by Nick Webb
“You ready for this, Floppychop?”
She didn’t respond, and he glanced over at her. The short, black tousled hair spilled over onto her forehead like an angry mop, and he was surprised to see her eyes watery and red.
“You good, Jet?”
She nodded, then snorted a laugh as she wiped her nose. “Yeah. Just fine. The whole situation just reminded me of my parents, that’s all.”
Gavin held his tongue, knowing she’d talk if she needed to.
She did. “It was just like this. Three years ago. They were both flight engineers. Worked down in Fort Walton. At the base.”
“One of the ones that was attacked?”
“Yeah. I was seventeen. Rules were lax in the Resistance force, and I begged them to let me come to the base with them. You know, watch the whole thing first-hand. We were gonna win, ya know? It was exciting.”
She fell silent. A nearby tech swore loudly as he spilled his tool cart and his supervisor yelled at him to clear the mess away before the nearby fighter lifted out.
“Yeah. Too exciting. That was D-day. They bombed the place. The whole fucking place. Even the civilian buildings where my parents worked. The flight engineering building? Just gone. Vaporized. You know why I lived?”
“Why?” he said, numbly.
“Because I left to go to the cafeteria building to get a candy bar out of the vending machine. The bombs started, and a few minutes later, I looked out, and the building they were in was gone.”
Silence. Then she snorted a forced laughter. “So food saved me. Funny, huh? I guess that’s why I joined up with the fleet as a galley cook. Stupid. Totally stupid. Clichéd.”
He murmured, “It’s not stupid.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Lieutenant Grace march their way, stopping to bark out orders to various deck crew techs. “In fact, I think you’re pretty damn brave. To sign up after shit like that. My family’s all nice and safe in the St. Louis suburbs. I just got out to see adventure.”
Jet nodded. “Yeah, well you’re about to get it, Newbie.” She turned towards him and smiled—the first genuine, non-smirky smile she’d shown since they’d met.
Friends at last, he supposed.
***
“Move, people, move! Get your asses out there! Quadri, what the hell are you doing?” Anya Grace marched over to the fighter pilot who’d stooped to help a tech pick up a large box.
He grunted with effort—the box looked dreadfully heavy, containing several thousand rounds of ordnance for one of the fighters. “Just helping the techs, sir. The faster the ship gets loaded the faster I get out of here.”
Anya jabbed her finger at the waiting fighter. “The faster you get your ass in your fighter the faster you get out of here. Move!”
Quadri glared at her as she shoved him aside and took his place with the box, but turned to run to his fighter. The box was far heavier than she thought, and she strained to keep her face from contorting.
“Careful, sir, if we drop this, the whole deck blows,” said the tech. Su, his name was, if she remembered right. She chided herself for not knowing her people’s names yet.
A real commander would know his name. A real commander would protect her people and get them some extra hands—Su looked like he was about to pass out.
“How long have you been on duty, Su?”
He glanced at an antique-looking timepiece on his wrist. “Eighteen hours, sir. Busy day.”
Anya puffed as she pulled on the box’s handle and looked up to see how far they had left. Just ten more meters to the fighter’s undercarriage.
“Who the hell signed off on your duty hours?”
“You did, sir.”
“Well dammit, Su, I don’t read those things. Next shift, only ten hours, ok?”
“Uh, sir, don’t we have an Imperial battle cruiser bearing down on us?”
Anya flashed a wry grin. “Sure, but I don’t want Occupational Safety to come down on me. Those bastards are worse than any battle cruiser.”
Su laughed. Good. Keep the people in good spirits. Keep them engaged. Distract them from wondering why the hell some washed out space jock was ordering them around.
After several more minutes of harried shouts, yelling, pointing, lugging, and swearing at her pilots, she saw that nearly every fighter was filled.
Except one. She regarded the empty bird, and tried to remember the name of its former pilot. Washburn? Wallingford? Washington? She’d only met him a few times, before the battle at Liberty Station. He’d died in the collision with the Caligula—thrown from his bunk and asphyxiated by the decompression.
