As Atton watched, one of the holes leading into the ship lit up with small arms’ fire, and three silvery specks were silhouetted in the flashing crimson light of those lasers.
The drones were firing on the three transports they’d let through.
“Incoming!” Gold One roared. “Another wave of transports! Get ready Gold Squadron!”
Atton grimaced and went back to hands-on flying. They encountered heavy resistance. A shimmering purple wave of Pirakla missiles raced out toward them, followed by dazzling streaks of laser fire. Hundreds of Shells concentrated their fire. As Atton watched, several streams of fire intersected on their targets, and at least half a dozens warheads found their marks.
Gold squadron evaporated before his eyes.
“Holy frek!” Gina said. “Where did that come from?”
Atton shook his head, stunned to silence.
Gina went on, “Looks like saving me was a good idea, hey Iceman?” That could have been you!”
Caldin’s voice came crackling over the comms a moment later. “Listen up, Golds! There’s just three of us now, and we won’t last long if we stay out here!”
Atton was relieved to hear her voice. He spotted her fighter on the grid, racing toward the Dauntless with countless fighters on her tail. A siren screamed inside Atton’s cockpit, and his ship’s computer highlighted a wave of incoming missiles. Gritting his teeth, he waited until the last possible second, and then juked hard left, pushing down on the stick for a dorsal twist. The missiles went spinning by, so close that they bathed his cockpit in an eerie purple light. Atton finished the maneuver with an upward spiraling loop that brought him onto Caldin’s tail. He pushed the throttle up past the stops, using afterburners to catch up.
“What do you mean out here?” Atton asked now that he had time to breathe. “All we have is out here! We’re in space for frek’s sake!”
“They’re not firing on the Dauntless anymore,” Caldin replied. “And if they want to capture her in one piece that’s not about to change. Form on me, Golds, we’re going in.”
Atton shook his head.
“She’s gone skriffy!” Gina said over the comms, as if Caldin couldn’t hear. “You know how much debris is floating around that ship? We’ll be lucky to survive the approach.”
Atton was inclined to agree. Despite that, he didn’t have any better ideas.
“Ruh-kah,” he whispered to himself in Imperial Versal. Death and Glory. Atton supposed now, thanks to Omnius, that battle cry was more like resurrection and glory. That was some consolation.
Maybe they wouldn’t win the battle, but at least they couldn’t die fighting it.
* * *
Strategian Hoff Heston stood behind a shattered bulkhead, wearing his assault armor and watching the crimson glow of lasers flashing in the dark. The drones were fighting valiantly, but Hoff knew they wouldn’t be able to hold out forever. The Sythians had the numbers to suffer any amount of attrition and still keep coming.
“We should have blown the core while we had the chance,” Tactician Okara said as she crouched down beside him. “Sooner or later we’re going to die, and this ship is going to fall into enemy hands.
“Omnius could have blown the core at any time, Okara. The fact that he didn’t means he’s not worried about the Sythians capturing what’s left of our fleet. Not only is this ship derelict, but without Omnius they can’t hope to control it.”
“They might not care. They’ll have our technology to study. Given enough time they might be able to reverse engineer it.”
“Now who’s second-guessing Omnius?” he asked.
Okara frowned and turned away, her armored boots making soundless footsteps as she returned to her position. Drone decks were depressurized and airless by default to avoid explosive decompression of the ship’s contents in the event that they were carved open—like they were now.
“They’re breaking through!” someone warned.
Hoff watched as a trio of drones came backpedaling into view, firing forearm mounted pulse lasers as they went.
The enemy returned fire. Dozens of bright violet lasers crashed into the drones’ gleaming chest plates, melting glowing orange holes in their armor. Two of them flew apart as their power cores detonated. Shrapnel hissed off Hoff’s shields.
