by Rick Partlow
He collapsed, finally, as if there wasn’t enough of him left to hold him upright and I let loose a breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding and pried the gun out of Anatoly’s dead fingers before I scrambled to my feet. Svalinn suits were pounding into the compartment, swarming over the two dead Russians and the hostages. Everything was hazy, half-shrouded by smoke from the gunfire and it took me a few seconds to realize that some of the hostages had been shot.
“Fuck.”
The curse expelled itself like a piece of food caught in my throat and I ran to Colonel Barnett, praying to a God I wasn’t sure if I believed in and definitely wasn’t on speaking terms with that he was still alive. We had to get this fucking ship running and he was the one man I knew could do it.
He wasn’t hurt. There was blood spattered across the shoulder of his fatigue jacket, but it wasn’t his. The woman in the chair beside him, the one who’d kept her expression neutral, had been shot through the throat and her blood decorated her seat, her uniform and much of Barnett’s. Two of the others had been hit as well, one of them, a very young technician second class, the Space Force equivalent of a corporal, had a bullet through his left arm and he was whimpering like a puppy. The other was older, a tech sergeant, and he was clearly dead.
I yanked the quick-release for Barnett’s harness and pulled him to his feet.
“Colonel,” I said, “get the drives and weapons systems up now.”
“What?” he asked, blinking, wiping at the droplets of blood on his cheek. He couldn’t pull his eyes away from the dying woman beside him.
I gathered the slack of the sleeve over his left shoulder in my fist and shook him.
“Colonel!” I snapped and he finally met my gaze. “The ship! Get the fucking drives and weapons working now!”
He nodded, stumbling over to the control panel, nearly tripping over the bodies of the two Russians.
“Get her to the medics!” I told Pops. I thought it was Pops. It was someone in a suit of Svalinn armor. “Don’t wait for them to get here, carry her to the sick bay!”
I staggered, the strength going out of me so that I had to catch myself. A whirlwind of activity was happening all around me and I couldn’t follow any of it, couldn’t focus. I touched a control on my comm unit. I had one more duty to discharge before I could fall apart.
“Bridge, engineering is secured. Colonel Barnett is working the problem.” I clenched my jaw hard to keep bile inside my throat before I said the last. “We have one KIA, two WIA, one critical and headed to sickbay.”
“Roger, Security. Good job.”
I stared at the pool of blood where the woman had been. She was gone now. Pops had taken her away. The dead man was still there, most of the left side of his head gone. And Quinn was there, his visor up, eyes fixed on the bodies of the Russians on the floor, looking like a lost child.
“Yeah,” I muttered, finding an acceleration couch and leaning on it, trying to keep from falling over. “Good job.”
Chapter Twenty
I should have stayed in engineering or gone to sick bay, or gone somewhere I could have strapped in for battle stations, but I couldn’t stay away from the bridge. I didn’t even retrieve my armor, leaving it for Dog and Preacher to take back to the armory. When the alarm sounded for a micro-jump halfway there, I just put one hand against the bulkhead and took a wide, stable stance. The whiplash hit hard, but without the sharp pain of last time. Maybe I was too numb to fully feel it.
The bridge was a cacophony of orders and status reports and no one noticed my arrival, not even Julie, who was weaving complex magic spells with the haptic controls at her station, begging the old gods of hyperdimensional space for their blessings. I felt none of it, just watched the show on the main screens, as if the whole thing were just some new MMORPG Zack was playing on his Virtual Reality headset back home.
It wasn’t easy to translate into a narrative a dumbass Marine like me could understand. The screen was split up into four or five different sections, trying to keep track of the movements of each of the enemy ships, the Truthseeker, and us all at once. We were surrounded by a blue halo, a wedge-shaped silver dart on the screen, but so was the Truthseeker, and it took me nearly a minute to figure out which was which.
