by Chris Ward
FIRE FIGHT
THE FIRE PLANETS SAGA #1
CHRIS WARD
“Fire Fight”
Copyright © Chris Ward 2017
The right of Chris Ward to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Author.
This story is a work of fiction and is a product of the Author’s imagination. All resemblances to actual locations or to persons living or dead are entirely coincidental.
CONTENTS
By Chris Ward
About the Author
Contact
Fire Fight
1. Harlan5
2. Lia
3. Caladan
4. Lia
5. Raylan
6. Lia
7. Leon-Ar
8. Harlan5
9. Lia
10. Hiberian-Orst
11. Lia
12. Lia
13. Leon-Ar
14. Raylan
15. Lia
16. Raylan
17. Caladan
18. Lia
19. Raylan
20. Lia
21. Harlan5
22. Raylan
23. Caladan
24. Lia
25. Raylan
26. Lia
27. Caladan
28. Lia
29. Raylan
30. Lia
Glossary of Characters
Glossary of Named Systems, Planets, and Cities
Glossary of Named Races
Glossary of Named Spacecraft
Glossary of Terminology
Thank You!
BY CHRIS WARD
Novels
Head of Words
The Man Who Built the World
Fire Fight
The Tube Riders series
Underground
Exile
Revenge
In the Shadow of London
The Tales of Crow series
The Eyes in the Dark
The Castle of Nightmares
The Puppeteer King
The Circus of Machinations
The Endinfinium Series
Benjamin Forrest and the School at the End of the World
Benjamin Forrest and the Bay of Paper Dragons
Also Available
The Tube Riders Trilogy Boxed Set
The Tube Riders Four Volume Complete Series
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A proud and noble Cornishman (and to a lesser extent British), Chris Ward ran off to live and work in Japan back in 2004. There he got married, got a decent job, and got a cat. He remains pure to his Cornish/British roots while enjoying the inspiration of living in a foreign country.
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FIRE FIGHT
HARLAN5
The freighter shuddered from end to end. Debris bounced down the listing corridors, knocking the droid, Harlan5, off his feet. Unperturbed, he engaged his magnetic realignment system to return him to upright, then held still until the under-fire spacecraft’s internal gravity control came back online. With a frustrated look back over his shoulder as more photon cannon fire battered the side of the ancient ship, he took hold of a rail to support himself, and brought Caladan up on the intercom.
‘I haven’t yet located the captain,’ he said.
A crackle of static was accompanied by another shudder. Lights flickered. A flashing computer map set into the ceiling showed where the hull had been breached: two levels above him. Ships this old weren’t designed well enough to take such a battering. He had minutes left at best before the freighter began to break up.
‘Level Four cargo hold. Not sure which bay. That’s the last location on her tracker before she switched it off.’
Harlan5 nodded. ‘Going there now.’
‘Hurry up. The freighter’s crew is sabotaging the systems to prevent the Barelaons getting hold of the cargo. They’d rather the ship fell apart.’
‘That’s what my programming told me to fear.’
The link cut off. Harlan5 scowled, the rolls of his metallic brow folding up enough to let a little oil dribble down his chrome face. With a puff of exhaust fumes, he hurried down the corridor toward the elevators.
As expected, they were broken. Harlan5 broke a hole in the floor’s casing and climbed down the shaft, moving quickly, hand over hand, his feet hanging free. His programming explained to him the fear a human would have of falling into the hundred-metre-deep elevator shaft, but he felt none of the tiredness such an activity would give to a human. There were benefits to being a droid, after all.
Breaking through the elevator doors on Level Four, he found himself in a corridor clear of all the debris on the levels above. Dim strip-lighting on power-saver mode illuminated lines of cargo bay doors, some standing open, most shut.
‘Captain?’
The word echoed down the empty corridor. It was met with a sudden blaring alarm as the ship rocked again.
‘Evacuate. Evacuate. We are under attack. Barelaon troops have boarded the ship.’
Harlan5 groaned. Activating the only one of his three defense blasters that still worked, he moved on down the corridor to where his internal transmitter gave him the last known location of the captain.
The stench of alcohol as he opened the cargo bay door told him all he needed to know.
‘Captain….’
She lay between two open crates, clutching in both hands one of the few unbroken bottles in a sea of smashed glass. She had drunk half of it, and during the process of passing out, poured the rest of it over her upper body. Her thick black hair was a matted, stinking clump, her skintight blue tunic slick and wet. The pale skin of her legs, visible between her skirt and black boots, shone with wetness. Harlan5 looked at the angle of the empty bottle and hoped he could attribute that to the liquor as well, otherwise Caladan would jibe her halfway across the known galaxy about a failure to control herself.
