by Nick Webb
He stared at the bodies. He couldn’t bring himself to care one way or another about that. He couldn’t bring himself to care at all. Death was seconds away. How close were those Telestine carriers?
Pike rushed around the corner with his teeth bloody and two of their own guns in his hands, and the Telestines there shrank back.
They’d been setting a bomb. That’s why there’d only been one or two of them at a time. These one looked more like techs, judging by their uniforms. He stared at the partially-set device, swaying on his feet. None of them had their guns out. They stared at him in mute horror.
“Your buddies are coming to take the ship down,” Pike said. He slumped against the wall. There was a laugh somewhere in his chest but he was too exhausted to give it life. His knees buckled. He looked up to meet black eyes. “Did you know that? They’re going to destroy this ship, and you’re all going to die. They’re just throwing you away. Throwing away your worthless, shitty lives, like the little shits you are. Good riddance.”
The lights flared, and went dark, and he heard the sound of footsteps. They were running. The lights were going crazy and he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. He tried to stand—he wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t crushed into goo—and resorted to crawling.
The lights flickered on. Lights. Power. It had to be them—had to be Dawn. Was there cheering in his earpiece?
“Dawn?” His voice was hoarse. Bodies slid out of the way beneath him as he brutally shoved them aside. “Dawn!”
The door opened for him with a hiss.
Nhean did not look around. His eyes were fixed on a giant screen before him—and on the Telestine who stood framed there.
“—traitors,” the Telestine was saying. His words were crisp and exact; he had learned English, this one. “Faithless,” the alien said.
Nhean laughed. The sound was wild. “Faithless? We never signed that treaty, Tel’rabim.”
“You did.”
“Our leaders did—and even that was nothing. You put their hands to paper and a gun to their heads. What choice did they have?”
“They signed it!” The Telestine’s voice was losing its crispness. “And I saw the lies in them even then! I told the others you couldn’t be trusted—and I was right. Artalbath hecardah lasan—faithless, honorless, nothing in you but lies and violence. Animals!”
“Essocar lorasai tragerve junari.” Nhean straightened his shoulders. “Oh, yes, Telestine. I know your tongue. Call us what you will. You came and you consigned us to death. A slow death. A death without death—and a life without life. You left it to us to roll over and die. Does it surprise you that we did not? Does it surprise you that there is life in us yet? Life enough to seek yours as payment for your crimes?”
The cheering in his earpiece was deafening. Pike tore it out and stumbled forward. His arm wasn’t coming up. He wanted to raise the gun, show the Telestine his death.
“Not in the least. I was the one who knew to watch you.” The Telestine’s lips stretched in an eerie grin. “I was the one who saw your potential—oh, yes, you have potential. What did you think the labs were for, human? What did you think the slaves were for? There’s intelligence there. There’s cleverness and some strength. But you aren’t stupid enough to be brute labor, and you aren’t clever enough to align yourself with a superior species. You’re unpredictable, you have a desperate need to win, and to win alone. You think you should determine the rules of the game when you have no right. You can’t be broken reliably.”
“The word,” Nhean said simply, “is pride.”
“Pride.” The Telestine pronounced it like a curse. “And you revere this thing?”
“It’s one of our sins.” Nhean laughed bitterly. “A deadly sin, we call it. And one of our greatest virtues. A paradox, really.”
“It will be your undoing. The one thing you all do is die.”
“It will be your undoing. You should have killed us all when you had the chance. Now you’ll never get it back. Where are you, Tel’rabim?”
The Telestine stared at him silently.
“We will find you,” Pike said. His voice sounded rusty. He jerked his head back to the corridor. “There’s a pile of dead Telestines out there to show you how it’s going to go for you.”
Tel’rabim’s face twisted with rage.
“You failed.” Pike started to laugh, and stepped forward, into the view of the video feed’s camera. “All of you. You said you wanted to exterminate us all. I bet you didn’t even think you’d fail. You built this flagship to hover in the skies and terrify us, so our last thoughts would be of our own death bearing down. You spent all that time studying us, and you never realized we’d fight back?”
