He knew what they were saying when they said that. Better than anyone since your father.
It had been over a hundred Ritellian years since his father manned just such a ship.
Another missile jolted Ryz’s ship, the Luma. His teeth knocked together. He spun the turret and finished off the attacking craft. The turret smelled hot and sharp. Ryz checked the heat readouts.
“Let’s get the aft guns vented,” he called to Natoo, the assistant engineer assigned to him. It was just the two of them in here, much to the engineer’s dismay. Natoo scowled up at him.
“Aft guns aren’t due for venting.”
Ryz bit back a curse. Arguing would just waste time and focus. “They need it done now. I’m firing fast and hot up here, and if we let them go too long, we’re going to lose them.” He had to keep them online. Besides the risk of a plasma ignition, the only other defense he had on the aft half of the ship was a single heavy charge, and he needed to save it.
He let the thought of being in the middle of this battle without any aft guns sink in for a long moment. Another barrage rocked the ship, adding urgency to the conversation. Natoo began swiping his control pad.
Ryz felt the momentary breathlessness as the venting changed the pressure in the cabin slightly. Natoo didn’t notice, and Ryz tried not to show his discomfort, holding his breath and gulping once the atmosphere normalized again.
Ryz couldn’t afford time to discuss his physiological abnormalities just now, and he hoped Natoo wasn’t watching.
He looked at the readouts. Three enemy ships left: A light attacker, a Stinger, and a Pinwheel—a globe studded with firing ports that made shooting from any direction easy. Three Maro ships versus the Luma and the Travae, the ship where his cousin stood on the deck. That was all that was left of the Ritellian fleet, all that was left of the whole Ritellian Empire besides the children and caregivers back on the planet. Once these two ships were gone, nothing would stop the Maro from dropping their burning rain on Ryz’s home planet and terraforming it for their own use.
The fleet had been strong, but the Maro were stronger. And they knew things. They knew, it seemed, the Ritel’s every weakness. They knew of the breathing port behind the left ear on every male, and they used that knowledge in hand-to-hand combat. They knew that zinc was fatal to infant Ritel. They knew that there was a taboo against speaking the name of the Ritellian sun—even now, as it flitted like a bird across Ryz’s mind, Sythia, he felt a little guilty. How they had gathered this much intel, no one in the leadership knew. It was more than a leak. It was as if they had, somehow, gotten into the minds and culture of the Ritel, and that had given the Maro a distinct battle advantage.
The three ships were arcing wide. They’d form a tripoint and close in, Ryz knew. He’d seen it before. He glanced at the live feed from the Travae. Uom, his cousin, leaned forward in his command chair, unmasked fear on his face. He was the sovereign leader of the Ritel, the head of state and the military, but Uom had never been in battle, and the Travae was not a warship. It was a royal transport, meant to get him and his family away from Ritel before the Maro could get to them. Though his defense squad was firing valiantly, this attack would be the end of the monarchy, and effectively the end of the Ritel.
The end of the monarchy. That phrase came from the letter, too: They said your mother would bring about the end of the monarchy, but it went on without her, which goes to show that things aren’t always as bad as they seem. There is always a way to do the right thing.
The right thing here was simple, and Ryz didn’t hesitate. Three attackers. Priority target: the light attack ship. In any other instance, it would have been the pinwheel, but Ryz had been watching, and by the looks of the red glow under its skin, its guns were overheating, too. The light attack ship was already firing on the Travae, and Ryz used the thrusters to flip the Luma and push it between the two. He was firing before he righted, and the pulses rocked the enemy craft.
Ryz defied his Academy training by avoiding the urge to set up a firing position. If the Maro knew from which direction they could expect fire, they’d maneuver to keep their best shields toward him. Every visible panel of the LAS was heavily shielded. But Ryz had faced over thirty light attack ships in the last few weeks, and he’d discovered something: a panel, just between the aft tracking ports of the enemy craft, that crumpled like paper under heavy fire. This is what he’d been saving that last charge for. He kept barrel rolling the Luma, guns trained on the LAS, streaming pulses. He had to draw their attention, needed the Maro to stabilize their own attack position toward him.
He knew it was working when the dazzling little ship turned its attack from the Travae and onto him. Strafing it with fire, he spun the Luma up and over the Maro ship’s position and brought it to a jarring halt just aft and starboard of the craft. This was the moment. His secondary hands hit the fire button and the heavy charge burst from the belly of the Luma, driving straight and silent toward the Maro ship.
They detected it, tried to spin, but were too late. The charge hit the top edge of the panel and the ship keened off, internal explosions flashing alongside the haphazard stream of plasma missiles tumbling from the firing ports and drifting into the blackness around them.
Ryz turned his attention back to the remaining ships. As he’d predicted, they’d turned their fire on him when he engaged the light craft, and it was only now, in the absence of its constant barrage, that he noticed they’d been firing, too. The pinwheel’s charges weren’t hitting though, its elevated temperature playing havoc, he supposed, with their guidance systems. But the double barrels of the third ship, the Stinger, were sending out long-range, high-efficiency pulses that were finding their marks more often than he’d realized. The Luma’s control board lit up with damage reports. The outer hull was beginning to falter.
