The Others

by Jay Allan

  “As you command, Highborn.” The Thrall, highly-ranked among his slave comrades, bowed no less obsequiously than those of lower positions. Then he returned to his station, snapping out his own orders to the other humans present in the control room.

  Hellerax turned toward the display, watching himself as the new contacts moved forward, directing his thoughts to the ship’s AI, commanding it to modify the scanning protocols. He remained committed to his directive, to interposing his force between the enemy fleet and its escape path. But he was troubled nevertheless about the strange behavior of the small group of enemy vessels. He reviewed the scans, analyzed the new information flowing in from the sensor arrays. For an instant, he imagined they weren’t ships at all, but instead some kind of massive missiles, placed as a trap to move against his ships as they passed by. But the readings all suggested standard vessel similar to the others deployed in the system. If anything, the newer contacts were less advanced, their energy readings weaker than the other ships in the system.

  He couldn’t make any case to himself to alter the plan, to interrupt his fleet’s flanking maneuver. If the three ships continued to approach, his fleet had more than enough firepower to destroy them, without deviating from the plan.

  But what are those smaller contacts?

  He watched as the clouds moved forward, advancing in front of the ships that had launched them. His first thought had been missiles, but scanner reports confirmed they carried no detectable quantities of antimatter. It was possible they were nuclear warheads of some sort, but he was confident his fleet’s defensive batteries could handle them if they approached.

  His conclusions made sense, and he believed they were correct. But he was still concerned.

  Then, he pulled his attention away. His ships were approaching their appointed positions…and the enemy fleet, now in wholesale retreat, was approaching.

  It was time to finish them. Time to make the victory complete.

  * * *

  “It’s been a year, but I know none of you have forgotten the fighting around Colossus. I know what you can do, what you have done, so I won’t waste words now. You are the best, the most elite squadrons in the fleet, and by extension, in all of human-occupied space. We’re outnumbered here, and outgunned, but I’ve been watching this whole fight, and beyond the handful of Hegemony fighters, I haven’t seen any other small craft. These bastards have savaged the Hegemony fleet, and they’re going to do the same to our own ships…unless we do something about it. You’ve all got full bomber hits, and double-warhead plasma torpedoes, so make them count. These ships are tough as hell, there’s no question about that. But, by God, so are we! So, follow me once again. Follow me into the fight!”

  Stockton pulled back on the throttle, feeding power to his engines. He had no idea what kind of point defense to expect, whether the way toward the approaching ships would be wide open…or if one order from the enemy fleet commander would unleashed a wave of deadly fire that wiped space clean of his squadrons. He thought about it for a second, and then he put it out of his mind. It didn’t matter. There was no choice. His people were going in anyway, and they’d know what they faced soon enough.

  He stared at his combat display, at the lines of enemy ships ahead of his wings. They hadn’t changed their alignment to react to Barron’s approaching attack.

  They probably don’t consider three ships a major threat.

  And that means, they haven’t seen Lightnings, or at least they don’t know what a few determined squadrons can do.

  He felt his blood rising, the heat of battle flowing through his body. He was older, wiser than he’d been years before, and he’d come to appreciate the tragic cost of battle. But deep in his soul, he was still an animal, a predator.

  A hunter.

  “We don’t know much about these ships, but we fought the Hegemony enough, and we saw how much trouble they’ve had here. This is a new enemy, the most powerful one we’ve ever faced. So, we’re going to do just what we do best. We’re going to take our Lightnings in, all the way in, and we’re going to plant these torpedoes into the guts of those ships. There’s something about them, something that throws off the scanners, so, let’s see how that works at a thousand kilometers, or five hundred. Or less. Because when I say close, I mean close.”

  Stockton wasn’t even sure what he was asking of his people was possible. But that had never stopped him before, and it damned sure wasn’t going to here, hundreds of lightyears from home. He didn’t know what kind of defenses the enemy had, but he hadn’t seen them launch any fighters in the battle, so he was willing to bet his squadrons would come as a surprise to them.

  Two hundred bombers weren’t a lot, not against the fleet looming ahead…but he had another eight hundred on the way, and two hundred of those were sitting in the bays, courtesy of his staged drill, just as Dauntless’s, Repulse’s, and Indomitable’s squadrons had been.

  He reached down, grabbed the throttle…and he blasted his ship at full thrust, knowing every one of his pilots would follow his lead. He looked again at his screen and then out of the front of the cockpit into the blackness of space.

  Stockton knew what was happening, where he was leading his pilots. Into another war, against a new enemy, one even darker, more powerful than the ones they had faced before. Barely a year of peace, and now it was gone, and along with it, the hopes of so many of his people.

  And the lives of the thousands who would almost certainly die in the war his attack was about to start.

  Even his own thoughts, of time with Stara, of living a life without wondering if each day would be his last, and seeing that same fear in her eyes…they were shattered as well.

  There was a part of him mourning, despondent over what was happening all around, but mostly, he found himself wishing he felt differently than he did, wondering what was wrong with him, what disconnect inside him drove the inexplicable thoughts taking control of him as his ship blasted hard toward the enemy, toward combat.

