by J. N. Chaney
Dash snapped to the operational display. Benzel’s force should be translating into the Backwater system at almost any time, but it would take at least an hour, and maybe as much as two, before they’d be close enough to influence the battle. Dash doubted that the Realm forces were going to last that long.
“Sentinel, any suggestions? Have to be honest, I’m running out of ideas here,” he said.
“I wish I could offer some dramatic means of turning the battle, but I’m afraid that the resources we have available just aren’t sufficient for the task. Perhaps Leira is correct. Withdrawal may be the only viable option.”
Dash said nothing. He just clenched his jaw and switched back to tactical, scanning the multitude of icons, desperately seeking inspiration. As he did, he saw the icon representing the Sabertooth suddenly change.
Her captain had given the order to abandon ship.
Dash’s stomach reefed down to a tight knot. With the Sabertooth out of action, the fleet had lost its largest remaining ship. What was left would be able to hold off the Deepers for—another half-hour. Maybe. After that, there’d just be the four mechs left to face the Deeper fleet. And even as powerful as they were, that battle would have only one outcome.
Dash looked up from tactical, gazing across the scene of carnage playing out high above Backwater. Fighters and missiles darted among lumbering capital ships, beam weapons fired, plasma blasts flashed and died, debris spun and tumbled about. His attention caught on something, though. It was the Deeper Battle Prince, the big one that had led the maggot-mechs in their attack on the Sabertooth. Maybe, if Dash could take him out, it would—
Would what? The idea that simply taking out its leader would cause an enemy force to collapse into chaos was the stuff of fiction. Dash might satisfy his thirst for revenge by destroying the Battle Prince, but whoever was next down their chain of command would just take over, and the battle would still grind out to its awful, inevitable conclusion.
“Leira, Conover, Jexin, let’s try and clear as many of the Deeper ships from near the gate as we can. If we can give the Dauntless and the rest of the ships on the other side of the gate time to get through, we might be able to turn this thing around yet.”
While he was talking, new icons appeared on tactical. Benzel’s task force had finally arrived.
Leira came on a private channel. “Dash, why don’t we pull back, join up with Benzel, and then counterattack? If we try to hold here until Benzel gets here, we’ll—”
“Probably all end up dead, yeah, I know. But we can’t let the Deepers get possession of the gate. Even if we counterattack and take it right back, that’ll give them enough time to deactivate it, or destroy it, or link it to some other destination.”
“But this is crazy! We risk losing all the remaining ships here, and the mechs!”
Dash didn’t yell. He spoke in an even tone because he could see the battle unfolding like math—and the answer was in question. It wasn’t the time for anger or shouting. He needed to lead. “I know that. I’m the Messenger, and what we will do is this—we expend every weapon. We melt down every capacitor, fire every shot, and then we fight until our blades go dim. Understand? We fight. This is my call.”
“It’s your call, but not your fault,” Leira said.
“Fault is irrelevant here. Victory is. I’m the one who should have seen this coming and not gotten target-locked on what was happening back at the Forge. Now, we clean up what’s left, and we do it with everything we have.”
“Dash—”
“Here’s the part where I say I’m the Messenger again, except I’m saying it to give an order. We’re going to fight for this gate, Leira. Like I said. Until my armor melts and the sword snaps. We fight.”
He waited for her inevitable objection and the argument to follow, and he resolved to tell her not to bother. There wasn’t any point. When she did reply, though, her voice had the same tone of weary inevitability his did.
“Roger that.”
That’s it, Dash thought. Leira’s accepted that this is the end. Because that’s what it really is, isn’t it? The end?
He readied his drive. “Sentinel, give me an inventory.”
“Of what, Dash?”
“Everything we have to fight with. Now.”
With that, he kicked the Blur and took the fight to them.
Dash loosed a salvo of missiles, followed-up with a dark-lance barrage, then slammed a burst of rail gun fire into the Deeper cruiser, just for good measure. The alien ship shuddered under the impacts but kept firing, landing hit after hit on the Archetype. Sentinel fought mightily to keep the shield intact, but it was a losing battle.
