“Good thing the admiral didn’t listen to you,” Carter replied.
“They were counting on our humanity to get us killed,” he said, suddenly furious with the Confederates and war in general. “Cardinal, launch the next salvo, and Stone, alert 61st Squadron to target those missiles. We don’t want anything getting through.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Enemy fleet is launching fighters!” Vasquez reported. “Three minutes before enemy missiles reach ELR with us,” she added, reminding them all how close they still were to a deadly engagement.
“Let’s make sure they don’t get there,” Alexander said, watching as a second salvo of missiles went streaming out from the Alliance formation. A vast wave of Alliance fighters and drones sat glittering on the horizon, each glinting speck enhanced by the Lincoln’s combat computer until it was bright enough to challenge the stars.
Vasquez spoke again, “Our drones will reach ELR to intercept in five, four, three, two, one.”
The drones opened fire, and the ship’s combat computer painted invisible lasers an icy blue. Laser-armed enemy missiles answered Alliance blues with crimson reds.
The entire exchange lasted only a fraction of a second. Fiery explosions pockmarked the void, and Alexander glanced at the tactical just in time to see their entire line of drones vanish along with a comparative number of enemy missiles fragments. The remaining missiles sailed on. Alliance fighters opened fire first, cutting enemy ordnance down by half. Then they fired back, stitching space with red laser beams and wiping out hundreds of fighters in an eye-blink.
“61st taking fire!” Stone announced. “We’re down by four.”
Alexander winced, wondering who had died this time.
The remainder of the enemy missiles went with them, and then the Confederate fleet launched another salvo. Alliance missiles raced past Alliance fighters, leading the charge against the enemy. Soon both waves of missiles split into thousands of smaller shards and the laser-armed fragments opened fire on each other.
Missiles obliterated missiles with random fury, cutting each other’s numbers by half and then sailing on to tangle with fighter screens once more. Alexander watched another chunk of their fighter screen evaporate.
“Down two more!” Stone announced. “One pilot left,” he said, his tone dark with fury.
Alexander swallowed past a lump in his throat. The enemy’s missiles disappeared again, but part of the Alliance salvo got through. He looked up to watch the simulated explosions of three different Confederate capital ships. The light faded, and he checked the tactical. Ten more to go.
“ELR with enemy fleet in three minutes.”
“We’re going to take casualties if they get to laser range with us,” Cardinal warned. “There’s no time for another salvo of missiles.”
“Then use the hypervelocity cannons,” Alexander ordered.
“They’ll adjust their headings and evade,” Cardinal said.
“So we track shoot! We might score a lucky hit. It’s better than waiting for them to hit us. Open fire!”
“Yes, sir.”
Alexander watched on the main holo display as bright golden streams of hypervelocity rounds raced out into space, tracking the tiny gray specks of enemy warships.
“They’re returning fire!” Vasquez announced.
“Davorian! Evasive maneuvers!”
“Setting thrust vectors. Five Gs maximum. Brace for maneuvering thrust!”
Suddenly Alexander was pinned to his couch, immobilized as the ship executed a series of random maneuvers that would throw off enemy gunners’ aim. Stars pinwheeled and zagged in bright silver blurs while hypervelocity rounds went on stuttering out into the void in shimmering waves of computer-simulated light. Enemy rounds came racing back, impossibly fast, and far too close for comfort. Cannon fire streamed by on all sides.
“Taking fire!” McAdams gritted out between bursts of acceleration.
Damage alerts sounded. Then came a tooth-rattling screech of metal shearing and of high caliber shells digging into their armor.
Another alarm blared, this one more distinctive. Every spacer knew that alarm from their drills. The subsequent shriek of air hissing out confirmed it.
“Hull breach! Losing pressure,” McAdams said.
Alexander’s ears popped and he heard his suit auto-pressurize. His eyes darted around the bridge, trying to find the source of the breach. Switching from external speakers to comms, he ordered, “Seal it up!”
