by Rob Dearsley
Arland charged out the same door the mercs had come from, the gun in her left-hand barking. Two men dropped before they even knew she was there. Another figure followed Arland at a more sedate pace, firing past her with his own rifle.
As the mercs turned to face this new threat, Hale and Luc rolled out of cover and opened fire, forcing the men to fight on two fronts.
Arland dropped another couple of guards before her weapon clicked empty, she tossed it aside and flicked her right wrist, extending a metal baton.
She ducked under a blow from the nearest guard and jammed the baton into the back of his neck. The man’s arms and legs flailed. Dannage swore he could actually hear the crack of bone as the mercs joints were hyperextended.
Arland didn’t stop; she’d barely even slowed down. He recognised the focused, determined expression on her face. Behind it was a flaming anger he’d never seen in her before. She’d always been cool and collected, especially in a fight. Now she was almost mad with rage as she bore down on the guard’s leader, a tall man wearing an SDF combat uniform. Dannage guessed it was Harris.
He almost felt sorry for the man.
Harris got off a couple of shots, hitting Arland high in the chest. She didn’t miss a beat as she closed into melee range and stabbed the baton hard enough into his stomach that it collapsed. Harris took a couple of steps back, his body convulsing.
A bullet cracked off the column next to his head and Dannage recovered his composure enough to duck behind cover again. By the time he looked back out, Arland had re-extended the baton and Harris was down on one knee, spitting blood onto the concourse.
Arland kicked him in the face, sending him reeling onto his back, and jabbed him with the baton. After he finished convulsing, Harris tried to rise. Arland kicked him back down and struck him again. This time he didn’t move.
Dannage climbed out from behind the pillar. Utter devastation filled the concourse above him.
All the guards were dead. Hale helped Luc to his feet. On the other side of the platform, the stranger moved in beside Arland to cover Harris.
Arland looked up and saw Dannage for the first time.
“Sir?” she said. A complex string of emotions that Dannage couldn’t quite follow flowed across her face, before settling for relief, tinged with irritation. “I thought you were dead.”
Before she could even finish, he had rushed up the curve of the platform and bundled her up in his arms. “Stars, Arland. Don’t do that to me.” She smelt of stale sweat mixed with acrylic smoke. At that moment it was the best smell in the world.
“Sir! Sir! Put me down.” She batted him on the shoulders until he let her go, grinning. Until that moment he hadn’t realised how much he’d missed her. How much she meant to him.
“We need to get back to the Folly.” Hale helped Luc stand, his face was pale and tau t with pain.
Dannage nodded. “I want to be back on the ship before the Terrans arrive.”
“Too late.” They all looked down at Harris, his bloodied face splitting into a maniacal grin, his eyes rolling back in his head. “We’re already here.”
Crap, Dannage thought. “Run.”
Interlude Three
- Ferrite System, 12 hours ago -
The fleet command centre was abuzz with activity as Captain Rossini stepped from the elevator. She looked down at the dispatch notes on her flex-screen. They’d reassigned her again? She’d spent too long as a fixer, being shuffled from posting to posting to fix, assess or train other officers. When she was made CO of the Pike she thought she’d finally gotten an assignment that would stick. But no. Fleet Command moved her to another ship. It wasn’t even one she’d heard of. She hoped it wasn’t one of the old rust buckets they’d been pulling out of mothballs for the past week or so.
Crossing the room, she spotted her quarry. “Admiral.”
The elderly man turned to face Rossini. “What can I do for you, son?”
“You’ve reassigned me to the Manhattan?” she asked.
Admiral Niels indicated for Rossini to follow him toward the bank of windows that looked out over the staging ground.
“Your track record suggests you cope well with change and the unexpected.”
Rossini barely suppressed a sigh, she’d heard it all before, every time they shipped her off somewhere new.
“We need a soldier of your calibre on the Manhattan. It would be no exaggeration to say that she is the lynchpin of our plan to defeat the Terrans.”
