by Nick Webb
She heard the shuttle bay doors begin to open and the shuttle rocked on its mooring as the air blasted out into space around them. Larsen was taking this as quickly as he dared.
“Godspeed and good luck.” Larsen’s voice was quieter now. “Hope to see you all soon.”
The answers came back quietly; the pilots were very aware that they might be emerging from the station into a war zone. Given what they knew of Telestine weaponry, the station was no safer—but the illusion was there. Space never felt quite as big as when you were in a shuttle.
“No activity showing in the immediate area.” Larsen’s voice was a bit too relieved for Walker’s comfort. She didn’t want him spooking the rest. “Engines are spun up, maneuvers will begin as soon as shuttles are aboard.”
Thank god they had drilled for this. Walker clutched her fingers around the harness and stared straight ahead as the shuttles split off for the ships. The Intrepid loomed through the windshield of the shuttle. Her eyes traced over the lettering as she gave a silent prayer. Did the Telestines understand the way humans named ships? Did they realize that this was an expression of hope? Of defiance?
It seemed like an eternity before the shuttle thudded down in the bay, and Walker’s eyes snapped open; she must have closed them to keep her face calm.
“Everyone stay put. Delaney and King, with me to the bridge. Larsen, come with us as soon as you can.” She punched the button to open the shuttle as soon as the light flashed green, and made her way across the bay at a dead sprint.
By the time they emerged onto the bridge, all of them were panting. Walker saluted at the duty officer and took her place at the control table as he melted away. She nodded to the pilot.
“Make for Earth.”
The woman pivoted in her chair. “Ma’am?”
King’s jaw had dropped open.
“Admiral—” Delaney began. His voice was tight.
“What other option do we have?” Walker looked over at him. “They know about us now. They came to fight us. We don’t have the fuel to run anywhere else, and we don’t even know if we could outrun them.” She made a calculation in her head. It was time for specifics now. “Tell the Washington and the Pele to hold them off, and get the rest of the fleet to Earth.” She said a silent goodbye to Brown and Kim, and straightened her shoulders. There was only ever the best choice. “We have to be there when the defense grid goes down.”
Now it was all up to Pike to find—and figure out how to use—the Dawning.
Chapter Thirteen
Jupiter, Ganymede’s L4 Lagrange point
Fighter Bay, New Beginnings Station
Mechanics were yelling, pilots were sprinting between the ships, and the deck chief slammed Eric Barker’s windshield closed so hard it bounced up again.
“Hey.” Barker grabbed it and hauled it down. “Don’t get me killed.”
The chief didn’t seem to hear him. The man barely stayed to make sure the shield was in place before he was off the ladder and hauling it to the next fighter.
The robotic tug dragged Barker’s ship into the airlock chamber and he looked around to see who was assembled. They would be the second group out. Two wings were already flying, and Barker’s crew had just been coming off duty when the klaxons sounded.
“What’s the word, Woof?” Whiskey, one of the older members of the team, leaned to catch his eye as she slid into her cockpit. The ships’ engines were beginning to flicker to life as the tugs zoomed away and the back of the bay—a heavy door burned black with the fire of a thousand launches—came down.
“Bastards found us, that’s all I know.” Barker ran through the ready checks, his fingers shaking. He’d flown hundreds of patrols, had even seen Telestine carriers and fighters drifting nearby, but he’d never engaged. No one had ever engaged before, unless you believed that ridiculous story about the Valiant launching an attack on Earth.
He didn’t.
“And we’re supposed to ... take them down?” Whiskey’s wingmate seemed as uncertain as Barker was himself.
“That’s what we make the big money, boys.” The red lights began to flash, signaling decompression. “All right, team, get your ships ready to fly and listen up.”
A chorus of ayes came back down the line.
“The fuggers found us. I don’t know how, but you know how important it is that the fleet gets out of here. We don’t, there’s no Rebellion anymore, capisce?” He waited for the agreement. “Our goal is to take out any of the fighters heading for the capital ships. They’re pushing off now and they’ll go to drift around the edge of the planet and get out of sight of the Telestines. We’ll keep the bastards occupied here and meet up with them at the rendezvous point.”
“That better be one close rendezvous point.” That was Whiskey. He could see her raising her eyebrows skeptically.
He didn’t respond as the door opened and the fighters sped out into the black, falling into a wedge behind him. Truth be told, he wondered the same thing himself. If their ships left them, they had no cover from the cannons, and they didn’t have the inertial dampeners to match the acceleration the capital ships could pull—or the fuel to get out into any of the three “dark spots” humanity had found: dead zones in the Telestine surveillance.
He hoped there were more than three.
“Right now, we focus on the mission.” His voice was curt. “Bank starboard and go down; we’ll come up from under the Pele.”
They obeyed without a word, and he felt their fear thrumming in the air.
“Don’t know about you, but I’m glad to be taking a shot after all this.” He tried to keep his voice light.
Whiskey, thankfully, picked up the lead. “How many times we seen them go by? Man, I was tempted. Bang bang, fuggers. Now we get to shoot back, eh?”
The chatter began, nervous jokes between the pilots.