“Repair drones deployed,” McAdams replied.
Alexander heard more shells hitting their armor. He winced with every muffled crunch of an impact.
BANG!
The main holo display vanished and a gaping hole appeared. A burst of red mist appeared where Davorian was sitting, and Alexander felt himself yanked roughly against his harness as a violent wind ripped by him. The vacuum sucked the debris and Davorian’s body out in an instant, along with all of the remaining air on the bridge, leaving nothing but a glaring hole full of stars, and a ragged scar on the deck where their helmsman used to sit.
CHAPTER 45
Catalina saw her raft run aground on the shore of a jungle-infested island. A sea-salt smelling breeze ran through her sweat-matted hair, cooling her momentarily. She’d taken off her and Dorian’s helmets soon after making it to the raft. No need to hang on to those anymore.
“Everybody out!” the captain roared as the raft came to a stop. “Move it! We need to get under cover A-SAP.”
The colonists clambered out, splashing noisily in the shallow water as they tripped and stumbled their way up the beach.
“Let me help you,” someone said.
It was the lieutenant she’d been speaking to earlier. Caty nodded and allowed him to lead her to the front of the raft.
He jumped down first and reached up for her to pass Dorian down. She withdrew sharply, as if the lieutenant had threatened to snatch Dorian away from her.
The man smiled and waited patiently, and Caty realized she’d overreacted. It would be safer to pass Dorian down than try to climb out of the raft with him in her arms.
She passed her baby down and then crawled over the side of the raft. As soon as she was standing on the beach, the officer handed Dorian back to her.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” the captain shouted down to them from further up the shore. Caty noticed that she and the lieutenant were the last ones out. Everyone else was already fleeing for the jungle.
Caty ran up the beach, kicking sand and trying desperately not to trip. She reached the end of the beach and barreled into a dense green wall of ground cover and trees. Forcing her way through with a crying baby, she caught up to the rest of the colonists. They stood still and frozen near the edge of a clearing, speaking in urgent whispers. Someone scowled and hissed at her to keep her baby quiet. Dorian wasn’t the only small child making too much noise, but she got the hint. She did her best to shush Dorian, bouncing him and cooing softly in his ear. That calmed him somewhat, and she looked out at the clearing.
It was some type of farm. Based on the amount of water she saw shimmering in the sun between the bright green tufts of crops, she guessed that it was a rice farm. A trio of workers were out in the field, their conical rice hats shining in the sun.
Caty tried not to give in to despair. The workers hadn’t seen them yet. They could go back and walk farther down the beach, look for a more remote area to hide. She heard the jungle rustling behind her and turned to see the captain joining them. One of his officers greeted him and quickly explained the situation. She overheard them arguing about it.
“We can’t go back,” the captain snapped. “There’s two confederate destroyers sailing down the coast as we speak. If we go back to the beach now, they’ll see us.”
“That was fast. What about the other rafts?”
The captain shook his head. “We can’t afford to worry about them right now. If they’re smart, they’ll head for another part of the beach and spread out.
Do those rice farmers look armed?”
“No.”
“Then that gives us the advantage. Get Guitierrez and let’s go. Leave the colonists here until we’ve cleared the area.”
“You want them to watch?”
“They can look away if they have to. Move up.”
Caty heard someone shouting in the distance, and she spun around to see one of the workers in the field pointing at them. The others looked up and froze. The captain and his officers made their way to the edge of the clearing, their weapons drawn. Caty followed, driven by the horror of what they were about to do.
“Does anybody speak English?” she called out as loudly as she could. “We need help!”
The captain rounded on her and grabbed her firmly by her arm. “Are you crazy?”
“Someone had to warn them,” she said.
“And now they’re going to warn the nearest platoon of soldiers. Nice work.”
“Ahh, Captain…” one of the officers said.
“What?”
