The Battle for the Solar System (Complete Trilogy)

by Sweeney, Stephen

  “Go to sleep, Dodds,” came a voice.

  It took Dodds a few moments to realise that it was Estelle who had spoken. He rolled over, looking to her bed and seeing her staring up at him. “Did we wake you up, Estelle?”

  “It’s after lights out, Dodds.”

  “Sorry, Estelle, couldn’t sleep,” Dodds said. “We were just chatting. We ain’t doing any harm, right?”

  “You’re drunk and you’re being loud,” Estelle hissed back at them.

  “Yeah, but so’s little Kelly,” Enrique said.

  Dodds looked down at the woman who was asleep in a single bed, next to their bunk. She was snoring.

  “Oi, Kelly, stop snoring!” Enrique said.

  Kelly didn’t.

  “I remembers when that girl use ta be able to put it away,” Dodds said. “We had that week off, where we went to the resort in Leighton and she drank ush under the table every shingle night.”

  “Yeah,” Enrique sighed, “that feelsh like a lifetime ago.”

  “Hmm, how things change …”

  “Yeah, shame she still shnores likes a pig, though,” Enrique snorted. Both men started laughing.

  “I mean it, you two – shut up and go to sleep!” Estelle raised her voice. Others around her stirred a little in their beds.

  “What’s the problem, Estelle? We’ve got no patrols tomorrows,” Dodds said.

  “Or maybe jus’ a late one at most, the way they muck the schedules ‘bout,” Enrique added.

  “Yeah, exactly. Nothing to do tomorrow morning.”

  “If you don’t shut up and go to sleep, then I will give you something to do in the morning, Lieutenant!” Estelle shot back.

  “Estelle, you serious, hon?” Enrique started.

  “Final warning, Lieutenant!”

  Christ, what’s gotten into her? Dodds wondered. She could be so bi-polar at times. At one point in the evening she’d been fighting with Kelly, then laughing, and now she’s back to fighting again. Was it them being loud that was annoying her? Or that they were doing so after lights out, when everyone else was asleep and quiet? Or maybe because he was bad-mouthing Hawke? Well, it wasn’t as if nobody else ever did. Sure, anything bad that happened would ultimately be a poor reflection on her, but he doubted that would happen. Maybe she still hadn’t recovered from being dropped from the ATAF project, after all.

  He decided to call it a night. Besides, the room was starting to spin a little more now. He hoped he wouldn’t find himself springing out of bed in the next five minutes and sprinting for the toilet. Knowing his luck, he’d only make it halfway before coating the floor of the corridor a nice shade of yellowy-brown, and he’d only have to clear it up.

  Just as he closed his eyes, he caught sight of Chaz on the top bunk at the other end of the dorm. He was lying on his back, arms folded across his chest, staring up at the ceiling. Dodds had regularly seen him like that, especially back at Xalan. The big man was clearly awake, Chaz never slept on his back. He wondered what was on his mind. Was he, too, thinking about the conversation in the Club that night? Or maybe what the Dart pilot had said?

  It came to him just as he began to drift off. Maybe what was bothering Chaz went all the way back to what had happened on Xalan, to that thing that had never been explained. At some point in the past, Parks had made Chaz a promise …

  … one that he had never intended to keep.

  XI

  — Far from a Saving Grace —

  Natalia Grace slept deeply, her slumber artificially induced by the hibernation capsule she had crawled into over three weeks ago. All was still, the escape pod that continued to carry her through space now lying in near-darkness. Crumbs from biscuits she had eaten dotted the floor, a small trail leading from a storage cabinet to the cockpit chair.

  Locked within that capsule, those last three weeks had passed unnoticed to her. She no longer had to endure the frustration and depression she had suffered during the first seven days alone in the pod. She had mourned the loss of her companions many times during that period, weeping almost uncontrollably the whole way through jump space. Exhausted, she had settled down and fallen asleep in the cockpit seat, waking much later on and being greeted by the inky-blackness of normal space, signalling her exit from jump.

  Hope and relief had washed over her and she had pressed herself as close to the cockpit window as possible, to take in her new surroundings. Far below she sighted a planet, though not one she recognised. Not that it mattered. She’d escaped! A quick glance out the rear viewport revealed the gate she had exited, the structure only a little way behind her. Not long after her arrival, the navigation systems of the escape pod synchronized themselves with her new location’s navigation buoys and soon revealed her location – Iliad, an Independent frontier star system; the planet below her, Diso. According to the navigation computer, Iliad was sparsely populated, but populated nonetheless. At that moment, Natalia had exhaled a breath she felt she had been holding in for months.

  At long last, she was home.

  She had activated the pod’s SOS broadcast and then set about exploring the cramped pod. From a storage cabinet she had removed a small bottle of water and a handful of biscuits, before settling back in the cockpit seat to await rescue.

  And there she had waited. And waited. And waited.

  But the minutes had turned to hours, and the hours to days, and in all that time she saw no signs of rescue. In fact, she saw no signs of anything. Not one single glimpse of another vessel, nor any sort of activity within the system whatsoever.

