by M. G. Herron
Two mechanics darted under Casey’s Sabre. The wheel chocks were removed and diagnostic cables unplugged. She felt the encumbrances being shed as if the starfighter was her second skin.
“Raptor out, throttle’s coming up. Checking cabin pressure…” Casey rattled off her checklist, confirming fuel reserves, controls, weapons and emergency systems. “Ready?”
“You’re a go,” said flight control.
She rested her helmet back against the seat and took a deep breath. Her heartbeat quickened in her chest, as it always did on the runway. The Sabre rocketed forward, pressing her into the seat as her starfighter launched from the hangar. “Whoo!” She guided the plane through the blue-tinted atmospheric shield and into space at speed. “Yeah!”
Flight control chuckled.
It felt damn good to be back in the cockpit. Especially after the invasive medical examination that left her feeling filthy and violated. They had found no sign of parasitic infection in her, or in Yorra, who cleared the hangar behind her. Park was still recovering in the sick bay. He briefly returned to consciousness before they left, but he didn’t have his wits about him. The medics said his condition was still touch-and-go, and she was glad to leave him in capable hands. Casey, herself, felt less than useless sitting bedside vigil. That sort of job wasn’t for her.
This was.
She banked left and soared over the Mammoth fleet, which had begun to spread apart as they prepared to jump into hyperspace. A welcome crew would be waiting for them on Ariadne, ready to transfer the civilians into the refugee camps, and begin the process of relocating them to other, safer colony worlds.
Yorra’s starfighter came abreast of her. They did a quick run around the Mammoth fleet together. Finding no threats in their visual field or on lidar, they veered toward Robichar.
In the distance between Robichar and the unnamed gas giant it orbited, small pops and flashes of light could be seen. It reminded Casey of a far-away fireworks show, or maybe a fraught press hearing where the reporters were clamoring forward with rapidly firing cameras. In reality, she knew that starfighter squadrons had begun to engage the Kryl hive in battle. The floating mines had delayed their progress, but that had merely been a diversion, a way to buy the admiral time to get any remaining civilians off planet and into the Mammoths. The best defense is a good offense, as her father used to say. He and Admiral Miyaru would have gotten along swimmingly.
Casey fought down the urge to redirect her flight path and join the battle. She wondered, briefly, if her father and the admiral had known each other during the Kryl War. Had they fought together? He’d never mentioned anyone named Kira or Miyaru, and the Empire was a vast place, with many fronts of the war being waged against the Kryl. It’s possible they had never met. But Casey sensed that he would have approved of her approach.
Whether Inquisitor Osprey would have approved of his daughter’s actions…. Well. He would certainly have something to say about foolish emotional attachments and risking your neck for no damn reason. But he wasn’t here now, and she could do without the guilt trip. Her mind was made up and the admiral had approved it. Nothing to do now but get the job done. And fast, before the Kryl broke through and started landing more than advance forces on Robichar.
“Gears, listen up. We’re to rendezvous with the Search and Rescue team, retrieve our missing pilot and then get back into the fight as fast as we can.”
“Roger that.”
She knew the plan, of course. And it was just the two of them. But old habits dug deep grooves, and the briefing gave Casey something to hold onto.
“Captain.” Yorra hesitated. “What if we don't find him, sir?”
Casey glanced one more time at the distant fireworks. The flashes of light seemed so harmless from here, but she knew that up close, her comrades were dying in blazes of superheated fury. They had hundreds of starfighters, yet every precious life lost was a tragedy.
She brushed a finger over the trigger on her control stick.
There would be time to use that later. She lifted her itching finger and began the descent to Robichar.
“We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. Let’s go.”
They came down over a mountain range and linked up with the Search and Rescue team. Three Sabres had been flying a grid pattern in search of Nevers.
“Match frequencies.” Seconds later, she and Yorra were on the same broadbeam channel as the SAR pilots.
