Persephone

by Blaze Ward

  “Veitengruber,” he said, opening the channel to the flagship.

  The lifesuit he was wearing today included heavy gloves, so simple tasks were a little harder. But it also took him back to flying a Starfighter, when he had that same weight on his movements. As opposed to facing space with nothing around him.

  “Kosnett,” the Admiral replied. “Stand by to make your first Jump. We will enter JumpSpace in thirty seconds.”

  “Understood, sir,” Granville said, nodding unconsciously as he did.

  They were doing it the Imperial way, today. He laughed to himself before opening the intercom so he could talk to everyone.

  In Aquitaine, the Command Centurion turned over fighting to the Tactical Officer, so they could watch the rest of the ship. Normally, Heather or Siobhan would have handled that task, but Ground Control and Lady Blackbeard were each aboard their own ships today. Evan Brinich would have normally taken over for them, and was pretty good at it from what Granville understood from the others, but Phil needed him in command of the massive sensor arrays on the scout.

  Today, those installations were going to be most of CS-405’s firepower, so Phil would revert to being his own Tactical Officer, like a good Imperial Captain, just as Granville had aboard Persephone.

  Needs must, when the devil drives.

  “All hands, stand by for JumpSpace,” Granville said in as calm and commanding a voice as he could manage, at a time when his voice still wanted to crack and his hands shake.

  He had pasted a small, printed image of Deni on his console. He reached out and touched it once, missing his love.

  Granville watched the flagship vanish, leaving him with the other vessels, but only for a few seconds. CS-405 was using the equivalent of human-calculated JumpDrives, so they were slower and a little less accurate than Persephone’s JumpSails. And the others were staying up here for a day or so, until they got the signal from the Admiral that everything was fine for them to join him down in the sunshine.

  Hopefully, Granville would still be alive tomorrow to greet them. That was not a given, considering today’s task. But Deni would survive, even if he didn’t. The Admiral had offered to officiate a wedding, but neither man had been able to take that step yet. Perhaps they would both be able to face it after this battle.

  NovLao as a culture was less concerned about such things as two men in love, but Deni had been raised in a very traditional, church-inflected family. He was almost as lost at this point as a young man raised to the martial glories of Imperial service, in a land where homosexuals were at best ridiculed, and at worst murdered by their own families.

  “Transitioning to JumpSpace,” Granville said.

  His voice might have cracked, but he could always blame the excitement of being back in service and about to enter battle, if asked.

  As lies went, it was a reasonably believable one.

  Granville focused on the projected course that would rendezvous with CS-405 shortly, before he began that thing that his history lessons kept wanting to call the Charge of the Light Brigade.

  Onward, forward, into the valley of death.

  He only rode with five companions today, so perhaps Childe Roland, sounding his horn instead. Hopefully, his would be a happier legend in the retelling.

  RealSpace.

  On a Jump this short, avoiding the orbital plane in order to come in low, the flight had taken little time. Only the gravity of the star and the density of the solar wind were significant impacts on navigation.

  Twenty light-minutes from Mansi-B. Passive sensors only. Dead stop relative to all motion. Wait.

  Ninety seconds later, a ping. Laser comm had established a lock and received a burst transmission.

  CS-405 had found him.

  “Persephone, this is Kosnett,” the burst message read. “We have you locked. CS-405 is at battle stations and ready. You have the flag. Godspeed.”

  Granville took a moment to wipe his eyes and sniff back tears at the sudden emotions that threatened to overwhelm him. He toggled the transponders on, because any ship coming out of Jump that close and that fast was automatically an enemy vessel, and he wanted those bastards to know who had come for them.

  IFV Persephone. Seventeenth Imperial Police Protectorate.

  Your doom.

  Not Roland after all, as he thought about it.

  George.

  “All hands, this is Granville Veitengruber,” he said into the intercom and the logs. And history. “I have the flag. Accelerating to attack speed. Prepare for battle.”

  One button on his console controlled the shields, pitiful as they were on a police cutter. They were a matter of exclamation point, rather than defense, because station batteries would go through them like wet tissue paper.

  Still, Granville was a warrior, and he needed his shield when facing a dragon.

  The second button unlocked the three guns, a single Type-3 on the bow and defensive Type-1’s on the flanks.

  When facing a dragon, he needed a sword.

  Finally, the engines, accelerating on a smooth curve as he brought them more and more on-line, trusting that Bardeen was monitoring them and would get him where he needed to be.

  The knight is nothing without his steed, charging proudly into battle. Even against a fire-breathing dragon.

  Granville watched the gauges as the charge built, thunder rumbling heavily across the field in his mind as the entire weight of the Imperial Fleet gathered speed behind him. They would be coming out of this Jump at the highest speed that Heather had been able to calculate would let him insert into the atmosphere cleanly, instead of bouncing somewhere off the thickening air and surfacing too close to another station with a long rifle.

  Finally, the targeting console on his left. Hard-wired onto a second stand welded in place by Galin Tuason, the last of Persephone’s three plankholders, to give them sixteen missiles in tubes around the outside of his hull.

