I start. “I am?”
“You are literally the only person in existence who knows about us, and it has to stay that way for Ava’s sake. If there’s anyone on Joenn lower than a Wasair, it’s an Elatir who throws away hyer life to be with a Wasair.”
“But you’re a Vanguardian. That doesn’t count for anything?”
Erisia snorts. “If anything, being chosen to replace Opetia Lormey as Joenn’s Vanguardian made things worse for me. True, it meant none of Joenn’s precious Elatir would be in the line of fire, but it was a worldwide embarrassment for a lowly Wasair to receive the honor. The Hiristall Congress fought it every step of the way, but the Vanguard wasn’t having it. I was their chosen candidate and that was that.”
“For what it’s worth, I think the Vanguard made the right choice.” Hye smiles. “And I promise you, I’ll never breathe a word about you and Ava.”
“I know you won’t. Thank you.” Hye sighs. “Can I get out of here?”
“I think I can convince Dr. Forre to kick you out.” I say it as a joke, but there’s nothing funny about it. I need Erisia back on hyer feet ASAP because we have a lot of work ahead of us. It’s time to stop playing defense and start playing offense.
It’s time to take the war to the Black End.
TWENTY-TWO
That night Erisia, Gaartiin, and I privately mourn our respective losses. We have some rebuilding to do, but not tonight. Tonight is about honoring our fallen friends.
After a troubled night’s sleep marred by nightmares I don’t remember upon awakening, I shower, dress, and get ready to take care of my first somber piece of official business — by which I mean I stare at myself in the mirror practicing my stoic face and telling myself not to cry.
Johr is at my door at nine hours round as ordered. That gives me a solid hour to make my case. Hopefully, she’s not in an argumentative mood today.
Oh, what am I saying? She’s always in an argumentative mood. Nuts, I should have blocked off two hours.
“Come in,” I say.
She enters without a single snarky word and stands at attention with minimal enthusiasm. She’s taking the loss of our comrades as hard as I am.
“We have a lot of work to do, so I’m going to get right to the point. I want you as my new wing sergeant.” Johr doesn’t blink. Sorry, I should say she doesn’t flinch; she never blinks. It’s creepy. “Johr?”
“I appreciate your confidence in me, sergeant,” she says.
“That was rather noncommittal.” She shrugs vaguely. “You’re good, Ylena. You’re smart, brave, a strong fighter, the others respect you, and you have no reservations about telling me off.”
She cocks an eyebrow. “First time anyone’s ever complimented me for that.”
“And I meant it as a compliment. I don’t just need a good soldier by my side; I need a good person.” I sit at the foot of my bed, and all my stoic face practice goes right out the window. “The Black End killed my friends. It hurts in ways I didn’t know I could hurt. I hate the Black End for that and I want them dead. God help me, I want them dead.”
A frisson ripples down my body as I say it. It’s a foul, ugly confession that stops short of fully expressing the blazing hatred I feel toward the Black End. I don’t just want them dead; I want to be the one who pulls the trigger.
“Commander Do told me there’s no point in winning a war if we lose ourselves. I need someone who can help me stay grounded,” I say. “I need someone who won’t hesitate to call me out if I lose focus or start to go off the rails.”
Johr smirks. “Would you like me to sing you to sleep every night, too?”
“God, no. I’ve heard your singing voice.” The smirk becomes a smile. “Is that a yes?”
“Yes, ma’am,” she says, straightening. “It’d be an honor.”
“The honor’s mine, Wing Sergeant Johr.”
“That’s what I meant.”
I get up. “Come on, smart-ass.”
Johr follows me into the hall. “Where are we going?”
“One of my favorite places: the deep end of the pool.”
***
I don’t know what passes for interrogation in this corner of the galaxy (and I probably don’t want to, for the sake of my conscience), but it’s effective. Between the info our prisoners gave up and whatever the techno wizards pulled off the scrub fighters’ nav systems, the Council of Generals dug up enough intel to warrant an all-hands conference with the Vanguard’s field officers. Johr and I file into an amphitheater along with every last commander, lieutenant commander, lieutenant, sergeant, and wing sergeant. Even the training officers are here; I spot Commander Dorr across the auditorium sitting with Lt. Commander Havven.