By the time Niels finished, they were looking out of the windows across the assembled fleet. It was massive, the largest collection of ships she’d ever seen, all in one place, united by a single purpose. In their midst was a huge beast of a ship. Four crew modules, each as large as a mid-sized cruiser, and two oversized propulsion units had been stuck together around a structure that strongly resembled the ray guns from the old movies. It had a distinctly Terran design aesthetic. Parts of it had still been cocooned in scaffolding when she’d arrived in-system, but most of the scaffold was gone now.
“That.” Niels pointed to the huge ship. “Is the Manhattan. She’s been equipped with technology our scientists have reverse engineered from the Terran ships destroyed in Feldspar and Gypsum.”
Rossini tried to keep the shock off her face. That was one hastily assembled super-weapon.
Niels’s thoughts seemed to track her own. “We only just got her finished, but she’s ready. We just need a target.”
Before either of them could say more, a young petty officer rushed over, throwing a hasty salute to them both.
“Sorry to interrupt, sirs, but we’re receiving a priority message from a cargo haulier, designation CX515.”
Niels replied, “Tell them we don’t have any ships to spare to deal with pirates right now.”
“Beg pardon, sir. But they’re saying they know where the Terrans are going.”
That caught both their attention.
“Show me,” Niels ordered, then turned to Rossini. “Captain, the bay F gondola is connected to the Manhattan.”
Rossini lingered for a moment, her eyes tracing the sharp, aggressive lines of the new ship.
“This is going to be interesting,” she muttered to herself, then turned toward the lift and docking bay F.
◊◊
The gondola carriage shot from the side of the station toward the Manhattan. The small craft was little more than a four-man box with an atmo-exchanger on the top. Rossini was only sharing it with one other person. The other man sat in the opposite seat, his eyes a little too wide, his breathing shallow and fast.
“First time in space?” Rossini asked conversationally.
“What? No.” The older man’s attention flicked from the view outside to Rossini and back again. He gestured to the Manhattan. “I never thought we’d finish her on time.”
“You worked on the construction crew?” Rossini asked, now interested in finding out all she could about her new command.
“Yes. I was part of the team working with the Terran tech,” he replied. “They’ve got some crazy technology. Their understanding of superfluid dynamics and plasma conductivity far outstrips our own.”
Rossini didn’t have the first clue what any of that meant. “So, what does she have to fight the Terrans?” She indicated the ship growing steadily in the portal.
“Who? Oh, yes. We managed to construct a heavy plasma cannon in the exa-joule range. Okay, we had to build it into the main reactor, and the director channel runs the whole length of the ship.”
“Wait, wait.” Rossini held her hands up to stop the man before he continued using words Rossini didn’t understand. “Are you saying the ship is just one big gun?”
“It’s more complicated than that.” The man caught Rossini’s eye roll. “But, essentially yes. Command modules were added into the framework after the main directional channel was constructed.”
There was a moment of vertiginous acceleration, then the pair jolted as the gondola connected i
nto the Manhattan’s receiver and slowed to walking pace. More gondola carriages stacked up behind them.
A minute later, the doors to Rossini’s left opened with a hiss of hydraulics, revealing the Manhattan’s flight deck.
Rossini grabbed his bag off the rack attached to the outside of the gondola car and stepped to one side, instinctively clearing the arrival area ready for occupants of the next cart.
“Captain on deck!”
Rossini turned toward the lieutenant who had shouted and returned the salute. Around her, everyone stopped what they were doing and snapped to attention. She had a momentary flash of some tech standing rigidly at attention, waiting for the order to stand down as a blowtorch set his trouser leg on fire, and had to struggle not to smile.
“As you were,” she called out, and the techs jumped back to whatever they were doing.
“Something funny, sir?” the Lieutenant asked.
Sod, she thought he’d covered her humour. “No, lieutenant?”
“James, sir,” Lieutenant James supplied.
“Well, Lieutenant James, are you going to show me to the bridge?”
“Of course, sir.”