“He says we’re clever enough, but he never thought we’d be clever enough to win.” Nhean looked over at Pike with a small, satisfied smile.
“You haven’t won,” Tel’rabim spat. “You’ve only hardened the Great Race’s resolve to terminate you. You’ve only seen a quarter of our fleets. Believe me, human, death is coming. You should have kept the faith, Nhean. Neither of you would be here today but for us. You’d have died in the void, and yet you won’t keep faith. Even she didn’t keep faith.”
“You made her a weapon.” Nhean lifted one shoulder. He reached over to take the gun from Pike’s hand. “A weapon with a mind. And as you say ... humans cannot reliably be broken. We may not have her any longer, but we are coming for you, Tel’rabim. We will meet you at every battleground and we will best you. We will come for your cities and we will prove you right. You should have killed us when you had the chance.” His arm came up and the gun went off with a crack; the screen shattered into hundreds of pieces.
And Pike caught sight of the girl, lying motionless behind the interface.
“Dawn.” He was at her side in an instant, shaking her shoulder. “Wake up, you have to wake up.”
“Pike—”
“Get away from me.” He snarled the words. “Dawn, please.” Her chest was moving, but only faintly. Her eyes were wide and staring; she saw nothing. “Dawn....” He rounded on Nhean.
The man was staring at him, pity in his eyes. “She knew, Pike. She was prepared.”
“You swore.” He gathered the body in his arms. The heart still beat, but there was nothing there. “You swore.”
Nhean bowed his head, focusing instead on the flickering readouts of the Telestine interface.
“Pike? Nhean?” Walker’s voice cut through.
Pike flinched, his arms clenched around the girl’s body. He hadn’t noticed when they came in, but a bruised and battered James stood nearby, hat-less, supporting Gabriela who was bleeding from several points on her leg.
Nhean waited, and when Pike did not answer, the man walked through the rubble to pick up his commlink.
“It’s done, Walker.” he said quietly. “We’ll meet you on the Intrepid. It’s done.”
Chapter Sixty-One
Mercury, High Orbit
Shuttle Bay, EFS Intrepid
Walker was shivering now as the sweat dried on her skin. The shuttle the Intrepid sent for them had seemed like heaven—her idea of a summer’s day on Earth, but an hour later the chills had hit her again, and she couldn’t stop remembering the cold leaching the strength from her, and the memory made her shiver all over again.
The mad crush of bodies pushing their way through the Intrepid’s shuttle bay—the survivors of the various broken ships of their three fleets—helped to warm her, at least, and representatives from each of the surviving intact ships were coming for a hastily-called meeting on what to do next. A council of war, essentially.
They still had dozens of dormant Telestine ships floating all around them, and a decision to make.
She wiped her eyes and pushed her way through the crowd on tiptoe, which was useless—she was too short for that to work in her favor, and no one seemed to be noticing Admiral Walker trying to push her way through them. Still, she might see….
Not what
she’d expected. She was looking for Pike, for Nhean, but her eyes rested on an inconsolably weeping form on the floor leaning against the wall. McAllister’s face was wrenched tight, eyes red, and shaking. Tocks and Princess sitting with him on either side, as if in vigil.
They’d won. But for some, the pain would be too much to bear for a long, long time.
There—the distinctive sight of Pike, taller than the rest. Walker let out her breath in something that might easily have been a sob and forged across the stream of people, brushing off attempted handshakes and congratulations. She didn’t want those now. She would let the people here have their celebration, though there was worse to come and they had already lost things they could not afford to lose. People needed celebration after victory, she knew that.
But she wanted to see Pike. She wanted to know where he had gone, what had happened aboard that ship. Until thirty seconds ago, she’d been afraid that he was dead, and that Nhean simply wouldn’t tell her.