  She had turned to the radar system in an attempt to discover whether there was anything else around her, perhaps a research station or a vessel that may have failed to spot her, her arrival in Iliad having somehow gone unnoticed. Should there have been anyone else around to hear her SOS or detect her pod, she would have expected to see a number of coloured shapes on the radar display, indicating the presence of other vessels or entities in the area. But save for a solitary yellow marker resting at the bottom of the display, which she had already identified as being the gate, it was empty. With the aid of a flight manual she had found in the storage cabinet, she had begun tweaking settings and display options, searching for something, anything, that might help rid her of the feeling that she was alone.

  There was nothing.

  After the second day had passed, the relief she had felt upon entering the star system had all but abandoned her, now replaced by a feeling of dread. Her escape pod continued to drift, moving away from Diso and leaving the jumpgate far behind. She knew what had happened – the system had been abandoned, evacuated in response to the threat of the Pandoran army’s invasion, the first stage of the solution that had been cooked up by the Confederation and IWC. Out of every system she could have arrived in, why this one?

  She had done her best to hold back her anger and frustration, but it had forced itself out anyway. She had hurled the flight manual across the tiny pod’s interior, before cursing out loud and slamming her fists onto the console. Soon after that she had begun to weep yet again.

  In the face of this situation, Natalia was unable to shake the feeling that all her suffering and loss had been for nothing. Her fate seemed sealed. Here she would remain until she died, trapped in this cramped, steel coffin as it propelled her through space.

  No, come on! Snap out of it! She had come too far and been through too much to give up hope now. She had looked to the open hibernation capsule that she had been using for a bed. For a while, she considered placing herself under its control, to negate her need for food and water and to better wait out a potential rescue. Perhaps someone would wander into the system, performing a final sweep to make sure that it had been fully evacuated and would discover her pod.

  But how long might that be? Forty days? Twenty-eight weeks? Fifty-seven years?

  She turned back to gaze out at the empty space ahead of her, nibbling on a biscuit and thinking back over the events of the past few months.

 
*

  Her primary mission had been a complete success. Along with several other operatives, she had made her way into war-torn Imperial space, to perform one final mass intelligence-gathering sweep and attempt to discover as much about the Pandorans as possible; key above all else, their behaviour and strengths, as well as any identifiable weaknesses. Secondary to these had been their structure and culture, their strategy, goals and objectives, logistical concerns, recent activities …

  … and their numbers.

  And dear God, there were a lot of them.

  It was a frightening amount of data to be gathered, and at the beginning it had seemed impossible. But it had been achieved, though not without the expense of many lives. The data cards holding the various reports now resided in her jacket, within a zipped inside pocket. In her paranoid state she had checked that pocket daily, in case, through some unexplained occurrence, they vanished.

  Another fundamental part of her mission had been to complete a series of hit-and-run operations against essential enemy targets, throughout a number of the empire’s systems. Shipyards, factories, training and recruitment facilities, and the so-called ‘breeding pools’. Those had been the hardest, not only because they were so heavy defended, but because of the fact that there still might have been thousands – if not millions – of innocent people down there. They may have been praying for rescue, but they may also have been praying for death – anything but to become a part of the Senate’s Mistake. And in the end, she had reminded herself that killing them was the lesser of two evils.

  During the strikes the team had gone in hard and fast, there being no sense in attempting to be strategic about it. The Enemy were far better equipped, far more knowledgeable, and much more combat efficient than they could ever hope to be. Her unit had suffered incredible losses along the way, but they had known even before they set off that many of them wouldn’t be coming back.

  With their objectives met and their mission accomplished, the surviving members of the team had begun the journey home. But as they approached a jumpgate to cross the Imperial border, they had been hit hardest. Natalia had been standing on the small bridge of her vessel when a jump point had formed behind the convoy. From it had emerged an Imperial frigate, along with a host of starfighters of all variety. They had attacked the instant they were clear of the point, with ferocious speed and efficiency.

  One member of the convoy had been eliminated within seconds and several others had been crippled moments thereafter. Her own ship had been struck by a volley of rocket fire, sections of the vessel starting to come apart. Fires and explosions had ripped through the interior, resulting in a great deal of damage and casualties. Power and stability had been lost, the gravitational systems had begun to malfunction, and the ship had started to tumble, barely a few kilometres from the gate.

  As the enemy forces had focused their efforts on those members of the convoy who were returning fire and desperately trying to clear a path to reach the gate, Natalia had collected up all the report data, pulled the burnt and injured navigator from his chair, and started for the escape pods.

  *

  Somehow, she had survived. Though for how much longer she couldn’t say. The SOS continued to broadcast from the escape pod, as it had done ever since she’d arrived, though seemingly with no one to hear it. And after seven days in the Iliad system, the escape pod’s onboard computer had started to jingle. It had warned her that she was running low on oxygen and recommended that she place herself in hibernation for the remainder of the journey. Natalia had looked around to the hibernator with a twinge of dread. It seemed she had little choice about using it now. That little capsule would become her resting place until she was rescued.

  If ever.