“What is this, exactly?” Johr asks.
“Answers to a bunch of questions you didn’t know had been asked,” I say. “Erisia.”
“Carrie,” hye says, sliding up next to me. “Johr.”
“Wing Sergeant Johr, if you don’t mind.”
“Interesting choice.”
“I could say the same thing.”
“That comment was about me, was it not?” the freshly minted Wing Sergeant Mells says.
“I didn’t want you feeling left out.”
“Thank you.”
You’re killing me, Mells.
We take our seats. For several more minutes, officers file in and sit and wait for the briefing to begin. There’s little in the way of idle chitchat. Outside of our secret circle, no one knows what the attack on Han-Yu Seven was really about, so there’s not much to fuel the rumor mill.
The generals file in silently and sit in the innermost circle of seats, except for General Gretch. He takes center stage and paces in a slow circle, his head bowed, as if deep in thought. He stops, nods to no one in particular, looks up, and spreads his hands. The guy’s an ass, but he knows how to build the drama.
“You’re all aware of the incident on Han-Yu Seven,” he begins. “You know that it was a strike by the Black End. What you do not know is that the traitor Galt led the attack.”
Shock ripples through the audience as a series of incredulous gasps. No one notices the odd little pool of silence surrounding me and my friends.
Gretch is admirably frank as he lays out the events leading up to Han-Yu Seven, including the assault on Kyros Prime and the true reason behind said assault, as well as Galt’s visit to a distant backwater planet called Earth (all together now: Never heard of it).
I wonder why Gretch is dragging my history with Galt into this, but he doesn’t keep me in suspense for long. According to our captured Black Enders, Galt learned I was stationed there, so he commandeered a fighter squadron and went berserk in the middle of Pin Gok City to flush me out and inflict a little payback — just as Commander Do predicted.
“We believe Galt was acting on his own and not at the direction of his masters,” Gretch says. “The Black End took a substantial risk attacking Kyros Prime to free him. They wouldn’t send him back out to kill a single inconsequential Vanguardian.”
“That would be you,” Johr whispers.
“Thanks,” I say.
“While we don’t know what the Black End’s ultimate plan for Galt is, the council is not inclined to wait and find out,” Gretch says. “Our techs scoured the captured fighters’ nav systems. Their flight histories are all over the Zhyzyzu Arm so we’ve been unable to pin down the Black End’s base of operations to a specific location, but the traffic patterns suggest a hotspot in the Maku Cobano Expanse.”
The room goes dark for a moment and then fills with a three-dimensional holographic starmap of the Zhyzyzu Arm of what I know as the Milky Way. Gretch gestures. The map zooms in on a specific sector. A second gesture causes yellow lines to explode all over the starmap, a connect-the-dots display as rendered by a five-year-old high on Lucky Charms soaked in chocolate milk. Almost every single line passes through or by an area speckled with thousands upon thousands of irregular blobs.
“The Maku Cob
ano Expanse,” General Gretch says. “An asteroid field approximately three hundred million miles across at its widest point. While it does not represent a significant navigational hazard, ships avoid it regardless.”
“An asteroid field isn’t a significant navigational hazard?” I say to Erisia. “Is he kidding? I’d call a maze of gigantic space boulders a significant navigational hazard.”
Erisia’s face squinches. “There’re hundreds of miles of empty space between each asteroid,” hye says. “You’re more likely to get pinged by a micrometeoroid than one of the big rocks. You’d have to be the worst pilot in the universe to hit one.”
“Oh,” I say sheepishly. Curse you, George Lucas; you lied to me again.
“We will be deploying all squadrons to the Expanse to conduct reconnaissance on two levels. In addition to a general search for signs of Black End activity, we will be tasking select Vanguardians with tracking Galt’s astrarma. To be blunt, we do not expect this approach to yield results. Galt is aware we can, given time, locate him through his astrarma, so we expect he will refrain from using them.”