The final drone remained standing, somehow managing to raise his arm despite the withering assault. Wrapped tight in spindly silver fingers was a pulsing red sphere. A splitter grenade. The Drone made a move as if to throw it, but then its legs were blown out from under it, and it’s torso went tumbling away in zero G, the grenade still locked in its grasp. That grenade began pulsing more rapidly. It was going to detonate behind their lines.
With only one direction open for escape, Hoff called out, “Charge!” He ran from cover, rounding his bulkhead and coming to a twisted and shattered deck. The ceiling had been ripped away, revealing nebular clouds thick and brooding overhead. Hoff’s arms came up, palms outstretched, weapons charged. On his scopes he saw a dozen others running out behind him. Dead ahead lay a milling crowd of enemy soldiers. Then came a mighty shove from behind that ripped them free of the deck despite the artificial gravity fields projected by their armor.
Hoff went tumbling up toward open space. He drifted over the heads of hundreds of milling Sythian soldiers in their chitinous black armor. Glowing red eyes turned to gaze up at them as they flew overhead. Hoff opened fire and the rest of his squad followed suit. Streams of red pulse lasers shot out from their palms. A few of them threw grenades down on the enemy formation and they landed like bombs, picking up enemy soldiers by the dozen and tossing them out into space.
The enemy scattered and fired back, but Hoff’s squad made short work of them. The trio of Sythian transports that had brought the enemy to their ship appeared below them, all three landed in the middle of a ragged hole that had been blown straight through half a dozen decks. Hoff briefly considered commandeering one of those transports, but what would be the point? Where would they go? It would be easier and faster to get home by fighting to the death. Hoff felt the warm glow of Omnius’s approval ripple through him. Even for one who’d already been resurrected, it took considerable faith to put aside the fear of death.
Mentally activating his comms, Hoff said, “This area’s clear. Let’s get back into cover.”
He used the grav guns in his gauntlets to grapple back down. The deck rushed up beneath him, and he bent his legs as he touched down. The rest of his squad landed all around him. All except for one.
“Where’s Okara?” Hoff asked.
“Back on Avilon,” the man beside him said. “She got hit by shrapnel on our way out.”
Hoff grimaced. Now there were just fourteen of them. “Let’s go,” he said, breaking into a run.
Using his ARC display, he brought up a contact grid and zoomed out as far as his sensors could see. He ended up with a bird’s eye view of the Dauntless, showing a radius of a dozen clicks around it. Red contact icons streamed into view, not far from their position. Hoff minimized the grid to better focus on his surroundings and look for cover. “We’ve got incoming,” he warned as he ran out into another clearing.
The deck disappeared abruptly beneath his feet and he drifted down, falling past the jagged edges of four more decks before his feet touched solid ground once more. The others landed around him in quick succession, and Hoff stopped to look up through the top of the blast crater they’d fallen into. “Hold position,” he said, squinting up at the nebula. A trio of dark specks were flying toward them, growing larger and closer by the second.
“Take cover!” Hoff yelled.
They scattered, diving behind broken bulkheads and doors. Hoff dashed through a floating cloud of shattered drones and ducked into an overturned supply crate.
“Activate cloaking shields!” he said, and watched as the rest of his squad went dark on the grid. Hoff hoped those incoming Sythians couldn’t see through cloaking shields.
Peering up at
the trio of approaching ships, Hoff saw that they had small, thin profiles that didn’t correspond to either the Sythians’ bulky shell-shaped fighters or to their teardrop-shaped transports and cruisers. A suspicion formed in Hoff’s gut just moments before his comm crackled with a new voice.
“Don’t shoot; we’re friendly!”
Pleasantly surprised, Hoff replied, “Identify yourselves!”
“Strategian? Is that you? This is Gold Seven, reporting—pilot Caldin, sir. With me are pilots Ortane and Giord.”
Hoff heard Atton’s voice next. “Hey there, sir. I see they haven’t managed to kill you yet—I mean again.”
Relief washed over Hoff. He watched with a growing smile as three X-1 interceptors hovered overhead and then abruptly disappeared as they activated their cloaking shields. “How did you find us?” he asked.