“Hail, Furies,” the leader of the SAR team said as he rocked his jet from side to side, waving at her with his wings. “This is Major Antonin speaking.”
“Any luck finding our missing pilot, sir?”
“Negative, Captain. We found his scuttled Sabre quickly, and it seems like he got away safe, but there hasn’t been any sign of him since. We traced his tightbeam signal when it appeared, but have not yet received visual confirmation of the target or the cube.”
Casey frowned. That was worrisome. Anything that separated Nevers from his cube—his lifeline—had to have been not just important, but life threatening.
“Take us to it.”
“Roger. Follow us.”
They reached the end of the mountain range and turned sharply to come back. They flew out over a luscious valley carpeted with trees and passed the spaceport. The launch pad still showed blast marks, but debris had been cleared from the runway and piled to both sides.
“This must be where the shuttle exploded,” Casey said to Yorra on a private channel.
“Freaky, Cap.”
Casey had to agree. There were no people left now, giving the scarred, barren landscape an apocalyptic countenance.
Major Antonin’s voice cut back into their conversation. “Signal’s coming from that ridgeline.”
“Copy that,” Casey said. ”Have you conducted a search on foot?”
“Negative. We were just getting to that when you arrived.”
“We’ll take the lead on the ground if you want to continue aerial recon?”
“Copy. Can do.”
Sabres were uniquely designed to alight in hostile territory without need of a runway, for emergency landings on small space stations or remote asteroids. You had to be a fine hand with the balance, but Casey and Yorra had lots of practice. It was, after all, how Yorra had gotten her call sign, “Gears.” The memory of the lieutenant destroying three sets of landing gears made her smile. She had no such issues this time. They set their Sabres down on top of the ridgeline near the reported source of the tightbeam signal without incident.
The cube could be anywhere within a couple hundred meters. It was strange how bare the ridgeline was. There were no people in sight, certainly no sign of Nevers and no sign of a cube either. Casey popped the canopy of her cockpit and hopped down onto the grass. After checking her suit’s parameters—standard operating procedure; she knew this planet’s atmosphere to be breathable but her training went deep—she unsealed her helmet with a soft hiss and shook her chin-length bangs out of her eyes.
Yorra jumped down from her craft and removed her helmet as well. Her glistening black hair had been tied up in a bun.
“Where the hell is the cube?”
“Signal’s coming from around here somewhere. Let's split up. You search that way, I'll go this way.”
Anxiety formed a knot at the pit of Casey’s stomach as they scoured the rocky ridgeline. After pacing the area for several minutes, neither Yorra nor Casey had managed to locate it. She radioed back to the Major using the comm in her Sabre. “Major Antonin, is it possible that you got the location wrong?”
“Negative,” he said “The signal is coming from your location.”
“Could it be a false reading? Interference from one of the communications arrays at that spaceport?”
“Unlikely, Captain. Signal’s definitely coming from your area.”
Casey frowned and cast her eyes out across the ridgeline.
Yorra was still searching. She cocked her head as she stared at a pile of stones. There was a lot of loo
se rock up here. Lieutenant Yorra kicked a couple aside then bent down and lifted a stained and battered cube out of the pile. “Found it.”
Her voice didn’t sound excited. The hard knot in Casey’s stomach fell out into a pit of dread.
She joined Yorra at the pile of stones and picked through it, expecting to find Captain Nevers’ body. They found no body—to her relief.
If his cube is here and Nevers isn’t, where did he go?
Together, they examined the cube. It was battered and dented, but these things were made out of aluminite, the strongest man-made metal alloy in the known universe. It obviously had been damaged, and not merely by Nevers’ crash landing. Some of the tiny dents looked like they might even have come from gunshots. She recognized the burn scar from a blaster rifle, and even a couple dents that looked like they came from high-powered projectiles, maybe one of the gauss rifles favored by drop troopers and special forces? Those scars alone told her more about what Nevers had been through in the past day than anything they’d heard so far.
“This got ugly,” Yorra said.
