Webb Compendium

by Nick

  “—it… jeez, Shotgun, it worked.” Kit turned to face him. “Did Pritchard put you up to this? That was brilliant.”

  “He gave me the idea, sure,” said Jake, half wondering if the Admiral indeed had this in mind. The man was watching from a distance, so if he disapproved, they’d soon know.

  The comm flared up. “All squads, this is Viper leader. Everyone on me—let’s take them out one by one … you know, while we wait for our hackers to finish their job.” It was the standard strategy for taking on a small strike force of light cruisers with a few squadrons of fighters. Concentrate on one at a time, only moving on to the next when the previous ship’s weapons were destroyed. But it only worked if the cruisers couldn’t cover each other.

  Jake pushed the controls to veer towards the indicated light cruiser, dodging an enemy fighter that had swerved to flank them. The bogey careened off-course and impacted on the surface of one of the light cruisers, caught in the cross-fire of another Resistance fighter.

  “Shotgun, that’s two you owe me today,” said Crash over the comm.

  “Thanks, buddy. I’ll pay you in beer later. Let’s get over there and take out that cruiser.”

  Like a furious swarm, the remaining twenty or so fighters descended on the singled out light cruiser, and, covering each other from the pursuing Imperial bogeys, began blasting away at it with ion pulses and torpedoes. Within minutes, debris and men streamed from the pockmarked hull. Over a football field in length, a Comet-class light cruiser is by no means small, and when one explodes, it was prudent not to be anywhere nearby—the blast front from an anti-matter engine criticality event was nothing to sniff at.

  “Kit, how’re the engines on that thing? They anywhere near critical?”

  The gunner nodded. “Getting there—maybe ninety percent. We’d best be moving on to the next one.” Jake noticed that all the cruiser’s guns had fallen silent, and the crackle of the comm confirmed his opinion.

  “This is Viper leader. Two down, five to go, boys and girls, follow me to the next—HOLY SHIT!”

  A bright flash flared against the blackness of space and Jake automatically clenched his eyes shut. When the light subsided and he opened his eyes, the exposed image of the blood vessels in his eyelids was the only thing he could see for a moment.

  “Rooster, tell me that wasn’t the orbital siege engine firing at us.”

  Kit examined his console and shook his head. “We lost Viper nine. Alex and Kate.” He studied the readout another moment before looking up. “Jake, that wasn’t the siege engine, or a cruiser. It was a mine. One of those anti-matter mines the Martians laid down. They’re mostly in a higher orbit, and Alex hit one—or got within a few meters of it—I think they’ve got proximity detectors.”

  But then, as if to defy Kit’s explanation, a massive, bright blue beam leaped out across space from the siege engine and slammed into another one of their fighters, blasting it into a cloud of vapor. Jake’s stomach clenched.

  “Who was that?” he asked, but didn’t really want to hear the answer. Another friend lost.

  “Red Eleven. Now that we’re away from the cruisers we’re a wide open target for that thing.”

  Asymmetrical warfare.

  And suddenly, Jake had another idea.

  Early on in the Empire’s expansion, the Imperial fleets targeted the Voors. A sparsely populated planet, originally colonized by Indonesian and Indian settlers, they utterly refused Imperial control, and in defiance they abandoned their towns and fled to the belt of asteroids encircling the gas giant planet their lush moon orbited.

  Undeterred, the Imperials sent the cruisers in to chase the Voors out.

  And paid dearly for it.

  Nearly half of the Corsican heavy cruisers were lost to stray asteroids colliding with the ships, and a quarter of the light cruisers and frigates suffered a similar fate. The Empire didn’t discover until much later, after the Voors were subjugated, that the defenders had attached rudimentary thrusters onto several hundred of the asteroids and programmed them to crash into any ship larger than their own.

  What if….

  “Rooster, can our sensors pick up any more of those mines?”

  Kit shook his head. “They’re small, Shotgun. They’re black, and I think they’re even covered in some meta-material that reflects most wavelengths.”