“Dash, several systems have gone critical. The blast-cannon has cycled into automatic shutdown. Now is the time I recommend that we withdraw, but I’m assuming that’s not an option, so—”
Dash slammed the Archetype hard aside, dodging a missile. “So?”
“So, I have nothing else to say. I will do my utmost to keep the Archetype capable of fighting for as long as possible.”
Dash swallowed hard. Even Sentinel had now accepted the implacable certainty of how this was going to end.
“I know you will, Sentinel. Thank you. For everything.”
She didn’t respond. Dash was glad because he couldn’t think of anything else that wasn’t too painful to say.
The Archetype’s shield died. X-ray laser and burst-cannon shots began to tear into the armor. More alarms sounded. The left elbow actuator went offline and stayed there.
Dash wheeled the Archetype hard, checking Benzel’s progress as he did. Still at least thirty minutes away.
At the rate the Archetype was taking damage, this would probably be his last pass at the Deeper fleet, or second-to-last, at best. He took a breath, lining up on a Deeper battlecruiser that was attempting to bludgeon its way through the tattered remnants of the Realm battleline and reach the gate. A few fighters still hung in the battle, and three N’Teel Moonbanes, along with a solitary Denkiller—had already started attack runs on the big Deeper ship. Dash saw one of the Moonbanes hit by a missile, sending it tumbling out of control. The Denkiller just exploded, impacted by something Dash hadn’t even seen.
He glanced back. Leira doggedly hung on his right rear quarter, his wing to the bitter end. Conover and Jexin had paired up on the other side of the battle and seemed to position themselves for their own final run.
Dash punched the drive and accelerated directly toward the battlecruiser.
As he did, something began pushing through the gate. But it wasn’t the bulbous bow of the Dauntless. It was something larger. Much larger. It quickly filled almost the entire width of the expanded gate, a massive, curving wall of black.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t one of their ships. So it had to belong to the Deepers. They’d somehow managed to seize the other end of the gate and now pushed through some enormous vessel to take this end, too. That meant the Kingsport was lost, along with all the ships and people who’d been building and supporting it.
So this, Dash thought, is how a war ends.
It struck him that this must be how the very last Golden felt at the end of the Life War, right before Dash killed it. He felt a strange moment of kinship with that Golden, in this moment of its utter failure and final defeat.
The vast shape continued pushing through the gate. Before it was even clear, it opened fire.
Except its target wasn’t the Realm fleet. It unleashed a colossal torrent of dark-lance and blast-cannon fire on the Deeper battlecruiser that had been making a run at the gate. The big ship staggered, then simply started to break apart under the sustained barrage.
Dash stared. He’d been right. It wasn’t a Realm ship coming through the gate.
It was an Anchor. It was Eastern.
“Dash, Ragsdale here. Unless you have some other preference, I’m just going to start killing Deepers, okay?”
Dash just stared. The sight of Eastern nudging its way through the gat
e, and right into the thick of the battle, left him stunned. Dumbfounded. Whatever word you used, anyway, to describe seeing something so familiar, in a place where it so doesn’t belong.
“Dash, do you intend to fly the Archetype directly into that Deeper ship?” Sentinel asked.
Dash shook himself free of his fixation on Eastern, slamming his situational awareness back where it belonged—on the battle. He’d been aligned for an attack on the battlecruiser charging for the gate, but Eastern had taken care of it for him. He pitched the Archetype up, zooming free of the battlespace again, then spinning around to take in the admittedly awesome sight of Eastern plowing directly into the Deeper fleet.
As soon as the Anchor had cleared the gate, something far, far smaller zipped through. Dash had no trouble immediately recognizing it as the Slipwing.
“Hello, Dash. Sorry we’re late,” Viktor said. Dash couldn’t miss the slightly smug tone in his voice.