‘Captain … we have to leave. The freighter is under attack. Barelaon troops have infiltrated the upper levels. They’re currently looting the cargo, after which they’ll destroy all working ships in the hangars, then rape, maim, or simply kill any living crew members they find. It really isn’t a particularly nice situation. My programming suggests that now is a very good time to leave.’
He was answered with a groan.
‘Captain?’ He kicked out at her leg, aiming for a purple bruise she had picked up a couple of Earth-days ago.
‘Ouch!’
‘Ah, you’re alive. That’s useful.’
Lianetta Jansen opened her eyes and looked up. ‘Sod off. Today’s the day, Har. Today’s the day Little Lia pops her clogs. You can go away now. Tell Caladan he’s not the worst pilot I’ve ever known, but he’s close. Perhaps third.’
Harlan5 gave the best human-like shrug his shoulders could give, then reached down and took hold of Lia’s ankles.
He had heard that men found her intensely attractive. Caladan often claimed that had the bionic repairs to his body after years of military service not rendered him sexually inert, he would have fallen at her feet. Certainly, there had bee
n occasions when her alluringness had got them out of tight situations, but to Harlan5 she was only what she was: a lump of human flesh that had a propensity to get itself into trouble.
Without a word he hauled her up and swung her, grumbling and moaning, over his shoulder.
‘It might be better to unholster your weapon, Captain,’ Harlan5 said, as he carried her with effortless ease back to the elevator shaft. ‘We are likely to meet Barelaons at some point before we reach the hangar and it’s hard for me to engage my own weaponry while carrying you. If you see any, just shoot them, please.’
‘Leave me behind,’ Lia muttered. ‘I don’t care.’
‘I do,’ Harlan5 said. ‘My programming says so. And Caladan can’t fly the ship without you—at least not unless he fixes the autopilot—so by default he cares too.’
‘Sod off,’ she said again, but made no attempt to wriggle out of his grip.
Climbing the elevator shaft while the freighter rocked around him was a little more difficult with Lia slung over his back, but Harlan5 set to his task with systematic concentration, while Lia moaned at regular intervals, as though to prove she was still alive.
‘Just drop me,’ she said, more than once. ‘I don’t care.’
‘My programming says—’
‘Shut up.’
They had left the Matilda in the Level Two hangar bay. As Harlan5 traversed the labyrinthine corridors and stairways of the stricken freighter, the sounds of battle rattled through the air ducts ahead of them. Harlan switched his only functioning defense blaster to standby, aware that more than five shots would be effective suicide. He had already gone too far from his charging port, and would run out of battery if they were engaged in a firefight. Hung over his back, though, Lia stirred.
‘Damn it, let me down.’
‘Certainly.’
He dropped her on the ground at his feet. Lia scowled up at him, then pulled herself up, holding on to Harlan’s arm as she adjusted her top, pulled down her skirt, and pulled up her boots.
She ignored her hair, but did take a moment to wipe a mixture of sweat and dried blood from the side of her jaw.
‘I dropped the bottle.’
Harlan5 nodded. ‘Caladan would suggest that was a good thing.’
‘Shut up. Which way is the ship?’
Harlan5 pulled up his computer memory of the freighter. ‘It’s—’
An explosion rocked the corridor, throwing them to the ground. An airlock to their left burst open, and black-masked soldiers in thick body armor rushed through, heavy proton rifles held across their chests.
Lia had dropped into a crouch and shot down the nearest three before Harlan5 could react. His programming told him he ought to be impressed.
‘Move, Har!’
Lia dived right as proton fire crackled against the wall beside him. Harlan5 scrambled through a door she had blasted open, then they were running across a tall hangar while the flashes and crackles of weapon fire sparked and frazzled around them. Three ruined transport craft burned even as they provided cover for a battalion of attacking troops. Behind them, automatic weapons fired out of cannon emplacements in the walls, while the freighter’s scant defenders tried to hold a position by the hangar airlocks.
‘Where’s the Matilda?’ Lia shouted, ducking and rolling to avoid stray proton fire. ‘Damn it, where did Caladan hide her?’
‘Captain, oxygen!’ Harlan5 cried. ‘If the hangar doors open, you’ll die.’
‘Ah, got it,’ she replied, flashing him a grin as she pulled a thin sheath of plastic from a pocket on her belt and looped it over her head. The smart-mask immediately expanded into a clear bubble around Lia’s face, sealing to a bracelet around her neck. Its tiny vacuum pack offered enough oxygen for one hour, even though Harlan5 had told her time and again to find a black market selling better upgrades.