Fuck you, Jake.
She didn’t envy his position, his responsibility, but she’d be damned if she was going to let him get away with poor decisions that killed her people.
But the Caligula was bearing down on them once again, and they needed every fighter available out there.
She noticed a young pair sitting in the corner, talking in low tones, watching the commotion all around them.
“Ashdown. Xing. You’re up.”
They jumped to their feet. “Uh, sir?”
She strode over to them. “You heard me. We’re all dead unless you two can stop the Imperial bastards. Come on. Newbie, you’re pilot. Floppychop, you’re the gunner. Get moving.”
“But, sir,” began Ashdown, “We’ve hardly begun our training. Even you said how shitty we’ve been flying.”
She picked up their helmets from the bench and thrust them into their chests. “Well your shittiness will have to suffice.”
“But are we ready to fly in a real battle?”
Anya met his eyes. They looked scared. Terrified, even, but at least the boy was controlling himself well. Admirably, in fact. “Look kid, here’s the secret. None of us are ready. When you get out there and you’ve got five bogeys firing at you from ten different directions, your training goes out the window and you just fight to survive. I’ve seen you. You’re a scrapper. You’re a fighter. In fact, don’t ever tell any of the other jocks this, but you’re a natural. Now get the fuck out there and bring me back some Imperial heads.” She pointed at the last remaining fighter.
They both pulled themselves up straight. Ashdown more than his friend, Xing. She was ok—better than most of the other recruits—but nothing like the fresh-faced boy next to him.
The girl would learn fast, though. Just like Anya had. Without another word she marched off to go deal with another minor crisis as the two rushed to their bird.
And she had the sneaking suspicion it would be the last time she’d see them. The feeling nearly killed her. She almost shouted out for them to stop, that she was kidding—really, how could they even think that they were ready to fight—but she stopped herself. She didn’t just suspect she wouldn’t see those two again, but all of them—every last fighter. Every last jock.
This could very well be their last stand, and so they might as well throw everything they had at the Imperials.
Those two would either die out there fighting, or in here watching the fight, like Anya. She swore again to herself and wiped her brow as she marched over to tell off another tech for spilling oil all over the deck.
***
Gavin Ashdown was born with a videogame virtual controller in his hands. He loved the thrill of the overwhelming odds that the game console would throw at him. The strategy, the tactics that went into a successful fighter campaign. And when you mess up, you get a redo. The game starts over, and you live to fight another day.
But as the swarm of fighters approached from the Caligula he wondered where his reset button was. Does this game have cheat mode? he asked himself. And even as he thought it he shook his head, wondering why he was even thinking things like that when the enemy was seconds away.
“You ready for this, Newbie?” asked Jet, who snorted.
“I told you, that’s not my callsign.” His friend had been trying to tag him with that for days now. Gavin eyed the closest wave of fighters nervously.
<
br /> “You don’t get to pick your own callsign, Newbie. Lieutenant Grace called you that, fair and square.”
“Look sharp, Floppychop, we’ve got our first bogeys coming in. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“I’m doing the Grace maneuver. Be ready for it.”
Jet snickered before Gavin whacked her shoulder and clarified, “Not that Grace maneuver. Come on, she’s your commanding officer.”
“Hey, she’s the one that told us about it,” Jet said with a smirk. “Ok, fine. All ready on this end. Let’s show ‘em what we got.”
Gavin accelerated full bore towards another fighter, as if engaging them in a game of chicken. Red bolts blazed all around them as he wove the fighter to and fro, but Jet threw back fire of their own. With a flick of a finger, Gavin shifted the ship out of existence, reappearing just fifty meters behind the other fighter, and with its ass now in view, Jet blasted it. To hell, Gavin thought.
Man, maybe this is just a videogame.
“Ready for another one?”