“Engagement protocols, general?” Commander Do asks.
Gretch’s ever-present frown intensifies. “Under no circumstances are you to fall back. Defend yourself as necessary but do not leave the field of engagement. If you let the Black End out of your sight for a second they will take advantage of it and flee, and then we’ll be right back where we started, so you hold the line at all costs. Understood?”
The entire room murmurs in acknowledgment.
“You have two hours after the briefing to prepare for deployment. Long-term deep space preparation protocols,” Gretch says at a commanding shout. The only Vanguardians who’re exempt from the order are the training units, which Gretch is keeping on Kyros Prime to support planetary defense, just in case this is another bait-and-switch.
“Thanks for the promotion, sergeant,” Johr grumbles as we filter out of the conference room. “And right before a major strike against the Black End. Your timing is impeccable.”
“Don’t say I never gave you anything,” I say.
TWENTY-THREE
Six days pass without incident.
The only reason I know six days have passed is because our squadron gets to return to Kyros Prime every two days for what’s called, appropriately, grounding time — eight hours out of our energy forms enjoying simple pleasures like food, sleep, a shower, gravity, a day/night cycle...it’s necessary for our sanity, and I mean that literally. No known Alliance race is suited for extended periods in deep space outside of an artificial environment. Spend too long out in the void and you start to lose your grip on reality. Add to that the tedium of flying for hours on end in a static pattern across billions of square miles of space (with course adjustments around the occasional asteroid) looking for “anything out of the ordinary” and you have a recipe for some restaurant-quality space madness.
What worries me is that we’ll eventually reach a point of no return, when no amount of shore leave will be enough to keep us from losing it. The generals are determined to keep us out there until we find something, even though there’s a distinct possibility there’s nothing to find. As Commander Do once told me, space is incalculably huge, possibly infinite. It’s way too easy to hide in plain sight because there’s so much metaphorical ground to cover, but the commander insists our task isn’t so impossible. The search method we’re employing, the Hrugulun Pattern, makes it possible to effectively survey enormous swaths of space in relatively little time — though the emphasis is relatively; Commander Do says we could sweep the entire Maku Cobano Expanse within a matter of a few months.
A few months.
All the more reason to make the most of my precious shore leave, I suppose.
“I don’t understand you sometimes,” Erisia says. I open my eyes to see hyer looming over me. “Eight hours of freedom. All the things you could be doing and what do you do? Lie in the middle of a training field and stare at the sky.”
“That’s right; that is what I’ve chosen to do,” I say. “As we say back on Earth, to each her own. You unwind your way, I’ll unwind mine.”
And frankly, I prefer my way to what some of my unit are doing. Grun is somewhere beating up on any cadet foolish enough to step into the ring with him. Tosser is at his favorite bar in Plaza North getting hammered. Johr is in her quarters having quality adult time with one of Erisia’s people, Yiw Equa Ken. I know this because she told me. In detail. Because she felt it was her duty to keep her immediate superior fully apprised of her whereabouts in the event of an emergency. That woman has a twisted sense of humor.
Erisia sits next to me then lies back. “No,” hye says after a couple of minutes. “Still don’t get it.”
“It’s tangible. It’s solid.”
“It’s not space.”
“Exactly.”
“That I get.”
“How come you’re not doing something more interesting?”
Hye shrugs. “No one to do it with.”
I laugh. “I can’t tell if that was a compliment or an insult.”
“Had nothing at all to do with you, Fargirl.”
I sit up. There’s a wistful note in hyer voice. “Ava?”
“I’ve been thinking about hyer a lot lately. I’ve tried not to. I know that sounds awful, but it’s easier to pretend hye doesn’t exist. It hurts less.”