  He felt like he was back home.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Colossus

  Lyra System

  Year 322 AC

  “You can’t be serious, Admiral.” Sonya Eaton stared back at Winters with an expression that suggested she was looking at a man with two heads. “There must be someone else, someone senior to me…someone better qualified.”

  “No one I trust as much as I do you, Sonya.” Winters stood a meter from the flustered officer. He was telling the truth. He did trust her, and she’d proven her abilities again and again. But Winters was trying to make his point without mentioning that the fleet’s pool of senior officers had been badly depleted by years of war. That was an unpleasant enough topic under any circumstances, but the last promising member of the high command to be killed had been her sister.

  Sara Eaton had been he navy’s rising star, the officer in the group just under Barron and Winters most likely to succeed one day to the top command. But the last war had claimed her, as it had Van Striker and so many others, and it now it fell to her younger sister to fill her shoes.

  “But, Admiral…”

  “The decision’s been made, Captain…though it’s no longer Fleet Captain Eaton, I’m afraid. Admiral Barron and I discussed this even before he left, and I’m afraid your command of something like Colossus makes it a virtual necessity. Your stars will be delivered to your quarters tomorrow, but for now, you’ll have to take my word for it, Commodore Eaton.” Winters extended his hand, and a stunned Sonya Eaton just stared at it for a good ten seconds before reaching out and grasping it.

  “I don’t know what to say, Admiral. I’m…”

  “Don’t say anything. You earned this position, and even more, you earned the trust Admiral Barron and I have in you. This feels like a reward now, but you may feel differently when we’re fifty systems coreward, and you’re sitting in the middle of the biggest target in the fleet. I only have limited information, but based on what Tyler sent me, this war is
going to be nasty, far worse than any we’ve fought before, if you can wrap your head around that. We’re going to need the best every one of us has to give…and not all of us are going to make it back. If any of us do. And you’ll be commanding the one ship we don’t really know how to operate. So, hold back the thanks, at least for now. You’ll have Anya Fritz, and the team the Hegemony sent out to offer technical support, but you’re still going to have one hell of a job on your hands.”

  “I’ll do everything I can, Admiral. I won’t let you down.”

  “I know you won’t, and so does Admiral Barron. That’s why you got this command. Just do your best, it’s all any of us has to offer.”

  “Yes, Admiral. I will.”

  Winters nodded, and then he managed to smile, a skinny, haunting sort of grin. “One year of peace, Sonya. One year. We’ve barely licked our wounds, and we’re not even close to replacing our losses…and it looks like another war has found us. Another enemy. One we know almost nothing about.”

  “That’s okay, Admiral. We’ll do what we have to do, as we’ve always done.” There was defiance in her tone, strength. But Winters knew it was almost certainly fake.

  As fake as his own.

  * * *

  “I just wanted to tell you, we’re all proud to have you in command, Commodore. We couldn’t have a more worthy officer in charge…especially with us heading coreward, and possibly into battle.” Anya Fritz stood in front of Eaton, and her words dripped with sincerity, even though the engineer was also a commodore, and one whose commission bore the earlier date. Frtiz technically outranked Eaton, at least when they were off Colossus. But the sparkling new commodore held the ship command, and with it, domain over everyone onboard. The official status of such an interpretation was a fact of no particular significance, however. Anya Fritz’s rank was symbolic of her status, of all she’d done. But it was largely superfluous. The engineer had never expressed the slightest interest in commanding anything except her teams of sweating technicians.

  “Thank you, Commodore Fritz. I’m hoping you can bring me to speed on developments onboard. From what I’ve heard, you’ve made considerable progress.” Eaton could see the power in Fritz’s expression, the strength in her posture. The engineer almost radiated an aura of pure determination.

  Eaton knew Fritz was unlikely to do anything besides work her magic to keep Colossus operating, and Eaton was grateful for that fact. But if Fritz ever stepped out of her bounds as head of the engineering team, Eaton doubted she could face down the legendary officer. Eaton was tough, herself, one who’d served alongside some of the Confederation’s very best, but Anya Fritz was a force of nature.

  Eaton was grateful they were on the same side. And there was no one in the Confederation she’d rather have crawling around the almost endless guts of the massive warship, conflicting ranks or not.

  “We have made progress, Commodore Eaton.” A pause, and a sour look on Fritz’s face. “The Hegemony team has been of…considerable…assistance.”

  Eaton didn’t imagine the sentence she’d just uttered was the most difficult thing Eaton had ever done. But it sounded very much like it was close.

  “That is not surprising, Anya…who even knows how many years they spent restoring it, and the newer tech in it is theirs, not ours. I have no doubt you’d have managed everything yourself, but right now, we need every shortcut we can get. Admiral Winters is already out at Dannith with the fleet, and we’ve got to follow as quickly as possible. I think our fleet is going to need everything it can get to win this fight.

  Or even to survive it…

  “I think you’re right, Sonya…and there’s no question, Colossus is the strongest thing we’ve got. The strongest thing the Hegemony’s got, too.” A pause. “With any luck, we’ll be able to set out for the Badlands in a month, maybe a bit sooner.”