He cleared his throat. “Uh, Viktor—”
He stopped as his brain got stuck on the sight of Eastern again. The Anchor sailed with an almost imperious grace into the Deeper battleline, its massed batteries of missile launchers, dark-lances, nova-guns, and blast-cannons spewing out a colossal deluge of firepower. The Deepers, taken as completely by surprise as Dash, had fallen into chaos. Ships burned hard, frantically maneuvering to avoid the Anchor, spitting desultory fire back at it as they scattered. A few tried to accelerate directly into Eastern’s hull, apparently intent on venting their frustration at the battle’s sudden and decisive turn by suicide attack. But the Anchor’s fire control systems were ready for it, immediately prioritizing any Deeper ship whose trajectory became a collision course and blasting it to scrap before it could even get close.
Dash found his voice again. “Uh, Viktor, correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the last place I saw you, Ragsdale and Eastern, the Forge? Like, just a few hours ago?”
“Uh-huh.”
A smile crept onto Dash’s face at Viktor’s tone. The man was enjoying this.
“And now you’re coming through a gate that leads to a place over a thousand light-years away?”
“You see it with your own eyes, don’t you?”
“Viktor—”
Laughter cut Dash off. It rang with the relief of something desperate that had worked out, of a near-disaster averted. Dash would have laughed the same laugh if it weren’t for the fact Ragsdale and Viktor had just pulled off something—well, impossible.
“They managed to re-link the Radiant Point at the Forge,” someone else said. It was Conover. “You guys managed to link it to this gate, didn’t you?”
“Aw, Conover, you stole my thunder,” Viktor groused.
Dash went back to staring. “Wait. You linked the Radiant Point to this gate? What about the other Radiant Point, you know, the one about a hundred and sixty thousand light-years out? And the other gate, the one connecting us to the Kingsport?”
“And just how the hell did you manage to do it?” Leira asked, easing the Swift to a halt near the Archetype.
Dash wanted an answer to that, too. Surely they hadn’t just consigned the Kingsport, and the Realm forces at the other Radiant Point, to oblivion? That would render this whole stunning turnaround to victory worse than just having lost the Backwater Gate.
“How we did it is complicated, something we can explain when we don’t have a Deeper fleet to finish off,” Viktor said. “For now, enough to say that all the research Elois and her team, and the AIs, and the rest of us working on these gates have done has paid off.”
“All I really care about right now is that we can dial it back to the way it was,” Dash put in. “Viktor, please tell me that we can.”
Viktor suddenly sounded a little peeved. “Of course we can. We wouldn’t have even tried it if we didn’t think we could.”
Dash let out the last bit of tense breath he’d been holding. “Okay, then. This is the part where I say, good work, guys. But this is more than even reaching the freakin’ Large Magellanic Cloud levels of good work.”
It was. Across the tactical display, Deeper ships were either fleeing or dying. The unexpected arrival of the massive Anchor had split the alien fleet apart while bringing as much firepower to bear as all of Benzel’s task force, and doing it all at once—and at point-blank range. Dash saw that the Anchor was taking hits, but none inflicted more than superficial damage.
But something else caught his eye. One of the Deeper icons had fallen into a trajectory that would take it directly toward the gate while using what remained of the spinward half of their fleet for cover.
It was the Battle Prince. The big one.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Dash muttered and kicked the Blur drive to full thrust. “Leira, I’m going after that asshole.”
“After which asshole?” Leira asked, then added, “Ah, I see him.”
“Looks like he’s planning on flying into the gate,” Conover said.
“Yeah, he is. Ragsdale, any chance you can stop that bastard before he does?”
“We’ve got him targeted, Dash, but between the ships and wreckage and crap between him and us, and the way he’s jinking around, I wouldn’t count on it,” Ragsdale replied.
“No problem, I’ll take care of him myself,” Dash replied, angling his trajectory onto a converging course with the Battle Prince.
Dash glanced at the derelict remains of the Relentless as he sailed past.