And then they came up from under the ship and the chatter stopped.
He’d seen Telestine carriers. Of course he had. If you lived on a station and you looked out, you were bound to see one eventually. They wanted humans to see them, after all. The things were made to look imposing, a regular reminder of just how outmatched humanity was. To remind us of our place.
And he’d only ever seen them from a distance, silhouetted against the red-orange bulk of Jupiter—or drifting out in space. Up close—
They took your breath away.
Three carriers loomed over them, impossibly large. Next to them, New Beginnings Station looked like a shoddy, battered little toy. The Pele was even smaller than that, for all that it dwarfed the fighters, and the Washington, beside them, was one of the smallest capital ships they had. The rest of the fleet.…
Was gone.
That was when he understood, and from the silence on the line, he realized that the others knew too.
He and his pilots were the sacrificial lambs. The ones who stayed behind while Walker drove the getaway car.
Damn her.
And god bless her.
“Fugger formation to port.” Was that his voice? It didn’t sound like it. He wasn’t even aware that he’d been tracking the progress of the Telestine ships, but it seemed that his body was continuing on as if there was any point at all.
There was a point. Purpose came back in a rush, and he turned his head to look at the distant specks of silver against the heavy curve of the planet. The fighters cut between them, roaring overhead, and Barker forced himself to replace the hollow punch of betrayal with something more, something different. What had he said, the day he told his parents he was leaving Johnson Station for the Rebellion? Getting Earth back is worth more than any single one of us. They’d been listening to the Secretary General’s speech, he remembered. It was that speech, reminding them to follow the laws of the treaty—to not rock the boat—that had caused something to snap inside him. If we stay like this, out in the black, we’ll all die.
He’d already been as good as dead the moment he was born on one of those stations.
Like hell he was going to let death scare him now. And that boat? He wasn’t going to rock it. He was going to crash it. The secretary general could go to hell.
“You all see the Intrepid over there?” He knew his voice was shaking. He was doing the best he could. He could feel his hands moving like he was in a dream, righting the ship and taking preliminary aim at the Telestine formation in their sights.
Whiskey picked up the lead again. “Yeah, chief. We see it.”
“That ship has the admiral on it.” He banked hard to port and slammed into high acceleration, sucked back in his chair as their formation shot toward the Telestine ships. “She’s going for Earth. Maybe not today, but someday. You heard about that mission they launched a few days back? Well, that was just the first piece. Admiral Walker’s going to take back Earth someday—and we’re going to make sure she survives long enough to do that.”
There was a long pause, and he blinked rapidly. His vision was blurring.
“Aye, chief,” Whiskey said softly. “Let’s teach these bastards a lesson.”
The ayes trickled in, some voices shaking, others numb.
The shooting started, tiny bursts of warm fire in the darkness and cold, and the formation swerved loosely to get out of the way. But defense wasn’t enough, and those ayes weren’t good enough, either. “So what’re we gonna do?”
Nothing. They were avoiding fire, but there was no life in them.
Shit. They were going to die and there wasn’t going to be any point to it.
The alien formation was coming up and Barker let loose a stream of bullets. He held his breath as they were lost in the black, and then the Telestine fighter at the front of the wedge burst into a hundred shards of silver.
“I said, what are we gonna do?”
“Fuck ‘em up!” The shout came back, hoarse, from Fighter 8.
“What’re we gonna do?” He pounded on his windshield for emphasis.
“Fuck ‘em up!” The whole wing yelled the response back at him.
“Hell yeah we are! All fighters engage, let’s make ‘em sorry they found us!”
The roar of their approval was deafening. The formation split into four pieces, and Barker yanked on the yoke to take his group straight up. A formation of Telestines coming in hard to pick off the human fighters from above scattered in confusion and Barker heard his wild laugh echoing over the comm lines. “You like that?”
Almost beside him, one of the Telestine ships shattered and spun. He had time to see the fracture, a white cockpit, and his ship was already past the lost fighter as Whiskey gave a yell of satisfaction. They came up and around in a tight arc to dive down on the Telestines.
“They’re coming around!” said fighter five.
“Not fast enough—get ‘em before they can get us in their sights.” His fingers closed around the trigger. He hissed in disappointment when one of the Telestines swerved out of the way of his bullets.
“Chief.” It was Whiskey, uncharacteristically quiet as they wove through the chaos outside.
“Sec. Come here, you fugger.” Another burst of rounds, and the Telestine swerved again. “Come on, almost got you—yes!” He pumped his fist in the air. He was still grinning as he flipped the switch for a private channel to Whiskey, Fighter 2. “What is it?”
“The Washington.” Her voice was soft, aching. Whiskey was fiery, grey streaking her brown hair, but she could drink any one of them under the table, and she told the dirtiest jokes he’d ever heard. Ace pilot, he’d said it a hundred times; she’d turned down the role of CAG at least twice. Now all that was left of the Whiskey he knew was the aim with which she took down one Telestine, and another, and another. She looked over at him, a tiny figure in her fighter, and then looked beyond.
He knew what he would see, but he followed her gaze anyway, and the sight was like a blow. He swayed sideways as the ships banked into another formation and the Washington came directly into view.
