by Rick Partlow
“As you wish, Major Clanton. There is an enemy cruiser emerging from hyperspace approximately 230 miles from our position.”
“Great,” I said, wincing as I nearly pulled a muscle trying to get into the Svalinn armor without someone else to cinch the gaskets. “I got the only fucking AI system in the entire Space Force with an attitude.”
I pulled on my helmet and sealed it in place, then pulled my rifle out from around the back on its gimbal.
“Bravo, can we maneuver yet?”
“At twenty percent of standard acceleration analog, Major.”
“Well don’t be shy, get us the fuck out of here as fast the ship will take us!”
“Out of here is a vague command, Major.”
“Bravo, you are trying my patience….”
The blue glow on the main screen caught my eye and I knew it had to be the enemy ship’s particle cannon firing. And we had less than twenty percent drive field to shield us.
God wound up and kicked Bravo like a can down the road and I was thrown off my feet despite the gyros built into the suit, crashing down onto my backpack. And then I began floating above the deck and the lights flickered. The view on the main screen went dark, and when it reappeared, the detailed computer animation based on the gravimetic sensors was gone, replaced by a flat, optical image from a camera feed somewhere near the bow of the ship.
“Hull penetration over engineering,” the computer reported. “Complete power loss from main reactor, all power conduits have failed. Artificial gravity has failed.”
“But I’m so glad you’re still with me,” I said through clenched teeth.
I was helpless, stranded in midair, but thankfully, the suit had a provision for that. I peeled back the protective sleeve from the wrist control unit and touched a control to activate the magnetic anchors on the soles of my boots. Slowly at first, I began sinking to the deck. Thank God I was closer to the deck than to the overhead or I would have had to walk across the overhead to the bulkhead and back down around to the deck.
And I needed to be on the deck because I knew what was coming next.
My feet touched with a thump and I took a step toward Fen-Sooyan. He was awake and aware now, thrashing in his seat, panicking I thought, either at the sudden lack of gravity or maybe at the realization it meant we were floating and helpless. He hadn’t even remembered to activate his suit’s mic, but I could see his mouth moving inside the visor of his helmet.
I think I might have mentioned earlier something about how if the external damage to a cruiser reaches all the way to the bridge, it pretty much means the ship was so much driftwood. We were already driftwood when the final shot came.
There was a crackle of static electricity between the fingers of my left hand, a flash of light so bright I could see it through my helmet, through my eyelids, and a wave of heat, and then nothing.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I shuddered with a sudden chill and tasted metal.
No, this is wrong. I’m dead. I shouldn’t be cold. Unless Dad was right and there is a Hell and I’m in it.
I opened my eyes and wished I were in Hell.
Instead, I was lying on the cold, metal deck of a ship, staring up into the emitter crystals of four laser rifles and past them into the colder, steel-blue eyes of the four Tevynian soldiers holding them. Two men, two women, and the main differences were that the men had better mustaches and the women looked more bloodthirsty.
I tried to jerk upright from instinct at the sight of the weapons and the fearsome expressions of the soldiers wielding them, but my hands were bound behind my back with something unyielding. I’d been stripped of my armor, though they’d left me my clothes, for which I was thankful.
“I don’t suppose,” I said, my words rasping out of a dry mouth, “any of you guys speak English?”
“And yet I do, Major Clanton.”
The voice was familiar, though I couldn’t place it at first. Female, strong, bombastic. The accent was atrocious, vaguely eastern European in the way that Boris and Natasha from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons were vaguely eastern European. I sat up, cautiously, trying not to alarm my captors.
I was on the bridge of a cruiser, I could tell that immediately. Ours, the Tevynians, the Helta, they all looked the same because they all came from the Helta design. The screens were in the same place, the bridge stations were in the same place, the hatchway was in the same place. The Tevynians had added their own little touches to the décor, of course. Heads. Helta, Skrith, Vironian, Chamblisi, affixed to the bulkheads in a neat row beneath the screens and over the hatchway. No humans, because they would have looked too much like their own I suppose.