Caty saw what—the farmers were approaching, not running away in fear. Maybe they hadn’t heard her clearly enough to realize she was speaking English, not Mandarin or Indonesian.
One of them called out in heavily-accented English. “Hello?”
“Shit…” the captain growled. “Let me handle this. Everyone get back under cover!”
Caty refused to budge. The captain stepped out of the jungle with his weapon raised and aimed at the nearest farmer’s chest. “Don’t move,” he ordered.
The Indonesian farmer stopped, his eyes widening. The other two advancing behind him also froze and traded glances with each other.
“Who are you?” the nearest farmer asked in accented english.
“We’re Alliance colonists. We crash-landed off the shore. Your people are looking for us. If you take us somewhere safe, I promise no harm will come to you or any of your friends. If you don’t, I’m going to shoot you now. Nod if you understand me.”
The man nodded once. “You do not have to threaten us. We will shelter you, but you must agree to come quickly, before it is too late.”
“We’re enemies. How am I supposed to believe that?” the captain demanded.
“We are not enemies. Our governments are enemies.”
The captain stood there staring at the farmer for a long moment, clearly unsure about what he should do. Caty feared for the farmers’ lives and covered Dorian’s eyes.
“And if I shoot the three of you here?”
“Your weapon is not silenced. The sound will carry. People will come looking for us, and no one will agree to shelter you after identifying yourselves as hostile. You will trade an uncertain fate for a certain one.”
The captain’s shoulders slumped, defeated by that logic. “Lead the way.”
The farmer nodded once. “We must be quick,” he said. He and the other two with him turned in unison and ran, splashing through the field.
“Let’s go,” the captain called out in an urgent whisper before running after the rice farmers.
Caty followed, trying desperately not to trip in the water-logged rice field. Here they were placing their lives in the enemy’s hands, hoping for mercy. Maybe those farmers really didn’t see them as the enemy—maybe—but she couldn’t help remembering all of those news reports about Confederate people being ant-minded, cold, intensely logical, and self-sacrificing to the extreme.
They were perfect communists, hard-wired from birth to always put the greater good ahead of individual needs. So the question was, did sheltering Alliance colonists somehow serve the greater good?
Caty shook her head, trying not to worry about it.
They ran through the clearing and crashed into another stretch of untamed jungle. Caty felt her arms burning pitilessly from carrying Dorian’s weight for so long, but she gritted her teeth and forced herself to focus on something else. Eying the dark shadows between the trees, she imagined enemy soldiers lurking there, the bright red dots of their laser sights landing on the colonists one by one.
But that didn’t happen. Instead they came to another clearing, this one much smaller than the one with the paddy field. A well-worn footpath led straight to a short, squat concrete building with a rusted metal door.
Is that a bunker? She wondered. What are rice farmers doing with a fallout shelter out here in the middle of nowhere?
Maybe it wasn’t a shelter.
Maybe it was a Confederate military base.
Caty felt her heart rate spike with dread. She imagined that rusty door bursting open and hundreds of enemy soldiers boiling out.
It’s a trap!
CHAPTER 46
“I’m transferring the nav to my station,” Alexander said, glancing at the ragged gash in the deck where Davorian had been sitting a moment ago. Alexander mentally activated the nav functions, and a flurry of control panels crowded the heads-up display inside his helmet, giving him access to the ship’s thrusters, maneuvering jets, and a three-dimensional grid for course plotting.
He focused on the grid to enlarge it, and a miniature representation of the Lincoln cruised along a jagged yellow vector that zagged back and forth randomly. A second line, this one green, showed the ship’s average heading. A sensor overlay highlighted incoming hypervelocity rounds as over-sized golden streaks, moving so fast compared to the Lincoln that they were almost impossible to evade. The only advantage the Lincoln had was that those rounds took more than ten seconds to reach them, and the payloads weren’t nearly large enough to destroy the ship unless a solid stream of them hit.