  Because when facing the dragon, St. George needed his lance.

  Granville took a deep breath.

  “Now,” he said simply, trusting that everyone listening would understand. He wasn’t sure his voice could say anything more.

  Persephone leapt into JumpSpace.

  The Dragon (February 17, 403)

  On his screens, Granville knew exactly where the primary command station for the Mansi system was located. All orders and traffic had originated from it, and very little had gone out from other stations, except in response.

  And he knew exactly where the normal edge of the gravity well for Mansi-B was located. All ships with JumpSails had nifty sensors built-in to conservatively locate that place where you should stop. The high-tide mark, as it were.

  Going any deeper risked overloading the fragile matrix that made JumpSails work in the first place. Then you had to zero everything and realign all the bits and pieces until the ship could fly safely again.

  Siobhan had explained Alber’ d’Maine to him. The Berserker. Others had gone a step further and let him read a concise report about Tomas Kigali’s epic flight from Ladaux to Ballard, racing against an Imperial fleet set to destroy Alexandria Station and the library contained therein.

  CR-264 had done this exact same thing then, riding the system past the point where the ship wanted to drop into RealSpace, until he was forced out as the energy gradients climbed higher than the matrix could hold. In Kigali’s instance, he had been trying to set a new record, point to point, and had come very close to the mathematical minimum-time-sail possible between the two worlds.

  In the aftermath, CR-264 had simply come out of Jump as close as possible, and then executed a double-slingshot around the planet before the ship was able to slow down enough to drop into orbit.

  Persephone was going to top that today. Granville and his crew were going to come out as deep as possible into the gravity well, and open fire as soon as they could achieve lock, before diving headlong into the atmosphere and try to slow down enough to land safely without flying into r
ange of one of the other stations.

  All the while expecting everybody out there to launch missiles at him. Because the others were likely to be a touch angry, after his surprise.

  The survivors, anyway.

  Persephone’s engines and sails were old. Tuned by hand in the middle of a cattle ranch, rather than in a proper orbital dry-dock. Good enough for the task at hand, but nowhere near enough to be smooth.

  The ship emerged into RealSpace with a lurch so hard that Granville thought they had slammed into orbital traffic, such as a cubesat or something small. No loss of atmosphere, so hopefully all was good. Everyone was in their suits, because of that risk, but he had to be prepared.

  Bad things were going to happen. He just wanted them to happen to the other guys instead.

  Or at least first.

  The sensors came back with a hard lock almost immediately, as close as they were when they emerged. The station was almost exactly below him, a hollow hexagon design, aligned with the planetary surface.

  It was like looking into an open, gray eye to see the blue and white clouds beneath.

  Or an arrow falling out of the sky at a bullseye.

  “Engage,” Granville ordered, just in case anybody wasn’t going to fire as soon as they could hit something. The Type-1 beams were a little beyond the edge of effective range, but that was going to change shortly.

  Already, the hull whispered under the pressure of air, even as tenuous as it was this high in the sky.

  Granville confirmed all sixteen missiles showed green lights and pounded his fist into the big, green button in the middle of the screen, marked Havoc. He didn’t get the joke, but others had apparently gotten hooked on some ancient writer.

  And these certainly qualified as Dogs of War, to quote Galin and Markus.

  Leomiti’s bow gun fired, lashing out at the station and slamming into the starboard edge of the ring, as seen from directly overhead. Granville didn’t have time to look at the sensors and see if the shot had been stopped by a panel, or lightly deflected, or even just slammed into bare metal. The logs would show it tomorrow, if anybody cared.

  On the screen in front of him, the world turned white.

  For the briefest second, Granville thought something had burned out somewhere, a stress overload or a circuit failure killing all his cameras, but then Persephone blasted through the exhaust of sixteen missiles all launching within a second of each other.

  It was like a modern art exhibit, staring down a corridor made of giant icicles, until you realized that each of those was a harpoon racing madly to kill a whale.

  Airspeed indications had slowed, almost exactly to the degree Heather had predicted. Persephone was still falling, a meteor racing towards the ground, but he could nose in now, once they got low enough, and then hopefully pull a wide, orbiting spiral down until the engines could hold them.

  Anything, rather than have to broach to one side and take fire from somebody else.

  Spier’s gun fired next. Granville had no idea what her target was, or even if she hit the station. He was focused on flying right now, trying to keep the ship centered so both flank guns could do something. If the defenders were on the ball, they might be able to fire a missile back right now, when he had no maneuverability and a closure rate so high that it would be there before anybody could react.

  The fog of falling arrows in front of him didn’t help his peace of mind, so he toggled to a targeting radar instead. That just showed the ass end of his missiles and the ring of the station coming towards him at a speed that kept screaming Impact Imminent in his subconscious.

  A light flashed out, so close that he thought Persephone had flown into a sunbeam accidentally from some lunar shadow. A moment later, his brain processed that as an inbound beam that had missed. He had no idea what they were shooting at, either, and didn’t care right now.

  Time to make this Kigali fellow look junior varsity. After all, the man had been doing his antics in a cutter like this one. But Granville Veitengruber had cut his teeth in an A-6j melee fighter. His were the crazy people.

