I dive hard, dropping under the salvo as it explodes in my path soundlessly, which means I can hear the chaotic exchange that follows over my earpiece as clear as day. Voices overlap, creating a garbled mess, but somehow I can pick out Pardo-En as he shouts at Grun, tells him to look out. There’s a crackle of static, followed by Grun screaming Pardo-En’s name, followed by Erisia wailing that Pardo-En’s gone. He’s gone.
Oh no. No no no...
“We’re getting massacred!” Cadet Wolls Hon keens.
“Regroup now!” I say. “Vanguard, on me!”
“Why? So we can make a bigger target?”
“Shut it, Hon!” I bark, my mind racing. “Mells, Grun, you’re with me. Prigg, Et-Da-Yu, A’mran, you’re with Erisia, the rest of you are with Gaartiin.”
“Ha. Yes. Flying hammer,” Gaartiin says.
“Good call, Fargirl,” Erisia says.
“Congratulate me if we survive,” I say. “Alternating runs. Go!”
We clear the sphere to prep for the next phase of what I hope is a brilliant strategy, a strategy we’ve learned a little about as a concept but haven’t had a chance to work much in practice. The flying hammer involves one Vanguardian taking point for a small team, each member of which assumes a specific duty. In this case, I act as the pilot and forward gunner, Mells watches our rear, and Grun provides overall defense by throwing up shields or strategically returning fire or calling out enemy positions as necessary. It requires cooperation, coordination, trust, and a lot of practice.
Here’s hoping three out of four is good enough.
Erisia and Gaartiin take their formations out of range of the ship’s disturbingly Vanguard-specific weaponry, clearing the airspace for my team. On my signal, we rocket in, roaring by the ship at breakneck speed, so fast their systems can’t get a lock on us. I call my shots, targeting the exposed missile batteries along the ship’s starboard flank. My pass takes out two of them. Their return fire doesn’t come close to touching us; singularity missiles detonate harmlessly in our wake. Once I clear the sphere, Erisia zips in on an oblique course to mine, to further stymie a counterattack, and makes hyer run. Another battery goes up, belching a massive fireball. Gaartiin makes his pass and trashes two more batteries.
“Plaza North, this is Commander Dorr,” he says without a whiff of fear, anger, or urgency. The man is unflappable. “Status report.”
“Holding our own, commander, but not by much,” I say, “We have a ship loaded with anti-personnel weaponry making our lives miserable and we can’t take it down without endangering Plaza North.”
“Assistance is en route.”
Commander Dorr makes good on his promise in a big way. A massive energy blast heralds his arrival, punching clean through the ship’s nose. It rocks from the impact, its tail rising like the stern of the Titanic on its way to watery oblivion, and for a heart-stopping moment I think the commander means to let the ship drop on Plaza North, innocent civilians be damned.
I should have known better. Dorr’s backup, a whole squadron of Vanguardians, swarm the ship. Several of them break off to focus on taking out the last of the missile batteries while another contingent disables the ship’s thrusters, cutting loose with a series of coordinated blasts that cause the propulsion system to go off like a bomb. Flaming debris rains down on Plaza North.
The ship drifts lazily for a moment, like a balloon that’s escaped its child, then our cavalry gathers behind it and, using carefully controlled gravity pulses (one of the tricks I haven’t yet gotten the hang of), push the crippled ship out over the water. I expect them to start pounding the bejesus out of it and drop it into the ocean, but what happens next isn’t so cathartic. Dorr orders several Vanguardians to begin boarding procedures, advising his people to bring back prisoners, not bodies.
“That’s more mercy than they’d have shown us,” Grun says.
Dorr overhears this over his comlink. “I believe we’ve seen enough death here for one day, cadet,” he says.
“Yes, and all on the wrong side. We lost Qo and Werv. We lost Pardo-En.”
Grun says his name and instinctively, foolishly, I look around as if expecting Pardo-En to rejoin us and make one of his dry sarcastic cracks. He doesn’t, of course, but I keep looking.
I keep looking.
THIRTEEN
“Cadet Hauser.”