One of the blue ships was describing an arc around the outer edge of an enemy globular formation, just outside the range of their beam weapons, flashing yellow indicators beside it advertising battle damage, while the other was darting like a spear into the heart of the Tevynian cruisers.
“Firing impulse gun,” Davis announced and I finally figured it out.
We were the spear, the red line of our shot heading directly into the center of the cluster. It missed, the first time I’d ever seen that happen, because the ship it had been aimed at jumped into hyperspace a half-second before it reached the space they’d recently occupied.
“Shit,” Davis blurted, then realized where he was and corrected himself. “Sorry, sir, we have negative impact. Target performed a hyperdimensional translation and…shit!”
I didn’t blame him. The Tevynian ship had reappeared less than a thousand miles off our starboard bow—yeah, yeah, I know, but that’s what I’m going to call it—and was bearing down on us at full boost. I’d never seen one of the Tevynians attempt a micro-jump before. The bastards might have been primitive, but they were learning. I dropped into a spare acceleration couch and strapped in, knowing what was coming.
“Micro-jump,” Olivera said, still the cool-as-a-cucumber Air Force pilot but beginning to fray around the edges. “Take us ahead of the Truthseeker.”
“Jesus!” I wheezed, unable to keep the exclamation inside as the ship slipped in and out of hyperspace.
Julie glanced back, finally realizing I was back on the bridge, and her eyes spoke volumes she didn’t have the time to say.
“We’re a thousand klicks from the Truthseeker,” she told Olivera, duty claiming her attention. “A few light seconds from the nearest enemy formation.”
“Lt. Adams,” Olivera said and didn’t have to finish. There was only one person he’d want to speak to out here.
The communications officer nodded to him, and Joon-Pah appeared on a section of the forward screens. I don’t know why, but I expected him to be covered in soot, blood running from a cut on his forehead, the bridge on fire like in all those old science fiction TV shows. Like on that stupid-ass show they’d made from my books. But of course, that wasn’t how space battles worked, even with real force fields and energy beams. There was a shitload of armor and the high-tech equivalent of circuit breakers and all sorts of layers of protection between the hull and the bridge and while the engineering compartment might get a dangerous overload of the power trunks, it wasn’t a circa 1943 aircraft carrier and the only way the bridge would take damage was if something penetrated far enough to put a hole through it, in which case the whole ship would be so much driftwood, or if their energy fields were overloaded enough to cause a gravitational flux that damaged the superstructure of the ship, in which case the whole ship would be so much driftwood. But I repeat myself.
The Helta captain didn’t resemble a bad SF movie, but he didn’t look happy.
“Our drive field has been attenuated by fifty percent,” he said without so much as a ‘hey, how’s it going?’ “We’ve lost two of our power conduits and if we take another solid hit, we may lose jump capability.”
“We disposed of our infiltrators,” Olivera said. “They were Russians. Been on board since we left Earth.”
I raised an eyebrow. Olivera hadn’t had to tell him that, clearly hadn’t wanted to, but I thought he was trying to make up for not sharing our situation with him earlier.
“Thank you for keeping them off of us.” He tapped a finger rhythmically on the armrest of his command chair, eyes hazed over in concentration. “We’re going to take one last pass at them.”
Fuck. I’d known what he was going to say because he wasn’t the sort of commander who ran from a f
ight, but my stomach sank at the words. There were still ten enemy ships and while they hadn’t shown any great imagination at using their superior numbers to trap us so far, they weren’t morons. They were scared of our impulse guns, that was clear, but if we gave them enough tries, they’d figure out a way to kill us.
And I just knew he was going to let them try.
“I don’t want you to take any more damage, so you’re going to be the distraction and we’ll do the shooting. Can you handle one more micro-jump?”
Joon-Pah’s face was pained and I knew he wanted to say no, but the Helta had given Olivera a ration of shit about dishonesty and lying now would have stained his little ursine soul. And the fact he was more worried about that than dying was one of the things I liked about him.