I was so absorbed by the heads I nearly missed the captain. She stood over me, right fist on her hip, left resting on the butt of a holstered laser pistol. And I knew why her voice had sounded familiar despite the accent and the fact she was speaking English. Her face was harsh and cold and beautiful like a glacier carving its way into the side of a mountain, her red hair tied into matching braids and I had seen her before on another Tevynian ship, the Belenus, during the Battle for Helta Prime.
She was Captain Cartimandua, and even more than letting her live, I regretted telling her my name.
“I suppose you did not expect to see me again,” she said, sauntering closer. If smugness had a face, it would have been hers. “I am honored to meet you in person this time and not through a screen.”
I almost asked her how she’d come to speak English, but that much was obvious from her accent. The Russians.
“How did you know it was me?” I asked instead. “I never showed my face back on the Belenus.”
I scooted my feet beneath me and looked around at the soldiers guarding me, wondering if they’d let me stand.
“No, you did not,” she agreed. “But our new allies, the Russian Republic and the People’s Republic of China, they have extensive files on you.” Her full lips quirked into a smile. “You are, I understand, quite famous on your world.”
Great.
I tried to get to my feet, but something hard and blunt, like a gun butt, smacked into my left shoulder and knocked me back to the deck. I bit back a curse and the groan of pain coming hard on its heels, and scowled at the soldier who had hit me. One of the women, of course.
“How am I alive?” I asked.
“Your armor is quite impressive.” Cartimandua paced around me, pushing past the guards. They yielded to her not just with a deference to her authority but almost with awe. She grabbed me by the back of my collar and hauled me to my feet with impressive ease. The woman was as tall as I am, and maybe thirty pounds lighter. “It saved you from the brunt of the blast that destroyed the bridge of your ship. It couldn’t conduct all of the static charge from the particle cannon away from you, however.”
I wanted to ask her about the rest of the crew, about Pops and Quinn, but I controlled the impulse.
“Let me rephrase the question, since you haven’t been speaking my language that long. Why am I still alive?”
She laughed at that, a cruel sound. I was sure it had been the last sound many an enemy of hers had ever heard.
“Ah, a better question indeed. You are alive because the Confederation values prisoners of your reputation, Major Clanton, not just for what you know, but for what you represent: vanquished enemies who were once fierce, but have been brought down. You will be kept alive to parade before our rulers and then before your people, once we have conquered the Source, to demonstrate to them they are truly beaten. And then you will be publicly strangled to death, over the communications network you call the internet, your execution broadcast alongside those of your President and your military leaders, as an example.”
“Pour encouragez les autres,” I murmured.
I briefly toyed with the idea of trying to argue morals with her, pointing out that she was killing humans just like her, that it had to be against their philosophy or religion or whatever they called it to slaughter her o
wn kind, but it would have been hypocritical of me and definitely wouldn’t have worked. I had to try something, but my head was pounding and my mouth was dry and thinking wasn’t coming easy.
“Surrender,” I said, finally.
Captain Cartimandua blinked, as if she wasn’t sure she believed what she’d heard.
“Pardon,” she said, “but are offering to surrender to me? Because that’s not necessary, given our situation.”
“Surrender to me,” I clarified, “and I can guarantee you that you’ll be given a ship of the line, a glorious war to fight, and a palace of a home on Earth, on the Source. You have to believe the Elders are on our side, that the Source is destined to prevail, right? That’s part of your religion, isn’t it? Join us. Be on the winning side.”
I figured she’d laugh. I would have laughed. Instead, she tilted her head, looking at me from a different angle, as if she were actually considering it.
“A bold suggestion,” she acknowledged. “One worthy of a warrior of your reputation. And not without its temptations.” She sighed, either regretful or doing a good job of faking it. “Unfortunately, even with my ship, your forces are too badly outnumbered. Come.” She jerked her head toward the main screen. “I will show you.”