With James in the lead, they rode two lifts before arriving at the bridge. Again, James announced his presence with ear-splitting volume, and again the captain waved the bridge crew back to whatever they had been doing when she came in.
“Captain Rossini?” A woman with salt and pepper hair pulled back into a bun walked over and extended her hand. “I’m Commander Chambers, your XO.”
Rossini took the extended hand and nodded in reply. “How’s she shaping up?”
The XO smiled. “For something they threw together in less than a month, we’re in pretty good shape. Engines are good, and the capacitors for the weapon are at ninety percent.”
“Capacitors?”
“The big gun uses a huge amount of power, so it has to be run off capacitors. They in turn charge from the core. Science bods say a full charge gives us two shots, then we have to wait two to three minutes for the capacitors to recharge.”
Two to three minutes? Estimates like that were all well and good in the lab, but in battle, time was measured in seconds not minutes, and a three minute reload cycle might as well be forever. She shook his head.
“We’ll just have to make the first shots count, sir.” Chambers gave him a quick grin. “Anything else, sir?”
“That will be all, if you need me, I’ll be in my office.” She looked around the bridge. It was half as big again as the largest bridge she’d served on before, but seemed to have three times as many consoles crammed into it, giving the room the impression of a maze. “Chambers, where is my office?”
She replied with that grin again. “Out the doors at the back, down the corridor, second door on the left. If you end up in the stock room, you’ve gone too far.”
This time, she returned Chambers’s grin.
Twenty
- Pyrite System -
The Folly had survived, they were alive, the captain was alive. The refrain ran over and over in Arland’s head. But even with all the evidence, she didn’t want to believe it. It was too much to ask for, to hope for. Stars, she’d seen them die, grieved for them. She kept looking over to the captain and Luc, waiting for them to evaporate into memory. What if this was some horrible trick?
Arland followed the captain as they ran for the docking port. He was yelling into his ship-to-shore com. From the sound of it, things weren’t going too well. Jax couldn’t dock the Folly to pick them up.
“Sir,” she called over the various alarms screaming through the station. “The shuttle we came over on is still docked at the upper ring. We can use that.”
She could see the decision warring on his face. He wanted off the station. That much was obvious. But he’d rather be back on his ship, not some SDF shuttle.
“Sir.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. “We can dock with the Folly once we’re clear.”
His expression softened, and he placed his hand over hers. “Thanks, Arland.”
They changed direction, Simon leading the way back toward the shuttle.
At the shuttle, Arland helped Hale strap Luc into one of the aft seats. Once they were done, she followed the captain into the cockpit.
The captain had once bragged that he could fly anything.
“Stars, what screwy kind of control system is this?” He glared down at the touch display flight console.
Simon pushed his way into the pilot’s seat, displacing the captain in the process. “I’m certified.”
“Yeah, sure, take over, that’s fine.” Sarcasm dripped from the captain’s words.
“Sir, in the interest of expedience,” she began, but the captain waved her off.
“Just make sure brush-cut here gets us back to the Folly, not some SDF hanger deck.” With that, the captain marched into the aft compartment, leaving Arland looking after him.
She looked down at Simon, confused by the captain’s jealousy. She and Simon were just colleagues. He’d saved her life, she’d saved his. Respect between soldiers. That was it. That was all there would ever be, and if the captain couldn’t see what was going on right in front of his face, then it was his loss.
◊◊
Dannage stormed back into the aft compartment and threw himself into one of the flight chairs. Hale had finished strapping Luc in opposite him and was hunched into the next seat along.
“Hey, Arland, sooner rather than later.” He snapped the buckle on his harness closed with more force than was necessary.
“We’ll be off in a minute,” a male voice called back from the cockpit.
Dannage felt his jaw tighten. Damn that smarmy git, with his touchscreen console. It was a stupid way to fly a ship anyway. Any pilot worth his salt used stick controls. He’d never understand the SDF’s need to replace everything that worked with an overly complicated solution. He’d put good money on that git being SDF. Of course, she’d be drawn to the military type, it was the brush cut and the lack of brains. That was the SDF all over.
