Rebellion at Ailon

by T J Mott

  “What’s this about?” asked Abram accusingly. He checked behind himself, clearly noticing the open and unguarded back door to the room, and turned back to the newcomers. He was tense, his eyes open wide in shock as if his thoughts ran in parallel to Thad’s.

  Sal blinked nervously, and Thad struggled to decipher his expression. “I think Messier understands the cost of the Marcell incident far more than you give him credit for,” Sal answered.

  “And why would you think that?” Abram asked pointedly, his voice elevated again.

  “Because,” Sal said, now eyeing Thad suspiciously, “Chad Messier is Thaddeus Marcell.”

  The room fell into complete silence. Thad’s heart seemed to skip a few beats and he felt a sudden shot of adrenaline. Beside him, Poulsen shuffled uneasily. He stole a glance at her, seeing that she had tensed up and moved about halfway into a defensive posture.

  But Abram laughed. “Sal, Marcell would be a complete fool to come here, and we’d never be so lucky.” He eyed the squad suspiciously, as if still wondering if they were there for him. “But I am in favor of arresting Messier. He may have some kind of connection to Marcell, and when this war is over we can use Messier to locate him.”

  “I’ve been trying to find out more about Messier for quite some time now,” Sal said, sounding slightly sad, his eyes warily tracking Thad. “He’s quite a mystery, and until recently I couldn’t find anything. But after we identified the Lynx, I decided to do more research on Marcell, and I found an interesting article about him. About a year ago, he was captured and offered up to his enemies at some kind of auction at that big casino in the Cadria Minor system.”

  “Yes, I recall that,” Abram responded. “We sent some of our own people there as observers. And to kill him if possible, but he escaped before they had a chance.”

  Sal nodded. “Yes. So I re-read their reports. And this time, one detail jumped out at me.” Sal pointed a finger towards Thad. “During his time in Cadria Minor, Marcell’s left arm was amputated, just below the elbow.”

  Thad shuddered as his eyes followed Sal’s finger. It was pointed directly at his left arm. His robotic forearm and hand, which had replaced his flesh-and-blood one after it had been summarily cut off during that auction at the Cadrian Casino, right in front of the entire crowd of onlookers and bidders. Apparently, Thad’s actions as a pirate had disabled an elderly woman’s son, and the laws of her world called for amputation of a hand as punishment. And when she’d explained it to the crowd, the crowd had enthusiastically supported it. He opened and closed his metal fist almost subconsciously.

  “Chad Messier has an injury that matches Thaddeus Marcell’s and seems to have happened at about the same time. And a Marcellian starship responded to his call for reinforcements.” Thad struggled to keep his expression passive as Sal suddenly locked eyes with him. “I don’t think he put out a general call for mercenaries, like he told us. I think he called his own men. That was why he was so confident about it.” Sal glanced at Poulsen. “I’d place a bet that Ghost Squadron actually works for him, too.”

  Abram’s expression went from amused to disturbed in a flash.

  Thaddeus stole a look at Poulsen. She looked wound up like a tightly-coiled spring, ready to fight off everyone in the room. There is no way we can fight them all off if this turns violent. We need to avoid that. He shook his head at her slightly, and felt a flood of sadness. If the Ailonians suddenly dealt with him for his crimes, that was one thing, but Poulsen was innocent. She didn’t deserve to share his fate. He didn’t think she’d even been part of the Organization yet when he’d attacked the Ailonian convoy.

  “Well?” Rhena said, glaring at Thad apprehensively.

  Thaddeus sighed deeply and unclenched his fists, extending his open hands to his sides as a show of compliance. “It’s true,” he admitted. “I am he.” He paused, and the room fell back into silence. No one moved, which surprised him. He’d half-expected Abram to lose control and assault him, or for the squad to immediately take him into custody. But everyone stood still, ready and watching and tensed up, obviously unsure how things would play out. “First, I offer no defense for my pirate raid in the last war. It was wrong, and since coming here, I’ve seen how destructive my actions were to this world. Second, I’m here with a starship squadron and enough of my own troops to tilt the war back in your favor if you’ll allow it. I give you my word that I am on your side.”

