The Battle for the Solar System (Complete Trilogy)

by Sweeney, Stephen

  Each member of her family had one of the pendants, their initials and the same words engraved on every one of them. They had different photos for each, the owner of the pendant absent from the line-up, so that it felt as though they were all together. Kelly’s father had had the pendants made up a month before Kelly had joined the CSN. It had been a fun day for the family – something different to the glamorous, often stiff, red-carpeted events that they usually attended together. After the photo shoot, they had gone for lunch, heading for a steak restaurant they had spotted on the way over. Kelly remembered how Gemma and her mother had been papped, their faces covered in barbecue sauce off the ribs they were eating.

  The comfort and amusement that those memories often evoked was not forthcoming today though, the feeling buried beneath layers of unshakable anguish.

  Whilst all the pendants were more or less the same for each member of the family, Kelly’s was a little thicker. The back had an extra compartment that only she and her father knew about. With shaking fingers she prized it open, careful not to damage the delicate contents within. From out of the compartment tumbled two small pills, one black and one yellow. She looked down at them, recalling how shocked she had been when her father had explained their presence to her.

  *

  “… take them both at the same time,” he said. “They will start dissolving as soon as you put them in your mouth, so swallow them quickly. Your heart rate will slow, and you’ll lose consciousness within about thirty seconds. It won’t be painful or unpleasant at all. And after about two or three minutes, you’ll be dead; five at most. It’ll be just like falling asleep.”

  “My God, Dad, no!” she said, appalled with the idea that she might one day find the need to use them. She couldn’t believe the suggestion was being made at all, least of all by him. She stared down at the two pills nestled in the back of the pendant and then raised furious eyes to him. “I’m your daughter! How could you?!”

  Her father sighed. “There are a number of reasons you might want to – you might crash and break your legs, with no help coming and the chance of burning to death, you could be trapped somewhere, waiting to drown, you could be captured by enemy troops and made to endure torture. Or worse. There are hundreds of reasons.”

  “You’re asking me to consider taking my own life!” she shot back incredulously.

  “I’m giving you a way to end it quickly. This isn’t easy for me, either, but I’d rather know that, if it happens, you were able to die peacefully.”

  Kelly opened her mouth to retort, but could no longer find the words to express her anger, dismay and disbelief at her father. She simply glared at him, turned on her heel and stormed off.

  Though, despite her disgust at the suggestion, the subject and its arguments became burned in her mind, and, after a lot of thought, discussion and research, she had agreed to take the pills with her. The decision had made her father happy, though he had said he never wanted the day to come when she might consider using them.

  *

  With it now open, Kelly had hoped that, after ten years within the pendant, exposed to so many different environments, pressures and temperature changes, the small pills might have broken, dissolved or otherwise perished, granting her an excuse not to take them. Alas, they still remained perfectly preserved in the transparent container that encased them.

  With some effort, she broke it open and tipped them out onto her hand. For a time she sat looking at them, at everything they represented. She now held her own life in her hand. These two pills were how she could choose to end it; how she would make her declaration that it was all over. Two tiny little pills. She would never see her father again, nor her mother, Gemma or Susan. She would never know what had become of Estelle, Dodds and Chaz. She would never know if help finally came, what or who those black-suited freaks were, or what would become of Enrique. Would he die? Would he live? There were so many questions. She would never find out what her father’s ship was doing in Imperial space, or what she, herself, had been doing in Independent space, performing Special Operations for the past few months. She would never get closure on the ATAFs – those absurdly powerful starfighters that now lay at the bottom of the sea, sealed with Ifrit’s cargo bay.

  All of those things she contemplated whilst staring down at the pills, poking them with her fingers. Eventually, her fingers closed around their delicate form, holding them tight. They felt smooth, not chalky as they had at first appeared. She wondered how they might taste. She brought them up to her mouth.

  “Would … you not … spare some for … me?” a tender voice came.