‘Through there!’
The ground exploded in front of them. Lia dived again, this time behind Harlan5’s back, allowing the droid to shield her from the plume of flame.
‘They’ve seen us,’ Harlan5 said.
‘And there I was thinking they were just a very poor shot,’ Lia answered. ‘Hurry up and find the ship.’
‘This door.’
Harlan5 blasted the airlock open and waved Lia through. Four shots left. His programming suggested that living life so close to the edge ought to leave him exhilarated.
‘There. Caladan! Fire the thrusters!’
In the centre of the hangar, the Matilda, the Pioneer-Class XL Rogue Hunter Assault Craft that Lia, Caladan, and Harlan5 had called home for the last five Earth-years, sat like a crushed spider, her eight extendable legs folded around an oval-shaped central living hub, reducing her to half of her full one-hundred-and-eighty-metre length at full extension. As Lia shouted, lights came on beneath her, and three of the huge metal legs retracted and returned to their fittings, revealing a lowered capsule with an open hatch door waiting for them.
‘I’ll cover you,’ Harlan5 said, turning and setting his aim for the entrance they had just blasted through. Three shots and he still might make it, but if need be he would give himself up for his captain. It was the most honorable way a droid could die; his programming told him so.
The glitter of black armor appeared through the smoke. Harlan5 blasted it, his sensors telling him two Barelaons were now dead. He set his aim for the next, then steadied his body to prepare for the kickback.
‘Oh, no you don’t. Get in there.’
‘But Captain….’
‘Get on the damn ship!’
A hand shoved him, and his programming told him to allow it to gain a reaction. He stumbled into the capsule and turned to help the captain climb in behind him. It shook as proton cannon fire stuck the door as it closed and sealed, and the casing’s magnetic shield deflected it. Two seconds later they were inside the ship, the capsule’s other door opening to let them out.
As Harlan5 looked around in the corridor for the charging cable he had lost during the flight through stasis-ultraspace to reach the freighter, Lia ran through the stuck-open doors on to the bridge.
The captain’s chair swung around and a grumpy, crumbled face surrounded by a thick beard scowled at her.
‘Did you get the chip before you got plastered?’
Lia patted her belt. ‘Of course I did. You know me, business before pleasure. Get out of my chair, asshole.’
As Caladan stood up, he patted the old leather that had come from the hide of some long-extinct creature from one of the outer moons in the Centaur System. ‘Just getting familiar for when it’s finally mine,’ he said.
‘It never will be. Come on, let’s get out of here.’
Caladan grinned. He punched a button on the dash and the ship lurched, its landing pads coming free. On video screens tapped from the freighter’s computer system, Harlan5 watched their own spaceship shudder beneath the fire of a dozen Barelaon proton rifles, but inside, the magnetic shields kept the ship unharmed. Barometers showed the Matilda to be at sixty percent of maximum resistance. Harlan5 glanced at the captain and Caladan as they worked the controls, his programming telling him he should feel nervous.
‘Nearly there … okay, tap the freighter’s computer, get that hatch open.’
On a video screen displaying the hangar’s front, a towering steel door slid open, revealing the blackness of space beyond, only the distant twinkle of stars breaking up a blanket of dark. On an adjacent screen that was a stolen digital feed from one of the hangar’s own security cameras, Harlan5 watched as the Matilda’s lower take-off thruster lifted them up into the air, then the rear thrusters engaged, and the ship roared out of the hangar entrance, reducing within an instant into a spot lost among the field of stars.
‘We’re free,’ Caladan said. ‘Disengage with the freighter’s computer, unless you’d like to watch it go down.’
Lia smiled. ‘And you call me morbid?’
‘I’ll record footage in case you want to see it later. What no
w?’
Lia glanced at Harlan5. ‘Thanks, Har. Good work. I’d give you a pay rise if I paid you.’
‘I appreciate the thought, Captain.’
Lia rolled her eyes. ‘How many times have I told you…?’ She shook her head and turned to Caladan. ‘Get us as far away as possible.’
Caladan nodded. ‘Consider it done.’
LIA
The blackness of space often terrified newcomers to space travel. They assumed you would feel close to the rest of the galaxy, when all it did was remind you how far everything was away. Drifting in deep space with only the occasional distant speck of an asteroid for company, you were reminded continuously that you were less than nothing on the foot of nothing.
Not that Lia cared. In fact, she actually preferred it. The hopelessness, the hollowness, it felt welcome, deserved. She was nothing, the way it should be. The only downside to being nothing in space was that it was harder to procure one’s medication of choice.
