launched another torpedo at the second turret. It exploded in a convulsive blast.
The four of them peeled away toward their next target.
“Where the hell is the Warrior?” asked Spacechamp.
Ballsy glanced at his scopes, and sure enough, it was gone. Only a few dozen New Dublin cruisers, and all of Warrior’s fighters could be seen, pounding away at the five remaining Swarm carriers.
Chapter Ten
New Dublin, Eyre Sector
Bridge, ISS Warrior
Captain Granger bolted out of his seat. The sight of the individual on the screen—obviously not human, yet speaking Granger’s own language—spurred him to action. Or at least to tactically stall until he could find out who, or what, they were dealing with.
“Who am I speaking to?”
No answer. The person on the screen stared at Granger. The eyes reminded Granger of a cat—slitted, dilating, and then shrinking in response to some stimulus Granger wasn’t aware of. Slowly, dangerously, it bared its teeth—yellow, spiked teeth that looked like they could cut a man’s neck clean off.
“Who are you? This is Earth territory, and this planet is under our protection. I advise you to—”
The alien interrupted. “Stop your attack on our ally. Then leave. You have—” It paused, as if thinking, or considering its words. “—Sixty seconds.”
Granger stared at his opponent, then motioned to the comm. “Admiral Azbill. Now.”
Ensign Prucha nodded, and frantically called into his receiver. Moments later, Admiral Azbill’s voice once again came through the speakers on Granger’s station. He motioned to the ensign to mute the audio on the alien’s video feed.
“Admiral, are you seeing this?”
“Yeah, Tim,” Azbill replied. “Those Russians with masks on?”
“No. This looks like the real deal. Ship design is completely foreign.” He glanced at the intel station to be sure, and the officers there all shrugged. “We’ve got nothing on these guys. You?”
Azbill cleared his throat. “Negative.”
Granger looked at the countdown timer one of the tactical crew had enabled on the front viewscreen. They had less than twenty seconds to comply. Twenty seconds to see if those fifteen new warships were as dangerous as they looked. Allies with the Swarm? The idea boggled his mind. If it was true, it could derail their entire war strategy.
“Admiral, we’ve got to hold fire on that fleeing carrier. Let’s see what these people want. Who they are. What they’re doing here.”
After a short pause, Azbill swore. “Fine. I’ll send word to the Galway. You’re close to them—get a full sensor work up. Full sweep, all frequencies. Neutron scan. Meta-space monitoring. Everything. We need to know what we’re dealing with.”
Granger nodded, and after a quick glance to Lieutenant Diaz, to make sure the tactical crew was on top of the scans Admiral Azbill had ordered, he motioned back to the comm to un-mute the alien’s audio.
He looked back up at the vaguely reptilian man—at least, he assumed it was a male—on his screen. “We have complied. We no longer attack the Swarm vessel.”
The alien looked to the side, probably to someone off-camera, for confirmation. Then, turning back, he rested his hands on the table in front of him. “Now leave.”
“First, I want to know who you are, and why you’ve come.” Granger knew it would take at least a few minutes for the scanning crews to get anything approaching a useful data set, so he’d have to stall to give them enough time.
“We have come to our ally’s aid. Who we are is not relevant.”
“It is relevant, sir, as this is our space, and you are the guests. It is not polite to withhold your identity from your host.”
It was difficult to read the alien’s facial expressions, but to Granger it looked as if the other man scowled. “Guests. We are not your guests. We are your adversaries. You are enemies of our ally. The Valarisi have been our friends for … time. For all time. You will submit to them if you are wise. Continue to resist them at your peril.”
Valarisi? Was that what the Swarm called themselves? Odd that after seventy-five years and two devastating invasions, they hadn’t even learned the name of their foe.
“And you? What do you call yourselves?”
“We are Dolmasi. Of the Concordat of Seven. The first allies and friends of the Valarisi.”
Granger stroked his stubble. “Concordat of Seven? What is that? Are there more civilizations than the Dolmasi who are friends with the Swarm? What are your intentions toward us?”
The alien smiled—at least, as good a approximation of a smile as the face could manage. Granger couldn’t tell if it was a natural expression, or if, like the alien’s ability to use English, the rudimentary facial expressions were a learned skill.
“Our intentions are to stand by our allies. Our allies wish to bring you into submission, so that is what we will do. We are the second house of the Concordat of Seven. We and our brothers will bury you, unless you lay down your arms, abandon your ships, and welcome the most high Valarisi—the first house of the Concordat of Seven—onto your worlds with open arms.”
Granger’s fist clenched behind his back. He had half a mind to order a mag rail bombardment right then and there on the lead vessel and teach these people a lesson: you did not come barging in to Earth’s territory on the Swarm’s behest and expect a warm welcome.
But the exchange bought them some valuable information. Crucial information.
The Swarm could be negotiated with. Communication was possible.
He tossed a questioning glance toward the sensor station at tactical, and the ensign in charge there, Ensign Diamond, shook his head. Damn—they still needed time for their scans. They needed to know everything possible about this new enemy. In case they had to fight them.
“And might I ask your name, sir?”
The alien inclined his head. “Vishgane Kharsa. I am Vishgane of this vessel and all the vessels you see here, and fifty others.”
“Vishgane.” Granger repeated the word. It must have meant Admiral in whatever language the Dolmasi spoke. “I am Captain Timothy Granger of the ISS Warrior. The Swarm—the Valarisi, as you call them—have invaded our space and kille
d our people. We will expel them. Do not make me expel you as well.”
The alien made an odd noise, almost like a grumble or a cough, and it took a moment before Granger realized he was laughing. Interesting—he’d taken the requisite course at IDF Academy for first contact which included topics like xenobiology and xenosociology, and it never occurred to him that an alien would ever develop the social custom of laughing like humanity had. Or was this another learned skill again, and if so, how much had they learned?
“You are in no position to expel us. You command one ship that has the potential to harm us and another twenty that don’t.”
He shot a quick glance at the sensor station, and made a questioning face to the crew there. With a grimace, the ensign nodded. Apparently they’d had time to parse some of the sensor data and confirmed that the new enemy vessels did indeed pose a threat. A significant one, by the look on Ensign Diamond’s face.
Granger glanced at his tactical screen, at the fifteen ships that floated ominously just kilometers away, between them and the lone Swarm carrier which hobbled away at a fraction of its optimal acceleration. He wondered whether the tracking beacon had been damaged in the assault, and if the vessel would be able to q-jump away.
“Perhaps not, Vishgane Kharsa. But would you like to test that theory? I daresay many of you will not survive your encounter with the ISS Warrior.” He cocked his head toward tactical and murmured, “Ready anti-matter torpedo.” They’d never been fielded before—IDF weapons research division had only given them a handful to test—but he suspected a regular nuke wouldn’t be enough to scare them off.
Another coughing grumble, and Vishgane Kharsa spread his arms wide in what Granger guessed was a sign of confrontation. “We care not for survival with the Valarisi as our ally. We sacrifice and die at their command, as is our glorious right.”
“So you are slaves then?”
A hiss. That sound and its meaning were obvious. “Slaves? We are no slaves. It is a prestige and an honor to serve the Valarisi. We are the most honored and loyal of their allies.”