He regretted the thought almost before he’d finished it. The SDF wasn’t all that bad; they’d made Arland. If she’d not been drummed out of the SDF, then they would never have met.
And she’d been happy – back on the Folly. It was the happiest he’d seen her. She thought he hadn’t noticed, but he’d seen it. Under all the sarcasm and grumbling she loved being on the ship. The Triskelion photo flashed through his mind’s eye. She belonged there. Not back with the SDF.
If she couldn’t see what was right in front of her face, then it was her loss.
“Captain, captain!” Jax was practically screaming into the com by the time Dannage thumbed the transmitter open.
“Jax, calm down. I’m here. We’re all good.”
On the other side of the crew bay, Hale went stiff, her eyes going distant. Stars, the Terrans must be close.
“—all over the system, what do you want me to do?” Jax sounded about a second away from a full-blown panic attack. Hale was staring off into space and next to her Luc watched him through eyes clouded with pain.
“Why is it always down to me?” he asked no one in particular.
No one replied.
Sighing, he unbuckled his harness and clambered forward into the cockpit. “What’s happening out there?”
“Terran ships. Lots of them,” Arland replied, “and by the look of it, they’re still jumping in.”
He looked past her, through the windows to where ship after ship flashed into existence. Stars, there were so many of them, and they just kept coming.
In that moment he could see the future laid out in front of him. This was it, the end of the thread he’d pulled weeks ago at Feldspar. One way or the other, here and now was where the fate of humanity would be decided.
Arland’s thoughts must have mirrored his own. “Looks like the Binaries were right after all.”
“Where’s the Folly?” he asked.
Arl
and pointed off to their right, where the blunt, triangular shape of the Folly cast an erratic route through space.
“Cap’n,” Luc called from the aft compartment, “what about the scouts?”
Arland looked up questioningly at him.
“We told the SDF about this system, and Niels said he’d send scout ships to investigate.”
The man let out a low whistle.
Arland looked up, her eyes wide. “Admiral Niels?”
“Umm, I guess. Why?”
“He’s pretty much in charge of the Intersystem Defence Force, last I heard,” the man said, without taking his eyes from the stupid control screen.
“The scout ships are there, flanking the Jean-Luke,” Arland said pointing. The two low, aggressive looking ships held station on either side of their more elegant cousin.
“Mate, we need to get out of here. I’m plotting a course to those ships. We’ll dock and then get the heck out of here, wait for the rest of the fleet to arrive.”
“Not without the Folly,” Dannage replied through gritted teeth.
“Mate—”
To hells with it. He grabbed the man’s chair, spinning it so their faces were inches apart.
“I am not your mate,” he said, “and we are not leaving my ship and my crew behind.”
“Sir,” Arland placed a hand on his arm again. “Get the doctor to dock with the Jean-Luke as well, and we can transfer over.”
Damn it. She was right. She was always right. Closing his eyes, he nodded and thumbed the com open.
“Jax, you there?”
“Still here, just about.” The rattle of her keyboard almost drowned out Jax’s voice.
“Okay, new plan. Bring the Folly in to dock with the SDF Jean-Luke.”
“The one that was shooting at us?”
“Yeah, that one. Don’t worry they’ll have automated docking tethers to guide you in.” He thumbed the link closed before the doctor could argue further. “Do not make me regret this, brush-cut.”
◊◊
Dannage grew increasingly uncomfortable as they closed with the SDF parade ship. He glanced down at the scanner readout. Good, the Terrans were still on the periphery of the system, well out of weapons range. They should be safe until the Terrans rounded the swirling blue-green of the gas giant. When he looked back up, the SDF docking bay filled the shuttle’s viewport. The deck lurched as they crossed into the Jean-Luke’s gravity field, hard enough that he had to grab for Arland’s chair to stop from falling. Bloody ammeter.