“Captain, the admiral is ordering us to withdraw,” Hayes said. “We’re getting too far ahead of the fleet.”
Alexander zoomed out the nav map and saw that the Lincoln was leading the Alliance formation. No wonder they were taking fire. “Coming about,” he said, setting a waypoint behind the rest of the fleet and calculating a new random evasive pattern to reach it—minimum acceleration three G’s, maximum seven. “Brace for—”
He didn’t even get a chance to finish that warning before the engines and maneuvering jets fired simultaneously at seven g’s. Alexander felt that force slam him into the sides of his couch, grinding the cartilage in his ear against his skull with the sheer weight of his now seventy-pound head. A few seconds later, the acceleration eased, and Alexander gulped down a desperate lungful of air.
“Incoming transmission from the enemy fleet!” Hayes announced. “They’re surrendering!”
Shock coursed through him. Alexander was about to reply, but another burst of acceleration cut him off. He sent a mental command to pause the evasive flight pattern, hoping the enemy’s surrender wasn’t a trick.
Hayes spoke again before Alexander could ask for details. “The Liberty is requesting to link their comms with ours and join the negotiations.”
Alexander nodded and glanced at the main holo display. The repair drones had patched the hole, but the holo display was still damaged. “Patch them through to Carter’s station.”
“Yes, sir.”
Alexander watched as a visual materialized in front of Carter’s couch. The screen was divided down the middle—on the right Admiral Wilson of the Alliance, on the left, Admiral Zhang.
Zhang looked even worse than when they’d last seen him. Dried blood crusted his lips and chin where it had run down from his nose. His eyes were bloodshot and glassy, his expression pained, his skin waxy and pale despite the purpling mass of broken blood vessels in his cheeks.
“We will agree to negate thrust and allow Alliance shuttles to board us as soon as we leave the wormhole,” Zhang rasped. “We will leave at a steady one gravity of acceleration, and you need not fear that we will betray you. I and my entire crew are going below decks to receive emergency treatment for our injuries.”
Admiral Wilson’s gaze became intense and suspicious. “How am I supposed to believe that?”
“You can believe whatever you like.”
“If we turn around and give you
our backs, we’ll be reducing our available offensive capabilities, and if we let you leave the wormhole first, you’ll have a chance to get to Earth ahead of us. Not to mention you’ll pass in and out of effective laser range, and if we don’t fire on you, we’ll be giving you the chance for a deadly first strike.”
“You have us outnumbered. If we open fire, you will retaliate and obliterate us.”
“You sacrificed your own colonists for a chance to destroy our fleet, how am I supposed to believe that this is any different?”
“Yes, we did not think you could be so heartless. We were wrong.”
“Likewise. Their blood is on your hands, Zhang.”
Carter cleared his throat. “Admirals, if I may interrupt, the only way to broker a surrender here is for both sides to trust each other.”
Admiral Wilson’s gaze remained narrowed and sharp. “Yes… Zhang, you said earlier that you don’t have long to live. I assume you’re not the only one.”
“Without medical attention I will die soon, as will many of my crew.”
“That means you don’t have much to lose—not that you ants ever think about self-preservation. Why surrender?”
“Because it is over. We have lost. Reports from Earth tell us this same thing. There is no point to continue the fighting. We are now thirty seconds to ELR. You must make a decision soon. If you accept our surrender, you may add our fleet to your own. A small risk for a great reward.”
“Ten warships,” Wilson clarified.
“Yes,” Zhang replied, “and us as your prisoners.”
A chime sounded quietly inside Alexander’s helmet, drawing his attention away from the negotiations to a text message on his HUD. The message was from Lieutenant Cardinal, and it was marked urgent.
Heads up, Captain. I’ve just been ordered to fire on the enemy fleet with all guns, half a second before ELR.
“I accept the terms of your surrender,” Wilson said.
Alexander blinked, horrified at the lie.
New Frontiers- The Complete Series Page 32