I flinch, startled awake from a light doze. I blink the sleep away to see Commander Do standing over me, her face hard, tight.
“Commander. I’m sorry,” I say. “I needed to rest for a minute.”
“It’s all right,” she says, and she waves for me to stay where I am. I slump back against a chunk of debris the size of a car, a piece of a tower that got blown in half by a Black End missile. Commander Do hunkers down in front of me. “How is recovery going here?”
“I have no idea,” I say, and that’s the most honest answer I can give her. There’s nothing here but devastation on a scale like I’ve never seen before. Okay, that’s not exactly true. I saw its like on Olar, and before that, I saw it in photographs of New York City after 9/11. This is so much different. I was here when this happened. I was part of this disaster. I failed to stop it from happening.
“Cadet?” the commander says.
“I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing,” I say. Commander Dorr attached me and the rest of my squad to Lt. Commander Havven and ordered us to sweep the plaza for survivors. We’ve found plenty so far, people who managed to be in the right place and the right time and avoided the missile strikes entirely.
We’ve also found a lot of people who weren’t so lucky. Too many.
“I understand,” Commander Do says. “Recovery duty is always overwhelming. It feels like there’s so much chaos you’ll never be able to restore order, but I assure you, cadet, order will return. In time, it will return.” She sighs and glances around. “Sooner for Plaza North than for some other parts of Kyros Prime, I suspect. Things here could have been much worse.”
“They could have been a whole hell of a lot better, too, if we’d gotten backup sooner.”
“Cadet...”
“Where was everyone?” I snap. “We were all alone out here! We were all alone and now three of my friends are —!”
I can’t say it. I can’t say the word. That would make it too real, and I can’t handle real right now.
Commander Do lays a hand on my shoulder. “I know. And I’m sorry, but the generals determined that Plaza North was low priority.”
“Protecting innocent civilians is low priority?”
“It’s not that simple. Kyros Prime suffered a massive coordinated assault on multiple targets. The generals had to decide, and quickly, which were the most valuable from a tactical standpoint. They sacrificed a backup power generation facility, two training commons, the docking facility on Nantack Island, and yes, Plaza North to concentrate our defenses on Kyros City.”
“To save themselves.”
“To save what is objectively the most valuable target on Kyros Prime,” Commander Do says, a gentle reprimand. “It hosts the central archives, the armories for our support teams, and most of the Vanguard’s command staff was there when the Black End attacked. Had they succeeded in wiping out Kyros City, the Black End would have crippled us. The generals had to consider the greater good.”
“God, I hate this big picture stuff,” I mutter. “I get it. The generals needed to minimize the overall damage so we could stay in the game, but dammit, it’s always the people at the bottom who suffer the most.”
“You’re not wrong, cadet. I wish you were.” She reaches out to me. I take her hand. She pulls me to my feet. “There will be time to mourn, for your friends and for the innocents who died this day, but that time is not now. There are still civilians here who need you. Find them. Help them, however you can.”
And with that, I get back to it.
Daytime burns away at a snail’s pace as we sift through the wreck
age with the assistance of the Vanguard’s civilian support staff. A block at a time, a trio of car-sized flight pods makes a slow pass over a search sector, scanning for life signs. If they get a hit, we start clearing rubble. The pods employ tractor beams to lift and move debris, and whenever necessary, we Vanguardians use our gravity-control abilities to make the larger chunks more manageable. The process is a grind, slow and careful and tedious, and in time, it completely erodes our ability to find the slightest joy in recovering a survivor. The work extends deep into the evening. We break once for a quick dinner at a mobile command post set up in a small park. Erisia, Mells, Zqurrl, Grun, Gaartiin, and I stand huddled in a tight circle, eat our bowls of flavorless slurry in silence, and then get back to work.
Hours pass. The number of survivors we find dwindles.
It’s somewhere within the vast stretch of darkness between midnight and dawn when Commander Dorr summons us back to the command post. His posture is as ramrod straight as ever, his face its usual mask of stern indifference, but I can see the exhaustion in his eyes. Try as he might to hide it, the day’s taken its toll on him as much as any of us.