The crowd parted in a swirl of people and she saw the three of them: Nhean in his too-nice suit, still somehow looking passably dignified, in spite of the spatters of blood covering the fabric. And Pike was there, bloodied and battered.
And the girl.
Walker did not ask whether she was alive. She watched, saw the faint rise in the girl’s chest, and then turned to yell for a medic. She was pleased to see her people scramble out of the way as a medic unit raced toward them—they were still a military of a sort. That was good—they would need that discipline in the days to come. She watched as the girl was laid carefully on a stretcher, and Nhean pried Pike’s fingers free for the medics to take their patient away.
At the look in Pike’s eyes, Nhean stepped back. There was pure venom there, a cold fury that was nothing like the Pike Walker knew. In her experience, Pike ran hot. He yelled when he was angry. He solved problems with fistfights and shouting. Now he was her kind of angry: icy cold. Holding a grudge. Nursing a frozen hatred.
She said nothing for a moment, watching him.
He looked at her and something in him seemed to snap. He lifted his shoulders helplessly. His head was shaking back and forth. He wanted action, wanted to do something, but there was nothing to be done.
She opened her arms and pulled him close. It didn’t matter how ridiculous it was, her all of five feet tall and him towering over her. It mattered that they were solid and human and both alive and she was glad to see him here.
“He promised,” Pike said quietly. “He said she wouldn’t be hurt. I should have known.” He paused, and added darkly, “just like before. Just like Thomas.”
He always called his father by his name, never by dad or father. Walker said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“He said she knew.” There was a simmering anger there now in his whisper.
She stepped back as she considered this. “If she had known, what do you think she would have done?”
There was a long pause.
“She would have done it anyway,” he finally admitted.
Walker nodded silently.
“There was a traitor in the Rebellion,” Pike said, as if he’d only now remembered that piece of information. “Someone from the surface. Charlie, you remember him. Tel’rabim sent him to get the Dawning back.”
“How?” It mattered.
“He told Charlie he’d give his family back. Nhean said….” Pike’s face darkened at the thought of the other man. “He said it was how the Rebellion got word of families on the labs. Tel’rabim was just stealing people, hoping to drive the ones left behind into the Rebellion, and then use them later. With their families as … bait. Leverage.”
Walker closed her eyes; she didn’t want Pike to see the admiration in them. It was damn clever, that was the thing. She didn’t want to admire anything about Tel’rabim.
But it was the sort of thing she would have done to the Telestines, if she could.
She looked down at the floor while she composed herself.
“I should go to the med bay,” Pike said. His eyes seemed to take in Walker’s bloody uniform, the sweat still dying on her skin. He saw the shadow of tears in her eyes. “What happened?”
“A battle happened,” she said dryly. It was all there was to say. She shook her head and turned to look as a rippled hush went through the crowd. “Go. I’ll catch up with you later.”
She pushed her way back to the wall. Only her rank got her through, and it was slow going. Everyone was huddled around a comm unit.
It was when she saw Delaney’s face that she knew.
The message was on a loop, repeating over and over again in the stillness. She would have recognized that voice anywhere; her hands clenched.
“—a full surrender,” the Secretary General said. “We must beg forgiveness for our breach of the Treaty. I encourage anyone with any information whatsoever about the Rebellion, its fleet, and its members to come to me or to the Telestine government. I have negotiated a full surrender. We must beg forgiveness—”
The comm unit switched off. Nhean’s finger was on the button, shaking.
“Get me on the comms,” Walker said. Her lips were numb. “I need to tell the fleet—”
“It’s too late.” Delaney’s voice was quiet. “Three of the ships have already jumped out to surrender to the Secretary General. Venus and Mars have issued their own surrenders. The stations at Jupiter are in negotiations. Everyone is scared shitless that the Telestines are coming for blood. And all the planets and stations are sitting ducks, so why wouldn’t they be?”