“Someone didn’t want us to find it, either. They must have hidden the cube up here after they realized they couldn’t destroy it.”
“So what do we do now? How do we find Nevers if he doesn’t have the cube? He could be anywhere.”
Casey slowly shook her head. If he doesn’t have the cube, he’s as good as dead. But she wasn’t ready to give up on him yet. “We take the cube and we keep looking.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“If someone stashed the cube up here, that means Nevers isn’t the only person left on Robichar.”
And if Nevers wasn’t alone, that meant—in spite of the apocalyptic landscape around the spaceport—there were still people here. People who would be slaughtered when the Kryl hive landed.
Admiral Miyaru considered the evacuation complete. And yet, here was evidence that people had been left behind. Why had they refused to evacuate? Or had they simply not been able to get to the spaceport in time? The latter seemed unlikely, considering how much advance notice the Empire had given the colony.
Casey took the cube to her Sabre and locked it safely inside, then used her comms to report what they’d found back to Major Antonin.
“Smells fishy,” he said.
Yorra made a thoughtful sound. “If I’m Captain Nevers and I crash-land just a few klicks from the spaceport, that’s where I would go first. It’s the most logical destination.”
“But if he made it there,” Casey said, “he would have been able to make contact with the Fleet. Maybe even fly up with the last shuttle. As far as we know, he didn’t.” She remembered the apocalyptic landscape littered with debris from the shuttle that exploded. Had he been on it? “When did that shuttle go down?”
“Around the same time as Nevers arrived.”
“Okay… let’s assume he wasn’t on the shuttle. If he lands near the spaceport, he probably saw the shuttle get shot down. Then what does he do?”
“I don’t know, Captain,” Major Antonin said.“It took almost a full day before we got any reading on his cube’s tightbeam signal. We were also having comms problems with our broadbeam systems. We kept having to fly back up to ten thousand feet to talk to each other.”
“So he can’t go to the spaceport and his cube won’t connect. The first thing he’d do is try to make contact, surely.”
“You’d think.”
“Major, are there any other spaceports nearby?”
“Not on this side of the moon. You’d have to fly due south for an hour to reach the nearest one.”
Casey did some mental math. That was about a third of the way around the small moon’s surface. On foot, Nevers never would have risked a journey of that distance, if he even knew where it was.
“Major, where else can you find a comms system on Robichar? Did you see anything in your search?”
“There are a couple old bases built by the original colonists. Prefab buildings and such. There’s probably a comms array there.”
Casey and Yorra got back into their Sabres and zoomed skyward. It didn’t take long to find the compound.
“That’s new,” Major Antonin said. “The comms array wasn’t damaged like that last time we flew over.”
Casey glanced down. Blast marks scarred the land here the same way they had at the spaceport. The only difference was, this base was occupied by Kryl. The place crawled with groundlings. More than she’d ever seen in one place, except in old war footage on the holovids her father kept on a shelf near his medals and memento displays.
Using her Sabre’s cameras, she zoomed in on the communications array—no longer operational. It had been slagged and then partially grown over with Kryl membrane.
“It must be Nevers. He figured out what was jamming the signal and destroyed it.” Hope rekindled in her chest, a small guttering flame. “Couldn’t have gone far. Keep searching.”
“The admiral said to return to Fleet once we had the cube.”
Ignoring him, Casey streaked out over the valley, using the Sabre’s infrared capabilities to search below the thick canopy for any sign of life.
“You can go if you want, Major. I’m not leaving the planet without my pilot.”
Silence on the line.
“Are you going to help me or not?”
“Hold, Captain.”
More silence.
The background tone of the comms changed as Major Antonin’s line was replaced with another. Only one vessel had the ability to take over a channel. “Captain, this is your admiral speaking.”
Casey clenched her teeth so hard her jaw shook. She forced herself to take a deep, calming breath and braced for the worst as she attempted to keep her tone neutral and purely professional. “Yes, sir?”