“We followed your heat signatures,” Caldin replied. “It’s a good thing you’ve cloaked. There’s a swarm of transports and fighters on their way here. You don’t want them to pinpoint you the same way.”
“Are they following you?”
“Maybe, but there’s no room to land in here. I suspect they’ll give up and head for more open areas of the ship. What are your orders, sir?”
Hoff crawled out of his supply crate and turned in a quick circle, watching as the others came out of their hiding places—translucent green shadows moving through the rubble. They were invisible to the naked eye, but his sensors revealed them on his ARC display. Hoff nodded once, as if coming to a decision. “We’re going to take as many of them with us as we can. For Omnius!” he roared.
“For Omnius!” his crew echoed.
Chapter 31
After both Destra and Atta had eaten their fill, Destra’s mind wandered to the Gors and their bloody revolution aboard the Baroness. She thought of Captain Covani, lying in a pool of his own blood on the bridge. He was the only one they’d killed. Knowing him, maybe he really had been the aggressor, and maybe the Gors’ mutiny had been with all the best intentions. She tried to put herself in their position, slaves recently freed from their masters, only to have their home world brutally attacked out of spite. They were just trying to get home and see if any of their families were still alive, and Covani had been standing in the way of that. Now their fleet and what remained of their species was on the run, being chased across the galaxy by Sythians. It was beginning to look like humanity’s killers would go extinct before they did.
On her way out of the mess hall, Destra saw one of the unnaturally handsome, young-looking Avilonians approaching. With his broad jaw, chin dimple, cheek dimples, and unreasonably perfect skin and hair, he was just a little too perfect. To top it all off, he appeared no older than twenty-one. After meeting Admiral Hale, however, with his equally handsome and young-looking face, Destra wasn’t surprised. She knew that most Avilonians looked that young, regardless of their actual age.
Destra grabbed the deck officer by one over-muscled arm as he was about to walk by her. He stopped and turned, looking annoyed. She noticed that his neatly-pressed black ISSF uniform bore the four silver chevrons of a deck officer. That meant he was part of the bridge crew. Good, she thought. At least I’m talking to someone who’ll know something about what’s going on.
“Officer, maybe you can help me? I’m looking for Torv.”
“Torv?”
“One of the Gors, the son of their high praetor . . .”
The officer shook his head. “The Gors are in voluntary isolation on deck twelve, Ma’am,” he said. “We have them all under guard until we reach Noctune.”
“And when we arrive? What are we going to do with them then? We’re just going to abandon them there and jump back?”
The man blinked his glowing green eyes and shook his head. “Isn’t that what they want us to do, Ma’am?”
“Because that’s all they think they can expect.”
The man shot her a bewildered look.
“Who can I see about speaking with the Gors?”
“They’re not talking to anyone at the moment. We’ve already tried communicating with them. They just hiss and spit at us. Ugly savages . . .”
Destra’s eyebrows floated up. “Do you have a translator?”
The man frowned. “Not at the moment.”
Destra scowled. “Then how do you expect to communicate with them? They understand us, but we don’t understand them, and that’s a one-way conversation. They always sound like they’re hissing and spitting at you; that’s how they talk, but I suppose you weren’t aware of that.”
“I still remember when a squad of them broke into my house and killed me and my family, Ma’am. Do you really think I care what they sound like when they talk?”
Destra shook her head. “You can’t blame slaves for following their masters’ orders anymore than you can blame a gun for firing when someone pulls the trigger.”
“Maybe not, but you can lock away all the guns and make sure they’re never fired again.”
Destra snorted. “Good luck. Someone always finds the key and brings them out again.”
“Right. Well, if you’ll excuse me, I don’t have much time for lunch. If you want to speak with the Gors, no one’s going to stop you, but a word of advice . . .” The man’s green-eyed gaze fell on Atta. “Leave the girl someplace safe.”
Destra gave a thin smile and nodded, walking on to the nearest bank of lift tubes.