  From what she knew, a perfectly normal, healthy human could survive for months in a capsule such as this, their metabolism slowed to the point where neither food nor water was needed to sustain them, the minimal amount of oxygen required being supplied by the system itself. Death through starvation would eventually claim them, though. Maybe not for six months, maybe not even for twelve, nor even twenty-four. But they wouldn’t live forever. And that was the part about it that had scared her the most, because she didn’t know for how long she might drift.

  As she’d stripped, Natalia had wondered if the inside of the escape pod would be the last thing she ever saw. Would she close her eyes, never to wake? What of her reports? What would become of them? And without them, what would become of the billions of lives whose fates now rested in the hands of the Confederacy and IWC?

  She paused before relenting to the capsule’s control, returning to the cockpit to power down all the lights, and switch the SOS broadcast to a low range. She was in two minds as to just how widely she should be advertising her presence. On the one hand, it could aid in her rescue, should anyone detect her ship adrift. On the other, the Enemy could be drawn to it. They would without doubt detect the craft anyway and come to investigate, but whether they wasted any more time with it was another matter. In recent months, she had discovered that the Pandoran army had begun to aggressively salvage almost everything they could lay their hands on. Most likely they were gearing up for their next big push, preparing to spread out from Mitikas and onwards to the Independent systems and Confederacy, where they would seek to complete the Mission. To that end, they now preferred to cripple their adversaries in combat, so that the vessels could be assimilated into their ranks, only destroying those that were either of a measurable threat or of no use to them. This, she knew, was the only reason she had survived the attack on her convoy, her vessel briefly meeting their requirements, before it had started to come apart.

  Through the near-darkness she made her way back to the capsule and settled down inside, having checked once again that her reports were still safe and secure in her jacket, which she had draped over the nearby chair. With that little peace of mind, she activated the controls that would close her in and induce the hibernation.

  It was her hope that by switching off most of the power she would give any inquisitive Pandorans the impression that the escape pod had been drifting for years, the power and vital systems components having broken down long ago, the occupants almost certainly dead. In such a case, she hoped that the pod would also prove too small to be of any use to them. Cast-off, non-threatening and ready for the scrapheap, they would waste no more time with it and quickly move on.

  Or perhaps they would destroy it anyway, just to make sure.

  Damn the Senate’s Mistake; damn the Enemy; damn those blasted Pandorans.

  XII

  — Another Rude Awakening —

  “Dodds! Hey! Wake up! Wake up!”

  Dodds blinked himself awake, instantly becoming aware of three things – the first, that Estelle was standing next to his bunk, shaking him vigorously. The second, that there was an alarm wailing. And the third, that he had a splitting headache. Without question, the previous night’s drinking session had well and truly caught up with him, and right there and then he wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep and wake up much later on, when everything had calmed down and it no longer felt as though someone was tightening a vice around his head.

  Estelle shook him some more, making his head thump even harder. “Dodds!”

  “Yeah, I’m awake!” he protested. He struggled to pull himself into an upright position, wincing at the pain. He saw that all around the dormitory other people were hastily pulling on clothes and running out the door.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “Enrique, do not go back to sleep! Don’t you dare go back to sleep!” Estelle shouted at the man in the bunk below him.

  Dodds leaned over, taking care not to tip himself off the side of the bed. Enrique was slumped down on his mattress. No doubt his head was in an identical state to Dodds’ own.

  “Enrique! Hey, come on!” Estelle called again.

  “Alright, don’t shout; I heard you the first time,” Enrique said. He hauled hims
elf up and sat hunched over, head in his hands. “Uh … I feel like I’m going to puke.”

  Dodds pulled out a watch that he kept under his pillow and tried to focus on the little blue figures on the face. It was just after four in the morning. He hadn’t managed more than three hours’ sleep since settling down. He felt a momentary sense of déjà vu. The last time he had been woken this early, it had meant trouble. “What’s going on?” he asked again, his eyes still following the people running out the room. He then saw a figure come barging in through the quarters’ doorway, flanked by two other staff.

  Aw, hell. A commodore would never normally come to round up crew. What must have happened to get him involved?

  Anthony Hawke surveyed the scene in front of him with a look of utter disgust. “Come on! Come on! Get moving!” he barked. “You hear that alarm? That’s the call to general quarters! That means now! What are you standing around for? Move! Move! Move!”

  Estelle turned back to Dodds and mouthed for him to get up, now! Dodds looked to Hawke and saw the commodore’s attention shift to the bunk he and Enrique occupied.

  Hawke’s eyes narrowed as they fell upon Estelle. “What the hell are you doing? Did I not just make myself clear? Have you gone deaf?”

  Even in his present state, Dodds knew that Estelle was in the one place she’d rather not be right now – stood next to two members of her flight group, who didn’t seem capable of mustering the strength to pull themselves out of bed during an emergency.

  “Sir, I was—” Estelle began.

  “Do these little boys need their mummy to dress them?” Hawke growled. His eyes than shifted and Dodds felt his heart jump as a flicker of recognition crossed the man’s face. “Lieutenant Dodds! I should’ve known! How could it possibly have been anyone else?”

  Dodds opened his mouth to speak.

  “Didn’t feel like getting out of bed this morning?” Hawke cut in. “Decided you were going to call in sick? Because you sure as hell better be at death’s door, if that’s the case!”