  Eaton had been hoping to get started more quickly, but she realized that had never been realistic. She just nodded.

  Fritz stood quietly for a moment, and then she said, “It did help having the Hegemony team here, but we’re going to need even more from them. If Colossus is going to fight a war for us, Admiral Barron’s going to have to get more from our new…allies…than a few engineers. We can fly out there on fusion power, but when this thing goes into battle, we’re going to start burning through antimatter…and if we don’t want to turn this massive warship into a toothless floating hull, the Hegemony is going to have to give us more.”

  Fritz was silent for a moment before she continued.

  “A lot more.”

  * * *

  “The fleet will move out at once, Commander. All ships, full thrust to the number two transit point.” Winters sat in Victory’s command chair, looking out over the flagship’s staff. The battleship was the newest in the fleet, the largest and most powerful vessel ever launched from a Confederation shipyard. It was also one of the small number of active ships that was not a veteran of the recent war. Her launch had been barely three months before, and her workstations and corridors were still almost blindingly new and bright.

  The ship had enhanced primaries built into her hull from scratch, weapons considerably more powerful than the patch jobs that had been crammed into the fleet’s existing line ships. She carried an extra reactor as well, a triple fusion unit larger than anything the Confederation had built before on a movable hull, and a resource that cut a full thirty seconds from the recharge time of her main batteries. She was the best in the fleet—save, of course, for Colossus—and the natural choice for a flagship. Winters hadn’t really thought twice about using her as such, though he’d thought for a passing moment that he would turn the ship over to Barron when the fleet linked up with the admiral’s advance force.

  Then he realized, with a bit of a grin, he probably couldn’t pry Barron out of Dauntless with a crowbar.

  And she’s not even the real Dauntless, at least not as far as he sees it…

  Winters was still a little surprised the Senate had approved a new war, that they had sent him coreward with broad new powers for Barron. That had all been Andi, of course, and he couldn’t help but be relieved—and amused—at how thoroughly she’d outpaced both him and Gary Holsten in efficiency. Winters had been ready to engage in outright mutiny, even to send Marines into the Senate chambers to force a vote at gunpoint. And he could only imagine the threats and blackmail that had spawned from Gary Holsten’s dirty little collection of files.

  But in the end, it had only taken one pregnant woman with the audacity to address the entire Confederation, to rouse the people behind one of their own, one of the few revered as a genuine hero on every planet in every system. Tyler Barron had inherited a beloved old name, and his own actions had only polished it further. Andi had recognized that, and she’d gone to the people, not as one of the most dangerous women alive, not as the warrior who’d killed Ricard Lille, but looking sad and desperate, asking for the men and women of the Confederation to rise up behind their hero, to leave the Senate no choice, no room for dirty political wrangling.

  And she’d made sure the camera angles left no doubt she was carrying Tyler’s child.

  Winters imagined the general consensus was that Andi had been lucky to marry into a dynasty like the Barrons. She’d come from nothing, less than nothing, and most of her career had been disreputable to a certain extent at least, and obscured in the shadows.

  But Clint Winters knew the more complex truth. Tyler Barron was pretty damned lucky, too, and Winters himself was fortunate to have them both as his friends.

  He sat quietly, and thought about Andi, stuck home, out of the action for once, probably for the first time in her life. For all the dangers she’d faced, all the enemies she’d fought, he knew this would be her greatest challenge in many ways.

  There wasn’t much he could do about any of that, about the deadly dangers all his people faced, or the frustrations Andi would have to endure. But he promised himself one thing.

  He would make sure Bar
ron survived the war, see that he made it back to his wife, to the child he didn’t even know was on the way. He would do that whatever it took. Somehow.

  Whatever the cost to him.

  Chapter Forty

  CFS Dauntless

  Ettara-Mordlin System

  Year 322 AC

  The Battle of Pharsalon – “To Forge an Alliance”

  Barron stared straight ahead, trying to decide who was crazier, him or Jake Stockton. He was leading three battleships in a reckless charge against a whole enemy fleet.

  But Stockton was out in front, taking just over two hundred bombers into the teeth of that same fleet, with no idea whatsoever what kind of defenses the enemy had against small craft.

  The only excuse either of them had was that they were well positioned to take the enemy ships from the rear. It was an advantage, but a fleeting one, and if Barron waited for the rest of the fleet to transit back, it would be lost.

  Besides, the best he could figure, the rest of his ships would reach engagement range just about the same time as Chrono’s retreating forces did on the other end. Atara and Dauntless’s AI agreed with his calculations as well. Without help, the Hegemony fleet would be torn apart, hit from two directions as they fled, and the only thing he could do to mitigate that was throw what he did have into the fight.

  Immediately.

  He slid around in his seat, his shirt matted to his back by sweat. It had only been a year since he’d been in battle, and he’d spent the last several months planning and expecting a fight. But now that it had come, he felt rusty, a little uncomfortable. How much of that was normal nerves before a battle, and how much concern over the consequences of his completely unauthorized and illegal actions, he had no idea.