“Where are we going now, Mom?” Atta asked.
“To see a friend of mine,” she replied.
“Your friend’s a Gor, isn’t he?”
“Yes, but don’t worry, I won’t take you to meet him.”
“Why not? I want to say hi, too!”
They reached the lift tubes and Destra slapped the call button. She turned to Atta with a bemused expression. “They don’t scare you?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore. One of them used to visit me at night.”
Shock coursed through her at the thought of one of those hulking, gray-skinned monsters visiting her daughter at night. “What? When?”
“Aboard the Baroness. He used to come and sit beside the bed and watch the door with me until I fell asleep. He kept the monsters away.”
Destra shook her head, unable to contain her horror. “What monsters, Atta?”
Atta shrugged. “All of them.”
The lift swished open beside them and they walked in. Destra selected deck 12 from the control panel and leaned back against the nearest wall for support; her mind reeled. She realized just how much faith they’d placed in the Gors. They’d been given the run of the Baroness for weeks, all of them armed and armored, able to cloak themselves and disappear entirely from both sight and sensors. During that time, the ship had been rationing its food supplies, and the Gors had been slowly starving to death. Being carnivores, they could have turned on the crew at any time to sate their hunger, but they hadn’t done that.
“He never tried to hurt you?” Destra asked.
Atta shook her head. “No.”
The lift tube opened and a gust of frigid air swept in. Deck 12 was dark, almost pitch black, and a full squad of armored sentinels stood guarding the lift. Their helmets turned as Destra and Atta walked out. Their face plates were fogged with condensation.
Destra stopped beside the nearest soldier. “What’s going on here, Corporal?” she asked, noting his insignia.
The man shook his head. “We’re on guard duty.”
One of the other sentinels turned and nodded to her. He was a sergeant. “Well, hello there, Mrs Ortane,” he said. “What are you doing down here?”
Destra realized that she knew this man. He was none other than Sergeant Cavanaugh of the Black Rictans. She vaguely recognized a few of the others with him as members of his squad.
“What brings you to the Gors’ balmy slice of paradise?” he asked.
“Balmy?” she asked, moisture steaming from her mouth as she spoke. Seeing that reminded her that it was cold, and she began
to shiver.
“The Gors’ idea. Soon as they got control of the thermostat on this deck they plunged us all into sub zero temperatures.”
“I see.”
“You brought your daughter here?”
Destra glanced at Atta and shrugged. “She wanted to come.”
“The Gors are dangerous, Ma’am.”
“So are we. May I see them?”
Cavanaugh hesitated. “I’ll escort you there.” He gestured to a pair of his squad mates and they took up positions on either side of Destra and Atta. “Follow me,” Cavanaugh said.
They started down a long, dark corridor. There was almost no light for them to see by, so the sentinels turned on their helmet lamps. That was for her and Atta’s benefit, since the soldiers could see just fine with their light amplification overlays and infrared.
The sergeant led them off the main corridor, to a pair of double doors with yet another squad of sentinels standing guard. Cavanaugh opened the doors for them, revealing a large, shadowy room with high ceilings and plenty of open space. It looked like it had been a supply room at some point.
The sentinels stopped just inside the entrance and swept their helmet-mounted glow lamps around, revealing a group of large, black objects arranged in a circle on the far side of the room. Glowing red eyes turned their way.
“There they are,” Cavanaugh said.
Destra walked up beside him with Atta. She scanned the huddled group of Gors. They didn’t look very threatening, all sitting on the floor with their knees drawn up to their massive chests, like school children gathered around and listening to their teacher tell a story. Then she noticed they were watching something.
“What’s that in the center of the group?” she asked.
Cavanaugh passed his glow lamp over a large, gray-white lump lying on the floor in the center of the group, and it immediately began to writhe, hissing and screaming. A few of the armored Gors rose to their feet and moved to block out the intruding light. Destra blinked, shocked and confused by what she’d seen.
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