“Rescue operations are at an end,” he says. “You’re all dismissed. I will not accept volunteers for recovery detail work until you have all had at least two days to rest.”
My stomach drops. Recovery detail, he said. I know the difference between rescue and recovery.
Prigg, however, does not. “But sir, there might be more survivors,” she says.
“There aren’t. Our support teams finished a sweep of the plaza ten minutes ago and reported no life signs in the hazard zones.”
He says it so plainly, without an iota of emotion, and we take the news in kind. There are no gasps or cursing, no tears or whispered prayers for the dead, just a silence so complete the vacuum of space sounds like a Green Day concert by comparison.
“We’ve done all we can here,” Dorr says. “Go home.”
***
The elevator door slides open, and Erisia shambles out, one hand against the wall for support. I follow hyer down the hall to hyer room just in case hye keels over from exhaustion, which is a distinct possibility. The day’s finally caught up to us. It’s taking what little I have left to make sure Erisia makes it home all right. It’ll be a miracle if I don’t fall asleep in the hallway.
“My quarters are right there,” hye says. “I’ll be fine.”
“I know,” I say.
Erisia walks face-first into a door and mutters a curse that translates to English well enough. My species certainly doesn’t hold exclusive rights to colorful turns of phrase involving one’s genitals and what one can do with them.
“Come on,” Erisia moans, slapping the door. “Open, you stupid —”
“Erisia? These aren’t your quarters,” I say, pointing at hyer door. She undershot by two rooms.
Hye bares hyer teeth at the deceptive door, a growl rising in hyer throat. Hyer face turns a mild shade of purple and hye drives a fist into the wall and spits another Joennese profanity. That’s when the dam breaks. Erisia collapses into my arms and lets out a gut-wrenching wail. We sink to the floor. I barely have the strength to keep myself on my feet much less both of us, but I do have enough strength left within me to hold Erisia tight as hye weeps into my shoulder and mourns our dead friends.
I’ll cry later. It’s hyer turn now.
FOURTEEN
A dark cloud hangs over us for the next two days.
The Council of Generals dispassionately acknowledges the dead during the morning announcements, but that’s as far as that goes. Each world is left to honor its fallen Vanguardian in accordance with its own customs, but there are no plans for any sort of memorial service here on Kyros Prime. The council is not big on ceremony, good, bad, or otherwise. The closest we come to a memorial is a small, informal, impromptu wake during dinner, as we all listlessly poke at our slurry — and it’s Grun of all people who starts the ball rolling.
“My culture does not deal in regret when it comes to falling in battle,” he says into his bowl. “Dying for a just cause is considered the noblest way to pass into the next world and should be answered with pride.” He sighs. “Yet all I feel over Pardo-En’s death is regret.”
“He did not like you, you know,” Mells says.
“I know,” Grun says. How could he not know? Pardo-En wasn’t exactly shy about sharing his feelings — which, as it turns out, is exactly the point. “That’s why I respected him; he did not hide his contempt. He spoke plainly and honestly. My regret is that I never returned the courtesy.”
I can’t help but think there’s a bit more to it than that. Pardo-En made it abundantly clear he didn’t like Grun in the slightest, but in the end, Grun was still his teammate, and he did what he had to do to protect his comrade-in-arms. I imagine Grun’s having a hard time wrapping his brain around that — but even if he could understand it, I doubt it’d assuage the guilt he must be feeling. Pardo-En took a bullet meant for him, after all.
That’s the problem with self-sacrifice: it can still inflict damage on the survivors.
“Pardo-En was the first here to treat me as a friend,” Mells says. “Though it did take me several days to realize that was his intent.”
Erisia grunts. “Sounds about right.”
“Yeah,” Zqurrl says. “I never knew whether he was in a good mood or not.”
“Unless we were at a gather,” Gaartiin points out. “Then there was no question.”
I laugh at a flash of a memory, of my first gather and of Pardo-En diving into the crowd crying “GIVE ME MOOOOORRRRE!”