  Her eyes fell upon Enrique. His eyes were open, if only as open as they could be, given his state. His face was covered with dark red patches of dried blood, his features puffy from where he had been beaten.

  “Enrique.” Her hand dropped away from her lips and she crawled over to where he had lain ever since having been dumped there by their captors. She reached out a hand to touch his face. She wanted to hold him, to kiss him and tell him it would be okay. But she knew that, right now, her touch might only bring him pain, and she didn’t want to inflict any more of that upon him.

  She felt her eyes starting to fill with tears as she looked at the face of the man she loved. Here, now, was a reason to live, to fight on to the end. She rested a hand delicately on his forearm. “I wasn’t … I mean … I …” She tried to explain herself to him, before she lapsed into silence. She became aware of the pills she was still clutching in her hand and cast them aside, so that they bounced and fell into the little crevasses of the padding, away from her.

  “How … how do you feel?” she asked him.

  “Like one of the punching bags on Spirit,” he said.

  He sounded drunk, and as he spoke, Kelly could make out the missing teeth in his mouth – he had lost at least the two front ones. She fought to control her feelings this time, not wanting to start weeping in front of him. She had to be strong for both their sakes. She gently stroked his sandy-blond hair, managing to smile at his words.

  “What were you thinking?” she asked. “Why did you challenge him like that?”

  “Wanted him to look stupid … Teach him … not to screw with me …”

  “But you must have known you couldn’t win.”

  “I nearly … did,” Enrique said. “Will do … next time. Just have … to warm up a bit more … in future. Always told you it was important … to stretch first …”

  Kelly smiled. “I’m glad to hear you’re okay,” she said.

  Enrique tried to move, but cried out with the pain of the effort. Every one of his muscles must have been protesting against the motion.

  “Stay there, don’t move,” Kelly urged him.

  “How long have … I been out?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Kelly said, shaking her head. “Two, maybe three hours?” But that was just a guess, it was probably a lot longer. She had no watch and the cell had no windows, making it almost impossible for her to measure the time.

  “Did … they hurt you? Did they touch you?”

  Touch her? Out of everything that Kelly imagined her captors might do to her, rape was the very last thing she had considered. Somehow, she simply couldn’t connect that sort of activity with the soldiers. It didn’t seem as if they would gain anything from it. And if they didn’t, to them it was simply a waste of time.

  “No. No they didn’t,” she said. “I haven’t seen them since they brought you back. I thought they were going to take me next.”

  “Ha. They’ll have to get … past me first.”

  Kelly didn’t comment. She wouldn’t put it past Enrique to attempt to stand in the way of them if they did, even in his current state of health. For Enrique, it would quite literally be a case of over his dead body.

  She lay down next to him, arranging herself so that she could hold him with the minimal of discomfort.

  “Do you think the others are dead?” Enrique said after sometime.


  “I don’t know,” Kelly said, still stroking his hair. She hoped not, but there had been no signs of rescue. The tortured screams from the other cells had waned sometime ago, and the building had fallen into a deathly hush, ever since Enrique had been brought back to the cell. “I get the feeling that they don’t want to kill us, though.”

  Enrique let out a snort that was too ambiguous for Kelly to decipher.

  She took hold of the man’s hand, feeling the difficulty he had curling his fingers around her own. “Let’s get some sleep,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  She leaned over and kissed him gently on the forehead, before laying her head down and closing her eyes. Sleep soon took her. And her family filled her dreams.

  XVI

  — To Sleep —

  Night had fallen across the city as Dodds and Natalia continued trudging through the ruins of the urban centre, carrying with them a sack of various food stuffs.

  During their journey north, they had come across a delivery truck that had slipped into a gaping hole in the road and become wedged. Dodds had clambered down into the massive crater and, with some effort, managed to pry open the back doors of the vehicle, using his bare hands and whatever makeshift tools he could lay them on.