I didn’t need her to interpret the details on their main tactical display. I’d been standing behind Julie’s shoulder while the Helta trained her and the rest of the bridge crew on their systems. We’d changed a few things on the Jambo, but I could tell friendly from enemy. I just had to remind myself to reverse them since I was on a Tevynian ship.
The Tevynian tactical officer glowered at me but said nothing, probably too fearful of offending Captain Cartimandua. Whatever face he made couldn’t have been uglier than what I saw on that screen.
Bravo was dead and dark, split from bow to hangar bay, hanging off the starboard side of the Tevynian cruiser, its momentum lost to the death of the drive field. It was startlingly close in the view, and I knew something of the magnification settings of the tactical display, so I knew we were still within a couple miles of the dead ship.
“Did anyone else survive?” I asked. I hadn’t wanted to give her the satisfaction, but I had to know.
“Your Helta friends?” Cartimandua scoffed. “No, the engineering room was destroyed, all within killed by exploding power conduits. And the one with you on the bridge did not live through the killing stroke of our particle cannon.” She cocked her head, that same, admiring gaze that almost seemed like she was assessing me as a sexual partner. “It was admirable to attempt to fight us in a ship with no weapons, by yourself with only a few cowardly Helta scum.”
I didn’t reply, just searched the screen for the rest of our ships. I found the Tevynian cruisers first and counted. There had been nine when they arrived in-system, along with three carriers according to Captain Lee. The carriers were nowhere to be found, either destroyed or jumped out of range once it became clear they would be of no further use. Of the cruisers…there were six left intact. Two were gone, probably vaporized by impulse gun rounds since I was fairly sure they wouldn’t run out on this fight, and a third still was tumbling out of control in a decaying orbit much too close to the Moon.
Two-to-one odds wouldn’t have been that bad…if we still had them. The Delia Strawbridge was drifting, dark on thermal, drive field dissipated, her silvery skin marred in half a dozen places by black scars penetrating the interior of the ship. I knew it was her because I’d seen her sensor profile from the shuttle. The cowling around her impulse gun mount hadn’t been completed before she launched, and the length of the rail gun was a black line running down her dorsal spine.
“Only two of your ships remain,” Cartimandua told me, as if I couldn’t see it for myself. “The one you call the James Bowie still fights valiantly.” And she did, despite the rainbow ring glowering from her drive field, a sure sign it was losing strength. All it would take was one shot from her impulse gun and another of the Tevynian cruisers would vanish from reality, but the enemy captains knew that too, and they were staying out of the way of her spinal mount, also aware that the gun could only fire straight ahead. “It will take hours, perhaps, to destroy her, but we know she will not flee. There is nowhere left for her to run to. And as for the other….”
The other was the Alpha, Julie’s ship. She was chugging through real space toward the Jambo, intent on helping Olivera set up a shot with the impulse gun, but I could tell just by her speed that she was damaged. Cruisers using the drive field streaked through space at the equivalent of a hundred gravities, but the Alpha was crawling, her drive field attenuated by multiple hits. Even now, two Tevynian cruisers were shadowing her at the edge of particle cannon range, and as I watched, one of them surged forward and fired.
It was remote, far away, happening to someone else, like I was watching a documentary on the subject years later. I kept telling myself that, building a shell to protect me against what I knew was coming next. It didn’t work. The Alpha’s drive field collapsed and took half the ship with it. The drive nacelles, the reactor, the fuel stores all disappeared in a flash of actinic white, squeezed out of existence at the atomic level by the gravimetic wave falling in on it from all sides.
And so was I.
I collapsed to my knees, my legs unable to bear my weight. She was gone.
“Was there someone you cared about on that ship?” Cartimandua asked.