And I will enjoy every second of making this bastard pay.
Dash shoved the Blur drive past its redline, so intent he was on catching the Deeper Battle Prince. Even the Archetype’s vast acceleration wouldn’t let him catch up before the alien leader passed through the gate, though. Dash could only grit his teeth and hope that the Battle Prince wasn’t able to deactivate the gate as he passed through it, or once he had. Although, if they could now switch the linkages among the gates, it meant they at least had some redundancy to fall back on.
The Archetype swept over the expansive hull of Eastern. The Anchor continued firing, simply checking fire on batteries as he flashed past, then opening fire again when he was clear. Then the colossal hull fell away from him, and Dash raced across the clear space between Eastern and the gate. The fleeing Battle Prince now lay directly ahead of Dash, and he was gaining quickly.
But the Deeper leader still reached the gate first. He flashed through it and vanished.
Dash didn’t quite get what the Battle Prince was up to. He’d just popped back into real space within point-blank range of the Forge, whose formidable shields should be able to protect the Radiant Point until Dash arrived. It must be, he thought, a last, desperate attempt to win some measure of victory from what had abruptly become a sound defeat. Again, Dash felt a momentary—and unwelcome—instant of kinship with the Battle Prince. Literally only minutes ago, Dash had been the one staring certain defeat in the face. Again, he understood exactly what the Deeper leader was feeling right now.
That is, of course, if it even had emotions as Dash understood them. He hoped it did, though, because that flicker of empathy quickly darkened as the Archetype swept past a smashed Realm frigate. He hoped the Battle Prince had the same emotions he did and was now wallowing in every one of them.
The gate loomed ahead. Dash aligned himself into the center of it and raced through. He expected to find the Battle Prince already under fire from the Forge and hoped he’d have a chance to get at least a couple of shots in—
Wait.
What?
Dash gaped around him. There was no sign of the Forge at all.
The Archetype swept across a barren wasteland, jagged ridges of shattered rock soaring up in towering spires. A pale, purplish-tan orb hung overhead, casting a wan light that barely illuminated whatever, wherever, this desolate place was. Dash immediately recognized the orb as a brown dwarf, a strange beast caught somewhere between gas giant and actual star. A little more mass and it would ignite, nuclear fusion turning it into a fierce, hot young st
ar. A little less, and it would settle into a long and relatively sedate life as a planet. As it was, it still gave off more energy than it absorbed, the radiation streaming from it scouring this bleak moon down to its bedrock.
For what seemed like the hundredth time today, Dash marveled at a situation that had abruptly and dramatically changed from what he’d expected into something entirely different. Somehow, the Battle Prince had changed the far side of the Backwater Gate yet again, so instead of leading to the Radiant Point located at the Forge, it led—
Here, wherever the hell here was.
And, yet one more time today, Dash’s preoccupation with trying to make sense of sudden nonsense almost cost him dearly. Instinct made him roll the Archetype on its back, just in time to see the Battle Prince swooping down from above, brandishing a mace-like power-maul sizzling with energy.
Dash yelped and flung the Archetype into a nearly right-angle turn. He felt it, the colossal g-forces leaking through even the enhanced inertial dampers and squeezing him hard against the cradle. The maneuver proved too much for the Archetype’s already damaged left arm. Centrifugal force ripped it free, sending it slamming across the rock landscape like a battering ram.
If he’d been flying the pre-upgrade Archetype, he never would have avoided the Battle Prince’s attack. As it was, he just barely missed the sweep of the power-maul. Instead, it smashed into the peak of one of the rocky spires, shattering it into a hail of shrapnel. The Battle Prince raced through its own turn, desperately trying to follow the Archetype. Dash had the edge, though, maintaining the crushing turn until his opponent slid outside of their tightly arcing course. Realizing it couldn’t out-turn the Archetype, the Battle Prince instead pitched up and raced away from the planet, opening up with a burst-cannon barrage that saturated the Realm mech and the stony barrens beneath it.