  He was rewarded for his efforts by the sight of bread, water, cereals, fruits and vegetables, and a number of canned goods. Many of the meats he had judged to be inedible. In the heat of the day, and with the lack of refrigeration, they would have spoiled fast. The rest looked comestible. Between them, he and Natalia had removed what they could sensibly carry and what would be most beneficial to them, loading it into a plastic sack before returning to their favoured paths of alleyways and narrow streets.

  *

  “What’s wrong?” Dodds said, seeing Natalia stop again and lean up against a wall.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “We need to find somewhere to stop and sleep.”

  “Now?” Dodds asked, scanning their surrounding for a suitable resting place. “Wouldn’t it be better for us to keep moving in the dark?”

  Natalia shook her head. “They can see in the dark, we can’t; the advantage would be all theirs. We’ll have to wait for morning before we can go on.”

  Dodds wasn’t so sure. “We’d see their torches from a way out. Or, at the very least, the eyes of their helmets.”

  “Believe me, they don’t need torches or helmets. Their eyes are better than ours … just like everything else about them.”

  She pushed off from the wall with what looked like a great deal of reluctance. She did indeed appear to be flagging. It seemed that, given the choice, she would quite happily have sat down where she was and gone to sleep.

  “Well, we can’t stop around here,” Dodds said, motioning to the caved-in and partly collapsed buildings that stood about them. “It’s not safe.”

  “Safer than being out in the open,” Natalia said, with the same air of reluctance. He could hear the weariness in her voice. “Seriously, Dodds, I really need to eat something, too. I’m starving. A proper meal, I mean. Not just a bit of fruit.”

  Despite his wish to press on, Dodds found himself in agreement. After everything that had happened that day, he felt like he could sleep for a week. His feet, above all else, were sore and aching from the hours of walking. His boots felt all too tight – he actually couldn’t wait to get them off. Thinking back over all the day’s events, he could hardly believe what he’d been through in less than twenty-four hours. He had narrowly escaped death no less than three times – the invasion of Ifrit, the crash landing in the sled, and then the run-in with Zackaria. If Lady Luck had been favouring him recently, then she must surely soon be getting ready to depart. A rest would be good.

  He started forward. “If we look carefully enough, we might be able to find—”

  Natalia grabbed him tightly about the forearm. “Wait!” she hissed, pulling him back.

  Dodds turned to her in surprise, seeing the look of panic on her face. Moments later, he heard what sounded like the whirr of turbines. It was likely the cause of her distress.

  Natalia tugged again at his arm and the pair darted from the narrow street they had been walking down and into what remained of a tighter, narrower alleyway. There, they crushed themselves up against a wall, next to a line of overspilling rubbish dumpsters and black plastic sacks.

  Natalia pressed her lips up to Dodds’ ear, so close that he could feel the warmth of her breath. “Don’t make a sound. Don’t say a word. Don’t even whisper,” she murmured, her words almost inaudible.

  The sound of the turbines steadily increased and the two sunk down a little lower, as the origin of the noise made itself visible. From his position behind the wall of dumpsters, Dodds saw what looked like a flying motorcycle slide into view. Sat astride was a black-suited figure, a familiar-looking dark helmet resting upon their head. Two ruby-red eyes shone out of the mask, their glow feeling all the more eerie and sinister than ever before in the gloom of the night.

  The hovering vehicle wasn’t all that high off the ground, perhaps only five metres at most. A pair of bright lights pierced the darkness before it, illuminating the path that it patrolled. It moved slowly past the alley, the rider looking all about themself as they went.

  Dodds watched it go, daring to move nothing but his eyes as he did so. It passed by without incident. He felt the danger begin to pass. Moments later, his toes curled up as a second bike appeared, moving up behind the first. He had thought the noise from the engines was too much for a single vehicle! He hoped it would carry on straight after the first. He willed it to do so.