  “How can we take the word of a pirate and murderer?” Abram scoffed. “After what you’ve already done to us? You’re guilty of the blood of thousands of Ailonian slaves! Or do you expect us to simply forget that?”

  Thad shook his head solemnly. “No. I can’t expect you to forget.”

  Abram swiftly moved towards the other Council members, joining them behind their protective guard. “Take him into custody,” he ordered. “Marcell will be executed for his crimes against humanity in the last war. And you,” he said, sneering at Poulsen, “if you want to avoid execution, you will take command of his forces here and finish the war. If you fail, you’ll join him.”

  Four of the Rebel fighters raised their weapons, pointing them at Thaddeus as they began to approach him. The other fighters also raised their weapons, but remained in guard position around the Council. “Stop!” Rhena exclaimed, startling Thaddeus by the uncharacteristic ferocity in her tone, and his would-be arrestors halted, still aiming their lasers at him. Rhena turned to Abram. “The rest of the Council has already discussed this matter while you were out playing soldier. And the ugly truth is that we need Marcell’s help! Without him we’ll lose the war, and our re-enslavement will be even worse than before!”

  “What if he betrays us?” Abram shouted back. “What if he’s just here to finish the job he started four years ago?”

  “If he intends to betray us somehow,” Rhena continued, “then we’ve already lost and there’s nothing more we can do! We’re out of options! Our only realistic chance at survival is to trust him! As unpleasant as that is.”

  “This is outrageous!” Abram bellowed, his face red with rage and his body quivering. “Ailon’s worst enemy has walked right into our midst, and we’ve caught him, and you want to ally with him!” He glared laser beams at Thad, tensing up and balling his fists, and took a step forward. Poulsen suddenly stepped in front of Thad where she could easily intercept Abram, who sized her up and stopped his approach. “This Council has routinely sided with him against me, despite my history of military leadership! And now we know that he’s Thaddeus Marcell, and you continue to side with him! It’s clear this Council no longer has Ailon’s interests in mind, and it’s as good as dead to me now!” Then, abruptly, Abram shouted an expletive and left the room.

  Thaddeus took one step to the side so he could see past Poulsen and lock eyes with Rhena. She looked uncertain and afraid. “What would the Council have me do?” he asked her.

  Her eyes hardened, glaring at him with a cold fury he’d never seen in her before. “Marcell, win this war.”

  Thad nodded. “Rhena, I’m sure things just got very difficult for you. I’m sorry. For all the trouble I’ve caused. But I promise, I’ll do everything I can to help Ailon. I really am on your side.”

  No one responded and the room suddenly felt very cold. All eyes were on him. Some looked accusing, some angry, some shocked, some betrayed. Now they were only trusting him out of sheer desperation, and as soon as that necessity was gone, he knew he’d have no allies here. He felt his mouth go dry. Yes, Thaddeus Marcell was that hated by the Ailonians, even after he’d proved himself while masquerading on the front lines, fighting for Ailonian freedom as Chad Messier. All the favor he’d worked up among them was gone, in an instant, his recent good works completely overshadowed by that one dark moment in his past.

  He gestured at Poulsen and the two left the room together, moving slowly and deliberately with their hands spread out in a non-aggressive posture. Nobody moved to stop them. As they carefully stepped around the group of arm
ed Rebels, he felt the adrenaline start to fade, and now he felt weary and drained. His body began to tremble and feel weak. But as they stepped through the door into the dark hallway beyond, Thaddeus saw a sight that made his blood instantly freeze.

  A few meters outside the door—the open door where anyone could have listened in on everything that had just happened—was Ria.

  She was on her knees on the concrete floor, completely rigid and unmoving, staring at the open door that the two mercenaries had just walked through. One hand covered her mouth, which hung wide open in pained shock beneath red eyes and tear-soaked cheeks. She sat completely still.

  He took a careful step forward, and she made no indication that she saw him, her eyes remaining fixated, staring straight forward into infinity.

  “Ria,” he said carefully. “I’m so sorry. I really am.” She still didn’t move, not even the slightest. She stayed wordless and silent, frozen in place. It was almost as if she wasn’t really there. Catatonic.