“Send Major Antonin with the cube. I’ll allow you to continue searching for Captain Nevers, but mark my words: if you’re not back in the Paladin with him before the last Mammoth jumps into hyperspace, you’re on your own until the cleanup crew gets here, and even then, it’s unlikely they’ll risk lives to rescue you from occupied territory.”
Casey scrunched up her face in puzzlement. Osprey had been ready to argue for her course of action. Words had been forming themselves into statements and justifications in her brain, lining up like good little soldiers on the tip of her tongue. Nevermind. Forget it. Who was she to question an admiral when she was prepared to give Casey exactly what she wanted?
“Understood, Admiral.”
“Stand by, Captain. Harmony wants to speak to you.”
Harmony? The shipboard AI wanted to talk to her?
“Uh, yes, sir?”
A smooth female voice came on the line, like the ideal of a broadbeam news anchor. “Hello, Captain. I admire your bravery and commend your persistence.”
“Th-Thank you? I think?”
Usually Casey basked in her compliments, drawing them out to make them last. But everyone knew the AI only talked to the admiral, so it felt weird to hear such a thing. Maybe she shouldn’t have drawn so much attention to herself. Everyone said the shipboard AIs had as much influence advising the Emperor as Fleet Command, or even the High Priest of Animus himself. It made her nervous to be put under that kind of microscope. Beads of sweat trickled down her neck under her helmet.
“Be mindful that the Kryl horde is making its way toward Robichar. If my models are accurate, they’re likely to touch down near your location.”
She gulped. “Thanks for the heads-up.”
“You’re very welcome. Bring your pilot home safely. Here’s Admiral Miyaru again.”
“Thanks… Admiral?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“How long do I have, exactly?”
“Until approximately…” There was quiet on the channel as calculations were run and discussions were had—away from the microphone. A rustling as the admiral returned. “1830 GST.”
Casey checked her heads-up display. Galactic St
andard Time… if she accounted for the flight back to the destroyer on maximum burn, that gave her just over two hours to find Nevers.
“Copy that, Admiral. Raptor out.”
Casey gritted her teeth and refocused on the windshield. The HUD overlaid topographical heatscans on the forest beneath her.
Where did you go, Nevers? What could possibly be more important than getting home alive?
Twenty
Harmony danced and flashed like some airborne laser show. Kira swiped a hand through the hologram and the AI’s floating motes of light danced aside, swimming around her hand like a weightless liquid.
“That girl’s head is harder than a piece of star metal.”
“Yes, Admiral,” Harmony said, the tone of her voice almost mocking. The back of Kira’s neck warmed as the image of a younger woman with a haughty upraised chin and a familiar crop of bleach-white hair was projected into her mind. Harmony spoke the next lines clearly but silently through the control chip in Kira’s neck. Though the bridge hummed with activity and people as the XO directed the battle with the Kryl hive, only Kira heard these words: “I remember another captain with a stubborn streak. She was young and talented and full of a righteous fury.”
The image of her younger self combined with Harmony’s words cast Kira backward in memory. Had it been nearly twenty years since she was first stationed on this ship? The missions go slow but the years rush past…
She’d been deployed on the Paladin with a wing of Scimitars—the older model of starfighters that Sabres evolved from. The destroyer had been sent to the front, to the outer curve of the fifth spiral arm, where they were holding the line against Kryl encroachment. She’d gotten her first bogey on that deployment—her first dozen, in fact. She’d also lost friends, defied her admiral and spent time in the brig for insubordination.
Oh, how the tide had turned.
It was her third night of isolation in the brig when Harmony first revealed herself to Kira. Her squadron had been called out on several back-to-back offensive bombing maneuvers. She was sick with anger and a feeling of being left out, unable to sleep and worried for the squad. Particularly, the man she’d fallen in love with—Omar Ruidiaz, a pilot like her. Harmony reported the fight to her, maneuver by maneuver, tracking the captain and her other comrades. This calmed her enough that she had finally been able to fall asleep.