“Partyin’ Pardo-En,” I muse out loud, which draws a chuckle from everyone but Mells.
“Ah,” he says after a moment. “That is amusing because it rhymes rather poorly.” His lips briefly form a melancholy smile. “I believe this would be when he would say, ‘You are killing me, Mells.’ I recall the first time he said that to me...”
The fond memories flow freely from that point on. I don’t have many to contribute, but I’m perfectly content to listen to the others as they offer story after story, most of which end with Pardo-En making some biting, wry comment. When we run out of anecdotes, which is too soon, we raise our glasses in toast.
“To our grumpy little dragon man,” I say.
“To our resident sourpuss,” Erisia says.
“To our noble comrade,” Grun says.
“To our friend,” Mells says.
What more could be said after that?
***
Restlessness sets in early on day two of our enforced furlough, so I honor the letter of Commander Dorr’s order if not the spirit and sit down at my desk with a big mug of hot dammas to do some research on the ships that attacked us. Unfortunately, there’s not much to work off; at some point within the past few years they were all reported stolen, hijacked, or just plain missing and hadn’t been seen or heard from until the assault.
What Worries Me (Part One) is that the ships we took down are a fraction of the total number of transports, exploration vessels, personal pleasure craft, and whatnot that have been reported missing to the Alliance. Sure, some of them may have Bermuda Triangled for perfectly mundane and not-at-all sinister reasons, but the Black End has a well-established track record of commandeering civilian ships and modifying them for combat use. We strongly suspect they’re gearing up for something big, bigger even than the assault on Kyros Prime, and the smart play is to assume they now have an armada hiding somewhere, waiting to raise further hell.
What Worries Me (Part Two) is the anti-Vanguard weaponry the Black End somehow got its hands on. A singularity missile, as the name suggests, generates a small, short-lived, but extremely powerful black hole that sucks in everything within range of its detonation field. A Vanguardian could in theory counter the intense gravitational pull, but the singularity springs into existence so suddenly there’s no time to react. Amber rounds are just as nasty. Upon detonation, they instantaneously genera
te a hyper-dense crystalline substance that can absorb and diffuse massive amounts of energy, making them effectively impervious to those particular Vanguardian powers. What makes these things so ugly is that they don’t kill the target instantly. Instead, a trapped victim suffocates to death, often while trying in vain to burn their way out. They’re susceptible to precise harmonic resonance (translation: a properly pitched soundwave) but chances are anyone trapped inside the amber would be long dead before anyone could free them.
Singularity missiles and amber rounds originated on Tantyll V and the Celestial Grandeur Jewel of the Red Sun Malancar, respectively. These nonmember worlds had, shall we say, skeptical attitudes toward the Kyros Alliance’s intentions and developed these weapons for the express purpose of defending themselves against a possible Vanguard incursion. The Alliance took this as an act of aggression in and of itself and came dangerously close to justifying Tantyll and the Celestial Grandeur Jewel’s paranoia. Cooler heads prevailed in the end, and the Alliance agreed to designate the Tantyll and Red Sun Malancar systems as neutral nonmember worlds; if the Alliance stayed out of their lanes, they’d stay out of the Alliance’s. The treaties included a disarmament clause; Tantyll and the Celestial Grandeur Jewel were supposed to dismantle their anti-Vanguard arsenals and promise not to share the technology with anyone. Similar language was later included in a major disarmament treaty called the Festran Accords.
The worst-case scenario here? Tantyll and the Celestial Grandeur Jewel never honored their end of the bargain and are arming the Black End.
There’s a knock on my door. “Come in,” I say.
“Cadet Hauser,” Commander Do says, stepping inside. “Are you busy?”
“Just doing a little homework on anti-Vanguardian technology. I don’t want to get caught with my pants down again.”
“Your people have such curious euphemisms,” she says, but her smile isn’t because she finds humankind’s penchant for colorful turns of phrase amusing. “You’re very diligent. That’s good. That will serve us well in what’s to come.”
Action Figures - Issue Seven: The Black End War Page 13