  And as he and Poulsen continued on, he actually felt some minor relief. Now she understood why they couldn’t be together. Now, hopefully, she’d let him go.

  And hopefully she doesn’t follow through on that threat to kill me.

  Chapter 39

  “Commander Poulsen, the comm unit we assigned to the Rebel Council has just come online.”

  “Great,” she answered as she took her seat at Ghost 1’s piloting station. Her lead gunship had had a stockpile of military-grade Imperial comm units which had far better range and clarity than the quirky radios the Rebels had been using, and so she’d made the decision to provide a number of them to the Rebels for the remainder of the war. “Add them to the channel.”

  “Open.”

  “Council, this is Ghost 1.”

  “Ghost 1, we copy,” replied Rhena’s voice, sounding from the bridge speakers as clearly as if she was in the same room.

  “Here’s the plan,” Poulsen continued. “I’m going to deal with that railgun. Once it’s out of commission, we’ll begin landing Marines.”

  “I want to end this as quickly as possible,” Admiral Marcell cut in on the channel. “I’ll work to get some Rebels in position for a strike on the Capitol, but we’ll wait to attack until you can land Marines at our location to reinforce us.”

  “Copy,” she said as she eyed her instruments. “Systems check?”

  “Everything looks good to me,” said Clauncy, her copilot. Exira, the ship’s engineer and First Officer, added his agreement from his station near the back of the bridge.

  “Go ahead and patch in the entire squadron to this channel,” Poulsen ordered as she fired the gunship’s maneuvering thrusters. Behind her, in the aft section of the starship, the reactor’s pitch and volume increased. Outside, the ground began to move away. She set an altitude lock at twenty meters, keeping Ghost 1 low so the railgun remained just below the horizon and cityscape.

  “Ghost 1, Lynx. Our Marine transports are loaded and preflighted, awaiting your launch order.”

  “Ghost 1, Ghost 2. Flight 1 is beginning re-entry now. We’ll be at your position in ten minutes.”

  Poulsen switched one of her displays to a tactical map and began tapping on it, setting a few waypoints and markers that were automatically broadcast to the rest of the squadron. “Negative, do not converge on Ghost 1. I want the flight to converge on the railgun. We’ll all approach from different vectors.” That way it can only shoot at one of us at a time, she thought, wary of how risky a direct attack like this was. But it had to be done. That surface-to-space railgun was the only obstacle to achieving perfect air superiority and landing Marcell’s Marines. Like with most ground wars, the key to victory was the surrounding airspace.

  Minutes later, the four remaining gunships of Flight 1 hovered in a circle around the railgun some three klicks out from the railgun, floating twenty meters above the ground where the gun couldn’t quite see them. Poulsen’s heart thudded in her chest. Once they approached any further, there wouldn’t be enough planetary curvature left to protect them, and it could open fire.

  She gritted her teeth. She’d already lost one gunship and its entire crew to the gun, and she was dreading writing letters to the families and friends of Ghost 3’s crew. But this is war, and that’s what happens in war. Even for mercenaries who are detached from the cause and only care about credits, like us. Once again, she thought back to her teen years among the Hyberian Raiders, remembering how much bitterness she’d held towards her brother for keeping her out of the action. Now she understood. Even an elite group like the Hyberians—often considered the best merc group to have ever existed, although as an insider Poulsen believed their reputation was incredibly overblown—took losses during missions. How could Ian Poulsen, having already lost his parents to an accident, ever put his overeager little sister in harm’s way? And now she in a similar position, putting her gunship crews in certain danger.

  “Keep a close eye on the gun’s tracking. If it’s aiming at you, go evasive. Everyone else, get in close and open fire. The gun moves very swiftly. But I think if we get within five hundred meters, we can outpace it. All units, I want full-strength sensor jamming directed straight at the gun.”

  “Jammers active. Commander, they may not need sensors, we’ll be in visual range.”

  She nodded. “It’s better than nothing, though.” Resting her hands on the sidestick and throttle, she took a deep breath and steeled herself to charge straight into a powerful railgun. “Flight 1, ready?”

  “Ghost 2, we’re ready.”

  “4, standing by.”

  “Ghost 5, standing by.”