Jet snorted. “Bring it.” Her breathing picked up and a slow smile grew on her face.
Gavin swerved the fighter around to another enemy. Their comm blared to life. “Holy shit! Did you see that?” It was Quadri’s voice, and he didn’t sound pleased.
“What?” came another voice over the open comm. Gavin thought it sounded like Lee’s.
“One of these bastards just shifted, and blasted the hell out of Brooks! He’s gone, man. They’re learning their micro-gravitics!”
Gavin pressed on the accelerator, aiming for their next target, which wove back and forth and through wide loops, trying to shake them. But in the blink of an eye, it was gone.
Swearing, Gavin pounded the gravitic shift switch, shifting them blindly a few hundred meters towards the planet below. And just in time, as, from their new perspective, they watched as their former quarry pelted the space they’d just occupied with a rain of fire.
“Shit. He’s right,” said Jet. “What the hell do we do now?”
Gavin grit his teeth, trying to ignore the wreck of Brooks’s fighter plummet down through the atmosphere below. “We beat the hell out of them. Come on, let’s go.”
***
Sergeant Jayce eyed the small gray patch amid the sprawling brown terrain far below. It stood apart from the main town, just like Volaski had said, and their sensors had picked up the telltale readings of an ion-beam cannon. From what the man had said, there were probably two lasers trained on the shuttles as well. Velar was distrustful by nature, and would surely have all available surface-to-air weapons locked on them just as a precaution.
“Making our final approach,” said the pilot.
Jayce thumbed another wad of snuff into his cheek. “Good. My finger’s getting itchy.”
Sergeant Tomaga peered at him over the shaft of his rifle. “You know our orders. No killing of innocents.”
“What the hell would you know about that?” Jayce glowered at the former Imperial. Daring him.
Tomaga didn’t answer, but looked down at his rifle and rubbed his sleeve against a stubborn smudge on the barrel. Jayce grinned—he’d hoped to provoke the man. Make him a little angry. Get his blood going before they landed—heavens knew that they needed it.
The pilot pulled up on the accelerator, bringing the speed of the craft down to something more amenable to landing.
And then all hell broke loose.
***
It was daytime, which surprised Jake. He’d thought it was the middle of the night, but soon he realized that down below, down in the mines, it was whatever time the boss said it was.
But not anymore. He cringed to think about what was happening to the boss right now. After all, the man was a slave too. But their fellow captives thought of the man as worse than their captors, precisely because he was one of them—he was a slave, and yet he held the whip. He colluded with the enemy and therefore he was worse than the enemy. Maybe Jake shouldn’t have handed him over to the others after all.
But there was no time to second-guess himself. He had to find that railgun, and he had to find his best friend.
If Ben was even still alive.
There were two guards sprawled out on chairs watching a porno vid in the control room near the shaft’s exit, but Avery cold-cocked one of them with the butt of a short shovel he’d found in the hallway and Jake punched the other as hard as he could in the nose when the man snapped around to see them. Blood in his eyes, he didn’t see the business end of Avery’s shovel as it connected bluntly with the back of his skull.
Jake wiped the blood off his hand, and shook the pain away. “Where from here?”
Tovra pointed down the corridor. “Out this building and into the next. Storage building. Very top.”
Jake took Jeremiah’s hand and led him down the corridor, with Tovra, Alessandro, and Avery following close behind. Luckily, the rest of the building seemed to be deserted, and when they peered out the door towards the storage building next door, they saw commotion some distance off near one of the main buildings they’d first entered. But there was no one nearby, so they ran for it.
Once inside the storage building, Jake saw that they wouldn’t have it so easy. Dozens of slaves trudged back and forth between several large bins, apparently sorting chunks of ore into a variety of different grades. A handful of men with sidearms and handheld devices similar to the Boss’s Domitian control device sat around the outer walls, looking for trouble.
Jake whispered back to Bernoulli, “You got your omni-scanner ready? I think now’s the time.”
