by A B Lucian
Sabina and Captain Dupont limped to his side with puzzled expressions on their faces. “We need to go,” one of them said. Yosh wasn’t sure which. He barely recognized the voice over the gasps and cries of hundreds of dying people darting through his mind. He told them what he’d done, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes the entire time. They said nothing, just sat beside him and waited. Arkanians could last almost five minutes without breathing, so they waited ten. Assai contacted them during the wait to tell them the cruiser stopped firing on the Archibald, and to ask about their status. Were they on the ship that detached from the cruiser?
Yosh couldn’t bring himself to speak so Captain Dupont answered. He told Assai what happened with Mikail and the Black Silence, and at the end he told her Yosh had vented the atmosphere from the entire cruiser.
Yosh could almost hear Assai’s wince over the communicator. “Acknowledged,” was all she said.
Yosh staggered to his feet. He shook his head. It wasn’t over yet. He cleared his throat and spoke to Assai over the communicator. “We’re on our way to the bridge.” He spoke louder than usual to conceal the shaking in his voice. “It’ll be easier to control the cruiser from there.” It surprised him when no one laughed at the pitch in his voice and no one mentioned it. “Follow the ship that detached from the cruiser. Don’t lose it; it won’t cloak, and it won’t get far.” He bit his lip and walked toward the doors.
It’s Mikail’s fault, Yosh thought, clenching his teeth and his fists. They put on the helmets of their assault suits, they had at least fifteen minutes worth of air, and left the engineering bay. Captain Dupont walked to his right, a pistol held tight in his good arm, and Sabina to his left with an arkanian hunting knife held tight in both hands. Some arkanians might have used their helmets too, and they needed to be ready. But all they found on their way to the bridge were contorted bodies and faces frozen in their last moments of anguish. Their eyes and mouth were always open, staring straight at Yosh and screaming.
The burning sensation behind his eyes didn’t disappear, it just worsened. He was thankful for the helmet, not just because it allowed him to breathe. He turned his visor’s opacity to maximum and let the tears flow for the first time since his father died. Venting the atmosphere meant giving up on his grandfather. He had read Sabina’s expression in the hallway as she attacked Kagos’s men. He knew his grandfather was dead, but somehow he had still clung to a sliver of hope. Perhaps he could be saved. Perhaps Doc Murdoc could do something. Perhaps… Perhaps not. There was no hope now—Yosh sacrificed it for 800 million slaves who didn’t know who he was or the danger they had been in.
He straightened his shoulders, shutting out any other thoughts. This was Mikail’s fault and Yosh would make sure he’d pay. He stepped over the bodies of open-mouthed arkanians and two-hundred-pound dogs and quickened his pace toward the bridge.
◆◆◆
“I have control of navigation,” Captain Dupont said and sat back in the forward most seat at the forward most point of the cruiser’s wedge-like bridge.
“Weapons are still online and I got the shield generators working,” Sabina said in return, tapping on the wide console to the right of Captain Dupont with ship-wide status displays surrounding it.
Yosh stood in the middle of the corpse-littered bridge—a dozen consoles flanking him on each side. In the front, at the tip of the wedge, three main consoles spread under a huge viewscreen. Its sheer size was humbling. The Black Silence had been larger than anything Yosh ever piloted. Mikail’s cruiser and everything inside it was larger. The Protectors had built their ships with compact systems and efficient use of space in mind, while the arkanians seemed to like a certain ostentatious style, as if aiming for intimidation by sheer size in every aspect of their lives. Yosh stared at one of the arkanian crew members. He had re-pressurized the bridge once they reached it, but the dead stayed dead. Yes, I’m the one who killed you, he thought, answering the question in the bulging eyes of the corpse.
“Yosh.” The captain’s voice pulled him out of his thoughts. “The Archibald is chasing the Black Silence. What do you want to do?”
Yosh pressed his lips together. Why was he asking him? “Do we have them on sensors?”
“We do,” the captain replied. “I will put them on the viewscreen.”