  Halfway across the mouth of the alley, it stopped. Dodds stiffened, his heart jumped. Natalia’s fingers wrapped tightly around his. The bike hovered at the entrance for a time, the rider looking down its length.

  What had he seen? Could he see their faces? Surely he couldn’t hear them breathing? Or perhaps his hearing was so acute that he had picked up on their heartbeats, which must now be thumping hard in unison. Dodds’ eyes darted about as he checked out his own surrounding. Aside from a number of rubbish bins and a scattering of sacks – some torn, with the contents scattered about in a small area – the alley was empty.

  Hell! If the rider had seen anything, then it was surely them. He tightened his hand around Natalia’s, preparing to spring up and make a bid to escape, the moment he saw the bike’s operator make a move for a gun. Unless, of course, those things they rode were already equipped with some sort of offensive weaponry. He made mental preparations to move; it was the only thing he could do …

  There was a rustle, and something suddenly scampered out from between the sacks, racing off down the alleyway, into the darkness. The rider’s head snapped about to follow it, the red eyes tracing the creature’s rapid and skittish movements along the dark passage. The scurrying thing was joined by another two, and the three darted away into the darkness, squeaking as they went. Rats! They must have been drawn to the stench of the litter and rubbish, emerging from their nests and hiding places earlier than normal, and plundering the sacks of wasted food as the city lay in silence, the usual deterrent of human voices and feet nowhere to be heard or seen.

  The rider sat for a time, watching them depart. Then, seeming satisfied, turned his attention away and starting off back in the direction he had been going.

  Dodds and Natalia both remained still and quiet where they were, until the sound of the bike’s engines had totally diminished. With the danger passed, Dodds exhaled as loud as he dared. It wasn’t the first time that they had been forced to hide from patrols during their journey through the city, but this had been by far the worst. It never became any easier either, every encounter a nerve-racking experience. Each time he had expected that they would be discovered – there would be a cry, a hail of fire would strike them as they tried to run … and that would be it.

  He felt Natalia shake at his hand.

  “You can let go now,” she said.

  “Sorry,” D
odds said, releasing her hand and grabbing up their food sack. “I just really bloody hate rats!”

  “Really?” Natalia sounded surprised.

  “Yeah. I can’t tell you how hard that was for me just now.”

  Natalia chuckled. “We were less than twenty metres from two Imperial soldiers on skybikes and you’re more scared of three little rats?”

  “Not scared, I just can’t stand the things! You’d always find them running around by the equipment sheds of my parents’ place. Most often early in the morning or late at night.”

  Natalia crept to the mouth of the alleyway, pausing as she took a careful look around before signalling the all-clear. “Well, I’ll make sure you’re not holding my hand the next time I see one,” she said as they emerged.

  “Some of them would even just drop out of the trees, directly in front of me. It was always the really big, fat ones, too – just like those three,” he said, nodding back down the alleyway. He noticed that Natalia still smiling. “Don’t tell me you actually like rats?”

  Natalia continued to smile.

  “You owned one, didn’t you?”

  Natalia shook her head. “No.”

  “Good.”

  “Two,” Natalia said, playfully raising two figures. “Cute little white ones, called Brad and Jan.”

  Dodds rolled his eyes. “Anyway, look – I think we should stop here. If they’ve been through here once already, then they probably won’t be coming back.”

  “True, but I wouldn’t put it past them.”

  Dodds nodded and surveyed the scene about them. After a while, he decided that it mattered little which of the buildings he chose for them to rest in. So long as they did not appear to be structurally unsafe, any would do.

  “Here,” he said, nodding to the building that joined the alleyway. He walked around to the front, stepping over the piles of shattered glass and pushed open the door. It appeared that the place had once served as a small café or restaurant, with a number of square tables and chairs dotting the ground floor. It was fairly dark, and the two ascended the stairs to the next floor, finding it lighter, if only by a little. It nevertheless served their needs and the two moved to the back, away from the huge gaping hole where the windows had once stood.