  Jake grunted. “Give me something to work with here, buddy.” Pushing against the controls, the fighter dove down in between two flanking Imperial bogeys, narrowly avoiding the fire from one of them.

  “They’re designed to be hard to detect, Jake. What good is a mine if you can just see it out the window?”

  Exhaling in exasperation, he maneuvered the fighter towards the next light cruiser that Viper leader had indicated, and joined with the rest of the Resistance squadrons in pummeling it into submission, all while tangling with the remaining Imperial fighters.

  “Come on, Rooster, you’re telling me that little boxes full of anti-matter are completely undetectable?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Their gamma ray signature blends right in with the background cosmic gamma rays. There’s just enough shielding on those things to muffle out the signal and make it look like—”

  He trailed off.

  Jake turned to look at his co-pilot. “Yeah?”

  “Hang on, a second. Thinking….”

  “Think faster,” said Jake, eyeing the light cruiser as it began to belch debris and puffs of air and dust. An occasional flailing body flew out one of gaping holes in the side of the ship.

  It looked like the other light cruisers had caught on to their bluff. The remaining ships started to pull together, which would afford each of them more cover against the swarm of Resistance fighters. And before their squadron had worked out its next strategy, another deadly blue, shimmering beam shot out from the siege engine and slammed into another fighter.

  The situation was turning dire. Kit didn’t even call out the identity of the poor souls as his hands darted over his console and his brow furrowed, lost in concentration.

  “Rooster, I need you back with me,” said Jake.

  “New heading. Accelerate at maximum power towards these coordinates.”

  Jake glanced at the numbers scrolling down his screen. “What’s so special about these?”

  “That heading should be directly perpendicular to the average orbital vector of those mines. I think if we can scan for their gamma signatures while moving at a normal vector, we can pick them out from the noise.” Kit shrugged his shoulders and turned to Jake. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Hey, it’s all I got,” said Kit.

  Jake snorted, but adjusted their heading. Soon they were accelerating directly away from Mars, leaving the raging battle far behind.

  “Anything?” said Jake.

  Silence. Jake glanced over at Kit, whose furrowed brow finally gave way to a smile. “I got one.”

  Jake reached over and slapped his friend on the shoulder before flipping the ship around to intercept the signal Kit had transferred to his console.

  “And just what are you planning on doing with it?” asked the gunner.

  Jake glanced out the viewport, scanning the area around them for the mine that the sensors claimed should be there. And, almost imperceptibly, something blocked out the light from a particularly bright star to his right.

  There it was. Black as night, and nearly impossible to see, just fifty meters away.

  “Shotgun? Answer me.”

  Jake smiled.

  “Asymmetrical warfare.”

  Kit’s nostrils flared. “What the hell do you mean, asymmetrical warfare?”

  “You know, just like Pritchard said. We’ve got to take out that siege engine somehow, otherwise our strike forces will never be able to land. Our people down there will be crushed—the Empire has a garrison down there almost as numerous as the population.”

  Jake pushed against he controls and eased the ship a litt
le closer to the innocuous little black sphere, now hovering just twenty meters away. Set against the red backdrop of Mars it was a whole lot easier to see.

  “Shotgun if you get any closer to that thing it’ll blow. STOP!” Kit roared.

  Jake eased up on the controls, and settled the ship just ten meters away from the mine. Tapping ever so lightly against his gravitic controls and holding his breath—as if even the slightest stray move would trigger the thing—he ramped up a localized gravitic field immediately ahead of them, and another right behind, between them and the mine.

  “Are you going to even tell me what you’re doing?”

  Jake nodded. “We’re going to give the package a little push.”

  “How?”

  “With the gravitics. Look, if I simulate a standard Earth mass right between us and the mine, what’ll happen?” Jake asked, quizzing his co-pilot.

  “Easy. Both bodies will accelerate towards the virtual mass at one gee, and we’re dead in a tenth of a second. What are you, batshit crazy?”

  Jake nodded again. “Maybe. But what if I project two standard Earth masses directly ahead of us at the same time? Both us and the mine will then accelerate forward at about one gee, right?”