The main viewscreen—a life-sized representation of Yosh’s home could fit on it with room left to spare—flicked open. Stars burned bright against the blackness of space. Without the ship’s computer highlighting The Black Silence with a red circle and tactical information, Yosh wouldn’t have spotted the shadow gliding ominously through the void. Its long oval shape and its overall design spoke to something deep inside Yosh. Compared to it, the Archibald looked like a hunk of twisted red metal with odd angles in its design and crooked parts sprawling out of places you didn’t expect—worlds away from the sleek design of the Black Silence. Yosh imagined the arkanian heavy cruiser looked like the Archibald only bigger.
Yosh stepped toward the viewscreen. “Can we get closer?”
Captain Dupont nodded and adjusted something on the panel. The image of the two ships grew as they approached. The lights from the Black Silence’s engines dimmed after a minute, then they gave out and died. Yosh grinned. It had to happen eventually. It amazed Yosh that Mikail kept the ship running this long. He had squeezed the energy stores dry to get from Mandessa to the cruiser. The engines should have died seconds after detaching from the cruiser, but Mikail had been a Protector, so he might know some tricks Yosh didn’t. It didn’t matter now. The light from the sun bounced off the shiny black hull as its bulk slid forward, pushed only by inertia.
“Guess who’s hailing us?” Sabina said, a lopsided smile across her face.
Yosh’s fist tightened. “Mikail,” he said, sighing.
“I think it is you he wants to talk to,” Captain Dupont said.
Yosh straightened his back. “Oh, I want to talk to him too. Put him on screen. I want to see his miserable face.”
Mikail’s scowl filled the entire wall. Red lights flashed off his sweaty bald head. The crease in the middle of his forehead was deep as a black hole and his ice-blue eyes burned with the fury of a thousand suns. “What are you fools waiting for? Blow them away. Annihilate them!”
The anger and intensity in his voice almost made Yosh cringe, but he controlled himself and forced a delicate smile to the corner of his lips. He said nothing, smiled and watched Mikail’s face, waiting for him to notice. There was a hole in his right cheek half a fist wide. A large chunk of skin, sinew and muscle was missing, and the wound bled heavily. What amount of beard he had left was bathed in blood. Blood trickled from the open wound, running through the wiry strands of red hair and into the collar of the Protector suit.
Mikail’s eyes bulged and his nostrils flared and spluttered as he noticed Yosh. His face puckered and even more blood seeped out of his wound. “You!” The image on the viewscreen tittered and loud banging came from somewhere beyond the image on the screen. Mikail’s distress made Yosh grin and almost made him forget everything he’d been through to reach this point.
“Are we in weapons range?” he said to Sabina casually.
“We are,” she answered, and continued in a hushed tone. “But let’s not blow up that black beauty yet. We could use it.”
He turned his head and whispered back. “I know, of course not.” He cleared his throat and turned back to Mikail. He had ceased hitting the console and now stared coldly at them. His eyes searched the bridge as if hoping one of his dead arkanian crew would rise and kill Yosh.
“Mikail Munov,” Yosh started, and Mikail’s eyes shot back to him. “You are responsible for many deaths. Today, your sins have caught up with you. You’re stranded on the Protector vessel you stole from me. You greedily pushed the engines for over fifteen minutes when I know for sure they had almost no power left.” He paused. Mikail’s eyes narrowed. “Which means you’ve routed power from other system reserves, p
erhaps even life support, to distance yourself to safety until your cruiser could destroy my friends and retrieve you.” He stopped again for a second and enjoyed seeing the crease between Mikail’s eyebrows deepen even more. “Your crew is dead, your cruiser is mine, and I don’t think you have much air remaining. Surrender and I won’t condemn you to a slow death by suffocation like I… like I did your crew.”
Mikail regarded him in silence. Sweat poured through his eyebrows and mixed with the blood from his wound. It must have stung, but he didn’t flinch.