“Ready, friend,” said Alessandro.
Avery pointed towards a pair of guards with their back to the group, and Jake nodded his approval. With the shovel still in his hands, and shielded from the rest of the warehouse by a stack of plastic barrels, Avery and Jake crept behind the two men. Simultaneously, Avery pounded one man’s head with the shovel as Jake grabbed the other from behind in a chokehold.
The man bucked backwards, throwing Jake off-balance and making his sprain throb in pain. He wrestled the man to the ground, and, looking up, dodged away just in time for Avery’s shovel to connect with the man’s head with a sickening crunch.
“Hey!” A guard several dozen yards away spotted them and drew his sidearm, diving behind a concrete column before popping off a few rounds. Avery wrenched the sidearm out of the holster of the guard they’d just felled and took cover behind another column, as Jake fished the gun from the other guard sprawled out on the floor, pushing Jeremiah to the ground with his other hand.
“Stay down,” he whispered in his ear, scrambling around the barrels to try and catch the guard in the crossfire. He nodded once to Avery, who laid down suppressing fire as Jake dove through an open space to another column—this one with a better angle on the guard. Out of the corner of his eye he saw two more guards advance on Avery, but they hadn’t seen Jake yet.
He watched, waiting for just the right moment. Too soon and he’d blow his cover. Too late, and it’d all be over….
There—the guard peered out from behind the column, and Jake pulled the trigger, smearing the man’s brains all over the column next to him. The body slumped against the concrete and fell to the floor.
The other two remaining guards dove for cover as they saw Jake, but as they did, Avery advanced and flanked them as Jake collided with another slave bolting for the exit. The slaves who hadn’t dropped to the ground cowering in fear ran for their lives, and Jake tried to blend in as he ran for the next column.
He peered around the corner and made eye contact with Avery again, who signaled him to lay down suppressing fire. Checking the clip of his gun, he nodded and popped around the corner with a barrage of bullets aimed at the two columns obscuring the remaining guards. With a flash of motion, it was all over. Avery sprinted towards the columns from the other direction, reached around the corner, and fired twice without looking. Two bloody bodies slumped to the ground.
His st
omach still in his mouth, Jake forced himself to breathe. Adrenaline was nice, but not the kind that accompanied bullets. “No-look shots. Nice,” he called out to Avery.
“Meh. Sloppy. But I’ll take it.” Avery wiped the sweat off his forehead as he scanned the rest of the warehouse for more guards.
“Jake. There’s the stairs,” Alessandro said, pointing to a darkened stairwell on one wall. Jake turned to the prisoners still cowering on the ground.
“We’re about to see a whole lot more action. If you can fight, find a weapon. If you can’t, then hide. We have some business upstairs, and I’d be quite obliged if some of you could see that we’re not disturbed.”
A heavy-set man on the ground near Jake stirred. He looked new—the extra folds of fat suggested he’d only recently arrived and had not yet been subjected to very many months of a slave’s ration. “Is this it? Are you setting us free?”
Jake nodded. “I sure as hell hope so, sir.”
Without waiting for more chitchat, Jake grabbed his people and dashed up the stairs. The upper level of the warehouse was more of a storage room than anything else. A thick layer of dust coated dozens of old, cobwebbed pieces of equipment. After some searching, Alessandro hollered.
“Ha! This is it.” He yanked a dusty blanket off the long barrel of the railgun and ran a hand over it. “Nice. It’s brand new, friend, looks like it’s never used.”
Jake ran over to the gun. The barrel was pointed at one of the walls, but he saw the housing that would elevate it upwards, towards the ceiling, which had several tiles missing as if it had been built in a hurry.
“Here’s the controls,” said Avery. He pressed a button and the screen flared to life. “Still has power too. Must be powered inductively—I don’t see a line anywhere.”
Alessandro fiddled with one of the panels on the large gun, and tested the latch on the loading chamber. It opened.