  “Go! Go! Go! And good luck!” She hesitated, just for a fraction of a second, remembering their practice skirmish where the new squadron had completely fallen apart without her leadership. Scowling, she shoved the throttle forward. Ghost 1 accelerated, feeling sluggish compared to her practice simulator runs back on Headquarters due to its downsized thrusters. At least the helium tanks were empty.

  Moments later, the railgun came over the horizon. It looked very much like an astronomical observatory, but instead of a telescope sticking out of the building’s armored dome, it had a thirty-meter-long pair of hardened alloy rails wrapped in nonconductive and nonmagnetic struts, braces, and coolant pipes. Firing immediately, it launched a high-velocity slug that moved so quickly that from Poulsen’s vantage point it appeared to be a white laser beam, crossing the distance instantly. It flashed over and to port, and since she was still alive and nobody was calling out damage reports, she assumed it missed.

  She put on a burst of lateral thruster power, sliding the gunship to starboard and away from the railgun’s point of aim, hoping she could stay ahead of it as it swiveled to track her. The view outside tilted slightly from uneven drag forces. Although the gunship was capable of operating in an atmosphere, it wasn’t really designed or tuned for it. In the back of her mind, she wondered if Blue Fleet engineers could come up with an alternative thruster tuning that worked better in air and gravity.

  The railgun was rapidly growing larger outside as Ghost 1 continued its approach. Her gunners opened fire, spitting laser beams at the emplacement as the turret continued to track her. Poulsen felt a bead of sweat form on her forehead. She had no idea how long it took the gun to cycle, but if it was like any starship-based railgun, it would be firing about—

  Anticipating, she slammed on the maneuvering thrusters and rocked her gunship towards port, instantly reversing the ship’s lateral movement. And a split second later, the gun fired again, spitting a white-hot slug that passed just meters to starboard this time, right through the space her gunship had occupied just milliseconds ago.

  “The emplacement’s hardened!” her WSO reported. “Our lasers can’t break through the dome. We need to hit at the barrel, but it’s so small we can’t do that through our own jamming unless you give us a stable platform!”

  “I can’t give you a stable platform while it’s shooting at us!” she r
etorted. “Flight 1, did you catch that? Aim at the barrel structure!”

  “Commander Poulsen, that last slug hit a ten-story structure behind us. Based on Rebel information, I think it was a slave dormitory.”

  She felt a sudden shot of cold inject into her stomach. “Damage?” she asked.

  “Complete collapse. Most of Orent’s buildings are made of a cheap concrete-polymer mixture. It isn’t shock-resistant. The impact crumbled the entire structure into powder, along with a number of smaller buildings behind it along the slug’s trajectory.”

  She hissed in anger. She’d hoped that by staying low, the gun would hesitate to fire. But apparently the Avennians were not concerned about collateral damage. How many of their slaves had just died?

  Ten stories was about thirty meters, she estimated. Glancing at the cityscape outside, she didn’t see anything that seemed much taller than that. “Flight 1, increase altitude to fifty meters!”

  “Aye, Commander!”

  Nudging Ghost 1 to a higher altitude, she looked outside and saw that the gun was no longer tracking her. It had changed targets, swiveling ninety degrees to follow Ghost 4, which, due to its powerful Mark V thrusters had approached far more quickly than Ghost 1. “Ghost 4, go evasive!”

  An ear-splitting series of alarms sounded in quick sequence. Poulsen recognized the sound, but couldn’t recall the meaning. She was too busy piloting. “What the hell was that!?” she shouted in annoyance.

  “Phi-band alarms, six—no, seven starships just dropped out of hyperspace three light-seconds away from the planet!”

  “Laraby, you’re in charge up there,” she ordered. “Gunners, stand by. I’ll get us a little closer and slow down so you have a clear shot.”

  The railgun, now pointed somewhere to her right, fired again. She swiveled her head to follow the shot. Two klicks away, the slug hit its target. A brilliant flash of light engulfed Ghost 4, replaced in a heartbeat by a cloud of dust and smoke and pulverized armor. She spat out an expletive and watched in dread as the gunship’s remains rapidly lost altitude and plowed into the ground, tearing through a long line of buildings and kicking up a massive cloud of dust hundreds of meters in length.