  “About one gee? About? You’re going to gamble our lives on about?”

  Jake rolled his eyes. “Keep your panties on, Rooster. Watch.”

  And, hoping against hope that his stupid idea was slightly less stupid than it sounded when he explained it loud, he initiated the gravitic fields.

  “You keep a close eye on our proximity, Rooster. Tell me if it’s getting any—”

  “IT’S GETTING CLOSER, YOU ASSHOLE!”

  As fast as he could, Jake adjusted the field strengths, ramping the trailing field down and the forward field up. “What about now?”

  Kit bit his lip, and nodded. “Fine. It’s holding steady eighteen meters off our stern.” He turned to glare at Jake. “What next, genius?”

  “Now, we fly towards the siege engine and tear that bitch up.”

  To Jake’s ears, his co-pilot could barely contain his anger. “That’s your plan?” said Kit.

  “You got a better one?” he retorted.

  Silence.

  “That’s what I thou—” Jake began.

  “They’ll never let us get close. We’re dead before we get to within a klick of that thing,” said Kit, peering out the viewport at the slowly rotating behemoth of a battlestation.

  “Yeah, well,” Jake eased his hands into the controls. “That’s where my super-fancy flying comes in,” he said with a lopsided smile. He locked his eyes on the siege engine. “You just let me know the second you detect a power buildup from that thing.”

  “Which? The mine or the station?”

  “Both,” Jake said with a grin—the only expression he could manage that would suppress the rising tension and dread in his chest.

  This was incredibly stupid, and he knew it.

  But barring Admiral Pritchard pulling through with some unforeseen brilliant plan, it was all they had.

  “Massive power surge ahead!” Kit yelled.

  And in an instant, Jake swerved to starboard, only narrowly avoiding the blinding blue beam leaping out from the siege engine, which loomed ever larger in the viewport.

  “We still got it? The mine?” Jake said, without taking his eyes off the station.

  Kit peered back. “Yeah, I think I see it.”

  “Almost there….” Jake muttered. He hadn’t appreciated the true scale of the orbital siege engine until that moment. Now just two klicks away, it nearly blocked out the view of the red planet far below, still swirling with silent dust storms.

  “Jake! Again!”

  His reflexes on a hair trigger, he yanked the controls down and to starboard, swearing as he accidentally looked straight at the shimmering blue beam, which temporarily blinded him.

  The audio system all around them announced the booms of dozens of railguns blazing on the surface of the siege engine, and a swarm of high-pitched whines indicated the dozens of near misses of the high-speed slugs. Jake swerved the fighter to and fro, randomly, in what he hoped was not a vain attempt to avoid their fate. Either a collision with a railgun slug, or a direct hit by the Hyper-Ion-Beam cannon, or drifting too close to that mine—at the moment it seemed absurd that they’d pull through without one of them happening.

  But they made it. One klick to the station, and the mine’s trajectory and inertia should handle the rest. “That should do it. Disengaging gravitics,” said Jake.

  Sweat dripped down his face as he listened with dread to the whizzing slugs flying past. He dropped the ship down, and could just barely make out the black sphere careen past them, straight towards the siege engine.

  The comm flared to life. “Lieutenant Mercer, Admiral Pritchard. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Jake grinned as he answered. “Just clearing the way for you, sir. Feel free to thank me later.” And as the words left his mouth he had to shield his eyes from the blinding explosion enveloping the station. Even through his eyelids and hands, the light glowed red. The internal speakers seemed to get confused with the magnitude of the blast, as they only puffed out a little whimper of a sound, high pitched and tinny.

  They’d done it. He’d done it. Somehow, he’d read the Admiral’s mind, channeled the man’s brilliance, and singlehandedly destroyed one of the most awesomely destructive tools of the empire. It almost seemed unreal as he watched the flare from the blast fade away, leaving a sputtering wreck in its wake.

  Glancing back at the disintegrating station, he felt a little letdown as he realized the mine didn’t even come close to taking out the whole thing. Less than a quarter of it was gone. But that didn’t matter. It was out of commission for a long, long time.