“You whelp. How dare you speak to me like that? You represent everything wrong with the Protectors,” he said from behind clenched teeth. “Your smugness and arrogance will be your doom. You think you’re better than everyone else just because of a few genetic modifications. You’re not superior!” His jaw clenched and his lips trembled. Blood flowed down his mangled cheek. “For all your might and all your alleged superiority…” he stopped a second to inhale, “you weren’t good enough to stop me.” He chuckled. “I brought all you Protectors to your knees. Me, an orphan boy from Luna! I brought you arrogant bastards to your knees, and I put a gun to your superior heads, and I pulled the trigger without hesitation.” He paused for breath again and smiled crookedly as blood seeped over his thin lips and between his large teeth. It was a haunting sight to behold. Though Mikail stared at Yosh through the viewscreen, his eyes were glossy and he looked right through him. Whoever he was talking to, it wasn’t Yosh.
Yosh snapped his fingers. “Hey! Snap out of it. Do you hear me? If you don’t surrender, you’ll die on that ship.” Mikail stared and chuckled. Yosh turned to Sabina. “Fire a warning shot.”
Sabina tapped a few commands into the console. A few seconds later a bright point of light appeared on the screen, a little to the side, in a separate window. It streaked through the blackness heading straight for the Black Silence. The torpedo left a thin strip of light as it slid through the dark murkiness. It hit the center of the Black Silence’s bulk. A pillar of light rose from its hull and molten pieces of metal rushed outward.
Yosh glared at Sabina. “I said a warning shot,” he hissed.
She smiled back and shrugged. “That was a warning shot.”
The Black Silence could take a beating, but Yosh didn’t want risk it after the many years she spent beneath the ground. At least Sabina’s shot seemed to bring Mikail back into the present. “You think death scares me, brat?” Mikail said, his eyes focusing on Yosh again. “I’ve tasted it on my tongue thousands of times. I’ve grabbed death by the throat and held it off for countless years.” He grinned and held out an outstretched hand with his fingers spread in the shape of a claw. “I took your father from you. I took your grandfather. I took the Protector suit he meant to leave you and now even the ship he wanted you to have.”
Yosh clenched his jaw, trying to keep his face as expressionless as possible. He didn’t want to give Mikail the satisfaction. “You’ll pay for the lives of my father and my grandfather, and all the innocent lives you took on Mandessa.”
Mikail’s eyes gleamed. “Oh, I didn’t kill your father, brat. I keep telling you people. What I did to him is far worse.” He chuckled from the depths of his lungs until it turned into a cough.
“Liar!” Sabina said and sprang from her seat.
Mikail shook his head. “If I die, I die victorious. I’m taking this ship with me and your little friends on that scrapheap, too.” Yosh saw Mikail’s eyes suddenly spark with a certain mischievous glare that gave Yosh the most sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach.
A robotic voice echoed from behind Mikail. “Self-destruct sequence activated.”
Mikail sat back and exhaled as if all his problems were over. “You better hope you lose enough today, brat, or I’ll be back to take everything you’ve left.” The viewscreen went dark.
“Blast him! He has stopped transmitting,” Captain Dupont said, tapping furiously at the controls. “The bastard would rather blow himself to smithereens than let himself get captured.”
Yosh’s heart raced. “Get the Archibald on the line. Fast. Warn them. Now!” he said to the captain and jumped into one of the two empty pilot seats at the front of the bridge.
“Channel is already open,” the captain said. He’d been working on it before Yosh even said anything. “Archibald, get out of here. Assai, Marge! Back away from the Protector vessel. Full speed. It will self-destruct, get away. I repeat: the Black Silence will self destruct. Get away!”
Yosh wanted to say something, but he was too busy manually maneuvering the cruiser’s giant bulk. When the Black Silence exploded anything within a 300-mile radius would be obliterated. Protector vessels had done this in the battle for Earth. Once ships were damaged beyond any use, their captains engaged the selfdestruct sequence and punched forward at maximum thrust into the arkanian formations. Some captains even rammed arkanian capital ships at the precise moment their own ship exploded.
The result was devastating. Just one of the vessels, if maneuvered correctly, could take an entire arkanian battle group out of the fight. Not all the ships would be close enough, but they would cripple all the big capital ships and the smaller supporting vessels for hours, even days. A small ship like the Archibald wouldn’t survive the blast at their current range. Yosh blasted the heavy cruiser’s engines at full throttle and pulled its bulk hard to port.