She might have been sincere, might not speak English well enough to give the words their correct intonation. I might have been reading intent into an innocent question, not a taunt, but my I couldn’t think through the featureless red haze and I had nothing left to lose. I sprang to my feet without a plan, without a strategy, my hands bound behind me but determined to kill her, and ran straight into the butt of a laser rifle.
The guard had been aiming for my face, but I wasn’t so blinded by rage that I didn’t remember to tuck my chin into my chest the way I’d learned during so many years of martial arts, taken at first because I could afford it and I was bored, and later honed by Jambo and his Delta team in the gym. Instead of striking me across the jaw, the butt of the gun grazed the side of my head, still hard enough to knock me flat, my vision filled with stars.
I blinked them away and rolled onto my side, looking past the laser rifles trained at me and into Cartimandua’s chill blue eyes. I searched for fear inside of me, but there was none left. I had nothing to offer but rage, and nothing to stop it but my death.
“If you leave me alive,” I told her, my voice cold and emotionless, “I’ll get loose eventually, and when I do, I’ll kill as many of you as I can until you kill me. You might as well just shoot me now.”
I hadn’t prayed, really prayed like I believed it, in decades, not since I’d left home and joined the Marines. I prayed now.
Just let them kill me. If I’m going to Hell, it can’t be any worse than this.
She glared at me, more annoyed than angry, but she pulled the laser pistol out of its holster on her belt.
“Very well,” she acceded. “I suppose you’ve earned that much.”
She aimed the crystalline emitter between my eyes and I smiled. It wasn’t a bad way to go.
A klaxon sounded and Cartimandua spun, her gun hand going to high ready, finger slipping off the trigger. She snapped something in her language to the tactical officer and he responded with urgency, pointing at the screen and without my comm unit, I didn’t understand a word of it. But I understood the icons on the display, popping into existence in a ragged line just past Lunar orbit. They were cruisers, twelve, fourteen, sixteen of them, one appearing on the heels of another, so close I was afraid they might have an unintentional field intersect…and they weren’t Tevynian.
I didn’t speak the language, but I distinctly heard the words “Chamblisi” and “Helta” from the tactical officer, and I got some satisfaction from watching his face go white. Whiter, I should say, because all these Tevynian were about the whitest white people I’d ever
met.
The Alliance had come through. Help had arrived. I should have been elated, should have been whooping in victory watching the cruisers sweep down like hungry sharks, their particle cannons stabbing into the night. A Tevynian ship disappeared as four different Alliance vessels fired on her simultaneously, collapsing her drive field into a quantum singularity in a microsecond, and another began to drift, powerless, her nacelles burst and glowing white hot, naked to space.
But all I could think was that they were too late.
Oh, Earth was saved, and without the Tevynians to back them up, the Chinese and the Russians would draw in their horns and claim it had all been the work of some rogue faction of terrorists who would be handed over to the International Criminal Court. The day was saved and I didn’t give a fuck.
They were too late for Julie.
Cartimandua speared me with a glare.
“It seems I no longer have the luxury of allowing you to die, Major Clanton,” she told me, shoving her pistol back into its holster. “My superiors will wish to know what you know, which, I’m afraid, will be most unpleasant for you.” She nodded toward the guards and snapped a command. “It galls me to have to run,” she told me, “but at least I won’t return without a prize.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Two of her soldiers grabbed me under the arms from behind and I didn’t bother to struggle as they lifted me to my feet. The Tevynians, unlike the Helta and us, kept the hatch to the bridge secured, so one of the guards went ahead of us to touch the control for the door. He was standing directly in front of it when it slid aside and something white hot punched through his chest and out his back, spraying the guard holding my right arm with steaming-hot blood.
I knew what was happening immediately, the realization a jolt of energy revitalizing me. The soldier let go of my right arm, a hand reflexively reaching to wipe his eyes and I stamped downward into the knee of the Tevynian on the left. He howled an epithet and let go, and I leaped forward, expecting Cartimandua to shoot me in the back but beyond caring.