It hung at an angle, slowly spinning, struggling to compensate for the engines that had been shot to hell on its starboard side. Cannons still fired, but the decks surrounding the gunnery showed gaping holes. Fire flickered in its windows, and its hull was streaked with black. Telestine fighters plunged toward the carrier and sped away as their bombs pierced her hull. It was a terrible thing to see, a beautiful ship—beautiful to him, in any case, her rough jumble of parts the effort of blind hope and hundreds of mechanics—mobbed by fighters, dying by slow inches. Captain Kim didn’t have a chance. The Washington was dying.
He didn’t give an order. He didn’t have to. There was no going home to their ship anymore, and if there was one thing he was sure of, it was the raging fury of the rest of his wing. They accelerated so hard he heard a few heads other than his own slam back against the headrests. The rest of the groups swam back into formation in a three-dimensional arrow.
The thing he wanted more than anything was to climb out of the cockpit and lash out with his hands. He wanted to drive a blade into one of these bastards and see them bleed. He wanted the impact of his fists and a blade, and blood, and their screams in his ears, and if all he had was this trigger and the missiles under the wings, it was a poor consolation—but their deaths would do.
If he was dying here, he was going to make it hurt for them first.
He’d make them bleed.
He fired a missile and saw the rest of his team do the same. The missiles were for capital ships, and the Telestine fighters didn’t stand a chance. They did not so much explode as vanish, dust rather than shards in the black.
Too quick, too easy a death. He looked up, teeth bared in an animal grin. “Come on, team. We’re taking the carrier.”
No one even questioned. They arced right and shot up at the belly of the ship. Missiles blazed as the wing shot and banked again; a gaping maw exploded where the missiles connected with the Telestine ship and it rocked in place, escaping air pushing it into a spin before the engines compensated. He could feel it watching him like a malevolent beast.
“Anyone know where the CICs are on these things? I think it’s time to do a guided missile run.”
From the dead silence, he knew no one had mistaken his meaning. They didn’t have guided missiles.
“Up top, chief—I think, anyway. That’s the Telestine way—always on top.” Whiskey’s voice was professional. “I’ll come with you—I’ve got half my missiles.”
“I’ve got some missiles still, too,” someone chimed in.
The rest of the group fell away from the three of them as they streaked toward the top of the ship. Barker looked back once to see them each in their own path. They’d picked targets, they were ready to give everything they had. Lights flickered up on his screens as his team armed their missiles one by one. He flicked the cover on his up and hesitated a moment. His finger trembled when it came down on the button; a moment later, the warning beep showed him that Whiskey and the other pilot had done the same.
“Hit at three points, or join up?” Her voice was deferential.
The fore of the ship grew in their view as he considered his answer.
“Together.” It wasn’t going to make much of a difference.
Debris shot past them. He turned on his wide-channel comm to listen. He could hear Captain Brown of the Pele yelling orders, another wing of fighters calling to one another.
Collision course, his screen flashed. He canceled the alert. His hands were shaking; he took them from the yoke.
“Barker?”
He looked over. “Yeah?”
“Good speech.”
He managed a smile. “Thanks. Honor to fly with you, Whiskey.”
“Same, chief.”
He did not watch his death coming. He turned his head to look at New Beginnings Station, a shattered husk of what it had been, solar panels floating in shards nearby, tumbling to catch the light of the planet. Other Telestine carriers surrounded it, unleashing hell. Hellfire and brimstone, he thought suddenly, the phrase from his youth surfac
ing unexpectedly. He looked at the place he’d called home, the creaking hunk of metal that had been just enough to keep them alive, and just enough to kill them.
And then the Telestine carrier blotted everything else out, and he leaned back in his seat as his fighter slammed into the CIC, two kilotons of explosive energy ripping through the hull.
Chapter Fourteen
Earth
Mountains Near Denver, North American Continent
By the third day, they could reliably see the laboratory without binoculars. By the sixth day, it was possible to pick out its shape: almost round at the base, with elegant structures stacked atop the high-tech-approaching-wizardry flotation devices.
Pike, who had once seen the estates on Venus, described them to the soldiers with him as they walked.
He tried to explain, but there were few words to describe the way it felt to descend into that hellish atmosphere, all boiling clouds and jets of superheated air—at least at the lower altitudes. And one time he’d accidentally strayed too low, trying to avoid official detection on a smuggling run. The Aggy withstood the pressure—and, thank god, most of the heat—but there was no way to miss what was happening outside in the boiling Venetian maelstrom. It took no special knowledge to look at that place and know that it was wildly hostile to life, though the denizens of the luxury estates assured Pike that the view was an acquired taste, and highly prized.
The soldiers seemed to find his descriptions of the Venetian atmosphere more interesting than the estates. Pike supposed he understood that. He’d had a sense of almost visceral revulsion the first time he stepped foot on the polished floors of one of the opulent floating mansions. Everything clean, gleaming.
And the rest of humanity practically imprisoned.
“Telestine pets, those Venetians,” one of the soldiers muttered. “If they’d helped us, maybe we could take down these ships rather than trying to get up to them.”