A giant ball of light engulfed the Black Silence as it detonated.
Yosh interposed the cruiser’s bulk between the explosion and the Archibald just in time, and prepared for the shockwave of expanding gases and incandescent durasteel. The cruiser’s shields drained in an instant and the entire ship rocked violently. The giant viewscreen shattered and jagged shards of it rained down on Yosh.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Yosh screamed at the top of his lungs as Sabina removed the razor-sharp shards imbedded in his forearms and legs. He had rolled out of the seat and curled into a ball as soon as he saw the viewscreen shatter, but he still took the brunt of the rain of shards on his forearms. Three particularly large pieces of glass had cut right through his suit’s protection, digging themselves deep into his flesh. Yosh heard one of the larger pieces scrape against bone as Sabina pulled it out. The pain blared through his skull, almost making him retch.
The shock had thrown captain Dupont away from the navigation console and clear of the deadly rain of shards. Only small pieces reached him, but his suit protected him and he ended up with only a large bump on the head and several bloody scrapes across his face.
Once Sabina removed the shards from his arms and legs, Yosh pushed himself to his feet and limped to the communication console. He slumped into the arkanian-sized chair in front of it and tapped a few commands. “Archibald. Archibald, do you read? Come in.” Time passed, and no response came. The sensors were offline, as were most of the cruiser’s systems. The burning sensation built up behind his eyes. Not Assai. Please, please, not Assai too. “Archibald, come in!” He felt tight and drawn in his chest. “Assai. Please respond… Please…”
Captain Dupont’s large paw squeezed his shoulder. “I will try to get the sensor array working. The Archibald’s communications might have been knocked out.”
Yosh nodded vigorously. He wanted to believe it—he wanted to believe it so much—but he saw the captain’s clenched jaw and murky eyes as he stalked away and knew he didn’t really believe what he said. Yosh wanted to put his fists through all this damned technology. What use was it if he couldn’t save Assai? What use was this monstrous ship? The thought of driving it into Essa at full speed tempted him. One less death machine floating through the stars.
“Yosh,” Assai’s voice crackled through the speakers.
Yosh let out an involuntary cackle at the sound of her voice and the tightness in his chest disappeared. “Assai, it’s so good to hear your voice again. Are you all right? Is everyone all right?”
“We’re fine Yosh,” she said, hurriedly. “What’s your situati
on?”
Yosh smiled. “I’m okay, we’re okay, Assai. The ship is ours. Have the Archibald dock with the cruiser.”
Cheers and shouts of victory resounded over the communicator. The chant of “Long live the Protectors! Long live Yosh,” surprised him. He knew it was true: he was a Protector of the Earth, but he didn’t think of himself like that. The Protectors were heroes, Yosh was just a young man stumbling through all this mess and trying to stay alive. Yosh was a mass murderer. He had focused on what went wrong, but in truth, Mandessa was safe, the cruiser no longer posed a threat, and most important of all, Mikail was dead. The cheers went on and eventually Yosh allowed himself to sit back and smile at Captain Dupont and Sabina.
Sabina was covered in arkanian gore and her hair was sticky-red. The curly strands on which the blood had dried looked stiff and brittle. She leaned against the weapons console, crossed her arms over her chest, and nodded to Yosh with a slight smile.
Captain Dupont seemed as astonished at the cries of victory as Yosh was. His face didn’t reveal much, but his eyes shone. “I never thought we would ever cheer for victory over the arkanians again,” he said and looked at Yosh with admiration and respect in his eyes. “Especially one so resounding. Congratulations, Yosh Farmer, we defeated Mikail the Betrayer and captured his flagship. Generations of our people will sing your praises.”
Yosh nodded and wanted to allow himself to enjoy the victory, but something deep within himself was still broken. Sabina walked over to his side and by unspoken consent he rose and followed her off the bridge. Captain Dupont pressurized the hallways and corridors they were to use as Yosh and Sabina strolled past the twisted bodies toward the room where their grandfather died.