“I have to go back.” Nhean’s voice was tight. “I’ll get Venus on our side.”
“I don’t think you will.” There was no cruelty in Delaney’s voice, only weary certainty. “There’s a price on your head now. You, specifically. You, me, the admiral. All of our officers. Bill Pike. The girl.”
And the three ships that had jumped … knew every secret there was to know: the dark places in the Telestine array, the flight patterns, the technology.
Even as the whispers started around her, Walker’s mind fastened on one thing. They didn’t all know about the girl. They didn’t all know how the Telestine flagship had been taken down, or about the divisions in Telestine society. They didn’t know….
There would be time for a full catalog later. Time to make a different set of plans. Now, she needed to stabilize, to reassure. She needed to stop the panic in its tracks. She raised her voice as well as she could, and was pleased to hear the whispers stop.
“Today, we stood our ground against an enemy determined to begin the genocide of our entire species.”
Silence greeted her words.
“You—every one of you, your crewmates both here and on your ships—stepped into the breach to say, no more. We are not prey. We will no longer turn and run. We took back something today: our pride, our honor, our humanity. With or without Earth, as long as we fight for our freedom, we will be human.”
There were tears in her own eyes, though they did not fall. “Many of our number made the ultimate sacrifice today. There will be a time and place to grieve for them, but it is not today. It is not now. There is no time for us to rest yet. Now is the time for us to honor them by continuing their fight.” She swept her gaze over the crowd and, met the eyes of those whose faces were pale with fear. “Make no mistake, fight we will. And fight hard.”
Her voice seemed to swell in the space. “I have no intention of abiding by a treaty we signed with a gun to our head and our children in chains. Now is not the time for us to surrender to fear, to tell ourselves that the yoke that hangs heavy around our neck and drags us to a slow death is better than an open fight. Now, in the face of our victory, is the time to stand tall, and firm, and resolute. Unflinching.” She swept her gaze over the crowd. “We will win this. We will win freedom for humanity, and today, we have already won the first victory of the great war of liberation.”
The clapping began quietly, hesitantly, and then it gathered momentum. Stamp
ing began, whistles and cheers and shouts of the fighter squadron slogans, and the Rebellion’s anthem, voices carrying the chorus high.
Let them have their celebration. One by one, Walker sought out the ship captains and caught their eyes. She nodded her head toward the passageway that led to the CIC and led them away from the celebration.
Now was the time to prepare.
Epilogue
Mercury, High Orbit
Bridge, EFS Intrepid
It was some hours later that she sat back at last, rubbing at her eyes. Her head ached fiercely. The celebration in the main hangar bay had not abated, as she expected. It had spread to the mess. Shuttles had arrived from the other ships, bearing the fruit of a dozen illicit distilleries, and the songs and cheering only seemed to grow louder as the party went on. There was another incoming Telestine fleet, and she had recommended full destruction of the Telestine ships that were sitting ducks, against Nhean’s vehement opposition. But there was not time to study.
Even when the first orders went out and the fleet started into an acceleration burn, the party did not stop; thankfully, the helmsmen still seemed to be sober enough to set coordinates.
“We’ve done all we can,” Delaney said firmly. He nodded his head at the stack of papers on the desk: rendezvous points, schedules, and patrols of their own. “We have a few hours until we change course.” He nodded at the other captains. “We’ll handle getting the crews back to their ships.”
“During this burn?”
“We’ll pause the burn momentarily. Well, and it’ll take a while to wind the celebration down, anyway. I’ll go be the grumpy old man and crash the party. You all get some sleep.”
“Ma’am?” The comm unit buzzed and crackled.
The med bay. Walker exchanged a quick glance with Delaney and pressed the button. “What is it?”
“Something you need to see,” said the doctor.
“I’ll be right there.” She didn’t like that tone. She nodded at one of the captains. “Change of plans. Noringe, you get to be the grumpy old man. Get people back to work. Delaney, come with me.”