  “Lieutenant,” continued Admiral Pritchard, slowly, and in a tone that Jake had not heard the man use before. A cold, icy tone. “In the future, do not presume to think for me. We might very well have used that siege engine.”

  Jake’s heart stopped in his throat. “Sir?”

  “No, I’m not saying we expected it to be here. I had no idea the Empire had brought it to Mars. But there were ways we could have commandeered it. It would have been a valuable asset.” He muttered something else inaudible, out of range of his comm. “Oh, bother. Very well,” his voice assumed his more gregarious tone. “Get back to that battle and help mop up. We’ll be joining you shortly—“

  An explosion interrupted the Admiral’s instructions. An explosion that would have sounded more appropriate coming from the siege engine when it blew, and not the tinny whimper the speakers had suggested. This explosion was real, and it was close.

  And the flames and acrid smoke accompanying it were even worse.

  An Imperial bogey soared overhead and shot away, its job done. Jake glanced out the viewport and saw their left wing completely gone, and several holes punched in the main cabin, which spewed their precious air supply out into space.

  He checked his helmet, and satisfied he was protected against the vacuum he scrambled to get the ship under control and out of the spiral. A spiral whose path ended on the stark surface below.

  The red planet loomed ahead, filling the viewscreen. He could just barely make out the thin outline of the rarified atmosphere clinging to the surface of Mars as they began their plunge to the surface.

  Kit turned to him, and, anger gone from his voice, he assumed a deadpan, fatalistic tone. “Any more bright ideas, Shotgun?”

  The edges of the fighter began to glow a faint red as they plunged through the thin atmosphere.

  Jake held up his hands. “Sorry, I’m fresh out.”

  And perhaps worst of all, and not even sure why he was even thinking about it as they careened towards the surface, he realized he’d never discovered Pritchard’s secret. Again.

  Dammit.

  To the End of the World

  Part III of Prelude to Resistance

  Nick Webb<
br />
  Jake Mercer smiled at the girl lying on her side next to him. He reached out and ran his hand up her thigh, over the soft swell of her hip, and grazed his fingertips across the small tattoo of a bird on her lower back. She shivered and his smile widened as he saw her skin erupt into goose-flesh.

  “That tickles,” Ensign Kelley murmured in a sleepy voice.

  “Sorry,” said Jake, though he wasn’t, not really. The shiver made it look as though the little bird tattoo was about to take flight.

  “‘salright.”

  He touched the tattoo again, tracing the dark outline with his index finger. He expected her to shiver again but she didn’t. What was it about this ink? Jake had seen lots of tattoos on lots of girls—lots of girls—but he had never been so fascinated by one before. Perhaps it was because he was a pilot and birds are the reason that man took to the skies all those centuries before and he felt a kind of kinship? He didn’t know and, feeling the weight of his arousal resting on his thigh, he didn’t care at the moment.

  “Not the time for depth,” he muttered and, in one smooth motion, lifted her leg, slipped it over his shoulder, and rolled her on to her back.

  “Jake, I’m tired,” said Kelley, a slight petulant tone in her voice. “What are you—oh, oh my….”

  He breathed in her scent and felt lightheaded. He could do this all day and Kelley probably wouldn’t mind. They could—

  “Shotgun!” a voice cried out. “Jake!”

  Lt. Jake Mercer shook his head and snapped himself out of his momentary reverie. What the hell had he been doing? Moments before the wing of their fighter had been blown off and they were now entering Mars’ atmosphere—what there was of it, anyway—and starting to spin out of control. It was definitely not the time for carnal thoughts.

  “Sorry, Rooster,” said Jake. “I’m here.”

  “You just spaced, man,” said Kit, his fingers flying over his control board.

  “I know, sorry,” said Jake, annoyed at himself. He did a quick glance through the windshield and had to fight down his gorge. The left wing was gone and the edges of the craft were glowing a brighter red as they pierced into Mars’ ionosphere. Worse than that, though, was the spin: it was increasing in velocity. Jake fought the controls as he tried to figure out some way to stop or, at the very least, slow down their death spiral.