“We can,” he confirmed. “But only one. We’ll need time for repairs after that.”
“Right.” I wasn’t sure if Olivera was assuring him he’d have time for those repairs or simply acknowledging that yes, the Helta did need repairs though he wasn’t going to guarantee he’d have the chance to perform them. “When they come in after us, act like you’re too badly damaged to jump, kind of putter along at half-speed back toward Alpha Three.”
“It will not be much of an act.”
“We’ll jump out a light-second,” Olivera went on as if the Helta hadn’t spoken, “then hop right back in when they start to close in on you. We’ll put a round through one of them, hopefully, then we’ll both jump back out to Alpha Three.”
“We will wait for your signal.” Joon-Pah’s face was replaced by an external view of his ship.
“Status on the enemy?” Olivera asked Davis. He could have looked at the tactical display himself and knew enough to interpret it, unlike me, but even a cast-iron bastard like Olivera got nervous enough to want to fill the silence with chatter, and sitting here waiting for someone to fire an energy beam at us sure as hell made me nervous.
“They’re reorganizing,” Davis reported, tracing a red line between the enemy ships, which were slowly maneuvering back into their loose, widely-spaced spherical formation, thousands of miles between them. “They’re too far out to come at us on sublight drives. It’d take hours and they don’t strike me as that patient. Plus, they know we’d just jump out before they got into beam range, and they also know our impulse guns have a longer reach than their particle cannons or lasers.”
“Why don’t all their cruisers have particle cannons?” I asked.
A dozen pairs of eyes stared at me, some angry, some disbelieving, at least one pair fond.
“I mean, they steal all their ships from the Helta,” I said, warmth flushing my face, though I don’t know why I was embarrassed. If Olivera, a general, could talk to fill the empty silence, a mere major like me should have had an even better excuse. “The Helta cruisers have particle cannons. Why don’t the Tevynian cruisers all have them?”
“Some of the ships they steal,” Olivera told me, sounding only mildly annoyed, “aren’t complete yet. Like the Jambo when we took her from the shipyards. The Tevynians have a lot more lasers than they do particle cannons so they stuff them into everything they have.” He sighed as if I were a toddler asking stupid questions and he was indulging me. “Go ahead, Captain Davis.”
“In my opinion, sir, they’re going to jump into our position in formation, or try to, maybe converge their firing arcs on us so we can’t maneuver out of them, probably from beyond technical maximum range. If they can fire enough shots at us even from extreme range, they could overwhelm our shields. They might even attenuate our drive field.”
“Julie, get ready,” Olivera told her. Her eyes narrowed slightly, a sign of annoyance no one else would likely notice. “The second they jump in on us, take us to just the other side of their formation and point our nose at one of those pieces of shit long enough for Davis to shoot.”
“Aye, sir.”
“You’d better cut it out with that shit, Navy,” he said, though I thought maybe he was smiling just a little. He glanced my way, and his earlier annoyance had transformed into something more thoughtful. “You sure you’re okay to be here, Andy?”
“I wasn’t hurt,” I said, trying not to sound sullen. I wanted to, but I was trying not to.
“That’s not what I mean.”
I knew what he meant.
“I’d rather be here,” I told him. “There’s nothing for me to do down there but wait.”
“I got the report from sickbay,” he said, the words pitched low, though I’m sure everyone could hear them. Maybe it was more from respect than any attempt to keep the statement private. “Technician Second-Class Foster is going to be fine. Technical Sergeant Bridger….”
I didn’t need to hear the rest. He said it anyway. “She didn’t make it. Lost too much blood.”
I tried to remember her face. I could picture the expression, the careful neutrality, but for some reason, I couldn’t put it all together into a face. She’d enlisted in the Space Force, had been motivated enough to go to NCO school, probably hadn’t been a tech sergeant for that long, given her age. And somehow, she’d ended up on the Jambo, which meant she was likely one of the best around at her job. They didn’t put people on this ship unless they were the best. She had her shit together enough not to give into the fear, to defy the expectations of those Chernobog assholes.