His was the only ship in the fleet with that extra protection. It was mostly meant to keep the vast sucking emptiness of deep space at bay, but it also helped in moments like this, when they were under fire. The presence of the extra hull annoyed Natoo, mostly because it added a layer of complexity to his engineering duties, and Ryz was tempted for a nano-second to say something about how the engineer should appreciate it.
Without heavy charges, he didn’t know how to take down a Stinger. Long and lean, the ship cut toward him like a smooth-edged blade. Its pulses didn’t rock the ship like the missiles had done. Instead, each brought a prolonged shiver that ran through the metal and lit up the readout screens. Each vibration locked Ryz’s body with a fleeting shock, a buzz that froze his sixteen fingers useless above the controls. The closer the Stinger got, the more intense the brief fits of paralysis became.
“Do something!” Natoo’s voice was strangled. He was suffering more from the pulses than Ryz.
“On it,” Ryz said, trying to sound cheerful. His mind scoured the possibilities. Heavy charges were gone. Plasma missiles were likely too slow to reach the Stinger before it reached him.
Ryz had never faced a Stinger without a battleship backup before, and he was seeing why the pod-on-Stinger strategy wasn’t taught at the Academy—because there was no chance for the pod.
But he’d always been good at seeing things no one else saw. And in the long, breathless moment of the next shockwave, Ryz saw what he needed to do.
Slowly, as his body thawed, he rotated the ship.
“Yes!” Natoo cried from below. “Let’s get out of here!”
Ryz didn’t stop to explain they weren’t retreating. To do so was to leave the Travae as good as helpless. Though it still had a chance against the crippled Pinwheel, the Stinger would destroy the smaller ship. He aimed his aft guns, an apology to Natoo on the edge of his mind, and started to fire.
The controls were designed to force a pause between the pulses, allowing a slight cooling of the firing system so it would last in a battle. But Ryz didn’t need it to last. He needed heat, and he needed it now. So he used his extra fingers, the little ones on the edges of his pri
mary hands, the ones nobody else had, to do what he’d spent so much time in the Academy training himself not to do. The extra reach allowed him to hit the firing buttons simultaneously, instead of alternating as the system was designed to do. The pulses became a stream, and he aimed them at the oncoming assault from the Stinger.
“We’re overheating!” Natoo cried from below.
Ryz wished he hadn’t vented the aft guns. That had made this process just that much longer, and he had no seconds to spare.
“Emergency suits, Natoo,” Ryz said, using his knee to bump his own ES activation button. A specially-designed suit unfolded around him.
“No, Ryz,” Natoo said, “No. Stop this!”
“It’s time for an exit strategy,” Ryz said, trying to keep his voice even. Another shock thrummed through the ship, and his fingers clenched hard on the panel, depressing the firing buttons for that long, frozen moment. A bitter smell filled the ship—the heat was reaching a critical point. He hoped it would be quick, that the heat would fry them fast, so they wouldn’t suffer too long. He considered removing the suit, but there was no time now.
Brilliant light shot through every crevice of the Luma, emanating from the aft cannons as the plasma reached the flash point and ignited in the barrel.
“Please,” Ryz heard himself say. The final pulse streaked forward, carrying its intense energy directly to the thousands of invisible plasma trails the Stinger’s pulses had left behind. Like rails of fire they lit up, igniting and racing each other back where they’d come from: the Maro ship’s cannons.
The two ships erupted at the same time, and Ryz had one last, fleeting glimpse of the Stinger shattering apart as his own ship ruptured and he was ejected. It was the last thing Ryz saw as he tumbled into darkness.
* * *
It wasn’t my idea to send you away.
The words of the letter came to Ryz through the darkness. He strained to hear Natoo, to see if he was okay, but there was only silence, save for his father’s voice in his head, speaking those haunting phrases. Father sounded just as he had that morning so long ago when Ryz had been loaded into a cabship and delivered like a package to the Juvenile Academy.
I would have stayed with you—and with her—forever. But there was no place for our family in their world. No place that we could picnic or hold hands or watch a sunrise without people staring. After she died,
The words still jolted Ryz. He hated them.
The Royals just didn’t know what to do with you and I. They would have kept you locked away, Ryz, hidden, if I hadn’t agreed to go. I’ll always be grateful that they allowed you into the Academy. You don’t know it, but your fate would have been much worse if they’d chosen to turn you out. And now, I hear, you’re an ace pilot. Better, I understand, than I was. That doesn’t surprise me. You were born better.
I know what you’ve heard about your mother. That she let the Ritellian Empire down, that she abandoned her subjects. But that’s not true. You should know that.
Did she abdicate? Yes, she did. She gave up her throne and her title. And abdication means a lot of things. It means that instead of being the most respected, revered leader, you become the most berated, least trusted suspect of your country. It means you leave your home and you’re always on the edge of every family gathering. You’re not allowed to have an opinion on how your brother is managing the Empire, though everyone else has one, because you had the chance to do it your way and you threw it away.