“This will all be over soon,” I say with more optimism than I feel. “We’ll take down the Black End, the crisis will be over —”
“And then what? I go back to Joenn, reunite with Ava, and everything’s wonderful?” Erisia says, the melancholy turning to anger — and with good reason. For me, going home will be the greatest possible reward for all the pain and misery I’ve endured. For Erisia, going home means returning to a world that regards hyer as trash, a world that would turn its contempt on Ava with equal force if their relationship became public knowledge. No matter how this war plays out, there’s no happy ending for them.
I’m such a thoughtless idiot.
I don’t get a chance to apologize. A voice thick with barely restrained panic erupts in my ear, backed by a discordant chorus of screams. Coordinates are downloaded to our headsets, and we’re ordered to warp back to the Maku Cobano Expanse and come in guns blazing.
“We found them! We found the Black End!”
***
Deep space is a void so deep and complete and perfect you can’t call it black because black as a word, as a concept, utterly fails to fully describe the nothingness. The Maku Cobano Expanse is a patch of space that just happens to have millions of massive boulders floating around in it, but we’d never know it were it not for our astrarma-enhanced vision compensating for the total lack of light.
A lack of light is not a problem right now. We warp in at the edge of a dazzling display, as if every firework in the history of ever was going off at the same time. White streaks large and small zip about at speeds only Vanguardians can detect. Pulsating beams in scintillating colors I have no names for slice through the sphere of combat. Explosions pop in and out of existence in the blink of an eye, sometimes taking with them one of the streaks. It all happens almost soundlessly — almost, except for a nightmarish symphony filling my earpiece. Screams of pain and terror hit their crescendo and then abruptly stop, a nanosecond of silence follows, and then a new scream cuts in, only to cut right back out again, incomplete.
We’ve warped right smack into the middle of Hell.
And this Hell has its own devil in the form of a warship that exists in defiance of sense or scale, a Frankenstein’s monster assembled from other ships — and I don’t mean other ships were torn apart and cobbled back together in piecemeal fashion, I mean entire ships have been fused together to form the titanic beast before me. The central mass, a cylindrical hulk with a bow like the head of a chisel, might be a Promanian Terminus-class destroyer, one of the toughest warships in the Alliance — toughest and most destructive
, thanks to a primary cannon that channels the full power of its plasma reactor into a blast capable of boiling oceans away to steam and reducing thousands of square miles of land to ash from orbit. It is a literal planet killer. I can make out at least four other distinct shapes attached to it: a Brytti medium cruiser; a Drakkirian Annihilator, another heavy warship; a long, narrow form that might be the hull of a Xerthan Atmos, a vessel designed for high orbit planetary assault; and a totally unfamiliar ship with a wide, flying wing-style silhouette. It’s chaos incarnate that exists solely to spread anarchy across the Maku Cobano Expanse like a virus, and if the Vanguard fails here, the disease will spread to consume every world in the Kyros Alliance and beyond.
But we are failing. Whatever we were expecting, this wasn’t it, and we don’t know how to respond except by blasting the crap out of it and hoping for the best — and that is obviously a losing strategy. We’re a swarm of pesky fireflies attacking a bug zapper. The monster fires twisting lances of energy at us, spits amber rounds and singularity missiles that erase Vanguardians from reality. Our return fire does nothing. Our shots spray harmlessly off an energy shield that completely envelops the ship. Entire squadrons combining their powers are unable to punch through.
The Vanguard’s long suspected the Black End had a major anti-Alliance ace up its sleeve, and it looks like this sucker is it.
Commander Do, sensing the futility of a direct assault, leads us around the edge of the sphere and has us target incoming attacks in a desperate effort to minimize the fatalities, but this is a war of attrition. All the Black End has to do to win is outlast us, and unless we can get through this dreadnought’s force field —
Dreadnought.
The Nightwind.
Matt Steiger, if this works I will kiss you.
“Commander! Remember how we took out the Nightwind?” I say.
“The Nightwi—? Oh. Oh!” she says. I don’t have to spell my idea out; she knows exactly what I have in mind.
Action Figures - Issue Seven: The Black End War Page 19