And right at the end, right when she’d been on the verge of coming through the whole experience unscathed, some bloodthirsty mercenary had shot her in the throat out of spite. She’d died in the arms of a stranger, bleeding out over Pops’ armored chest.
Olivera looked as if he was waiting on me to say something. I didn’t.
“They jumped,” Davis announced, leaning into his control console like he needed the leverage to strike out at the enemy.
Their emergence wasn’t immediate, took longer than before and I wondered how much time variance there could be and whether it was tactically significant. I counted automatically, unsure if it made any difference, but wanting to know how long it took them. I got to four and the ten ships sprang into existence with a shower of gamma rays, a rainbow ring in the computer’s fairy-tale simulation. They were close, so close I could make out the details of the particle cannon turret on the nearest of them just before it fired on us.
The Jambo shuddered, not the impact of something solid but close enough for me to forget I was in a starship and glance at the walls with suspicion.
“Now.” Olivera’s voice was steady, unhurried.
Julie swiped a hand and I threw up.
I didn’t think it was possible. I’d never had motion sickness in my life, not on a cruise in the Med, not on helos or V-22’s, not at Airborne School in the back of a blacked-out transport plane flying nap-of-the-earth trying to get us to puke, and not in hours and hours of free fall. I wasn’t alone, though. Adams retched and then Lt. Cannon and I felt even worse that the two youngest officers on the bridge were the only others to decorate the deck.
The deck plates were metal gridwork and the gaps swallowed up the bile quickly, but the lingering stench made my stomach lurch again. I clamped my jaws shut, determined not to act like a damned Army private, and the roaring in my ears subsided enough to catch the exchange between Olivera, Julie and Davis. So much of the battle was controlled by command, helm and tactical that I wondered if they could have gotten away with reducing the bridge crew to maybe four or five and letting the other two officers double up engineering and damage control and communications with navigation. But despite the fact the whole thing was run by the Space Force, it was a ship, and Navy crews always had a lot of redundancy.
“We’re two light seconds toward Alpha Three’s orbit,” Julie reported.
“The Truthseeker is keeping just ahead of their guns,” Davis put in. “But they’ll be back in range in seconds. Ten, maybe twelve.”
“You have the coordinates for the jump back?” Olivera asked Julie. She didn’t look up from her console, just nodded. “Are you g
onna upchuck all over the floor again, Clanton?”
“Deck,” I corrected him, gulping the word out. I shook my head, despite the roiling in my stomach. “No, I’m good.”
“Take us back, Julie.”
Warning klaxons blared, spreading the word to strap in. I hadn’t noticed it before the last jump, but this time it was obnoxiously loud. It sounded like the speaker was right beside my ear instead of out in the passageway, mocking me, promising to make me puke like a greenhorn again. I tensed and muttered curses through clenched teeth and did not lose what little was left in my stomach this time, though the price for my steadfastness was a wave of muscle cramps.
Pain blinded me and I came to the conclusion that there was a good Goddamned reason that the Helta and the other Allied races didn’t do this kind of shit with their hyperdrives. Flashes of light blinded me to where we’d popped into existence this time, the buzzing in my ears kept me from hearing the exchange of order and status reports, and the haze of unreality lasted longer this time, the effect cumulative with the short-interval hops.
“Firing.”
It was the first word I could make out, and I took it as a good sign. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again to the image of a Tevynian cruiser giving birth to a new, short-lived star with its dying breath.
“We got him!” Davis crowed, and a chorus of cheers erupted across the bridge.
The cheers were as short-lived as the artificial star, drowned out by proximity warnings. Proximity meant something different in space than it did to ships or aircraft on Earth, measured in hundreds of miles rather than hundreds of yards, but the danger was just as real—enemy ships were in firing range. And if we knew it, they sure as hell did.