And if you threw it away to marry someone completely unsuitable to rule with you, then it’s even worse.
But that’s one thing you need to know, my son,
And here Ryz’s mind also conjured his father’s face: the crinkling eyes, the upturned mouth. Hideous, like his own.
Your mother didn’t give up her throne for me.
The first time he’d read the letter was the first time Ryz had ever heard that. All the sneering and jeering from the others at the Academy, all the official documents he’d seen, all the broadcast interviews, had said that his mother had left her throne because she was in love with his father and no one would ever accept his father as a member of the royal family. So if she hadn’t abdicated to be with his father, what had made her leave the throne? What had convinced her to turn her back on her subjects? And why did the letter argue that she hadn’t actually turned her back on them after all?
Ryz was dimly aware of voices. He listened again for Natoo, but heard only strange tones and unfamiliar speakers. He feared space had claimed his engineer.
Ryz ran through the last moments of the battle. Could he have done more? Done better? The weight of Natoo’s loss shook him. He couldn’t breathe properly. It was as if his lungs weren’t having to work as hard as usual. They felt light and floppy, his mind giddy with extra air. His suit must be malfunctioning. He pushed a hand toward his mouth to check for obstructions, but found nothing there. He tried to force his heavy eyes open, but a hand to his forehead found them wrapped in gauze.
Ryz wanted to tear it off, but he was afraid. That last bright light—had it damaged them? All he could think was that he hadn’t read the second page of the letter yet. His father had more to tell him. What if he could never read it?
He lay very still and ran a hand down his chest. He wasn’t wearing his protective gear. Just his flight uniform. The letter made a crinkling sound in his pocket. He realized he wasn’t floating in deep space anymore. He was lying on his side on what felt like a cold floor. The back of his left shoulder seared with pain from a flash burn. Reaching out, he felt thick metal slats all around him. He was in a cage.
More voices. He couldn’t understand them. They were speaking a different language, and their tones, Ryz was sure, sounded nothing like Ritellian speech. He crawled to the edge of his cell and pressed his secondary fingers between the slats. The bars were long and thin. He began to probe, hoping to find a lock to release.
A loud exclamation told Ryz that he’d been seen. He pulled his hand back into the cage.
There was a strange squeeing and the sound of static before familiar words began to flow in around him.
“That better? Can you understand me?” His captor was using a translation wedge. Ryz recognized the artificial voice. Strange words, then a stream of Ritellian.
“Where am I?” he asked, and the wedge garbled out his question to its owner.
“You’re on a research ship. We picked you up in open space. You’re lucky we were trawling.”
Even in Ritellian, the word was unfamiliar. “Trawling?”
“Right. Scraping space for interesting particles. And then we found you.”
“What’s wrong with the air?”
“Nothing. This is what you’re meant to breathe. Your suit seemed maladjusted for your needs. Have you always breathed that mixture?”
“Of course. That’s what we breathe on my planet.”
“Interesting,” the voice said. “You’ll likely find this a bit easier.”
“Why can’t I see?”
“Your eyes are badly burned. That’s why we’re keeping you out of the light, too.”
“In a cage.”
“Well, that’s for our safety. We weren’t sure exactly what—”
“What I am?”
“Right.”
“You won’t win any awards for that observation.”
There was a long pause, as if the researcher didn’t know how to respond.
“I’m only joking,” Ryz said. “I’m a bit of an anomaly where I come from, too.”
“Ritel?”
“Yes.”
The researcher made a sound, but the translator didn’t speak. The noise it made sounded like surprise.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Doctor Cataris. I tended to your wounds.”
“Then locked me up.”
“Yes.” There was acknowledgment in the doctor’s voice, a taking of responsibility. Ryz appreciated that.
“Who do you work for? Whose ship i
s this?”
“We’re from COS—the Consortium of Species. Our mission—”
“I know your mission. Collect specimens. Study them.”
“It’s important to know all we can about various species.”
“Why? What do you do with that information?”
There was a long pause after the translator finished relating his question. The researcher, it seemed, had walked away. But another series of tones and static came from Ryz’s left. Another translator, this one a little slower, was activated.
“They won’t answer the hard questions. Believe me. I’ve asked.” The voice was light and her language complex. “They keep saying they’ll let us out, but I haven’t seen any evidence that they mean it.”
“Who are you?”
“Another prisoner,” she said. “The only other prisoner right now, though it looks like they are set up for a lot more.” There was a little pause before she added, almost as an afterthought, “They call me Delta.”
“Where did you come from?”
“They brought me from a refinery over in the Barin Quadrant. I was navigating a fuel vessel they hired to come out and fill them up.” Her voice got quiet. “I don’t know why they wanted me. There were a lot more interesting species on the ship. At first I thought they needed a navigator, but they brought me in here and I haven’t left the room since.”
“How long?” Ryz asked.
“Months, I guess. It’s hard to tell now.”
“Has it been bad?”
There was a long pause before she spoke. “Some of it.”
Bridge Across the Stars: A Sci-Fi Bridge Original Anthology Page 17