  “All hands, hang on to something stable,” he yelled.

  In a situation like this, everybody should already be seated and belted in. But the grav-plates were likely going to be the first thing to fail, if the guns needed power.

  And he was about to get outrageously stupid.

  Javelins fall with a wobble inherit in any muscle-powered missile. Arrows do the same.

  Bullets spiral, having come out of a rifled barrel under high pressure that translated into speed and friction.

  Mansi-B was laid out below him like a map, with a ring marking buried treasure almost exactly in the center. Granville pushed the ship into a side loop.

  Pitch is the description of the bow going up and down, relative to the attitude of flight. Yaw is the side-to-side motion. Roll turns in place like an alligator with a still-kicking antelope in its teeth. And then you added more motion to carve out a giant circle.

  Up, over, and across in a clockwise spiral, as seen from someone trailing him with a camera as he twisted onto his starboard wing.

  Another flash of light. Again, more an elusive memory than an experience, but it might have intersected with one of the missiles inbound on that station. No time to consider. No place to remain.

  Persephone rolled again under his touch, this time to port with a flare of side-slip thrown in as he skittered the nose out and up a shade in the middle of the grander motion.

  Most ships would maintain the cycle when rolling like this. That was predictable, since jerking the hull back and forth stressed internal frames and aged your spacecraft at a hideous pace.

  Someone down there had been expecting another starboard roll. A shot went by like lightning striking a nearby tree. All of the heavens were aglow, and Granville thought he could see an ionization trail reaching back to the station.

  Big guns. And they missed.

  Ten seconds to flyby. Three seconds to impact. Granville pushed the bow down and held pitch while spiraling madly in place like an ice skater pulling their arms in for speed. The crew would begin losing the contents of their stomachs if he held this too long, so he let go of the roll and flattened himself back into a clean dive.

  The bow of Persephone wasn’t centered on the station any more. He would fly by them at the mark of eight o’clock.

  All the hordes of hell appeared to open portals and vomit forth at the same time. White skies underneath him turned red and orange as missiles got home. He couldn’t tell what the effect had been without more time than he had, because right now, the risk was slamming into the orbital debris he had created.

  Hopefully, the station was mortally wounded and about to fall out of the sky in great, messy pieces that he would miss, because there was no way in hell to maneuver now.

  Secondary explosions? Or late missiles? No way to tell.

  Something big went boom again with a flash more than a second after the big firestorm. Granville lined up the station overhead and dove away from it as well as he could, careful not to turn turtle and start to tumble.

  It was one thing to do this in snubfighter. It was something else again in a police cutter.

  All three guns fired again, almost simultaneously. He could only tell because they overloaded the circuits and the grav-plates cut out until Isiah could reset things. The bridge lights went dark at the same time, but the screens were still on, so the ship hadn’t died.

  And then something crunched and all the consoles went black.

  The Cavalry (February 17, 403)

  And after all that, Phil ended up in Tactical Command again. After all his arguments with himself about being graceful in letting Heather handle the task without any advice from him, when she was so good at. How he needed to be in charge and act like a Command Centurion.

  Heather wasn’t here. Siobhan was absent, as well. Normally, Evan would have graduated to Tactical now. He was coming along, but right now, Phil needed the man’s geni
us on the sensors today, jamming the living shit out of that station and her gunners. Anything less and they might not pull this off.

  So Command Centurion Philip Kosnett, being his own Tactical Officer, just like Heather, Siobhan, and Granville Veitengruber were doing as well, this squadron stretched as far and as thin as the crew could hold.

  “All hands, stand by for combat,” Phil said aloud, letting the comm system pick it up and route it out to all decks.

  Yeoman West Lovisone was flying the ship today, something of a thesis defense in a very unforgiving school of hard knocks. He glanced up now and nodded at Phil over his console, eyes maybe a little more squinted than usual and fingers probably stiff with tension.

  Unlike Persephone, CS-405 would be coming out at a time when the station was alert. And they would be coming in relatively slowly, compared to the insane speeds Heather had calculated to bring Veitengruber to safety. Assuming nothing failed.

  Thus, he needed Evan. Needed both sensor arrays hosing the station down with all the electronic countermeasures and noise that the ship could generate, like spotlights blinding ancient pilots attempting to find a target to bomb.

  “Gun crews, you are unlocked,” Phil said ominously. They were still in JumpSpace. Normally that command didn’t happen until they had emerged and had a target. Right now, Persephone was the only thing out there NOT to shoot at. “Engage as you bear.”

  No need to give them orders about shooting priorities. If it wasn’t Veitengruber and it was moving, it needed to die as fast as someone could lay a targeting reticle on it. If nothing appeared, put all fire into the station until either died or surrendered.

  Emergence.

  The ship was coming out hot, but had to stay maneuverable. They were above the high-water mark of the gravity well, so they should be able to dodge back out if they had to, something else Persephone couldn’t do with their mad dash in.

  Evan had the station on the screen. Like the gun crews, he had the responsibility to protect the ship.